Fandom VIP

A Fandom VIP is someone who, while not officially associated with the company that produces a given work — say, for the purposes of this article, Star Wars — is still widely known in the Star Wars fan community, and possibly by the producers of Star Wars themselves.

Maybe they created a fan website that has become the source for information on Star Wars. Maybe they created a Star Wars Fanfic or another amateur Derivative Work that is so well-done everyone in the fandom has seen it. Maybe they just got posted on YouTube waving a lightsaber around like a hyperactive monkey.^note Most VIPs are known for more positive things. Regardless, everyone in the fandom now knows their name... or at least their Internet handle.

This can get a little weird for some VIPs, who often still think of themselves as "just another fan." Some will let it go to their heads (even before they've truly hit the big time), some will freak out, some will just take it in stride.

It's arguable where the line is between a Fandom VIP and just a plain fan is, of course. However, when they're invited to speak at a Star Wars convention, or hired by Lucasfilm to continue what they were already doing for free, any doubt that they've become a VIP goes out the window.

The recognition is great, but remember that Celebrity Is Overrated: VIPs are easy targets, and are often singled out for torment by jealous fans. This may extend to their friends. Thankfully, the anonymity factor helps their life from getting too crazy: the vast majority of VIPs today did whatever they became famous for on the Internet while older ones did so through fanzines and mail, so their faces (and/or real names) are often unknown to most, making them indeed just another fan in the real world (even if they're gods on the Net).

In other parts of the net, this is known as a Big Name Fan. However, it is not to be confused with a Big Name / Important Person who turns out to be a Fan — otherwise known as One of Us. If a person in-universe is a member of a real fandom, that's Fictional Fan, Real Celebrity. Can cause them to become a Promoted Fanboy. Not to be confused with High-Class Fan, which refers to a hand fan used to indicate a character's high status or wealth.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Captain Osaka on DeviantArt to the Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann fandom. Gained a massive reputation for producing the DOUBLE K comic, which is the Gurren Lagann cast thrown into a Buddy Cop Show.
• Sakky, Sakura, or Sailor Astera is probably one of the more well-known fan character creators in the Sailor Moon fandom.
  • Usagi Kou is more well-known. Though not necessarily for good reasons.
  • Ian Miller is known as the idol of purists everywhere for doing in-depth research about what the canon terminology is supposed to be. Oh, and having a thing for collecting fanart of Hotaru in a bikini.
• Gigguk is one popular anime reviewer.
• Brad DeMoss, one of the pioneers of the Fan Vid concept. His biggest claim to fame is his "Evangelion Episode One" video (Neon Genesis Evangelion clips to the Star Wars Episode One trailer sound), which got notice and approval from both Lucasfilm and Gainax. He regularly co-hosts the Masquerade event at AnimeExpo.
• Mark Simmons, maintainer of the now-defunct Gundam Project website, ended up getting hired to assist with the English-language adaptation of Mobile Suit Gundam.
  • He even got a minor character in Gundam SEED named after him.
    • And protagonist of G-Saviour is Mark Curran who has a sidekick call Simmons.
  • Of similar note is his occasional work partner, Keith Rhee. Rhee originally started the Gundam Project site and later maintained Bandai's own Gundam Official site for a number of years.
• The crew of Dattebayo, though technically operating illegally, have been in good relations with Viz Media for quite some time — so much so, that, when Viz began releasing their own subs shortly after Japanese broadcast, rather than ruin that relationship, they chose to stop subbing Naruto rather than force Viz to send them a C&D letter.
• Alan Harnum is considered the writer of Revolutionary Girl Utena fanfiction. His unfinished opus is almost considered required reading in Utena fandom. On top of fanfiction he also contributed to the fandom in many notable ways. He was the one who used to host the Utena Fanfiction Repository.
  • Giovanna and Yasha of Empty Movement have a forum that was popular with fans before the rise of microblogging platforms.
• Yu-Gi-Oh! has several due to the wide-ranged aspects of the franchise:
  • LittleKuriboh is one of the few Big Name Fans who has made a big name for himself outside the fandom in question. And in fandom, he's pretty much a hero and a saint.
  • Slifertheskydragon is considered by most fans to be the best and most prolific artist in the Yu-Gi-Oh! fandom. She also hosts fan activities and fan panels, and is on first name basis with most of the Japanese and English production staff. In fact, she's so popular that, in March 2011, a card signed by Slifertheskydragon sold on eBay for 750 dollars in a charity auction.
  • YGOrganization is widely regarded as the unofficial news site for the franchise, covering almost every aspect of news from the anime to the card game to updates for the video games. Yugipedia even specifically uses their translations/localizations for names when official English names are unknown.
• Neon Genesis Evangelion, according to The Other Wiki, has several authoritative fan commentators, such as Taliesin Jaffe (from the End of Eva DVD commentary, who Funimation now turns to as their "Eva Expert" for Rebuild of Evangelion) and Sean McCoy (from the ADV Platinum DVD commentary, who now regularly runs Eva panels at Con.)
• D180223 has made a name for himself to mecha fans for giving constant updates on mecha-related content, be it anniversaries, new series, Super Robot Wars, in-depth videos on certain lore-heavy mecha known as Mecha Talk etc. He even has been featured on Did You Know Gaming for discussing Super Robot Wars.
• Satashi in the Lyrical Nanoha fandom, on FF.net, Animesuki, and the Nanofate.us fora.
• Digimon has Chris McFeely, who operated the Digimon Encyclopedia back in the early 2000s.
  • Similar to McFeely, Grace Anderson, known commonly as "Megchan", was not only the official translator for the first four seasons of Digimon, but also ran a now-defunct fan site called Megchan's Digimon Sekai where she provided overseas fans access to Japanese material and translated updates as the shows were coming out in Japan.
• With Cartoon Network's Toonami block revived in 2012, a few fans have become so excited and vocal that Williams Street noticed them and have used their work on several occasions. Amateur rapper Richie Branson wrote several raps on Toonami's return and on shows they aired, the first of which the staff used to kick off the first broadcast on TV in May! Many songs used in the TV bumps are by fans of the block.
• In the Free! fandom there's textsfromgayswimmers and the duo of Octopimp and SparkyTheAndroid, the creators of the successful Abridged Series 50% OFF.
  • In fact, the latter's work became so well known that their parody's been referenced by a fan in Japan during Nagisa's birthday, and even by Greg Aryes, the dub voice of Nagisa!
• Nisekoi has Y-san from Chiba Prefecture, Marika's biggest supporter. His feats include putting Marika on top of the popularity polls, sending gifts to the author for her, and actually placing on the popularity polls. The epilogue even has Marika just about to encounter a "man from Chiba", strongly implied to be him.
• Team Four Star's Dragonball Z Abridged is well-enough known in the Dragon Ball fandom that the group's voice actors have been invited to conventions next to the voice actors of the characters they parody. The group were also invited by Funimation to do the English dub voices for a Stylistic Suck Show Within a Show of how Mr. Satan defeated Cell for Dragonball Z Kai: Sadly, Toei animation were not amused and the TFS version now exists only as a Deleted Scene.

Comic Books

• An early example can be found in The Flash books where Paul Gambi, tailor to the various Rogues of Central and Keystone City, is named after Paul Gambiccini who at the time was 14. Gambiccini hasn't ever rested on his laurels as since then he's gone on to be a noted author and academic.
• Daredevil fan Kuljit Mithra, creator of the website Manwithoutfear.com. The site is considered the best archive of information on the comic book character, to the extent that writers of the Daredevil title routinely consult it for research, and Brian Michael Bendis thanked Mithra in the afterword of his last issue as a writer for Daredevil. Mithra & Manwithoutfear.com, along with Philipp Lenssen & Coverbrowser.com are given special thanks for providing the cover gallery at the end of Daredevil's 500th issue.
• DC Comics historian John "Mikishawm" Wells is a Big Name Fan, having written the text pieces for collections such as Crisis on Infinite Earths Absolute Edition, and even getting mentioned in Kurt Busiek's Power Company, where Wells & Schaum is a research organization providing information on metahumans.
• In Spider-Girl, a temporary love interest for the main character, Chris Jarkoer, was named after a fan, Jarkover.
• Dave Campbell, who writes the blog Dave's Long Box, ("I'm going to review my comic book collection and you're going to like it!") got to write handbook bios for the Official Handbook of the Invincible Universe.
• George Olshevsky, a mathematician and amateur paleontologist, and comic book collector since childhood, created the Marvel Comics Index in 1976, then made the Official Marvel Index for Marvel and also other similar publications for DC.
• Jeff Christiansen, a boarded Veterinarian, created the website Appendix to the Handbook of the Marvel Universe in 2001, in 2004 he was hired for a version of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, originally published in the 1980s and 1990s.
• Jess Nevins, whose various comic annotations not only lead him to literally writing the manual for each volume of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen but also backup work in Ed Brubraker's Incognito.
• Peter Sanderson, a comic book historian whose research work has been used by both DC and Marvel since the '80s. He's an academic in the field of comics and has written a long-running column.

Comic Strips

• Derrick Bang has held this role in the Peanuts fandom since the early '90s. After amassing a complete collection of strips by going through microfilms of old newspapers, he wrote a lengthy FAQ for the Peanuts newsgroup, then expanded that into a website and a book (50 Years of Happiness), both with the cooperation of Charles M. Schulz himself. Since then he's written several other Peanuts-related books and does freelance work for the Schulz organization.

Film — Animated

• Meet the Robinsons: Elena and Olivia Ceballos, twins behind the account "ELIOLI Art", are huge in the fandom, and it is guaranteed that you'll come across their copious amount of fanart for the movie.
• Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken: D001, also known as Ruby Gillman Fanboy, managed to gain this status before the movie even came out. Thanks to his continuous posting of the movie on various websites (Twitter, Discord, and YouTube), he shared any regional advertisements and behind-the-scenes documentation he could find for the film. This includes several that were never shared by any official United States-based DreamWorks or Universal accounts. Some people have pointed out that he did more of a job at advertising the movie than DreamWorks themselves. This was further proved by the official DreamWorks account actually making a tweet thanking him for tweeting about the movie.

Film — Live-Action

• Star Wars:
  • Ryan vs. Dorkman is a well-known fan video that uses skillful choreography and special effects to create a live-action lightsaber duel. After overwhelming fan response, Ryan and "Dorkman" proceeded to film a rematch, this time with a score composed (for free!) by film composers Gordy Haab and Kyle Newmaster. The fact that the lightsaber fights are better than the ones in the movies... they deserve it. Even better? They were helping with the movie fights, and this is the stuff that they were not allowed to do!
  • Speaking of Star Wars, SuperShadow, infamous for being the one guy you should never ever believe about upcoming developments. The irony being that he was right about the female Exile, so idiots edit Wookieepedia to say the Jedi Exile is male. Yeah.
  • Albin Johnson, founder of the 501st Legion, eventually had his organization worked into Star Wars canon: Darth Vader's personal platoon is named the 501st.
  • Ernie Fosselus acted and directed one of the best parody films of Star Wars ever made, the 22-minute-long Hardware Wars. George Lucas liked it so much he had 20th Century Fox pay Fosselus to allow them to include the short on the DVD of Star Wars.
• Bill "Jettman" Ramey, founder of the "Batman on Film" website and forum, is pretty well known to a good number of people in the online Batman and Superhero fandom.
• Sal Piro became one for The Rocky Horror Picture Show, using Audience Participation to make the movie a cult classic.

Literature

• Ai no Kusabi has Kira Takenouchi known for her Taming Riki fan fiction and other original yaoi works.
• Several examples in the Harry Potter fandom:
  • Cassandra (Cassie) Claire, known for popularizing (if not in fact creating) a certain characterization of Draco Malfoy, and for plagiarizing most of her well-known fic in that fandom. Parlayed her pre-existing fan-base into a publishing deal for her original fiction.
    • She also has the privilege of being a VIP of two fandoms — while she is mostly known for her Harry Potter fiction, she is infamous in The Lord of the Rings fandom for The Very Secret Diaries.
  • Melissa Anelli, webmistress of The Leaky Cauldron. Like Emerson, she was invited to interview J. K. Rowling, managed to get an interview with Rowling on PotterCast, got a foreword written by Rowling in her Harry: A History book and is often called on by the media to talk about the series. She is also a senior creative consultant on Pottermore, a project officially endorsed by Rowling.
  • Steve Vander Ark of The Harry Potter Lexicon. The Lexicon was one of the websites J. K. Rowling favored in the Harry Potter fandom until they decided to publish a book based on the website that was almost entirely her own words...
  • John Noe of PotterCast / The Leaky Cauldron is also a bit of a VIP, since he had the character of John Dawlish named after him.
  • Makani is one of the most famous Harry Potter fanartists. Her art is used in The Leaky Cauldron as a kind of "official" image for HP characters, and her take on the Malfoy family is a source of much fanon.
    • Makani soon became a VIP in the Team Fortress 2 fandom for her artist's rendition of The Administrator, that later became canon. And then Valve hired her.
  • Neil Cicierega is especially well known for his Potter Puppet Pals series.
  • Emerson Spartz, creator of Mugglenet, deffinitely qualifies for this, as he has interviewed J. K. Rowling and he was one of the writers involved in two HP-based books, both of which were best-sellers.
  • At least among the Marauders Era fanbase, The Shoebox Project is often accepted as the definitive fanfiction for the four friends. The writers, LiveJournal users ladyjaida and dorkorific are respected and revered among the fandom.
    • ladyjaida, real name Jaida Jones, moved on to cowrite the book Havemercy. And now she has her own fandom. Ninety percent of Havemercy fangirls started as Shoebox fangirls, and they're an insanely loyal bunch.
  • Harry and the Potters, anyone? Draco and the Malfoys? Whoever heard of making rockbands off books, really...
  • Also, the musical theatre group Team StarKid who made the Affectionate Parody A Very Potter Musical. The guy who played Harry Potter (Darren Criss) is actually a mainstream actor now, what with his role on Glee, and Ron Weasley recently made an appearance as a background dancer.
  • John Granger aka the Hogwarts Professor could count. He's written several books on the series and currently hosts Mugglenet Acadamia which dissects different aspects of the series. He also previously hosted the Pottercast recurring segment, Potter Pundits which does the same thing.
• Stephen Briggs has worked with Terry Pratchett on Discworld maps and other supplemental materials, narrates several audiobooks, and has written all of the stage adaptations of the books and played the role of Lord Vetinari in all of them. (That counts as fan activity because its strictly am-dram.) And he's part of the conventions.
  • Although not as big a part as current convention organiser John Hicks, who was previously the Head of Productions, and has also been responsible for Discworld amateur dramatics, but is now better known as the black-robed and skull-ringed Dr Hix of Unseen University's Department of Post-Mortem Communications.
  • In fact, Discworld has many Big Name Fans, since it's a relatively small fandom (the books are runaway bestsellers, but many of the fans aren't the sort of people who do "fannish" things; they just like the books). And since the merch is mostly on the cottage-industry, I've-got-a-good-idea-how-does-Pterry-feel? level, the difference between being a Big Name Fan and being part of The Discworld Industry is downright fractal.
• Percy Jackson and the Olympians: Viktoria "Vika" Ridzel, also known as Viria, is one of, if not the most popular fan artists in the fandom. She is renowned for her fanart of PJO characters to the point where they were considered better than the official art, with even Rick Riordan giving her his full support. In 2017, Ridzel was commissioned by Riordan to provide official character art for his website, becoming a promoted fangirl.
• Warrior Cats:
  • Blizzardclaw (or "Blizz"), owner of Warrior's Wish, one of the most famous fansites of the series. She has been personally invited to two events by the author/editor of the series by name, once via the series' official e-mail newsletter. Vicky also wrote her as a character named Blizzardstar, leader of ShadowClan (Blizz' favorite Clan), in Code of the Clans.
  • Su Susann, a fan on Vicky's Facebook page who often answered questions for other fans, was given access as one of the page admins, and who Vicky has given permission to post things on her behalf (such as revealing names of otherwise unnamed characters). Unfortunately has a bit of a Broken Base due to creating some Original Characters and resulting arguments as to whether they were canon (Word of God confirmed that they weren't and that it was just intended to be for fun), to the point that her hatedom even had reported her Facebook account enough for it to be temporarily banned.
  • The Poole family, aka FarDrivingClan. They made a point of seeing Vicky on every one of her US tours, even if it meant driving across several states to see her, and were therefore featured in her tour diaries often, and over time she became good friends with them. She named the Omen of the Stars main character Ivypool after the then-infant of the family, Ivy, and her announcement about a studio acquiring movie rights was a video that included Ivy.
• In The Lord of the Rings fandom, Michael Martinez is one of the most prolific scholars and trivia buffs, with several books and countless articles under his belt. (He is also, incidentally, the owner of a large Xena: Warrior Princess website as well.)
• Michael Macauley, webmaster of Shurtugal.com, the #1 Inheritance Cycle fansite. The site gets heavy input from the series' author Christopher Paolini with monthly Q&A sessions from him. Palolini even put some of his imput in Macauley's book The Inheritance Almanac.
• For some years, M.J. Simpson was the leading expert and go-to guy on The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Douglas Adams generally, but hated the movie so much that he became disillusioned and refused to do it anymore.
• For A Song of Ice and Fire:
  • Elio and Linda, the owners of Westeros.org are this for the A Song of Ice and Fire fandom, and actually help GRRM with keeping details straight.
  • Adam Feldman, author of the blog, "The Meereneese Knot" was celebrated for more or less single-handedly reversing the Contested Sequel nature of A Feast for Crows and A Dance With Dragons especially the Trapped by Mountain Lions nature and Diabolus ex Machina resolution of some of its plots by highlighting how both books feature a great deal of internal drama, coalesce with the larger themes of the series (namely whether a good person can be a good ruler) and the frustrating nature of the books is very much an Intended Audience Reaction. George RR Martin himself praised Feldman's work.
  • Adam Whitehead, aka Werthead, long-time forum moderator on Westeros.org and author of the Wertzone blog, who has contributed academic articles on ASOIAF to several publications over the years, and done extensive work on fan-made atlases and maps. Later expanded his coverage to other series with crossover appeal, and particularly knowledgeable about The Wheel of Time.
  • Roman Papsuev, aka "Amok," drew amateur portraits of characters from the series that became so popular that Martin personally provided corrections to the details of some characters and later commissioned him to draw character portraits for The World of Ice and Fire.
• Russian science-fiction has Semetsky, a frequent con-goer. A Running Gag among the Russian authors is inserting Semetsky as a Red Shirt in their books.
• Mina De Malfois is a fictional example whose position occasionally sets her in the middle of the fandom controversy she comments on.
• Jennifer, the owner of the V. C. Andrews fansite The Complete V.C. Andrews, the biggest resource for any info on Andrews, her books, and the books written by her ghostwriter (including US and international book covers, timelines and family trees, and little known trivia facts).

Live-Action TV

• Andi Mack has Sadie Anne Rue, who organized a popular project that involved sending 1,000 paper cranes to Disney Channel Headquarters to save the show. While the show wasn't renewed, the cranes were loved by the cast and crew.
• Barney & Friends:
  • Perhaps the most notable example is Andrew Olsen, admin of the Facebook group "Barney History Fans." He ended up actually working on the documentary, I Love You, You Hate Me.
  • Another famous fan is Drew aka SonicHOG, a massive Barney expert who has made a video essay about the series' history.
  • Emilia Leonetti is an active fan who was later chosen by original Barney voice actor Bob West to become one of his digital assistants.
  • Kerron Stark has been an avid Barney fan since childhood and did amateur performances of the character in his teens. He is very active in the fanbase as he is a moderator-turned-admin in Barney History Fans, stars in his own show, Mister K's Clubhouse and performed a cover of the Barney's Great Adventure version of "I Love You" for his album "Echoes of Influence".
  • Although they have diversified their content as of early 2023, artist and YouTuber HedgeOnStage is considered THE Barney content creator, making video essays and artworks pertaining to the franchise.
• For Supernatural the character Jamie in the season 4 episode Monster Movie was named for a sick fan.
  • Tracy went from a fan who writes Dean/Castiel fic and likes Misha Collins, to meeting Misha and having a milkshake with him, having her friends asked where she was when she wasn't at a convention and running the charity The Random Act which Misha's minions created.
  • Madison from the same fandom also somewhat fits this; she had tea with Misha Collins and has arguably one of the best known blogs in the fandom.
• Melissa Good is a critically acclaimed Fan Fic writer in the Xena: Warrior Princess fandom. So critically acclaimed, in fact, that the producers of the show asked her to write several episodes for the sixth season of the show.
  • Producer David Eick, during commentary on his later show Battlestar Galactica, while not mentioning names specifically, reflected back on the Xena years, and explained that at the time in the mid-1990s, "fan reaction from the Internet" was a very new thing. The show's staff got very excited about going online and reading the real-time reactions of fans. The problem was, because this was so new and shiny to them, they had no real concept of how to contextualize or frame what they were reading: internet fans are the most obsessive, and you kind of need to read through a lot of it, or "professional reviews" to get even a basic feel of what the "reaction" was. But because "the Internet" was so new at the time, they'd basically just go online and read through major fanfiction hubs without much of a sense of "cognitive dissonance" like "maybe these are just obsessed niche fans". As Eick explained, in the later seasons this resulted in them pandering on a massive scale, doing all sorts of things the online fans they encountered suggested... And it actually turned a lot of the casual viewers away. It's open to interpretation how "good" these episodes were, but they really weren't as "accessible."
• Bjo Trimble and her husband John are some for the Star Trek franchise, having driven the letter-writing campaign that spared the original series from cancellation before its third season. It's believed that the producers of Star Trek: The Next Generation named the Bajorans in her honor.
  • She also authored the original Star Trek Concordance that was the definitive reference work for many years.
• The crew of the fan produced web series Star Trek: New Voyages, who not only have props from the original show in their own set but have had appearances from multiple former cast members of the original series, with Walter Koenig and George Takei playing major roles in two of their episodes (playing aged versions of their own characters.)
  • Former voice actor Vic Mignogna guest-starred and -directed in New Voyages and squee'd about it during his guest appearances at anime cons. He's even pursued his own series, Star Trek Continues, until he was kicked out of the project by his Role-Ending Misdemeanor.
  • The Kirk/Spock fandom itself has a few:
    • Killashandra (aka Killa or Killabeez) — wrote some of the most beautiful fic ever written on the pairing, as well as the ship manifesto for the same. Her story "Surrender" is considered the finest exploration of D/s and dubcon in the fandom, and "Turning Point" was the first K/S fanfic ever posted online.
    • Diane Marchant — wrote the very first K/S fanfic, "A Fragment Out of Time". (Note that this was not only the very first K/S fic but the very first Slash Fic, published in 1974.)
    • Leslie Fish — wrote the second ever K/S fanfic, "Shelter", which likely inspired the "Kirk and Spock in a cave" cliche. She's also quite well known for her Filk Songs.
    • Brittany Diamond — aka "suicidallyreckless" on Tumblr and nicknamed "Captain". Rose to prominence during the 2009 post-movie boom, and has created The Ship's Closet, a vidcast analyzing Kirk/Spock, as well as the Analyzation/Commentary, which does the same thing only in writing. She's a bit bemused by her status, amusingly enough.
• Doctor Who:
  • Ian Levine is also well known amongst fandom. As well as his efforts to locate missing stories, he also briefly worked on the show as an unofficial fan continuity advisor.
  • Jean-Marc Lofficier, author of Universe Concordances The Doctor Who Programme Guide, The Terrestrial Index and The Universal Databank.
  • Before he became a Promoted Fanboy as the official voice of the Daleks and Cybermen, Nicholas Briggs was well known for writing and starring in some fanvids and audios during the cancellation. To the extent that his portrayal of the Doctor appeared in the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip as a possible future self.
  • Lawrence Miles is a Doctor Who Big Name fan who wrote some very popular spin-off novels in the 90s, including a number that acted as Wham Episodes for the first half of the Eighth Doctor Adventures. He failed to get a writing job on the revived series, but still has a devoted following online despite his extremely negative views on much of the 21st-century show.
  • Peter Capaldi is arguably the biggest VIP fan the franchise has seen. In the early 1970s he attempted to take over the main Doctor Who fan club - a fact noted in a number of books - and at one point received a package of scripts from then-producer Barry Letts. He later wrote articles for a number of fanzines, as well as getting letters related to Doctor Who published in the Radio Times. All this decades before he was cast as the Twelfth Doctor in 2013.
  • Current showrunner Chris Chibnall was a well-known fan of the show, even appearing on national TV in the 1980s to discuss it.
• Power Rangers:
  • Several Power Rangers VIPs have gotten shout-outs in the show:
    • Derik Smith: Monster of the Week named Kired.
    • Joe Rovang: Monster of the Week named Rofang.
    • Jason Takach: Monster of the Week named Takach.
    • Jesse Lee Herndon (better known as SirSTACK) — Herndon Laboratories.
    • Chris Funaro: Funaro Maximum Security Prison.
    • And don't forget Amit Bhaumik. He was the webmaster of an extensive, detailed and now defunct Power Rangers information database called the "Online Archives". He was one mind behind the (in)famous Scorpion Rain hoax. He became story editor of Wild Force and worked on that season's two crossover eps. He also worked as a "consultant" on Power Rangers (Super) Samurai, and co-wrote two of the series clip shows. Unfortunately, Chris Funaro revealed that the two had had a bitter falling out (Amit understandably loves Samurai, Chris does not)
    • Bruno of MMPRtoys does toy reviews for Power Rangers and Super Sentai and animations along with his wife, Mia and his friend Jerry, and has a huge collection. He also worked on the show during the latter part of Saban Entertainment's tenure on the show, including Wildforce with Amit doing VFX and stop motion animation
    • Lewis Lovhaug aka Linkara probably counts, especially considering he got invited as a guest to PowerMorphicon.
    • Andre the Black Nerd was always a fan, but started gaining more attention around the Neo-Saban era. By 2015 he was big enough that he was hosting the panel for Power Rangers Dino Charge at Comic-Con.
    • For the show's 20th Anniversary Saban created the Super Fan Power Force and invited fans to apply to help participate in the promotion of the 20th anniversary. Since slots were extremely limited to 20, you pretty much had to be a Big Name Fan to get in, with the application asking for what sites the applicants were involved with and other credentials, so many fans need not have applied. Amongst those picked were Linkara, Fury Diamond, Darkblaze, Lavender Ranger, Linear Ranger, and Power Morphicon to name a few.
  • Actor, filmmaker, and professional stunt performer Aaron Schoenke, co-founder of the film production company Bat in the Sun, has become recognized as a key figure in the Power Rangers fandom ever since the late Jason David Frank appeared in two episodes of the Bat in the Sun series Super Power Beat Down reprising his role as Tommy Oliver. By most accounts, Schoenke and Frank were close friends and collaborators up until the latter's untimely death in 2022, with at least two film projects in the works. Schoenke's recognition in the fandom eventually led to Bat in the Sun being hired by Saban to produce a short film promoting the officially licensed mobile game Power Rangers: Legacy Wars, and the company's interpretation of the Green Ranger costume allegedly inspired the design of the one used in the official Boom! Studios comic book.
• The Lipp Sisters (Deborah and Roberta Lipp) are this for Mad Men — they were even invited to sit in the VIP section (directly behind Elisabeth Moss and January Jones) at the Season 4 Premiere in Times Square, pictures of which including them can be seen here.
• For the Sherlock fandom, we have Angrybeige.
• Larry Williams, who decided to just make a Youtube video reviewing the first episode of Game of Thrones, not being familiar at all with A Song of Ice and Fire. This soon expanded into reviews for every episode, with his emotional ranting about his love for the show and rabid defense of his favorite characters earning him a ton of new subscribers and eventually the attention of the people behind the show, who even sent him a poster signed by the producers and Sean Bean (though he apparently gave up on the show from Season 5 onward, as he produced no reviews after Season 4).
• The Price Is Right has Marc Green and John Sly, founders of Price fan forum golden-road.net. The forum was once so popular that several staff members posted there, even former producer Roger Dobkowitz.
• Anyone who is a devoted fan of The Muppets will know the names Ryan Dosier of The Muppet Mindset and Joe Hennes and Ryan Roe of ToughPigs. In fact, they are such big name fans, Disney even used blurbs from their reviews of Muppets Most Wanted in one of their official promos.
  • If you're on Twitter and you don't know Joshua Gillespie, you probably at least know the Muppet History account he runs, with more than a quarter of a million followers.
• If you're a Sprout fan, chances are, you know Madeline "Maddie" Fretz of Parents and Kids Share Together, who founded her site on Blogger in 2020. In fact, she was such a big Sprout fan that she received a Christmas video from Sprout stars at the end of 2021.
• Kerry, who sometimes goes by Veritas, created a Jeff/Annie fanvideo for "Community" set to Sara Bareilles' "Gravity" in the early days of the show. It gained enough recognition to be directly referenced in "Paradigms of Human Memory." Dan Harmon paid out of pocket for the rights to the song and called her "the Van Halen of Community fans."
• Arrow fans are hugely aware of fan artist Lord Mesa, who creates short, small, cute and silly Arrow fan art pieces. They're so well known to the fans that the Arrow production team have a wall of their art at the offices.◊
• Katie G, who runs the Hell's Kitchen Facebook community "Hell's Kitchen Underground", has personally met with and interviewed several of the contestants on the show, and Gordon Ramsay himself himself has retweeted her Youtube videos. One of the contestants,Barret, even temporarily took over "Underground" after Katie's mom (who appeared in some of Katie's interviews with the contestants) unexpectedly passed away.
• Joseph Marshall is this for Johnson and Friends, Lift-Off and The Noddy Shop. He's met several of the people who worked on the shows in question, started a fansite for Johnson and Friends and even started an independent record label, Silbert Records, to re-release the songs from these shows.
• Inai Inai Baa! has Xu Jiawei, the admin of the wiki for the show. She has auditioned for the Chinese version of the show, appeared in a stage show based on said version twice, and met the Chinese oneesan Xiaoyi. She is a major fan of the 2003-2007 onee-san Fuuka and often wears a costume resembling hers.
  • Western fans may have heard of otomodachifan. He collects various Inai Inai Baa! merchandise and DVDs and has even talked to Kotomi Kuga, the 2007-2011 oneesan, via Twitter.

Music

• meathead is the most prominent "Nine Inch Nails" humour guy, and he makes rather poorly-animated (though really funny) Flash cartoons... one of which found its way onto the official NIN website.
• Wayne Studer, Ph.D. has pretty much the most detailed Pet Shop Boys fansite in existence. He's appeared in one of the documentaries about them, and his "On This Date..." feature has been incorporated into the front page of their official site.
• Chinen Yuri is, without a doubt, hands down, the biggest Arashi/Ohno fan ever. It probably helps that he's in the same company as the group as they inspired him to become an idol himself.
• Disturbedpedia has attained this status within Disturbed's fanbase for archiving nearly every single video about the band on their YouTube channel, including some very rare material that can't be found anywhere else.
• Space fandom had Pab UK and Eiteews, aka Paul and Donna, who ran Spacetheband. There's also Billy Cook, who is responsible for making Love You More Than Football, the 'lost' third album, available to fans.
• Omi has gained fame in the X Japan fandom for her fancomics based on Yoshiki Hayashi's (and occasionally other fans') Twitter postings.
• Bolle Gregmar for Blue Öyster Cult. As one of the band members once said, "Bolle is the Blue Oyster Cult - we're just the band."
• Tyler Oakley, video-blogging extraordinaire with a huge crush on One Direction, got to interview them in August 2013.
• Journey has Rhonda Dirr, who had the first fansite for Jonathan Cain (Journey's current keyboardist) and who has become good friends and webmaster for Mr. Cain; Dan Stacy, who founded the Journey e-mail group in the '90s, and Cyndi Poon & Lora Beard, longtime fans of the band who were brought on-board with the band to run the band's fan club Journey Force throughout the '70s and '80s and now manage FanAsylum, one of the premier fanclub companies in the US, who still handles Steve Perry's promotions.
• While multiple members of The Black Dahlia Murder are known for their championing of small-time and obscure acts and efforts to expose them to a wider audience, Trevor Strnad and Alan Cassidy take it even further. The former runs The Obituarist, a column on Metal Injection, where he does a rundown of recent and up-and-coming releases from a wide variety of underground acts, while the latter took it one step further and joined the UK technical death metal outfit Slugdge (which he was a longtime fan of) as a dedicated drummer after they asked him to do session drums on a future release.

Podcasts

• My Brother, My Brother and Me: Fans who frequently submit Yahoo Answers for Griffin to read on the show get shout-outs and credits from the boys. The most prolific of these get into VIP territory, typically denoted by them getting their own little Running Gag Phrase Catcher. There's Rachel Rosing ("Game recognize game"), Zoe Kinsky ("Climbing that ladder!"), Jacob Locker ("Coming out of retirement!"), Ira Wray ("Are you Ira Wray?" "Who wants to know?"), and the undisputed king of them all, Level 9000 Yadrew Drewydd Drew Davenport.
  • Drew Davenport's fame spilled over into the McElroy Brothers' other podcast, The Adventure Zone: Balance, where he was the namesake for Davenport, the gnome butler and intrepid interdimensional starship captain.

Pro Wrestling

• ECW had a core group of superfans, known as "Club ECW", who seemed to appear in choice seats in the audience of their shows week after week. Some of them became known by Fan Nicknames due to their distinctive appearances ("Sign Guy" always had a witty sign, "Hat Guy" always wore a straw hat and Hawaiian shirt, "Faith No More Guy" bore a stunning resemblance to Jim Martin from Faith No More, etc.). Eventually, ECW staffers started reserving the best seats in the house for these fans. Five years after ECW shut down, their special status was still honored for the official ECW reunion show, ECW One Night Stand, as well as the unofficial one, Hardcore Homecoming.
• Perhaps the biggest VIP in Professional Wrestling, however, is Dave Meltzer, author and publisher of The Wrestling Observer Newsletter, the original Smart Mark newsletter. Others include Wade Keller (of the Pro Wrestling Torch, another popular newsletter), Bob Ryder (who made the transition from VIP to wrestling insider when he took a job with WCW), Scott Keith, Christopher Robin Zimmerman, and Chris Hyatte. Unlike most other entertainment companies, wrestling promotions (with the exceptions of the aforementioned ECW and Ring of Honor) tend to hate those who write on the subject with a passion, since they have a distinct tendency to pull back the curtain on Kayfabe (the late promoter Herb Abrams went so far as to feature a wrestler named Davey "The Observer" Meltzer on his UWF tv program; needless to say, "Meltzer" suffered defeat and humiliation). RD Reynolds and Blade Braxton of WrestleCrap also have a fairly large online following, although both have been involved in independent pro wrestling, and they also tend to take a comically self-deprecating view of their importance as VIPs (Blade's insistence that he had a brief affair with Amy "Lita" Dumas after meeting her once at a car show, for example).
  • Finally, there are Bill And Doug (AKA RVDTito4Life of YouTube fame, and rival of Kent Jones), who were hired by TNA to become the hosts of the online show, TNA Addicts.
• Jae, the guy who ran what was the only English language Dragon Gate website, was enlisted by the promotion to help set up their first tour of the United States. In an interview, he told a short story about how CIMA, the promotion's top draw, called him at 2 a.m. one night.

Sports

• Certain teams have famous supporters that are always in attendance and become very associated with them.
  • In basketball, there's Jack Nicholson for the Los Angeles Lakers, Spike Lee for the New York Knicks and Billy Crystal for the Los Angeles Clippers.
  • In US college sports, a good number of celebrities with some connection to a school or its geographic area are often in attendance (schedule permitting) and become equally associated with said school. Examples include (but are not limited to) Ashley Judd with the Kentucky Wildcats, Matthew McConaughey with the Texas Longhorns, Jim Ross with the Oklahoma Sooners, and Snoop Dogg with the USC Trojans.
• Shirley Manson of Garbage is perhaps the most unlikely San Antonio Spurs fan you'll ever encounter. She said she became a Spurs fan when she caught a glimpse of Tim Duncan doing a free throw and became smitten with him.
• Virtually every NFL team has a signature fan who is frequently shown in advertisements. Some of them even featured in a dedicated exhibit at the actual Pro Football Hall of Fame (though, contrary to the opinion of some, never actually inducted). Examples include:
  • "Pinto Ron" (Buffalo Bills)
  • "Barrel Man" (Denver Broncos)
  • The Hogettes (Washington Commanders)
  • Darth Raider (Las Vegas Raiders)
  • "Crazy Ray" (Dallas Cowboys)
  • "Fireman Ed" (New York Jets)
  • "Big Dawg" (Cleveland Browns)

Tabletop Games

• With the development of the Master List of Limitations, Jack Butler became this for the Champions/Hero System community.
• It is generally agreed that Surbrook's Stuff, maintained by Michael Surbrook, is the go-to site for Champions/Hero System gamers needing character sheets for, well, just about anything.
• Brian R. James (known at one time as "Iakhovas" online) counts as one for the Forgotten Realms fandom, since the higher-ups at Wizards of the Coast were so impressed by his compilation of names, dates, and facts regarding the Realms into a 100-page PDF history tool that he was approached for permission and eventually tapped to have his work fleshed out, illustrated, and added to by numerous well-known writers including Eric Boyd, George Krashos, and Ed Greenwood himself to become the Grand History of the Realms.
• Thanks to a combination of a distinctive whiskey-soaked accent and his feature-length Mockumentary productions about the content and history of the BattleTech universe, Tex of The Black Pants Legion is a major name in the fandom and often suggested as a gateway content creator for new fans to get immersed in the lore. He even became Ascended Fanon when his character, former Mechwarrior (and slightly questionable professor) Randolph P. Checkers, had his presence canonized in one of the books.

Theater

• The Phantom of the Opera fan Christine Daaé is now largely known for having legally changed her name to that of the show's heroine, but in the 1990s ran an international fanzine and founded most of the early Phantom discussion forums on the internet, including Phantom of the Opera.com She has represented the fandom on radio, television, and in the press. Her public dislike of Andrew Lloyd Webber sometimes made her a controversial figure. She has refused to confirm or deny rumors of relationships with two The Phantom of the Opera actors.

Theme Parks

• The Halloween Horror Nights fandom of Universal Studios Orlando has a number of big names: Dr. Raymond Holmes, Nightshade, TerraPhantom/WESKER69, and jwfearman among many others. These people are often known throughout the multiple sites (originally one, HHNVault, until it shut down) and have had their names hidden on the website or in the event props and scenery as easter eggs.

Toys

• Teddy Ruxpin has several:
  • Long-time fans may know Josh Issacson, who ran Teddy Ruxpin Online. In 1999, he interviewed Ken Forsse.
  • More recently, Billy Tooma, who created the documentary Ken Forsse: Come Dream With Me Tonight, could be considered one of these. He even appeared in an episode of The Toys That Built America focusing on Teddy Ruxpin.

Video Games

• Rooster Teeth Productions, the creators of the machinima Red vs. Blue. Rooster Teeth has been since commissioned by Microsoft to do advertisements, and high-definition copies of Red vs. Blue are sold in the Xbox Live Marketplace and in many game stores. The crew also have voice-acting roles in the game Halo 3, including a hidden skit that changes cast members and lines based on the difficulty level selected. A custom gametype they created, Grifball, got playlists in Halo 3 and Reach, and was updated and expanded upon in Halo 4.
  • Randall Glass, creator of the "Halo Physics Experiment", better known as the Warthog Jump, became immensely popular for a time. He even got into the credits of Halo 2 under the "Special Thanks" section.
    • Both the cast of Red vs. Blue and Randall Glass made it into a special "Tribute vault" in Halo: Reach, along with several other groups of fans.
• Tehnoobshow, who started out with a few videos about a stereotypical noob, eventually became this to Runescape, even being commissioned by Jagex to work on the videos to open their machinima contests.
• In the early to mid-nineties, a fair number of famous and semi-famous Doom mapmakers wound up being engaged as official level designers for actual developers. The first was Tim Willits, Doom enthusiast and mapmaker assimilated by id in the mid-nineties, his most notable work being The Ultimate Doom, Doom³ and the entire Quake series. He later ascended even further to become the lead designer and current co-owner of the company.
• Of note in the EarthBound fandom is Clyde "Tomato" Mandelin, a professional translator working for Funimation and lead/sole translator of the Mother 3 and MOTHER 1+2 Fan Translation projects, getting lots of love from both fans and the game industry for his virtually Herculean efforts in the case of the former. He's also a big name in the fan translation "scene" in general, having worked on high-profile projects like Bahamut Lagoon and Star Ocean, and has been mentioned by famed translator Ted Woolsey in an interview. These days, he runs EarthBound Central, a personal blog dedicated to exploring the minutiae of EarthBound, new finds in the games, developments for the series, theorising about why everyone's so reluctant to rerelease them, translation changes, and occasionally talking about what creator Shigeru Miyamoto/Shigesato Itoi is up to these days, and Legends of Localization, a site that looks at changes made while bringing other games from Japan to English speaking regions, occasionally the other way around, and sometimes other combinations of "from" and "to" regions.
  • On a more traditional level, there's Jami Lynne. Under the handle "Katon", they were one of the masterminds between three well-renowned fan radio plays and the most consistently popular radio DJ for STARMEN.net's internet radio station, Radio PSI, in the early 2000s. They received this popularity with more surprise and humility than many VIPs on this list, and have kept a generally low profile outside of their personal music projects, their contributions to the OMORI soundtrack, and some occasional work for Starmen.net's offshoot company Fangamer.
• Plenty of Freedom Planet fans have at least heard of Fladervy, one of the most notable speedrunners in the community. His runs of Lilac and especially Milla have exploited the game's physics so extensively he tends to top the leaderboards for the game. He's been invited to many Games Done Quick events to show off the game, even the game's creator Strife has expressed his approval many times. To a slightly lesser extent, there's Succinct and Punchy and johannhowitzer. They've all received favorable Tweats from the creator and voice actors.
• For Monster Rancher there's the late Lisa Shock, owner of the popular fansite Monster Rancher Metropolis and known for her research into the game mechanics. She is even credited under "special thanks" in the third, fourth, and fifth game, as well as the Updated Re-release of the first two games.
• From the Warcraft and World of Warcraft series:
  • Xaran Alamas, the owner of a large Warcraft III fansite back in the day and later the runner of a semi-official World of Warcraft "lore question and answers" thread at the fora. He is also reputedly a cyber-friend with Chris Metzen, the leader of the series' creative division. In WoW's second expansion pack, he got an NPC named after him.
  • Not to mention Skosiris, the founder of THE site for any World of Warcraft information, Wowhead. He is well known enough for Blizzard to name an NPC after him. They got the race wrong (Skorisis' main is an Orc as opposed to the Blood Elf NPC), but admittedly a Blood Elf make better Loremasters...
  • Same goes for Breanni, founder of a site categorizing minipets in WoW who also gets referenced ingame as a minipet vendor, and the NPC IS a gnome.
  • Many other fans have received items named after them. As examples, Aldriana's Gloves of Secrecy are named for the famous rogue theory-crafter on the Elitist Jerks website, Phaedra's Vestments of the Sprouting Seed are named for a woman who ran a popular blog about resto druids (and who was pregnant at the time the item debuted), and Blockade's Lost Shield is named for a dwarf warrior on the Barthilas server with an infamously large collection of tier sets and shields.
  • Ahab Wheathoof, a tauren farmer with a simple quest in Mulgore, was designed and voiced by Ezra Chatterton, who was brought to Blizzard's offices by the Make-A-Wish foundation.
  • There's also Boubille, creator of MMO-Champion, the WoW news and data mining site where most people get their information on upcoming patches way before Blizzard ever announces anything, and it's also a great compilation of developer posts.
• From the StarCraft series:
  • Arguably every pro-level player, both in and out of Korea.
  • Amateur commentators like Mike "Husky Starcraft" Lamond, Sean "Day9" Plott (himself a former pro-level player), and a slew of others are regularly hired by Blizzard and other pro-level game leagues to commentate the games.
  • StarCrafts, created by Carbot, not only has official t-shirts sold by Blizzard, but also has his images incorporated into both icons and profile images in the game itself, and even got an official graphics pack for StarCraft Remastered.
• Blizzard's generally extensive engagement with their fans has produced a lot of these. Tournament Play masters aside, many independent commentators achieved internet stardom by doing After Action Reports and How To guides on the StarCraft series and World of Warcraft, and were eventually brought on by Blizzard in some official capacity or another.
• The Pokémon fandom is pretty much split into three, and accordingly the heads of said ways are Big Name Fans:
  • "Serebii" (real name Joe Merrick, ironically provided by a page about him on rival Bulbapedia. No relation to aintitcool's Joeseph Merrick as far as we know) hosts one of the two most well-known Pokémon sites, the self-titled Serebii.net, and has been known to appear on other Pokémon-related forums, as well as on Star Trek-related forums under the name of Captain Joe. His attitude regarding other Pokémon websites and a few allegations of plagiarism (though unsubstantiated in recent years), bullying and looking to pick fights (even with other fandoms!) have given him his own personal Broken Base amongst Pokémon fans. His animosity with Bulbagarden and PokéBeach in particular is near-legendary, though he still frequents both sites.
    • If you need another example of his reputation in the fandom, keep in mind that the Official Nintendo Magazine (the UK one) nearly always uses Serebii.net as a source for their Pokemon news. Serebii/Joe Merrick himself also often ends up writing for said magazine, so you've got a situation where a fan is well known enough that the official media for the company uses his work as a source themselves.
  • "Archaic" (real name Liam Pomfret) is webmaster of the other big-name Pokémon site, Bulbagarden.net. He's one of the oldest VIPs in the fandom, having first made a name for himself back in 2000-2002, primarily as a leader or spokesman for the Pokémon shippers community (which got him top billing for Ship-to-Ship Combat here); a role in which he managed to turn the entire staff of Pokémasters, then one of the major forums, against shippers. He later worked for Serebii as his right hand man, but left to (re)establish Bulbagarden, incidentally creating a conflict between the two communities that is still ongoing many years later. The initial relaunch of Bulbagarden is most charitably described as achieving somewhat underwhelming results, but after several years of the website struggling, Archaic added a wiki to the site, which quickly grew into Bulbapedia; he later led the effort to expand into the collaborative Nintendo wiki network NIWA.
  • "Water Pokémon Master" (real name Jon Sahagian; thanks to Wikipedia for this info) of TCG website PokéBeach.com is another well-known website in the fan community. His devotion to the franchise has allowed him to interview the previous director of the Pokémon anime, Masamitsu Hidaka, and he is the only foreigner to have seen an early screening of the 12th Pokémon movie in Japan. His site has also been featured in several TCG magazines around the world. He is known to be in contact with internal Pokémon officials, even to the point where he can pick up the phone and call them to confirm rumors and stories. He is also a little infamous with some people at The Pokémon Company International for posting early scans of TCG sets several weeks before they are released.
• In Fall from Heaven, Magister Cultuum fills this role, to the point of having a Great Sage named after him, an being quickly know to everyone on the Forums.
• Touhou Project:
  • KirbyM too, owner of Walfas, a Touhou-related site. Worked on Maikaze's Touhou anime, although that too was fanmade...
  • IOSYS, makers of some of the most notable song remixes.
• Minecraft has SethBling, one of the more known abusers of the in-game wiring system. He is quite popular with the developers, too.
• Pikmin Link is possibly the biggest VIP in the Zelda fandom. Being a cosplayer, even a particularly good one, is not usually enough to earn such a title. However, Pikmin Link's cosplay reached the attention of Nintendo executives, who recruited her to portray Link at the official release of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, and the costume she wore has been retired and is kept under glass - because it was signed by Shigeru Miyamoto himself.
• Gideon Zhi, of Aeon Genesis, has released far more Fan Translations than any other group, and his work is almost inevitably featured in any articles about the subject.
• While he was more associated with the Saturday morning cartoon and the Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics) based on them, Dan Drazen was a big name in Sonic the Hedgehog fandom for a while. He's also into Care Bears.
  • Additionally, Jay Axer and Patrick "Spaz" Spaziante both were fans who ended up drawing for the Archie comics.
  • Further, Ian Flynn was just a fan and then he got the job to write the Archie comics.
  • Evan Stanley also counts, who rose as a notable face in the Sonic fandom with her fancomic Ghosts of the Future and then cemented that status when she got the opportunity for freelance work on illustrations and then writing of the Archie comics. How? She simply entered a fan artist contest in 2010 and while she didn't win, the editor, Paul Kaminski, contacted her and presented her the prized opportunity. Plus, she was only 17-18 years old.
• Team Fortress 2 is a perfect example of this trope, following on from a Quake mod with a commercially-released game that became one of the premier titles on Steam. Within the game, a few high quality player-made maps have been honorarily canonized as official.
  • Also in the Team Fortress 2 fandom are fans known for producing high-quality fanwork. Among them:
    • Chemical Alia for her work on the Female Medic and Heavy reskins.
    • Makani for designing what eventually became the official design for the Administrator.
    • Cat Bountry for writing what could be the best and well-known fanfics in the fandom, including Respawn of the Dead.
    • This was turned into Promoted Fanboy when Cat Bountry got the opportunity to write one of the official Team Fortress 2 comics.
• Anthony Burch from Hey Ash, Whatcha Playin'? was offered, and accepted, a job a Gearbox because of how funny Hey Ash was.
• Irma 'Aimo' Ahmed is well-known in various BioWare fandoms, but perhaps she's best known these days for her fan works for Dragon Age. She even got to do a comic based on a deleted scene in Dragon Age: Origins (spoiler warning in the link) with the head writer for that game.
  • Also well known to BioWare's fandom, particularly the Mass Effect fanbase, is Holly Conrad. A costume maker and prop maker, Conrad started gaining notoriety when she and her studio, Crabcat Industries, showed off a series of Mass Effect cosplays at Comic-Con 2010. By that time a year later Conrad had been commissioned by Bioware to make costumes for their live broadcast during Comic-Con 2011, make props and costumes for Mass Effect 3's live-action trailer and she's become a symbol for FemShep within the fandom.
    • Similarly, one of Crabcat's co-founders, Jessica Merizan, has since been hired by Bioware as the company's Community Manager.
• Zeality is known for running the Chrono Compendium, the biggest Chrono series website. Recently he was featured in an article about his role in the community.
• James Rolfe, aka The Angry Video Game Nerd, is practically a celebrity in the online movies and video games fandom.
• During the COVID lockdown of 2020, Casey Mongillo discovered Bloody Roar 2 and loved the game so much that they made a fan re-dub patch for the game, bringing along other voice actors such as Kaiji Tang and Kira Buckland to voice each character while personally voicing Bakuryu the Mole.
• Zan Sidera (or just Zan) is the number #1 public figure for the Mega Man series; known for his extensive canonical knowledge, keen analysis and immense dedication. For example, he built extremely detailed and comprehensive timelines for EVERY Mega Man game there is to date. Some of the more well-read and complete timelines involve the Zero series, the X series and the Legend Series. Obviously, the timelines are not spoiler-friendly.
  • Also while they are not as known as him, there are Robert Oakes (Oakie), Hypershell and Marshmellow Man, with which Zan often discuss over the facts. Marshmellow Man himself can read Japanese and provided Zan Sidera and the fanbase with information, which would have been exclusively for the Japanese.
• Fan Film creators Beat Down Boogie became VIPs because of their mashup of Modern Warfare and Metal Gear Solid titled Modern War Gear Solid.
  • Likewise, Chris Doucette and inonibird both had their shares of fans for their respective Metal Gear Solid Quirky Miniboss Squad comics. Those who had never played the games read the comics and were surprised to see how little characterization both FOXHOUND and the Cobra Unit received when they played the games.
• The Portal fandom has Forte. Her human versions of the personality cores (especially her Wheatley design) are some of (if not the) most widely used in the fandom. Quite a few people even ship her with Wheatley.
  • Portal also has Waffles, or Waffleguppies, author of the famous fanfic Blue Sky, a super-popular work that has its own trope page and a dedicated circle of fans.
• In Achron, Shadowfury333 fills this role. He's become a sort of unoffocial game commentator, casting replays and live games, as well as making a large number of maps and special additions (such as observers) through modding the game.
• Fire Emblem:
  • VincentASM is best known as the owner of Serenes Forest, the largest and most complete Fire Emblem site. The End also rose to this level when he translated the Hasha no Tsurugi manga. There's also japanbrowser441, who is famous for making a very large number of commissions of Sophia (a character from Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade) and putting her back on the map as a result. It's often concluded half-jokingly that he's either rich or spending his lottery money, because as of March 2021 he's been making them for over half a year at least and shows no signs of stopping.
  • X-KAN/Kantopia was one of the best known translators in the Fire Emblem community, and despite having been semi-inactive starting around the dawn of The New '20s, still is known for translating bits of Fire Emblem media and details largely unknown outside Japan to this day. They have also done translations for other game franchises, such as Pokémon.
• David Goldfarb, an ex-developer from DICE who helped with the production of the Battlefield series, is a huge fan of films that involve bank robberies and similar heists and had been wanting to produce a game in that genre for years. After David left DICE, he joined Overkill Software, the makers of PAYDAY: The Heist, and helped the studio produce the sequel.
• In Dota 2, Cyborg Matt is famous for his analysis of patches and support of the Dota 2 community, to the extent that some theorize he is the game's mysterious developer, IceFrog.
• In beatmania IIDX communities, you can expect to hear the player names MADOKA and DOLCE. a lot; they are known as two of the best IIDX players in Japan, often becoming the finalists in the IIDX tournament at the annual Konami Arcade Championship.
• Let's Play-er Chuggaaconroy is a VIP of the Mother series, Pokémon, Xenoblade Chronicles, Ōkami, and The Legend of Zelda all at once. He can be considered one for Nintendo in general.
  • Chugga also has an unusually bilateral example of this in the case of JaidenAnimations, as both content creators are subscribed to one another and follow each other on Twitter.
• DeceasedCrab is well known for his Lets Plays of La-Mulana, to the point that he was on the special thanks credits of the remake.
• A Let's Player by the name of Northernlion is very well-known in The Binding of Isaac community, mostly because he does a daily run through the game that has been on-going for several years. Community reactions are a bit split on him, largely over his playstyle, but he's well-known enough that game creator Edmund McMillen guest-commentated on one of his playthroughs.
• The Dark Souls community has several over the series' lifespan: VaatiVidya and Epic Name Bro are both known for their in-depth, comprehensive analysis of the game series' lore (which is famously vague and complex). OnlyAfro was a notorious DS1 "memelord" famous for comedic PvP montages and builds and popularized the "Giant Dad" build, and Iron Pineapple gained traction in the DS3 era for PvP shenanigans and "Soulslike" games. Limit Breakers is well known for his analysis videos of obscure and occasionally useless mechanics in the Souls series.
• "mossbag" is well-known in the Hollow Knight community for his in-depth and comprehensive lore analysis videos, sometimes incorporating memes to balance comedy and seriousness (In fact, some of the memes in the community originate from his videos). Whenever a new fan wants to learn more about the game's lore, veterans usually recommend watching mossbag's videos.
• Who enjoys the Sega Saturn title NiGHTS into Dreams…? None other than Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto, and he's named it as a masterpiece and the one game he wishes he had developed.
• Lady Norbert was this for Eipix Entertainment, the Serbian developer of the Dark Parables and other point-and-click titles. The company has used her work for official social media marketing, as well as thanking her for making the page about the Dark Parables on This Very Wiki. She was granted the honorary position in the company of "North American Vice-President of Fairytale Detection," as could be seen on their Facebook page when the company was still active.
  • With Eipix no longer making games, she has started to become this in the early 2020s for Elephant Games, being one of the chief admins of the Grim Tales/Detectives United wiki (of which the devs are stated to be big fans) and working with their social media coordinator to improve crossover traffic between the wiki and the devs' Facebook page. She was also the grand prize winner of their first-ever fan fiction contest, which was judged by the game writers themselves.
• Jack Lusted was once just a guy modding Rome: Total War. But after developing such greatly successful and popular - not to mention large-scale - mods such as Terra Expugnandae, Late Romans and Lands to Conquer (for Medieval II: Total War), he was hired by Creative Assembly in 2007, and these days calls most of the shots on upcoming Total War games as Project Lead.
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • Dave Humphrey is the creator of the Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages, the first and foremost wiki for all things Elder Scrolls.
  • Lady Nerevar is admin of The Imperial Library, a site dedicated to the discussion and preservation of the series' lore, as well as the fiancee of former series writer Michael Kirkbride.
  • Shirley Curry, aka "Grandma Shirley," is a popular Youtuber in her 80s that does Let's Play videos of Skyrim. As of 2021, Bethesda has mo-capped her for inclusion as a character in the yet-untitled TES VI.
  • Zaric Zhakaron posts his intriguing, detailed videos on the franchise (and on Bethesda games in general).
• Max Christiansen, AKA Maximilian Dood (of The Online Warrior, Assist Me, and Yo Videogames fame) is a Big Name Fan for the entire Fighting Game genre, plus a few other specific titles like Devil May Cry. He's held in high regard by quite a few big names in the industry like Tekken producer Katsuhiro Harada, Mortal Kombat co-creator Ed Boon, and actor Reuben Langdon (who plays two of his all-time favorite characters, Ken Masters and Dante). He's also become a Promoted Fanboy a few times, doing official work for Capcom^note Hosting the Cross Assault web series to promote Street Fighter X Tekken and the Assist Me videos were officially sponsored to the point where Capcom's Yoshinori Ono cameoed in the last episode and more prominently Iron Galaxy Studios.^note Producing trailers and story mode cutscenes for the Killer Instinct reboot
  • Fans of Max have created custom mods to make him a skin for playable characters in several games. He's even received a voice mod for the Troubleshooter in DNF Duel, who already has a colour palette that fits him perfectly.
  • His biggest tribute is in Naraka Bladepoint, which also includes Benny the dog, his late best friend and co-star in many of his videos.
• Since not long after it was announced and released, the Jurassic World: Evolution fandom has been dominated by YouTuber Best In Slot, who covered the game's development frequently on his YouTube Channel in addition to videos covering various skins and features after release. His videos have become ubiquitous in the community that reactions to new features often elicit calls of excitement towards his videos on the subject.
  • This also happened to Steamblust, a user who posted a variety of photoshopped images to Reddit depicting species not in the game, often using their appearances in other Jurassic Park media as a basis, such as the Troodon and Herrarasaurus from Jurassic Park: The Game to the Carchardotonosaurus from Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis as well as fully original creations; he eventually added watermarks to his images due to people using them in videos and reposting them without permission. He has since even produced skins that work within the PC version. There are often many calls for the developers to follow him for inspiration.
• Many designers become VIPs in the Zoo Tycoon communities during periods of high productivity in modding and gradually become lost in the shuffle when their work is superseded by later designers; the most enduring names have usually been those who pioneered new capabilities, especially with modeling software.
  • HENDRIX, originally known as Dinosaur Man, is a highly influential figure who has become known for his programming and scripting in recent years, though he was initially known as simply being a particularly talented designer. He was one of the pioneers of using Blender to create new models and later animations for the game, and created not only multiple popular solo project releases, but an entire user expansion in his own, as well as being a pivotal figure in both the Radical Remake and Cretaceous Calamity user projects. He later made a script to generate Zoo Tycoon 2 models as Zoo Tycoon 1 animals, and after fifteen years, created the long-desired script to allow importing edited models into Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis.
  • Although the designer Legosith is not quite as well-known in the community, he is also well-known within the community for being the first to create a fully new biome, representing the deep sea Abyss, after five years of failed attempts to do so by senior designers in the community. (This was his first public project.) He also was the first to create new animations for the game, allowing flying birds, and was key to creating the first XL map for Cretaceous Calamity.
• Tyler "Tyler1" Steinkamp's rise to popularity through League of Legends is considered the stuff of legend. Originally he gained infamy as "The Most Toxic League Of Legends Player in America" due to his rampant griefing and poor sportsmanship, leading him to be permanently banned through 22 different accounts, with Riot Games permanently banning Tyler himself from the game by early 2016. However, after a long campaign to dispute his ban and a few years of mellowing out and becoming more cooperative while streaming other games, Riot eventually rescinded his ban on grounds of good behavior in 2018 (even several of his harshest critics at Riot, including LCS caster David "Phreak" Turley, welcomed him back). Nowadays, not only is he consistently one of the game's most popular streamers, but he's periodically invited by Riot to participate during esports events and official videos, and held as a glowing example of a troll turning a new leaf.
• As far as things go for first-person shooters from the '90s, or more modern shooters that emulate ones from the '90s, Civvie 11 is typically considered one of the most important people to discuss them.
• Toontown Online
  • Toontown Rewritten lead Joey Ziolkowski holds an in-person ToonFest every year, where one of the venue's traditions is to have staff from the original game answer fan questions.
  • On the side of Rewritten and Toontown: Corporate Clash themselves, Ugly Corny hosts a page providing Content Packs, which are texture and music mods provided by the community, for free. Both Rewritten and Corporate Clash accept Content Pack creators as official partners.
• Project Arrhythmia: ol666, the creator of the Black Heart series of custom levels. It has millions of views on several videos showcasing it, and is popular enough to be confused with the base game - occasionally, ol666 has been incorrectly credited for Project Arrhythmia itself.
• Puyo Puyo: If you have ever looked up shipping fanart of Sig x Amitie, there is a high chance you have come across the fanart made by the Chilean artist MacaHeroes, alternatively known as just Maca or Maku. While she does draw other Puyo and gaming fanart, she's very outspoken in her support of the couple and tends to be known by other Puyo fans in the West who ship the couple. It's to the point where at least one of her pieces of shipping fanart - specifically this one - was retweeted by the official Puyo Twitter/X account (more because they liked the art and less because of any approval of the couple, but still).
• Five Nights at Freddy's: The Big 3 Youtubers in the fandom are Markiplier, MatPat, and Dawko. All 3 even got a Shout-Out in Freddy in Space 2.

Web Animation

• Battle for Dream Island: Curiously, Rosie O'Donnell is a highly respected figure in the Object Show community, due to her giving BFDI a Colbert Bump through discussing multiple times on TikTok how her daughter, Dakota, is a fan of the series.

Webcomics

• Homestuck: Andrew Hussie asked popular fan artist Shelby Cragg to draw art for in-universe Fangirl Calliope.
• Jungle Juice: An entomologist by the username "Entomo" leaves fun facts about arthropods in the comments section of each chapter. Folk have gotten so used to this that Entomo gets top-comment almost always, and many of the early comments on chapters will be asking about where Entomo is.

Web Original

• The Nostalgia Critic:
  • Rants, the admin of the TGWTG secrets blog, has been making a name for himself. His popularity varies from person to person, however.
  • One fan named Erica is well-acquainted with the Nostalgia Critic team, with their Demo Reel Slash Fic being read by Doug and Uncle Yo. They're most well-known as the partial inspiration for Hyper Fangirl's character; see them interact with the team in cosplay here.
  • For the later NC fandom, the most prominent Tumblr was ThatChickWithTheGifs, responsible for most of the reaction gifs circulated around the fandom before it shut down in 2018. The members of the show have used these gifs on their own social media accounts.
• Chris Hardwick of TheNerdistPodcast, started out as a (very well connected) interdisciplinary geekdom VIP, but is now a Ascended Fanboy (working for BBC America and ComicCon) and a cultural institution onto himself.
• Many of the bigger remixers in the Game Grumps fandom can get this status, including but not limited to the "Triforce" mixers, AtPunk, Liltommyj, and JerryTerry, the latter eventually composing several theme song variations for Jon's own show.
• Hermitcraft has Elybeatmaker, known for making Voice Clip Songs, and perhaps most famously Pixlriffs and ZloyXP, creators of the Hermitcraft Recap, a Youtube series that functions as a sort of weekly news of the server, and which is highly regarded by the Hermits themselves. As Pixlriffs is himself a Minecraft YouTuber and plays on Empires SMP, he became something of a Promoted Fanboy when Hermitcraft and Empires did a Crossover. Naturally, most of the Hermits who encountered him made some reference to the Recap, and Pix found himself in the awkward position of having to do parts of the Recap in first-person — and later, recording an episode "in front of a live studio audience" (read: Cleo, Joe, xBCrafted and Sausage) on Hermitcraft itself.
• hololive: Years after his presence in the Touhou fandom (see KirbyM above), Walfie became wildly popular in the hololive EN fandom by both the Vtubers and fans for his fanart, reaching Promoted Fanboy status with the addition of "Smol" chibi models in his art style for April Fool's Day 2021, which have since then become a recurring part of the EN lore.
  • Kanauru has created several 3D animated videos for hololive EN that have been published on the official channels, including "Smol Adventures" and the MV for the "Dreamin Chuchu" cover.
  • The aforementioned MV uses 3D models by Priichu, which have since been used by the hololive EN Vtubers in several VRchat streams (such as April Fool's 2022).
  • VTubing in general has a sort of class of these, the "clippers" — that is, those who take clips from streams and edit them into highlight collections for the audience's benefit. As this job often involves translating the Japanese VTubers' dialogue into English, it's considered an important part of the community, and successful clippers will be the source of many memes and introduce a lot of people to new VTubers. The first Vtuber Awards show, while obviously mostly focusing on Vtubers themselves, also had an award for "Best Clipper".
• SAD-ist is a fan animator known for her animatics for the Dream SMP. Though she was already a relatively well-known animator in Dream's community (her previous animation being based on a clip from Dream's Minecraft Manhunt series), her popularity skyrocketed after her animatic of the L'Manburg War for Independence, "Dream SMP War".

Western Animation

• There are a few in the Avatar: The Last Airbender fandom:
  • "Megafan" Kimberly Miranda aka Isaia, one of the very first Avatar fan artists on DeviantArt. Her account now has over a million views and her artwork is often shown in magazines for the show. Her "It's Avatarded" satire comics are responsible for the Fan Community Nickname.
  • Johane Matte aka Rufftoon, also on Deviant Art, earned one million pageviews in almost half the time that Isaia did. She was later hired as a storyboard artist for the show and provided illustrations for the Avatar-dedicated Nick Mag.
  • The Legend of Korra has Korra Nation, a website where people vote for who they think the 'biggest' fans are. Most of the top scorers are Big Name Fans.
  • Muffin Lance is widely known on AO3 and Tumblr. She has multiple popular stories, including Towards the Sun, Cheating at Pai Sho, Little Zuko V The World, and Salvage. She has also organized fans to create what is officially known as Li’s Friends: Horrible Pets to Protect You From the Horrible World, but is often referred to as Li's Book of Friends or Zuko's Book of Friends (the name changed to avoid copyright from ATLA or Natsume Yuujinchou/Natsume's Book of Friends). This is a coloring book with original creatures, like the giant isopuppy, mimic catopus, polar bear goose, and more.
• Several Transformers fans had Shout-Outs made to them in Beast Wars, but the most famous must be Ben Yee, a Transformers site owner who actually was given credits props as a consultant on the show.
  • Another Big Transformers Fan might be Chris Ho, AKA Internet Personality Vangelus, having served as the voice of Transformers: TransTech Shockwave and having fan art drawn of him by Derrick J. Wyatt.
  • Monzo also deserves mention, having helped Hasbro determine the copyright status of several Transformer-names. His name appears as Universe Onslaught's serial number, along with his birth date.
  • Also of note is Keyan Carlile, who became famous among fans of Transformers: Animated for his fan-made version of Season 4 and frequent interactions with members of the show's cast and crew. He even had the honor of hosting a TFCon panel alongside Eric Siebenaler, Marty Isenberg, and David Kaye showing off reanimated versions of various deleted scenes from the series.
• Mark Moore was/is an infamous Captain N fan, notable for his "Season 4" (through 8) fanfic continuation of the original cartoon series.
• Code Lyoko:
  • Thunderbird3, or TB3, is apparently on speaking terms with the creators and even made a documentary with interviews of the cast and crew. For the fairly small English-speaking fanbase, this was a big thing.
  • SearchingLyoko, founder of Code Lyoko United and a well known member on Lyoko Freak and Code Lyoko Evolved, communicates with MoonScoop quite regularly and was quite possibly a major factor in the creation of Code Lyoko: Evolution.
• ReBoot forum There are a few members who are in on the entire plot of the revival webcomic and/or regularly correspond with higher-ups among the revival. The comic's writer himself is also a member, and regularly interacts with the members to get their input.
• Most Danny Phantom fans are aware of NeoYi. What most people know her for is her excellent fan comic Chess Piece but really, it's nearly impossible to explore the fandom (specifically on DeviantArt) without learning about her eventually. Others include Firefury Amahira, Tavalya Ra, The Alchemist's Muse and Esme Phantom, all of which are very well known around the community.
• The Super Robot Monkey Team Hyper Force Go fandom has Netbug009, she will deny this but we all know it's true... Though her Status as a VIP may be the result of the fact that it's a small Fandom and she's the one currently running the only active fan-forum Monkey See, Monkey Fu.
  • There were some others back in the day, but most of them have moved on.
    • While not still actively in the fandom, if you didn't know about Sora-Mito's fanart back in the day, you had either been hiding under a Shuggazoomian rock or had seen it without realizing it. (Quite a few people took it for their own websites without permission or credit.)
    • Then there was ii, who was the head Admin on MSMF for a while and went through SEVERAL Usernames in his time. Oh yea, he was also one of the few boys in the Fandom which certainly helped his case...
• Total Drama:
  • Winter-Rae, a notorious Crack Pairing writer, and The Kobold Necromancer, who wrote the pioneering Total Drama Comeback series as a spin-off second and third season. If you know anything about Total Drama fanfiction, you've heard of their works. Kobold is actually so prolific that Total Drama actually references his work a few times, such as outright using the term "Total Drama Comeback" in the Action special.
  • Courtney Garcia, AKA CITPrincess is a very popular TDI artist on deviantART, who is well known for her outstanding cosplays of Courtney (the character) and live action reenactments of her scenes from the Total Drama series. She became even better known after winning a Halloween Contest sponsored by the official Total Drama Island Blog in 2009. She's even hung out with Chris Potenza himself for a convention and still keeps in contact with him.
• Heidi "Lady Niko" Rekell has been the unofficial administrator, and "go to" person for Galaxy Rangers. She worked closely with Koch when it came to the DVD release.
• KaBlam! fans most likely will know Princess June (AKA Kablamoid96 or June the KaBlamoid), who created the most music videos on YouTube for the show, a fanfic writer, a fanart artist, and created the first message board for the show. She's one of the reasons why the cult following is getting bigger. Not to mention she knows Mo Willems, the creator of The Off-Beats.
  • And of course, there's another fanfic/fanart KaBlamoid who all the fans should know... KaBlamoid4Life!
• The Loud House has That Engineer, author of Syngenesophobia and What is a Person Worth?, which are two of the most well-known fanfics out of the show (being the most famous ones out of a trend of fics continuing the infamous episodes "Brawl in the Family" and "No Such Luck", respectively). Many members of the fandom have at least heard of one of those fics, even if they didn't read them, and some fellow writers were inspired by him or referenced his works in their own fics.
• In the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fandom, such people are commonly known as being "horse-famous".
  • First of all, there is Shaun Scotellaro (more commonly known as Sethisto), who runs one of the biggest fandom hub websites tied to the show: Equestria Daily. The site is notable enough that it's received exclusive content from The Hub (the Equestria Girls advert), and Sethisto has been interviewed for Wired's article about the show.
  • Other well-known people are the co-moderators of Equestria Daily, such as Cereal Velocity, Phoe, and Calpain. Authors are fairly well-known too, such as Kkat, the author of the (literally) epic-length fanfic, Fallout: Equestria.
  • There's also The Smiling Pony, who (along with an entire team of moderators) runs Derpibooru, the largest and most well known pony imageboard on the net. So much so that his variant design for Trixie's cutie mark (which has six sparkles and a different star than the canon design with only five sparkles) is so widely recognized as the real deal that it has been used for officially licensed merchandise and even lifted directly from his Deviantart and used by IDW for their comic adaptation.
  • There's also BaldDumboRat, who (at least when it comes to fanon) is considered THE voice for Derpy Hooves.
  • The Living Tombstone, Wooden Toaster, and many other Brony musicians are world-famous for what they do.
  • You won't go far into that fanbase without hearing the names Egophiliac, John Joseco, Kloudmutt, Braeburned, Pixelkitties, or Atryl^note To name a few, all of whom are very well known fan artists (some of whom do NSFW stuff so tread carefully) who have contributed thousands of pieces of artwork, are known by cast and crew members, and are responsible for a number of memes and Fanon.
  • Then there's Wild Fire, an alias of MLP storyboard artist Sabrina Alberghetti, and Mandopony, a fan musician. The two met, began dating regularly, and formally announced their engagement in January 2015. They even run a shared Tumblr account, available here.
  • And then there's MLP Analysis, essentially becoming the Channel Awesome of the Brony Community. Well-known members include, but are not limited to, Josh Scorcher, Silver Quill, and I Love Kim Possible A Lot.
  • The concept of horse-fame has been addressed by musicians in the fandom a couple of times, such as by MandoPony in his farewell song "Horse Famous" or by Nowacking and Elit3 in a Nickelback parody that goes by the same title.
• Daria has a few, including Kara Wild who actually managed to score interviews with showrunners Glenn Eichler & Anne Bernstein. Novelist and Dungeons & Dragons game designer Roger E. "The Angst Guy" Moore is also a major fixture within the fandom and is (in)famous for creating some of the most competently written & heart wrenching Dark Fic known to man.
• The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius has Mara S (or acaciathorn, if you want to use her deviantart account handle). She founded and currently runs the longest-running JN fansite on the net. Plus, she wrote a truly incredible, book-length fanfiction called 'The Other Side Of Tomorrow', complete with chapter illustrations and its own fandom. If you've participated in any JN fandom on the net, chances are you've run into Mara or her works at some point.
• Gravity Falls:
  • Among the Fallers, the most well-known is certainly Adam Warrock. Adam was already quite famous online because of the rap songs he created and uploaded to YouTube, but when he made a rap about Gravity Falls using the theme song as the beat, the video became so popular in the fandom, to the point the show's creator tweeted him and called him "the greatest man who ever lived". Adam, among with another fan, Chris Haley, also hosted a podcast during the show's run, "The Gravity Falls Gossiper," which the show's creator once guest starred on.
  • Moring Mark got his start as a popular fan artist in the Gravity Falls community, but would later become more well-known for his countless Star vs. the Forces of Evil and The Owl House comics, with his work being instantly recognizable to anyone within those fandoms.
• Deviantartists DJCoulz and DJ88 are well known across The Lion King fandom for pioneering many of the most popular ideas across the fandom. The former's version of Ahadi and Uru (Mufasa and Scar's parents) has been copied by nearly every other fan. The latter is most famous for giving Zira an abusive father and giving characters from a series of books and comics more vibrant "movie" colors. They're some of the best artists in the fandom.
• Kappa Mikey fans know of Lizzy Silvas, aka Kappa Lizzy who was actually drawn into an episode of Kappa Mikey from winning a fan contest and did her own voice-over. She attended conventions and even inspired other fans to nickname themselves. Kappa Lizzy is also well known by SEGA for playing the Sonic The Hedgehog video games, watching the shows & reading the comics during her years of recovering from a brain tumor when she was a child.
• Miraculous Ladybug:
  • Tumblr user AzuraJae. Jae started mlsubbing, a large scale fansubbing project for the budding show involving at least twelve different languages and gained 10,000+ followers in the span of just three months. Since the start of Jae's project, the fandom has exploded tremendously in numbers - One could say she revolutionized the fandom. She was also the one to give Thomas Astruc the affectionate fanon nickname Hawkdaddy, or Papapillon in French. Additionally, Jae loves to draw fan art and write fanfiction and uploads to them to tumblr.
  • Tumblr user Seasonofthegeek is well known for her fic content for the fandom, which is both numerous and well-written. She also takes part in fandom discussions and creates art for the show.
• YouTuber McKenzie Atwood (better known as MKatwood) has done many things for the Steven Universe fandom. She's the creator of many meme compilation videos of the show, including Pearl's Secret Rap Career. The last installment of the series features Pearl's voice actress Deedee Magno-Hall, and has been acknowledged by Michaela Dietz (Amethyst) and Shelby Rabara (Peridot). She is friends with Deedee Magno-Hall and Zach Callison (Steven), and later became an intern at Cartoon Network before becoming host of the show's official podcast.
• Though his name value isn't immediately recognized in the South Park fandom, Willie "Big-Will" Westwood is the creator of the South Park Scriptorium fansite, which has remained consistently updated since the show's first season; his transcriptions of episodes of the series since its first season are authoritative, and was recognized by the show's animators and creators in its early years; the scripts were also as a basis for the script project at the main fan wiki; he has been the sole active moderator at the official South Park Studios message board for well over a decade as well.
• PrismaGalaxy514 is one of the biggest names in the Johnny Test fandom, due to her creative spirit, detailed artworks and exploring the series in various ways, either through interesting stories, concepts, theories or headcanons.
• DeviantArtist JustinandDennis (J&D) is well-known amongst the members of the small-but-dedicated PB&J Otter fandom. They are responsible for creating several fan characters/OCs and has even created some of the show's Fanon such as backstories, and also wrote some Transformation Fiction for the series (who's human characters/"TF victims" would later become Ascended Extras in their original work). They are also active in other fandoms such as the Blazing Dragons and Rayman fandoms.
• The Blazing Dragons fandom has French DeviantArtist Benthehyena, or Natacha Satari. She is almost singlehandedly responsible for creating the show's fandom through her efforts to raise awareness of the series, with her most notable contribution being co-creating the #BDRevolution campaign with Season 2 story editor Erika Strobel.
• Thomas & Friends:
  • Matt Michaud, better known as Enterprisingengine93 is one of the most recognized fanwork creators. He has an acclaimed series called Enterprising Engines. Mattel even hired him to direct the Thomas Creator Collective.
  • Michael White, also known as WhitehouseFilms, is a fan of the show who knew Andrew Brenner personally. Andrew Brenner invited him to work on the series, and White ended up writing several episodes for seasons 22-24.
  • The Unlucky Tug is renowned for his in-depth video analyses on the show and its characters.
  • DieselD199 is perhaps the most famous content creator, with his TOMICA Thomas & Friends series having amassed 700 million views.
  • The Sodor Island Fansite is a comprehensive fansite about the show and its lore, and have even interviewed several Thomas staff members.
• Animaniacs has Ron O'Dell, known as Keeper1st or Keeper for short. He wrote many webpages about the show back when it was airing, including the Animaniacs Mega Lyrics File, and has a collection of VHS tapes of various Animaniacs rarities, from the 1998 Animaniacs Attack marathon to international dubs of the series. Even Warner Brothers themselves took notice by inviting him to tour their studios in 1995 and drawing his hat on The Lobe in Freakazoid!.
• Ben 10 has Kuro the Artist of The Ink Tank. His Youtube channel was originally meant to bring attention to his webcomic 5 Years Later, a crossover with Danny Phantom. However, the channel quickly grew to massive popularity within the Ben 10 fandom. Now, the channel has hosted interviews with cast members, investigated obscure trivia, and is analyzing every episode of Ben 10. Many people in the Ben 10 fandom tend to see his word as final, even if he himself is adamant that he's just another fan.

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