JayTim Oneshots

💚 A Deep Dive

Summary: The second Night Blogger companion fic. If you haven't read that one, this will make zero sense. (Also, the formatting for this on AO3 is a million times better, so ideally read it on there instead.)

An in-universe online news article doing a deep dive into a mysterious tiny fandom with a cult following. [4,275 words]

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𝗦𝗧𝗔𝗥 𝗖𝗜𝗧𝗬 𝗕𝗨𝗭𝗭

𝙰 𝙳𝙴𝙴𝙿 𝙳𝙸𝚅𝙴 𝙸𝙽𝚃𝙾 𝚃𝙷𝙴 𝚂𝚃𝚁𝙰𝙽𝙶𝙴𝚂𝚃 𝙲𝚄𝙻𝚃 𝙵𝙰𝙽𝙳𝙾𝙼 𝚈𝙾𝚄'𝙻𝙻 𝙴𝚅𝙴𝚁 𝙼𝙴𝙴𝚃

𝙹𝚎𝚊𝚗𝚎𝚝𝚝𝚎 𝙷𝚊𝚛𝚘𝚕𝚍
𝙾𝚌𝚝𝚘𝚋𝚎𝚛 5, 2024

There's no better way to say it: what I'm going to do today is take you into the wacky, wonderful, and even more terrible fandom that is BB's Relationship Confessional (sometimes also known as BRC, BB's Blog, BBBlog, The Mystery Blog, BB/BF Blog, and other such similar names. Too many to list). It's confusing, it's dark, and it's shrouded in a ridiculous amount of mystery, but it has a tiny, yet undyingly loyal cult following.

Cult following is really an apt descriptor. I've never seen fans so afraid that their fandom may come to bite them in a very real way, and yet they persist.

I suppose I'd better start at the beginning.

I'll go ahead and apologize in advance: this article will probably read as half-mad, disorganised ramblings at best. I have worked on this for months, gone through draft after draft, and still have not arrived at any clear, coherent, sane-sounding way to explain any of this. It's a confusing mess from beginning to end, and I do apologize for that, but trust me when I say that this is a thousand times more succinct, quick, and straightforward than what I had to wade through to bring it to you. I hope you are able to enjoy it nonetheless.

Now that I've gotten that out of the way...

When I happened across the BB's Relationship Confessional fandom, it was entirely accidental, and if it was surreal from the beginning, it only got stranger from there. Of course, I immediately knew, as an investigative journalist, I wouldn't be able to rest until I had figured it all out.

It started on a late night perusal through AO3 (Archive Of Our Own — a site where users can post fanfiction, or even original writing if they wish). I merely clicked a tag, no other filters, no specification for fandom or relationship, so of course I was greeted with the most recent fic (fanfiction) posted. 

Normally I just scroll by unfamiliar or uninteresting ones, but this one was so strange, I couldn't help stopping to look at it, and then clicking on the fic out of interest just to see what it possibly was. Instead of names, every ship and character was just...letters. Like acronyms, or shortened nouns. It was quite a long fic that had just updated with a new chapter, and I certainly didn't intend to read the whole thing, but I wanted to know what their names were and why they weren't listed out. Strangely, they never were in the fic either. The characters were simply as follows: BB, pre-MAI BF (I'll explain this one later), BF, DF [Dear Father], Bro1, Bro2, Bro3, NSis1 [Not-quite Sister], NSis2, Sis, Gpa, BFF1, BFF2, BFF3, Mom, Dad, GF, Ex, Baby, BBFF1, BBFF2, Ma, Pa, SW1, SW2, SW3, Cop1, Cop2, Pedo1, Pedo2, Pedo3, Pedo4, Cat, and MP. If that mostly seems like a weird string of placeholders to you, congratulations, it did to me too.