Surprisingly, though perhaps it should not be so surprising, there are some among us who do not wish to be better fans. They are the truly lost, those who delight in hate and embrace chaos. Beneath the troll bridge of their IP addresses, they grind their axes and fashion their memes. As their mascot, they have adopted Chokut Sar, leading general of the Voydals and a gleeful advocate of torture. He laughs at us from the tiny rectangle of their profile pictures, if it were possible for him to laugh. In contrast to the Kil’aathi such as Commander Dinara Gorun, a bunch of purple, peaceful hippies forced into war against their nature, the Voydals look like insects, with mantis legs and bulging glossy eyes. Hive-minded, they communicate telepathically from antennae notched with thorns that are also used as weapons and thus they have no mouths. What they have in place of a mouth resembles an anus. The mouth-anus sort of clenches and releases when they project their thoughts into another’s thoughts. It is supposed to be intimidating, but we consider their proboscises about as scary as a bouquet of flaccid penises. These groupies of evil post screencaps of Chokut Sar interrogating rebels, his antennae fastened to their temples. “I will break you,” Chokut Sar promises. Or he’s covered in blood, having paid a visit to the internment camps, and declaring, “The lesser races are meant to serve.” Gangs of these angry young men (they are always angry young men) in their pathetic masks of extraterrestrial bullies purposely bump into us at events and harass us in the bathroom. Meanwhile, they chant the mantra of the Voydals: “We are gods. Obey or die.”

Pasty as the bottom-feeders that feast on outer space trash, with genitals as unused as those of the Celebos, geniuses that went extinct from the galaxy because they regarded bumping uglies as icky—that is how we imagine these Voydal worshippers. It’s easy enough to block their accounts until one of us, a fan famous in his own domain, a gamer called GangrenePete, unwittingly instigates a controversy that makes them impossible to ignore. GangrenePete is the creator of a video channel with millions of subscribers where he documents himself playing through vintage console favorites such as Castlevania: Symphony of the Night or, more recently, Starship Uprising: The Voydal Apocalypse. At some point, GangrenePete was asked why he decided on the name GangrenePete, and he said he decided on the name GangrenePete because he is “raw and disgusting.” For several hours (curated into a playlist of fifteen-minute installments), GangrenePete controlled the tiny, pixelated avatar of Commander Dinara Gorun and gleefully slaughtered Voydals with her ray gun, simultaneously noting what a fox the actress Faith Massey had been and how he had spent his adolescence beating his Pete meat to a poster of her or the covers on the VHS tapes of her workout regimen, Commander Dinara Gorun’s THE BODY. Whenever she died, forcing him to restart the level, he would shout, “That Voydal is raping her!” In response, the hostess of a feminist web series entitled Nerd Girls Resist! proceeded to shame GangrenePete for essentially being an insensitive asshole who normalized sexual assault.