hi - i’m zehra, the founder of Lore. i’ve been online in fandom spaces since 2010. i grew up on tumblr. i wrote fanfiction that millions of people read. i learned early that obsession is signal.

from the first time i watched iron man in a movie theater at 9 years old to my 37th marvel movie at a thursday midnight premiere, the post-consumption ritual has stayed the same: google, a hundred tabs, timelines, theories, interviews, and reddit threads. then the browser closes and everything disappears. the internet never remembered how much time i’d already given it. how deeply i’d already been there. there’s a new way now with what we’re building (and launching soon) – lore.

this essay is part of fan behavior. it’s where my obsessions tip over into analysis. i only write when something in culture feels structurally wrong and i can’t let it go.

spoiler note: this essay discusses the stranger things series finale in depth.

on january 1st, at 6 in the morning, i logged into netflix from lahore with a 104 degree fever. despite being 6 days deep into the monstrous strain of flu that was also ripping through new york oceans away, i still set an alarm (and honored it) because that is how fans show up. i watched the stranger things finale with my dad, half-delirious, wrapped in a blanket, present in the way only people who have lived with a story for years can be. i noticed the overexplaining, felt the whiplash of how quickly the main fight was resolved, and still found myself deeply moved by henry creel’s arc and jamie campbell bower, who managed to give vecna more texture than the script sometimes allowed. all before fully losing it at purple rain during mike and el’s goodbye.

when the episode ended, i felt the familiar mixture of feelings that comes with closing a long story: a combination of grief, relief, disappointment, and love, along with the quiet understanding that something important had reached its conclusion. i opened twitter expecting the usual afterglow of fandom, the edits, the rankings, the arguments, the jokes, the collective lingering that has always followed finales in online spaces.

and for a moment, that’s exactly what it was. but slowly, almost imperceptibly, the center of gravity shifted, and the conversation stopped circling the ending. suddenly, the collective was pushing against it.

the idea that the finale was just a decoy, a way for the duffer brothers to “prank” us, gained traction as a theory aptly “conformity gate.” what started as sentiment quickly grew into conviction, and fans began insisting we were still inside vecna’s curse, that a secret episode was coming on january 7th, and that it would undo everything we had just watched. i remember seeing one of the first tweets when it still had a few hundred likes and assuming, not dismissively but instinctively, that it would run its course the way extreme reactions always do, eventually giving way to debate about execution, character arcs, and the messy work of accepting that a story is finished.

what unfolded over the following days didn’t feel like fans extending the world or playing inside it, but something closer to a collective effort to invalidate the ending itself, with attention moving away from what the finale was and toward proving that it could not be. frames were frozen, background details isolated, timelines constructed, and skepticism redefined no longer as disagreement but as failure to see what was supposedly obvious. questioning the premise itself became grounds for exclusion.

i’ve been in fandom spaces for 16 years. that’s long enough to have watched theories become elaborate, unhinged, beautiful, delusional, inspired, and everything in between, and i have never seen a finale rejected in quite this way. the moment finn wolfhard hosted SNL and joked about conformity gate on air, it was clear the discourse had moved beyond fandom and into cultural spectacle.

that was the moment it became clear to me that this was an interesting case study for mass refusal, and that the refusal said less about fans losing their grip than it did about a widening disconnect between audiences and IP owners.

as the psychosis metastasized, screenshots stopped functioning as possible evidence and began circulating as confirmation, while timelines hardened from speculative maps into corrective tools. repetition did what repetition always does online, turning insistence into inevitability, especially as social platforms rewarded the most confident versions of the claim and pushed them further and faster than anything tentative or uncertain.

what made conformity gate different from past fandom spirals wasn’t intensity, because fandom has always been intense, but rather enforcement. extending the story through fic, headcanon, or alternate readings (which is how fans have historically metabolized disappointment), felt almost beside the point. the goal was not to live alongside the ending or even argue with it, but to disqualify it entirely.

the belief in a secret episode was the manifestation of a strange loyalty to a world that had asked for years of attention, patience, and emotional investment, and had, in the eyes of many, failed to return that devotion with equal conviction.

there is also a more uncomfortable truth here, which is that some of this rupture has to be owned by the creators themselves in addition to studios. the duffer brothers built a world that trained audiences to pay attention closely and then slowly stopped rewarding that attention with the same rigor. stranger things was never just a vibes show. they built a world that demanded precision, then abandoned precision at the exact moment the world needed it most.

by the time the series reached its final stretch, that discipline had softened. exposition replaced implication. plot compression replaced escalation. emotional resolution arrived faster than the world seemed capable of supporting. the finale was unsatisfying because it felt structurally thinner than the universe that preceded it. the world that once invited scrutiny no longer seemed able to withstand it, and fans noticed. not subconsciously. explicitly.

the decision to introduce significant vecna canon through the first shadow before fully resolving the core television narrative only compounded this instability. prequel context works when it deepens a closed system, not when it complicates an open one. by expanding the mythology outside the primary text while leaving critical questions underexplained on screen, the duffers created a fracture in the canon. the story was technically complete, but the world felt unfinished, and that gap is precisely where belief began to wobble.

this matters because fandom psychosis does not emerge when stories are bad, it emerges when stories are almost convincing enough to demand belief, but not coherent enough to sustain it. Conformity gate is the predictable response of an audience that had been taught, over multiple seasons, that close reading mattered, only to be told at the end that it suddenly didn’t.

once conformity gate became widely accepted amongst fans, the way “evidence” functioned inside the fandom changed as well. details were no longer interesting because they were ambiguous, they were valuable because they could be made definitive, even if doing so required distortion. screenshots circulated without context, out-of-context lines replaced narrative logic, and small production artifacts were elevated into proof of intent. These things offered something the ending no longer did: certainty.

one of the most widely shared examples came from a screenshot of the binders on a shelf in the finale, which fans claimed spelled out “x a lie,” a hidden message that everything we had just watched was false. the image spread quickly, accumulating likes, threads, explainers, and increasingly confident conclusions, even though the screenshot itself had been doctored. in the original frame, the letters read “x aile,” a fragment that carried no clear meaning at all, but by the time corrections surfaced, the interpretation had already calcified.

this is evidence laundering. once an idea gains enough momentum, the object itself becomes secondary to the belief attached to it. the screenshot doesn’t need to be accurate, it just needs to be useful. corrections feel less like clarifications, and more like threats. by then, the evidence has already been metabolized into the story fans want to believe, and undoing it feels like sabotage.

what allowed conformity gate to scale was infrastructure. the internet didn’t invent this impulse, but platforms gave it velocity, turning what would once have stayed contained to a few threads into something that felt ambient, inescapable, and increasingly authoritative simply by virtue of repetition.

short-form video in particular rewards confidence over caution. a theory delivered calmly, with qualifiers, doesn’t travel as far as one delivered with certainty, urgency, and a promise of revelation. tiktok explainers flattened complexity into claims, claims into conclusions, and conclusions into content loops that fed on their own performance. the more decisive the take, the more it circulated and the more it circulated, the more correct it appeared.

this is where fandom’s traditional practices collided with platform incentives. close reading has always been part of fan culture, but it was never meant to be optimized for reach. screenshots were once conversation starters, a way of asking “what do you see here.” under platform logic, they became assertions, deployed to end discussion rather than open it. 

netflix’s own posture unintentionally amplified this effect. cryptic social posts, marketing ambiguity, and a long-standing culture of teasing future drops trained audiences to expect hidden layers and delayed reveals, even when none were intended. when the platform briefly posted “your future is on its way” with a date attached, it validated conformity gate just enough to keep it alive.

the result was a feedback loop that felt self-evident from the inside. the algorithms did what algorithms do best, surfacing the most confident interpretations and burying anything that complicated them.

and beneath all of this sits a quieter realization that fans rarely articulate outright but deeply understand. on a subscription platform, their time is the currency. watching, rewatching, theorizing, and believing all prop up the same system, regardless of which specific IP they’re attached to. belief is no longer something the platform needs to earn from any single story, which means fans become more selective about when they offer it, and more resistant when they feel it’s being taken for granted.

this is the point where platform logic stops merely amplifying fandom behavior and starts reshaping it, turning interpretation into leverage and belief into something that can be withheld, negotiated, or collectively rerouted when conviction falters.

once you see attention this way, the rest of the behavior starts to make sense. fans are not naive about how streaming economics work. they know that the time spent staying emotionally invested is the product being sold, and that under a subscription model not tied to any single IP, that labor doesn’t accrue value back to the story itself so much as to the platform hosting it. 

other modern fandoms have shown what happens when a story is allowed to be dense, coherent, and morally uncompromising. attack on titan sustained years of intense analysis without collapsing into denial because it existed in a time when the complex worlds IP owners built could withstand scrutiny. 

under legacy models, attention accumulated slowly and durably. stories ended, but worlds persisted, reinforced by physical presence, merchandise, rituals, and cultural memory that extended far beyond the narrative itself. under platform logic, value spikes early and decays faster because the system incentivizes throughput over permanence. when conviction weakens, fans don’t passively drift away. they renegotiate. they become more selective about what they’re willing to believe, more resistant to accepting endings that feel underwritten, and more likely to redirect their attention toward meaning-making rather than consumption.

this helps explain why declining viewership over time doesn't register as failure to fans so much as proof of leverage. they understand that their engagement is fungible, that the platform will survive regardless of whether this story lands, and that belief is one of the few forms of power they still control. 

in that context, conformity gate stops looking like mass denial and starts looking like a negotiation tactic, a collective attempt to stabilize meaning when the platform has little incentive to do so itself. belief outpaces canon because fans are subconsciously aware of the terms under which their attention is being extracted, and are trying, however imperfectly, to reclaim some agency over what that attention is worth.

this is where world-building starts to matter again, and why the distinction between expanding a story and expanding a world isn’t only semantic. stories are finite by nature. they end. But worlds don’t have to. the IP that holds long-term value doesn’t rely on endless narrative continuation to stay alive, it offloads belief into space, ritual, identity, and things that don’t require plot escalation in order to persist.

this is why some worlds plateau rather than decay. merchandise, theme parks, games, toys, shared rituals, even the quiet familiarity of symbols allow fans to live alongside an IP without needing it to keep proving itself through new installments. the story can end and the world can remain intact.

platform-first IP struggles to do this. under the logic that governs streaming, expansion tends to stay narrative; more seasons, more spin-offs, more multiverses, more content. all without a corresponding thickening of the world itself. belief stays trapped inside plot, which means every new installment has to earn more than just attention. it has to earn legitimacy all over again, and when it doesn’t, the quality curve bends downward quickly, and fans feel the cost of that failure immediately.

this is the condition under which fandom psychosis emerges. fans are asked to supply permanence that the system no longer provides and when the world isn’t reinforced externally, fans step in to reinforce it internally. they do this through interpretation, theorizing, and eventually conclusive concepts. conformity gate is a way of holding the world together when narrative conviction falters. it is a collective attempt to keep meaning from evaporating entirely.

this doesn’t mean fandom isn’t broken. obsession isn’t the problem. what’s broken is the contract between stories and the audiences who give them years of their lives. Belief rushes in to fill the gap when canon weakens, but not as an extension of the fantasy – as labor. and until platforms relearn how to build worlds that can earn conviction fans will just have to keep intervening where IP owners fail, a fate that feels Sisyphean in nature.

next week i’ll cover the rise of Heated Rivalry. here’s what else we have on the horizon:

if you have any thoughts, pop culture moments you want us to dive into, reply to this email. it goes straight to my inbox.

for the obsessed, always,

zehra