FORUM » WIKI TALK » CURSED (OR JUST LOST) MEDIA » The Lost Creepypastas of Gungelover
MentalTrams #888931387
So, as a quick preface before I start. I'd like to credit crewtime and their true crime postings for inspiring me to give this a try. Lost media has been something that fascinated me ever since I was a little kid, and writing up about the most notable cases I can remember personally investigating not only seems like a good writing exercise, but might inspire other people to try and look for these lost works.
Anyway, let's get started.
The nature of Creepypastas, those short-form spookums that were made to be circulated and re-circulated during the late-oughts to the mid-2010s, meant that most creations were rarely - if ever - given proper authorial credit. Additionally, a good majority of them came from imageboards that heavily prioritized anonymity above all else, which made giving attribution where it's due next to impossible unless an author decided to break that anonymity some time later.
That slowly began to change as the internet entered the 2010s. With the growth of places like r/nosleep, Creepypasta Wiki, the Scolipendra Project, and - yes - Parawatch, internet horror writers became more relaxed about their identities and the concept of being credited for their works. They adapted flashy pseudonyms, put their works either under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license or - in some rare cases - public domain, and encouraged their fans sharing and adapting their works.
However, not all authors subscribed to this. Which brings us to the topic of the most (in)famous of the big-name 'pasta writers, Gungelover.
Now, I got to exercise some caution by saying that I have to keep some things I talk about in this writeup intentionally very vague. This author's estate is very litigious about "unauthorized" discussions about her life, and the weird licensing surrounding her body of work makes it impossible for people to even quote and cite samples of her writing. I'm taking a big risk just by paraphrasing; it's that serious.
MentalTrams # 888931390
Gungelover was a pseudonym used by Robin Harriet Lychen. Prior to her entrance into the Creepypasta space, she primarily worked on sprites for RPG Maker games and created a few short-lived webcomics (the longest one lasting only two years) under her own name.
Even if you don't recognize her by name, you've almost certainly read her works. Gotcha!, Haunted Games, GO FUCK YOURSELF!… She wrote a good plethora of works during her time in the community, with her writing 30 alone during her peak year of 2013.
Now, were her Creepypastas any good? Ehhhh, no, not really. Without the rose-tinted glasses, there were recurring problems in her works from the start:
- Inconsistent tone that constantly shifted from horror to absurdism to gross-out humour, sometimes even mid-sentence.
- Including literary details that - in theory - were meant to flesh the worlds and characters out, but in practice came across as non-sequiturs.
- Unnecessarily verbose protagonists/narrators with unnatural mono/dialogues.
Despite these flaws, Gungelover had a decent fanbase built around these works of fiction, and she was not shy about how proud she was of all of them.
Which makes the fact that some of them are lost media all the more ironic.
Now, let me stop some of you more pedantic folks before you get to typing any comments.
Yes, these stories are not technically "lost". Lychen's estate has confirmed several times that these works do still exist on a few solid state drives she backed them up onto.
But given
- A) They also stated they have no intentions on re-releasing these works;
- B) They are very aggressive in threatening any website or individual even claiming archives of these works;
- C) The licensing, that I will get to in a bit; and
- D) Solid state drives don't last forever,
it's understandable that most people consider them lost anyway.
MentalTrams # 888931394
There are three creepypastas by Gungelover that are 100% confirmed to be unavailable for public viewing. I'm going to summarize them as best as I legally can, from the information that I was able to find through testimonials, surviving reviews, and hours of digging through search engine results. In the interest of safety and protection, I will not be naming or linking my sources.
Name: Tic-Tac-Tonya
Summary: A tongue-in-cheek, genderbent homage/parody of some creepypasta OC that used to be popular in the early '10s. It focused on a young woman named Tonya, who went insane after being seared by X and O shaped branding irons across 95% of her skin and became a serial killer. She would torment her victims by making them play Tic-Tac-Toe on their own skin with irons. If they got "three in a row", they'd live and be released. If she did, she would kill them.
Reason For Removal: From what I could gather, Gungelover got so sick of harassing comments - mainly from fangirls of the original OC she was spoofing - that she removed it and left a passive-aggressive comment "congratulating [her] haters" in its place.
Name: Frank Evalasta's Guide to Surviving Creepypastas
Summary: A short "list/ritual" story that detailed how the reader can survive if they encountered popular creepypasta monsters. Had 30-40 bulleted points giving tips to survive these creatures, intermixed with a meta-narrative about "Frank" slowly dying from being poisoned by one of the monsters he "survived". The final point, which was near incoherent from spelling errors, ended mid-sentence.
Reason For Removal: Ironically - given what happened later - Gungelover found out that one of the monsters the story talked about, "Bundle", was copyrighted by its creator. Rather then redoing the story, she decided to cut her losses and remove it.
Name: Unknown
Summary: This story is the least-known of the bunch; I was only able to find one comment on a defunct blog that left a review of it, and it was entirely in Russian. From what I was able to gather from my limited understanding of the language, the story focused on a researcher at some unnamed, nebulous organization trying to search for something called the "Sable Ship" before it could do… something… to reality. Apparently this story was uploaded in the dead of night with no fanfare - only staying up for four hours before being deleted - and had lots of tonal whiplash even by Gungelover's standards.
Reason For Removal: Unknown
MentalTrams # 888931397
Around late 2014 to early 2015, Gungelover found out that Creepypasta "dramatic reading" channels were doing adaptations of her works, without being given credit in any capacity. These channels were also monetized, meaning these channels were profiting with on her stories, with her not seeing a single cent.
So she started sending messages to these channels, demanding the videos either be taken down the readers properly credit her and give her a cut of the ad revenue. Most channels were quick to comply with either of these demands, but a few of the bigger ones refused and relentlessly mocked her for even bothering.
So, how did we get from there to people being afraid to even parody Gungelover's work?
7 deadly words:
Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives License.
Gungelover eventually got so pissed at these "leeches" stealing her art and making money from it that she went nuclear, irrevocably forgoing any chance to profit from her own work in exchange for making it illegal to monetize it, iterate upon it in any fashion, or deny her contributions.
Now, let me say that I don't hate Robin Lychen for doing this to her work as Gungelover. Proper attribution, even for silly online campfire stories, is important. And she wasn't alone in being peeved about this. Around this time, writers in Reddit horror-lit communities were also raising hell about being uncredited and uncompensated for their tales being read aloud by YouTubers. And they are and were 100% in the right to do so.
But I also cannot stress enough how devastating this was to Gungelover's fanbase. Yes, she got her wish, but she also caused her readers to have to delete years worth of fanfic, fan-art, cosplays, and other works to avoid being sued by their favorite author.
MentalTrams # 888931399
"Now, hang on," you're probably about to say. "CC BY-NC-ND couldn't be the reason for all this lost media turmoil. If anyone has copies of these stories, so long as they give her credit, don't monetize it, and don't make any alterations and/or fanworks of them, they should be legally in the clear."
And you'd be right, in 99.99% of circumstances.
But in this .01% case, Robin - and, later, her estate - operated under a totalitarian interpretation of these terms. To her, anything that wasn't a direct link to her works' respective pages on her website was considered a "derivative work", and would be dealt with to the fullest extent of the law. And after South Carolina prosecutors sided with her during a lawsuit filed by the family of a teenage girl who did a reading of one of her lost stories - with full credit and everything - and they were forced to bankrupt themselves to pay Lychen's damges…
Needless to say, no one dared to cross her.
Her fanbase continued to dwindle as a result of all this, but Gungelover pressed on. Her stories' problems would grow increasingly worse over the years, and at the lowest of her popularity, she began adding snide remarks referencing her biggest critics into her 'pastas, even naming the antagonist of one after the family she sued into homelessness. Early attempts to search for archived copies of the Lost Three were stymied by legal messages so intimidating and threatening, that Lost Media Wiki (both iterations) have flatly refused to host search efforts for them.
And then, on February 29th, 2020, Robin Lychen vanished off the face of the Earth.
MentalTrams # 888931402
On that day, all her social media accounts were deleted, comments made by her on other sites were scrubbed, and her website stopped updating. Attempts by close friends and loved ones to contact her failed.
Now, people who're better writers than me have talked at length about the strange circumstances surrounding her disappearance. All I'll add is that - according to a former officer I reached out to under condition of anonymity - when law enforcement searched Robin's home, literally everything except for her hard drives were destroyed and scattered all over the place.
Search efforts were made, of course. The few fans Gungelover had left, and even her critics, attempted to pitch in as much as they could.
However, after one-and-a-half years of fruitless searching, Robin was declared legally dead. Her family set up an estate to handle the hosting and maintenance of her website, as well as to continue enforcing their overzealous reading of the license.
Ocassionally, small and private Discord servers will be set up to try and renew the search for the Lost Three. These always end up collapsing either due to infighting, Discord administrators personally shutting them down, or spambot infestations.
However, I'm not one to give up on this search. There are still those dedicated to finding these stories, even if only just to read them and see what the fuss was all about.
I hope to find some like-minded lost mediaheads who'd be willing to join in my efforts.
🗿theonewhoknocks # 888931407
Due to an email we received from the Robin Lychen estate, we are unfortunately gonna have to remove this thread.
MentalTrams has been issued a two-month ban from Parawatch Wiki spaces, in compliance with the estate's terms, and anyone caught sharing archives of it will be permanently banned with no chance to appeal.
Sorry :(
[THREAD LOCKED]