Mishapocalypse

Overview

Mishapocalypse is an online flash mob event that took place across Tumblr on April 1st, 2013, in which hundreds of bloggers changed their profile avatars to a photograph of Supernatural actor Misha Collins originally taken during a panel at the 2009 San Diego Comic Con.^[1]

Background

Prior to April 2013, Misha Collins was well known on Tumblr due to his role as an angel named Castiel^[17] on the television drama Supernatural. The show has attracted one of the largest fandoms on the microblogging site, with a post^[18] seeking out other Supernatural fans gaining more than 17,000 notes in a little more than a year. The Supernatural fandom is often grouped together with the Doctor Who and Sherlock fandoms in crossover posts with the hashtag "Superwholock"^[19], as a large chunk of Tumblr users watch all three shows. The idea for Mishapocalypse was first suggested on March 4th, 2013 by Tumblr user lokisleathersuit^[2] in a post which gained more than 64,000 notes as of April 2nd.

Notable Developments

On March 31st, lokisleathersuit announced^[3] on her blog that she changed her icon early to kick off the event. By the early hours of the morning on April 1st, users had contacted her noting that Collins avatars were taking over their dashboard.^[4] By 6 a.m. (EST) on April 1st, lokisleathersuit had coined the event “Mishapocalypse.”^[5] As the day progressed, Tumblr users began posting photoshopped images utilizing the same picture of Collins in addition to changing their avatars, thus flooding their follower’s dashboards with the Collins photo. These Tumblr posts were collected using the hashtags “misha”^[9], “misha collins”^[10] and “mishapocalypse.”^[11]

Before long, it spread to Facebook (shown below, left) and Twitter (shown below, right), where people also began changing their avatars and display names to Misha Collins. A Facebook fan page^[6] for the event was created, gaining more than 450 likes and the Twitter hashtag #mishapocalypse^[7] was used more than 26,000 times between March 31st and April 2nd.^[8]

Also on April 1st, two Wikipedia entries^[12][13] for the event were submitted and deleted by the editors and six definitions for the term "Mishapocalypse" were submitted to Urban Dictionary.^[14] A page on the event was later submitted to the Supernatural Wiki.^[15]

Collins' Response

At 3 PM EST on April 1st, Misha Collins made his first tweet^[16] about the Mishapocalypse, linking to the Tumblr tag, making a joke about the amount of people posting his "psycho-pervert-face photo." Five minutes later, he tweeted again (shown below), joking that he wanted to get surgery in order to avoid seeing his face again.

Notable Examples

Search Interest

External References