How Fans Saved Sexypedia From Being Erased From the Internet
On October 25, the small fan community behind a chronicle of fandom called Sexypedia awoke to find that years of work had been erased. Anyone who tried to visit the wiki was greeted by a message informing them the wiki had been “closed.” The volunteer archivists panicked and scrambled to pick up as many pieces as they could—and move them to a new home.
Sexypedia’s name comes from the tongue-in-cheek idea of the Tumblr Sexyman. The term arose in the early 2010s, after Tumblr users noticed commonalities between the most popular characters on the site. The MCU’s Loki, Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock Holmes, even The Once-ler from The Lorax—all were some combination of skinny, white, well-dressed, and morally gray. Since then, the term has shifted to describe a range of fan favorites. More than a specific label, “Tumblr Sexyman” is a way to think about discrete fan communities as linked, part of a greater cultural movement.
Created in 2020 as a joke that quickly turned serious, Sexypedia became the primary reference text for this movement. Hosted by Fandom, formerly known as Wikia, the database was a labor of love, managed by a small staff of volunteers who mostly organized its contents via Discord server. During the past four years, Sexypedia, while not exactly sexy in the explicit sense, became a valuable repository for, and oral history of, an otherwise ephemeral part of cheeky internet horniness.
