As a pre-exposure and (though to a lesser degree) post-exposure DAYD nonnie, I'd gladly answer anything about that time period that I can recall.
As for Danaoffthedancefloor... she's probably example #1 that I would give to people who think that no real emotional harm can come from getting involved with Andy. Definitely not the only example I could give but... definitely one of the most upsetting and raw.
Ok, what kind of things did he claim about himself pre-exposure and once he was exposed how did he try and justify it? Were you inner circle enough to know of the channelling?
Did you go to the DAYDcon at the end of 2009?
Were you still around when Abbey published her blog including her "Letter to the DAYDians" in 2011? How was that received in the inner circle/justified by Andy?
No, I didn't go to the DAYDcon in 2009. IIRC, DAYDcon actually occurred after the big reveal, so even if I had wanted to go before (and to be honest? part of me did! Andy was fun in a way, even when you knew he was full of shit!), I was too apprehensive to go after. From what I can tell, everyone had a good time having snowball fights, making stew, talking DAYD long into the night. They had fun. Andy was fun.
Unfortunately, I don't know personally how people who were still deep in DAYDverse took the Letter to the DAYDians. I was almost entirely gone by that point. I was, afaik, the person who explicitly asked Abbey to address the DAYDians, since I'd seen evidence of the obvious horrorshow that the Trail of Tears hike was going to be, but I wasn't speaking with Andy or any other DAYDians by that point in time.
BUT Turimel does have a post on her LJ that somehow got hold of a Skype conversation in the DAYD community, and it looks like it's from right around the same time. A little earlier in 2011 than Abbey's "Letter," so it's not in reaction to that specifically, but it is directly addressing all of the wank in Andy's words. Warning as always for transfail on Turimel's blog, but if you want to see just how brainwashed some of the true believer fans were, this isn't one to miss.
http://turimel.livejournal.com/105515.html
What were your apprehensions about the Trail of Tears hike? What was Andy's obsessions with match making? Because didn't 3 DAYD couples get married?!
Did you know Brittany? Do you know anything of interest concerning her relationship with Andy? I don't mean share anything that may cause any member of her family pain if they chanced upon it, I mean more concerning Andy's describing her as "a close friend" just after she was killed, but has over time become Andy's "life partner"?
What were your apprehensions about the Trail of Tears hike?
My disclaimer for this is that in the post-reveal period leading up to Brittany's murder, I was involved very minimally in DAYDverse things. I (like a good number of people, I suspect) saw the news about Brittany's murder when Andy posted it on LJ and Facebook, which I browsed pretty casually, and I initially thought for sure that it was fake. Until the story was corroborated in the media, I assumed that this was typical Andy: a grand story of woe involving someone with a tragic past, the assumption of a new identity, and the chance to turn a real person into a writing exercise and a talking point, as he frequently did. Of course, tragically, I was wrong this time.
The Trail of Tears hike rubbed me the wrong way for a lot of reasons, first of which was the purple prose that Andy wrote as a eulogy for Brittany. I just mentioned that Andy uses people he knows as writing exercises, to the point where it sometimes feels like he takes a kernel of their realities and then embellishes and ups the drama and (lately) deepens the social justice hook that will let him reel other people in. There were details of the sort of abuse that Brittany allegedly suffered at her partner's hands that I'm hesitant to mention because they were extremely graphic... but I'll say that, knowing Andy, I doubted those allegations because they were so graphic. Maybe that makes me a bad person, but... I knew that Brittany really had been murdered. I didn't know if I could buy everything that Andy wrote about her in his eulogy post, and the fact that he used that post as a launch point for the ToT hike bothered me. Andy also mentioned (in a chat, I think, or on his LJ or Facebook) that Brittany's family had barred him from her funeral, which was a major red flag. Families don't bar their daughter's friend (especially a friend who was injured in the same shooting) from her funeral unless there's something really wrong.
It also didn't sit well with me that Andy suddenly became the authority on intimate partner violence, to the point where he could essentially go on tour evangelizing (after putting all his followers to work setting things up for him, of course). I doubted the motives and lgitimacy of the "It's About Power" campaign, which Andy talked about getting true blue charity status for, and knew 100% that it would be abandoned once he'd used it to get all of the hike swag sponsored. Totally right about that.
Also, as other people have pointed out (and as you say above), the "lover/life parter" definition evolved over time. It felt like Andy was deifying Brittany in some way, which I can understand from anyone who is grieving a friend or family member who dies tragically. But... it was just that as Brittany evolved from being a follower to an acolyte to a favored friend to a special friend to a soulmate to a life partner, it seemed more and more clear to me that Andy was manipulating her memory for his own gain, knowing damn well that nobody could question him about what he was saying because, well... Brittany really was dead, and Andy really was wounded, and you're a big asshole if you question his grieving process.
Did you know Brittany? Do you know anything of interest concerning her relationship with Andy?
I didn't know Brittany well, but we did overlap in DAYDverse so I definitely knew of her, read her stories, etc. I knew that she was one of Andy's fiercest fans, and I knew that around the time of the reveal, she was emerging as one of the clear favorites. TBH, and not to speak crap about the dead, but here goes, Brittany set off some of my alarm bells in the same way that Dana Off the Dancefloor does: too willing to pretend along with Andy, to do things like adopt new accents, get sucked into crazy stories, do his bidding, etc. Ceirdwenfc has mentioned publically that Brittany and she didn't start out on the best terms. This was because Brittany was aggressively asserting herself for Andy's attention, driving a wedge (intentionally or not, I don't know for sure) between Andy and Ceirdwen. (And Ceirdwen, though I really do think she's a nice person, does not respond well to being separated from Andy.) It was also because Brittany was the one who most encouraged Andy in the Undead Shaman Wizard Eating Your Children saga that splashed Ceirdwen and her kids all over people's blogs.
That's pretty much all I remember about Brittany. One of her younger brothers was a DAYDian too... she went on a hike up the west coast with Andy at one point... that' sabout it.
What was Andy's obsessions with match making? Because didn't 3 DAYD couples get married?!
I think that it was 2 couples and 1 couple that didn't work out:
* Welsh Guy, American Girl (Married after the ToT Hike) * American Couple (I think married in Vegas shortly after DAYDcon.) * American Girl (minor!!), Kiwi Guy (There was a big plan to marry them off to each other, but it fell through. This was so fucked up.)
The first two couples, afaik, are still married, and neither couple is on good terms with Andy. Recently, someone found blog entries from the woman from the first couple, detailing how badly Andy had messed her up on the hike. She's since moved or deleted. I don't blame her.
I don't know what the deal is with Andy and match-making, but Abbey says that it goes way back. If I have to guess, I think it's probably that Andy knows that matchmaking gives him the abilioty to be a puppeteer and to get himself actively entwined in two people's lives and then to pull away quickly if he feels like it once they're together. It also gives him the chance to prove a point through the people involved in the couples. In the DAYD cases, in no telling order, the points he tried to make had to do with disability, self-esteem, distance being no obstacle, the power of shared struggle to unite strangers... I guess he's a Romantic in a weird way!
The question I'd like to know in regards to Brittany is, did she really believe Andy could channel? Because a relatively recent spin on their relationship is Andy claiming it was Brittany who was the first person who realised his channelling was a symptom of his mental illness and encouraged him to get help in 2009 but they put it off because they couldn't afford it. But then there's the Undead Shaman emails which gives the impression she really believed it and also recently Andy said when defending himself against the Finelookingcat sexual assault allegations that for his birthday in 2010 he was ensconced away in a bedroom somewhere with Brittany and a couple of other DAYDians in one of the astral plane battles or something. I always had the impression she died still fully believing in Andy's powers, which of course he's now contradicting with the whole "Brittany wasn't an enabler, she could see I was mentally ill" angle.
Also, was Cfc involved in the channelling at all? For some reason I've always thought she wasn't and I'm not exactly sure why I've come to that conclusion. Maybe because when the whole Undead Shaman emails went public, because it involved her indirectly, and if she were aware of the channelling, she'd have been directly involved or something?
Also, could you shed any light on the loyalty oath business?
"The question I'd like to know in regards to Brittany is, did she really believe Andy could channel?"
From what I could tell? Yes. Brittany frequently wrote about spirituality (something that Andy began to talk about more and more frequently when he was trying to reel Brittany in), and it seemed to me that she really did believe that Andy could channel. From how involved Brittany was in the Undead Shaman Wizard thing, but also from how she seemed to eat up the Skype chat channeling and to vocally back up Andy's claims that this was a spiritual thing and that you were simply intolerant or close-minded if you didn't believe that Andy could 100% actualfax bring Colin Creevy and Terry Boot out of him, she seemed to buy it.
Maybe this really was part of her spirituality. Maybe she came to believe it out of a necessity to get herself close (closest) to Andy. Maybe she evolved her perspective through more time with Andy and eventually did counsel him that this business was mentally ill and that he needed help. I'm not sure. I doubt the last possibility, though. Andy's "Brittany was my mental health savior" line reeks of post-murder revision to me.
The other, more sinister possibility is that Brittany was just as calculating and manipulative as Andy was and consciously voiced her belief in his channelling abilities so that she could lean on them later, when convenient for her. I believe it's been brought up before how interesting it was that when everything was going to shit, Brittany and Andy made Ceirdwen (Brittany's only real competition at the time for Andy's right-hand woman) and her family the focal point of their ridiculous attempts at obfuscation via astral plane happenings. I haven't completely worked out what I feel about this theory (I watched the USW thing unfold when everyone else on the web did, so I don't really have much more "insider" information on that horrorshow), but if Abbey's history with Andy is to be believed, I sort of think that this reading is too cynical. Maybe Brittany was conniving from the very getgo. But I think it's more probable that as she fell more and more into Andy's orbit, it got harder and harder to separate herself from his lies.
"Also, was Cfc involved in the channelling at all? For some reason I've always thought she wasn't and I'm not exactly sure why I've come to that conclusion. Maybe because when the whole Undead Shaman emails went public, because it involved her indirectly, and if she were aware of the channelling, she'd have been directly involved or something?"
I saw a post here recently claiming that Ceirdwen didn't know about the channelling. AFAIK, this is completely untrue: I was aware of the channeling at least as far as it happened in the Skype chat (the "Room of Requirement"), which Ceirdwen was an active part of and witness to. IIRC, she didn't lap it up the way Andy's newer sycophants did, so I'm not sure what she thought of it privately, but she definitely witnessed it as it was happening. Very possibly there was more, weirder, and more dangerous channelling talk going on in other forums that Ceirdwen wasn't aware of, but she knew that Andy was claiming that his characters were literally speaking through him. She did know.
"Also, could you shed any light on the loyalty oath business?"
OK, what's so distasteful about the fact Cfc knew about Andy's channelling is this: she bangs on and on about how Abbey being older than Andy and her being married and owning a house and having a degree in psychology and gender studies Abbey should have realised that Andy was a mixed-up, gender-confused obviously mentally ill teenager and Abbey should have got him help rather than enabling that mental illness by believing everything he claimed.
So if it's true that Cfc was aware of Andy's channelling how come she, with her much larger 17 year age gap and her whatever degree it is she has (something about homeschooling?), she didn't realise he was obviously mentally ill rather than believing everything he claimed? Because in order to have been his friend from the very beginning of DAYD, since early 2008 she's going to have to have been witness to lie after lie after lie after reframing after reimagining after no-this-time-it's-the-truth-for-reals-I-promise. She's going to have to have believed all those ridiculously grandiose cutting-off-baby's-arms-in-Africa stories, believed that the stupidly macho Irish version of Andy Blake was a real person rather than a hodge podge of exaggerated fiction, she would have had to lived through the whole Andy Blake/Amy Player reveal, actually believed that Amy Player was Andy's mentally ill twin sister and believed he could channel his Harry Potter characters, yet...it's only since Andy's officially made mental illness and schizophrenia part of his narrative publicly that she's all "I knew he was mentally ill all along and any decent person would have seen the same and got him help rather than flown him across state for sex" and come down hard on Abbey about her believing Andy rather than recognising him as ill. And this is only a very recent stance, since 2012. So how come between the years of 2008-2011 Cfc didn't realise Andy was ill when he was obviously exhibiting behaviour that is now part of the mental illness narrative with the channelling? It just doesn't stand up to any kind of scrutiny at all.
Unfortunately, this is going to be another one of those times when I've got to disappoint people. Sorry, nonnnie! I very vaguely remember there being a loyalty oath, but I don't remember it or its details clearly enough to feel comfortable writing about it. (I'm not out to sensationalize stuff that I don't completely remember!) There was definitely a chain of command that people took seriously, but I don't know if that was because of an oath or because people just got really wrapped up in Andy's games.
Non-Hike DAYDIAN Q&A, part 1
http://fail-fandomanon.dreamwidth.org/97974.html?thread=480802230#cmt480802230
As a pre-exposure and (though to a lesser degree) post-exposure DAYD nonnie, I'd gladly answer anything about that time period that I can recall.
As for Danaoffthedancefloor... she's probably example #1 that I would give to people who think that no real emotional harm can come from getting involved with Andy. Definitely not the only example I could give but... definitely one of the most upsetting and raw.
Ok, what kind of things did he claim about himself pre-exposure and once he was exposed how did he try and justify it? Were you inner circle enough to know of the channelling?
Did you go to the DAYDcon at the end of 2009?
Were you still around when Abbey published her blog including her "Letter to the DAYDians" in 2011? How was that received in the inner circle/justified by Andy?
No, I didn't go to the DAYDcon in 2009. IIRC, DAYDcon actually occurred after the big reveal, so even if I had wanted to go before (and to be honest? part of me did! Andy was fun in a way, even when you knew he was full of shit!), I was too apprehensive to go after. From what I can tell, everyone had a good time having snowball fights, making stew, talking DAYD long into the night. They had fun. Andy was fun.
Unfortunately, I don't know personally how people who were still deep in DAYDverse took the Letter to the DAYDians. I was almost entirely gone by that point. I was, afaik, the person who explicitly asked Abbey to address the DAYDians, since I'd seen evidence of the obvious horrorshow that the Trail of Tears hike was going to be, but I wasn't speaking with Andy or any other DAYDians by that point in time.
BUT Turimel does have a post on her LJ that somehow got hold of a Skype conversation in the DAYD community, and it looks like it's from right around the same time. A little earlier in 2011 than Abbey's "Letter," so it's not in reaction to that specifically, but it is directly addressing all of the wank in Andy's words. Warning as always for transfail on Turimel's blog, but if you want to see just how brainwashed some of the true believer fans were, this isn't one to miss.
http://turimel.livejournal.com/105515.html
What were your apprehensions about the Trail of Tears hike? What was Andy's obsessions with match making? Because didn't 3 DAYD couples get married?!
Did you know Brittany? Do you know anything of interest concerning her relationship with Andy? I don't mean share anything that may cause any member of her family pain if they chanced upon it, I mean more concerning Andy's describing her as "a close friend" just after she was killed, but has over time become Andy's "life partner"?
What were your apprehensions about the Trail of Tears hike?
My disclaimer for this is that in the post-reveal period leading up to Brittany's murder, I was involved very minimally in DAYDverse things. I (like a good number of people, I suspect) saw the news about Brittany's murder when Andy posted it on LJ and Facebook, which I browsed pretty casually, and I initially thought for sure that it was fake. Until the story was corroborated in the media, I assumed that this was typical Andy: a grand story of woe involving someone with a tragic past, the assumption of a new identity, and the chance to turn a real person into a writing exercise and a talking point, as he frequently did. Of course, tragically, I was wrong this time.
The Trail of Tears hike rubbed me the wrong way for a lot of reasons, first of which was the purple prose that Andy wrote as a eulogy for Brittany. I just mentioned that Andy uses people he knows as writing exercises, to the point where it sometimes feels like he takes a kernel of their realities and then embellishes and ups the drama and (lately) deepens the social justice hook that will let him reel other people in. There were details of the sort of abuse that Brittany allegedly suffered at her partner's hands that I'm hesitant to mention because they were extremely graphic... but I'll say that, knowing Andy, I doubted those allegations because they were so graphic. Maybe that makes me a bad person, but... I knew that Brittany really had been murdered. I didn't know if I could buy everything that Andy wrote about her in his eulogy post, and the fact that he used that post as a launch point for the ToT hike bothered me. Andy also mentioned (in a chat, I think, or on his LJ or Facebook) that Brittany's family had barred him from her funeral, which was a major red flag. Families don't bar their daughter's friend (especially a friend who was injured in the same shooting) from her funeral unless there's something really wrong.
It also didn't sit well with me that Andy suddenly became the authority on intimate partner violence, to the point where he could essentially go on tour evangelizing (after putting all his followers to work setting things up for him, of course). I doubted the motives and lgitimacy of the "It's About Power" campaign, which Andy talked about getting true blue charity status for, and knew 100% that it would be abandoned once he'd used it to get all of the hike swag sponsored. Totally right about that.
Also, as other people have pointed out (and as you say above), the "lover/life parter" definition evolved over time. It felt like Andy was deifying Brittany in some way, which I can understand from anyone who is grieving a friend or family member who dies tragically. But... it was just that as Brittany evolved from being a follower to an acolyte to a favored friend to a special friend to a soulmate to a life partner, it seemed more and more clear to me that Andy was manipulating her memory for his own gain, knowing damn well that nobody could question him about what he was saying because, well... Brittany really was dead, and Andy really was wounded, and you're a big asshole if you question his grieving process.
Did you know Brittany? Do you know anything of interest concerning her relationship with Andy?
I didn't know Brittany well, but we did overlap in DAYDverse so I definitely knew of her, read her stories, etc. I knew that she was one of Andy's fiercest fans, and I knew that around the time of the reveal, she was emerging as one of the clear favorites. TBH, and not to speak crap about the dead, but here goes, Brittany set off some of my alarm bells in the same way that Dana Off the Dancefloor does: too willing to pretend along with Andy, to do things like adopt new accents, get sucked into crazy stories, do his bidding, etc. Ceirdwenfc has mentioned publically that Brittany and she didn't start out on the best terms. This was because Brittany was aggressively asserting herself for Andy's attention, driving a wedge (intentionally or not, I don't know for sure) between Andy and Ceirdwen. (And Ceirdwen, though I really do think she's a nice person, does not respond well to being separated from Andy.) It was also because Brittany was the one who most encouraged Andy in the Undead Shaman Wizard Eating Your Children saga that splashed Ceirdwen and her kids all over people's blogs.
That's pretty much all I remember about Brittany. One of her younger brothers was a DAYDian too... she went on a hike up the west coast with Andy at one point... that' sabout it.
What was Andy's obsessions with match making? Because didn't 3 DAYD couples get married?!
I think that it was 2 couples and 1 couple that didn't work out:
* Welsh Guy, American Girl (Married after the ToT Hike)
* American Couple (I think married in Vegas shortly after DAYDcon.)
* American Girl (minor!!), Kiwi Guy (There was a big plan to marry them off to each other, but it fell through. This was so fucked up.)
The first two couples, afaik, are still married, and neither couple is on good terms with Andy. Recently, someone found blog entries from the woman from the first couple, detailing how badly Andy had messed her up on the hike. She's since moved or deleted. I don't blame her.
I don't know what the deal is with Andy and match-making, but Abbey says that it goes way back. If I have to guess, I think it's probably that Andy knows that matchmaking gives him the abilioty to be a puppeteer and to get himself actively entwined in two people's lives and then to pull away quickly if he feels like it once they're together. It also gives him the chance to prove a point through the people involved in the couples. In the DAYD cases, in no telling order, the points he tried to make had to do with disability, self-esteem, distance being no obstacle, the power of shared struggle to unite strangers... I guess he's a Romantic in a weird way!
The question I'd like to know in regards to Brittany is, did she really believe Andy could channel? Because a relatively recent spin on their relationship is Andy claiming it was Brittany who was the first person who realised his channelling was a symptom of his mental illness and encouraged him to get help in 2009 but they put it off because they couldn't afford it. But then there's the Undead Shaman emails which gives the impression she really believed it and also recently Andy said when defending himself against the Finelookingcat sexual assault allegations that for his birthday in 2010 he was ensconced away in a bedroom somewhere with Brittany and a couple of other DAYDians in one of the astral plane battles or something. I always had the impression she died still fully believing in Andy's powers, which of course he's now contradicting with the whole "Brittany wasn't an enabler, she could see I was mentally ill" angle.
Also, was Cfc involved in the channelling at all? For some reason I've always thought she wasn't and I'm not exactly sure why I've come to that conclusion. Maybe because when the whole Undead Shaman emails went public, because it involved her indirectly, and if she were aware of the channelling, she'd have been directly involved or something?
Also, could you shed any light on the loyalty oath business?
"The question I'd like to know in regards to Brittany is, did she really believe Andy could channel?"
From what I could tell? Yes. Brittany frequently wrote about spirituality (something that Andy began to talk about more and more frequently when he was trying to reel Brittany in), and it seemed to me that she really did believe that Andy could channel. From how involved Brittany was in the Undead Shaman Wizard thing, but also from how she seemed to eat up the Skype chat channeling and to vocally back up Andy's claims that this was a spiritual thing and that you were simply intolerant or close-minded if you didn't believe that Andy could 100% actualfax bring Colin Creevy and Terry Boot out of him, she seemed to buy it.
Maybe this really was part of her spirituality. Maybe she came to believe it out of a necessity to get herself close (closest) to Andy. Maybe she evolved her perspective through more time with Andy and eventually did counsel him that this business was mentally ill and that he needed help. I'm not sure. I doubt the last possibility, though. Andy's "Brittany was my mental health savior" line reeks of post-murder revision to me.
The other, more sinister possibility is that Brittany was just as calculating and manipulative as Andy was and consciously voiced her belief in his channelling abilities so that she could lean on them later, when convenient for her. I believe it's been brought up before how interesting it was that when everything was going to shit, Brittany and Andy made Ceirdwen (Brittany's only real competition at the time for Andy's right-hand woman) and her family the focal point of their ridiculous attempts at obfuscation via astral plane happenings. I haven't completely worked out what I feel about this theory (I watched the USW thing unfold when everyone else on the web did, so I don't really have much more "insider" information on that horrorshow), but if Abbey's history with Andy is to be believed, I sort of think that this reading is too cynical. Maybe Brittany was conniving from the very getgo. But I think it's more probable that as she fell more and more into Andy's orbit, it got harder and harder to separate herself from his lies.
"Also, was Cfc involved in the channelling at all? For some reason I've always thought she wasn't and I'm not exactly sure why I've come to that conclusion. Maybe because when the whole Undead Shaman emails went public, because it involved her indirectly, and if she were aware of the channelling, she'd have been directly involved or something?"
I saw a post here recently claiming that Ceirdwen didn't know about the channelling. AFAIK, this is completely untrue: I was aware of the channeling at least as far as it happened in the Skype chat (the "Room of Requirement"), which Ceirdwen was an active part of and witness to. IIRC, she didn't lap it up the way Andy's newer sycophants did, so I'm not sure what she thought of it privately, but she definitely witnessed it as it was happening. Very possibly there was more, weirder, and more dangerous channelling talk going on in other forums that Ceirdwen wasn't aware of, but she knew that Andy was claiming that his characters were literally speaking through him. She did know.
"Also, could you shed any light on the loyalty oath business?"
OK, what's so distasteful about the fact Cfc knew about Andy's channelling is this: she bangs on and on about how Abbey being older than Andy and her being married and owning a house and having a degree in psychology and gender studies Abbey should have realised that Andy was a mixed-up, gender-confused obviously mentally ill teenager and Abbey should have got him help rather than enabling that mental illness by believing everything he claimed.
So if it's true that Cfc was aware of Andy's channelling how come she, with her much larger 17 year age gap and her whatever degree it is she has (something about homeschooling?), she didn't realise he was obviously mentally ill rather than believing everything he claimed? Because in order to have been his friend from the very beginning of DAYD, since early 2008 she's going to have to have been witness to lie after lie after lie after reframing after reimagining after no-this-time-it's-the-truth-for-reals-I-promise. She's going to have to have believed all those ridiculously grandiose cutting-off-baby's-arms-in-Africa stories, believed that the stupidly macho Irish version of Andy Blake was a real person rather than a hodge podge of exaggerated fiction, she would have had to lived through the whole Andy Blake/Amy Player reveal, actually believed that Amy Player was Andy's mentally ill twin sister and believed he could channel his Harry Potter characters, yet...it's only since Andy's officially made mental illness and schizophrenia part of his narrative publicly that she's all "I knew he was mentally ill all along and any decent person would have seen the same and got him help rather than flown him across state for sex" and come down hard on Abbey about her believing Andy rather than recognising him as ill. And this is only a very recent stance, since 2012. So how come between the years of 2008-2011 Cfc didn't realise Andy was ill when he was obviously exhibiting behaviour that is now part of the mental illness narrative with the channelling? It just doesn't stand up to any kind of scrutiny at all.
Unfortunately, this is going to be another one of those times when I've got to disappoint people. Sorry, nonnnie! I very vaguely remember there being a loyalty oath, but I don't remember it or its details clearly enough to feel comfortable writing about it. (I'm not out to sensationalize stuff that I don't completely remember!) There was definitely a chain of command that people took seriously, but I don't know if that was because of an oath or because people just got really wrapped up in Andy's games.