Finding a Community

There’s one thing that connects every one of us, and it’s that we’re all fans of something. Whether it’s Harry Potter or Halo, True Detective or Tarantino films, Manchester United or hardcore rap, we all have something that we love to follow, to rave about, to share.

For the attendees of Rooster Teeth Ireland’s Summer Event with Burnie Burns, myself included, they were further connected by a love of Rooster Teeth, the producers of several hugely popular web series such as Red vs Blue, RWBY and Immersion. It brought just under 350 people to the D|two Nightclub, queueing for hours to meet with two of their heroes – Burnie Burns, one of the founders of Rooster Teeth, and Ashley Jenkins, founder of Rooster Teeth’s gaming and entertainment news channel The Know. The former was the main attraction, having written, directed and starred prominently in many of Rooster Teeth’s early productions – most notably voicing Leonard Church, arguably the lead character in Red vs Blue. Ms Jenkins was one of the main reasons that I got involved with gaming journalism, so for me, and a good portion of the attendees, both guests held equal weight.

Earlier in the year, on April 11th, a much smaller group of people – no more than 100 – had assembled upstairs in The Bar 51, coming together for RT Ireland’s annual Dublin event. “It’s a completely different thing altogether,” says Eoin O’Riordan, one of the founders and organisers of RT Ireland, with regards to how the Summer Event differed from their usual gatherings. “The smaller events have a different demographic – they’re far more casual, very relaxed. We didn’t really know what we were getting into with the Burnie Burns meet-up, there were so many people there attending one of our events for the first time. They were there for Burnie and Ashley, rather than for RT Ireland, but they gave an amazing showing of themselves. All that we heard back from [Burns and Jenkins] was that everyone were so nice.”

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RT Ireland itself had begun life on New Year’s Day, 2014, when O’Riordan and the other founders got together on the Rooster Teeth website’s forums, forming the group upon realising that all former attempts had failed, and Ireland was left all but unrepresented in the Rooster Teeth community. “A lot of people kept saying ‘we should do this, we should do this’, O’Riordan explains, “but it wasn’t until we actually took that step, that we realised the responsibility we had on our hands. For a long time, I had been growing fed up of seeing RT members going to London, Canada, New Zealand. I felt that, per capita, we had to have just as high a ratio of fans, if not more. I was obsessed by RT, but didn’t really have anyone to discuss it with, so there was a need on my part for a group like this to exist.”

The crowd stared on, unable to process the fact that right in front of them were two of the people they had spent so much time watching online.

They say that no plan survives first contact, and O’Riordan can certainly attest to that, admitting that “about half an hour in, everything went to hell. The Eventbrite app failed on one of our phones, so I had to download it and fill in checking tickets. Burnie and Ashley were an hour late, but that had all been part of the plan, allowing us to get people into the venue in an orderly fashion. However, it quickly became clear we’d have to cut a lot of what we had planned. We had wanted to do a panel, and put some questions to our guests, but given how long the queue was, we realised that we’d only be able to do a meet and greet and allow people a few minutes each to talk and take a photo with the guests they had come to see.”

As an attendee, though, we saw none of this chaos. The queues were slow, each of us being split into one of five groups as we came in, but that lent us the opportunity to talk amongst ourselves, and meet new people who shared the same interests. What really struck me, upon talking to some of my fellow attendees, was how many of them have travelled from the North or from the rest of the UK to make it down to the event. O’Riordan states that it was important to him for the group to transcend borders, having argued against an early concept for their logo to portray the RT rooster in green, white and orange. The current logo, portraying a green rooster, represents the idealised vision of Ireland, putting aside religious and political differences in order to allow the group to represent the full island, and allowing fans to unite over their shared love of Rooster Teeth.

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All of the organisers were able to have some impact into the event, but surprisingly Burnie Burns himself had very little, having only concluded RTX (the Rooster Teeth Expo) the week before, back home in Austin. However, the event itself came to exist entirely by his intervention, having tweeted to the group’s account on the day of their smaller April event earlier in the year. “We couldn’t believe it,” O’Riordan confessed. “We had just wrapped up our main event of the year, and then we found out that Burnie had tweeted us, saying ‘I should come over this year and we should have a big event’ – just that, and nothing more.”

This led to a whole new chapter for the group. O’Riordan hopes that RT Ireland will continue its expansion, stating his intention to organise events in Galway and Northern Ireland over the coming year, having already done so in Dublin and Cork. To him, Rooster Teeth is able to bring together so many people together for one simple reason: “In and out of their various shows, they give the impression of being a casual group of friends, and that vibe really translates to people, because they can identify with it in their own lives.”

Much of a similar vibe was present at the event itself, as people waited patiently for their chance to meet Burns and Jenkins, discussing their favourite RT shows and personalities to break the ice with new acquaintances. This was never more clear than when the special guests entered D|two, with Burns whooping as an attempt to spark the crowd into life. Instead, he was met with a subdued cheer, and star-struck disbelief. The crowd stared on, unable to process the fact that right in front of them were two of the people they had spent so much time watching online. At the other end of the event, when a pair of X-Ray and Vav cosplayers (characters from another of RT’s various animated shows) finally got their chance to take their photos with Burns and Jenkins, they received a tremendous cheer from the crowd. At the end of the day, we’re all fans of something. Some of us just happen to be lucky enough to be able to share that with others of a similar mind. That’s the purpose of RT Ireland, in a nutshell.

Illustration by Mubashir Sultan; Photos by Tyler Kelly.

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