I wasn't interested much in the Gwenpool Fortnite collab (fingerless gloves are a cute tweak), but someone asked on Twitter about "evil future Gwenpool" being labelled "Dark Gwenpool" ingame (which is what I've been calling my fan character variant since 2020):
"Dark" is a very common prefix for evil alter egos, so even if people occasionally mistake my comics for official material, I was certain this was a coincidence. But then the person also casually pointed out that she's called "Dark GwenPool" on Wikipedia. Huh?
No sources cited as far as I can tell. One of the original Gwenpool creators even agreed that "Dark Gwenpool" was never official:
I hunted down the Wikipedia changelog where apparently someone injected all the Dark Gwenpool stuff on 8th of April this year (2024). So maybe someone on the Fortnite team checked Google/Wikipedia instead of making up the name from scratch.
I tried to hunt down the wiki editor for questioning only to find out they are banned for being a sockpuppet account. In fact, that user was such a prolific sockpuppeteer that they've got their own Wikipedia page listing all 164 suspected alts. One of them is called "Batrocfrogg", what kind of canonization assist from beyond the grave is this?!
Since that lead went cold, I looked at the sources the wiki edit gave when talking about the character more generally. Aside from the official comics where she isn't called Dark Gwenpool, we've got:
- "Peter Parker & Miles Morales: Spider-Men Double Trouble #2" – evil Gwen just has a cosplay background cameo there, no name drop.
- Marvel Duel, a niche F2P mobile card game, where she's an antagonist.
The person who first pointed out to me that "Dark Gwenpool" was also on Wikipedia dug around and found a screenshot that evil Gwen is indeed called "Dark Gwenpool" in Marvel Duel:
Obviously I assume the Marvel Duel devs just made that one up without knowing about my comics. Case closed on that lead! But I'm not sure if the Wiki edit was based on this.
Marvel Duel, if we can still trust its wiki page, only released in eight countries. They are mostly in the UTC+8 time zone. The edit was finished on ~22:00 UTC+0, which would be Tuesday 05:00 AM local time if the editor is from one of those countries themselves.
Of course, maybe the person played an emulated/jailbroken version (the game does come in English), watched a foreign Let's Play, or is just a super night owl. None of these are stranger than having 146 sockpuppet accounts. But it also doesn't exactly help the edit's credibility like I had hoped.
I also don't know if Marvel Duel included the name variations "Dark GwenPool" and "Dark Gwen" that the Wiki editor used specifically (in the screencap above she's stylized differently). The editor also called her the "evil alternator future version" tho, so maybe they aren't a stickler for details.
But yeah the TL;DR is that "Dark GwenPool" is currently the main name for evil Gwen on Wikipedia with no source cited. Marvel Duel calling her that as well was probably just coincidence. Maybe Fortnite also made it up, or they copied it from Wikipedia, or maybe they copied it from Marvel Duel itself.
I thought it was weird and funny enough to share. 164 sockpuppets. WTF.
