Netflix canceled their favorite show. They mounted a global campaign to save it.
It started, as these things often do, with fan outcry on the internet.
Hours after Simon Barry, the showrunner of "Warrior Nun," announced on December 13, 2022, that Netflix had canceled the beloved fantasy-drama after two seasons, fans began to congregate: in Discord servers, on social media, and in one fateful Twitter space.
"There were, like, 6,000 people at one time," Adrienne Place, a 42-year-old production assistant and "Warrior Nun" fan in Tennessee, said of the Twitter space. Kristina Tonteri-Young, the actor who played the fan-favorite character Beatrice, even appeared on the live-audio platform to console fans, Place recalled. "We all came together then," she said.
On its surface, "Warrior Nun" might not seem like the type of show to inspire this sort of devotion. The Netflix original — an adaptation of Ben Dunn's "Warrior Nun Areala" comics, starring Alba Baptista as Ava Silva, a young woman who's given a new lease on life through a holy artifact that links her to a group of demon-battling nuns — was fairly well received by critics but didn't get a lot of media attention.
But for its most vocal devotees, "Warrior Nun" is much more than a television show. The series, led by a primarily female cast, spotlights a queer romance, something that's still rarely represented on television. It also doesn't shy away from Christian themes, as it grapples with faith and religious trauma. For the show's die-hard fans, its cancellation was a loss not only of a favorite series but of what many saw as a beacon of representation.
The Twitter space, created on the day of the show's cancellation, was a place of catharsis, where fans could put literal voices to their emotions. Their genuine passion for the show, the sadness they felt at its cancellation, and the solidarity they developed sparked a larger movement to save it.
In the 11 months since news of the series' cancellation broke, "Warrior Nun" fans have mounted one of the most extensive, persistent, and organized campaigns to save a show in television history. It was, technically, successful, though fans aren't sure to what extent: On June 28, Barry announced that "Warrior Nun" had been saved, and on August 14, the executive producer Dean English told fans that it would return as a feature-length film trilogy, though other details about the revival are scarce.
While fan campaigns aren't new — the earliest documented one was a letter campaign to save "Star Trek: The Original Series" in the late 1960s — the sheer scope of the community "Warrior Nun" fans created is unlike anything that came before it.
In speaking with 13 people involved in the remarkably organized effort, I discovered not just how they did it (spoiler alert: it involved a Discord server, an ungodly number of spreadsheets, and a litany of inside jokes) but how a fandom that ran like a "very efficient company" also morphed into something that transcended the show it was created to support.
Fans leaped in to offer their skills to save 'Warrior Nun' days after its cancellation
On December 14, a group of friends who had spent the evening before venting over Discord launched Sapphics in Pain, a group designed to fight the cancellation of "Warrior Nun" and advocate for more women-loving-women representation. The next day, a self-described "Warrior Nun" "accountant" named Jereczko, a 26-year-old from Poland known on Twitter as @Jereczko97, began releasing hourly reports on the platform tracking the volume of the #SaveWarriorNun hashtag, using other fandom accounts like @avatricesource as a template to measure fan-engagement data.
On December 16, Sarah Blackburn, a Utah resident who works at a car-insurance company, launched a GoFundMe that would eventually raise enough money to buy billboard space on Sunset Boulevard, across the street from Netflix's Los Angeles offices.
Before December was out, "Warrior Nun" fans from around the world had gathered on social media to offer their talents to help the campaign. Robin Summers, an attorney in Vermont, responded to help with legal matters. Lucie Zatloukalová, a 21-year-old designer from the Czech Republic, told Business Insider that she joined the Discord server and started "shopping my little Photoshop skills around."
A fan known as Cohosh (@CohoshThe) released a 41-page marketing review of promotional content and media coverage of the show, featuring detailed accounts of everything from the cast's engagement with fans on social media to the coverage the fan campaign was receiving in the press. A fan who goes by Pietra, or @coeurdinosaur, on X, suggested creating a newsletter to keep the group updated on the campaign's progress and showcase fan art and teamed up with Place to put out its first edition the next day.
By early January, a group that called itself the Order — named after the show's Order of the Cruciform Sword, the organization of battle-hardened nuns — formed on Discord. (Members of the Order stressed they are not the "leaders" of the "Warrior Nun" fandom and said their work would not have been possible without the collaboration and support of other fans.)
An organization chart dated in June and authored by Cohosh demonstrates the scope of the fandom and its projects, which range from a Change.org petition to renew the show for a third season (which stands at over 124,000 signatures) to charity fundraisers organized primarily through GoFundMe, which the campaign says have raised over $60,000 in the show's name. These days, the Order is headquartered at warriornun.com, which serves as a central hub for news on the campaign and the fandom.
For the Order, saving 'Warrior Nun' was serious business — and it was run like one
Christopher Penn, the cofounder and chief data scientist at the marketing-analytics consulting firm TrustInsights.ai, didn't watch "Warrior Nun" until after he'd spent months elbow deep in the fan campaign's data doing some volunteer analysis. When he joined the group's Discord server, he was struck by their meticulous organization.
"You had finance, you had graphic design, data analysis, media outreach, public relations, social media, all this stuff," Penn told BI. "It was essentially structured like a midsize business in a lot of ways. Had you not known that it was a fan-led effort, you might be excused for mistaking, 'Oh, I'm going to be looking at someone's business. Am I in the right server?'"
The campaign's data-focused projects are particularly impressive. Building on the work of Cohosh's early marketing review, a subset of the Order that cheekily refers to itself as the Order of the Cruciform Spreadsheet put together four white papers making the case for why the show would bring value to a network like Starz, or streaming platforms like Apple TV+, HBO Max (now Max), and Paramount+. These in-depth reports, which are a common marketing practice, pointed to third-party research from Parrot Analytics that showed audience demand for "Warrior Nun" was well above the market average.
"With 'Warrior Nun,' the data was there," said Summers, the attorney, who's a self-proclaimed "policy nerd." "And the data had a story to tell."
Fans within the Order were also conducting strategic outreach, targeting Netflix executives, executives at other streaming platforms, and members of the media. Kate Witt, a Ph.D. neuroscience candidate studying in New Zealand, estimates that she and her collaborator Ashley Robinson, who has worked in operations and marketing, sent over 4,000 emails during their outreach.
When it came to raising or using money to further the group's goals, transparency was key, said Blackburn, who organized the initial GoFundMe. She helped create a transparency document to show where money from the fund was going, which included everything from flower bouquets and balloons sent to Netflix's headquarters to proof of $5 transactions on Venmo to test that the account was properly linked to the GoFundMe.
All that meticulous outreach and record-keeping added up: The Order estimates that the 49 people working on the campaign racked up about 371 total hours of labor a week over 31 weeks.
It's an unprecedented effort in an age of organized fandoms. "We've seen just a tremendous, I call it a maturation, of fan-community collectivity and organizing that takes advantage of more and more sophisticated forms of communication, but also more ability to be able to connect with one another across all of these digitized platforms," Jonathan Alexander, a professor of English and informatics at UC Irvine, told BI.
"I do think this campaign in particular demonstrates just how savvy fans are becoming in a hyper-digital age," said Julia Alexander, the director of strategy at Parrot Analytics and a Puck News analyst. "And I would suspect it's only going to get more captivating as more people in their early 20s, mid-20s start coming into the scene as big fans, as the reason they went into entertainment."
The campaign to save 'Warrior Nun' has transcended efforts to save the show
The tireless efforts of the Order and other "Warrior Nun" fans seem to have worked — though right now, it's unclear to what extent.
While Barry was the first to announce that "Warrior Nun" had been saved, he and several other writers associated with the series said on X that they were not affiliated with the movies. Details about the film, from its cast to where it will eventually be distributed — Deadline reported that Netflix is not involved — are still scarce.
Barry's apparent lack of involvement in the upcoming trilogy has fans concerned that the movies won't stay true to their beloved series. Many use the hashtag #SaveOURWarriorNun to express what they're truly fighting for: the wittiness, queer representation, and heart of the original series, as well as the characters they love.
"It's more than just this show," Leah Barber, an Order-affiliated video producer who lives in Ireland, told BI. "It's the shows that have come before it and the shows that come after it. We are, obviously, fighting for this show and the characters and the world that it's created. But it's much bigger than that, especially when it comes to representation."
Many of the "Warrior Nun" fans who spoke to BI emphasized that their efforts have transcended their initial goal of saving the show: They've made valuable friendships within the fandom and picked up plenty of useful skills along the way.
"It's a cliché to say, but the destination isn't the thing that matters," said Zatloukalová, the designer. "It's the journey. And I do think that applies to this case where, on a personal level, I have made friends that will be in my life for the rest of my life."
The campaign has made an impression on the creative staff of "Warrior Nun," too. Barry told BI that he has the utmost respect for people who watch the show, and he still regularly engages with the fandom and its projects on social media.
"I'm always in awe of anyone who takes the time out of their busy days and lives to fight for the survival of a show that they firmly believe in and that speaks to them," he said.
Barry added that he would have liked nothing more than to continue working on "Warrior Nun" for a third season. But he said that what the fans have built can stand on its own.
"I really believe in the camaraderie and the support that they've given each other," he said. "And I do feel like at the end of the day, that's a great legacy."
Read more on the past, present, and future of fandom: