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Early MCYTblr Interviews: fraseris

today's interviewee is fraseris/dukeborninfebruary, who ran the quack-ity "kinnie" blog, started the hermitblr "geckohc" tag, and has been in MCYTblr from the beginning! below are the questions and answers.

Q. What was your overall experience in early MCYTblr?

A. i had a great time honestly. it was such a hyperactive fandom because there were new hours of content daily, and like a lot of others i was doing pandemic school which meant basically doing nothing all day. this feels strange to say now that the world is pretending to be back to normal, but this whole online world was basically my life for an entire school year. and i think we were using the content and fanspace to ignore reality as hard as possible, because shit sucked severely. so everybody was very deeply invested and dedicated in a way that you just can't have anymore. and at least before the exile arc, when the fandom really blew up (esp i think on stan twitter) it was a relatively small fandom. when things got on trending we celebrated. so it was a really well connected space and we had a lot of fun with our mutual obsessions. ive never been in a fandom like that before and i probably never will be again

Q. If my memory serves, you ran the "kinnie" imposter blog quack-ity. What was that experience like?

A. well, i was not good at impersonating quackity at all. which made it harder to actually scare people and funnier when I actually did freak out a few. a friend who i met in sleepyheads told me that things had been too quiet since tubblr and velvetiscake so i just kinda did it. i stayed up until like 4 am two nights in a row before i gave up. it was really fun watching sleepyheads try to figure it out. someone in there did decide it was me and eventually i had to admit that they were right. i could've been more strategic but i didnt care all that much and i did break a record for hours without revealing myself!! but then zonebur broke that. ive always credited myself with reviving the art of kinnie blogs after like a month of silence, because after quack-ity there was zonebur and the niki blog and many others. i tried a ranboo imposter blog but nobody cared because this was a few weeks before he joined the dream smp. i also had another quackity imposter blog but by then it was too late and people were bored with us

Q. As I remember, you were the first blog to receive the "gay kroger anon" copypasta. What do you remember about that phenomena?

Q. What are some common criticisms of creators that you remember from 2020-2021?

A. i remember when i first joined the tumblr fandom (august 2020) there was a lot of controversy surrounding dream. this was before all his infamous no-pr-team social media outbursts, and the speedrun cheating allegations, and him legitimately grooming kids. honestly I didn't understand what he had actually done back then and i dont really know now. my best guess is that it was the dream team crit people's theories leaking out. it was always just a general "dream is racist" with no real evidence, at least that i saw. because of that the dream smp and fandom was disliked even before the growth in dec 2020, when people really started hating it. looking back i think a lot of that criticism and those rumors were true but at the time I didn't care and definitely felt uncomfortable criticizing friends of My Streamers theres also the sleepy bois callout. that seriously rocked the boat because this was basically the height of their viewcounts (jan ? 2021?) like tommy was getting over 100k viewers every stream and wilbur was getting almost as many. the eventual consensus from sleepyblr as i saw it was that this was all too old to be legitimate grounds for "cancelling." then there were some apologies, i think, and people were pissed at techno for never even acknowledging any of it. but I don't think it really effected their following. the people who liked them and wanted to watch them kept watching them. and in the end that callout didn't even scratch the surface of what wilbur had done. i will say that the main crit of tommy was that he was being negatively influenced by the adults around him and he "needs to be saved from them" or something like that. which unfortunately rings true in the wake of his statement and lack thereof about wilburs' serial abuse of younger people. its depressing to look back on because of that and also because of techno's death. at the time it really showed how people (myself included) attached their own worth to streamers' presence and the parasocial relationship between them. the amount of guilt and panic i saw was crazy

ALSO! when callmecarson was publicly outed as a groomer in jan 2021. that didn't make nearly as much controversy in the dream smp fandom as the other callouts, but at least in the spaces i was a part of like gay castle and associates there were a lot of people who had been smplive fans in the years before. at least two other creators from smplive had similarly been outed before, so it wasn't the first time, but caron definitely caused the remaining fandom to deteriorate. it also put lunch club's life and death in such a negative light and ruined it for a lot of people, because we had never understood the full story before

there was also the drama surrounding jawsh and noah hugbox. there was always negativity about stans (meaning the twitter fanbase) in the smplive world and jawsh started controversy by tweeting negatively about them and about dream. hugbox and him both brought in a sort of redditor anti-sjw vibe to the debate and mostly argued with dream on twitter because dream was always a huge supporter of stan culture and one of those people who told their chat "i love you" all the time, so they really disliked him. of course he acted just as ridiculous as them. this whole thing is where the original "dont stop the party" video came from. a lot of people on tumblr found the whole thing silly but there were also some people as offended and opinionated as most of twitter, who straight up cancelled josh and noah. one of my dearest mcytblr memories is my friends and i staying up late and laughing at noah hugbox's joker act together

the most general criticism of all of these streamers was that they promoted unhealthy parasocial relationships. that mindset was mostly in the crit spaces before the fandom really grew in december, but it became a big deal in the philosophy of the fandom. I'd been complaining about parasocial relationships for a while, but more on the side of viewers than streamers, and i was pissed off when the larger fandom turned it into a nothing-word. i also remember people disliking tubbos politics because he was basically centrist & confused with a touch of young tory ignorance. but myself and my friends and the people i followed were overwhelming uncritical of everyone

Q. As I remember it, you were also a fan of smplive. How do you think the two fandoms interacted/influenced each other?

A. (apologies to people who were actually active participants in smpblr if this isnt comprehensive.) smpblr was very anti-stan, anti-rpf, and so it was really at odds with smptwt where the exact opposite was true. the smp-boundaries account is a consequence of this. people would follow those posts like law and if you broke a boundary and didnt apologize well enough you would be ostracized. maybe this discourse wasnt so central to the fandom during the height of smplive, but by the time i was lurking in later 2019 it seemed to be the main topic of discussion. i think that this mindset really informed sections of the early dream smp fandom, but most people in 2020 stuck somewhere between the two extremes. the transition between the casual real life streaming on smplive and the character roleplay on the dream smp was definitely rough. i don't think there was ever a time when the true boundaries of what was and was not acceptable to discuss or create were set. generally you could treat the characters like characters and make art and write about them, but you could get in trouble with some people for depicting gore or anything sexual including sexual orientation or transness. and some spaces accepted rpf while others hated it with a burning passion. the fandom mellowed out over time and the characters were accepted fully as their own characters, but at least as i saw it took a while

Q. What do you remember about "smprompa"?

A. for a long time smprompa was a white whale. i led a short crusade trying to find it and had some genuinely great finds submitted by anons (i believe under the tag 'hunt for smprompa' or 'search for smprompa' or something on my blog.) but we didnt get anywhere close to the full text. it was a cultural artifact that i dont think many of us approved of, but we wanted it because of its significance to the smplive fandom and creators. when it was discovered by gay castle folks my mind was a little blown

#early mcytblr interviews #Volume 12 #fraseris

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