#mcytblr: relatively quiet

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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?

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. 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

[jjkyaoi]

hi. i figured that while i’m on that crime boys grind, that i should. cracks knuckles. pop off with something that makes yall cry, so

i’ve been rewatching the wilbur tour stream with tommy recently, and there’s some things i noticed about what c!tommy had to say to his chat about getting wilbur stone that i haven’t seen people talk about much? and because i’m thinking about it —and, honestly because i’m sort of tired of the ppl misinterpreting how c!tommy feels about c!wilbur— i’m just gonna. does my silly little dance. use my big boy brain and talk abt it

“nonono, i know about the manipulation, i don’t *care!* cause he doesn’t think i can! ....which, obviously i can, so i’ve obviously proved that— but it’s not *about* that! i know he’s trying to manipulate me and it won’t *work.”*

so, here it’s obvious that c!tommy is struggling about how he feels about the interaction he’d just had. he seems to be slightly caught up in the fact that wilbur doesn’t think he can get the stone, and that’s something that he has to remind himself “isn’t the point”, but *also,* the fact that he later on says this;

“and he would be impressed with me, which, admittedly would feel nice, cause it’s—cause it’s nice... and it.. it doesn’t matter, though, but it—it *would* be nice.”

clearly, all the bad past experiences he’s had with wilbur has lead him to distrust the man— has lead him to view the man as somebody who “can’t be trusted” no matter what and somebody who “hasn’t changed since pogtopia”, especially considering later on he goes on to say this

“cause he’s gonna start another *thing.* and if he thinks l’manberg.. was just a way so he could get in....”

“oh no. i’m gonna have to— he’s gonna destroy the server, if he likes dream.”

clearly, wilbur’s earlier interactions— the things he said to him, whether they be true or untrue about l’manberg and dream has lead to tommy not trusting him even more— or, the words had such an affect on him/hurt him to the degree where it’s doubled down on the little trust he has for c!wilbur, and hearing wilbur openly admit that he likes c!dream, the man who’s been tormenting him to no end, puts him in tommy’s “enemies” category— makes him think that he’s gonna destroy the server and he’s gonna have to go against him, whether he likes it or doesn’t like it or whether it be true or it isn’t.

c!tommy is currently,,, conflicted on how he feels about c!wilbur, to say the least. we don’t know the interactions he had in limbo with wilbur, but it caused his view of the man to go from apprehensive to aggression. even saying *this* to ranboo and tubbo in the revival stream.

“do you think i liked wilbur? is that what this is about?”

and when ranboo goes on to say,

“*the* wilbur? like, your friend?”

tommy responds,

“we are not *fucking* friends, ranboo.”

beforehand, if tommy were to be told that, he wouldn’t have such a violent reaction— he wouldn’t have dismissed his ally ship with wilbur completely, wouldn’t have said that they weren’t friends entirely. tommy’s main motivation in the past was dedicated to wilbur— the *real* wilbur, so it’s confusing yet, if you think about it, there’s some reasons for why he could react so violently against c!wilbur.

going back to the limbo interactions. there’s like, what, some canon months worth of interactions we didn’t get to see in there? we only got to see *one* interaction out of months worth, but when c!tommy came back he didn’t seem— he didn’t act like the interactions were very pleasant. it’s off screen interactions so there’s plenty room for interpretation, but c!tommy has hinted, multiple times that whatever interactions he’d had with wilbur in there weren’t good, even to the point of begging c!dream to not revive wilbur, when beforehand the most he’d been about c!wilbur’s possible revival was nervous, even going so far as to say that he’d be his *friend* just so he doesn’t revive wilbur, and in the revival stream c!tommy was looking genuinely scared at the possibility of wilbur being back, going “you don’t understand, *wilbur’s back”* in a tone that, obviously couldn’t mean good things or isnt said in a pleasant way.

tldr. a part of tommy things wilbur is going to do something dangerous. this mistrust/believe is a combination of all the unresolved trauma he has from wilbur from the past, the off screen limbo interactions, and c!wilbur unintentionally adding fuel to the fire by saying that he believes his literal abuser is the hero and that he didn’t really care for l’manberg —which, i don’t believe is true - in the least, but regardless, isn’t a good thing to say to c!tommy— which is just a huge heap of garbage onto “the reasons why c!tommy doesn’t trust c!wilbur, the saga”.

however, this doesn’t mean i’m saying c!tommy thinks wilbur is completely irredeemable/thinks he’s the spawn of satan, either. he doesn’t trust him, yes, but there’s *care* there, like the tangent c!tommy went on about how it would be nice for c!wilbur to be impressed with him for getting stone/possibly praise him; he still searches ofter the man’s reassurance praise and, probably always will, because c!wilbur had sort of always been a guidance figure for tommy for so long. c!tommy currently doesn’t trust wilbur, but there’s also a part of him for yearns for the man’s praise and his attention, which is the reason why he got the stone so quickly, though he furiously said that “wasn’t the point”.

and also, c!tommy’s entire monologue about “not giving up on people” to foolish, to which he said that c!wilbur wanted people to see him as the villain, iirc, which is. Interesting. to me, because it’s clear that he still hasn’t gotten completely rid of the “c!wilbur is the villain” mentality in his mind, but from that sentence alone he’s trying to understand c!wilbur more, and also his whole speech about how “if you care about somebody, don’t give up on them”. c!tommy’s feelings on wilbur currently are complicated, but he’s always been willing to follow him to the ends of the earth— he’s always trusted and loved that man with his entire heart, so that basically means that, yea, he still might think c!wilbur is a bad guy and not entirely trust him, but he also isn’t going to give up on him. and he’d said he “didn’t have it in him to save the server before” so it makes me think that 👁️ maybe he’ll just try to convince c!wilbur to the “good side”? thinks he doesn’t think he’s on the good side?? perhaps??

i don’t know. i’m just thinking about them. c!crime boys make me so very Emotional there’s so much - to them and i just ,,,, hold it gently. c!crime boys how do u manage to be one of the most bittersweet dynamics on this server

[missabella]

So this is going to be a post for my personal blog, but since it does concern Puffy and her mcyt meetup, I’m also reblogging it on puffy updates. 

Disclaimer

The reason that I’m writing is because I do know that some people in the mcyt fandom (whether it be on tumblr, twitter, youtube, reddit, tiktok, etc.) are quite young and see some of those content creators as role models. This post is mostly for those young fans that are easily impressionable. Nevertheless, if my words end up changing a content creator’s behavior about this entire situation, then good for them. But if they decide to carry on with their life as before, I won’t get upset. I don’t know them, so for all I know they may take extra precautions against the pandemic behind the scene. 

Additionally, I will mention some individual content creators by name in the post. I don’t want any hate to be spread toward them. If by some chance they end up seeing this post, I want them to know that I highly respect each and everyone of them and that I don’t have any ill feelings toward them

Finally, sorry if this is long and not concise. I just feel like I need to get this off my chest, and it is two in the morning where I am.

I’m a young adult that is a fan of mcyt. As some of you on mcytblr may know, my favorite minecraft content creator is Captain Puffy. I love her content and personality, and I personally identify with her since we’ve shared similar struggles in life. That being said, I actually don’t agree with everything she does in her private life, more particularly with her decision to go to the uk and to vidcon (which is now canceled) during the pandemic. But once again, that is her decision, and even though I don’t condone her decision, I wasn’t going to attack her for it. 

Yesterday evening, Gee Nelly threw a birthday party; Puffy had just arrived in the UK when she attended, and other ccs (like Minx, Niki, Wilbur, and Jack, just to name a few) attended. They weren’t wearing masks, nor were they socially distancing. Some fans found out that the party was happening, and they were rightfully upset, especially considering the fact that recently Tommyinnit had gotten covid, that VidCon got cancelled because of covid, and that London (and the UK in general) had seen an increase in covid cases.

Now, before I talk about my own opinion, I would like to clear up some misunderstanding that I’ve seen on twitter. For approx. the last four weeks, you no longer have to quarantine once you arrive in the UK if you arrive from the US and are fully vaccinated. In that regard, Puffy wasn’t doing anything against UK guidelines. Additionally you are no longer legally required to wear a face mask in the UK regardless on whether or not you are vaccinated. In other words, except if someone present was actually sick with covid, then no one was doing anything illegal.

Now, here is what I have to say about this. First of all, I could care less about restrictions and guidelines. Anytime I’m in public, indoors or outdoors, I’ve been wearing my mask since March of last year. The day I’ll stop will be the day that we’ve reached herd immunity, and we are nowhere near that. 

However, almost no one think the same way I do, which kind of leads to my second point; I’m not surprised at the choice made by any of those content creators in attendance. I wasn’t expecting anything more from them, for the good and simple reason that everyone in my town is doing the same thing as them. However, this doesn’t change the fact that I’m disappointed in their decision and that I would have loved for them to think more critically about this and to realize that it wasn’t a good idea. 

But relatively speaking, there is little importance in what those content creators decide to do during their free time. What matters more is how we react to it. This fandom is at a point where they look up at content creators as practically perfect in every way. So of course, when a content creator messes up, individual fans will react in one of two ways. 

The first way is to replicate the content creator’s mistake. This is harmful to all since neither the fan nor the content creator realize that this action is a mistake. This eventually leads to the normalization of the mistake, and once someone else realizes that it is a mistake, it may be too late to fix it. 

The second way is to completely shame that content creator for that mistake. This is also harmful for both the content creator and the fan. For the content creator, this situation is stressful since they may not fully understand what exactly they did wrong. For the fan, the existence of this mistake goes against this perfect image they’ve looked up to; this will feel almost as if the entire world collapsed, because in a way, their perception of the world did indeed collapse.

As a fandom, we’ve been going with the first way for a while. We’ve tried to justify Tommy’s vlogs, Ranboo’s trip to the UK, and the Karlnap meetup. Those of us that disagreed with this behavior (myself included) have decided to stay quiet and tried to be excited and happy for them. Now that covid cases are rising globally, that conventions are cancelled, and that content creators are getting sick, we decided to start being more vocal about our disagreement. Now, I feel like this fandom is slowly starting to react in the second way.

The main takeaway from this is that we should be holding content creators and ourselves accountable for their and our own actions, respectively. Both the fandom and content creators should recognize that we should start thinking by ourselves instead of listening to guidelines or popular opinion. Those of us that disagreed with the meetups and the vlogs should have spoken up since the beginning. We should also understand that no one, even the people we look up to, is perfect, and that everyone is allowed to make a mistake. And finally, we should also stop holding content creators to such high standards if we’re not also going to hold the rest of the world, including those around us, to those same high standards.