#Early MCYTblr Interviews

[mcytblr-archive]

Early MCYTblr Interviews: georgesoot

today's interviewee is georgesoot/dreamwasfound, who, in his words, "emerged from the senior living center to tell all". under the readmore is a transcript if the questions and answers.

Q: What was, in broad terms, your experience in MCYTblr? Are there any experiences/events that stand out to you?

A: Well it was primarily an outlet to channel all my obnoxious thoughts about Minecraft at the time. I had started watching Minecraft videos during the Pandemic, and came across [they who shall not be mentioned] and noticed there wasn't really a community on Tumblr yet. I just knew that someone had to show up and make it gay. It was easy to slot myself in, start making posts that I will never understand how I thought they would be funny, and slowly built up some sort of a following due to my sense of humor but also due to my ability to soberly ~critique~ the Minecraft Men as content creators, micro-celebrities, and as people. I never really fell into niches or was much aware of what other people were doing, until I was kind of folded into this idea of Dream Lying. I don't mean to sound self obsessed but I didn't really care about anything beyond my immediate sphere of friends?

For instance, you mention with other interviewees the Elections. I did not pay attention to those for a single second. I do remember we were saying "stop the count!" because we thought Georgeeehd should have won. And I dubbed Wormweeb the Prime Minister of Mcytblr, but I don't even remember who was running? Or why this even happened?

But as for other events, if they were funny or I could wring something out of them, I do remember them. For example, the mass migration of Kpoppies to Tumblr after it was suddenly "legal" to ship content creators. That compltely shifted the "culture" if it can be called that. I remember all the fake stan accounts, but I never attempted to interact with them. Obviously I remember the Tapeworm post, all the Discourse, the Controversies, how I was able to get hundreds of notes by summarizing events of the DreamSMP, my great shame in life.

But yes, most of the time, I was not there to take things too seriously.

Q: More specifically, what was your experience being in Dream Lying/early critblr? Do you think your experience differed from “main” MCYTblr?

A: As for my experience in what has been dubbed Critblr, well I've been credited with helping to start that whole movement. I think it's funny, because truly the kind of reaction to [censored]'s warcry scandal just wouldn't play out today the way it did back then. But I think it's a function of being an adult, that I could look at [censored] not as an idol, like at all whatsoever. It's easy to swept up in the emotions of things. But as a veteran of Discourseblr, and multiple fandoms, I could see through [censored]'s lack of media training and awareness of the average center left teenage perspective on these issues like it was wet tissue paper. People were mad at for that, but I didn't care what people thought of me.

Maybe by coincidence the other members of Dream Lying also had similar worldviews to mine. Everyone could look past the stanning of it all and recognize when something "canceallable" occurred and discuss it frankly and succinctly. Well I couldn't discuss it succinctly but others could. So to answer your question, yes it was a different experience from the rest of the "community." And it got to the point that it wasn't just "holding creators to account" it became fun. It was fun being the buzzkill in an ironic sense, and also fun in an unhinged way to just create these ludicrous scenarios of [censored] the Young Republican cornering you in the hallway and asking you so how does gay sex work actually though? And again, shipping was a component of this too.

And we turned out to be right. At the risk of sounding arrogant, this will become a theme.

Q: In previous interviews with DLying members, we’ve discussed that misinformation/in-jokes were a big part of the culture, one of them being that Dream sued you for libel. Do you remember any others? Did you expect so many people to believe you?

A: As I mentioned, I didn't take things too seriously. I enjoyed doing a little light trolling, such as when I infiltrated a [censored] stan tumblr server and showed everyone his dogs, and then reveled in the drama of them acting like I killed their families. People also turned on me because I abandoned The Ship for a ship that comprises of two… perpetrators of sexual misconduct as of March 2024, though that would also be true of the Popular Ship as well.

Anyway my personal computer died sometime in early 2021, so I, as is per the usual for my personality, made it into a joke because it really was quite stressful. I mentioned to Reese Georgeeehd and Ozzie ohge0rge (sp?) that [censored] must've sent a virus to kill my harddrive. This evolved into [censored]'s legal team sending me a cease and desist letter, as I'm sure I was being extra ~critical~ on Tumblr at the time.

They asked if they could make that The Official Narrative. I cautioned against it, it leaked anyway, because their "Private Twitters" had hundreds of followers, and this enabled this joke to become a full fledged rumor. And then my "ops" as the kids call them, got wind of this too. Most didn't believe it, but some had this "If it did happen GOOD!" attitude.

But some other examples… let me think. We did try to heavily imply that Ranboo was a former member of our organization. We rarely outright lied about the creators, but we did usually distort or exaggerate things when it came to us, for comedic effect. Frequently someone will say to me "Oh so and so mentioned you again," and my go-to answer is always "Tell them I got hit by a bus," or "Tell them I'm withering away from my dementia in the nursing home."

I did not expect people to believe me, because I did not spread the rumor because I had completely disappeared from the "public" by that point. I purposefully devised a very unrealistic joke in the first place, so I really don't know who would believe that. Especially since I was known to be friends and enemies with doxxers, who could find that information out if it existed.

Like the thought of [censored] being so hurt by a single anonymous loser calling him a Trump supporter and a bad voice actor and someone who was going to hold his British friend captive in his basement and force him to go on a keto diet to the point that he starves to death, or that he had offshore bank accounts to evade Taxes, or that he paid his brother to be his body double (this turned out to be true), that he was pretending to be bisexual for clout, that he had 100% cheated on his speedrun (also turned out to be true), that he had enslaved his mother as his maid, that he and his other friend from Texas would engage in a little frottage as bros do… well the list is endless. But the thought of him being so offended that he gets his lawyer, whom he pays, to send me a cease and desist letter… well it's one of the few things I came up with that was actually funny.

Uh but no, anyone with a healthy attachment to reality would never believe that.

Q: I understand that you were also in EBblr and its surrounding communities. What was that like? 

A: I was never in ebblr… all I did was watch a few Tubbo streams, realize that he was probably gay, and I was right. Because what do you expect at this point?

I pointed out publicly that Tubbo and Ranboo were engaging in some light queerbait, except that they were obviously both queer. The point was I thought they (or at least Tubbo) were trying to engineer a New [censored], because that gets you attention which gets you money… like Kaceytron was right about everything? In these spaces, being Queer is a commodity. But I'm letting the point get away from me.

In private, I mostly reacted with bemusement, and we did have some genuine enderbabies, as I called them (mostly derisively), in our server, who took it all so literally and that it was so kawaii desu. I thought it was cringe. Like, Tubbo pretending to be coy and saying Ranboo's foot was bigger than his forearm. That took me RIGHT back to my days as a cringy 19yo baby gay trying to flirt. Oh I'm getting embarrassed thinking about it. But there were a few moments that Tubbo and Ranboo manufactured together that I thought were pretty cute and wholesome.

On the whole, I'm still confused as to why I'm included in this sub-community. I approached Enderbees as a marketing thing, or something of the sort. I never read fics, I never looked at art, I never really cared. I especially didn't care about their "characters" on the SMP, which also set me apart from the genuine unironic shippers. Some thought this was worse than shipping because I was committing that dreaded cardinal sin: speculating on CC's sexualities.

And yes, I popularized the word Truthing in this context. I explicitly modeled it after 9/11 Truthers, because the JOKE (hi remember none of this was meant to be too serious) was that we were deranged conspiracists who were probably best kept away from normal society.

Q: Is it odd to be regarded as infamous within the MCYTblr niche? 

A: No it's not odd, I at least partially strove for infamy. Any attention gratifies the ego after all, not just postitive attention. Then there was the absurdity of it all. Here I was, in the Pandemic, having multiple degrees, looking for jobs, getting a job, going to work, paying taxes, and theater kids in high school were probably drawing devil horns on my pfp and throwing knives at it. All because I said everything I said about [censored], or "speculated" that Technoblade was gay because he had drama kid energy, or called Tommy annoying that one time in 2020, or babied [censored] too much. There's really no end to the list of nonsense I was spewing.

And I'd argue that I'm not infamous. Gayminecraftmen had to tell me about your blog and your interviews. I'm doing this because my friends think it would be funny. And the Drama of Georgesoot emerging from the senior living center to tell all is the kind of stupid humor I like. But aside from this, I haven't thought about Minecraft in a while. I have to be spoonfed lore about these annoying content creators who don't even make content anymore. Anything I learn about the "community" now is against my will.

At the time, maybe I was infamous, but now? I don't care. To even dignify my "infamy" would be to admit that Minecraft Youtube is even relevant anymore. How pathetic! I just filed my taxes and got an oil change last week. Me and the homies are having Dune watch parties and writing elaborate screenplays for Timothee Chalamet to star in in our heads (shout out to Ciara). To reminisce on my Tumblr infamy for a community of mostly teenagers about Content Creators who made content for said teenagers and later preyed on those teenagers… is so opposite from the adult problems and adult interest I have. Not to be condescending but that's just how it is!

Q: What are some common creator criticisms that you remember from 2020-2021? Do you still stand by them?

A: The common criticisms have held up in my opinion. [censored] and [censored] were queerbaiting. [censored] was cultivating an audience of loyal vulnerable teenagers and he took advantage. So did [censored]. And [censored] who literally bites people? Oh… okay then.

Dream Lying was right about [censored]'s friend whom he invited into his home and whom he tried to gift a career, only to be outed as an abuser. We were right about [censored] coming from not just a conservative background, but a bigoted one, one that he refused to actually grapple with. We were right about MCC being rigged. We were right about the cheating scandal. We were right about so many things.

The only thing I was definitely wrong about was the [censored] really did hop off the plane at LAX with a dream and a cardigan. I thought he for sure would just put off the [censored] team hype house meetup forever. My psychic powers don't always work I guess. That wasn't a criticism though, just my coping. Oh and I was wrong that Ranboo was an industry plant, but I was right that he's annoying and has no talent. And Dream Lying said from day one that Tubbo and Ranboo's little relationship would not last the summer and we were right! In fact during that whole thing I also speculated that Tommy would start queerbaiting and then he did! I felt like Cassandra at times.

Anyway back to the point. I mean the criticisms of [censored] were just all encompassing, and basically stemmed from the fact that he was like all these video game boys- a white man from a republican household who was not properly media trained because Streaming is not a real industry career and none of them were prepared for fame. And that has borne out over and over again. They all have shady pasts, they all abuse their fame and take advantage of fans. So I do stand by these criticisms.

Q: Is there anything else you’d like to speak on or have archived?

A: Not really, I've already said far too much, so apologies to whoever edits these, I hope you enjoy the novel I wrote for you. I don't know, I have dementia, none of this is real. Karlarmy forever. Also who even knows if I'm the real Georgesoot.

#early mcytblr interviews #Volume 10 #georgesoot

[memryse]

Them trying to appeal to mcytwtt that way isssss interesting since last time i saw mcytwtt they both hated mcytblr and were kind of consistently shitty to eret

i can confirm this is true. maybe not so much about the hating mcytblr part, a lot of them just straight up don’t know tumblr is still a website at all. they find us funny sometimes. i think they see us as zoo animals of sorts.

but their treatment of eret is consistently vile, yes. back when i joined the dsmp fandom in early 2021 eret was on a lot of people’s dni lists for a couple uneducated remarks they made on.. arguably rather niche queer topics. i mean “uneducated” in the literal sense that they didn’t understand, and because obviously as a queer person eret must understand all aspects of queerness instantly and never ever ever slip up or not know something, this was unforgivable. this died down towards the end of the year, but to this day i still see people being gross whenever they post a pic of themselves. disgusting amounts of what is, ultimately, just straight up queerphobia and body shaming, especially when the pics are of them expressing their queerness in some way (wearing a dress, breast forms etc)

their marketing directly on twitter is incredibly transparent “we don’t know what any of this is but come to our website for more of it” sort of tactics, like the most generic responses to popular mcyt posts. twitter users unfortunately eat this right up though, so i don’t expect that they’ve done enough research into the mcyttwt demographic to know any of the intricacies of it all, because they really don’t need to. most twitter users aren’t going to join tumblr, but they WILL engage with the tumblr account because “BRAND KNOWS MCYT?!?!?!?!?”, which is still good marketing. from the perspective of literally anyone who isn’t a young mcyttwt user though it all comes across as very obviously out of touch LMAO so. yeah it’s very obvious that they barely know anything about eret at all, let alone twitter’s relationship with them. you can tell that from the interview alone, the phrase “you got a lore episode” instead of “you did a lore stream” said it all tbh 😭😭 (and the fact that in talking about this lore stream, the tumblr lady just made vague references to fanart and positive responses, very much keeping it on topic of tumblr engagement. which is what the podcast is about yes but also definitely shows that she doesn’t understand what she sees in the mcyt tags)

i guess with this podcast they’re trying to appeal more to existing mcytblr users than mcyttwt tho but still… not a fan of a cc being turned into socmed advertisement. no hate to eret for taking the opportunity, it’s gotta be cool from their pov, but hm

#ask #recent MC Tournament things made me delete twitter today #we’ll see if it sticks #discourse #<- sorta

[mcytblr-archive]

Early MCYTblr Interviews: tack-tick

today's interviewee is tack-tick, a pioneer of the "phistin" ship and DSMP fan since before the first election! below is a transcript of the interview.

Q: What was your overall time in MCYTblr like?

A: I'd say my overall time in Mcytblr could be described as finding diamonds in the rough. This fandom is defined by finding your group, sticking to them and if you're smart not really looking beyond that. I did look beyond that and saw a lot of discourse and such. I had a good time with my friends but I did get negatively affected by the discourse at times. It was kind of a toxic shithole but by God mcytblr was our shithole lol

Q: Do you remember any specific discourse that affected you, or was it just the overall culture around you?

A: As a Technoblade main, it was the discourse surrounding his character that messed with me. At the time, I was mutuals (none in the phistin palace dw guys) with some people who hated his character. I, as an anxious teenager, was very worried it would cause drama if I unfollowed them and my dash became a lot of those long negative essays about how he was an awful person and yknow the drill. It was mainly my own fault and my dash became signfigantly better once I realized no one would be offended of I unfollowed, blocked a bunch of tags, started up my own discord server and focused more on writing fanfic instead of doomscrolling. A good lesson in curating your dash of anything else. (Btw those former mutuals are fine people, we just had radically different tastes in what we liked and disliked about the Dream SMP)

Q: You mentioned the "phistin palace"-- before we get into that, would you like to explain the "phistin" rarepair itself?

A: Now we are cooking! So, Phistin is the ship of Kristin and Philza. It's main focus was on the scraps of lore that we had about their relationship which was Kristin was the immortal goddess of Death and they couldn't really see each other often but loved each other very much. I'd say it's main appeal was being one of the few ships that was just really stable in the Dream SMP compared to the Karlnapity polycule and whatever youd call Quackbur. Fun fact, I can't find the post now but if i remember correctly me and tumblr user Demonadelem helped name the pair Phistin. Although, that was ages ago so I could be misremebering

Q: Was the ship entirely within the SMP, or was it just the general ship name for the real-life couple?

A: It was both. Since Kristin didn't really stream on the dream smp, a lot of her personality had to be based on what Phil said about her and her other streams. Basically, lore about the ship was pulled from the SMP but the dynamics and personality was from both. You could play around with the dynamic if you focused on Kristin being a goddess

Q: With that basic information laid out-- what was the "phistin palace"?

A: The Phistin Palace was a discord server I founded in August of 2022. Phistin was a ship that was basically a side thing I did in fandom because my main focus was Technoblade and emerald duo stuff. I think if you're a Technoblade fan you're legally obligated to be a Philza fan and vice versa. I don't make the rules. So Phistin was something I did when I wanted a break from Technoblade as a way to practice romantic shipping.

Then Technoblade passed away and I didn't want to do anything with his character for a while so I focused completely on Phistin. However, when I tried to find any fics they were either a background ship with only one line or Kristin was already dead from a tragic disease who's main symptoms were lying daintily in bed. While I was writing my own long form Phistin focused fic, Two Birds if anyone read it, I got a comment that complimented me for "giving her an actual charatcer" and maaaan that is a very low bar to be praised for. So, I started the palace as a way to find other Phistin fans who actually cared about them beyond Kristin being angst fodder for SBI.

Q: Do you have any fond memories in specific of the "Phistin Palace" discord server?

A: Oh so many. During the Syndicate finale, three of us all liveblogged and freaked the fuck out when Kristin showed up for the first time in a minecraft skin on the server. I made on of those AI chatbot things that was popular for a bit and the bot was supposed to be the Kristin character. I asked if she had a pet and she said she has a gecko named Tim. The entire server instantly decided they would die for Tim and he's now an emote. The general chat is also named Tim Time Fucker. A mermaid AU that was made that the majority of the server contributed a lot of lore to we named it the Communist Mermaid AU because the server collectively owns it now. Many good moments there

Q: Beyond the Phistin Palace, are there any large community events that you remember/took part in, or did you mostly stick to your friend group?

A: I remember The Penis SMP of course. I never really took part in large community events but I did watch them happen. I read the Passerine chapter where Tommy died becasue my dash flipped out when that dropped. I'd also try to watch Sad-ist animatics live when I could. At most, Id make a meme during a stream that would rack up a couple hundred notes or one thousand if I was lucky A thousand was like once or twice I think

Q: You mentioned that you were also a Technoblade fan before you became more focused on Phistin-- was your experience in that side of the fandom any different?

A: It certainly had more content than Phistin did lol. I was never really in any Technoblade discords or anything but back in the day it was focused on emerald duo and being funny. or angsty. Nowadays, it's way less lively unfortunately. It's not as bad as in 2022 but Technoblade fancontent seems to be less foucsed on the character and more on memorials/remembrance. At some point, you run out of things to say and not a lot of people wanted to stay in a fandom that just felt weighed down by it all. I did leave so things could perk up someday but I don't think that's likely

Q: We've talked about the fandom and how it responds to content-- let's talk about the content itself. What were some of your favorite moments from the Dream SMP as a whole?

A: The Red Festival Technoblade stream was the first one I ever watched live so that's a good one. The stream where L'manberg getting blown up at the end of The Manberg Arc is iconic for an underrated reason. I don't know how many people remember but Phil was highly speculated to be on the Dream SMP someday. On the day of that stream, he started on his hardcore world, then stopped his stream and did his dramatic switch surprise entrance to enter the Dream SMP for the first time. Also Technoblade escaping the anvil and then killing Quackity with a toothpick was great. I've never liked watching Twitch streams on my Ipad so most of my favorite moments come from YouTube

Q: Were you sad that Phistin wasn't a more popular ship, or did you enjoy the tight-knit community?

A: I was sad Kristin kept friggin dying, the poor woman lol. Sometimes I wish it was a bit more popular but the community was nice. The main issue is Phistin stuff started tanking hard on Ao3 in terms of numbers and tended to get misstagged quite a bit

Q: You've brought up a few times that Kristin was often fridged, disregarded, or replaced (on several notable occasions, by an actual Samsung fridge). How did you feel about it? Do you think there was any particular reason for it?

A: I mean, I really don't like it but I understand it. A lot of people loved that SBI angst but also wanted to write all the SBI. So the obvious solution is to kill off Kristin for free angst and keep all the SBI in the story. Passerine is a fic i respect a lot but it also kickstarted this trend to be honest. Kristin herself also didn't physically show up in the lore a lot so it was really tricky to write her. When I first wrote her, it was intimidating because I didn't have many fics to look at as good examples.

Was it shitty and a bit sexist? Yes but I don't think sexism was the only reason. Kristin's character was in a unique situation compared to the others. I have no problem with Kristin dying in a fic. The main issue is that often came with her personality being reduced to good mom and that's it. I'm not gonna call a bunch of probably first time writers evil sexists when I know what it's like to not know how to write her and being scared you'll get her completely wrong.

Q: Since it's come up, would you mind giving a quick rundown of what exactly the fanfic "Passerine" is? (As well as any memories you have relating to it!)

A: If i'm being honest, I only read the chapter where Tommy got murked. What I know from osmosis is it's an SBI royalty AU that had some kind of meta twist at the end and it was very sad. It also got a sad-ist animatic made out of it which jesus christ I'd give for that. I tried it but the writing style was too wordy for my liking. It's mainly important for Phistin history even though Kristin wasn't in it. No, The Fridge died in it but everyone just kinda assumed it was Kristin for long enough it got the ball rolling. Also I think Niki read it on a stream

Q: Before we wrap up, is there anything else you remember about MCYTblr/the DSMP that you'd like to talk about?

A: The DSMP sure was the minecraft server of all time that is defined as a server that was doomed from the start. Whoever makes a video essay on it is gonna have a hell of a job. 10/10 experience would not recommenced. Hello to the Phistin Palace if any of you read this :D

Mcytblr is getting more chill with shipping from what I've seen. Thank God, keeping making Philza Minecraft kiss those men and his wife.

Also SUBSCRIBE TO TECHNOBLADE

#early mcytblr interviews #Volume 16 #tack-tick

[mcytblr-archive]

Early MCYTblr Interviews: conarcoin

today's interviewee is conarcoin, runner in the 2020 MCYTblr elections, founder of gay castle, mod on the mcytblr-confessions blog, and MCYTblr veteran! below is a transcript of the questions and answers.

Q: You’ve been in MCYTblr for a long time, and participated in a lot of MCYTblr events, so let’s work our way through them. Can you tell me a bit about what 2020-2021 MCYTblr was like for you, or anything that immediately comes to mind when you think of it?

A: 2020-2021 MCYTblr was a shithole, but it was a shithole I made some really good friends in and I don't regret that period at all. I regret some stupid posts I made, sure, but overall? Nah. 2020 MCYTblr was always filled with drama as it was a transitional period - it was primarily made up of what we now call "truthers" and the scattered remnants of SMPblr, and that sort of caused a culture clash. I'm immediately reminded of the time I got into a huge drama for having the url "transtubbo" in 2020, which one ex-SMPblr user was not fond of. Also a lot of posts made by straight up weirdos like that one infamous "sex god whore" post.

(the url "transtubbo" was not a truthing thing, but a DSMP thing, but this was a time when truthers were still everywhere in MCYTblr and the divide between RP and real life wasn't as clear, which is how I ended up in hot water)

Q: I understand that you started and ran the “gay castle” discord server. Why was it created? What was your experience running it?

A: Gay Castle's still alive and well after 3 years. Me and a friend made the server in September 2020 due to being tired of the drama in another server we were in called Sleepyheads. It's a personal friend server, so we just invited people we thought were chill to hang out and have some laughs. I honestly would call Gay Castle my internet family, they're a wild bunch and we've had so many great times over the past 3 years.

Q: What was it like running the mcytblr-confessions blog? Do any confessions stand out to you from memory?

A: mcytblr-confessions is the child of me and like 10 or so other members of Gay Castle. The experience is mostly mundane, just queueing and deleting asks. We do get a lot of asks that get deleted due to breaking the rules and such, but it hasn't been particularly drama-filled or anything. There's way too many confessions that stand out to me, but personal favorites of mine will always include the Foolish peas anon, the Highcraft church anon, and the one about AustinShow calling anon Greg instead of their actual name.

Q: If my memory serves, you ran in the October 2020 MCYTblr elections. Who did you run as? What was your experience being a part of it?

A: I did, alongside a friend at the time who went by Fakenoblade. I don't remember too many details from that period of time. We ran as "Potato2020" and didn't get very far but we had fun. Cecilia (bless her heart, we're still mutuals even though we don't talk often) can do a really good Technoblade impression, so in call we had her say some funny lines that we edited into a promotional campaign video. Fun stuff.

Q: Are there any other events that stand out to you?

A: The day a bunch of content creators joined in 2021, mostly smaller ones. That was around the same time I became friends with Erin (@itselectralive), who is still one of my closest friends to this day and an absolute sweetheart. She got me onto a SMP she helped run called Balls SMP, which crashed and burned, but I had fun and met some cool people.

Q: Do you remember any of the main discourses/dramas that went through the community?

A: Apologist discourse, obviously. I didn't engage with it - I honestly didn't care for either c!Tommy or c!Dream - but it's hard to avoid it. Shipping discourse and boundary discourse. Honestly, I can't remember anything more specific besides the more general dramas.

Q: What do you remember most fondly from that time?

A: Honestly? Just early Gay Castle and also liveblogging the L'Manberg Election. That night was so much fun, one of the most vivid memories of that time period I have.

Q: Is there anything else you’d like to add?

A: You guys should watch SMPLive. Not really, it's aged like piss and several creators ended up being freaks but it's still got a lot of funny jokes and interesting lore (believe it or not). From what I have seen, its fandom is the root of a lot of MCYT fandom's most obnoxious behaviors, but the people who are left and still care about it are really cool. It turned 5 this month!

#early mcytblr interviews #Volume 8 #conarcoin

[mcytblr-archive]

Early MCYTblr Interviews: georgeeehd

today's interviewee is reese/georgeeehd/lmanburg/tommyofcolor! dreamlying member, mcytblr og, and the person who discovered that dream wasn't registered to vote. below is a transcript of questions and answers!

Q: What was your experience in wider MCYTblr?

A: I don’t have much experience with wider mcytblr. Maybe I used to reblog Grian stuff on my main blog, before all this DSMP shit. There wasn’t much of a Dream community when I started posting, much less one for DreamNotFound (surprisingly, Dreamnap was the popular ship of the two early on????? so bizarre to me), so I dug out my microcosm immediately. There was never a wider myctblr for me.

Q: What was your experience in critblr/dreamlying specifically?

A: The notion that dreamlying is the spawn of critblr is interesting to me, because I agree with you now, but I wouldn’t have at the time. Critblr was a tumblr community. Dreamlying was a friend group, predating critblr. I considered myself dteamblr for a really long time— I never felt aligned with the critblr movement because that was always Jason’s territory, really. I don’t mention it to nitpick or to scold, but like, I’m into this archiving thing, too, so I wanted to opine on how we label these groups. Maybe there should be a distinction made between what we considered ourselves vs. what we actually were.

My experience in proto-critblr was pretty cushy because it was all mine. Me and my contemporaries had a following, we were respected, we had smart things to say, we were funny, established, etc. Think, “The School of Athens.” I definitely grew a bit of an ego with how popular I was, which I’m sure will come across in this interview, haha.

At times I felt a little unchallenged, like people were only agreeing with me not because I was right, but because I was saying anything at all. At the same time, I was incredibly defensive and insecure, so the little pushback I might have gotten would bother me terribly. I was probably overreactive and mean. I was fifteen then, and I’m nineteen now, so there’s lots of things I would’ve handled differently, if I could.

In terms of my experience with dreamlying, I like what Ozzie had to say. We were all just very, very good friends. There’s not much else to it. In my first discord server, “dream lying” was a hidden messaging channel where we could critique Dream Team freely. “Dream lying” was supposed to parody the phrase “dream truthing.” So we were basically this tiny little secret society, at the start. There was no way we wouldn’t have hit it off.

Q: Are there any events that stand out to you?

A: A lot. Too many. Some are more personally relevant than historically relevant, and I don’t really know where to draw the line. The voter registration fiasco was a big one, but there were other smaller things… I was always in some fuckin’ controversy or another! The magic 8 ball says, Ask again later.

Q: Was being in MCYTblr an overall positive or negative experience for you?

A: Undoubtedly positive! I don’t even know where to start with this question. I met a lot of wonderful people that I still keep in contact with today, right? But beyond that, I feel like being in this community helped me grow a lot, like, personally. I was thinking and writing a lot. I learned so, so much, about people, about the internet, about fandom, about myself. It was such an expansive experience.

I guess I should mention that my time with mcytblr was incredibly stressful. My involvement in the fandom weighed heavily on my mental health. I felt very watched, and I still do. At my worst, I was hospitalized. (I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t mention my mcyt-induced mental hospital stint in my mcyt interview.) None of that really moves me, though, ‘cause it was all just part of the experience, and I find it all pretty funny, looking back.

Q: A few people have mentioned the account mcyttruth in relation to you, specifically around a callout post. What happened there? [I had misremembered-- I meant to ask this to Jason lmanburg, not Reese lmanburg.]

A: The mcyttruth callout wasn’t about me, but my discord server, dteamblr 2. I was not as involved here— at this point, critblr was in full bloom, and this server was like a rendezvous for people who liked dreamlying and modcord blogs (modcord was another friend group, like dreamlying, but critblr-based).

Regarding that callout specifically, I don’t know. Probably, there were too many r-slurs, too many jokes about hating Ranboo, the usual. There were a lot of callouts (for me or for people I was friends with), and I never really took them seriously. I mean, honestly, the url “mcyttruth” alone is derivative. Do you know how many times I’ve read the words “mcyt” and “truth”? Everything about this is a blur to me.

Q: I suppose I would ask-- given the current events surrounding many of the creators who were popular in 2020/2021, do you feel that dreamlying has been vindicated in their criticisms of creators?

A: Yes, but I would have said yes in 2020, because who these people are was as obvious to me then as it is now. Our criticisms weren’t like, headcanons that we made up to be mean, they were plain old observations. Wilbur was openly mentally ill, creepy, and generally dismissive of other people. Not to say that there aren’t good things about him either, but, of course this is the kind of guy to make his girlfriend clean up after him. There’s a million cautionary tales about guitar stringers with floppy hair under a beanie, whiny song lyrics, and a masturbatory approach to self-loathing.

Dream’s not this person anymore, so that’s not why I bring it up, but think back to when his old Reddit account was exposed for being active on r/The_Donald. That was everything we were ever talking about! That was Dream being exactly who he was— a young white man from Florida. I love Dream, always have, always will. Acknowledging that he is/was a whole person with flaws and unsavory politics, I think, is truer fanhood than the idolization everyone puts him through.

You use the word “vindicated” to acknowledge that we were heavily criticized ourselves. Most of that was on the basis of privacy— you know, whether or not it’s okay to speculate on people’s personal lives. It doesn’t matter that we were “right” so often, that we still are, and always will be, because people will focus more on the original sin of having speculated in the first place.

I used to love vindication because it made me feel smart, like I could see things that no one else could. Now it just makes me sad. I don’t think it has anything to do with smarts, nor would I care if it did. I think people just don’t let themselves think that far. You know, “I don’t want to make assumptions,” “It’s none of my business,” “It’s not that deep,” etc. Maybe there’s no instinct to look deeper at all. It really just makes me sad.

Q: Is there anything else you'd like to add/have archived?

A: I’d like to ask everybody to stay critical. The hivemind response to recent events have shown me that this fandom remains as shallow, unthinking, conformative, elementary… as it was four years ago.

Thank you for conducting these interviews in the first place. It's nice hearing everyone’s voices again.

#early mcytblr interviews #Volume 13 #georgeeehd

[mcytblr-archive]

Early MCYTblr Interviews: wormweeb

our interviewee today is @wormweeb, author of the cowboy au, nominee in the 2020 MCYTblr election, and overall MCYTblr veteran. below is a transcript of the questions and answers!

Q: What do you remember most fondly about “Early MCYTblr”? (2020-2021)

A: I think early mcytblr had the perfect mix of being an insular, small community with enough people actually posting (whether it be shitposts, art, fix, etc.) to keep the community alive. Perfect reblogger-creator ratio, I think. I loved seeing the familiar notifications from blogs that frequently RBed my stuff and familiar Urls in the tags (which I probably checked daily lol). There was this infectious energy that made being in the fandom so fun, with all the inside jokes and interactions and inter-blog familiarity.

Q: Do you recall your experience in the first MCYTblr election? What was it like?

A: Honestly, there was a lot of anxiety. I didn’t have many friends in the fandom in the sense that I didn’t often DM with people or talk in discord servers. I was kind of reclusive, so having to reach out to find running mates was nerve-racking! And then being thrust into a huge discord server with a bunch of other people I didn’t really know at all… It was all bizarrely anxiety-inducing. I didn’t really care about the results that much, since it was kind just a popularity contest (no hate, just true). I think the elections were cute and fun, another sort of fandom activity that I think only could’ve worked in an insular but involved fandom.

Q: Building off the last question– in my time archiving, I’ve seen people both hold you in high regard and condemn your blog wholesale. Is it odd to be talked about as a pseudo-historical figure in MCYTblr culture? 

A: It’s mind-boggling! When I did all my posting as wormweeb, roughly July 2020 to august 2021, I was 16/17 and literally never left my house due to quarantine. It’s bizarre to think I was influential in that microcosm of a fandom, because I was truthfully just Some Guy irl. It was weird to see the extremes of how people treated me, with some users (much younger than me, I should add) treating me like a cc, with other people acting like I was a toxic supervillain.

At the time, I was deeply concerned with my image in the fandom. I reveled in the shocked reactions to some of my more… avant guard posts… but I was also really bothered when people talked badly about me. I wanted to be liked and popular, but I also wanted to be shocking and critical. I had contradictory motivations behind my posting, which I probably lead to such polarized reactions to my presence in the fandom.

Ultimately, I think it’s super interesting to see how people talk about me — whether they remember me as ‘that one crazy truthing blog’ or the cowboy au author or a proto-critblr poster or a toxic bad takes poster, etc. I don’t take any of it too personally any more, thankfully.

Q: Do you think that MCYTblr’s cultural shift away from crit and ‘truthing��� has been an overall good or bad thing? 

A: I can’t really say. I think it’s natural that as a fandom expands, the most palatable takes will become the dominant ones, and any unpopular criticism / trutherisms will be pushed to the fringe. I can see why some people thought criticism was toxic and truthing was intrusive, but truthfully, I don’t think it reflected any poster’s moral character. I’m not involved in mcytblr anymore, so I don’t know exactly what the state of the current fandom looks like.

Q: Do you ever find yourself missing 2020-2021 MCYTblr? If so, what do you miss the most?

A: I often do miss that era of my life. Truthfully, I miss the attention and (infinitesimally small, microcosmic) cultural import I had. There was an exciting thrill that came with getting notifications every second of the day — that’s not an exaggeration either. I liked having people leave deranged asks in my ask box, or ask my opinion on some random streamer micro controversy, or people asking me when the next chapter of my fanfic would come out (lol). I, of course, miss the other elements of being in an active fandom — the fanfics, the fan artists, the familiarity between blogs,

However… I also know I was mentally unhealthy during that time. I was isolated, so it was fun and exciting to be an ultra-micro celebrity, but at the same time, I took it way too seriously. Because I painted myself as some sort of moral guardian, the great Intellectual Critiquer of content creators, I was terrified to make any bad takes… which, ironically, I made a lot of. I had painted myself into a corner both being dteam critical and (unfortunately) a genuine dteam stan at the time.

Q: Several in-jokes have lost their context (jewge, ancap dream, tradwife george/dream, homophobic dream and sapnap, republican dream, mega milk sapnap/george, etc). Would you like to provide their context, for archival and media literacy purposes?

A: Here’s a rundown for all of them!

“Jewge” was actually sparked by warpedfungusonastick, which I helped popularized. There are a few old videos where George’s friends called him jewge, and that combined with his ashkenazi last name led me to speculate he was jewish — for what its worth, im also jewish. Unfortunately, I think those videos of baby jewge have been lost to time. But nonetheless, that spawned a mini-jewge fandom, which jewge fanart!

Tradwife George and dream… I don’t know even know. I think the idea of “male wives” was trending on general Tumblr at the time. There was already this fandom idea of Dream being a “needy top” and George being the sugar baby/bitchy/uninterested love interest, which I just transplanted onto the idea of tradwifery. Dream as the doting tradwife, George as the unloving tradwife, etc.

Republican/Anarcho-capitalist dream — Ah, this one is kind of embarrassing!! I was really into jreg, and I was, for the first time ever, exposed to political ideas outside of the generic democrat vs republican dichotomy. I was really fascinated by right-wing libertarian or “ancap” ideology, and I already saw dream as a kind of self-made capitalist success story. At least, that’s what he portrayed himself as. My critique of dream and calling him ancap/republican was kind of a baby’s first leftism moment for me… but I nonetheless think the jokes were mostly funny.

Homophobic dream / sapnap — They gave me republican vibes. Dream especially, with some of his older, unsavory tweets, reeked of edgy gamergate humor.

Megamilk sapnap — I didn’t really pioneer this one! I believe this was mostly a Tumblr user who I think was pandascanpvp, or it was Plates gayminecraftmen (or both).

I’ll use this opportunity to catalogue a few more obscure wormweeb-pioneered AUs.

Homestuck au! I think I imagined it as dream = dirk, George = Jake English. Colournotfound (rip gone but not forgotten) did so much of the sustaining of the au.

Scott Pilgrim au. Dream = Scott, George = Ramona. Fundy = envy. This one got fan art!

Q: What was your physical, mental, and emotional reaction when kaceytron pulled up your crit post on stream?

A: Baffled. Excited. God, I wish I had clipped it! I still have a screenshot. I desperately hoped she would read it to dream (who joined the stream later). That felt like I had peaked as a cc stan blog… having a C-list streamer pull up my post on stream. Literally google searching “dream queer baiting” because she didn’t even know what she was accusing him of, or how to support her argument.

Q: Is there anything else you particularly want to share or talk about? 

A: I was just want to say that although I don’t watch or support any member of the dteam any more, I still am proud of the cowboy au. It’s kind of a relic of the time (especially the gnf and Maya mxmtoon stuff). The general response to the fanfiction was… wow!! Everyone who commented on that fanfiction was so exceedingly kind. People even drew fan art. I am still happy to have written something that, despite the inherent cringeness of it, positively affected so many people.

#early mcytblr interviews #Volume 9 #wormweeb

[mcytblr-archive]

Early MCYTblr Interviews: Anonymous

our interviewee today is the anonymous author of the "SBI Crit Post". he's asked to both remain anonymous and not to be sought out; he's been incredibly helpful and polite through this entire interview process, and i would ask you all to leave any residual feelings you may have from that time at the door. If you think you remember who posted it, please keep it to yourself. that said, let's begin!

Q: Before we begin talking about the ‘Crit Post’, I’d love to hear what your experience of MCYTblr was like before it was posted. Do you have any standout memories from this time?

A: Not particularly. There's some things that I guess looking back on nowadays is kind of wild, like how in the groups I was running in, shipping of any kind that wasn't DNF was super frowned upon (as in, I trigger tagged for IRL shipping)…but truthing wasn't really? Or, how back then the lines between 'critblr' and main mcytblr were super fuzzy. I hung out with both groups before the Crit Post to no issue. Oh!!! And this is a wonderful piece of MCYTblr lore that you may not know, but when I posted the Crit Post, I was apart of a MCYT art exchange themed after MCC called MC Creatives. I think it only happened once, and I can't exactly remember who ran it. They were a really nice DNF (? or just DTeam) blogger. I think it's cool to see that even back then the community was pretty tight knit and had overarching community activities like we see today. It's interesting to me that our fandom has missed out on some of the more important parts to being a fandom… not many big bangs, only one or two that I know of. It's very sad, but we are a weird fandom in general, and definitely a Modern Fandom, if you understand what I mean by that LOL. There is one memory that does stick out, completely irrelevant to this interview though. The fake Dreambur meetup. I pulled an all nighter for it. I was shaking. I drew fanart (though never posted it). Everyone was hysterical. And then it was faked and everyone went WHAT.

Q: As you let me know in your dms, you were the user who made the original “SBI Crit Post”. Would you mind giving a quick rundown of what it was exactly, for anyone who may not know?

A: I would, but frankly I barely remember anything about it. It was like… I saw someone being like "weird that we aren't as critical of SBI as we are of DT" and I thought, "Well, I can probably try?" and made shit up. It was nonsense. I can't even remember what I said about Philza. The points against the others were "Tommy is too young to be in this business" "Wilbur queerbaits" and… "Technoblade needs to be less honest about his ADHD he's glorifying it" or something like that. Again, it was nonsense at its best.

Q: What was your reasoning at the time for making the post? Did the overall culture around you play a part in it?

A: Here's the part no one knows: At the time of posting, I was 13 by maybe… one, two, or three weeks. And I'd spent almost the entirety of my time as a 12 year old in a community that was like "we need to be Critical of our Favorite Creators because this is Righteous and the Only Good Way To Engage With MCYT" and I was like "Everyone here is older than me and therefore endlessly smarter than me," and therefore just accepted it. You can see it very clearly in the part that was "critical" of Wilbur Soot. He was queerbaiting for what? Acting like he wanted to kiss men? Dressing nice? Ridiculous! But if we called Dream a queerbaiter (and never GNF, because everyone was convinced he was gay), then I thought surely Wilbur Soot could also be a queerbaiter! This made total sense to baby 13 year old me. It's not fair to really call that indoctrination: it's not like I was falling down an alt-right pipeline or anything. I was just a stupid kid with too much internet access who liked minecraft and knew nothing about like Dan & Phil or Septiplier (kind of thing that would make me suspicious of this activity--especially truthing). I thought I was fufilling some honor by saying "and yes, my favorite minecraft boys aren't without fault either!" The people that stayed friends with me after that… some of them were my closest normal non-Critblr friends, who refused to abandon me (shout out to you guys you know who you are), and the rest were the people in Critblr who were… okay with my behavior.

Q: I understand that the backlash to the post was very intense– what was it like from your perspective? Did it have any affect on you?

A: Lots. Lots and lots and lots. I lost a bunch of my close friends who weren't okay with what I'd said or how I'd doubled down, and it really messed with me as a kid in the middle of quarantine. There were times where I genuinely considered hurting myself irreperably as either a way to "apologize for what I had done" or just a way to stop worrying that everyone I knew was going to block me one day. Those feelings lasted for a long time, I still struggle with them to this day, over three years later (? I think). And I was kind of lead to believe that was an okay response. I recieved asks the night that it all went down where I was told I should hurt myself. Of course my own behavior wasn't cool, but neither was that. I know there was a post out there by a popular (at the time?) Technoblade blogger that detailed the faults in that post, but I never read it. All I knew about it was that people saw it, and harassed me because they saw it, and that the OP of that post hated me. It got to the point that seeing that blogger's URL caused me to have panic attacks, a ridiculous thing because that blogger as far as I know never actually did anything wrong. I don't know. Every once in awhile, someone in the server I'm in (hi some of you are definitely reading this :3 i love you guys) will bring up the post in passing and I'll have to mute the channel for 24 hours because I'm scared. Or even when we're discussing normal drama, if something feels too close to the Crit Post, or like it might come up, I'll get shaky and nauseous and have to mute the channel for 24 hours. It's weird, the shit being told to kill yourself because you did something dumb as a 13 year old can do to you.

Q: As a follow-up: What, if anything, do you wish had happened instead?

A: I don't know really. I guess the obvious answer is "I didn't make the post" or "I didn't double down", but I think the real answer has to be that I wish the community I was in hadn't taught me that what I was doing was an okay move.

Q: Do you have anything else to add about the Crit Post, MCYTblr, or the community as a whole?

A: Not really. I "retired" from MCYTBlr in I think 2022, but kept a passing interest in it for a long time, and I'm still active in a discord (hi again) comprised entirely of fans and retired fans. I loved MCYT, and in some ways, I still do. When I'm sad, I put on old Technoblade videos. When I'm really sad, I put on old Purpled videos. These things are my comforts, things that I haven't ever been able to give up. And that's good! Even if I don't talk about MCYT anymore, I'm glad it's there for me.

#Early MCYTblr Interviews #Volume 4 #Anonymous #SBI Crit Post

[mcytblr-archive]

Early MCYTblr Interviews: ilyuqi

today's interviewee is ilyuqi, who joined both MCYTblr and dreamlying after quitting twitter. below, under the cut, is a transcript of their audio messages responding to the questions.

Q: You were on Twitter before you moved to Tumblr– was there a specific reason for that change?

A: Yes! I got canceled! (Haha, very funny). Yeah, that’s kind of the crux of it, I got canceled pretty hard (to a point where, even though I might have had a chance to maybe regain my reputation and continue using my stan account, I just didn’t want to at that point.) I’d already been in so much drama before that (some warranted, some unwarranted), for example one of the things that people got on me for was that I wasn’t Sapnap-focused enough on my twitter account, and there was just an element of responsibility I felt, harboring a stan account with that many followers, as pretentious as that sounds. 

It was just no longer fun for me anymore. And now people were creating these multi-thousand-liked cancel threads against me citing my friendships with other people, and then also harboring real-life kind of things on me, for example, like, someone was accusing me of mlm fetishizing, and although I don’t think that’s the most serious accusation (Within the realm of internet discourse. Over the internet specifically, that’s a pretty “eh” thing to get canceled for), I just felt like – I was like, I didn’t do that, though! But I felt like my words were purposefully twisted and misinterpreted just because y’know, a lot of people also didn’t like me on that platform. So I just found it easier to go “yeah, I’m gonna go ahead and quit twitter, this isn’t fun for me anymore, the point of having a stan account is that, you know, I want to feel a part of a community” and I just didn’t feel that anymore, so I found it reasonable to just go ahead and like. Quit being a stan account. 

I think I might've privately stanned them on, you know, private accounts for a while, but then I one day ended up randomly answering someone’s question about dreamlying on tumblr, and then that spiraled into me actually becoming a critblr account. I never really intended that to happen, I thought it would be a fun thing of answering a couple of asks, but then suddenly it was, like, hundreds of asks and I was just like “woah!”. If you scroll back far enough on my tumblr, you’ll see that this really was never supposed to be a critblr. Like, I think you can still find my essays about, like, y’know, Girl Meets World from 2017? 2018? I have no idea, there’s no concept of time. But what I’m getting at is that, you know, the shift– the getting off twitter was definitely intentional, but the shift to tumblr, it was kind of just events. Y’know? It just kind of happened, but the main reason I left twitter was because of the cancellation, and I guess it just ended up transitioning into me moving onto tumblr.

Q: What was your experience being in the “fringe” of MCYTblr? 

A: My experience being on the fringe of Minecraft Youtube tumblr– I guess I should say that I didn’t really feel, like, a difference in my experience, which is illogical– I am perfectly aware of the fact that my blog and the community I participated in was very different from the minecraft youtube tumblr community as a whole. 

But I guess because I was never a part of the [larger] minecraft youtube tumblr community in the first place, I didn't really feel that lack. So for me, being on critblr was just– for me, that was minecraft youtube tumblr, you know? And I think that’s a very unique experience. I think many critblr blogs had the experience of being on minecraft youtube tumblr and then transitioning into being critblr, but for me, it was just immediately critblr. I never had the “idolizing my content creators” stan period while I was on Tumblr– I say that in heavy quotes– I never had that on Tumblr, I had already done that on Twitter. So I think it resulted in me not feeling a difference, I was just like. “Yeah this is– critblr is minecraft youtube tumblr for me, this is the only context in which I would want to talk about minecraft youtube on tumblr”. 

So I guess for me, my experience was just being on tumblr. I enjoyed answering the asks, I enjoyed making jokes, I was perfectly awake that sometimes I was saying crazy things, but for me it was just fun, so I just did it anyway. It should be noted that, for the majority of the time I had my blog, I think I was like sixteen, seventeen? So that might explain a lot of the stuff I said. But for me, again, it was normal. I did not feel a lack from being on critblr. For me, that was minecraft youtube tumblr. 

Q: Were you ever harassed for being part of critblr? 

A: I would say no. I never really felt harassed for being on critblr. At that point, I wasn't– like, my friends, they were all aware that I was on critblr, and none of them really had anything mean to say about it. At the time, those were the only opinions that mattered to me, so it was just kind of like. Eh. 

I think if I received any harassment ever, I– I don’t even think I can count it as harassment, it was just people who disagreed with my opinions, and were like, “this is crazy of you to say”. And in hindsight, I'm sure I deserved some of it. But harassment? No. While I was on twitter, I had adults attempting to cyberstalk me, doxx me, create these insane cancel threads on me (all while I was like fifteen years old), and to me, that was harassment. I would see familiar faces popping up in my dms to send me gore, send me death threats. I never experienced anything like that on tumblr. I think probably the craziest thing that ever happened to me on tumblr was some friend of mine sending an ask littered with slurs because they were mad at a critblr opinion that i had. That's probably the craziest thing I've ever had happen to me. I’m not friends with that person anymore. But harassment? No. I don't think I ever really, you know, got harassment. I think I had people who definitely didn’t like me, but I don't think I would count that as harassment.

Q: Do you remember any specific discourse/drama from that time?

A: I will say that a majority of the really really old discourse stuff, I experienced through twitter, not tumblr. So for example, the “Dream Native American war cry” situation, the “r slur” stuff, the spreadsheet, those all came through twitter for me. I experienced those while being active on twitter. 

The ones that I remember that I experienced through tumblr were specifically the “Dream kkk edit”, and then there was also an internal critblr affair where this account called mctruther or mcyttruth (I can’t remember, one of the two) made this giant callout post dedicated mostly towards Jason lmanburg. I remember this pretty vividly mainly because I wrote a callout, like, a response to the callout post, and uh, personally I found the post to be very silly. They were criticizing Jason and other people for using stuff like kiwifarms and being a part of ebblr, I think, and it was just very odd, and I didn't vibe with it. So I made a callout post, and I was just like “I don't agree with what you’re saying”. 

But yeah, no, so personally the Dream kkk edit  is what kind of made me go “okay, I don’t think I want to talk about Dream discourse anymore”. Because before this, for me, my critblr account was mostly dedicated to talking about the relationships that Dream had with his family, and George, and Sapnap, and other content creators, the internet in general– sometimes, I talked about Ranboo, and y’know like, what I thought his fans were doing for his face reveal? As in, y’know, they were hyping him up too much and he was getting visibly more and more insecure. But for Dream, you know, I think I was able to always maintain like, “yeah, I think he’s done a lot of shitty stuff in the past, but I think he’s perfectly capable of growth and learning, because he’s always owned up to his mistakes”, but the Dream kkk edit was one where he gave lies so quickly to try and cover his ass, and then gave this halfhearted apology in which he really rubbed me the wrong way. 

I obviously had no problem saying this, obviously I’m going to find a kkk edit pretty despicable, but I had people in my inbox arguing with me whether or not a kkk edit is really a mark of someone being antisemitic, or racist. They even debated whether or not the edit itself was racist or not, and I just kind of had to take a step back cause I’m like, “C’mon guys, like, I think if this happened in real life, y’know, this would Not be the conversation occurring right now, but you guys are giving so much leeway to this, like, random white guy over the internet.’ Like, I don’t want to have to debate with people whether or not racism is real. I wanna talk about GeorgeNotFound’s visa, and I wanna talk about Ranboo’s face reveal! I don’t want to talk about like– I don’t want to try and convince you that racism is real, that is not what I want to do. That is very exhausting, honestly. Cause, like– I don’t know, it was just very disheartening to see this community go down that route. And I was just kinda like “Okay, no,” and I think I made a big post that was just like “Hey. I’m no longer going to address Dream’s controversies, because they seem to be going down a route where I'm going to have to defend things that I know to be true, basic things I know to be true, and I have to defend them like I'm already wrong. And I don’t wanna do that, that’s too much for me.'' So yeah, that’s kind of the biggest discourse that I remember from critblr from when I joined it. 

Of course there were other things too, from the very very beginning. Like, I don’t know if any one of your interviews has talked about it, but misogynap was one of my favorite things on tumblr in 2020. Because like, I fully agreed, I was like yeah! Sapnap does give off misogynistic vibes! It’s really weird! And I vibed with that– but you could never say that on twitter. 

I think what made me the angriest about this whole thing– there were tons of things that made me angry, y’know, I didn’t vibe with the argument that he was, like, 15 years old therefore he was a dumb fifteen-year-old. I was like okay, I've been fifteen, I've never done anything like that before. But what definitely pissed me off was the fact that he immediately tried to deny it, and I was like dude, c’mon. Like, these are some pretty serious allegations and accusations, and you just decided to deny them, and you’re like “Augh! It’s just my stupid antis!” and it’s like, no, you made that edit!

And then when he owned up to it, he basically said something along the lines of “some people grow up with kindness surrounding them… I was not, and I grew up with hate… and therefore, this is the byproduct of that :(“ and I– I dunno. I don’t wanna say I get what he’s saying, but I think that is an incredibly, incredibly privileged take, to be able to say that. Like, I grew up with hate, therefore I also started hating. There are plenty of people in this world surrounded by hate all the time, and they don’t grow up to do that kind of stuff. And the fact that Dream’s stans took that and they were like, “oh my god he’s such a good person, I love that he apologized so well!” I was just kinda like guys. Come on, like this is a white guy being like “It’s just not my fault, it’s not my fault that I was so freakin racist as a kid! It’s just not my fault!”. Like, we’re all capable of making choices. Sorry. Sorry, does that sound too harsh? I’m sorry.

But that definitely was kind of my breaking point, to be like “Yup! I’m not gonna be debating dream controversies anymore, because if this is the kind of person he is, this isn’t someone I want to playfully speculate on. This is some serious stuff, this is not my forte, no.”

Q: How do you feel that the overall culture and in-jokes of critblr differed from “main” MCYTblr?

A: Like I've said before, I don't know if I'm the best person to make the differentiation between main mcytblr and critblr, only because I never felt the difference because I jumped right into critblr. Even before, in like 2020 when I was a lurker, I was lurking on georgeeehd’s blog, wormweeb’s blog, etc etc. I never really interacted with normal minecraft youtube tumblr. I guess maybe the closest I might've gotten to that is endercores? But we actually ended up meeting over twitter, and that’s where we became friends, we never really interacted on tumblr. So honestly, I don't know if I'm the best person to ask that question.

I just kind of would say that, going off of vibes alone, it’s that critblr was a lot more okay with poking fun at content creators for their jokes and making jokes at their expense, while main mcytblr jokes definitely lined up with more traditional stan culture, praising and uplifting their CCs. That’s kind of the most basic generalization I can give, but I personally would have no interactions to give you in main mcytblr.

Q: Similarly, how do you think the culture of MCYT tumblr differed from MCYT twitter?

A: So this is something I can definitely give you a lot on, the difference between minecraft twitter and tumblr. I think that the main difference between the jokes and the culture, honestly, between twitter and tumblr, was in direct correlation with the fact that the content creators being discussed were on twitter, but weren’t on tumblr. 

On twitter, you were faced with the possibility that these men might respond to your tweets at any time. You might make a harmless joke, but they might come after you for it. You might give valid criticism that’s meant to be shared amongst stans as kind of like a thinkpiece, you know, like “what do we think of this?” and you could get the men themselves in your replies, and completely change the trajectory of how that post was supposed to be taken. I have direct experience with this, so I can tell you firsthand, there were times where I made tweets and I had people kind of going like “Yeah, I do agree with you, I do agree with that!’ and then Dream (or whoever) replies, and they immediately go “oh, that’s so true Dream! Good job Dream! Yeah, yeah, yeah!” and I’m like guys, c’mon. Come on. You know? It was like that for me. 

But on tumblr, you really didn’t have to fear that! You knew that your post was going to remain in stan circles. Back then, I barely remember anyone screenshotting from tumblr to take onto twitter– I don’t remember that happening very often. I know it happened, just not very often. So you could really say whatever you wanted on tumblr, and not be absolutely crucified for it. For example, misogynap! Like, people were just calling Sapnap a casual misogynist on tumblr, and no one got in trouble for it. But, on twitter, Sapnap got super offended at someone saying “Eh, I think Sapnap might smell like cheetos and weed!” and he actually went through the process of making sure all of his friends blocked that one specific person, just because they said “Eh, I think Sapnap smells like cheetos and weed.”

So there was a very very different culture. They kind of made it so that twitter had to have that stan, like, idolization going for them, because if you didn’t, if you made jokes at their expense, they would come for you and they would get their stans on you, and you had to just pray that they also see what you said as a joke, otherwise they’re gonna pounce on you, too. I don’t know. I think that’s probably the biggest difference, the fact that the content creators were on twitter and not tumblr changed a lot of how you could make jokes and how you could act on those platforms. I don’t know, you can take that however you’d like.

Q: Looking back, a large amount of 2021 critblr culture revolved around doxxing and sharing personal information– what was that like? What’s your current perspective on it, looking back?

A: So, doxxing. Very interesting topic. I guess what I first want to start out with is: do I want to call it doxxing? No, probably not. I don’t think what anyone (or at least, what I saw anyone doing) was doxxing, or would be ever considered doxxing. I think if you really wanted to put a label on it, you could say “being invasive”. But is that illegal, or a crime? No, it’s not. Everything that I know that  people found was just, you know, public information on the internet, and it wasn’t obtained via illegal means, no one was hacking into bank records, no one was– [laughs] I don't know, stealing house papers? This was all just stuff that was online, available for the public to see. You just had to know how to find it. 

I would say for a while there– this was not on tumblr, this was on twitter– there was almost a competitive aspect to it, to see who could find what, but this was very strictly on twitter. This was– or, at least in my experience, this was on twitter. But on tumblr, it was just kind of like “Eh, if you know, you know”. Y’know? Like, it’s not like anyone’s making these blogs, and they’re like, uploading bios of Dream, George, and Sapnap, and have their addresses, and like their parents’ names and everything, it was just kind of like “if you know, you know”. 

I guess the big thing is like, do you regret it, how do you see it looking back. And while I can say “Y’know, probably not the best thing for a bunch of teenagers to be doing in their spare time”, I cannot say that I fully regret it, because these are men who are known to take the fact, like– known to take people’s lack of information and twist it and try to use that lack of information in their best interests. 

To kind of give you a feel of what I’m trying to say, think about Manatreed, right? That was a straight up abuser that Dream was housing and trying to platform onto the dream smp, which is a fandom composed of mostly minors and mostly teenage girls. Dream tried to do that! Dream might have gotten away with it, if people did not dig into his life and figure out who Manatreed was, and therefore figure out what this guy had done in the past, and then been able to put pressure on Dream for it. I cannot see something like that and say “Ooh, but being invasive is bad!” Like, I don’t know, I don’t wanna say they brought it upon themselves, because that’s a bit much, but at the same time, what would have happened if people hadn’t doxxed them? Manatreed would have just been on the SMP forever, like, no one would have known that! That’s kind of scary to think about. Like, in a way, yeah, sometimes things like that are important. And you know, again, everything was found through perfectly legal means, nothing was done illegally, and at the end of the day, the Dream SMP was free of an abuser. (In the end, considering recent events, does that really matter? Since half of the Dream SMP were all, like, abusers or allowed abuse to continue? Whatever– we’re not gonna talk about that.) 

But you get what I'm saying. I can’t look at a situation like that and say “Yeah, I regret like, doxxing or being a part of that community”. Cause at the end of the day, these men were hiding a lot of things, and they would have gotten away with a lot more if people weren’t so… I don't wanna say vigilant, but you know what I mean? I feel like you understand what I’m trying to say here. There was definitely an element of necessity, when it came to situations like those.

Q: Which criticisms do you think hold up? Which didn’t?

A: There is one criticism that I think has held up very very well, and it’s the fact that I believe that Dream is no longer going to change his behavior or make any real efforts to become a better person from his last mistake, because he has no real reason to. Because he now has stans that will enable and back him up through basically anything. There have been– I mean, I stand by that. I totally stand by that. He is able to basically do anything and kind of be untouchable for it. 

Even when the grooming accusations were going on, and the Gumball beef was going on, and most of the internet hated him, he still had stans backing him up. And those exact stans are the reason he was able to come back onto twitter, and now has his platform again, and people praise him and say like “Yeah, yada yada, Dream made a response video,” when that response video really did nothing! It was genuinely nothing, it was just a bunch of– like, he just talked into the mic for two hours. He didn’t prove or disprove anything for me. For me, it was just like, okay? You’ve given me nothing here. The thing is, though, his stans will take it, they will enable him basically through anything. And when you have people that, even at your worst, still see you as being the best, why would you want to change? Why would you feel the need to put in the effort to change your behavior if the people that give you your money don’t care about that, you know?

So that’s something I still stand by, that Dream isn’t going to change anymore, even if he says that he is, it’s going to be very disingenuous. Because at the end of the day, he knows he has stans backing him up. He has no personal gain in changing, and therefore, he won’t. 

Q: Is there anything else you’d like to add, or have archived on the blog?

A: I’ll say that I joined dreamlying in August of 2020, so a few months after it was created. I would say that it’s definitely insane to me that dreamlying has managed to keep its infamous status in the minecraft youtube sphere, just because we are all so vastly different from when it first began. So to see people still refer to us that way is just a little insane. I don’t even know if I’m really included in the “us” cause again, I joined a little bit late, but to me– that’s the thing, though! I think when other people think of dream lying, they think of these massive critblr blogs, but when I think of dreamlying I’m like, “these are the guys that I do movie night with”. Like, “haha these are my best friends”. You know? 

That’s another thing, I think people were genuinely surprised to find out that we were a friend group. Like, yes? [laughs] These are people that I genuinely love spending time with, and not in the context of minecraft youtuber-ing, it’s just like– yeah, these are my friends, and I love them dearly! And I don’t wanna get all like [various noises conveying sappiness] but these are my friends, that’s kind of how I see them. My experience as a member, like, boils down to “these are my friends! I did stuff with them that I would do with any other of my friends!” And I think it’s like a weird concept to people, because again, they view dreamlying as this kind of– they regard dreamlying with a lot of mystique, but then me, it’s just “friends :D”. “My friends, awesome friends”. I don’t know, I don’t think I’m very good at being articulate about, like, being perceived and how people perceive other people, but I guess the only word I could really use is just “insane”, that dreamlying has continued to keep its reputation, even after four years.

#early mcytblr interviews #Volume 11 #ilyuqi

[mcytblr-archive]

Early MCYTblr Interviews: kermiekermie

today's interviewee is @kermiekermie, who ran "Friend or Host", was a part of the "Block Men Simps" group chat, and has generally been an active member of MCYTblr for a long time! below is a transcript of the questions and answers.

Q: What was your general experience in MCYTblr? Does anything stand out to you immediately?

A: I think my general experience on mcytblr was pretty positive compared to some peoples. The one thing that really stands out is how young I was- i was 11 when i joined mcytblr in early-mid 2020. That didnt really change the way people treated me aside from the occasional teasing and babying, but I did make it a point to say I didn't want to be treated differently. Mcytblr was not my first time in a fandom space and I knew how to avoid creeps already so I never really had any truly negative experiences, honestly the only annoying things that happened were being banned from discords and blocked by people due to my age (which was completely understandable). The biggest memory I have of mcytblr is of course the Block Men Simps group chat, and the original members of the group chat are really the only tumblr mutuals I still keep up with (snail actually has my snapchat!) I still kind of view them as a sort of family, and they were there for me in what I consider an extremely low point of my life and really helped me take my mind off things. During quarantine, I didnt have any of my irls numbers or socials and my mom had just been diagnosed with breast cancer, so I quite literally NEVER left the house and tumblr was really the only social interaction I got for a solid year. And while that definitely impacted my social development (i still cant start a conversation with someone irl without feeling nauseous and shaky) i'm very grateful I had people to talk to throughout that.

Q: I understand that you were the one who set up "Friend or Host". What was the process of organizing a fandom event like that like?

A: Friend or host . god. Like I said, I was 11-12 throughout the majority of my time on mcytblr, and I had ZERO experience organizing anything and I had very little help from anyone else. I tried to make it work the best I could and got creative, but overall I don't think it was a very big success. Funnily enough, not everyone who participated in FOH knew my age and one of the winners actually blocked me afterwards they found out, which I still giggle about today.

Q: How did Friend or Host go?

A: I don't think FOH necessarily went bad, but if I had a little more help and better organization skills and planned it out further ahead of time, I think it would've gone better. It was still fun and I had a good time either way, but I can admit it was a little messy.

Q: What major events in the fandom do you remember? (Either from the MCYTers themselves or fandom-specific!)

A: Honestly, my memory of my time in the wider mcytblr community isnt all that great and I tend to get timelines a little messed up, but i DO remember being there for the creation of the original dreamceler copypasta. In the BMS group chat we were having our normal conversation and someone oncest got brought up at the same time as dream somehow, and thus Ginger wrote the extremely cursed dreamceler copypasta. This eventually evolved into an entire universe (the dreamceler cinematic universe?) with various different copypastas that eventually had to be archived because of how out of hand it got. Sometimes I still see the copypastas floating around and it kind of freaks me out every time. I also have a veryyyy vivid memory of the time I made the 2020 mcytblr election discord read OmegaNotFound on wattpad (do NOT research. for your own safety) and it was really amusing seeing everyones reactions.

Q: Do you remember any of the "kinnie" blogs?

A: oh MY the kinnie blogs!! i actually have dms with a couple of them plotting little jokes and such and I got involved with them quite often!! i actually ran a justaminx one for a couple days (yikes) and it wasnt really that believeable looking back. me and ginger as well as a couple other mooties loved spamming the ask boxes of them with piss jokes and such, and I feel like we played a pretty big role in how widespread and popular kinnie blogs became.

Q: What was the "Kroger Anon"?

A: oh my dearest kroger anon how I miss you…. I still dont know who the kroger anon actually WAS, but they would send rainbow colored advertising messages about Kroger to various mcytblr blogs at random intervals. Funny thing is, I dont live near any krogers and have never been to one in my life, but the anon messages kinda made me want to go. I miss kroger anon…. kroger anon if youre reading this come home please..

Q: What were common in-jokes in the fandom of that time? (Copypastas, headcanons, rumors, etc)

A: Common in-jokes is a hard one!! like i said earlier, my memory of my time in mcytblr isnt all that great or extensive and I could probably better answer this if I went through my archive but alas, I do not have the patience for that. Obviously we had the good ole tapeworm and pregnancy posts, dreamceler, and various other cursed copypastas and memes. One inside joke between the block men simps gc was "thinkign 👽" which came from a typo snail made that just kind of caught on and we would use every once in a while to giggle at. Other than that, I can't really think of any specific inside jokes.

Q: Is there anything else you remember or would like to talk about?

A: Something I really want to talk about is how much lurking I did!! on the outside I was definitely a normal parasocial mcytblr blog but I lurked on pretty much every corner of the fandom you could really think of. Obviously I have a ton of critblr and other controversial mutuals but I never really openly interacted with that side of mcytblr since it was pretty heavily debated and I am nothing if not conflict avoidant. I also did quite a bit of truthing that no one ever really mentioned which I guess I sort of appreciate. I think being in a fandom that involved actual real people ar that age for that long kind of screwed with me, and ive never really been able to be in a fandom for a piece of actual fiction because theyve just never gotten my interest in the same way, I guess. Even now, i was in grouptwt for quite a while (tgc podcast) and now im active on kpoptwt, which again, both of those fandoms are for actual real people. I dont think its the parasocial aspect either, ive never been super parasocial and have never had a problem criticizing the content creators I watch. Im really grateful for all the people I met on mcytblr, but I think the actual dream smp and the way I engaged with content overall negatively impacted how I interact with things now.

#early mcytblr interviews #Volume 15 #kermiekermie

[mcytblr-archive]

Early MCYTblr Interviews: umbie

today's interviewee is umbie, who was a member of ebblr from march 2021 onwards. i would like to once again ask everyone to remain impartial and respectful-- this blog is a place for all MCYTblr history, which includes parts of the fandom that were more controversial. that said, let's begin!

Q: Since I realize not everyone knows-- would you mind explaining what exactly ebblr was, to the best of your ability?

A: Ebblr is an abbreviation for Enderbees Tumblr. It existed as a network of undiscoverable blogs where folks shipped and truthed beeduo romantically. It ebs truthing started at the beginning of 2021, late 2020 on plate's blog gayminecraftmen, who you did an interview with, then moved to jason's blog on mcytruth, and later decentralized into a collection of blogs rather than being headed by any one person. It also became a place to discuss mcyt shipping and truthing in general- we didn't ship minors with adults, but things like techza, techbur, benchtrio shipping. character or irl, we didn't discriminate. The core of it was ebs, though.

There was also stuff like neurodiversity and gender truthing. really anything thats gauche to talk about on main.

Q: What was your general experience in MCYTblr? What was your general experience in ebblr specifically?

A: Mcytblr was very... enveloping, is how i'd put it. Easily the strongest hyperfixation i've ever had. It was also pretty frustrating at times. 2021 ebs was the height of the /p era, when the characters were off getting minecraft-married and the outside fandom insisted on them being platonic. We felt crazy. Ebblr started from blogs like mcytruth and gayminecraftmen, but I think the reason it blossomed into its own independent community was because ebblr addressed a need that mainblr, at the time, did not. I think it's facinating how in hindsight the fandom has ever so slowly turned around on the romantic c!beeduo, and now it's just kinda normal.

Being in ebblr was rewarding and enriching, but also very anxiety-inducing. We had pretty strict rules around interaction- keep your blog invisible, no cishets (lol), no nsfw, no outside reblogs. It started about after the first blocklist as a way of avoiding harassment, but developed into a moral thing later on. We existed in a kind of grey area where we understood that what we were doing was weird, but we wanted to be as inobtrusive as possible. In the early days, i made an effort to follow everybody. The community was that close-knit. Whenever a member of Ebblr accidentally reblogged an ebblr post to their mainblog, i would hop onto an alt and message whoever I needed to clean up the leak so none of our posts escaped.

Q: In critblr and dreamlying, there was a culture of "doxxing", or otherwise finding personal information about creators. Was that also true for ebblr?

A: Nope! That's one of the primary differences between critblr, dreamlying, and Ebblr. One of our rules was to keep our posting limited to things the creators released on purpose. That didn't stop us from being invasive, though. We diligently kept records of our "proof." We would obsess over details, and considered anything said on social media, stream, or twitter space fair game, even if better judgment was that they're not things the content creators would want talked about. It wasn't a monolith. A lot of folks didn't truth at all, and only wanted a space to post art or fics of pairings that were unacceptable on main. I also tracked planes during the meetup times, but jury's still out on whether that constitutes doxxing. I also had enough sense not to post about it directly. While most of us were uncomfortable with outright doxxing and distanced ourselves from those who did, we sure could walk the line.

Q: You said in your initial messages that you coined the term "critblr". Could you elaborate on that?

A: Dlying existed before ebblr, but Critblr did not! Critblr started out as a subsect of ebblr.

Critblr was conceived of in a discord server i shared with a couple friends that joined at the same time as me! It was meant to exist as a solution to formalize a growing rift within ebblr. There were blogs that were more involved in things like discussing doxxes and criticizing content creators and mainblr/maintwt opinions, and there were folks who were exclusively interested in shipping and/or truthing. Ebblr was upset with negativity and complaining, and the blogs who would become critblr didn't care for the shipping. It started as a place where you could discuss things you couldn't discuss on main, but people's needs became different. I remember the poll to name it. I suggested and vouched for critblr. Since the server's been since deleted, you're unfortunately just gonna have to take my word for it, but i'm part of the reason it's not called truthblr and I'm proud of that.

Q: This has actually been really clarifying for me; I knew ebblr and critblr were similar and intertwined, but I didn't know the specifics! I suppose, knowing that, what are some things that you remember about critblr in specific?

A: i understood critblr as a sort of anti-mcytblr. whatever opinion was widespread and popular on main, critblr was the place where you could find someone with the opposite opinion. it was a haven of haters, trolls and gossips, and it was really fucking funny. they loved having rivals- back in the summer of 2021, they/we had a "war" with fltwt. (at least in terms of what jason was up to. i have no idea how its developed now.)

honestly a lot more of the ire of critblr was directed at mcyttwt than it was on the ground at mcytblr. (although in 2021 the boundary between critblr and ebblr was still pretty loose and even as an ebblr main i was aware of all this, i'll say critblr for ease of communication)

another note about eb-critblr. it was extremely white. some of the rhetoric bouncing around on critblr at the time was kind of in the vein of "arent these twitter kids so sensitive for being upset with schlatt"

i think i also want to make point about how a lot of the truthing was kinda unserious. sometimes people dont have clips or evidence or info sometimes truthing was just projecting onto a content creator and feeling it in your heart. The instinct to truth, i think, came from a place of wanting to relate to the streamers. See yourself in them, their relationships, and their mental struggles. still, It was soaked in irony- there was this sort of untouchable jester attitude, and the less seriously you took yourself, the better. I think people cared a lot, though, and that ended up being the problem. There was a lot of pressure to be certain, which is fascinating coming from a space built on speculating on incomplete info. im sure other people in ebblr had very different experiences than I.

Q: Would you mind explaining what fltwt was?

A: fltwt came into being in summer 2021, when ranboo got doxxed. jason mcytruth had already stopped caring about ebs by now, so most of his and his associate's energy went into researching, exposing, and clowning them.

you need to understand that they were like. an abberation to us. we had been doing good honest truthing and shipping in our private corner since the new years, and here these twitter chucklefucks were throwing doxxes around and using them to truth with. they were like our evil twin. we hated them so much.

[all names have been redacted for privacy]

the reason my url is glowfr0g in this is because i changed my url after this interaction, but i have screenshots with my url as umbie aswell. we were SERIOUS.

since beeduo stopped hanging out like a week into the summer because of the doxx, the truthing in the community diversified a lot. one of such truthings was Clemtruthing- or transfeminine tommy truthing. fltwt straight up stole this from us, screenshotting and circulating our posts, and now theyre more known for it than we were. the blog mentioned here, [REDACTED], deactivated over this.

i think at one point fltwt was doing a popularity tournament and mcytruth was entered in as a contestant? but what i did here was hardly the only example of eb-critblr butting heads with fltwt. the demographic was largely bored twitter ranboo fans. yknow the "im literally neurodivergent and a minor" meme? that was popularized because of THEM. also that text interaction is dated july 30 2021

fltwt was, partially private i think? but overall not well organized at all and a lot of people on there were attention seeking. i have no idea how much these subtwts were actually invested in ebblr or critblr, for all i know it was extremely one-sided

Q: Was it an interesting experience to be in a niche community that regularly experienced "containment breaches" and blocklists? How did that affect the community's growth?

A: I kinda appointed myself the manager of the containment breaches! I had a whole process. If a mainblr blog reblogged a post, i would contact them on my umbie blog. Since they reblogged it, they were probably a lurker and i could ask them directly to take it down. However, if any of the mainblr blog's mutuals reblogged a post, i would contact them on an alt instead from the perspective of a concerned bystander that just wanted you to know that you had accidentally reblogged one of those posts from those weird shippers. Worked every time. I took pride in it.

There were really only a few blocklists? The first blocklist, what most people would know ebblr from back in the early days, got ebblr so much attention that's how most of the folks within it found out about it (including myself.) There were one or two scares after that, but nothing serious. I only ever got on one, and that one wasn't shared publicly. We still made a big show about having everyone temporarily change urls though. We didn't really want to be well known. Anybody who knew about ebblr understood that it was for the best of both communities if people kept quiet.

Q: How did the "boundaries" discourse affect your community?

A: we danced around with boundaries. Back when we were making fun of main for platonic marriage, a lot of us were loud about the fact that neither of them had called it a platonic marriage until the fans started doing it. We weren't technically breaking any stated boundaries, but i think part of why we were so loud about it is because we knew on some level that it was a cope. When the boundaries were finally stated and the truth that we were being weird all along was unavoidable, it was fucking DEFCON 1. A lot of people left ebblr over it, and a lot of people were like "wait, you didn't know we were breaking boundaries?" The community had boundaries, but they were not the same boundaries as the content creators.

Q: Were you ever involved in any main MCYTblr events?

A: nope. we wanted nothing to do with main mcytblr. We stayed aware, though, and made fun of them whenever things went sour.

Q: Do you think being in ebblr was an overall positive or negative experience?

A: mixed. so mixed. so incredibly mixed. The anxiety of me or my friends getting exposed or discovered kept me up at night. I was constantly conflicted about whether or not i was doing the right thing while also reassuring people that we definitely were. Our proximity to the darkest parts of minecraft fandom means i've seen and learned things that I wish I hadn't. When Beeduo went no contact it was uh. It Was Bad. It Felt Bad. We Felt bad, and I felt partially responsible. it's hard to know if that's true.

At the same time, I've met some of my best friends on there, ones that I keep in contact with to this day! Being on ebblr taught me a lot of critical thinking- I now understand that twitter isnt right about everything always. Being known and liked as Umbie helped me safely built up a sense of identity there that has brought me into the best chapter of my life so far, and experimenting with pronouns was also really really nice. For all the late nights and callout posts and blocklists and moralism and bullshit, i think i will be chasing the high of the vindication that i got when ranboo came out on twitter for the rest of my life.

You can call us a lot of things, but you can't call us incorrect on that front, and as truthers go, that's kinda rare.

[umbie was kind enough to also send me the following image-- this is the "enderbees" flag, seen in the yellow/purple rainbow, as it appeared on Karl Jacobs's stream of 2022 r/place! You can also spot the L'manburg flag, the Snowchester flag, and one more I can't identify.]

#Early MCYTblr Interviews #Volume 17 #umbie

[mcytblr-archive]

Early MCYTblr Interviews: mcyt-quotes

today's interviewee is mcyt-quotes, one of the first MCYT quotes blogs, member of MCYTblr since SMPLive, and winner of the first MCYTblr elections! below is a transcript of their questions and answers.

Q: To begin with, what was your overall MCYTblr experience like? Does anything particularly stick out to you?

A: it was fun, by and large. a good outlet for me to talk with likeminded people, and a good distraction to get me through my senior years of high school. i’ve been a public figure in a few online fandom spaces, now, and i think what stood out the most in the mcytblr space is the fact that some of the larger blogs were almost treated like mini-content creators themselves ? i got fanart a few times, especially through the whole election fiasco, and i remember there being incorrect quote blogs etc that i would pop up on now and then. i’ve never seen it happen on that scale before - it was odd, but fun in its own way. defiantly gave early-mid MCYTblr its own personality

Q: Speaking of the elections, do you remember what it was like to run in them? I remember that you won, but I'm interested to hear what it was like from your point of view.

A: ahahaha that was an experience. i fully signed up as a joke - i wasn’t very active on discord or very close with many of the other blogs, and i didn’t realise that my follower count was on the higher end of the spectrum, so i didn’t think i had a chance. just wanted to muck around and procrastinate studying for my final exams. things sorta spiralled though - i got hooked up with two bloody fantastic vice candidates (@the-royal-bat-snake and @sosigshoney) who did literally everything, and i also underestimated MCYTblr’s tendency to do it for the bit. i remember my campaign being something to the effect of promising a militia of arsonists, kitten genocide, cannibalism generally, and a total removal of free speech and thought ? and then i was elected and i was like ah fuck, i don’t have time for this. and then suddenly i was in the middle of some vast RP conspiracy that i was mostly asleep through, being Aussie, and very lost

Q: You mentioned that in the MCYT fandom, blogs were treated like smaller content creators-- how was that different from your other fandom experiences, out of curiosity?

A: so that sort of environment has popped up in other fandom spaces that i’ve been in - most obvious would be (and i want no judgement) the instagram DC and Marvel comics community, where i spent a few years running a large page. there were definitely elements of it - pages would get memes dedicated to them, etc. but lore ? i’ve never seen that before. i think it might be something about the nature of MCYT - aspects of the fandom, especially post Dream SMP (when this behaviour became most common) was built on mythologising people. not in the sense of worshipping them, but more so in the sense of fitting them into fictional narratives, just like the Dream SMP. and the blog owners themselves were primed to happily accept RP scenarios (something which has historically been seen as ‘cringe’), particularly those which blend absurdism and emotion. so the prison blogs, the election and subsequent RP, the penis SMP, the incorrect quotes blogs dedicated to fandom blogs (literally fandom-ception) came pretty naturally

idk, with more and time and reflection there’s probably something interesting there - Dream SMP was pretty unique in it’s time, and tumblr (especially post 2012) is a unique platform, so it makes sense they combined like that

Q: That makes me wonder, too-- it hasn't come up much before this, but I think it's an important aspect to examine: Do you think that large numbers of people (especially younger ones) being quarantined contributed to the intense/fast-paced fandom?

A: oh absolutely. it was pretty crazy to watch as a (semi) outsider. i joined the fandom in 2019, when it was Very small on tumblr - there maybe three other blogs i could follow who were MCYT related ? and then Covid hit and it bloody exploded. as i’ve mentioned, i was in my final year of high school, plus my town was only quarantined for a small period of time, so i didn’t really get that classic quarantine experience of having nothing to do. but christ, you could tell that so many people were spending practically their whole lives living through MCYT. and i don’t think that was a bad thing - it was clearly a great experience for a lot of people. but that’s why you had things popping up like the high school au blog dedicated to other MCYTblr blogs (where i think i was actually used as some evil class president or something ?? idk), which you would Not have seen in any other environment, i reckon

and i cannot stress your fast paced comment enough - every time i woke up it felt like heaps of astronomical events had happened in the few hours of USA timezone that had passed

it was fun - i felt like a long suffering older cousin at some points, but i don’t mind. that’s part of why i leaned into the election RP - if i could be as evil as possible, i gave them something to have fun with

Q: Now that you mention it, it's really interesting how that played out almost exactly as it did in the DSMP itself! A less-invested party coming in with a cartoonishly evil plan and winning the election to be played off of in roleplay, it's amazing how it worked out like that.

A: ahaha and it wasn’t lost on people at the time !! i was known for quite a while afterwards as a Schlatt-kinnie, which i was happy to lean into. a lot of the plot after that was lost on me - it was my two vice’s that i mentioned before and the rest of the cabinet which really carried things, and i would just pop in whenever i happened to be awake to endorse kitten genocide or something like that then go back to studying. but i’m pretty sure it did continue to trace the DSMP for a while afterwards - i banned the cult party [silverfish2020], so they were pretty quick to form a rebellion group, while i just continued to make worse and worse decisions. to be honest, though, it eventually spiralled out of control - i was taking it so laissez-faire that i forgot some people were genuinely invested, and while i forget details i definitely genuinely pissed a few people off at some point. i remember pretty vividly at one point someone made a post where they said they were worried i was going to doxx them or something like that (?) and i was like damn, this shits more serious than i thought it was. so i arranged to have my character assassinated and noped out - i couldn’t tell you what happened after that (or, frankly, before it). honestly, if you’re interested in niche fandom history though there’s probably something interesting in what went down - worth looking into if you’re bored

Q: Do you remember any other 'Big MCYTblr events'? It's alright if you don't remember what happened during them-- if you can't recall, I'll use them to ask around for people who participated!

A: i don’t rlly remember any other events…i know they happened, but i really had no interest in getting involved beyond answering whatever asks i would get about them. the election from memory was the first Big one (unless prom was first ? idk they were close together) and after that i was very happy to let Quotes as a character die, and i mostly ignored them

plus, it was about that time i started leaving the fandom - maybe a month or so later. by that point the community was Big, and moving fast, and a lot of drama had begun to leak in. you’ve covered some of the controversial blogs etc, and while i didn’t care about them personally they were indicative that the fandom space was different. combine that with me moving out of home and starting university, and i pretty much shut the blog down

Q: What led you to create the mcyt-quotes blog in the first place?

A: ummm i reckon just to have somewhere to talk about minecraft monday. there wasn’t a very dedicated fan base, and fuck knows i wasn’t gonna be talking about minecraft irl in a public aussie high school (i don’t have a death wish) so it just gave me somewhere to collect my thoughts. nothing interesting 🤷‍♀️

Q: Now that you mention it-- what are some of your most memorable moments from Minecraft Monday, whether from creators or the fandom?

A: ahhhhh there were some good ones. the fandom was deeply toxic during minecraft monday, but in a fun way - it felt sorta like following a sport more than anything. a niche reference here, but it felt the same as being a fan of australia’s soccer leagues - everyone hates each other, the organisers are greedy pricks who have no idea what’s going on, and there’s a new, entirely avoidable catastrophe happening every week. i think top moments include: the /top incident, where the fandom was divided after a scandal where Techno used an exploit to beat Vikkstar in an arena game; the a6d beef, where a6d was banned for not having enough viewers and then snuck back in and got into twitter drama with Keemstar; the week were Carson tried to sabotage Techno, leading to some of the most awkward moments possible and resulting in a lot of hate for the guy when he was otherwise still popular; week 7, where literally everything that could be broken was broken; James Charles getting adopted by the Minecraft community after his first cancelling but before everything that went down afterwards; and week 14, where a hacker griefed the arena, destroyed the event, and then accidentally doxxed himself while streaming it all. a fitting end

the main outlet for MCYT back then was actually reddit - there was a very active MCM subreddit which had a ton of statistics etc. the fandom was very into statistics back then, and actually analysing who would be a threat. that increased even more when serious esports players were added to the mix, like XQC and T1yler. they brought the toxic sweaty gamer energy to the competition, and the MC youtubers generally found them hilarious

it’s actually funny how much the vibe of the fandom changes depending on what’s most popular - MCM felt like sports fans, SMPEarth felt like historians, and DSMP was a giant role play arena

Q: Were you a part of the subreddit? (And, if so-- was it any different from MCYT Tumblr?)

A: yeah, i was crazy active on that subreddit !! i was always rooting for either Techno, Schlatt, or James Charles - Techno because he permanently dominated, Schlatt cause i was a casual SMPLive fan, and JC for the meme - and because at the time he was pretty widely accepted, since people loved that he genuinely seemed to get into the competition. funnily, the only time i’ve seen this competitive energy recreated was in the Techno vs Dream duel (which i also got way too competitive about). MCM was the first serious introduction of old school MC youtubers to the new generation - it was fun seeing all the classics slowly come around to Techno when they realised he wasn’t a sweat he was just good, or seeing them try to navigate conversations with the SMPLive gang when the old guard was still trying to be family friendly. the best week was actually Week 14, when a collection of old MCYTbers and new MCYTbers (and James Charles) decided fuck it and went to play on Hypixel for a few hours. it was great. i was also, later, very active on the SMPEarth wiki (the main hub for the fandom in those days) - that place is a gem to this day, and i’m not just saying that because i wrote far too much of it

Q: As time went on, did you see the culture of the fandom shift? What was it like to watch?

A: it shifted a Lot between different phases. even the demographic changed, at different points. you would be hard pressed to imagine that the fans of SMPLive were the same as DSMP, even though there was overlap in creators. even something more recent, like SMPEarth to DSMP - totally different vibe. you can see aspects that influenced each other, though - for example, the SMPE fandom’s obsession with making flags for different factions and putting factions at war with each other absolutely led into the establishment of L’Manburg. then Eret had his betrayal moment, and it turned from SMPE style war roleplay (which you would have on SMPLive, even, for example with the Stal conflict) to actual personal role play, where there were characters separate from the content creators. that division had never been identified before. that was when u started to see a lot of the mainstay parts of today’s fandom pop up - e.g. the c! vs cc! shorthand, or the constant division of content creators onto duos or other groups, and (of course) the shipping debates started up. they had always been there, especially in the Dream side of the fandom (which evolved spiritually from the Skeppy side, imo, which had similar debates) but they Really blew up with DSMP

that’s sort of when i stepped out - nothing against that style of fandom, it’s just not for me

Q: I've heard a lot of people who were in 2019-2020 MCYTblr say that the fandom was a lot more close-knit during that time-- was that your experience of it, too?

A: very much so. it was inevitable, we were a small bunch. i wouldn’t go so far as to say that everyone knew everyone, but everyone definitely had a mutual friend. i mean, hell, even connections to the creators were common - a lot of people on stuff like love or host were fans themselves. of course, looking back at the way that power was abused by certain creators paints it in a different light, but at the time it was fun

Q: Are there any fandom in-jokes, copypastas, running bits, or anything similar that you can remember from your time in the fandom?

A: too many to name. most of them id get in my inbox and just be confused, tbh, like the Kroger anon or some of the kinnies. i’ll try to go through some pre-DSMP era ones from the top of my head. the Hey Wilbur copypasta was cursed, as was SMPRompa (which i actually read the first couple chapters of, out of morbid curiosity. it was an experience). Stal, of course, was iconic in its time, as was the cuck shed. there was Keemstar being referred to as a gnome, his beef with the Skeppy gang, the ‘I could kiss you’ incident, ‘Hey Technoblade’. Jschlatt’s love or host bit where he was a closeted, deeply christian man made the rounds. Technoplane, of course. the Carson crying meme, and Gumball killing James Charles. Petezahutt dropping MCM to spite Keemstar, and Keemstar lying about it. ‘Preston is rusty’ was a classic MCM era meme, after the two fucking dominated. the sheer amount of times MCM got hacked was a bit of an in-joke, as was who actually won week 7 (to this day we didn’t know)

Q: Alright, and last one! Is there anything else you can remember/want archived, or any comments about MCYTblr as a whole?

A: ummmm i don’t think so ! i’ve said pretty much everything that immediately comes to mind. definitely an interesting fandom - one of the most unique i’ve seen. i appreciate your account a lot ! it’s funny to see old posts pop up again

#Early MCYTblr Interviews #Volume 18 #mcyt-quotes

[mcytblr-archive]

Early MCYTblr Interviews: warpedfungusonastick

today's interviewee is warpedfungusonastick, who's been in MCYTblr since the summer of 2020 and is a member of dreamlying! below is a transcript of their account of early MCYTblr.

Digging back into what I have of my online history, I started the tumblr blog warpedfungusonastick in late July 2020. Beforehand I had a very small <20 follower dttwt account and saw that the Tumblr community was more my vibe. I was 18 when I got into being a dteam ~fan and my personal views on fandom and stan culture and parasocial relationships were, while still evolving, kind of against a lot of the culture that was growing up around especially the twitter fan community.

(This being said, this was the depths of COVID lockdown and I rarely left my house because I was a senior in high school in the U.S. and living with someone who absolutely could not get sick. So I was terminally online and can definitely say in retrospect deeply invested in the fan culture and even the creators/their online personas while being semi-ironically self aware of this relationship.)

I first saw a dteam video in later 2019. Funny enough (and not funny at all, because I think about these Patterns quite a lot), I had then just left the Cryaotic fandom. If you don't know, he was an old friend of pewdiepie who split with him around the time of or before the multiple pewdiepie scandals and pewdiepie whistling off several alt-right dog whistles and that whole thing. But back to the point, like a month after i became a regular Cryaotic Twitch viewer, a long expose came out about him being abusive to his ex-girlfriend and a groomer of underaged fans. Cryaotic was a faceless streamer whose iconography was this little blob thing and I will not abandon the theory that the origins of Dreamwastaken fanart are the direct successor to humanized fanart of this Cryaotic persona.

Through the whole Cryaotic thing I first found out about kiwifarms/lolcow. What stuck to me, beyond the abhorrent stuff said on those sites, was that they had a pretty clear system of archiving things using sites such as archive.is and were completely unafraid to post "doxxed" materials anonymously.

Commentary on DL interviews: - I fully second what georgesoot said about "No it's not odd, I at least partially strove for infamy. Any attention gratifies the ego after all, not just positive attention. Then there was the absurdity of it all". I tried to be a lot less controversial than some other DL members, but I did run with them and did say some things that weren't within the typical conventions of more mainstream and popular blogs of the time. It was a dopamine hit for people to interact with my blog--like any social media--but I/we did it in a kind of absurdist way at a point with the things we said and the ways we kind of transgressed whatever the normal way of being a fan blog was. - Re: Wormweeb--I was also kind of mentally ill and depressed and really only interacted with both friends online (even if they were friends from school). And as a result I took it all a bit more seriously than it was at the time. This is is less related but I used to get these--visceral? reactions to when Drama would happen because I was personally invested more so because I didn't want my online friend group who (although seen as a united front on the outside sometimes, I think) each had our Faves in the mcyt space and had had petty infighting over the morals of that (both seriously and unseriously, but everything starts to bleed, in my opinion).

More about my previous exposure to Minecraft fandom: I used to follow mianite back in the day and watched a lot of captiansparklez & aureylian. Since I joined the dteam fandom before any blog presence I was there for their very first streams (which got like…5k views 10k?) and the birth of the dsmp as essentially a server for friends (which led to minor discourse later when the line between roleplay and people on a MC server blurred.)

So my points of reference for these types of fandoms were a fandom that was very much for younger children (Mianite) and therefore the creators were treated with more distance and the recently up-in-flames Cryaotic fandom.

Back to doxxing/archiving/odd relation between: I used to joke about the tension between the right to privacy and to be forgotten on the internet and the right for nosy teenagers with too much time on their hands (and literally obsession brainworms) to dig up your past. Two things I think that were interesting about the most (in my opinion) morally dubious element of mcytblr and most people formed their negative opinions of critblr on was the having/knowing "forbidden" information. Most of this we were either told by randos or knew through other people online. A lot of it also ended up on Dream's kiwifarms, but that was a bit of a two-way street.

And the second part of this whole thing is the way that this information would come up among The Discourse. Because knowing some of the things we/I knew, you could call out creator's lies/misrepresentations of their histories/online pasts in ways that people who didn't know couldn't. Which was kind of where some of the in-jokes came from. I also took the habit of archiving things (old accounts, posts, whatever) to archive.is and such at the time because I fell on the 'I don't want this digital history to be erased if only for my own sanity.'

I think this has been rehashed before, but at every corner, the mcyt/dteam fandom was a fandom like any other, complicated by the fact that it was a real person fandom. And especially on tumblr where the Culture was a little different because no creators (few creators) were on Tumblr, people kind of just said and did whatever. I struggle to think of any of this as important in the grand scheme of anything, but there was a massive outpour of content because of the sheer size of the fandom across all platforms. There was 24/7 content, big fomo, and so I think blogs acted like pundits--like a forum on the newist in DSMP or Love or Host or MCC or whatever. My memory of that time has atrophied a lot but I think that DL and co. cropped up as the pundit subclass (however some of us had actual talent like wormweeb and made fanworks) and the fandom overall was sustained by a sprawling form of Conversation on the Latest Content.

Q: right-- and while other blogs caught people up on streams, dream lying was more interested in meta on the creators themselves?

I think that was a part of it. We were all united in this semi-ironic cynicism about fandom culture as a whole while being fans ourselves, and we socially shared this Vision of a number of variably worded critiques about - stan culture - cancel culture - the dangers/pitfalls/intricacies of these.

I think a lot of it was just shits and giggles, but at least I at one point had this idea that I was a tiny little measured response to the excess of fandom culture. I looked down on uncritical fandom and thought that especially because some of these creators cultivated deeply parasocial relationships with their young fans (I was not much older, but all 18 year olds are Like That) it was some sort of imperative to talk about that at least a little bit.

As I read through my old posts--these was a lot of self important a lot of rambling a lot of nonsense. And I don't really think that these fandom culture can be changed by one little microblogger with a couple hundred followers, but I stand by a lot of my initial criticisms of the ecosystem as a whole and mainly the creators themselves and their (heh) lying, their harm, their overall misconduct and above all the systems that created and enable their whacky ass bullshit to this day. .

But the doubled edged sword of (I return to the forbidden info thruline) I never really shared info that was private because I wanted to be somewhat ethical, so it always felt a bit like we/I was going crazy with things I knew to be true but obviously wouldn't share because that's nor super moral.

Another note about The Rumors and DreamLying--in my memory we kind of thought were Something. And I guess we've been nudged along in that perception but I think the most vocal and controversial of us just said wild shit that stuck in people's brains and for the longest time I didn't associate myself with dream lying at all on Warpedfungus because I wanted to be Somewhat Normal, if measuredly critical and just…vibing. But I think at circles back to a lot of this being wank amongst a handful of terminally online people who at the time didn't get out enough and, like, fixated on this Thing because it was community (or a facsimile of) and at the end of the way we're all just archives or archived pages or gone forever.

(Which reminds me that for the longest time I had you and Roxytonic blocked because I thought archiving was corny but I now think it's kind of cool. It's a nostalgia trip, if anything else. I'm now in another fandom that would've really benefited from some hardcore archiving because so much of the old internet (and fan spaces amongst them--ie ff.net, livejournal, even more underground spaces) are completely lost to the sands of time and the deletion of those hosting sites, etc)

Q: i am very interested in your thoughts on, as you mentioned before in reference to cryaotic, the way that creators cultivate and manipulate fanbases, and the effects you think it had on how the mcytblr fandom

Dream, along with "learning/studying the algorithm" and getting insanely lucky, did many specific things to cultivate a fandom of immensely parasocial fans. And regardless of my cynical vision of what his motives were, his actions of wanting to be seen as a 'friend', sharing many personal details, being accessible to fans, DMing young stan accounts, following fan accounts, OKaying a lot of fanworks about him/his personal and the whole…gaybaiting (you know what i"m referring to) thing had the result of a very large very dedicated fanbase.

As far as cryaotic, it's my theory that dream knew the effect on having a very…intimate…relationship with his conventionally not ugly young white man friend, and used that. And as far as the other element that I associate between dteam/cryaotic--these were men who had very boring lives and probably saw themselves as undesirable to women Until they had this massive following and this kind of situation happens time and time again where people get Influence that didn't used to have and do messed up things with it. And I don't know what's to be done, but it's quite bad and completely goes against the "wholesome" image they try to cultivate. If not some of the stuff being actually crimes.

I think the common perception is sometimes that these cases are "bad apples" when there are so many bad apples And not even in the man aint shit way, but unlike more conventional routes to Fame, mcyts have no oversight unless they join and esports org and still then…the org may just side iwth them if it's worth it. And that's not to say that this stuff doesn't happen with conventional celebrity and even on college campuses and in everyday life and whatnot but I think people in such a public eye should be held to standards of conduct that may prevent some of this.

#early mcytblr interviews #Volume 14 #warpedfungusonastick

[mcytblr-archive]

Early MCYTblr Interviews: nibbleinephym

our interviewee is @nibblelinephym (known in 2020/2021 as severely-nearsighted). here is a copy/pasted transcript of the questions and answers!

(if these posts are too long, please let me know, and i'll incorporate a cutoff in the future!)

Q: What do you remember most fondly about ‘Early MCYTblr’? (2020-2021)

A: i think im most fond of how tight-knit the community felt in the 'early days' honestly? dont get me wrong seeing it grow and new creators bring even more people in has been wonderful but theres just something about a smaller fandom that feels nice. we were never by any means a Small fandom but we're a Lot bigger now than we were just a few years ago!

Q: I understand that you were the face of Silverfish2020 (winner of the first MCYTblr elections). What was your experience in the elections themselves like?

A: first, clarifying; unfortunately silverfish2020 was Not the winner of the first election; that was quotes2020, represented by mcyt-quotes (who i believe has since changed urls? apologies but im not sure what their current one is or if theyre still active at all ^^;) by exactly four votes -- for me the elections were a lot of fun! when they were first starting up i wasn't sure if i wanted to join, since there were a Lot of people involved already and i hadn't really solidified myself as part of the community yet (i think i was still almost exclusively a musical blog back in the first days of it, not multifandom, which is so wild to think about tbh). im really glad i did though, i met some truly amazing people through the event that i still talk with to this day :] everything felt very fast paced at the time, especially since the discord was almost always going at blink-and-youll-miss-it speeds; you had to be Constantly in there if you wanted to participate in conversation. i remember whenever someone joined the server there would be a mob of people from different parties trying to convince them to side with theirs. surprisingly, that tactic worked pretty well for a lot of parties. i vividly remember that there was usually a pause of activity in the general server when results were being posted and a boom when they were all out. it was overall just a generally pretty positive environment from what i remember

Q: You were also a contestant in the MCYTblr ‘Friend or Host’ for Paint (adhddream). What do you remember of it?

A: friend or host was great! i wasnt in the competition long (iirc i was one of the first five out??? i dont actually remember how many contestants there were for the round but i know i was pretty early ^^;) but paint seemed really chill, it was just a nice little thing that we did for fun at love or hosts peak. i remember the discord stream of it didnt exactly go very well -- there was an issue with the visuals i think? so it might have been only audio. but im not entirely sure about that, it didnt really stick in my mind as well as other things from that era.

Q: What was the roleplay for Silverfish2020 like? 

A: the silverfish roleplay was very,, im not sure what the best word for it would be. chaotic maybe. there were a lot of things going on there just because there were a lot of things going on in the elections roleplay as a whole. we really leaned into the cult thing when the jokes started and it just kinda spiraled from there. in the beginning we toyed with the idea of a chestburster type thing living inside of the party members but it never really went anywhere despite how much we talked about it in our private discord,, instead we just focused on the party being a sort of hivemind. they lived in a stronghold under a dead forest and would try to get others to listen to 'the buzz' (like. insect buzzing. except if you listened to it long enough youd start hearing promises of a new family and respect and power and shit like that). one of our party members, shard (@shardofsun) was very thorough with all of her lore, going so far as to make detailed plans in a notebook of hers. the roleplay extended throughout the other elections as well (if you ignore the third and only through past lifetimes in the fourth) and is still partially going on now!

Q: You’ve been consistently keeping a list of all ‘kinnie’ (content creator imposter) blogs. Which ones stood out to you?

A: i think one of the imposter blogs that stood out most to me was definitely iamdreamwastaken (who eventually moved to tmblrdream) just because they were very interactive and took all the shit we sent them in stride. i also really liked the timedeo imposter despite never watching any of timedeos stuff. just thought they were cool. honourable shoutout to the eret and nihachu imposters too they rocked

Q: What are the biggest blogs you can remember? What was your impression of them?

A: the biggest blogs i can remember are probably gnfkitten [braveboyhalo] back when cat was the only one on the blog, adhddream, hearty-an0n(maybe not a Big one?? but very active and in a Lot of peoples inboxes from what i saw) and wooteena. there are definitely more urls i remember like georgeeehd (i think?) and wormweeb but i dont think i followed georgeeehd and i cant remember a whole lot of wormweebs stuff apart from the infertility post so i cant accurately answer for them ^^; wooteena was an acquaintance of mine; we didnt talk a whole lot but we were mutuals for a while. they were always pretty chill, despite the fact there were people out there shipping them with a friend of theirs?? ive always had huge respect for them just because they had the energy to deal with shit like that. i was friends with gnfkitten and hearty-an0n, at the very least in a 'wave at each other on the street' way, and i have really fond memories of the both of them :] hearty is still active, they post about sports these days from what i see on my dash, but im not sure if cat is despite gnfkitten being active as a group blog. adhddream always seemed really cool! my memory of their blog isnt super clear but i know i really liked seeing them on my dash back in the day. since this is tumblr i have no way of knowing if any of these people were actually Big Blogs but it definitely seemed like they were to me at the time haha

Q: What was the most insane piece of fandom drama you can remember from early MCYTblr? Did you participate?

A: i dont actually remember a whole lot of fandom drama from that time honestly. i tended to stay in my bubble of mutuals and other people i followed so it rarely ever crossed my dash. i was like ,, 15-16 at the time so fandom drama stressed me wayyyyy out, i tried my best to avoid it. the only stuff i can really remember at all was people fighting about whether or not it was okay to ship the characters from the dream smp and if shipping the characters was the same as shipping the players, but i never participated in any of the discourse from what i can recall

Q: Is there anything else you want to mention or that you want to be written down and remembered?

A: nope! though im happy to clarify on anything stated here if needed or answer any other questions that may arise :]

#Early MCYTblr Interviews #Volume 1 #nibbleinephym

[mcytblr-archive]

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

#early mcytblr interviews #Volume 12 #fraseris

[mcytblr-archive]

Early MCYTblr Interviews: Anonymous

our interviewee is an anonymous member of gay castle, the sleepyheads server, and was involved in the MCYTblr elections. below is a transcript of their account!

Q: You mentioned several things in your initial message to me, so let’s work through them one by one. What was it like to be in the “Gay Castle” server from when it was created?

A: Gay castle was originally made so as to have a place for friends that wasn't the drama-filled space of sleepyheads. It was orchestrated by Conarcoin on tumblr, though technically the server was made by someone else just due to timing and such. Conarcoin is the owner of the server, though. At first you could only join the server via a direct invite from Conarcoin, but since it is no longer just an escape from another server, people now invite their own friends and mutuals as well. Gay castle originally was much smaller and much more mcyt-focused. I don't have a perfect memory of what it was like, but a lot of my time in the server was spent discussing headcanons and aus with other people, or playing minecraft together.

Q: What do you remember from the first MCYTblr election? (And, as a bonus question– do you remember who you voted for?)

A: I wasn't super involved in the first election, but i was there for it. I remember the hype was pretty big- people made animatics and edits and fanart. There was some sort of issue with who won, some sort of drama with how it was decided or how the election discord server was run, but I don't have exact knowledge of what went down. From what I know the people who were most involved started doing a rp based on the elections later, but I was never told much about it.

Q: What was the early life (and later downfall) of the sleepyheads server like? Was it a natural death, or was there some incident or drama that ended it?

A: Okay so sleepyheads was a bit wild. I wasn't there from the beginning, but I was there for at least most of the downfall. It did not die naturally- it does still exist from what I know, but completely remade, so you can't find any old conversation history or anything. It was the first mcytblr discord server I joined. The owner of the server had originally just created it for friends, and when so many people joined it got way out of control. There were issues with people not respecting the blacklist, not respecting pronouns, having nsfw discussions in all-age chats, lots of misogyny to female creators, etc etc. However, it was a big server, and so people didn't really take much notice. One of the things about the server, though, is that a lot of people used it for writing. There were several channels dedicated to individual aus people had made. One day the server owner decided that there were too many au channels, so they deleted all of them. The majority of people had not backed up their writing from the server, which meant a lot of fanwork was lost in one fell swoop. That really angered people and brought up a lot of grievences that people had been letting go, such as a server member getting kicked when people beleived no rules had been broken. Server members decided to create a channel that mods weren't supposed to read so they could discuss how to bring up their grievences and what they wanted changed. While discussion was going on, one person started spamming a general channel with screenshots of all the issues they'd had with people in the server and the server owner, and it took the mod team a while to ban them. People started arguing that there should be a vote for someone to replace the server owner, and there was a lot of fighting. A bunch of people left at that point, and the server kept bleeding members over time. By now it's completely remade and, as far as I know, pretty much dead.

Q: I haven’t asked anyone else about this, and I’m unclear on a lot of the details, so I’ll ask it here– who was ‘fakenoblade’?

A: "Fakenoblade" was a member of sleepyheads and the sleepyheads smp. They had a very good Technoblade impression and made their discord account look exactly like Technoblade's did at the time. They were very popular for acting as Technoblade on the smp and in voice calls. At one point several people took screenshots of one of the calls and posted them to tumblr, joking that Technoblade had actually joined the vc. Much later on, after the Sleepyheads server issues, they made it clear that they didn't go by Fakenoblade anymore, and I beleive they don't use the Fakenoblade discord account or tumblr account anymore, though I could be wrong.

Q: Do you remember any imposter blogs in specific? What do you remember from them? What was the general community response to imposter blogs?

A: The imposter blog that I remember the most was Drinnie, aka iamdreamwastaken, a very popular Dream imposter blog. They played into a lot of current mcytblr jokes, as well as encouraging interactions and fanart. They also created Dreambot, a bot trained off of a dataset of all of Dream's tweets, which would create "original" posts. I mostly remember them because they actually joined the Gay Castle discord server while not giving away who they actually were, and even joined a voice call, though I don't know if they used a good impersonation or a soundboard. They were one of the earliest imposter blogs, which helped with their popularity- people weren't yet used to the blogs, and so were genuinly unsure if any given blog was real or fake. As more blogs were created, and more "creator on tumblr" scares occured, people generally got used to the blogs, and were ambivilant towards them at best, hostile at worst. Drinnie and Zonebur were the two most memorable imposter blogs, mostly because they were early enough that there was still some mystery about them.

Q: What do you remember from the “Penis SMP”? Can you give a short explanation on what it was?

A: Penis SMP was basically just an earlier Goncharov. An outsider of the fandom made a post about how absurd mcyt tags were on tumblr, something along the lines of "this is just like the electric chair scene with penisunavaliable and shittyfartbaby69!!1!" (There's defenitly screenshots of the post still floating around, and it's possible that the og post is actually still up.) A lot of mcyt fans thought this was hilarious, so people pretended like it was real. There was fanfiction, fanart, worldbuilding, etc. More characters were created, with other absurd names like "milfboss", and the fandom grew enough that a group of people decided to make it real, creating a discord server so that they could stream as the characters on Penis Smp, though that project has died out and the server is now deleted. There's still 4 or 5 people posting about Penis Smp, I think, and it even got a Polygon article about it, which was a good enough source that Penis Smp is refrenced on the official Dream SMP Wikipedia page. Even though it's not really around anymore, it was absolutely a big part of mcytblr history- It kind of united a bunch of mcytblr into a collective project, at least temporarily.

#early mcytblr interviews #Volume 5 #anonymous

[mcytblr-archive]

Early MCYTblr Interviews: fagbearentertainment

our interviewee is @fagbearentertainment (formerly @/ugh-schaloob), who ran a philza minecraft imposter blog! below is a transcript of their account of early mcytblr and being an imposter blog.

The philza blog was a pretty fun experience. I would schedule my posts to UK timezones (im from the US) and answer asks during school to be more convincing. I also had a lil feud thing with a wilbur soot kinnie blog called therealwilbursoot or wilbursootofficial or something like that, they deactivated a while ago tho. We basically just told our followers to send really cursed asks to each other, I sent my followers with anteater images and they sent their followers with minion memes. It was a good time. We both admitted to being kinnie blogs pretty fast tho, after ~a month or two we both quit posting for the most part. Rip Philpire o7

I also remember something about the Wilbur blog (or maybe it was a different wilbur blog? Can’t remember now) marrying Nick Wild from Zootopia, they invited me to the wedding via ask lol

For the he/they tubbo discourse I really only saw people on my dash saying it was stupid bc I didn’t use Twitter at the time. I do remember lots of instances of people being excited when a cc used they/them for tubbo and reposting the clips constantly. All the support for cis people using multiple pronouns led to me experimenting with neos and questioning my gender which is pretty cool thanks he/they tubbo discourse

I was also fairly active in the mcytblr high school au stuff, didn’t use the discord much bc of social anxiety but I do have a few posts of my mcytblr high school sonas on my main blog if you wanna see those. I was called the schools local Quackity kinnie bc of a quiz we all did and it became my mcytblr sonas whole personality for a while XD

Also here’s art I made if what I was doing on the discord server and mcytblr high school blog. Don’t have access to either of those anymore so this is probs the next best thing for archiving if you want to archive it

#Early MCYTblr Interviews #Volume 3 #fagbearentertainment