IDB

watsonian wrote: Sat May 05, 2018 4:33 pm We moved on to discussing plant merch while I went tl;dr about bullying oops

allsaintshowell wrote: Sat May 05, 2018 12:11 pm
okay, if we're all talking about the same girl here which we probably are, none of that is true. i'm her friend, we met because she sold me her spare vip, we spent the whole day together, and i filmed her vip as she did mine. she was super sweet to both of them! she gave them her dissertation research on both of them separately and the effect they have on their fans' mental health. she talked to both of them, hugged both of them, and cropped her pic the way she did to reflect the fact that her and dan's last names are one letter apart and the crop on her insta from tatinof in 2015. i literally don't know where this rumor that she hates phil and was rude to him is coming from.

it's so interesting watching people actually play into the mob mentality that this tour is exploring because holy shit, this is hell.

Okay but her dissertation actually sounds fascinating. I love that shit. It makes me wonder if anyone's research on dnp or other YouTubers has reached the level of publication where I could find it through the university library. It seems like enough people write about them and, I assume, other YouTubers.

topdanhowellmemes wrote: Sat May 05, 2018 10:38 am People are saying some straight up horrible shit about her, and it always annoys me how everyone can be so behind Dan and his anti-bullying campaigns, and then in the next breath jump on someone who does something they don't like.

I think this has been mentioned before and it's a really interesting topic. If you focused exclusively on Dan as the sole source of anti-bullying guidance, I'm not sure you would get the message that bullying is always or even mostly inappropriate.

Obviously people should be learning about these things in school, from their parents, and from other life experiences! But if you were to just focus on the messages that Dan sends: yes, he's verbally against bullying and he talks about the negative impacts. But he also has a complicated relationship with his audience where what others interpret as bullying, Dan explains as shared humor and a form of bonding.

Example video!

Daniel Howell 2 years ago (edited)
this video is so cringe because literally all the tweets were just jokes from my followers which they didn't understand *facepalm*
but we did talk about nicer internet and cyberbullying at the end which is a good thing so ¯\(ツ)/¯?

I'm not saying Dan is wrong here. It's just that what the person at the BBC understood as bullying, Dan read as humorous and affectionate. The same could be said for fans: they see something that looks like bullying and Dan responds positively to it. Bullying appears to be acceptable and even desirable under certain circumstances, and those circumstances aren't at all clear or universal.

Which is a complex kind of communication that I do think works in person (see: all the times dnp have said 'I hate you' to each other in obvious affection.) But through the internet I'd argue that tone between strangers is often lost, and whether or not you interpret something as humor or hate is going to vary a lot based on factors entirely outside of the interaction.

Example video #2! Between 2:55 and 3:30, Dan on 'rat as a term of endearment' and 'weird internet humor'

to which Dan's conclusion is "In case anyone's watching this and they're like, wow, Dan's subscribers are really abusive. [...] Yeah, no, I think they're being nice. I'm kind of not sure to be honest. That's fine."

Is he joking about not being sure? I don't know. And that's kind of my point.

Dan can be against bullying, but if he responds to what you perceive as abusive in a positive manner or by defending it--and added to that Dan's tendency to focus on the negative comments he receives and pay attention to them, thereby rewarding it--there's a really complicated and contradictory message about bullying in there somewhere. It's certainly not simply 'bullying is wrong and you shouldn't do it.'

I want to come full circle and say I don't think Dan or the messages he sends can or should be blamed for any bullying that goes on in the fandom. People are fully responsible for their own actions, and more often than not bullying is clearly coming from a place of hostility and can't be blamed on humor or misinterpretation by either the person sending or the person receiving the message.

None of this really applies to attacking the fan, either, but perhaps a bit to the 'meme-ing' of Marianne hate. I just have a lot of semi-connected trains of thought that sometimes crash together and form a post like this.