something about having an audience

This was always an odd topic. It was hard to discuss in passing conversations or posts online, because it invariably left out literal years of context and would absolutely, without fail, create more issues than it was worth due to people latching onto things that they perceived as slights and offensives towards them. The greatest and worst comedy was that the most vocal and upset responses to any such commentary were generally never even a component of that initial conversation. People would see commentary from those with online audiences and would immediately get upset, since they were a part of an online audience. Well, that's a part of why I am writing this now. I don't need to go punch for punch with someone already incensed on something that they misinterpreted. Even with this attempt, this text won't be comprehensive and will likely yield further, similar posts in the future as I recall more experiences. 

But this is important to me as it has absolutely affected every aspect of my life, of relationships, and how I communicate (and had failed to communicate) with others in my past. 

In the last couple of years, before I disconnected from most outward facing sites, I would occasionally either be commented at or a post would fall into my periphery about people having a bad taste in their mouth from how I or my friends "treated" the community (or failed to interact with). I cannot speak for my friends, so take this only from my point of view. They very well may agree with some of my ideas, but as being spoken for inaccurately and involuntarily is one of my absolute most frustrating and hated things, I will not do the same to them. 

When our project was first getting off the ground, I stupidly made myself available 24/7 in every capacity. That's not to say I didn't love and thrive off of it. A large part of it was absolutely an undiagnosed string of manic phases that, coupled with my friends' enthusiasm and the camaraderie we all had for one another and the creative work, led to many late nights, from both just being young and also being productive. Every moment of connectivity that stemmed from that work, carrying over into my everyday life, felt refreshing. It was inspiring. It was rewarding. I felt recognized. As a (what was it, nineteen-year-old?) producer, the lack of downtime meant that people were engaged in what you were doing. It meant that people were recognizing your work and, to me, validating what I perceived at the time as my worth. We were making connections, being admired for our efforts, and moving the project forward. It was easy to be surrounded by it, because I loved the feeling of barely treading water and being overwhelmed by it. Our long-term plan was our life raft, our guiding light, and we knew what we were doing, however by-the-seat-of-our-pants it may have been in real time. I will be the first to admit, I absolutely let it go to my head at times. That will always be on me, but that's also a part of maturing and recognizing where I had let things spiral out of control and yielded a million bad choices or selfish decisions that I wish I could do over and do better. 

The project was picking up steam and once the floodgates opened to people finding our personal contact information, the world was wide open, as well. We really did try to stay hidden, for a while. We really did. 

Then the years started going by. The level of our work improved the longer we worked together and our vision never faltered. That doesn't mean it was easy, always keep that in mind. But frustrations that the audience felt, whether due to their disapproval of various story elements or production delays, began seeping into this deep pool that I had been treading in. No longer was the constant communication only related to horror inspirations or discussing my favorite nearby abandoned places, for example. The criticism and angst and online vitriol began to taint that constant stream. The pleasant running water was starting to devolve into a torrent of white noise with sharp edges. It seemed that, while all of the good was personally rewarding, all of the negatives also took on that penetrating, smothering aspect. The hate from strangers was becoming personal. But what was most painful to endure was that it wasn't just hate. 

People suddenly felt emboldened or that it was appropriate to suddenly bring intensely personal issues to me, even when they had barely ever spoken to me before. I'll leave this reminder a few more times, but remember it now: I'm speaking for myself. I'm sure similar things were directed towards my friends, but I am not recounting their experiences. I am recounting mine. Complete strangers would essentially cold call me in the middle of the night in crisis. I can recall a literal dozen instances of fans contacting me and stating that they were going to end their life and or dealing with critical medical issues. If that positive first couple of years of the production was a warm and inviting party, this was now attending the same party with the expectation that at any given twenty-minute interval a screaming stranger in a mask would kick in the door and then hold a gun to their head, hysterically yelling in self-defeat and pain. Is that the kind of environment you'd feel comfortable in? Did it mean something that these people felt that they trusted me? Of course it did. Many of them I was able to talk down and help as I could. But, as life and this stupid blog proves, I was in absolutely no position to be considered as qualified for such a task. Other people would even become upset with me when, after the tense moments subsided, that I wasn't stellar at responding to such a situation. I would be guilted for not knowing how to be a super doctor on the spot. I had my own mental health issues to ignore at the time and strangers thought that I could be the cure for theirs. 

Nonetheless, we continued the project. I don't recall exactly how we weathered these types of situations as they happened. In hindsight, it seems that it was a constant thing under the surface, only ever indirectly addressed when they were particularly stressful or in later years when I would cut myself off and make myself unavailable by, for example, removing the ability to directly message me. It sounds pathetic and in some ways it is, but some days it was so anxiety-inducing and exhausting to even look at my phone, to wonder what fresh hell awaited me and who would need help or berate me this time. 

On top of all of that, the "best" was yet to come. I touched upon audience's feelings towards the series itself. If they loved it or hated it, I was just glad people were giving it a shot. But when they didn't like a certain aspect, or certain characters, it wasn't enough to simply comment in their own little online fiefdoms or on the videos themselves. Nah, they had to tell us all directly with negging, constant, parasitic online stalking and visibility. So many people tried to shoulder and elbow their way into our personal lives and then throw a shitfit when we didn't reciprocate their wants. I truly feel for all of those women on online dating apps who get the, "hey, hey, hey," messages hourly for a day, followed by the, "okay fine you ungrateful bitch," and then followed up with a meek, "hey," another hour later. It's not a satirical stretch at all and it happens every day in a million inboxes around the world. I'm sure of it, because I've experienced it with excitable fans of fucking youtube horror firsthand. Dozens of these "connections" now flooded my personal life at every hour of the day. That was my mistake and something I'd never allow to happen again. But we were young. Live and learn, I guess. 

Essentially, it all just got to be too much. There was a lot of good, but just as much bad. And we were three dudes individually dealing with this simultaneously. We weren't a production company. We weren't a television studio with marketing and outreach and human resources. We didn't have a security detail and, as such, every facet of a production was being firehosed at us every hour of the day. A phrase that I'm all-too-familiar-with at this point: we truly experienced the highest of highs (creating our found families and friends, achieving production milestones) and the lowest of lows (read literally anything above and more) simply by existing through this phase of the project. 

Now I know I didn't receive the worst of it, even acknowledging all of the above. My friend and his partners have dealt with constant shit even years after the project had ended. But it was something that affected all of us and something we all experienced in bursts. This all happened during the production, but continued and in some cases worsened years after it was done. Even after our behind-the-scenes stuff wrapped up. 

Our personal contact information and our families were subjected to strangers calling or texting us with inane bullshit. "Upload a new video now. Please," I recall one text to my mom. Then, "now. Now. Now. Now," repeating as individual, consecutive texts until she blocked the number. I give our families so much credit for their patience, because I know it sure tested mine. That one also happened years after the series concluded. The nerve these kinds of people have...

It seemed that every other day there was a new dipshit pretending to be one of us. Not a fan page or fictional account inspired by our series, but the actual us. Listing our actual addresses or names or familial connections. Whatever. If you can think of something that would be uncomfortable for someone else to stand up and claim about your private life, we had "fans" impersonating us and further contacting other fans who believed they were communicating with our real selves. There was a game of cat and mouse of finding these profiles if they weren't so foolish as to follow our personal accounts themselves before playing their little games. It was never ending. 

Consider this part of my rant as a checkpoint. Keep all of this in mind. Whenever we talked about the toxic and irritating side of "fandom" -- this is what we were talking about. Never about polite fans who appreciated our work and created fan works of their own in homage. I'm talking about the people who, in any other circumstance, would be ostracized and potentially charged as a nuisance and blight on society. This checkpoint is important. When we've been criticized (on our streams, during games, in private messages, or in commentary) for saying, "fuck the fans," this is entirely and specifically what I meant. There was never any derision towards decent people or our friends in this regard.

All of the above is a montage reel of the worst aspects of it. Of course there was plenty of good. This project and a few other smaller ones that were completed over the years led to me (and us) meeting lifelong friends and creative partners. Some of the audience who have been in our periphery for years have become friends. We even ended up living with or making annual trips to see people we forged such relationships with. While there was a constant blemish on our experience online with the toxic people in these communities, we always, always appreciated the good. Their fulfilment and enjoyment of what we were doing was literally the only reward beyond doing it for ourselves. We earned some money that went immediately back into the project for the first year or so, but then made the choice to immediately cut off that source of income and the various requirements attached to it (such as not using licensed music). We didn't care, whatever we wanted to use in the series, we would, assuming it was available under fair-use. That meant no monetary gain from any of it. And that's what we wanted. 

That didn't stop the more rambunctious sorts from accusing us of silly things like the nebulous "selling out" over the years, but lord knows I'd take one of those hipsters standing at the back of the bar making such a comment over the parasocial nightmares I described earlier. 

Take all of this together. The math looks like this: achievement and value in the production itself with our friends + lifetime connections with people we met through our reach + a multitude of interesting points of view and witnessing the brilliance of our audience following along with our clues - the intense anxiety of the worst of the worst - any hopes of financial considerations = resulting in our experience with the project.

If I was asked if I could hypothetically go back and do it all again, I'd probably say no. Absolutely not. (Obviously, this includes the asterisk of somehow keeping my cherished friends and connections that I have fostered because of this experience. Especially the people I still speak to every day. After all, we're discussing hypotheticals, so it is what it is.) However, if you were to remove those parasites in this same hypothetical, I'd stand up and enthusiastically say yes, a million times yes. I've discussed this with various friends over the years and the overall answer was inconclusive. Ultimately, we decided that, had we never done the series, we don't know if we'd feel better off or not, but at the very least our lives would be completely unrecognizable. That was a comfortable enough middle ground to settle on. I don't regret actually putting all of that time in at all, as it forged lifetime bonds. The work itself and the time with my friends were some of the bests of my life so far. There were just some, clearly, major components that I could do without. 

If you don't know how important this experience was to me, and how much I still, to this day, care about the good people within our audience... well, you don't know me. 

That's all that's really on my mind at the moment regarding this. Over time, people have said that I am unappreciative or dismissive of our audience, and I politely believe that that is utter bullshit. I reject the premise entirely. I cannot stress the importance of the positive takeaways I briefly detailed here enough. I know the negative vastly outweighs the good in this post, but I had locked onto the matters that I know have personally affected my mental health and worldview for the purpose of this stream of consciousness. It was a lot to deal with. There were plenty of lessons to be taken from it. 

Throughout it all, from people both related to and unrelated to these connections, I've been both physically and sexually assaulted, coerced, threatened, and other entirely unpleasant things and forms of abuse from people whom I thought loved or cared about me. I've mishandled numerous personal relationships and neglected my own mental health for ages and now deal with (and therapeutically work through) that anxious guilt. But some of the most lingering pain was knowing that people you thought you had made connections with and assumed to be trustworthy for years, only regarded you as another internet personality to eventually discard. That's a lesson I'll not soon forget. 

Goes without saying that the above isn't about my boys. I recount all of this here if only to help explain why I do not seek those connections with strangers now, or why I may have appeared curt at times in misunderstood interactions. When you feel like every anonymous cold-open is some attempt at getting something from you, some opening salvo on how they can use you, whether just selfishly or with some sick agenda, it becomes stressful to interact. 

Unfortunately, it becomes easier to simply not engage at all.