release

I’ve stopped going on instagram for now. I wish I could say it was for sane reasons, like boycotting meta’s use of AI and data scraping, or getting away from doomscrolling – but in reality it was the narcissistic delusion that my favorite youtuber was checking up on me, and the urge to put out little messages in a bottle for him. I’ve come to a place where I am simply grateful for the joy his comedy brings to my life, and I embrace that fondness in a detached way, but that was the last little vestige of the parasocial connection. 

To be fair, there is one thing that has been cooking in the back of my mind that…I don’t think it’s directly parasocial, but is perhaps giving up too much energy to what is not mine. It’s imagining a Fox Szn mockumentary, and boy does it light me up like no other creative project at the moment. I’m leaning into it, because given how strong the drive and inspiration is, I have to assume it is at least a front for an idea of my own that will emerge at some point.

The core of it would be the father/son connection – that’s what I tried to capture in my most recent comic, although it’s hard to get the full nuance in 7 panels. I really don’t want the dad to be a villain, or even necessarily misguided. From his perspective, his son is passionate, talented, and has all the potential in the world. It kills him to see Ned kneecaped by pride, and a very rigid, naive concept of artistic authenticity. Most artists are making work for the purpose of communication, or connection. There’s a metaphor from the bible I’m about to butcher but it’s something like, you wouldn’t light a lamp and then throw a blanket over it. In the late 90s especially, if you weren’t working with a label and therefore not being played on the radio, your exposure was incredibly limited.

In my head Ned also is not the pure, tortured artist, married to exactly his vision and truth. He wants validation, but he’s in a damned if I do, damned if I don’t situation. Working with a label would potentially get him mainstream recognition, but there is a subculture that would reject him for “selling out”. I imagine he values the opinion of those artists more, but he feels increasingly frustrated and dissatisfied. Being a big fish in a small pond just isn’t enough. But, his dad represents everything superficial about success, and there’s a hit to the ego in telling him “maybe you were right”. But given the cannon lore and style of Last Night, he did cave in the end. 

The part where his dad might become a negative influence is his conception of “success” in music, based on his job as label executive. All day he is working with the objective, numeric “value” given to music within a commercial industry. It’s brutally competitive, and worth is measured and commodified. It would probably be easy to treat Ned like any other artist he is working with – to get album sales up, sell tour tickets, you make more money so we make more money. He wouldn’t mean to exploit his son by any means, and I don’t imagine him really applying negative pressure – at worst maybe expressing frustration that goes back to perceiving his son’s reluctance as imposter syndrome or stubbornness. 

That’s the core of the conflict – I suppose the real villain is capitalism once again, as cringe as it feels to say. But there may also be a message in there for dads about this dance between encouraging and facilitating success, while letting go of the outcome of that effort. And for teen and young adult children, the dance of being receptive to wisdom, while also allowing yourself to hold strong opinions different than your parents, if they really feel true to you.

 I feel like it could be quite heartwarming, and maybe I’ll just have to write it as fanfiction. Selfishly, though, I hope danny does something like that with fox szn someday. I would never want to be prescriptive to any other artist, but I miss so much the way he embodies characters in his comedic acting. To me he is such an exceptional performer, and the “dark”/violent skits he does are so much funnier because he can’t get away from what feels like a very gentle and optimistic core. But now, I release that prayer out into the universe, the digital universe in this case I suppose, and focus back on my own work.