I can’t tell if I just notice and give more importance to coincidences now, or if things are really starting to line up. The professor Trelawney in my brain calls them “synchronicities” and adds more red yarn to her board. Either way, the timing of Nick (Green)’s comeback has kind of floored me.
He’s pursuing music solo now, but he also made a video retrospective on his digital footprint – all the things he regrets or still feels guilt over. For as long as I’ve known him as a creator, he has always suffered from baring his flaws and going against the grain. Quite literally the first month or so after the collab with danny, he attracted the ire of “dgk” stan twitter by refusing to back down on his opinion that Kurtis using “bussin’” as part of a joke tweet was perfectly fine. He and his brother were messy in how they handled it, going on stream and DMing teenage girls, mocking them and asking them to come on stream to debate them. It didn’t give me a great impression but I also understood it – he was still in the middle of transitioning from human to creator. I imagine the rules were muddy and it was a storm of ego and fear and new found power.
I’ve seen that pattern play out with him cyclically. He did a video opening up about his mental health struggles and tentative OCD diagnosis, and I had to tell him it was hard for me not to project my experience of bipolar onto his periods of concerning hyperproductivity and deep depressions. (The irony being my counselor and I have started exploring OCD as I continue to graze at the buffet of mental illnesses). Needless to say, I see a lot of myself in him.
He was the first creator I worked with more than once. He was a dream first client, always kind and encouraging and accommodating. I’ve worked for people since who have shown me how spoiled I was. When I think of him through that lens, though, I’m reminded of Drew’s skit about “well, this guy was nice to me, I don’t think he could really be a bad guy”. I’m so far on the outside I’ll never really know. Gabi Belle might have thrown some shade his way but it was of course impossibly vague.
Side bar – Almost all the time, I am glad the sphere of commentary creators I watch operates in the way it does. When I was still an insufferable MMO pick me girl, I used to subject myself to the commentary scene even farther from God’s light than OG Idubbzz and H3, people like Nick Deorio and AugieRFC. It was the content equivalent of willingly drinking irradiated bleach, but sometimes you just want to feel something. Their content has always revolved around farming each other and their own internal drama, and I cannot even imagine surviving let alone thriving in an environment like that. Finding The Boys in 2020 was very cleansing and validating. For so long, I thought misogyny that rides the line of plausible deniability and cruelty masked as edge was the price of admission to commentary. The tight lid that softer scene of commentary keeps on internal drama is what facilitates the feeling of safety, and I wouldn’t have it any other way……….but sometimes I just want to scream SAY WHAT YOU MEAN, SAY WHO YOU MEAN OR SHUT THE FUCK UP LIKE YOU ALWAYS DO, FUCKING PUSSSYYYYYYYYYYY. The femcel stench is a hard one to purge.
But one other side of me I’ve been slowly strangling this past year and a half, is the Adoring Fan from Oblivion. I look back on some of my DMs with Nick and viscerally cringe, but also feel so sorry for this nervous wreck of a girl who I hardly recognize. I wish I could tell her it’s still asymmetrical if they just find you reasonably pleasant and useful to them. DMs that go days or weeks unanswered, replied to only when they want something from you. It’s not malicious, I don’t even really blame him. Creators at a certain size get spread thin, everyone wants a piece of them. They have to prioritize who gets attention, and people are always falling through the cracks. You can’t take it personally, but if that happens to you, you should take the hint.
Even though I thought that part of me had been mostly healed, when he mentioned NickIsNotGaming in his recent video, with a throwaway sentence about how it was yet another random side project he got bored of and tossed aside, it stung like hell. Looking at the thumbnails I put 10, 15 hours into, pulling an all-nighter to get the channel art he wanted a 24 hour turnaround for, thinking the failure of the channel was partially my fault because I couldn’t make the thumbnails good enough…for him it was nothing. Just one of many talented people he’s sifted through until he found the diamonds he really wanted. (That sounds more bitter than I intend – I learned so much working for him and it was the plunge in the deep end I needed at the time. The way it fizzled out just bruised my ego more than I wish it did.)
Nick, for me, represents the ways I sacrificed my self respect to express a love that was only ever quietly tolerated. Like him, it feels like my digital footprint is tainted. That PandaPufkin will forever be remembered as this embarrassing fan, a grown up 13 year old with all the self awareness of the worst kind of KPOP stan. How fitting it is that I am coming back to that name as I gear up to do art markets, in the same few weeks as he posts this video. And even more so that I am days away from my trip to LA.
I indulged a tarot reading about the trip at the psychic fair, and it was frighteningly positive. (that sounds weird to say, but I went in with the intention of tempering my expectations, and it did the opposite in a big way.) The one little bit of caution she did give was to play it cool. I feel confident I will – I am a completely different person than I was even a year ago – but you have to respect history a bit.
When I went to VidCon in 2023, I attended the meet and greet with Jarvis and ChadChad. I was heightened, and a little rattled when the lady at the front of the queue asked me if I was a chaperone, but I was mostly doing ok. Then Jarvis cold clocked me with the, “Oh, I recognize the name [on the art I had brought them], Danny said you were at the panel yesterday. He noticed.” I feel so bad for them because I don’t know how long I was stunlocked – it was the shock and rush and nausea of freefalling down the first hill of a megacoaster. I think I said, “I’m going to compartmentalize that” or something equally embarrassing, and rushed out after the photo.
The one thing I cling to, the evidence I have that things will be different, is that I am no longer trying to use these creators to fill a void that I did not have the self love to fill myself. In the past, those moments were the tiny scraps of validation that I clung to in a storm of ego and fear and perceived powerlessness. When Nick told me danny was bringing up my art to him and Eddy, when Kurtis shared the VHS I made on his story, the little hits of dopamine from a comment or a like from someone I watched – it was the only fuel my self esteem would accept. One dark night of the soul later, all that seems like peanut oil when I have rocket fuel. There is nothing more powerful than someone with intelligence and passion and nothing left to lose. I hope Nick and I can just keep the momentum.
>>robyns_ramblings 