Theory of an Ouvre

What stands out to you in my catalog?

I have created a tremendous amount of art or “content” as the kids call it, for the internet over the last twenty years, and yet there’s only a few things for which I would consider myself “known.”

When I was in the My Little Pony community, I was first recognized for videos trying to discern the ages of the six main characters thru hints given in the dialog across the first two seasons, and also for a video breaking down the habits by which ponies choose mates in the show; but I became best-known for ardently defending the end of the third season, which was especially controversial among figureheads in the community, and marked the moment many people lost interest in the show. (This happened for me in the Season 4 finale, which is another thing I’d become known for, in particular to people who were going to hate me for distancing myself from that fandom after getting sick of the type of comments my videos always got when I tried to appeal to the community at large).

In the anime community, I am best known for my advocacy of creators and arguments about the ways people talk about anime, for creating the backlash wave against Sword Art Online’s popularity, and for a still-very-popular (and divisive) video decrying the “three episode test” as unnecessary practice, when you can tell that something sucks pretty quickly. I also helped to make it acceptable to call K-On a classic anime on Youtube, showed more love to Ponyo than anyone, and dissected a handful of tentpole shows which has made me kind-of associated with them—at least, enough so that fans of those shows will ask me how my opinions have changed, or if I’ve kept up with the latest franchise incarnations, and so on and so forth.

There’s a lot of fracture in what I’m known for to specific members of my audience who’ve tracked their own route through the jungle of my content; and there is additionally the list inwardly of what I’m “known for” to myself—which often forgets a tremendous amount of what I’ve done until I remind myself by trying to list it all (as I find myself doing a few times a year in one form or another (sometimes live)). At any given time, the list of things I consider myself to be “doing” will for a long time include various projects that never make it to conclusion, and so never become known to anyone else, and eventually I forget about them too because I don’t have reminders of them in the finished product floating around. Sometimes I stumble on stuff like this seven-minute chunk I edited once as a test for this really ambitious project studying the kinaesthetics of every Legend of Zelda game in order, and I remember that I spent more time thinking about and plucking away at trying to realize that video than a substantial number of videos that I spent an afternoon making, and which I’ve never forgotten about because they have millions of views now.

I have no idea how long I’m going to live on this Earth, but every second, I can feel the sensation of how I must be closer to death than I was in the previous moment. My decisions may seem to keep me alive, and so in a sense it’s as though I’m extending my life, but in the sense that there will eventually be a future in which I am dead, and that I am always approaching that future, I know that I am always dying.