On PewDiePie (personal)

no blog entry again. instead: i vent about pewdiepie before bedtime. spoilers? this blog is mostly positive. and also improperly written, as it was not meant to be this long and started out elsewhere.

i have no clue how i turned out the way i am today when i was a huge pewdiepie fan on and off for so much of my time from 10-18ish but i’m very glad. i unfortunately have a lot of respect for Felix as a person but associating with people online who would also like him in less favourable ways did me so much damage back then. so i don’t really give a fuck who likes him and who doesn’t anymore, i don’t care if people really hate him, but i’m glad i could find joy in his content a lot of the time.

christ, when i turned 18 i had a list of goals for myself. stuff like a new diet, small depression related goals, etc, and with it i wrote a list of ‘consequences’ if i failed to live the new lifestyle (spoiler: didn’t last a week). Felix was uploading nearly every day at the time, so one of the consequences was that i could not watch his new video for a whole day. i had a job that made me happy and still one of my favourite things in the day was to come home and watch the newest upload of a deeply problematic man, who at the time i also found cute for some reason (never found him cute before 2020, it was a weird phase).

when i felt like my time as a fan officially closed, it was a meme review where he reviewed memes about amber heard. i was not really following the case but as a feminist and logical person i kinda had a bias to be on the uncommon side of the debate back then. i opened the video and paused when he mentioned it. he said something that sounded like he was trying to be respectful and i appreciated it But have you ever visited that man’s subreddit? At any point in time? i just couldn’t watch the video and clicked off. 

that was his first? or at least one of his first videos in japan. i watched two of his vlogs there as they came out and it was kinda sad, but also nice closure, to me coming to terms with the fact that my interest had finally died.

i think i’m still subscribed? last i saw him in my notifications he had the baby that he was so excited to meet. but i didn’t watch the baby video, and i don’t know his plans now. i know he’s been ‘retired’ for a long time before that, and i’m not really interested in what he does next, but i do have so many feelings to reflect on. as much as the rest of the world will cringe at any positive fluffy feelings on Felix Kjellberg of all people, i can’t have peace until it’s all out.

i started watching pewdiepie the second i entered middle school. i hid in my closet and watched one of his photoshop videos with headphones plugged into my blackberry. i remember thinking ‘i’m 11 now so im old enough’ (i had a rule for myself that i should stay away from all things that cuss, to protect my innocence or something) as if i wasn’t already aware his fanbase was actually younger. i wanted to check him out solely because i knew this indigenous girl who was a huge fan and she was one of my sweeter friends, i just lost contact with her then, and decided to see what the hype was about. me, being the target audience, thought he was hilarious. i followed him closely, i read fanfic, i wanted to buy meaningless youtuber merch, and not having any friends in a new school, i very much just looked forward to watching his videos after school. still, with my headphones on, still not repeating cusses, still thinking this content will taint me somehow, but still laughing.

as time went on and Felix started running into controversies, i was very disappointed and would lose interest in him for sometimes years. but i always came back because nonetheless, i still thought he was funny. maybe that’s problematic of me, because he made some terrible excuses and framed them as apologies, but with adpocalypse (he stopped cussing entirely) i thought he’d have no choice but to change his persona anyway. And he was very open that pewdiepie and felix are nothing alike.

during that time i was a little older, i’ve dabbled in some internet swearing myself 🥸, but the years just kept passing. more people were critical of him. i remember seeing someone say they feel bad for any minorities who grew up around pewdiepie fans, and as a biracial pewdiepie fan i just took a step back for another little while. when i came back there was kinda a chain meme with his fans where they all state their ethnicities. i don’t think it was because of the tweet because some time had passed since it, but i saw how diverse the audience was and then again, to me, my continued interest was justified. this was during Felix’s ‘uncomfortable’ era.. he was having trouble with covid flight restrictions and moving to japan and in many of his videos when there was a topic he wasn’t too familiar with, he’d look visibly uncomfortable.

i think his most awkward video was when he reacted to jubilee’s odd one out with gay people. but he wanted to upload that video anyway, and the whole thing just felt off. no, he wasn’t homophobic, but he did seem kinda shocked that gay people do actually have sex with each other and stuff. god, it was a hard watch. why would he post that?

then i think it was later he opened up about his depression of being in spotlight since he was 19. he became more and more real leading up to his move, he even spoke about abusing alcohol. i really appreciate when idols can talk about the pressures of their work with a pro-recovery framing. i think this is when i started to find him cute.

but all in all, the heard v depp in meme review? i didn’t want to know his thoughts on it, even when i already listened to him say how unbiased he was. i started following other youtubers who are maybe a bit too faux intellectual for me to ever feel the way i did with pewdiepie’s channel. but i’m actually glad he’s doing better in regard to his alcoholism, i’m glad he’s happy with the love of his life, his child, and living in a country where nobody knows his name. but i mostly wrote this because today i saw a rightwinger post about how The Boys, show known to make fun of rightwingers (but they love it anyway), ‘unfairly’ label him a nazi. am i mad about that? long story short, i don’t give a fuck. 🤷🏽

i don’t think he’s a nazi i think he’s extremely stupid, insensitive, and bigoted. he once found out live on camera that sweden participated in the slave trade. how am i supposed to believe that??? i’m aware how terrible that ‘defence’ sounds, but it’s true, and even he knows it’s true. as your local Kjellberg historian (not by choice) you can trust me on that. but i don’t care if others think he’s a nazi, in this day especially, where he has renounced his relevance very long ago. and is fully aware how shitty he used to be. 

fin