I think I'll always feel genuinely so bad for how the internet picked apart every minuscule detail of their private lives for YEARS. I don't even blame them for not uploading the way that they used to, although it makes me still hope that they will someday. Their videos hold a lotta nostalgia and I think I'll always miss them
The fact that people would spread things like the v-day video that they were obviously uncomfortable with made it difficult for me to admit I liked them because I didn't wanna be grouped in to that
@@sharkguy27 see the impression i've gotten from the things they've both said is that there were some romantic feelings but they never seem to have dated for real?and the way fans acted probably played a role as to why?idk at least this whole thing doesn't seem to have driven them apart which is good
@@chrysasouli8549 I mean, Dan confirmed there was something romantic between them and they are soulmates, but it makes sense why he doesn't want to confirm or deny if they have or are currently dating. But we don't really know, and probably won't know for years. Maybe even ever.
@@chrysasouli8549 I mean we will never know the story 100% but Dan said in his coming out video that they at least at one point were more than platonic. But the biggest give away is that they're both in their 30s and just bought a house together. Living together in a rented apartment or house in your 20s is common among friends, but buying a house much more permanent, especially in your 30s. If they weren't dating it'd be a dumb thing to do cause what if one of them meets someone and wants to move in with them just a year after buying a house together? Are they just gonna sell it? So I'm very certain they are a couple. But it doesn't matter, cause the point is their content isn't about their relationship and it can be enjoyed no matter if they're a couple or just friends :)
i think dan and phil are the only creators from my middle school/early teen years i would unapologetically start watching again if they posted together again. they radiate comfort for me even if my shortlived phan shipping phase was deeply deeply cringe
From my perspective as a bi guy who was heavily closeted nothing was worse then when people figured out or sensed you were queer and relentlessly tried to get you out of the closet. Seeing Dan get that treatment I totally understand why he acted like he did. As a side note being called an “uwu smol bean” should be considered a slur.
I think another good point to bring up is how grossly misogynistic the phantom was towards women that Dan and/or Phil were friends with; most notably Catrific. I remember at the time when she did a makeup collab video with them, people on Tumblr, Instagram, etc. ripped her apart just for being their friend that just so happened to be a woman. There is still an uncomfortable amount of phan speculation in the comments of the video. I always felt bad for her because I was in the minority that genuinely enjoyed her content and overall personality - not just because she was friends with them. I know that there were other women that got the same treatment, but Cat always seemed to get the worst of it. But all in all, I loved your video talking about the Phandom. You honestly took every word right out of mind and laid it on the table so concisely. Definitely excited to see more videos from you in the future!
@@liyre4189 yeah, exactly! i never really saw people be mean towards louise (the blonde lady) since she was married at the time and had a child and i think the phandom saw her as ‘safe’ which is really icky
I met them in 2016, and I yelled “oh my god it’s Phan” because I went to say “Phil an Dan” and realised how bad that sounded backwards bc it’s always been Dan and Phil, and apologised frantically and they both got the absolute giggles over it. Phil is one the worlds sweetest human beings and he gives the greatest hugs of all the famous people that I’ve ever met.
oddly enough, once you apologized and they figured out the situation, i bet they could even relate to shouting out something that makes sense in your head but is actually really awkward when said aloud 😂😂😂
I met them back in 2013/2014 by chance in a coffee shop, I was about 13 at the time. I completely agree. Phil was so freaking sweet and I’m grateful to have met both of them. Also grateful to Dan for taking a picture with me, even though he clearly did not want to be there lol
Honestly, when I was a young, closeted lesbian, I found it easier to engage with mlm fanworks and shipping because it didn't make me have to go to the place of questioning myself. It felt like it was a layer removed. But the pressure put on these men is unbelievable. Reminds me of some of the issues with Little Mix. Boundaries are vital.
Im a gay man and im seeing lots of comments that echo yours about being a young lesbian and honestly im not sure how to take it. Like it made the lesbians feel better but the fetishisation of gay men negatively effect gay men, which you then all probably contributed to it.
@@Sl1mch1ckens for real had real life friends try to "ship" me and my other friend, makes matters worse they were asexual due to trama and i am very sexual, some gross opposite dynamic that sounds out of some fanfic, she was also a "lesbian" but dated men, really dont get it either youre allowed to be uncomfortable my friend.
My favorite era of Dan and Phil content was their gaming channel, and I'm not even that into gaming honestly. I think that after all the years of being the focus of really invasive speculation and people picking them apart, putting out content that was still theirs and involved a lot of their personality and dynamic but still didn't put the spotlight directly on them was a really good idea.
Same!! I was not on tumblr at all and was not a Phan shipper or involved at all. I guess someone would say a normal phan. So the gaming channel was one of my favorite time/memories and of course the crafts channel
Another thing that really bothered me was now normalized shockfics (i.e the hat fic, the skin fic, etc) were at that time. As a young teen, I thought they were just gross and weird stories, but now that I’m older I realized how morally horrible those were. I know that shockfics are written to be shocking to the reader, but their audience was young teens like myself reading stories that contained a lot of sexual violence, gore, animal abuse, and torture just for the sake of virtual street cred.
I read the hat fic out of morbid curiosity from people saying DONT READ IT with 0 explanation, and after the internet lost its collective shit at Dan referencing it. I had to look Dan and Phil in their eyes at a meet and greet a year later knowing what I had read, and it really rode home to little teen me that oh my God these are real people who probably just sit at home during supper in silence staring their plate of spaghetti wondering how their lives have turned into this. Really put shit into perspective.
@@badvibesonly3526 The backpack fic made me feel sick for weeks, i really shouldn't have read it but people kept saying how bad it was and i just couldn't believe it would be THAT bad
@@kayllama20 i can give you the details if you want but t's rly rly gross and after all these years it's still the most disgusting thing i've ever read
@@badvibesonly3526 Oh god, I can only imagine how you felt in that moment. I’m glad that (for the most part) shockfics like that have fallen out of favor because fans realize how fucked up it is to write literal torture p0rn and shove it in creators faces. I’m not putting any blame on Dan whatsoever, but I know that those fics got waaay more popular and 1000x more disturbing after he referenced it.
I remember watching dan's video on fanfiction, and in the comments was an innocuous line about a hamster/gerbil (cant remember now), and everyone was replying with horror. I am about 12 at this point, I am really sheltered, andI've never read fanfic before. So baby me thinks "it can't be that bad" and I look it up. I don't even remember the plot of what I read, but it really grossed me out and shocked me, and I remember feeling really uncomfortable, and I avoided fanfiction entirely for a year until a friend recommended one in a fandom I liked. I will never forget how awful reading that made me feel, and even though I laugh about my intro to fanfic now, it just hits home what young fans could be reading, and what Dan and Phil had to deal with.
That "queer baiting" tweet makes me so angry that I can't even express it. I hate, hate, hate shipping actual people together. Characters in fiction? Totally fine. But speculating about the sex lives of real people and even pressuring them to be something just because you think it's ~ hawt ~ is absolutely inexcusable and downright creepy.
I have a confession to make. I accidentally started the whole sonic underwear drama when I was around 12-14. It was one of the cooking videos, I noticed the underwear, and I remembered that Phil got them on holiday in Florida. So I made a joking comment asking about it, fully under the impression that it was just friends sharing clothes. Then the shitstorm happened. Dan ended up disabling comments on that video. I still feel bad about it today at the age of 25. I'm a queer person myself and I can't imagine the personal drama I accidentally caused in their lives over that.
Don't feel too bad about it :/ I'm sure people would have speculated about it even without your comment dude, they over analyzed anything they did. Seriously don't beat yourself over a comment!!
@@indigo150 thank you ❤️. It really makes me cringe to think about, but I wouldn't blame another kid in my shoes at the time. Trying to extend that logic to myself 😭.
They definitely became "comfort youtubers" for me since their videos literally raised me from middle school to my current adult life now (as i'm sure other members of the "phandom" can relate to). I now just get embarrassed when I think of my intrusive 'phan' past because i DEFINITELY did not understand the separation between "real life human" and "internet persona" (which i think is also mostly due to the very close parasocial relationship dan and phil had with their viewers)
I don't really think it's great to call them deranged especially considering everything said in the video about shipping (although I admit I understand wanting to use that kind of phrasing sometimes because people can just be.. so creepy. but still)
@@mayacollette i myself am a kpop stan so i’m speaking on experience of what i see every day lol the narrative some of the stans create in their heads are actually terrifying
I always felt so bad for them. Shipping real life couples can easily become SUPER toxic very fast. Look at how One Direction fans basterdized Harry and Louis' friendship. I truly believe that the fans ruined it. It cannot be easy to be a public figure especially when everyone is looking at every single tiny detail of your life and looking for "clues" when you're not even trying to give any.
As a woman who heavily identified as a phan, I think it's because I was queer, but I also had a lot of internalized misogyny. It was much easier to enjoy two gay men being cute and in a relationship than it was for me to see two lesbians together and have to grapple with what that meant for me. It was a "safer" way for me to enjoy queerness without having to examine my own feelings towards women.
this has me rethinking a lot about my queer identity holy shit😭 my phannie phase was when i was like 11-14 and then i think i consciously started recognizing i was gay at like 16, but i remember a lot of my initial doubts were because i didn't have queer crushes when i was a child or the other "i've always known/been like this since i could remember" moments. but like maybe the hyperfixation on dan and phil and the comfort i got out of shipping them was in fact an indicator. much to think about here so thank u for that lmaooo
Except the vital point that it wasnt "two gay men enjoying a relationship", so i think also you maybe need to aknowledge that at the time you were projecting your queerness onto them.
My fingers are crossed that the more mainstream depictions of queer romances we get the less likely people will feel the need to speculate about queerness. I genuinely don't think the Sherlock or Supernatural fandoms would have been nearly as prominent during the 2010s if there was any competing mainstream show that actually paid off by depicting a well-written romance between adult men as lead characters. The more genuine depictions of romances between people who are the same gender we get (like, just in the last month there have been Our Flag Means Death, Heartstopper, and Severance, all completely different shows that released in the last month by different streaming services that defy queerbaiting norms) the less time and need we have to keep searching for absolutely any semblance of queerness among characters (and real people) who might not ever identify as queer.
I think so too. On the other hand though, there are people who ship men and women together, fictional or not, who are extremely intense and take these ships way too seriously and even harass the people they ship (or, if they're fictional, the people who wrote the characters) for not dating each other. Like Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez, or Jaiden animations and theodd1sout. Admittedly though, I see it a lot more with w/w and m/m ships than I do with w/m ships. Like you said, if the LGBTQ community had more representation in the media, then they wouldn't try to make everyone seem gay or force their headcannon and ships on people. They just want to feel representation and not be alone. It's still wrong though, at least when it's done to real people.
Exactly what I've been thinking about for ages! When you're in the desert for too long, you're going to get an apparition, cause you're so desperate you'll cling to anything. As the above person pointed out it wouldn't stop this kind of shipping completely. We are wired to see connections/patterns, even where there are none; in prehistoric times it kept us alive. Is there a deadly animal in the bushes or is it just the wind, better run just in case. It also got us out of them times, through innovation. But like the almighty algorithm, getting more advanced, but dealing with even more complex situations, there's going to be some glitches/issues. I just hope that one day it and our cave man brains learn to catch up on day. Thank you for coming to my ted talk.
I 100% was an intense phan shipper. I was very into proof and conspiracies, I even ran a Tumblr blog where I would post about my 'findings'. Now I'm in college and looking back my behaviour was so immature, invasive, and disgusting. I hope that young teens in fandoms can see videos like this and correct their behaviour so we see less and less repeats. Great vid. :)
When I was in high school, there was a gay rumour about me and my best friend. It really fucked me up at age 14 and I started overanalysing all of my interactions with her, to the point it damaged my friendship. I realised I was gay at age 24, much later than my other friends around me, and I think it was pushback from the rumour which stopped me realising it earlier. I can’t even imagine how it feels on a huge scale!
You said a 'little bit' of fetishisation.... i think it's more than we all care to admit. Women are allowed to get away with fetishising gay men because it's usually through the lens of fiction and art rather than real exploitation. dan and phil being real people blurred that moral line even more, yikes. a lot of teenage girls fall into the trap of shipping being supposed allyship, but at the end of the day, it's a little bit fetishy. which isn't an evil thing - but i think it should be talked about more the way that male fetishisation of wlw is.
can we remember the real reason that mlm is much more popular than wlw in shipping from women? Because it's not solely homophobic fetishisation. It's misogyny. Female characters are not written well and their relationships are not as compelling. Both with other women and with men - there aren't as many good female characters as there are men, and when there are, they're not the main characters, or they don't have as many interesting nor compelling relationships with other characters. F/F has the least amount of fics on ao3, and people wonder why - give your favourite media that you criticise for having all these gay fetishisers the fucking bechdel test. Or, look at the screentime of the women. Sorry for ranting, and i'm talking fiction here and not real life like you did in the latter half of your comment, but jeez this is a misconception that pisses me off.
@@greysonholtzI mean, yeah, there are more well written male characters than female characters out there. But also, people will ship poorly written male characters with each other too. Even if they're very minor characters with very little depth. The reality is that in 2024 there are many, many, many wonderful female characters and yet still it's mxm relationships and male characters that women and girls mostly gravitate to. You're absolutely right about the element of misogyny, but I don't think you can place the blame of that misogyny on there simply not being enough well written female characters out in the world.
As someone who stans Harry and engages in social media I can say the ship culture is homophobic, misogynistic and creepy. Till these days there are hundred of larries that believe H & L are in a secret relationship. They call their relationships with women “stunts” and “pr” and there a categories behind this ship like “no stunts” which means larries believe Louis son is not his biological son but just someone else’s kid to hide the real relationship between L&H 😒🙄 MOST OF THESE are straight women and they come up with these laughable and silly theories that don’t have evidence and I fear shippers will never truly die
i think you did a good job of showing the realistic idea that it was bound to happen, but this was very focused on the fan perspective and not as much on how dan and phil deserve autonomy and privacy, which is what i would have taken from the title. still a good video, just different from what i expected. both perspectives matter in this but i tend to prioritize their view because of how much they had to go through between stalking, relentless harassment-type comments, people trying to find their apartments, "that video" and a fuck ton more. i just have little room left to care about people who can find so much room to ship and project healthy LGBTQ representation onto fictional people but instead choose to put real people in a position where they feel their fame can largely be owed to people fantasizing about them. that's so... dehumanizing. i say all of that as a huge fan for many years, and ex active fandom member. i watched that incessant behavior and when i started observing from the perspective of the person being fetishized (not in the sexual sense, the "put on a platform to gawk at in a dehumanizing, reductive way" type) i started to feel too guilty and uncomfortable to partake anymore. i wish the conversation was more centered around that, not to "protect" grown adults who could speak for themselves, but so we can be better people and take responsibility for the harm we caused. also "VICTORIAN GHOST BOYS" LMFAO
yeah looking back on the behaviour is truly shocking. like the way "that video" was being passed around on tumblr on like password protected pages is quite baffling.
@@amentrison2794 yup. people thought it was entertainment and nothing more. i know most of the fandom was comprised of young people whose judgment skills weren't great but it's still depressing to think about how much damage that did to their well-being..
@@hnktbt I agree. they way parasocial relationships ride that line between being both intimate and entertainment leads to some really bad behaviour. and it's so odd to put the situations into the context that they may have technically been "right" which almost feels worse
@@amentrison2794 it is 100x worse, yeah. if they had both been straight and/or not together at all ever, it would have been SO much simpler because none of this would have deeply affected things about themselves (mainly dan i guess) that they had to hide out of internalized shame. we basically kicked him while he was down and he just had to smile through it because if he's not grateful for his fans he's the bad guy, even if the fanbase is toxic to him and he never intended on having it. i've spent a lot of time mulling this over clearly 😅
i watched their videos from a young age, but was never apart of the fandom, i adored dan in particular for his classic relatability™, but whenever i tried to look at anything fandom related i was bombarded with phan stuff and while i 100% understood the speculation there was always something off putting about the lengths some people would bring it to (to clarify i guess i’m saying i was a casual fan? 😅)
I remember watching them when I was in my freshman year of high school and trying DESPERATELY to find other fans who *didn't* ship them. I think that's the main reason I eventually stopped watching them. I couldn't look them up without being bombarded by shippers, so I just... didn't. Kinda sucks because I did really enjoy their content, but I'm so glad I don't have to harbor guilt about my Dan and Phil phase.
god, hard same!! I found and fell in love with their videos in 2012, and I fell out of the fandom hard around the time they were reaching peak popularity in 2015 bc I couldn't stand most of the fans, who were being obsessive and invasive about their privacy.
girl you got that sharpie on damn point, transported me straight to 2013 and knocked the wind right out of me. ouch! thank you queenie we love the pain 🥲
watching this video made me question why dnp stayed in youtube for so long. it’s impressive how they’ve been dealing with years of disrespect. they’re not as active anymore and people still find ways to be rude to them. this has always been a very strange fandom that i’ve always had really mixed emotions about it.
I was on the internet during the Phan ship wars and stuff. And while I did occasionally watch their content. The aggressive shipping and drama caused by it all kept me from actually watching their videos. So I didn't get into their channels until like 2018/early 2019. They make great content and I would consider them both "comfort creators" as their videos are easy to pick up, relatable, and even inspiring. But I'm so glad I skipped the 2012-2017 drama. And I'm so proud of how far they've come.
This is an incredible video. I started watching Dan and Phil way back in 2012, but the invasive culture of the fanbase kept me as a pretty much silent viewer who hardly engaged (beyond watching every single video they made on all channels for years). I remember being really uncomfortable at how determined people were to learn everything about their private lives. Years later, after realizing that I’m a lesbian, I feel like I better understand just why their content was so comforting to me, and why I was so bothered by people’s refusal to respect their privacy.
I feel so bad when I think about how they must have felt. Once in an English class my teacher called me out for using the world ‘partner’ in a essay about how I saw myself in 10 years and everyone laughed. I just imagine it being X10000 worse than that and it makes me super sad.
I never shipped them because I know how frustrating and upsetting it is for people to assume your sexuality :( People in high school used to think I was gay for my best friend and it really bothered me so yeah I can't imagine millions of people thinking I was dating her
I'm so thankful that my phan phase was the most intense when I was 16-18, not 13 like most people's here because at least I understood that these are real people and not characters
Yeah. Having a phan phase during middle school, like 2018-2019, it was more shunned because the culture was more around not shipping irl people directly. Although, I did still read phanfics (god I hate that term) and I am annoyed at myself for participating in the culture. lmao i don't recommend 13-14 year olds having a wattpad for that exact reason
I remember finding Dan and Phil when I was in middle school and wasn’t immune to internet shipping culture, but I read like one fanfiction for them before going “yea this is weird” and as I kept getting older I got more and more uncomfortable with the culture of shipping real people. My heart genuinely goes out to Dan and Phil, they were so formative in my life and having so many people speculate on your personal life like that couldn’t have been easy.
I specifically remember when I actually read a phan fic out of curiosity and the whole time I was thinking “I’d enjoy this way more if it wasn’t about real people.”
as a former relatively active member of their fandom from 2015 to 2016, the way shipping them and talking very casually about personal things regarding their relationships was normalized was...very weird. you'd see talk about who tops/bottoms, clips from the forbidden video, and very bizarre fics shared around on a typical tuesday afternoon. i'll admit, i took part in those conversations since i was young and wasn't aware of how Weird that was, but now that i'm older now, i realize how weird it is that all those conversations were normalized. i feel bad for them knowing that they were struggling to accept themselves while the entire internet was fantasizing about them dating. but besides all of that, i really enjoyed watching them and being a fan. the two of them managed to create an environment where i could feel safe and relaxed while watching their content, and they helped me through a really tough year, so i'm glad that they did what they did. i don't keep up with them often nowadays, but i look back on their videos with very happy memories
You posted this at such a good time! I recently fell down the Dan and Phil rabbit hole and I'm currently in the process of binging their Sims 4 series 😂😂
I also think it's interesting to note a lot of the normalization of "shipping" came from older women, at least from what i saw. Some of the biggest phan-related twitter accounts i remember during my phase (i was on twitter but not tumblr) were almost all definitely old enough to know better. One of them i remember being a woman in her early 20's whose friends always jokingly referred to as a "demon phannie" because she was simply that obsessed and creepy about it, but the fact it got reduced to just some joke probably contributed to a LOT of younger queer tens just accepting and normalizing this mindset
oh yea the “demon phannie” thing that happened was absolutely wild on tumblr too. applying that name to themselves jokingly in a weird attempt to forgive/lighten the obsessive behavior
@@adrianr3885 yeahh the fact the worst and most obsessive behaviours around the possibility of dan and phil being together was treated as just a “haha funny joke” made the concept of “shipping” them as a whole just not feel like that big of a deal. I never really thought about how it might affect them in real life because well… i was 12 in 2016 and i was just going along with what all the cool older ladies with the huge followings said was okay :/
I wasn't in the phandom besides watching some videos here and there but from my experience in the supernatural fandom the people who shipped actors together, not just the characters, were older women...
I've been watching them since 2015 and the shipping thing got me really uncomfortable. I loved and still love their vibe, together and separate, they have a chemistry that not everyone has, and I love their relationship (whatever it is), but everyone smashing them together in everything made them, and some of us, feel like their individual traits and themes weren't as loved as the joint content :(
I think this video was recommended to me because i still watch Dan & Phil. Really interesting & I really enjoyed hearing about the story and what’s happened over the years. You must have put a lot of work into this, thank you! 😀
the fact that they remained close through all that very public speculation is crazy to me and very admirable. i have a lot of sympathy for younger me, but i genuinely regret my participation in the toxic parts of the phandom. also, i really appreciate the kindness you have when you talk about these topics, for both creators and fans.
This isn’t that important, but I think it’s fair to also note that a LOT of “girls” into gay tumblr shipping turned out to be gay trans men when they were older (I am one of them lol) , or just queer in general. It’s not always that it was underlying misogyny and hate for women characters. I understand that absolutely was a factor in many cases, so I’m not dismissing it. But it can be a little exhausting when ppl imply that gay slash fiction & stuff is born from misogyny. Sometimes it’s just gay people enjoying gay stuff. All that being said, none of it was normal with Dan and Phil LOL
i'm so damn glad i found your channel, you release blocked cringe memories from my brain every single time you post in a way that no other commentary channel ever could, and I kinda love it
as an afab queer person, the Dan and Phil fandom on tumblr between late 2013 and early 2016 was the first place I really discovered queer identities and the majority of the people I interacted with were teenaged queer femmes or young non binary/trans people. the shipping culture was toxic and should not have been as intense and invasive as it was, especially with the hindsight of Dan’s coming out video, but at the time I think wanting Dan and Phil to be queer (for me at least) came from a desperate want to see more openly queer people online or otherwise that I admired and related to. They were my biggest idols as a. Teen, and i think a large part of it was me projecting my queerness onto people I looked up to. looking back, this wasn’t the smartest move, but I do think Dan and Phil should be proud of the queer communities they inadvertently formed online that I know helped a lot of people through their identity struggles and allowed people to feel much less alone in a very isolating time of life.
This!!! The fandom really helped me come to terms with my queerness and also understand so much about queerness in general, even if it wasnt about Dan and Phil themselves but simply their queer fans
Personally, I was SUCH a fan back in the day (starting 2015 or so) but never cared abt shipping particularily much, though ofc you couldn‘t avoid it I mostly just…used their videos to learn english and have a good laugh, as the average european gay does yk
same here! it helped me so much with learning british english and their videos were my coping mechanism - never really got into the shipping it sucks how bad it got :(
I watched these two when I was around 13/14 and it was the first time I was allowed complete unrestricted assess to the internet. I liked gaming and I liked their content but unfortunately it was SO easy to get sucked into the social media side of things. I didn’t know what love was at that age, I didn’t understand sex. I was so unbelievably influenced by the other 14 year olds turning their lives into some sort of reality show that I think at some points I forgot they were even real people. They just became characters. I stopped watching them when I was 16 and matured more, I focused more on school and I had other interests to attend. Looking back as a 19 year old I see how awfully cringe I was and I deeply regret any mental harm I may have contributed to them. They are real people and we had real effects onto them. I know they aren’t the only people who deal with toxic fans online but they’re a good example, it just scares me how much I was influenced by others on social media at that age. I was fully ride or die in that fandom and I’d be very careful letting my own kids have the same amount of acsess until they are around 16 too.
I won’t lie, throughout my time being fans of DnP, I genuinely thought people were joking when they “accused”/analysed their personal relationship as a romantic/sexual one. Only when Dan came out and a few thinkpieces also came out about the Phandom did I actually think people were serious in analysing the interactions between these two people. I just genuinely don’t understand why people would care about the private lives of DnP. I still watch Phil, and it’s just so comforting. Thank you for this video. :)
this is such a wonderful and articulate take on what was a pretty uhh happening…period? in Dan and Phil’s careers lol. I appreciate you so much for this video It’s also been interesting reading through the comments because, a lot of people have talked about how they were a safe space and some of them may have projected their own needs onto them (such as being queer, being romantically involved etc). Which for me to realise that I actually considered them as a safe space for the total opposite reason? They felt safe to me /because/ they were two best friends living together, and as someone who has eventually come out as aroace, I realise in hindsight they were maybe the first example in my life of people who could share a life platonically (to our knowledge) which for obvious reasons appealed to me. And I think regardless of what they choose to disclose/not to disclose going ahead, i feel so grateful that despite everything their friendship has held strong and that they continue to control the narrative around what they choose to reveal to us. And I think it’s lovely that most of us have come to the same conclusion as a fandom :”)
I have a bit of a similar experience! The fact that they were so affectionate with each other while not being romantically involved (or if they were then well, that's for them to know and for us never to find out), and this specific type of banter with innuendos that didn't mean anything really, was really comforting for my teenage self who would figure out 2 years after starting to watch them in 2016 that she's ace and most probably aro too. I did go into the rabbit hole of fan theories at some point, you really couldn't avoid it once you stepped onto phandom tumblr, but it was very clear to me when people were getting too aggressive about it. It might help that I stumbled into the parts where it was done more jokingly than hardcore proof ™ searching, but yeah. The possibility that you can be this affectionate and clearly have warm feelings towards another person without it being necessarily romantic was something I haven't yet realised I really needed
Exactly the same for me!! I was into them in early high school, and was on the aroace spectrum without knowing yet. It was so comforting to me to see a version of young adulthood that meant I could still like weeb things and be goofy and live with a best friend forever instead of the traditional "marriage and kids" idea that icked me the hell out.
yes omg this is how I feel. as an aroace person I find sm comfort in the idea that I might find a lifelong platonic companion like they've found in each other. this is part of my kpop obsession too, I'm so jealous of the close friendships and constant companionship groups like svt have. idgaf whether Dan and Phil are together or not, I just love observing their friendship
i think the biggest issue i had in the phandom and with some of its members is the way people would act like they owned dan and phil and had a right to know everything about them whenever they wanted to. And i also have seen a lot of fetishizing these men in very inappropriate and uncomfortable ways and making things hyper sexual that dont need to be
the phandom is one of my favorite things to rant about and ive been rewatching a lot of dan and phil recently and im so glad someone has made a video about it
I remember first starting to question my sexuality around the time I discovered Dan and Phil and since most of the people around me were super disapproving, it was comforting to see youtubers like Tyler Oakley and Troye Sivan and Dan and Phil being able to interact with eachother like that, and be accepted for it. I'm totally not saying DnP were something romantic at that point, but I didn't have a lot of good friends either and they had the relationship that I dreamt of. But shipping real people can get way too out of hand. there were so many weird memes and fics and stuff going around, and it was all kind of just accepted. After they kind of stopped posting and the fandom died down I think everyone kind of realized how screwed up it was? But it got as bad as the Dream and George stans for awhile there, if not worse
I got into them through their gaming channel wayyyy after the whole Phan shipping phenomenon and I thought they were either just besties or together without telling us which really didn't matter to me xD I just want more Dil Howlter, bring ur son back!!!
i had been in the dan and phil fandom since 2016 up until this year when i finally found something else to be interested about, so my entire teenage life was dedicated to these two men with essentially nothing else coming in between them. during this period in my life, i really had no idea what i found so comforting about these people, but between the years of 2018-2020, a lot of fans became much more self-aware about the potentially harmful behavior us fans were exhibiting onto dan and phil, like mlm fetishization, dehumanization, and just being creepy in general. though this whole era was so necessary, it made me super worried about my own position. i thought i played into this issue and it made me question why i was in the fandom to begin with. but with them settling down and wrapping up their big duo youtube content, it made a lot of room in my brain for me to move on to another interest. i quite literally hadn't been involved in anything else except dan and phil for like an upwards of 6 years straight, and this includes the periods where they were suuuuper inactive. though, something i find very interesting and notable now is how the worst years of my life, periods where i was doubtful, confused and upset with myself, corresponded with the time i spent in this fandom. and looking back on it, and especially with the help of your video, i've come to the realization that this attachment i had wasn't rooted in creepiness, they were just comforting, and i feel like a veeery large majority of fans could agree on this. like you said, their relationship and dynamic was so alluring because it was among one of the few, if not the only, same sex relationships that potentially weren't platonic on youtube. youtube is special in a way that creators never quite feel as untouchable as celebrities, so adding that to the dan and phil experience and seeing how normal and natural their relationship is was like. revolutionary. it was so important to so many kids who ended up discovering they were lgbtq+ to see a relationship like this because they were seeing something they never knew was possible. i think that's why i kind of didn't need them anymore when i finally came to terms with the fact i was gay and nonbinary. though, without a doubt, i absolutely would have never reached this stage of self-acceptance without them.
one thing that made me feel comfortable as a tween was that dan was publically vocal about fanfiction writers and fanart creators being artists. it's a really important part of why the phandom was creating content by the tons, as they both used to actively interact with and uplift fanartists, validating the interest tumblr invested into dan and phil. i've seen comments along the lines of, "why did dan and phil stay on youtube for so long if they were harassed all the time", and i feel as though this video doesn't do dan and phil's genuine appreciation of their audience justice. they kept trinkets and wore clothes gifted to them; for a few years they changed their headers weekly using fanart. my point is that most fans weren't coming from a place a malice, and dan and phil both acknowledged that themselves. this isn't to excuse incessant demands some fans expected of dan and phil, i just feel the community that came from the two outgrew it.
I was very active in the phandom around 2014-2016. I dont recall ever seeking them out to harass them about their relationship or their sexuality, but I wrote fics and I read fics and i didn’t really care much that they were actual people. I didnt feel guilty about it back then, as it was a post 2012 phandom that we lived in where dan and phil were making videos reading phanfic and going through their tumblr tags. I had my fics up on ao3 up until dan’s coming out video. I dont think it ever occurred to me (a 20 year old queer -in 2019) that Dan would have been going through the same kind of struggles that i was going through but amplified to extremes due to him being a much more public figure than i was obviously. Like you said, just me having 1-2 people asking me if i was gay felt like the end of the world, i cant imagine having a horde of people on the internet not only asking but insisting that I was gay and trying to prove that i was dating my best friend. I genuinely hope that my memory is solid that i never reached “demon phannie” status. But even so, I don’t think I’ll ever stop feeling guilty about the way i felt about phan back then. I don’t think I’ll ever not be sorry about it. I don’t think I’ll ever forgive myself for it. That being said, their collabs and the gaming channel bring me so much joy and i dearly hope that we may see more of them on a more regular basis at some point
i have been a fan of d&p since 2013; they have had such a positive impact in my life. i personally didn't think they were romantically together until dan mentioned it in his coming out video, but if they had announced back during their "prime" that they were romantically involved/had been together/announced their sexualities, i wouldn't have minded one bit ~ as long as the two of them were happy and comfortable being themselves than that's all that mattered to me. i am so thankful to have watched them become the men they are today and i am happy to have them in my life. i still watch both dan and phils videos to this day and keep up with them every now and then. whilst sometimes i do miss the "old days" of their youtube careers, i am happy that they are able to express themselves and do what they want without the phandom analysing their every move and what they post.
As a young kid who didn't even know what queerness was, I imprinted on Dan and Phil fast and intensely and while I didn't actively ship them, I definitely dabbled in the phandom. You hit the nail on the head. I'm on the aromantic spectrum and I figured out through Dan and Phil what I wanted my ideal relationship to look like: a queer platonic partnership with someone who shares my interests. I never actively shipped them because their public relationship opened my eyes to the different ways love could look, and how I wanted love to look in my life. Im still figuring myself out but I'm endlessly grateful for their content and it's influence on me. Dan's new stuff is incredible and relatable, I saw him live in my city and loved it. I'm excited for this new era.
Omg this is so weird because I've recently been binge watching your videos and I really wanted to recommend you talk about Dan and Phil. I've been a phannie since 2015 and I still love them and consider myself a phan (cringe ik) and I find their "history", for a lack of a better word, very interesting. When I was 13 I was all about phan and unfortunately I fell into that crazed fan category. a few years later I realized it's really dehumanizing and invasive. And looking back at how I and many other fans acted feels like a fever dream on how tf did anyone think this was okay at all. I also blame the fact that most fans were probably young at the time and couldn't grasp the concept of boundaries. Nowadays I steer clear of shipping real people, seeing how it nearly tore DnP's friendship apart I just don't think it's worth it.
i just saw a comment saying “we’ve got what we wanted” on a speculation video after they came out like these are real human beings not fictional characters u freaks 😭
you really keep blessing us with these videos, make sure to take time for yourself too!! i just hope posting so much recently hasnt left you burnt out!!
Man this was such an important phase of my tweens - I spent wayyyy too much time on them, honestly. I remember the hours upon hours I would spend reading fanfiction or scrolling along fanblogs on tumblr... I naturally started watching them less and less after a while but goddamn their videos are - as everyone else has been saying - sooo comforting. I feel bad about the sexualisation and ...dowright weird shit the phandom came up with.. I truly hope they weren't influenced by it too much
in my opinion the major reason for this was people treating dan and phil like photorealistic fictional characters made to be shipped instead of like real people with a normal friendship
now i wouldn't have minded if they revealed they were in fact a couple but also i wish the toxic fans didn't maybe drive them off the internet it was like when i said "ship what you want but stop bringing destiel up to jensen ackles he isn't into it" and they ignored me saying ship what you want and said i was telling them not to ship destiel when that wasn't the point i was making. so yeah there are so many toxic people who don't get that there is so boundaries to shipping.
i’m so glad someone finally brought this up! i was a fan of theirs for around 3 years or so and saw them on tour n shit. i was for sure one of those phan shippers but when i saw someone else on the internet say smth abt how shipping irl ppl is wrong, i checked myself and haven’t done that since. and i’m a kpop stan now so i see a lot of the same patterns of queer fetishization/infantilization and am like “did y’all not learn or smth” but then realize not everybody was in the phandom like i was😭
as a 12-15 yo fem kid struggling with my identity i projected a lot of myself onto dan and phil and wrote a LOT of phanfiction. and it was fucked up!!! and i regret a lot of that and posting it publicly because i realize now i was venting about my own situations by projecting it onto them. i was DEEP in the phandom 2015-2019 and i’m so glad i was able to get out of that. great video, thank you for explaining everything so well!!
I think shipping real people is absolutely fine as long as it’s done /within fandom spaces/ that do not bother or try to intrude on real people’s lives. Don’t ask invasive questions and don’t try to push things on people unless those people explicitly invite fandom to do so! Also as you said I think the scrutiny put on afab fandoms (as compared to, say football fandom) is mostly out of misogyny because how dare girls explore art and emotions. Additionally, I don’t think fanfic needs to be ‘healthy’ at all, just like traditional fiction is not ‘healthy’, we all know where censorship in art leads to. What one SHOULD encourage is a reflected consumption and creation of media, and proper tagging on AO3. Fetishisation =/= unhealthy themes in fanfic. Also, again, some of the fans are literally 14. Let them live and express themselves. As you stated many people in slash fandom turned out to be queer. Though I think the internalised and much more so the external misogyny of the original media definitely play a part, too.
dan and phil were so integral and deeply rooted in my adolescence that i find it genuinely difficult at times to take a step back and critically analyse their fame and the phandom. that said, very interesting video lol
I've been rewatching Dan and Phil lately, so that's probs why this popped up in my recommendations. I'd been watching D&P since I was 18 in 2011 (I know, I'm a dinosaur) and even still watch Phil's new vids. I never really understood the shipping of real people. I always thought that if D&P were together, it was none of our business, and if they weren't; again, none of our business. As a (closeted) queer, depressed former emo kid I really resonated with their content. Maybe because I was slightly older than the average Phandom member, the shipping really irritated me and I felt sorry for the boys.
I've also watched their videos for about that long (love them!) and I also felt uncomfortable with real people shipping, I think it comes from a place of enthusiastism for the creators but it can mean people forgot that these are not fictional characters and can feel the pressure of it.
As someone who watched Dan and Phil from very early on but was on the outside looking in at all the Phan mayhem I think the majority of what I saw was a mixture of gay fetishisation and an unhealthy parasocial relationship with content creators. I mean after all I remember there being 'Dan-girls' and 'Phil-girls' because of which one they were 'in love' with. And it doesn't help that the majority of people writing fanfic and doing all this stuff are going through puberty. They have hormones running through their body mixed with seeing their fave content creator say "I love you all so much" at the end of videos it's no wonder they develop an unhealthy obsession. They started living vicariously through whichever one they didn't fancy as much and when they saw the one they loved post pictures with other people the hatred they got was immense. I mean you just had to look on twitter after Dan's coming out video to see people angry that Dan didn't go into detail about their sex lives and stuff like that.
Thanks to Dan and Phil is that I started learning English, since it is not my first language. There where certain things that flew pass me, so I almost completely passed that entire Phan obsession phase that was on Tumblr, but I remember reading stoopeed theories and getting those "dissection of their body language" videos, and I always thought (and still to this day) that those were absolutely horrible and a complete v!ol4ti0n of their persona. I love them both. I have some of the books the published together and I'm planning on buying Dan's book soon. I still see some of their videos when I'm feeling nostalgic, but I think that many people owes them an apology for all those things they used to do...
yooo i met them during tatinof! they were so sweet and i was so so scared but they did their best to have a conversation with me and put my letter in a safe place even tho i wasn't supposed to give them one. these guys were my life for like all 4 years of high school and i'll always look back on them fondly. great video!
OMG I hope you'll consider making a video about the history of destiel and the final reveal, when I saw it trending on Twitter that day I was instantly transported into the mid 2010s Tumblr era
When I was 14 I was really deep in phandom. To me it was a combination of it being a safe space and me need to process the abuse that happened to me that results in some of the the ways I acted that where wrong. Now I worry about the mcyt and dreamsmp fandoms and that the same lines are being crossed.
I remember being a fan who lowkey shipped them but never had a headcanon that they were actually gay and in a possible relationship. My usual thought was, "Would be cool if they are together. Can't say or demand that they actually are, but would be nice." I did enjoy those "domestic" compilations of their interactions but thankfully never got into the fanfictions ( no offense to the writers but I just didn't feel comfortable reading fics about real people.) I feel bad that Dan was a closeted guy who got essentially outed by the internet without his permission. I'm just glad that he was able to move forward with his life, especially after the shitstorm he went through in his most recent video. And I'm glad that he and Phil are continuing their own projects, even if they are doing things more separately these days. I'm proud of both of them.
This is a great, nuanced take on the shipping culture surrounding these two. I'm glad someone who was involved in the phandom finally made a video like this. I've only seen videos from people who were never a part of the phandom and their assumptions about who we were as a group have always bothered me. I think people tend to assume we were all straight, cis teen girls when in reality the majority of us were queer and varied in age. I won't lie, what drew me to Dan and Phil was definitely the idea that they might be in a romantic relationship. I feel so incredibly guilty for letting my curiosity get the better of me and searching for all the "proof" (including the Big One. Iykyk). At that point I was closeted, in my early 20s and had been in a string of deeply unsatisfying and unhealthy romantic relationships with men. I saw Dan and Phil as a symbol of my ideal relationship, so I lost myself in fantasy. I was never involved in the invasive digging that a lot of other people were and didn't always approve of it either but I can't say I'm not at least a little complicit. Either way, it wasn't healthy. I don't use my fantasies about "phan" to avoid making real connections with people out of fear anymore though. I'm now in a relationship with a beautiful girl who I met though the phandom and I couldn't be happier. Phil was right. There is love for you and the future is bright.
im so amazed how very similar our internet interests and critics are. this was a nice peek into the chaos of the phandom and the on going moral debate of shipping real people
i was so active in this fandom. i dragged my mom to interactive introverts and everything. i still credit them with always keeping 12 year old me entertained trough a tough time.
Ashley I have utmost respect for you not only finding this cringe but reading it out loud. This is an unbearable one to watch bc of how deep I was in that I cannot believe we had unrestricted access to the Internet. I remember when I was in seventh grade we had to write a paper and I wrote about dan and I being friends And him coming to visit me in America. Not sure how long I’ll make it through this vid
i was a dan & phil fan during the heyday, and i never understood why people went *so hard* with the phan shit because it was obvious that it made them uncomfortable and i wasn’t interested in prying into their sexualities and just wanted to watch their content. i would for sure start watching them again if they (especially dan) started uploading more again, i loved their videos a lot :)
This entire time, I read the title as saying "Toxic SHOPPING culture." I was waiting for the topic to be brought up the whole video, and I was so confused at the end. I re-read the title, and this makes so much more sense. Lol
Thanks god I didn't engage in this fandom, not that i haven't watched every single video on both (well, 6 of) dnp's chanels at least twice, but I didn't engage in it as in fics, fanart, etc, which i think has allowed me to enjoy the actual content instead of the shipping aspect.
Phan was definitely fetishised to an extreme extent, not by all phans, but the phans who did it were really BAD. They had corn doubles that exclusively posted Phan themed content ffs. I don't think I've ever heard about other RUclips personalities that ended up having corn actors pretend to be them; and as far as I'm aware that isn't even that common when it comes to big celebrities. I started watching Dan and Phil in 2013(?), but I could never really get into the phandom because so much of it was sexualised; and I genuinely felt so bad for Dan and Phil for all they had to deal with just because some shippers took it to an extreme. You could see how it was taking a toll on their friendship, so it's really nice to see them in a much better place now, even though they don't post nearly as much as they used to.
I VIVIDLY remember reading that one fan horror smut story involving a hat and a rodent. I wasn't even part of the tumbler, tumbler shipping communities or the dan and Phil fandome.
(Long comment incoming, sorry i just have a lot to say about this topic) I love this video so much, especially the part at 14:10 :')) I've been binge watching dnp videos lately because of dan's comeback and this video caught my eye on the explore page, it was an eye opening experience to why people shipped them so much back in the phandom days. I remember back then ships like septiplier and phan were immensely popular, and since septiplier was speculated to be the reason mark and sean didnt collab as much after the shipping frenzy makes me realize how glad i am that dan and phil are still best friends. Also as a side tangent can we talk about how weirdly phil was portrayed in phan culture??? Like in one part of the phandom he was this weird, dominant, brooding top and in another part of the fandom he was a pure sweet cinnamon roll who has never heard of sex ever. It was pretty much the same for dan as well(sweet bottom who whimpers at phils masculinity😬) imo this just goes to show how much the toxic parts of phandom were fetishizing these men and characterizing normal people with normal lives into homophobic yaoi stereotypes
you really articulated so much that i think everyone who's been a part of this community at some point or another should hear! the least we can do about all this is learn from it
I was a big shipper of phan other real people ships. I also remember clearly struggling with figuring out my gender and sexuality at this time. I Think reading, talking and writing about these real people having romantic relationships like I hoped i would have one day really helped me. And even though i always thought it was wrong to confront them about these relationships i now realise how the internets opinion about their sexuality must have been really hard on them.
I watched them from 2012 onward and never actually participated in the phandom outright, even though I later became the proud owner of a t shirt and signed poster. I remember being scared to do anything online that would embarass my future self and was deeply aware of how fangirls were perceived (remember the “don’t cry craft” era? *chills*) I also remember a lot of phanficiton at the time was a safe way for me to experience queerness, Dan was often (inaccurately) portrayed as bi and there were tons of “coming to terms with sexuality” stories that I didn’t realize yet how strongly I related to.
I think I'll always feel genuinely so bad for how the internet picked apart every minuscule detail of their private lives for YEARS. I don't even blame them for not uploading the way that they used to, although it makes me still hope that they will someday. Their videos hold a lotta nostalgia and I think I'll always miss them
Took the words outta my mouth. The fact Phil still uploads is amazing (no pun intended) and I'm just so glad that the fandom has chilled out
The fact that people would spread things like the v-day video that they were obviously uncomfortable with made it difficult for me to admit I liked them because I didn't wanna be grouped in to that
Absolutely! It always makes me sad to think of how easier it could have been for them, Dan especially.
@@riyaisnotokay😂
They loved and capitalized on it.
the shipping thing was super uncomfortable it's a miracle that their friendship seems to have survived that at least
it’s bc they actually were dating all of those years, but they were not in a safe situation to be openly gay, which honestly makes things even worse
they were actually together/partners this whole time but the fans made it impossible for them to be open about it in peace
@@sharkguy27 see the impression i've gotten from the things they've both said is that there were some romantic feelings but they never seem to have dated for real?and the way fans acted probably played a role as to why?idk at least this whole thing doesn't seem to have driven them apart
which is good
@@chrysasouli8549 I mean, Dan confirmed there was something romantic between them and they are soulmates, but it makes sense why he doesn't want to confirm or deny if they have or are currently dating. But we don't really know, and probably won't know for years. Maybe even ever.
@@chrysasouli8549 I mean we will never know the story 100% but Dan said in his coming out video that they at least at one point were more than platonic. But the biggest give away is that they're both in their 30s and just bought a house together. Living together in a rented apartment or house in your 20s is common among friends, but buying a house much more permanent, especially in your 30s. If they weren't dating it'd be a dumb thing to do cause what if one of them meets someone and wants to move in with them just a year after buying a house together? Are they just gonna sell it? So I'm very certain they are a couple. But it doesn't matter, cause the point is their content isn't about their relationship and it can be enjoyed no matter if they're a couple or just friends :)
i think dan and phil are the only creators from my middle school/early teen years i would unapologetically start watching again if they posted together again. they radiate comfort for me even if my shortlived phan shipping phase was deeply deeply cringe
they still do occasionally post videos together and Phil is still very active
I like a lot about them but they often throw around stereotypes like it’s funny and I’m not a fan
I’m still subbed to Phil and check in on them every once in a while. I just wish them well 🥲💕
if they started playing sims again, thatd be it for me
@@katherineg8126 EXACTLY they got me into playing the sims ! (i would also love spooky week back during halloween i looked forward to that)
From my perspective as a bi guy who was heavily closeted nothing was worse then when people figured out or sensed you were queer and relentlessly tried to get you out of the closet. Seeing Dan get that treatment I totally understand why he acted like he did.
As a side note being called an “uwu smol bean” should be considered a slur.
I think another good point to bring up is how grossly misogynistic the phantom was towards women that Dan and/or Phil were friends with; most notably Catrific. I remember at the time when she did a makeup collab video with them, people on Tumblr, Instagram, etc. ripped her apart just for being their friend that just so happened to be a woman. There is still an uncomfortable amount of phan speculation in the comments of the video. I always felt bad for her because I was in the minority that genuinely enjoyed her content and overall personality - not just because she was friends with them. I know that there were other women that got the same treatment, but Cat always seemed to get the worst of it.
But all in all, I loved your video talking about the Phandom. You honestly took every word right out of mind and laid it on the table so concisely. Definitely excited to see more videos from you in the future!
People liked the blonde woman (I am so sorry I am terrible with names), probably only because she was very openly married with children
@@liyre4189 louise!
In every fanfic I read she was like the toxic gf 😭
@@gman854 LITERALLY!! or they would always write her as being very rude, annoying, etc. while also fetishizing dan and phil in the same breath like 🤔
@@liyre4189 yeah, exactly! i never really saw people be mean towards louise (the blonde lady) since she was married at the time and had a child and i think the phandom saw her as ‘safe’ which is really icky
I genuinely think shipping real people is just generally fucked up
Could not agree more
@@VivekPatel-ze6jyjust dont do it at all?
Its so chronically online & cringe. It radiates no friends
@@Tw0Dotsreal!!
I met them in 2016, and I yelled “oh my god it’s Phan” because I went to say “Phil an Dan” and realised how bad that sounded backwards bc it’s always been Dan and Phil, and apologised frantically and they both got the absolute giggles over it.
Phil is one the worlds sweetest human beings and he gives the greatest hugs of all the famous people that I’ve ever met.
oddly enough, once you apologized and they figured out the situation, i bet they could even relate to shouting out something that makes sense in your head but is actually really awkward when said aloud 😂😂😂
I met them back in 2013/2014 by chance in a coffee shop, I was about 13 at the time. I completely agree. Phil was so freaking sweet and I’m grateful to have met both of them. Also grateful to Dan for taking a picture with me, even though he clearly did not want to be there lol
Honestly, when I was a young, closeted lesbian, I found it easier to engage with mlm fanworks and shipping because it didn't make me have to go to the place of questioning myself. It felt like it was a layer removed. But the pressure put on these men is unbelievable. Reminds me of some of the issues with Little Mix. Boundaries are vital.
what happened with little mix?
What happened with little mix
Im a gay man and im seeing lots of comments that echo yours about being a young lesbian and honestly im not sure how to take it. Like it made the lesbians feel better but the fetishisation of gay men negatively effect gay men, which you then all probably contributed to it.
@@Sl1mch1ckens for real had real life friends try to "ship" me and my other friend, makes matters worse they were asexual due to trama and i am very sexual, some gross opposite dynamic that sounds out of some fanfic, she was also a "lesbian" but dated men, really dont get it either youre allowed to be uncomfortable my friend.
This made me miss Dan so much, such a likeable guy.
He said he should be coming back this year
He’s done a few vids on phill Chanel have a look !!! So comforting
he's still alive lol
@@elvytica yeah didn’t mean to make it sound like he was dead my bad
Lol I thought you meant he died. Glad to know he is alive
My favorite era of Dan and Phil content was their gaming channel, and I'm not even that into gaming honestly. I think that after all the years of being the focus of really invasive speculation and people picking them apart, putting out content that was still theirs and involved a lot of their personality and dynamic but still didn't put the spotlight directly on them was a really good idea.
I JUST WANNA KNOW WHAT HAPPENED TO DIL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1
Same!! I was not on tumblr at all and was not a Phan shipper or involved at all. I guess someone would say a normal phan. So the gaming channel was one of my favorite time/memories and of course the crafts channel
Same, i knew them as an individual, but it's their gaming channel that made me stay. good days
Another thing that really bothered me was now normalized shockfics (i.e the hat fic, the skin fic, etc) were at that time. As a young teen, I thought they were just gross and weird stories, but now that I’m older I realized how morally horrible those were. I know that shockfics are written to be shocking to the reader, but their audience was young teens like myself reading stories that contained a lot of sexual violence, gore, animal abuse, and torture just for the sake of virtual street cred.
I read the hat fic out of morbid curiosity from people saying DONT READ IT with 0 explanation, and after the internet lost its collective shit at Dan referencing it. I had to look Dan and Phil in their eyes at a meet and greet a year later knowing what I had read, and it really rode home to little teen me that oh my God these are real people who probably just sit at home during supper in silence staring their plate of spaghetti wondering how their lives have turned into this. Really put shit into perspective.
@@badvibesonly3526 The backpack fic made me feel sick for weeks, i really shouldn't have read it but people kept saying how bad it was and i just couldn't believe it would be THAT bad
@@kayllama20 i can give you the details if you want but t's rly rly gross and after all these years it's still the most disgusting thing i've ever read
@@badvibesonly3526 Oh god, I can only imagine how you felt in that moment. I’m glad that (for the most part) shockfics like that have fallen out of favor because fans realize how fucked up it is to write literal torture p0rn and shove it in creators faces. I’m not putting any blame on Dan whatsoever, but I know that those fics got waaay more popular and 1000x more disturbing after he referenced it.
I remember watching dan's video on fanfiction, and in the comments was an innocuous line about a hamster/gerbil (cant remember now), and everyone was replying with horror. I am about 12 at this point, I am really sheltered, andI've never read fanfic before. So baby me thinks "it can't be that bad" and I look it up. I don't even remember the plot of what I read, but it really grossed me out and shocked me, and I remember feeling really uncomfortable, and I avoided fanfiction entirely for a year until a friend recommended one in a fandom I liked. I will never forget how awful reading that made me feel, and even though I laugh about my intro to fanfic now, it just hits home what young fans could be reading, and what Dan and Phil had to deal with.
That "queer baiting" tweet makes me so angry that I can't even express it.
I hate, hate, hate shipping actual people together. Characters in fiction? Totally fine. But speculating about the sex lives of real people and even pressuring them to be something just because you think it's ~ hawt ~ is absolutely inexcusable and downright creepy.
I have a confession to make. I accidentally started the whole sonic underwear drama when I was around 12-14. It was one of the cooking videos, I noticed the underwear, and I remembered that Phil got them on holiday in Florida. So I made a joking comment asking about it, fully under the impression that it was just friends sharing clothes. Then the shitstorm happened. Dan ended up disabling comments on that video. I still feel bad about it today at the age of 25. I'm a queer person myself and I can't imagine the personal drama I accidentally caused in their lives over that.
Don't feel too bad about it :/ I'm sure people would have speculated about it even without your comment dude, they over analyzed anything they did. Seriously don't beat yourself over a comment!!
aww, it's alright, don't beat youself up about it. you couldn't have know that was going to be the outcome.
@@indigo150 thank you ❤️. It really makes me cringe to think about, but I wouldn't blame another kid in my shoes at the time. Trying to extend that logic to myself 😭.
It’s alright . Young me had a blast with the theory but now that I’m older I realize it was weird to stress them so much over it.
You didn’t do anything wrong!!
They definitely became "comfort youtubers" for me since their videos literally raised me from middle school to my current adult life now (as i'm sure other members of the "phandom" can relate to). I now just get embarrassed when I think of my intrusive 'phan' past because i DEFINITELY did not understand the separation between "real life human" and "internet persona" (which i think is also mostly due to the very close parasocial relationship dan and phil had with their viewers)
history repeating itself with how some deranged kpop stans ship their idols
I don't really think it's great to call them deranged especially considering everything said in the video about shipping (although I admit I understand wanting to use that kind of phrasing sometimes because people can just be.. so creepy. but still)
@@mayacollette i myself am a kpop stan so i’m speaking on experience of what i see every day lol the narrative some of the stans create in their heads are actually terrifying
I like them for their friendships, not their relationships…
I always felt so bad for them. Shipping real life couples can easily become SUPER toxic very fast. Look at how One Direction fans basterdized Harry and Louis' friendship. I truly believe that the fans ruined it. It cannot be easy to be a public figure especially when everyone is looking at every single tiny detail of your life and looking for "clues" when you're not even trying to give any.
As a woman who heavily identified as a phan, I think it's because I was queer, but I also had a lot of internalized misogyny. It was much easier to enjoy two gay men being cute and in a relationship than it was for me to see two lesbians together and have to grapple with what that meant for me. It was a "safer" way for me to enjoy queerness without having to examine my own feelings towards women.
this has me rethinking a lot about my queer identity holy shit😭 my phannie phase was when i was like 11-14 and then i think i consciously started recognizing i was gay at like 16, but i remember a lot of my initial doubts were because i didn't have queer crushes when i was a child or the other "i've always known/been like this since i could remember" moments. but like maybe the hyperfixation on dan and phil and the comfort i got out of shipping them was in fact an indicator. much to think about here so thank u for that lmaooo
same omg
Wow you just put in words why I had an interest in their relationship. Shit.
Except the vital point that it wasnt "two gay men enjoying a relationship", so i think also you maybe need to aknowledge that at the time you were projecting your queerness onto them.
wtf is queer 😭😭
My fingers are crossed that the more mainstream depictions of queer romances we get the less likely people will feel the need to speculate about queerness. I genuinely don't think the Sherlock or Supernatural fandoms would have been nearly as prominent during the 2010s if there was any competing mainstream show that actually paid off by depicting a well-written romance between adult men as lead characters. The more genuine depictions of romances between people who are the same gender we get (like, just in the last month there have been Our Flag Means Death, Heartstopper, and Severance, all completely different shows that released in the last month by different streaming services that defy queerbaiting norms) the less time and need we have to keep searching for absolutely any semblance of queerness among characters (and real people) who might not ever identify as queer.
I think so too.
On the other hand though, there are people who ship men and women together, fictional or not, who are extremely intense and take these ships way too seriously and even harass the people they ship (or, if they're fictional, the people who wrote the characters) for not dating each other. Like Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez, or Jaiden animations and theodd1sout.
Admittedly though, I see it a lot more with w/w and m/m ships than I do with w/m ships.
Like you said, if the LGBTQ community had more representation in the media, then they wouldn't try to make everyone seem gay or force their headcannon and ships on people. They just want to feel representation and not be alone. It's still wrong though, at least when it's done to real people.
Exactly what I've been thinking about for ages! When you're in the desert for too long, you're going to get an apparition, cause you're so desperate you'll cling to anything.
As the above person pointed out it wouldn't stop this kind of shipping completely. We are wired to see connections/patterns, even where there are none; in prehistoric times it kept us alive. Is there a deadly animal in the bushes or is it just the wind, better run just in case. It also got us out of them times, through innovation.
But like the almighty algorithm, getting more advanced, but dealing with even more complex situations, there's going to be some glitches/issues. I just hope that one day it and our cave man brains learn to catch up on day.
Thank you for coming to my ted talk.
definitely!!
I 100% was an intense phan shipper. I was very into proof and conspiracies, I even ran a Tumblr blog where I would post about my 'findings'. Now I'm in college and looking back my behaviour was so immature, invasive, and disgusting. I hope that young teens in fandoms can see videos like this and correct their behaviour so we see less and less repeats.
Great vid. :)
When I was in high school, there was a gay rumour about me and my best friend. It really fucked me up at age 14 and I started overanalysing all of my interactions with her, to the point it damaged my friendship. I realised I was gay at age 24, much later than my other friends around me, and I think it was pushback from the rumour which stopped me realising it earlier. I can’t even imagine how it feels on a huge scale!
You said a 'little bit' of fetishisation.... i think it's more than we all care to admit. Women are allowed to get away with fetishising gay men because it's usually through the lens of fiction and art rather than real exploitation. dan and phil being real people blurred that moral line even more, yikes. a lot of teenage girls fall into the trap of shipping being supposed allyship, but at the end of the day, it's a little bit fetishy. which isn't an evil thing - but i think it should be talked about more the way that male fetishisation of wlw is.
can we remember the real reason that mlm is much more popular than wlw in shipping from women? Because it's not solely homophobic fetishisation. It's misogyny. Female characters are not written well and their relationships are not as compelling. Both with other women and with men - there aren't as many good female characters as there are men, and when there are, they're not the main characters, or they don't have as many interesting nor compelling relationships with other characters. F/F has the least amount of fics on ao3, and people wonder why - give your favourite media that you criticise for having all these gay fetishisers the fucking bechdel test. Or, look at the screentime of the women. Sorry for ranting, and i'm talking fiction here and not real life like you did in the latter half of your comment, but jeez this is a misconception that pisses me off.
@@greysonholtzI mean, yeah, there are more well written male characters than female characters out there. But also, people will ship poorly written male characters with each other too. Even if they're very minor characters with very little depth. The reality is that in 2024 there are many, many, many wonderful female characters and yet still it's mxm relationships and male characters that women and girls mostly gravitate to. You're absolutely right about the element of misogyny, but I don't think you can place the blame of that misogyny on there simply not being enough well written female characters out in the world.
As someone who stans Harry and engages in social media I can say the ship culture is homophobic, misogynistic and creepy. Till these days there are hundred of larries that believe H & L are in a secret relationship. They call their relationships with women “stunts” and “pr” and there a categories behind this ship like “no stunts” which means larries believe Louis son is not his biological son but just someone else’s kid to hide the real relationship between L&H 😒🙄 MOST OF THESE are straight women and they come up with these laughable and silly theories that don’t have evidence and I fear shippers will never truly die
i think you did a good job of showing the realistic idea that it was bound to happen, but this was very focused on the fan perspective and not as much on how dan and phil deserve autonomy and privacy, which is what i would have taken from the title. still a good video, just different from what i expected. both perspectives matter in this but i tend to prioritize their view because of how much they had to go through between stalking, relentless harassment-type comments, people trying to find their apartments, "that video" and a fuck ton more. i just have little room left to care about people who can find so much room to ship and project healthy LGBTQ representation onto fictional people but instead choose to put real people in a position where they feel their fame can largely be owed to people fantasizing about them. that's so... dehumanizing. i say all of that as a huge fan for many years, and ex active fandom member. i watched that incessant behavior and when i started observing from the perspective of the person being fetishized (not in the sexual sense, the "put on a platform to gawk at in a dehumanizing, reductive way" type) i started to feel too guilty and uncomfortable to partake anymore. i wish the conversation was more centered around that, not to "protect" grown adults who could speak for themselves, but so we can be better people and take responsibility for the harm we caused.
also "VICTORIAN GHOST BOYS" LMFAO
yeah looking back on the behaviour is truly shocking. like the way "that video" was being passed around on tumblr on like password protected pages is quite baffling.
@@amentrison2794 yup. people thought it was entertainment and nothing more. i know most of the fandom was comprised of young people whose judgment skills weren't great but it's still depressing to think about how much damage that did to their well-being..
@@hnktbt I agree. they way parasocial relationships ride that line between being both intimate and entertainment leads to some really bad behaviour. and it's so odd to put the situations into the context that they may have technically been "right" which almost feels worse
@@amentrison2794 it is 100x worse, yeah. if they had both been straight and/or not together at all ever, it would have been SO much simpler because none of this would have deeply affected things about themselves (mainly dan i guess) that they had to hide out of internalized shame. we basically kicked him while he was down and he just had to smile through it because if he's not grateful for his fans he's the bad guy, even if the fanbase is toxic to him and he never intended on having it. i've spent a lot of time mulling this over clearly 😅
i watched their videos from a young age, but was never apart of the fandom, i adored dan in particular for his classic relatability™, but whenever i tried to look at anything fandom related i was bombarded with phan stuff and while i 100% understood the speculation there was always something off putting about the lengths some people would bring it to (to clarify i guess i’m saying i was a casual fan? 😅)
I remember watching them when I was in my freshman year of high school and trying DESPERATELY to find other fans who *didn't* ship them. I think that's the main reason I eventually stopped watching them. I couldn't look them up without being bombarded by shippers, so I just... didn't. Kinda sucks because I did really enjoy their content, but I'm so glad I don't have to harbor guilt about my Dan and Phil phase.
That really sucks honestly. Fandom culture can really push people away from content they love.
god, hard same!! I found and fell in love with their videos in 2012, and I fell out of the fandom hard around the time they were reaching peak popularity in 2015 bc I couldn't stand most of the fans, who were being obsessive and invasive about their privacy.
the more you post the more i realise our interests through the internet years have been identical
same AHAHHA i thought i was all alone sometimes, it feels good
me too I love it
same here!!
We're all in this together
girl you got that sharpie on damn point, transported me straight to 2013 and knocked the wind right out of me. ouch! thank you queenie we love the pain 🥲
watching this video made me question why dnp stayed in youtube for so long. it’s impressive how they’ve been dealing with years of disrespect. they’re not as active anymore and people still find ways to be rude to them. this has always been a very strange fandom that i’ve always had really mixed emotions about it.
I was on the internet during the Phan ship wars and stuff. And while I did occasionally watch their content. The aggressive shipping and drama caused by it all kept me from actually watching their videos. So I didn't get into their channels until like 2018/early 2019. They make great content and I would consider them both "comfort creators" as their videos are easy to pick up, relatable, and even inspiring. But I'm so glad I skipped the 2012-2017 drama. And I'm so proud of how far they've come.
This is an incredible video. I started watching Dan and Phil way back in 2012, but the invasive culture of the fanbase kept me as a pretty much silent viewer who hardly engaged (beyond watching every single video they made on all channels for years). I remember being really uncomfortable at how determined people were to learn everything about their private lives. Years later, after realizing that I’m a lesbian, I feel like I better understand just why their content was so comforting to me, and why I was so bothered by people’s refusal to respect their privacy.
This exactly
I feel so bad when I think about how they must have felt. Once in an English class my teacher called me out for using the world ‘partner’ in a essay about how I saw myself in 10 years and everyone laughed. I just imagine it being X10000 worse than that and it makes me super sad.
Oh my god I’m so sorry that happened to you
I never shipped them because I know how frustrating and upsetting it is for people to assume your sexuality :( People in high school used to think I was gay for my best friend and it really bothered me so yeah I can't imagine millions of people thinking I was dating her
I'm so thankful that my phan phase was the most intense when I was 16-18, not 13 like most people's here because at least I understood that these are real people and not characters
Yeah. Having a phan phase during middle school, like 2018-2019, it was more shunned because the culture was more around not shipping irl people directly. Although, I did still read phanfics (god I hate that term) and I am annoyed at myself for participating in the culture. lmao i don't recommend 13-14 year olds having a wattpad for that exact reason
I remember finding Dan and Phil when I was in middle school and wasn’t immune to internet shipping culture, but I read like one fanfiction for them before going “yea this is weird” and as I kept getting older I got more and more uncomfortable with the culture of shipping real people. My heart genuinely goes out to Dan and Phil, they were so formative in my life and having so many people speculate on your personal life like that couldn’t have been easy.
I specifically remember when I actually read a phan fic out of curiosity and the whole time I was thinking “I’d enjoy this way more if it wasn’t about real people.”
as a former relatively active member of their fandom from 2015 to 2016, the way shipping them and talking very casually about personal things regarding their relationships was normalized was...very weird. you'd see talk about who tops/bottoms, clips from the forbidden video, and very bizarre fics shared around on a typical tuesday afternoon. i'll admit, i took part in those conversations since i was young and wasn't aware of how Weird that was, but now that i'm older now, i realize how weird it is that all those conversations were normalized. i feel bad for them knowing that they were struggling to accept themselves while the entire internet was fantasizing about them dating.
but besides all of that, i really enjoyed watching them and being a fan. the two of them managed to create an environment where i could feel safe and relaxed while watching their content, and they helped me through a really tough year, so i'm glad that they did what they did. i don't keep up with them often nowadays, but i look back on their videos with very happy memories
You posted this at such a good time! I recently fell down the Dan and Phil rabbit hole and I'm currently in the process of binging their Sims 4 series 😂😂
Glad I’m not the only one binging their Sims 4 series right now😂
I fell down the ultra demon P/D rabbit hole. 😁 But I do like their charades!
Omggg no way I got sick this week and rewatched the sims series!
I also think it's interesting to note a lot of the normalization of "shipping" came from older women, at least from what i saw. Some of the biggest phan-related twitter accounts i remember during my phase (i was on twitter but not tumblr) were almost all definitely old enough to know better. One of them i remember being a woman in her early 20's whose friends always jokingly referred to as a "demon phannie" because she was simply that obsessed and creepy about it, but the fact it got reduced to just some joke probably contributed to a LOT of younger queer tens just accepting and normalizing this mindset
oh yea the “demon phannie” thing that happened was absolutely wild on tumblr too. applying that name to themselves jokingly in a weird attempt to forgive/lighten the obsessive behavior
@@adrianr3885 yeahh the fact the worst and most obsessive behaviours around the possibility of dan and phil being together was treated as just a “haha funny joke” made the concept of “shipping” them as a whole just not feel like that big of a deal. I never really thought about how it might affect them in real life because well… i was 12 in 2016 and i was just going along with what all the cool older ladies with the huge followings said was okay :/
my younger sister had a friend who's middle aged mum was a hardcore phan shipper and ran a popular tumblr blog about it. strange....
that is so disturbing
I wasn't in the phandom besides watching some videos here and there but from my experience in the supernatural fandom the people who shipped actors together, not just the characters, were older women...
I've been watching them since 2015 and the shipping thing got me really uncomfortable. I loved and still love their vibe, together and separate, they have a chemistry that not everyone has, and I love their relationship (whatever it is), but everyone smashing them together in everything made them, and some of us, feel like their individual traits and themes weren't as loved as the joint content :(
I think this video was recommended to me because i still watch Dan & Phil. Really interesting & I really enjoyed hearing about the story and what’s happened over the years. You must have put a lot of work into this, thank you! 😀
the fact that they remained close through all that very public speculation is crazy to me and very admirable. i have a lot of sympathy for younger me, but i genuinely regret my participation in the toxic parts of the phandom. also, i really appreciate the kindness you have when you talk about these topics, for both creators and fans.
“When the two bought their house together, you know, as platonic friends do”
STOP 😂
This isn’t that important, but I think it’s fair to also note that a LOT of “girls” into gay tumblr shipping turned out to be gay trans men when they were older (I am one of them lol) , or just queer in general. It’s not always that it was underlying misogyny and hate for women characters. I understand that absolutely was a factor in many cases, so I’m not dismissing it. But it can be a little exhausting when ppl imply that gay slash fiction & stuff is born from misogyny. Sometimes it’s just gay people enjoying gay stuff.
All that being said, none of it was normal with Dan and Phil LOL
Also this isn’t really a crit of the video, I love this vid! Just made me think about stuff LOL
i'm so damn glad i found your channel, you release blocked cringe memories from my brain every single time you post in a way that no other commentary channel ever could, and I kinda love it
as an afab queer person, the Dan and Phil fandom on tumblr between late 2013 and early 2016 was the first place I really discovered queer identities and the majority of the people I interacted with were teenaged queer femmes or young non binary/trans people. the shipping culture was toxic and should not have been as intense and invasive as it was, especially with the hindsight of Dan’s coming out video, but at the time I think wanting Dan and Phil to be queer (for me at least) came from a desperate want to see more openly queer people online or otherwise that I admired and related to. They were my biggest idols as a. Teen, and i think a large part of it was me projecting my queerness onto people I looked up to. looking back, this wasn’t the smartest move, but I do think Dan and Phil should be proud of the queer communities they inadvertently formed online that I know helped a lot of people through their identity struggles and allowed people to feel much less alone in a very isolating time of life.
This!!! The fandom really helped me come to terms with my queerness and also understand so much about queerness in general, even if it wasnt about Dan and Phil themselves but simply their queer fans
I get where you're coming from... But you're making it sound more positive than it really was...
Same!
@@Homodemon there were a lot of positive aspects of the fandom, too!
@Bright ...where did you get that from?
Personally, I was SUCH a fan back in the day (starting 2015 or so) but never cared abt shipping particularily much, though ofc you couldn‘t avoid it
I mostly just…used their videos to learn english and have a good laugh, as the average european gay does yk
same here! it helped me so much with learning british english and their videos were my coping mechanism - never really got into the shipping it sucks how bad it got :(
I watched these two when I was around 13/14 and it was the first time I was allowed complete unrestricted assess to the internet. I liked gaming and I liked their content but unfortunately it was SO easy to get sucked into the social media side of things. I didn’t know what love was at that age, I didn’t understand sex. I was so unbelievably influenced by the other 14 year olds turning their lives into some sort of reality show that I think at some points I forgot they were even real people. They just became characters. I stopped watching them when I was 16 and matured more, I focused more on school and I had other interests to attend. Looking back as a 19 year old I see how awfully cringe I was and I deeply regret any mental harm I may have contributed to them. They are real people and we had real effects onto them. I know they aren’t the only people who deal with toxic fans online but they’re a good example, it just scares me how much I was influenced by others on social media at that age. I was fully ride or die in that fandom and I’d be very careful letting my own kids have the same amount of acsess until they are around 16 too.
I won’t lie, throughout my time being fans of DnP, I genuinely thought people were joking when they “accused”/analysed their personal relationship as a romantic/sexual one. Only when Dan came out and a few thinkpieces also came out about the Phandom did I actually think people were serious in analysing the interactions between these two people. I just genuinely don’t understand why people would care about the private lives of DnP. I still watch Phil, and it’s just so comforting. Thank you for this video. :)
this is such a wonderful and articulate take on what was a pretty uhh happening…period? in Dan and Phil’s careers lol. I appreciate you so much for this video
It’s also been interesting reading through the comments because, a lot of people have talked about how they were a safe space and some of them may have projected their own needs onto them (such as being queer, being romantically involved etc). Which for me to realise that I actually considered them as a safe space for the total opposite reason? They felt safe to me /because/ they were two best friends living together, and as someone who has eventually come out as aroace, I realise in hindsight they were maybe the first example in my life of people who could share a life platonically (to our knowledge) which for obvious reasons appealed to me.
And I think regardless of what they choose to disclose/not to disclose going ahead, i feel so grateful that despite everything their friendship has held strong and that they continue to control the narrative around what they choose to reveal to us. And I think it’s lovely that most of us have come to the same conclusion as a fandom :”)
I have a bit of a similar experience! The fact that they were so affectionate with each other while not being romantically involved (or if they were then well, that's for them to know and for us never to find out), and this specific type of banter with innuendos that didn't mean anything really, was really comforting for my teenage self who would figure out 2 years after starting to watch them in 2016 that she's ace and most probably aro too. I did go into the rabbit hole of fan theories at some point, you really couldn't avoid it once you stepped onto phandom tumblr, but it was very clear to me when people were getting too aggressive about it. It might help that I stumbled into the parts where it was done more jokingly than hardcore proof ™ searching, but yeah. The possibility that you can be this affectionate and clearly have warm feelings towards another person without it being necessarily romantic was something I haven't yet realised I really needed
Exactly the same for me!! I was into them in early high school, and was on the aroace spectrum without knowing yet. It was so comforting to me to see a version of young adulthood that meant I could still like weeb things and be goofy and live with a best friend forever instead of the traditional "marriage and kids" idea that icked me the hell out.
yes omg this is how I feel. as an aroace person I find sm comfort in the idea that I might find a lifelong platonic companion like they've found in each other. this is part of my kpop obsession too, I'm so jealous of the close friendships and constant companionship groups like svt have. idgaf whether Dan and Phil are together or not, I just love observing their friendship
i think the biggest issue i had in the phandom and with some of its members is the way people would act like they owned dan and phil and had a right to know everything about them whenever they wanted to. And i also have seen a lot of fetishizing these men in very inappropriate and uncomfortable ways and making things hyper sexual that dont need to be
the phandom is one of my favorite things to rant about and ive been rewatching a lot of dan and phil recently and im so glad someone has made a video about it
I remember first starting to question my sexuality around the time I discovered Dan and Phil and since most of the people around me were super disapproving, it was comforting to see youtubers like Tyler Oakley and Troye Sivan and Dan and Phil being able to interact with eachother like that, and be accepted for it. I'm totally not saying DnP were something romantic at that point, but I didn't have a lot of good friends either and they had the relationship that I dreamt of.
But shipping real people can get way too out of hand. there were so many weird memes and fics and stuff going around, and it was all kind of just accepted. After they kind of stopped posting and the fandom died down I think everyone kind of realized how screwed up it was? But it got as bad as the Dream and George stans for awhile there, if not worse
I got into them through their gaming channel wayyyy after the whole Phan shipping phenomenon and I thought they were either just besties or together without telling us which really didn't matter to me xD I just want more Dil Howlter, bring ur son back!!!
i had been in the dan and phil fandom since 2016 up until this year when i finally found something else to be interested about, so my entire teenage life was dedicated to these two men with essentially nothing else coming in between them. during this period in my life, i really had no idea what i found so comforting about these people, but between the years of 2018-2020, a lot of fans became much more self-aware about the potentially harmful behavior us fans were exhibiting onto dan and phil, like mlm fetishization, dehumanization, and just being creepy in general. though this whole era was so necessary, it made me super worried about my own position. i thought i played into this issue and it made me question why i was in the fandom to begin with. but with them settling down and wrapping up their big duo youtube content, it made a lot of room in my brain for me to move on to another interest. i quite literally hadn't been involved in anything else except dan and phil for like an upwards of 6 years straight, and this includes the periods where they were suuuuper inactive. though, something i find very interesting and notable now is how the worst years of my life, periods where i was doubtful, confused and upset with myself, corresponded with the time i spent in this fandom.
and looking back on it, and especially with the help of your video, i've come to the realization that this attachment i had wasn't rooted in creepiness, they were just comforting, and i feel like a veeery large majority of fans could agree on this. like you said, their relationship and dynamic was so alluring because it was among one of the few, if not the only, same sex relationships that potentially weren't platonic on youtube. youtube is special in a way that creators never quite feel as untouchable as celebrities, so adding that to the dan and phil experience and seeing how normal and natural their relationship is was like. revolutionary. it was so important to so many kids who ended up discovering they were lgbtq+ to see a relationship like this because they were seeing something they never knew was possible.
i think that's why i kind of didn't need them anymore when i finally came to terms with the fact i was gay and nonbinary. though, without a doubt, i absolutely would have never reached this stage of self-acceptance without them.
one thing that made me feel comfortable as a tween was that dan was publically vocal about fanfiction writers and fanart creators being artists. it's a really important part of why the phandom was creating content by the tons, as they both used to actively interact with and uplift fanartists, validating the interest tumblr invested into dan and phil. i've seen comments along the lines of, "why did dan and phil stay on youtube for so long if they were harassed all the time", and i feel as though this video doesn't do dan and phil's genuine appreciation of their audience justice. they kept trinkets and wore clothes gifted to them; for a few years they changed their headers weekly using fanart. my point is that most fans weren't coming from a place a malice, and dan and phil both acknowledged that themselves. this isn't to excuse incessant demands some fans expected of dan and phil, i just feel the community that came from the two outgrew it.
I was very active in the phandom around 2014-2016. I dont recall ever seeking them out to harass them about their relationship or their sexuality, but I wrote fics and I read fics and i didn’t really care much that they were actual people. I didnt feel guilty about it back then, as it was a post 2012 phandom that we lived in where dan and phil were making videos reading phanfic and going through their tumblr tags. I had my fics up on ao3 up until dan’s coming out video. I dont think it ever occurred to me (a 20 year old queer -in 2019) that Dan would have been going through the same kind of struggles that i was going through but amplified to extremes due to him being a much more public figure than i was obviously. Like you said, just me having 1-2 people asking me if i was gay felt like the end of the world, i cant imagine having a horde of people on the internet not only asking but insisting that I was gay and trying to prove that i was dating my best friend. I genuinely hope that my memory is solid that i never reached “demon phannie” status. But even so, I don’t think I’ll ever stop feeling guilty about the way i felt about phan back then. I don’t think I’ll ever not be sorry about it. I don’t think I’ll ever forgive myself for it.
That being said, their collabs and the gaming channel bring me so much joy and i dearly hope that we may see more of them on a more regular basis at some point
please do a complete complete lore video about this. there is SO much
It's crazy to think that these guys were living through a real life Black Mirror scenario. This is a closeted person's nightmare.
i have been a fan of d&p since 2013; they have had such a positive impact in my life. i personally didn't think they were romantically together until dan mentioned it in his coming out video, but if they had announced back during their "prime" that they were romantically involved/had been together/announced their sexualities, i wouldn't have minded one bit ~ as long as the two of them were happy and comfortable being themselves than that's all that mattered to me. i am so thankful to have watched them become the men they are today and i am happy to have them in my life.
i still watch both dan and phils videos to this day and keep up with them every now and then. whilst sometimes i do miss the "old days" of their youtube careers, i am happy that they are able to express themselves and do what they want without the phandom analysing their every move and what they post.
As a young kid who didn't even know what queerness was, I imprinted on Dan and Phil fast and intensely and while I didn't actively ship them, I definitely dabbled in the phandom. You hit the nail on the head. I'm on the aromantic spectrum and I figured out through Dan and Phil what I wanted my ideal relationship to look like: a queer platonic partnership with someone who shares my interests. I never actively shipped them because their public relationship opened my eyes to the different ways love could look, and how I wanted love to look in my life. Im still figuring myself out but I'm endlessly grateful for their content and it's influence on me.
Dan's new stuff is incredible and relatable, I saw him live in my city and loved it. I'm excited for this new era.
Omg this is so weird because I've recently been binge watching your videos and I really wanted to recommend you talk about Dan and Phil. I've been a phannie since 2015 and I still love them and consider myself a phan (cringe ik) and I find their "history", for a lack of a better word, very interesting. When I was 13 I was all about phan and unfortunately I fell into that crazed fan category. a few years later I realized it's really dehumanizing and invasive. And looking back at how I and many other fans acted feels like a fever dream on how tf did anyone think this was okay at all. I also blame the fact that most fans were probably young at the time and couldn't grasp the concept of boundaries. Nowadays I steer clear of shipping real people, seeing how it nearly tore DnP's friendship apart I just don't think it's worth it.
I'm surprised you don't have more subscribers, your content is so high quality!
i just saw a comment saying “we’ve got what we wanted” on a speculation video after they came out like these are real human beings not fictional characters u freaks 😭
you really keep blessing us with these videos, make sure to take time for yourself too!! i just hope posting so much recently hasnt left you burnt out!!
I read the title wrong and thought it was going to be a Dr.Phil video. Boy was that a surprise
Oh good i was not alone.
I was sure it would be about the camps
Man this was such an important phase of my tweens - I spent wayyyy too much time on them, honestly. I remember the hours upon hours I would spend reading fanfiction or scrolling along fanblogs on tumblr... I naturally started watching them less and less after a while but goddamn their videos are - as everyone else has been saying - sooo comforting. I feel bad about the sexualisation and ...dowright weird shit the phandom came up with.. I truly hope they weren't influenced by it too much
in my opinion the major reason for this was people treating dan and phil like photorealistic fictional characters made to be shipped instead of like real people with a normal friendship
now i wouldn't have minded if they revealed they were in fact a couple but also i wish the toxic fans didn't maybe drive them off the internet it was like when i said "ship what you want but stop bringing destiel up to jensen ackles he isn't into it" and they ignored me saying ship what you want and said i was telling them not to ship destiel when that wasn't the point i was making. so yeah there are so many toxic people who don't get that there is so boundaries to shipping.
i’m so glad someone finally brought this up! i was a fan of theirs for around 3 years or so and saw them on tour n shit. i was for sure one of those phan shippers but when i saw someone else on the internet say smth abt how shipping irl ppl is wrong, i checked myself and haven’t done that since. and i’m a kpop stan now so i see a lot of the same patterns of queer fetishization/infantilization and am like “did y’all not learn or smth” but then realize not everybody was in the phandom like i was😭
as a 12-15 yo fem kid struggling with my identity i projected a lot of myself onto dan and phil and wrote a LOT of phanfiction. and it was fucked up!!! and i regret a lot of that and posting it publicly because i realize now i was venting about my own situations by projecting it onto them. i was DEEP in the phandom 2015-2019 and i’m so glad i was able to get out of that.
great video, thank you for explaining everything so well!!
I think shipping real people is absolutely fine as long as it’s done /within fandom spaces/ that do not bother or try to intrude on real people’s lives. Don’t ask invasive questions and don’t try to push things on people unless those people explicitly invite fandom to do so! Also as you said I think the scrutiny put on afab fandoms (as compared to, say football fandom) is mostly out of misogyny because how dare girls explore art and emotions. Additionally, I don’t think fanfic needs to be ‘healthy’ at all, just like traditional fiction is not ‘healthy’, we all know where censorship in art leads to. What one SHOULD encourage is a reflected consumption and creation of media, and proper tagging on AO3. Fetishisation =/= unhealthy themes in fanfic. Also, again, some of the fans are literally 14. Let them live and express themselves. As you stated many people in slash fandom turned out to be queer. Though I think the internalised and much more so the external misogyny of the original media definitely play a part, too.
dan and phil were so integral and deeply rooted in my adolescence that i find it genuinely difficult at times to take a step back and critically analyse their fame and the phandom. that said, very interesting video lol
I've been rewatching Dan and Phil lately, so that's probs why this popped up in my recommendations. I'd been watching D&P since I was 18 in 2011 (I know, I'm a dinosaur) and even still watch Phil's new vids. I never really understood the shipping of real people. I always thought that if D&P were together, it was none of our business, and if they weren't; again, none of our business. As a (closeted) queer, depressed former emo kid I really resonated with their content. Maybe because I was slightly older than the average Phandom member, the shipping really irritated me and I felt sorry for the boys.
I've also watched their videos for about that long (love them!) and I also felt uncomfortable with real people shipping, I think it comes from a place of enthusiastism for the creators but it can mean people forgot that these are not fictional characters and can feel the pressure of it.
As someone who watched Dan and Phil from very early on but was on the outside looking in at all the Phan mayhem I think the majority of what I saw was a mixture of gay fetishisation and an unhealthy parasocial relationship with content creators. I mean after all I remember there being 'Dan-girls' and 'Phil-girls' because of which one they were 'in love' with. And it doesn't help that the majority of people writing fanfic and doing all this stuff are going through puberty. They have hormones running through their body mixed with seeing their fave content creator say "I love you all so much" at the end of videos it's no wonder they develop an unhealthy obsession.
They started living vicariously through whichever one they didn't fancy as much and when they saw the one they loved post pictures with other people the hatred they got was immense.
I mean you just had to look on twitter after Dan's coming out video to see people angry that Dan didn't go into detail about their sex lives and stuff like that.
Thanks to Dan and Phil is that I started learning English, since it is not my first language. There where certain things that flew pass me, so I almost completely passed that entire Phan obsession phase that was on Tumblr, but I remember reading stoopeed theories and getting those "dissection of their body language" videos, and I always thought (and still to this day) that those were absolutely horrible and a complete v!ol4ti0n of their persona.
I love them both. I have some of the books the published together and I'm planning on buying Dan's book soon. I still see some of their videos when I'm feeling nostalgic, but I think that many people owes them an apology for all those things they used to do...
yooo i met them during tatinof! they were so sweet and i was so so scared but they did their best to have a conversation with me and put my letter in a safe place even tho i wasn't supposed to give them one. these guys were my life for like all 4 years of high school and i'll always look back on them fondly. great video!
OMG I hope you'll consider making a video about the history of destiel and the final reveal, when I saw it trending on Twitter that day I was instantly transported into the mid 2010s Tumblr era
I remember when I was 14, I wrote a multi-page essay to my friend explaining why phan was real, and that memory makes me want to die.
When I was 14 I was really deep in phandom. To me it was a combination of it being a safe space and me need to process the abuse that happened to me that results in some of the the ways I acted that where wrong. Now I worry about the mcyt and dreamsmp fandoms and that the same lines are being crossed.
I remember being a fan who lowkey shipped them but never had a headcanon that they were actually gay and in a possible relationship. My usual thought was, "Would be cool if they are together. Can't say or demand that they actually are, but would be nice." I did enjoy those "domestic" compilations of their interactions but thankfully never got into the fanfictions ( no offense to the writers but I just didn't feel comfortable reading fics about real people.)
I feel bad that Dan was a closeted guy who got essentially outed by the internet without his permission. I'm just glad that he was able to move forward with his life, especially after the shitstorm he went through in his most recent video. And I'm glad that he and Phil are continuing their own projects, even if they are doing things more separately these days. I'm proud of both of them.
This is a great, nuanced take on the shipping culture surrounding these two. I'm glad someone who was involved in the phandom finally made a video like this. I've only seen videos from people who were never a part of the phandom and their assumptions about who we were as a group have always bothered me. I think people tend to assume we were all straight, cis teen girls when in reality the majority of us were queer and varied in age. I won't lie, what drew me to Dan and Phil was definitely the idea that they might be in a romantic relationship. I feel so incredibly guilty for letting my curiosity get the better of me and searching for all the "proof" (including the Big One. Iykyk). At that point I was closeted, in my early 20s and had been in a string of deeply unsatisfying and unhealthy romantic relationships with men. I saw Dan and Phil as a symbol of my ideal relationship, so I lost myself in fantasy. I was never involved in the invasive digging that a lot of other people were and didn't always approve of it either but I can't say I'm not at least a little complicit. Either way, it wasn't healthy. I don't use my fantasies about "phan" to avoid making real connections with people out of fear anymore though. I'm now in a relationship with a beautiful girl who I met though the phandom and I couldn't be happier. Phil was right. There is love for you and the future is bright.
im so amazed how very similar our internet interests and critics are. this was a nice peek into the chaos of the phandom and the on going moral debate of shipping real people
You are simply a gem
Pro tip: stop shipping real life people 😭
IM SCREAMING you played so much of Dan’s first video, the drag 😂❤
i was so active in this fandom. i dragged my mom to interactive introverts and everything. i still credit them with always keeping 12 year old me entertained trough a tough time.
parts of this were excruciating to revisit, well done 😭
Ashley I have utmost respect for you not only finding this cringe but reading it out loud. This is an unbearable one to watch bc of how deep I was in that I cannot believe we had unrestricted access to the Internet. I remember when I was in seventh grade we had to write a paper and I wrote about dan and I being friends And him coming to visit me in America. Not sure how long I’ll make it through this vid
You dragged me straight back to hell. Thanks for the video!
i was a dan & phil fan during the heyday, and i never understood why people went *so hard* with the phan shit because it was obvious that it made them uncomfortable and i wasn’t interested in prying into their sexualities and just wanted to watch their content. i would for sure start watching them again if they (especially dan) started uploading more again, i loved their videos a lot :)
Have you talked about one direction’s fandom?? Cause these were the most insane and intense years OF MY LIFE because of all these internet boys
The Larry fandom and Phandom have very similar boundary issues
This entire time, I read the title as saying "Toxic SHOPPING culture." I was waiting for the topic to be brought up the whole video, and I was so confused at the end. I re-read the title, and this makes so much more sense. Lol
Thanks god I didn't engage in this fandom, not that i haven't watched every single video on both (well, 6 of) dnp's chanels at least twice, but I didn't engage in it as in fics, fanart, etc, which i think has allowed me to enjoy the actual content instead of the shipping aspect.
“And my favorite DanandPhilcrafts”
Ohh I haven’t heard that in so long 😂
Phan was definitely fetishised to an extreme extent, not by all phans, but the phans who did it were really BAD. They had corn doubles that exclusively posted Phan themed content ffs. I don't think I've ever heard about other RUclips personalities that ended up having corn actors pretend to be them; and as far as I'm aware that isn't even that common when it comes to big celebrities. I started watching Dan and Phil in 2013(?), but I could never really get into the phandom because so much of it was sexualised; and I genuinely felt so bad for Dan and Phil for all they had to deal with just because some shippers took it to an extreme. You could see how it was taking a toll on their friendship, so it's really nice to see them in a much better place now, even though they don't post nearly as much as they used to.
I VIVIDLY remember reading that one fan horror smut story involving a hat and a rodent. I wasn't even part of the tumbler, tumbler shipping communities or the dan and Phil fandome.
(Long comment incoming, sorry i just have a lot to say about this topic)
I love this video so much, especially the part at 14:10 :')) I've been binge watching dnp videos lately because of dan's comeback and this video caught my eye on the explore page, it was an eye opening experience to why people shipped them so much back in the phandom days. I remember back then ships like septiplier and phan were immensely popular, and since septiplier was speculated to be the reason mark and sean didnt collab as much after the shipping frenzy makes me realize how glad i am that dan and phil are still best friends.
Also as a side tangent can we talk about how weirdly phil was portrayed in phan culture??? Like in one part of the phandom he was this weird, dominant, brooding top and in another part of the fandom he was a pure sweet cinnamon roll who has never heard of sex ever. It was pretty much the same for dan as well(sweet bottom who whimpers at phils masculinity😬) imo this just goes to show how much the toxic parts of phandom were fetishizing these men and characterizing normal people with normal lives into homophobic yaoi stereotypes
you really articulated so much that i think everyone who's been a part of this community at some point or another should hear! the least we can do about all this is learn from it
I was a big shipper of phan other real people ships. I also remember clearly struggling with figuring out my gender and sexuality at this time. I Think reading, talking and writing about these real people having romantic relationships like I hoped i would have one day really helped me. And even though i always thought it was wrong to confront them about these relationships i now realise how the internets opinion about their sexuality must have been really hard on them.
Girl your content is so good and high quality! I can't wait for you to blow up!
Dan's first intro will never not make me cringe so hard i have to look away
I watched them from 2012 onward and never actually participated in the phandom outright, even though I later became the proud owner of a t shirt and signed poster. I remember being scared to do anything online that would embarass my future self and was deeply aware of how fangirls were perceived (remember the “don’t cry craft” era? *chills*)
I also remember a lot of phanficiton at the time was a safe way for me to experience queerness, Dan was often (inaccurately) portrayed as bi and there were tons of “coming to terms with sexuality” stories that I didn’t realize yet how strongly I related to.