Dan & Phil Part 84: Still Alive

[sapienveneficus]

A lot of people seem to be saying, or implying, that these negative feelings toward's Dan's April Fools tweet (or towards Dan in general, I guess) stem from the lack of videos on his main channel. And while, obviously, many fans miss Dan's solo videos (I certainly count myself in that group)and he's definitely been teasing a main channel return with no payoff for months and months, I think the strong feelings come from all of us missing joint content.

As @glitterintheair pointed out above, we don't know what's happened with Dan this year. People are speculating that he's been struggling with his mental health, but no one knows for sure. What we do know is that he's disappeared from videos and instastories and, before last week, from photos as well. We know that he and Phil haven't been in a video together at all this year, and that fact alone is unprecedented. It's also something we, as a community, weren't prepared for going into 2019. We knew that the gaming channel was going on hiatus but, to quote the now infamous December liveshow, "Nothing else is changing." Well, this lack of Dan and Phil content is a massive change because, even without the gaming channel, they were popping up in each other's instastories, filming liveshows together, and making silly videos on Phi's channel before this year. To drop everything with no warning or explanation, that's what has made people so upset. And people are upset with Dan because he's the one who has disappeared. Phil's over on his channel, filming silly videos from a white walled closet (while ignoring the giant elephant that is the disappearance of joint content), and Dan is...nowhere. His absence led people to speculate that Dan must be struggling with his mental health, and to get angry yesterday when he made a bad joke about returning to a medium (and a community) he'd abandoned.

[knq]

@knq I love that you heard a graph batsignal and came running

I'm surprised the shop is back up without new merch. It doesn't seem like a good time to release new merch but I did think that was what they were planning, especially with the trip to the garden in London with the IRL team recently.

[noodlebum]

Looks like the D&P shop is back up but they’ve added even more items to the sale. I wish they’d added the hoodies before I ordered!

Ooh now that purple hoodie is very tempting!

Definitely! Enough so that I might just suck up the second shipping charge.

Not gonna lie though, I can’t help but find this huge sale a bit ominous...

same...

[Stakhanov]

@Ataraxia25 It's clear some people are frustrated. Most posts on the last 3-4 pages were accounts detailing what they think Dan did wrong. To put it in a different way: I'm just expressing my own expectations and frustration but for me they aren't with Dan they are with parts of his audience. The phandom can be very, very tiring indeed in it's eternal cycle of built up expectations and hurt sensitivities spilling over in frustration and crazy standards. I guess that's maybe what you didn't understand in my post. But good for you.

Waiting might be hard, i've been waiting for solo content for over a year most didn't seem to mind as long as Dan was still making content with Phil. No doubt some people will leave the fandom because of the hiatus and because they don't care for waiting or whatever else reason. I like that actually. I hope we can return to a smaller audience and I hope the average age rises and that it makes the audience on a whole more mature.
But I respect the fact that Dan is right now not feeling ready to make content or communicate about it. Especially if it's in some way related to his mental health or general life circumstances pushing him away from youtube.

[flarequake]

Random, but not really, shop note - I’m glad the pastel Phil plushie is sold out (hope that doesn’t affect anyone still wanting to buy one, though) cos I was sad to see it still there on its own. Ofc they put the tour pair on sale together and hiked the price up by £5 so no worries about just a solo plushie being left on a shelf there.

Communication and honesty (not the same as openness imposing on their privacy) are what I’d like, if there’s any real need to say it again. I’ve nodded along to @liola and @fancybum’s posts, amongst others, also @waveydnp’s (no idea why the mention isn’t come up).

[alittledizzy]

Looks like the D&P shop is back up but they’ve added even more items to the sale. I wish they’d added the hoodies before I ordered!

Ooh now that purple hoodie is very tempting!

Definitely! Enough so that I might just suck up the second shipping charge.

Not gonna lie though, I can’t help but find this huge sale a bit ominous...

same...

I'm more excited at the idea that they're clearing out some of the merch that's been there since 2015 to make room for new stuff. I have a lot of appreciation for the stuff put out in the past year but nothing before that was my style at all.

There are also things that are out of stock but haven't been taken off the site. If they had no intention of restocking the pj pants or the pins I can't imagine there'd be any reason to leave them there when the site was literally just down for maintenance and could have been tidied up.

[anna_begins]

Deflecting that frustration with “he’s actually been pretty clear about not posting on his main channel lols, what’s the problem?” is garbage.

There's no deflecting going on here. I am fully aware that most of the disappointment lately comes from missing joint content and that's totally valid. My post about Dan's main channel was directly in response to people specifically talking about Dan's solo content in regards to his April Fools joke that he was uploading a video. The hostility in your reply is off-putting. I can understand saying you don't agree with someone's point of view, or that you don't understand where they're coming from based on things you've observed, but to mock it and say it's "garbage" is not helpful and not what I thought this forum was about.

I agree with others that this particular conversation is just going around in circles at the moment so I'm also going to bow out of it at this time.

I'm happy to see Dan tweeted again today & I always love to see them interact with John. I'm also happy that the pastel hoodies have been added to the spring sale. I've been on the fence about getting one because I rarely wear hoodies but I think the ampersand branding is too iconic to pass up. I'm really interested in seeing what Phil's new merch is going to be & does anyone else have a sneaking suspicion that Dan might include matte black nail polish in his next release?

[autumnhearth]

I only came here to say that I agree that another muckbang would be a very smart way to communicate where they are at currently (however vaguely they want to). I wouldn’t expect any other kind of joint content before a solo Dan video and I think it would be much more comfortable, calm, controlled and farther reaching than a liveshow. My husband actually suggested that last night. Of course he also just wants a gaming video, even if it’s filmed in pjs in their lounge. I had to shoot down his idea of a ditl though, I think that’s the least likely content we would get nowadays.

[plinthofmylife]

Not gonna lie though, I can’t help but find this huge sale a bit ominous...

same...

In my eternal optimism, I have decided to take it an omen that they need warehouse space for a whole new merch line focused around a new, fabulous project.

Plz let me have this.

[noodlebum]

Not gonna lie though, I can’t help but find this huge sale a bit ominous...

same...

In my eternal optimism, I have decided to take it an omen that they need warehouse space for a whole new merch line focused around a new, fabulous project.

Plz let me have this.

I like this idea

[coffeepenguin]

I only came here to say that I agree that another muckbang would be a very smart way to communicate where they are at currently (however vaguely they want to). I wouldn’t expect any other kind of joint content before a solo Dan video and I think it would be much more comfortable, calm, controlled and farther reaching than a liveshow. My husband actually suggested that last night. Of course he also just wants a gaming video, even if it’s filmed in pjs in their lounge. I had to shoot down his idea of a ditl though, I think that’s the least likely content we would get nowadays.

I don't think a mukbang would be more realistic than a liveshow tbh, iirc Dan wasn't that thrilled with the whole concept of eating on camera when they did it the first time.

I actually think that a joint ls would be a great idea but it only works if they know what they are doing and where they are going. I hope so, but I'm not sure For another example of a British youtuber dealing with mental health issues and worrying about his future, I found Tomska's perspective in the end of his last monthly vlog (start at 24m10s) pretty jarring, but interesting, even if their situation isn't identical, of course.

[plinthofmylife]

For another example of a British youtuber dealing with mental health issues and worrying about his future, I found Tomska's perspective in the end of his last monthly vlog (start at 24m10s) pretty jarring, but interesting, even if their situation isn't identical, of course.

Watching this yesterday I thought about Dan a LOT. I also thought about Dan when TomSka was talking in November (?) about the fact that he figures he probably only has one more good year on youtube and wanted to eek out the big projects he could while he still had resources. I kinda wonder if II/the last year of DAPG is kinda exactly that to Dan, especially with the way he talks about it. I also wonder how much Dan is lurking on tumblr tags/IDB and reading mean things about himself. Or just conspiracy theories. Honestly, it's probably worse to read theories you're working on a big project or moving if you're just contemplating your future on youtube and have no concrete plans. I also think it's possible he knows that not doing joint content is hurting Phil's views but he also wants things to be "perfect" before he comes back, but then that puts more pressure on it, and then more guilt on the fact that he's not making anything.

This harps on a lot of my personal feelings about burnout as a creator; I often wonder what it would take to stop creating for the internet and just "go get a real job" and then wonder if I'm idiot for that.

I can imagine Dan being in the same loop, especially having dropped out of uni and essentially accidentally ending up in his career because of internet crush when he was a teenager. It's hard to imagine a different version of your life or job when your job is putting your life on the internet, but also, there's no guidebooks for this. There's no self-help books or career counselors you go to and say "I have a job that didn't exist 10 years ago, and it's wrapped up in my relationship, and I'm wildly successful at it, but it's hurting my mental health but wtf else can I do".

ETA: I'm barely in the public eye compared to DNP, but I still have had to deal with getting doxxed/stalkers/deciding if I want to be public about relationships/locking down and using fake names in certain places. This is also because I'm a woman on the internet, of course, but at the scale of their celebrity, that shit is exhausting. It's tiring at my level of public eye.

[AroboticPhil]

I obviously miss dan & phil (liveshows, more personal ig stories, tweets etc -not so much dan videos as in the last year and a half it was often a bit of a miss for me) and the joint content a lot and i'm sad about the whole hiatus, but i'm not really angry or upset with them. We're not their friends or family, we don't have a personal relationship with them, we don't depend on them for things like a job ,... so I feel like morally they have the right to suddenly stop making videos/being entertainers without giving us any explanations. If I were famous, I would hate feeling like I have no right to anonymity and like I owe strangers insight into my life and myself if I don't feel like sharing it, for whatever reasons, even ones not as serious as mental health.
That said, I also feel like subscribers and fans completely have the right to be annoyed at them for that, because those people have supported them for years and this silent treatment can be really hurtful and disappointing for a lot of people and no one can blame them for leaving the fandom.
So yeah it sucks there's so little content and personally I'm more in a "not really thinking about DnP right now, I'll get invested again when they properly come back" vibe but if they loose a chunk of their audience because of this, it's 100% on them.
(also this is really just my own feelings on the situation i'm not saying anyone has/should feel the same way at all)

[knq]

This harps on a lot of my personal feelings about burnout as a creator; I often wonder what it would take to stop creating for the internet and just "go get a real job" and then wonder if I'm idiot for that.

I can imagine Dan being in the same loop, especially having dropped out of uni and essentially accidentally ending up in his career because of internet crush when he was a teenager. It's hard to imagine a different version of your life or job when your job is putting your life on the internet, but also, there's no guidebooks for this. There's no self-help books or career counselors you go to and say "I have a job that didn't exist 10 years ago, and it's wrapped up in my relationship, and I'm wildly successful at it, but it's hurting my mental health but wtf else can I do".

The whole ‘falling into YouTube’ thing is one topic of TTLMT I haven’t seen discussed all that much. It does seem to be what Dan’s saying in part of the video where he has cereal(?) and then starts putting it on like a clown mask. He talks about getting swept up in circumstances and finding yourself living a life that isn’t your truth. I’ve never been sure what that meant to him specifically. That he found his way into comedy without really intending to, perhaps? But he’s also said he enjoys comedy.

Now that I think of it TTLMT, just like II, brings up some really broad questions that it doesn’t answer and then transitions into smaller, answerable questions. Dan doesn’t know how to live his truth or sustain his own happiness long term, but he does know food, laughter, and sex make him happy in the short term. II asks stuff like ‘should we give the people what they want’ (dear god I’m tired of that phrase and glad I haven’t heard it lately) and broadly highlights conflict between creators and audiences and so on before coming to the much more short term conclusion that ‘right now we just want to please you.’

It makes me wonder if part of this hiatus for Dan is him figuring how to resolve some of the bigger questions he’d been posing but not answering last year.

[Catallena]

I'm gonna word vomit about Dan a bit because I have thoughts that are all over the place and potentially not related to anything, but I needed to write it down somewhere other than a Notepad file that I end up deleting.

read at your own risk lmao.

Ever since I started watching the boys in 2012, Dan has always seemed to strive for some unachievable form of perfection. And in hindsight, I might have watched that strive for perfection slowly cripple him over the years. Nothing he ever does seems good enough in his eyes. And whenever he does seem happy with something, he changes his mind about it at some point. For me as fan, that has always been one Dan's most annoying (and concerning) quirks. It kinda sucks to see him scrub away the past so often. It almost makes you feel silly that you ever liked those things. But I know that isn't Dan's intention and that while it might be inconvenient for me, it must be maddening for him.

The thing is that even if he uploads tomorrow, that won't change. Over the past few years he has done plenty to try and help himself move on from things he didn't like about his past self. He has deleted years of tweets, he has deleted and privated a lot of videos, he celebrated all the cringe parts of his branding with two books and a tour, and then he made a dramatic video about how danisnotonfire was dead. And none of it has ever helped him. And that just makes me so sad for him. Like I don't think he wants pity because pity sucks, but still.

I wonder how Dan is looking back on this past year right now. He was over TABINOF/TATINOF pretty quickly imo. Proud of what they had done of course, but he was over the whole era. He seemed to see it as a fresh start. But that new start barely happened. Uploaded a few videos, some with pretty mixed reactions. Continued the gaming channel. Then went on tour again. With the Interactive Introverts era being over, is it another chance at a fresh start without being held back by the past? Is that what this whole hiatus and the potential sacrificial offering of the joint branding is attempting? Or has he grown disillusioned with the concept of new beginnings since it might not have turned out the way he wanted last time and he actually doesn't know where to go from here? In my last post I said that I can't help but wonder whether Dan is actually 'ready' but actually just procrastinating. The more I think about it, the more I feel that way. But that also might be me projecting.

WOO. That probably made no sense. Cool. Bye.

[obsessivelymoody]

I'm gonna word vomit about Dan a bit because I have thoughts that are all over the place and potentially not related to anything, but I needed to write it down somewhere other than a Notepad file that I end up deleting.

read at your own risk lmao.

Ever since I started watching the boys in 2012, Dan has always seemed to strive for some achievable form of perfection. And in hindsight, I might have watched that strive for perfection slowly cripple him over the years. Nothing he ever does seems good enough in his eyes. And whenever he does seem happy with something, he changes his mind about it at some point. For me as fan, that has always been one Dan's most annoying (and concerning) quirks. It kinda sucks to see him scrub away the past so often. It almost makes you feel silly that you ever liked those things. But I know that isn't Dan's intention and that while it might be inconvenient for me, it must be maddening for him.

The thing is that even if he uploads tomorrow, that won't change. Over the past few years he has done plenty to try and help himself move on from things he didn't like about his past self. He has deleted years of tweets, he has deleted and privates a lot of videos, he celebrated all the cringe parts of his branding with two books and a tour, and then he made a dramatic video about how danisnotonfire was dead. And none of it has ever helped him. And that just makes me so sad for him. Like I don't think he wants pity because pity sucks, but still.

I wonder how Dan is looking back on this past year right now. He was over TABINOF/TATINOF pretty quickly imo. Proud of what they had done of course, but he was over the whole era. He seemed to see it as a fresh start. But that new start barely happened. Uploaded a few videos, some with pretty mixed reactions. Continued the gaming channel. Then went on tour again. With the Interactive Introverts era being over, is it another chance at a fresh start without being held back by the past? Is that what this whole hiatus and the potential sacrificial offering of the joint branding is attempting? Or has he grown disillusioned with the concept of new beginnings since it might not have turned out the way he wanted last time and he actually doesn't know where to go from here? In my last post I said that I can't help but wonder whether Dan is actually 'ready' but actually just procrastinating. The more I think about it, the more I feel that way. But that also might be me projecting.

WOO. That probably made no sense. Cool. Bye.

+1 to this. I didn't intend on saying anything on this topic, as I absolutely would get far too personal, nor would I be able to effectively state my feelings like this. But this post pretty much sums all of them up, and I just appreciate a lot it as someone with a very similar perspective.

[plinthofmylife]

Despite you calling it word vomit, @Catallena that all made perfect sense to me. And I agree.

[flarequake]

Strong nods from me too @Catallena and this is somewhere I identify with Dan a lot. I’ve had enough downs and ups in my careers (I’ve had 2 before I guess, and more very short attempts), thanks to deep lack of confidence, trying to fit into a more sensible box, health etc, and through it all I’m still a perfectionist idealist, but have a clearer idea of what I’d rather do and how it can work with where I am now (it’s a development of what I always wanted to do cos when I was 18 a creative career seemed too risky).

Anyway, not the same as Dan, but I see similarities and it’s not the easiest thing to figure out, certainly not by yourself, but @plinthofmylife’s last bit of their post had me think that even though Dan’s situation on YouTube etc is unusual, there are good therapists and coaches out there who can use their skills of helping people to figure things out. Heck, there are books aplenty to help you get to know yourself and this is also where Try New Things comes into its own eg if you have a go at a new hobby or volunteer somewhere you find out what you like/don’t like/are capable or just get a breath of fresh air.

[glitterintheair]

Great post, @Catallena.

I think that Dan's desire to achieve perfection has skyrocked after 'Daniel and Depression' and the positive reaction it got. I feel like realizing that he could actually do things like that, that he could achieve some form of perfection with his videos, made him believe that he could and should do that all the time.

That's easier said than done, though. He's putting way too much pressure on himself and it's not surprising that he has such a struggling relationship with youtube.

[glitterintheair]

Sorry for the double post but I was checking the dap shop and it seems like the dapg pjs are gone from the site.

[flarequake]

The pastel Phil plushie has too, the only sold out thing listed is Tabinof, makes sense not to retire that.

[Ablissa]

They might just be removing sold out things before launching new merch. It's normal to not keep stuff in stock forever, especially if it's becoming irrelevant like the pastel plushies (that was quite a while ago) or even the dapg pjs if they're rebranding the channel in the future.

(I might keep this avatar a while longer. it's super cute)

[alittledizzy]

Dan started following an American photographer named Ryan McGinley on instagram and now I've spent twenty minutes looking through his photography online. Thanks for expanding my worldview, Dan!

[knq]

Dan started following an American photographer named Ryan McGinley on instagram and now I've spent twenty minutes looking through his photography online. Thanks for expanding my worldview, Dan!

I clicked on his instagram, saw the naked man sleeping beside his dog, and went 'yep, that's an instant Dan follow for you.'

On the sale: I still see some 'sold out' items which haven't had their pages removed: Pins of Truth on the worldwide shop, pastel Dan plushie on the US shop, and original Dan and Phil plushies on the AU shop. I guess we'll see if their pages are removed in the future. Not sure what any of that means. I just want to feel slightly less bleak about the potential return of DanandPhil branding at some unspecified point in the future.

ETA: I've forgotten who it was that has knowledge in interpreting companies' financial statements here, but I'm curious if IRL's last financial account means anything to someone who can interpret that kind of stuff! To me it looked like they were making and spending about the same as the previous year but had substantially less money which I was confused by.

[queerofcups]

I know we're talking about merch now and tbh I'm not interested in debating so much as sharing my opinions and bouncing because there's a whole lot of feelings happening rn, but

1. Dan and Phil aren't employees. They're a business, they're business owners and we aren't their business partners. I'm not sure where I fall on the whole "unprofessionalism" argument, but if we're approaching anything they do as if they're employees who have the same sort of work concerns the vast majority of us have, I don't know how apt the argument really is.

2. I don't think any of the arguments I've seen about the hiatus have fully taken into account what an undertaking last year was them, personally or professionally (not saying they haven't happened, saying I haven't seen them, but I'm on here intermittently). Maybe its coddling, I know someone will see this as further excuse making, that's fine, but I wonder if a year of doing Youtube but jacked up to 1000% because you have to be On for a few months rather than a few hours, took a larger toll on Dan than we (or he) expected. And Phil for that matter.