Happy Easter everyone!! Oh wow, I'm happy to see how active this forum is.
you made it, jhambs. you finally have your own cult lmao
I'm really liking the fanservice discussion. Because yes, you're right
somelikeitpink, inherently, fanservice isn't a bad thing.
In big industries like movie and TV, the makers show us (the consumers) through fanservice that they care about their fans and listen to their wishes. Yay! Good thing. Now, YouTube isn't a big, mainstream industry. No, scratch that, it
is but it hasn't always been and that, as
meerms already said, is the problem: We don't watch YouTube to see fictional characters that are (hopefully) written the way we want them to. We watch YouTube to see real people do real things and share their real lives with us.
Thus, fanservice shouldn't exist on YouTube. But we all know that the times of teenagers complaining about school in front of a webcam are long gone. Youtube is a media of its own and fanservice on YouTube is very real. A lot of people aren't happy with the commercialization of Youtube and especially fans of Deppy (ngl, me included sometimes) like to pretend that D&P are better than the rest of the industry. But they're
not and obvious (and even worse hidden, less obvious) fanservice proves that.
In conclusion: fanservice = commercialization = bad.
Now that we've established that fanservice does indeed very much exist on YT, you can apply the basic system of fanservice to it.
(which I just totally came up with lmao)
I think you can basically boil it down to two kinds of fanservice:
Type A) the creators of the medium see that certain parts of their product are especially well received (and other's less) and give their fans more of what they like and less of what they don't but don't shift their overall focus too much
TV Show Example: The producers of the show notice that minor character A is really popular with the fans. Meanwhile, minor character B isn't very well liked.
They give minor character A a more important role in the overall story and give minor character B less screen time and/or try to make the character more likable.
Type B) the creators of the medium see that certain parts of their product are better liked than others and go out of their way to please the fans, even if it means other aspects of their product will suffer
TV Show Example: The producers of the show notice that minor character A is really popular with the fans. Meanwhile, minor character B isn't very well liked.
They promote minor character A to main character and give them their own story arc. Minor character B gets put on a bus or killed off.
The difference seems small but especially the creator's intentions behind the fanservice really make a big difference on the long run.
Now, we have to try sorting certain Phanservice moments into group A) and group B). The problem here is that very often,
we don't know what's actually fanservice and what's not. Still, I think there are some moments you can definitely identify as kind B) fanservice.
One example that comes to mind here (and you can gladly argue with me about this - this theory is nowhere near foolproof) is Dan in bunny suit and flower crown during the Easter baking video. Especially by wearing the flower crown he was clearly trying to appeal to their flower-crown-loving tumblr audience.
this post makes me feel like one of those conspiracy theorists lol. oh well.
Overall, his behaviour during the video was imo pretty hyper and he behaved more like his sometimes very loud DINOF persona than the "real" Dan (who, I'm sure, can be just as lively but probably not for the uncut entirety of a baking video). Back when the video came out, I remember we all agreed it was pretty phanservice-y in general - on top of what I already listed, Dan also fed Phil, gave the camera
that one look and Phil, too, was pretty AP-like and "quirky". So they both went out of their way to make the video more interesting and more appealing - especially for their main crowd, which is mostly based on Tumblr and - surprise - mainly consists of shippers.
Type A) fanservice is a lot harder to point out because we don't actually know how Deppy behave in private and thus often don't recognize how and when the lines between script and reality begin to blur.
Type A) fanservice could be anything from Dan looking at Phil a certain way, to Phil touching Dan's arm, to a joke/sentence not being cut from a video. Things that also fall in this category are, imo, videos like DITL, Just Dance and Reacting to Baby Videos, some of the stuff on Danisnotinteresting and LessAmazingPhil. D&P know what their audience likes - be it real, non-scripted D&P interaction (DITL/LAP/DINI), certain video games (Just Dance) or simple things like baby photos/videos (the "Reacting" videos + TABINOF, which imo contained a lot of Type A) fanservice in general). They deliver.
So, now we have to ask ourselves "is Phanservice bad?".
I'd like to say no but actually, it's not that easy. I like moments that could be considered "phan proof" but I don't like to be deceived I also don't like obvious, often clumsy, Type A) fanservice - especially since, unlike Jaspar &co, Deppy never point out the ridiculousness of that kind of fanservice.
So no Phanservice at all? But then, if we suddenly took every bit of Phanservice out of their videos, what would be left?
How different would their videos be?
We don't know. I don't know.
I spent more than an hour writing this but look at me, I now have even more questions than I had in the beginning. /sighs/
Deppy, you're lucky you're so cute.
... and holyy crap, this post got way too long. I need to get out and gain some perspective™
mods for the hard work on this memetastic forum. May the bants be ever fruitful.
