Lonelygirl15 and other ARGS | Fallen Titans #9

in the year following the formation of YouTube in 2005 one of the most prevalent rising genres on the site was that of the daily video vlog users would buy cheap camcorders record themselves discussing what had happened in their daily lives and would then upload these clips to be viewed and discussed by their audiences this is a genre of content creation which while certainly notable is rather unspectacular under a modern context in that the videos themselves tend to just be uninteresting recaps of the days of regular people often days so unspectacular that these very same people probably wouldn't remember much about them today however there is one standout case to be found in these in mid 2006 a small channel began posting what were essentially fan compilations and music video tributes to many of these most popular vlogging channels growing a small following the Creator then did a face reveal and announced that she was going to start vlogging out of a love for the content of her peers in the coming weeks brie would upload several times a week describing things about her life showing off her closest friend talking about problems that she was facing with her parents and other general elements of a commonly angsty teenage life other times she would simply try her best to entertain her audience by dedicating videos to trendy topics or educational material budeau is no longer a planet ceres Zeena you be three one three these are Pluto's new friends did I sound like the kids that you want at your lunch with no way the channel lonely girl fifteen is certainly rather charming but like many that fell before it can often prove to be a rather tedious and poorly executed at times it's something that you have to have a lot of dedication to watch thoroughly and it's age means that the content is often misinformed or outdated by all accounts it seems to be another channel that should have faded into the background falling into extreme obscurity as time passed but all was not as it seemed lonely girl 15 was a hit and not just with an ish YouTube audience it was a national headline a series discussed widely by mainstream audiences and was all around the first time that anyone really seemed to take this concept of YouTube that seriously this is the journey of one lonely girl and her 15 minutes of fame [Music] [Music] hmmm the tantalizing and refreshing taste of icebreakers sours this video is brought to you thanks to our sponsors at privacy privacy is a free and secure service that allows you to create virtual cards with unique numbers for every purchase you make online this is smart for the same reason that it's smart to use a different password for every website you use even if your information is stolen because of one purchase you're not at a big loss because they don't have your actual card info I've been using privacy just about everywhere I can set spending limits freeze and unfreeze cards and it's especially great for making purchases on sites that you've never used before it really does make me feel much more prepared for any potential shady things that might happen online and with the chrome add-on it's unbelievably fast and easy to make yourself a new card for every purchase with just a few clicks this has been especially important to me because for the past few months the secret evil organization has been stalking me so they can kill me steal my blood and then use my blood to become immortal so I need to maintain credit card security as a special treat for my viewers anyone who uses my link below will get a free five dollars to use anywhere you'd like that's free money and how we all know you're late with your Christmas gifts why don't why don't you use that to get something special for a loved one like maybe a refreshing case of ice breaker sours go to privacy calm slash Quinton that's priv Acy calm /qu int o n to get your free five dollars today so before we dive into our main topic of the day I think it's important that we stop and discuss the nature of AR geez and pseudo AR cheese on YouTube the phrase Arg stands for alternate reality game a rather oversimplified way to look at it is that it's a widespread new media version of a choose your own adventure book the Arg is usually defined by a few factors and existence across multiple forms of social media an apparent interactive nature and a mystery surrounding the content on screen as well as a thematic focus on the meta contextual nature of the project so for instance it's very common to see a rj stories told across multiple YouTube channels maybe a Twitter account and so on and so forth entirely out of the expectation that the audience will become obsessed hunting down these things and trying to figure out what they all mean perhaps some of the most culturally impactful examples of a youtube series with Arg elements was Marble Hornets the show was inspired by a contest which had been held in the something awful forums in 2009 the original poster stated that they were a great fan of photoshopping regular images to appear paranormal and wondered if the users could create and then spread a spooky image to garner mainstream attention potentially by attaching it to a unique story after some humorous trials and tribulations user victor serge won the unofficial competition by posting two doctored images of unnamed children with a tall or faceless man standing behind or near them those in the thread would pitch back and forth possible stories to add to these along with additional images and eventually a modern legend was born that of a lanky and mysterious figure who stalks children in broad daylight taking them away under mysterious circumstances he would be called many things in the coming years the negative the operator the beast but most universally Slenderman we're gonna call him skinny boy it was from this thread that two users pulled the inspiration to create Marble Hornets the show saw a main character known as Jay discovering a set of Clips recovered for an amateur student project entitled Marble Hornets the char of these clips was both the mystery of what was happening during the shooting of the film as well as the ultimate realization that those involved clearly weren't making a great movie now at first everything seems to be normal with these just being awkward clips from an unfinished shoot but fans would eventually start noticing small details discovering hidden clues to the lingering mysteries on-screen the Early Show is basically a live-action Where's Waldo where our pals skinny boy can be seen hiding very briefly in different parts of the clips often in moments which are extremely easy to miss the series went viral around the fifth episode and fulfilling the wishes of the original form it outgrew the original audience of posters and made their fictional Specter into an Internet icon [Music] [Applause] [Music] Marble Hornets is truly remarkable storytelling done in a really interesting fashion and the fact that it's garnered a twin peaks' like following with fans plotting out timelines and great theories about what the entire story is supposed to mean shows that it really captivated its audience as much as it intended to allow like twin peaks' the series unfolds in two separate ways one is that there's been a series of murders around the cast and that the main characters have to figure out why with the other being that there's a mysterious Specter who appears around all of these things although he never seems to do much a lot of people theorize that skinny boy is thus just a lover of chaos and that he manipulates these people to do these things because it's entertaining but my theory has always been that skinny boy just wants to hang out and that he keeps accidentally showing up whenever a murder happens making a very awkward situation for him energies are often very closely linked to the creepypasta community and thus your ability to enjoy them past their initial gimmick will likely boil down heavily to how much you can stand creepypasta tropes and writing Styles hyper-realistic blah speaking of which is actually not uncommon to see Arg content be simply mistaken as creepypasta early on for instance the storytelling narrative Ben drowned was originally a creepy story posted to 4chan surrounding a copy of his elder game which was actually possessed by an evil spirit further posts on a YouTube account and in other places would lead fans of the story on a wild-goose chase discovering a secret web site clues about a cult which seems to be connected to the haunted game and that posting response videos to uploads on the channel would cause different things to happen within the narrative this is perhaps one of the clearest examples of what a literal Arg should be in that it's a multi-platform puzzle hunt which also allows the user to interact personally with the narrative but all this brings us back to what is by all accounts the granddaddy of both the online fascination with Arg s and YouTube itself in 2005 a recent college dropout by the name of Myles Beckett became obsessed with the existence of YouTube content that could eventually came to realize that the key mysterious quality of the genre was that it feels extremely personal yet it's often so precisely produced no one can ever tell what is authentic and what is exaggerated basically that the vague line between truth and lies is foggy in the YouTube space beckoned conceptualized a series which would disguise itself as a real show about an American teenager but would actually hold something sinister underneath he then pitched his plans to mesh flinders his friend of many years at a karaoke bar ironically known as The Gaslight or maybe that's not what it's called maybe I'm lying to you despite there being a very limited chance that the series would ever be noticed let alone that it would ever be profitable the two took out around $50,000 in credit card debt and began promoting their project on Craigslist under the title children of the anchor Cove an anagram of accordion French hovel that might be a coincidence the two would meet a selection of online applicants for potential roles but it wasn't until the second day that they met Jessica Lee Rose who they immediately recognized was the best fit for the role however the moment the Jessica heard that the series was going to be uploaded online and that it was hardly anything professional she had cold feet being a young woman with a limited understanding of the Internet and a fair amount of street smarts she was rightfully worried that the project might secretly be porn what did you think that first what was your first gut reaction I'm just gonna go to the parking meter now and drive away but the producers promised her that it was nothing shady and they quickly began piecing together all of the necessities that they needed to produce the show Misha's bedroom was decorated to appear as that of a 16 year old girls and a cheap webcam was purchased to film each episode the most commendable aspect of lonely girl 15 is just how perfectly it captures everything about an amateur YouTube vlog when they switch cameras the difference between aspect ratios is absolutely jarring the audio quality often makes it impossible to tell what anyone is actually saying the scripting can be poor and sometimes inaccurate but I think the biggest thing that jumps out is that they use copyrighted music without permission even from the moment that the series premiered there were great debates had as to whether it was real or just an advertising ploy and the counter-argument consistently leveled was that it was just too badly made to actually be fake the show basically revolves around its three core cast members bree is a 16 year old who decides vlogging out of a love for her YouTube peers and tells the audience about aspects of her life her deep admiration for facts about science and stuffed animals and additionally the bizarre religion of her parents and the drama surrounding that her best friend is named Daniel he is an eighteen year old who was admittedly rather sleazy who can usually be seen either lazing around in the background of the videos or uploading over-reactive responses to briefs content which escalates things in a really bizarre way fun fact the last time this series went viral was around the time that damn Daniel was a thing so almost every video in the series has at least one high ranking comment quoting that video then of course comes my favorite character of them all purple monkey purple monkey is Brees puppet who is fully introduced in the second episode who she constantly calls upon throughout the series I watched this for the first time very recently and when purple monkey was introduced I was so happy because it's so lovably stupid of a detail to include and it's just so charming my first hope was that purple monkey would turn out to be the real focal twist of the show like it would turn out he's in control of the sinister stuff going on behind the scenes the entire time but alas that didn't happen because the world isn't fair apparently there's a purple monkey fan website and it's still online and it has a guest book and I was the first person his I met yet in ten years there's certainly a great charm to early lonely girl content which makes it very binge worthy I think it's partially the bizarre chemistry between Bree and Daniel which makes for a very will they won't they situation even today in 2018 watching through these I was surprisingly invested in the mystery of whether or not these two were going to be a thing even though this is ten years old and also openly fake speaking of fake I mentioned earlier that the discussions upon whether or not the series was real or not started from the very beginning and frankly when you watch the show it's not hard to understand why the entire thing just reeks of thematic deception the way that the story always bounces back between breehn daniel's channels with some sort of hot drama that they're discussing how no one in the show ever seems to discover the existence of the channel despite it being somewhat popular in the real but I think there's one specific video that makes the whole thing seem blatantly fake okay look at this right okay Bri is filming herself pinning pictures to this board for no reason suddenly her dad and Daniel walk in the camera is placed perfectly so you can't see the dad's face basically giving this the tone of an Old Tom and Jerry cartoon next the dead Stan's in the doorway and talks for a good minute before a title screen appears that reads that almost caught me good thing he doesn't know a webcam from a hole in the ground okay back to the video okay this is fake as much as people like to claim that lonely girl 15 through and hints about the true nature of the story from day one in reality the show really dumped most of its hints at once in a very blatant video uploaded in early September 2006 so today I got some really cool news for my parents I have been chosen to participate in a ceremony oh it's a cult it's a big honor and it's gonna take a lot of preparation there's a bunch of stuff that I'm gonna have to memorize yep nope don't ceremony Arg solved it was also in September 2006 that lonely girl 15 was first outed as a fictional series there were numerous things which led up to this the first was that someone had gone out and trademarked the name lonely girl 15 clearly implying that whoever was running the show was not an innocent 16 year old girl the second was that a small group of amateur detectives had tricked someone using one of the site's MySpace pages into opening a link which featured an IP tracker they were able to use this and confirm that it was being run by one creative arts agency and so overnight lonely girl 15 went from a somewhat underachieving Internet show about a teenage girl to a national headline being paraded as a new form of storytelling in the emergence of online content by the end of the month the show would become the most subscribed to channel on all of YouTube following their being outed the series took some great risks and it's this period directly after the reveal which I find to be the most interesting allowing the show to exit her room for the first time lowly girl explored the content and potential sinister nests of the previously mentioned blatant cult ritual Daniel is worried about the situation and asks to back out and when she tells her parents that she wants out they suddenly go missing Bree and Daniel spend the next several weeks on the run jumping from hotel to hotel and just generally trying to escape from this cult all while vlogging it in full and uploading it to the Internet because they are not smart what I love most about this little brief air of the show is how the story keeps being told but they still managed to stick to the format as well of the quirkiness of the characters it's sort of amusing seeing these exaggerated YouTube personalities existing in the real world and recognizing how awful they both come across Daniel is very flippant and emotional he runs off on three numerous times just out of a complete lack of level-headedness and Bree meanwhile is an actual child who is incapable of thinking critically about what's going on and drags all of her stuffed animals with her everywhere despite them being on the run she used to be smart and she used to listen to reason now she'd rather talk to a puppet instead of her best friend one way that lonely girl 15 made big history on YouTube was when it became the first channel to ever feature an advertisement this took place in truckstop reunion when other characters in the show are seen fawning over the delicious existence of icebreakers sour gum ice breakers sours in the car you may not remember this but a huge feature of old YouTube was the existence of response content which would appear just over the comments on any video that was posted it was a good way to encourage community bonding and also the spreading of content but it was also a huge nuisance and a great way to spread spam so they eventually got rid of it this is important to lonely girl 15 because some of the response videos are extremely important to deciphering the storyline and so imagine at the time watching a lonely girl 15 and seeing dozens of response videos and having no idea which of those channels were just fan accounts playing along and which of them were officially created by the creators for you to tie into the story the show would also at this stage begin including clues and puzzles for the audience to solve on at least one occasion this also led to people who had helped solve the in-game riddles being credited on screen so I logged into the form at LG 15.com to see if you guys came up with anything I can't believe you all solved it thank you so much mint girl asked her fingers realistic pill op ladybug dose 16 to kill the smiley Island love and everyone else you all rock I honestly couldn't have done it without you act up so stopped the fourth main addition to the cast came from one of the characters posting response content who promised to give the two shelter after they lost all of their cash his name is Jonas Jonas is hot Jonas is a contentious figure in the show because it was debated for a long time if he was actually there to help the cast or if he was aligned with the evil cult controlling the show at one point us leads to an intense confrontation between him and three where she becomes convinced that he's working against her needs and ties him up for several days untie me and let me help you figure this out kami I'm sorry Jess you can take it really easy I can see just have to I can't your bitch Bree shocking transformation from a very young girl who plays with her stuffed animals and talks about fact she read online to this very cynical and often brutal woman being persecuted to the ends of the earth and trusting no one is certainly one of the most notable and fascinating things about the show it's chilling when you realize just how far she's come and how much debris that we loved at the start has totally ceased to exist by this point I really was clueless before but that dumb girl died on that no this is also where the show starts to lose a lot of the charm that it started with lonely girl 15 was cool because it was an OK YouTube vlog series that had some interesting elements hidden inside it worth deciphering as soon as the show became all about that story and following exactly what was happening in the narrative at every moment with no entertainment and no breaks it just becomes a little exhausting furthermore the shoddy nature of the production becomes just unavoidable and it's a little embarrassing when you have to decipher what's happening in the footage not because it's meant to be mysterious but just because it's bad but the big change is Bree Bree just became so less interesting to watch once she lost her innocence and that makes it in turn a lot harder to follow the story while this might sound like a joke I earnestly believe that the point during the show where breeze stopped using and showing off purple monkey is where it stops being a thing that I enjoy watching in the following years the story would continue leading to the death of Bri and her replacement by numerous characters and additionally the creation of several spin-offs if you'd like to hear more about these spin-offs I earnestly suggest a video made by youtuber Austin McConnell who runs a pop culture discussion channel and was actually involved in one of these spin-offs two years ago on the 10th anniversary of the channel a video was uploaded revealing that Bri was in fact still alive the video featuring her once again advertising the order quickly went viral leading to a great mystery over where the show would lead next most people tend to think that there was only one video in their revival but there were actually quite a few it's just that all of these were spread across numerous channels which was standard with early lonely girl content I think this is why the revival was doomed to fail spinning up a story across multiple locations certainly worked in an age of playlists and a better functioning recommended system but most people literally did not even find these other videos and I think that's the main reason that the project didn't go anywhere of all the content on YouTube air Gees tend to be the closest to film or television in one big way while most YouTube content tends to revolve around monetizing lifestyles a orgies are projects before anything else and their fate lies in the same place is television either they end in satisfying ways bringing closure to the story presented or they drag on for a bit too long run out of money and suddenly stop after falling into obscurity and yet they often prove themselves to be some of the most creative on the entire site the most worthy of discussion and arguably the hardest to fully cover in a video this short as a reminder this video is brought to you by privacy you can check them out at privacy comm slash Quinton or check out the link below and get a free five dollars to spend on your first purchase I'm Quinn reviews and that's all you need

Channel: undefined

Views: 271,417

Rating: 4.6148028 out of 5

Keywords: Quinton Reviews, Quinton, Reviews, Youtube, discussion, Lonelygirl15, Lonely Girl 15, Lonely Girl, Early history, ARGs, Alternate Reality Game, ARG, Slenderman, Marble Hornets, Fallen Titans

Id: k5S2Kdb8Io4

Length: 21min 46sec (1306 seconds)

Published: Invalid Date

Reddit Comments

[u/DylanTrahan]

Dude, I'm impressed at the amount of work that went into this. It's inspiring me to get back to work on my next video.