Tumblr's $6000 Scam: The Story of All or Nothing

this video is brought to you by curiositystream get access to curiositystream and my streaming service nebula and watch my nebula exclusive video debater theater at curiositystream.com sarahzad you know one of my favorite past times when i'm bored and just want something to do is to look up old kickstarters and fundraisers there's something fascinating about seeing what things people are pitching out there good ideas and bad ones and which things get funded and which don't like there's a certain joy in seeing that someone made a failed kickstarter to promote a website that would fix literally all the world's problems or that someone tried to get a legend of korra live action series made and sometimes these fundraisers just come and go they get posted they raise some money and either something comes out of it or it doesn't and life moves on but sometimes things get more interesting sometimes you become a part of tumblr folklore you have things like miss officer and mr truffles a failed kickstarter spun off from a tumblr post about a woman cop and a bear working together that was its own can of worms that's been documented extensively but the long and short of it is that the project came hugely short of its eighty thousand dollar goal and fell through or something like the arc project an rpg that had this vague plan about how it wanted to spotlight queer characters which raised 6 500 and then just didn't do anything but those have both been covered and talked about by youtuber izzy's and as we know two youtubers can't cover the same topic so i guess that's that but there is another one one that captured tumblr's attention over seven years ago and is still talked about and brought up to this day i'm of course talking about all or nothing the web series about a pansexual and an asexual who are roommates people were so excited for this the post pitching the series got shared hundreds of thousands of times an indiegogo was started that raised over five thousand dollars things were looking great and then someone ran away with thousands of dollars so on february 19 2014 tumblr user discontent ramblings made a post that read as follows an asexual and pansexual become roommates and have wacky adventures the show is called all or nothing pretty simple pretty straightforward like it's clearly a pun about how pansexual people like all genders and asexual people like no genders nothing overly odd or offensive i spoke to discontent ramblings about the post and it was based on a couple things there was this initial post which is basically the same joke but without the sitcom premise and then there's also the fact that the original poster was asexual and had a pansexual roommate so it was like oh this would be a super cute premise with this pun name according to discontent ramblings she made the post over a burger without really any expectation that it would blow up the way it did but within a few hours it started to get more and more traction very very quickly most of the early comments were people saying things like oh this describes me and my friend or this would be a cute show netflix get on this stuff like that shortly afterward a night veil blog added the comment plot twist the asexual is really super outgoing and is a huge flirt while the pansexual is extremely socially awkward and has trouble ordering coffee let alone getting a date this is what really got people into this concept which kind of makes sense it's a play on typical stereotypes about both those groups that turns the concept on its head it's again a cute joke or idea then the real kicker tumblr user schrodinger's nerd drew a piece of concept art for the show which you basically never see the post without there's the shy pansexual and their ace friend with a little title card that says all or nothing a few folks have pointed out that despite the prompt for the show kind of centering around things being the opposite of their stereotypes the concept art does kind of lean into stereotypes of the east asian character being shy and quiet and the black character being outgoing and loud though i don't believe the artist had any negative intentions as other folks have pointed out it's possible that this art kind of fitting into people's safe preconceptions might have helped it become popular on tumblr especially at the time so i know i'm being pretty reductive when i talk in my videos about how dashcon was the catalyst that made people go from liking dorky earnest fandom ideas to hating them in actuality the website's cultural shift resulted from lots of different things happening across about a year or so dashcon just being one of them but that being said i do feel like it's important here to talk about how this belongs to the pre-dashcon era because the website trying and failing to organize a fan convention was one of the first times that like trying to organize a large-scale thing based on the website was ever really tried there was just a lot more earnestness back in the day around the idea that we could make real life stuff happen based on tumblr posts so for that reason i do want to emphasize here that this post predated dashcon by about six months and you can very much tell that's the case when you read all the reactions here people really really wanted this show to become a reality in some ways it's kind of hard to see why like we aren't told anything about these characters or what the plot would be except that there's a shy pansexual and an outgoing asexual but on the other hand and this is something that'll get talked about pretty extensively later on in the video this kind of emphasis on the existence of representation above all else was a pretty common cultural attitude at the time of all or nothing so you see a lot of comments that say things like i am going to reblog this until it becomes an actual show or like oh my god someone call cbs or like oh my gosh what if they had bisexual neighbors and their slogan was by the way all in all the post got nearly 750 000 notes which is absolutely insane for tumblr by the way like very few posts break a million notes and the fact that this one is three quarters of the way there is absolutely buck wild to be fair some of these notes are not from 2014 but suffice it to say all or nothing was really really popular not only that but as we all know from being on the internet people love to re-upload other people's content and posts just screenshoting all or nothing got an even further reach meaning it absolutely has been liked and shared more than a million times when i spoke to discontent ramblings she talked about how it felt really good at first to have people want to make creative ideas based on her work to have so many folks get excited about it and that's completely understandable the experience of having a post go viral with mostly positive things said about it would have felt really nice especially when it's in some way people praising and wanting to build off of your creative work not to mention like i said earlier this kind of culture of trying to make stuff based on tumblr via kickstarters and wide support had been a thing for a while some of it is just that a lot of people on tumblr especially before the ban of not safe for work content which forced a lot of artists off the website for fear that their content would get caught up in the ban tumblr was a hub for a lot of creatives for a long time art writing and music made up a big portion of tumblr fandom and it wasn't uncommon for people to add their own original art to your post and this could often be really cool like there was this post once about how cool it would be if instead of oceans the earth was covered with forests where the deeper you went the taller the trees would get and the more giant woodland creatures you would see and someone illustrated it in an almost over the garden wall style and it was cool as hell or there was this post where these three guys one of whom actually later turned out to be rogue one star ris ahmed posted a group selfie at an airport and made a joke about being in a boy band and someone illustrated an album cover with all three of them as boy band members or someone made a text post about how they didn't fit the typical cottage core introvert stereotype and they were an introverted gym bro and someone actually drew them just because they could and that post got really popular stuff like adding art to people's art posts and building off of people's ideas was really common some people found it annoying there's that infamous selfie chain where someone compared themselves to an english teacher and like 80 people added on their own selfies but for the most part it was representative of a pretty collective culture of adding on to each other's creativeness and it was seen as broadly acceptable to do that so when someone drew that all or nothing edition it got people really excited hence why you had dozens of people talking about how this needed to become a real show and in true tumblr fashion someone answered that call so in june 2014 a few tumblr users set up an indiegogo page to make their own version of all or nothing so if you don't know indiegogo is like kickstarter basically you list your product and fans can fund it in exchange for some rewards or just because they want to support you and see your work come to fruition the campaign was titled all or nothing web series with the description being a sitcom-styled web series about a pansexual and an asexual whom are roommates this is fine for a text post that's just a pun but it is a bit strange for an actual pitch for a show like okay what's the plot what else do we know about these characters are there other characters or are they just yeah they're just pansexual and asexual okay they were asking for 600 originally by the way though it was a flexible funding campaign which i'll talk about in more detail in a second they tell you a few things on the indiegogo page none of which is like a plot or specific budget allocation but it's still interesting originally the cast was listed with names and photos that has since been deleted from the page and i'm not going to share it here for obvious reasons they also talked a little bit about their goals more specifically they wanted to represent the lgbt plus community and give visibility to some groups that don't really have much of it they also claimed they would be hosting the web series on youtube and that the money would go to a mix of lights cameras and action basically needing good cameras lighting craft services for the cast as well as costumes and transportation so alright even without knowing the direction this story goes there are a few things worth noting about all or nothing the web series is indiegogo page just right off the bat okay so let's break this down piece by piece because once you begin to dissect it stuff starts to really fall apart for starters let's look at the original goal here six hundred dollars anyone who has worked in any kind of production knows that six hundred dollars doesn't cover jack [ __ ] you're lucky if that's even gonna cover catering for a few days it doesn't even cover the cost of a quality camera and a tripod or anything like that furthermore the original indiegogo lists at least eight members of the cast and crew even if we're being generous and assume that no funds are needed for any other part of the production that means that on average everyone would get paid only 75 dollars which is comically low absurdly low that's only slightly more than my co-writer emily's salary the description for the indiegogo page says that the money will go to lights camera action which is cute unless you're asking people to fund your professional show they elaborate that the money will go to buying lights and good cameras and renting out sets and transportation and look it's not enough to afford any of that have you seen how much tweeny lights cost have you they're pricey as hell i mean it's one banana michael what could it cost ten dollars also this is a personal pet peeve but the fact that the stretch goals were being used for cute little things like sending out signed headshots and making dvd copies instead of you know finding ways to improve the finished show says a lot it goes back to this just not feeling like an actual professional pitch that was really thought out not helped by just how little actual detail there is here beyond just the basic idea of an asexual person and a pansexual person being roommates there's just nothing no character descriptions no talk about tone or the basic episode to episode plot or hell even the number of episodes that this was gonna be the only hint towards that is the fact that 11 people donated towards the hundred dollar tier which promised the opportunity for said person to write an episode meaning that if this had all gone as planned at least 11 episodes of all or nothing would have been written by indiegogo donors instead of the writing staff also side note but the ten thousand dollar tier is the exact same as the hundred dollar tier except they'll fly you out to their location and feed you grapes and call you your majesty surprisingly no one donated ten thousand dollars even the fact that they made this on indiegogo with flexible funding feels a bit off like no shame to people who use indiegogo but here's something to keep an eye out for when it comes to potential scams one of the big differences between indiegogo and kickstarter is that with indiegogo's flexible funding you keep the money donated regardless of whether or not you reach your final goal this differs from kickstarter where you need to reach your funding amount otherwise it's all over what this basically means is even if a campaign makes drastically less money than they need to actually produce a product they still get to keep all the money like if a hundred thousand dollar project had flexible funding that would mean that even if they only made 10k they would get to pocket that money even though it clearly couldn't be used to actually make anything essentially indiegogo allowed the team to keep the money should things go wrong unlike kickstarter where it had to be well all or nothing that's not a guaranteed sign that a project is a scam but it's something to look out for especially when it comes to projects that very much need to reach their goal to feasibly make anything at all it's not a definitive sign of scamming but it is at the very least a red flag or in this case a pink and yellow and blue flag and a black grey white and purple flag of course this is irrelevant because all or nothing reached its original goal it reached its original goal within the first few days and then just kept going keeping the fundraiser open for several months the amount raised went far beyond the original 600 and totaled out at 5 899 us dollars which while still a low amount of money for a series is a lot of money a surprising amount of money given how little information was actually communicated to donors here it really should be emphasized just how much nothing this team had there was no campaign video no pitch document no thorough breakdown of how funds would be allocated no portfolio or prior credits listed they made a youtube channel but there's literally nothing on it even the primary artwork to pitch the series wasn't theirs they used it with permission from the artist who was otherwise completely and totally unaffiliated with the project the only thing on there that actually seemed to be their creation was this logo here for their production company which is absolutely incredible i love it it's like the eraserhead baby in a test tube it's brilliant but otherwise there was literally nothing here of their own to show for nothing to prove that they could or should do this project it's not a great fundraiser and yet it still worked it really speaks to just how much people really wanted to see this get made despite having literally nothing to show for themselves this team was able to raise almost 6 000 just based on pure hype and trust us it's going to be great people were sold on just the idea that this could be real that it would turn into a full thing and that this would finally bring some great representation to web-based serial content plus would someone really go to all the trouble to make an indiegogo page for this if they didn't know what they were doing and the answer is yes yes they would after two months the team finally ended the indiegogo campaign and stopped taking donations then the campaign went quiet after about a month the official twitter account tweeted that some people have been asking me if we're ever gonna start filming and i've made a post on our facebook page about that in depth check it out said facebook page has since been deleted so whatever it said is lost to time but it's not entirely relevant anyway about a week after that there was one more tweet that simply said quick update just sorted out a few things with my bank should get the money soon so sorry it's taken so long and that's the last tweet from the account some say they're still at the bank to this day okay but in all seriousness this would lead to radio silence like if it was a slow amount of updates coming out that would be one thing and honestly sort of usual for a project like this productions take a long time and it takes quite a bit to accumulate stuff that's actually presentable to others but this was full on silence no more updates were ever made to the indiegogo page none to the social media accounts the youtube channel which has over a thousand subscribers by the way seemingly never uploaded anything just nothing all around and as more time passed and nothing was delivered the narrative around all or nothing shifted soon realization hit word about the all or nothing series being nothing more than a scam circulated around tumblr it became part of the folklore that time someone decided to scam tumblr users out of money by promoting a tv show that they never actually delivered on the original post was still popular and still being earnestly shared around as late as 2016 but any actual enthusiasm to see the indiegogo project finished seemingly died as everyone just assumed they were grifted by grifters nowadays people use all or nothing as mostly a punchline like for example there's this post here about how tumblr is a bad news source where someone replied with a joke about how they heard there was a show about an asexual and a pansexual being roommates or this post here that parodies the original pitch or when someone made a kickstarter years later for a lesbian remake of queer eye called butch pal someone made this post comparing it to dashcon and all or nothing here's another one joking that the all or nothing creators should guest speak at the next dashcon like suffice it to say all or nothing really cemented its status as part of tumblr's collective lexicon and the memory of it was not positive for most people on tumblr the name all or nothing was more or less permanently associated with the concept of scamming people online unfortunately some of this response also coincided with like a website backlash against people who identified as either especially asexual people like for years on tumblr it was viewed as completely normalized to just blatantly [ __ ] on people for identifying as asexual largely because ace people were perceived as being cringy or annoying for just like existing i don't think this is the primary reason why all or nothing became a meme i think broadly that has more to do with the whole indiegogo debacle but i do think that i would be remiss not to acknowledge that just making fun of asexual people was a big part of tumblr's culture from around 2016 to i would say it's only in the past couple years where it's really started to die down and that's coincided with folks instead deciding to [ __ ] on pansexual people so honestly there hasn't really been a mass slowing down of the whole thing yet like if you remember in my last video i was talking about how like anti-social justice people like used to make a bunch of troll blogs pretending to be social justice warriors in order to elicit backlash and hatred against those groups people straight up did that for asexual people too like there's this block i think it still is updating called like crazy ac and spacey that is just very very blatantly a troll that is like pretending to be asexual to make asexual people look bad and they've been at it for years like are you bored yet are you bored yet [ __ ] this was not scripted i just think this is stupid as [ __ ] okay back to the script um okay yeah so some of the people turning all or nothing into a meme weren't doing it because people got scammed but just rather because they saw it as a sign of cringy pansexual and asexual people being cringy and that's so hilarious and we should make fun of them but a lot of it definitely centered around this scam perception and so memes about all or nothing being this scam operation really took hold online over the past couple years after the indiegogo campaign it got to the point where in october 2017 almost three and a half years after the original indiegogo campaign happened the original artist behind the all or nothing fan art had to make a public statement about matters they clarified their lack of affiliation with the fundraiser and that all they did was give permission to use their artwork which they now regret they also detailed some of the information about the series that had since been lost due to the facebook page's erasure apparently the team announced a q a video that just never happened and then after a few months of silence announced that the money was gone but that they were still gonna try to make the series anyway soon after all of the social media accounts were shut down in fact when the original artist messaged the creator to ask where the money went she actually immediately abandoned her tumblr blog remaking it right afterward a few months later the creator of the indiegogo would release a statement on her tumblr detailing more about what happened in it she took full responsibility explaining that her and her friends who were teenagers at the time saw the original post and got excited and made the fundraiser they intended to use the money just to buy a camera and hoped that would be enough once they exceeded their goal there was a lot of enthusiasm and excitement for the project that just sort of fizzled out as things happened for starters there was apparently a lot of personal drama going on which reduced the number of people working on the project from an already small eight to an impossibly low three that would be enough to knock the wind out of the sales of anyone working on a project but that wasn't the only complication there was still the question of the funds so here's how she explained it she started the indiegogo without having her own bank account so in order to have a place to put the funds she asked to use a family members then a few weeks after the campaign ended said family member contacted her and said that the money was gone because they had an emergency and needed it panicking at the sudden lack of six thousand dollars and feeling pressured to be the one to fix things she instead deleted all of the social media content and went dark something she later regretted doing in the hopes that it would take the pressure off of her to deliver something in the end the whole indiegogo saga was a disaster the people involved have all had to distance themselves from both the project and their original online handles even those who weren't involved and simply did things like make the artwork from the original post or even just made the original posting questions still get hassled about it even though it's really not their fault in fact when i talked to discontent ramblings she said a lot of her feelings on the post was soured by stuff like this and frustrated by people acting like anyone who supported the original post or was excited about the idea was stupid for caring about it in the first place the people who donated were left in the dark for years and never got their money back nor anything to show for it if the story is true then not even the people who started the indiegogo got the money it's one of those situations where everyone comes out as a loser all or nothing is frequently called a scam by people and for good reason when you look at it that's what it seems like right a classic case of people starting a project and then taking the money and running though it's hard to say if what happened here counts as a scam in the conventional sense it really does seem like the team had every intention to make this a real thing the story of all or nothing feels less like one of malevolence and more one of naivete here you had a group of teenagers who really really thought they would be able to make this series a reality and then reality hit and the all or nothing series just never happened except an all or nothing web series did get made all or nothing actually does exist before i tell you about that i want to briefly let people know about trials and trebuchets a d d podcast that i'm in with my friends so trials and trebuchets is an actual play podcast that features four young adults at a mysterious magical school it's originally three but then it's four it's a wonderful mix of adventure mystery and slice of life we do things like talk to crushes play detective overthrow tyrannical governments come close to awakening ancient beings health set on killing us go to classes and more it's a lot of fun and you can listen to it on either spotify youtube or any podcatcher app at all we've also done lots of fun one-shots and side stories that you can listen to even if you don't want to catch up with a lot of episodes for example our 2020 halloween special using call of cthulhu is a 1920s foray into a dangerous subway system full of cults and mystery and our one-shot literal trials and trebuchets is about a bunch of beleaguered workers who team up to kill their robot boss with a trebuchet we even did an episode where we played the great british bake off in rpg form if you're interested in a cool compelling and fun story starring me and my amazingly talented friends check out the link in the description or just look up trials and trebuchets okay okay so the real all or nothing [Music] i think it's worth mentioning that the people who ran the all or nothing web series indiegogo were not the only people who found the idea of an all or nothing series interesting or compelling besides the piece of fan art that initially kicked this whole thing off and the failed indiegogo there actually was one more significant attempt to produce something all or nothing adjacent and this one actually worked so okay one of the reasons that the all or nothing web series failed is that they simply set their sights too high they were a bunch of 17 year olds that had no real idea what they were doing and fell prey to a lack of understanding of how production worked interpersonal drama and poor planning and while that certainly doesn't excuse defrauding people out of thousands of dollars it does kind of put into perspective that the reason the idea was doomed from the start wasn't just that a sexual and pansexual roommate isn't remotely enough of a premise to make much out of it was also that the people trying to do it and the ways in which they tried to make the show were just not super well equipped for that medium like no you are absolutely not going to be able to make a sitcom style show with a full cast for 600 especially not when you've promised nearly a dozen separate people the reward of getting to write an episode but that doesn't necessarily mean that anything relating to the premise is inherently impossible to make and there is no better proof of that than the actual all or nothing web series yeah someone actually made one a real version of all or nothing does actually exist so when looking around for videos and promo material about the indiegogo a trailer for all or nothing the web series comes up you can see based on some of the comments that some people had the impression that this all or nothing was associated with the crowdfunding scam but in actuality this was an unrelated project based on the same text post that the other web series was based on and had nothing to do with the indiegogo this all or nothing was a two-person project written and produced by two creators named samantha and claire and right away there were a few things that put this project at a natural advantage compared to the sitcom idea so firstly this web series was vlog-based so all of the little episodes were like bite-sized three-minute clips told via these two roommates vlogs this automatically sets them apart from the sitcom idea because like sitcoms are insanely expensive to produce you need expensive equipment cameras microphones long scripts and a large crew trained and willing to work on it but making a vlog series is a lot more accessible you basically just need a webcam as far as equipment goes although having decent lighting certainly does help take it from someone who doesn't have it you can also make videos in more bite-sized pieces which is a lot more accessible and feasible in terms of writing a script takes up less filming time and is also more likely to appeal to people who are still new to your concept this was also a few years after vlogs started to really become a popular storytelling medium the lizzie bennet diaries a series created partly by hank grain that retold pride and prejudice in modern vlog form had come out a couple years prior and when i spoke to samantha and claire who were very nice by the way they cited the series as one of their inspirations and actually referenced it in all or nothing the web series that's not to say the lizzie bennet diaries was the first time the vlog format was used for storytelling i certainly have not forgotten about lonely girl 15 but it was one of the first times this format really blew up and was especially accessible to people in the fandom sphere that is to say there was definitely an audience for this kind of content in the subcultures samantha and claire were making the series for so without even looking at the content of the series itself just looking at the actual pitch of what they compared to the indiegogo team were trying to do it's fairly easy to conclude that they were at a much higher chance of succeeding at doing what they were trying to do and to their credit they did actually start and finish their all or nothing web series they had a story that from the beginning they were planning on telling and they saw it through if you check the channel out now there is actually a self-contained narrative on there with a clear start and end which is kind of inherently impressive given how rarely projects that get started online actually get finished not only that but there's this kind of arg element to the web series the creators made tumblr and twitter accounts for all the characters in the story that regularly updated when the episodes did and even stayed active for a little while after the series concluded just sharing updates on what the characters were up to and how their lives were going the whole thing is neat and was probably pretty fun to put together so the all or nothing web series is comprised of 39 bite-sized vlogs which take about two hours to watch in total it tells the story of these two friends annie who is pansexual and a member of her school's speech team and emily her best friend who was also in speech team in high school not to be confused with my co-writer emily who was in mock trial in high school the two of them are starting university together and their roommates the beginning of the series is mostly just them goofing off and having fun meeting new friends from the speech team at their university and talking about their experiences together what about those emails i am just getting excited from those oh my god they end each one with give it your all or you'll get nothing or all or nothing for short we kind of stole it okay what about the speech parties i hear they're legendary okay but you can't leave me deal oh someone started vacuuming very loudly outside my apartment and then they just kept going and i couldn't film and now it's night so high another thing about this all or nothing series while it does incorporate the premise of having two roommates who are asexual and pansexual it isn't really about that at its core besides one plot element that i'll talk about in a moment it's more like a combination of rom-com and sports anime focusing on the interpersonal relationship between these two friends and the people they meet at university this is probably for the best given that the original premise doesn't give people very much to work with it makes sense that it had to be expanded into something and in the case of the web series it was expanded into a story about the university's speech team and the new relationships the characters form at university once again i spoke to the creators samantha and claire and they themselves were on the speech team which makes sense because honestly no one but a speech team kid would write about it with this level of passion and specifics as a debate team kid i can confirm that i am resigned to the fact that no one but a debate kid will ever give me the representation i desire the story was partly inspired by the all or nothing prompt partly inspired by their own friendship and partly inspired by a story a guy was telling at a speech party about his real life that sounded straight out of a rom-com according to samantha and claire the series didn't really cost much money to make save for buying a camera which they were already planning to do anyway it was written over the course of a couple weeks the whole thing was filmed over one weekend and then editing was done over a few months the side characters were mostly played by speech team friends and a lot of stuff was shot in only one or two takes the story begins as previously said with annie and emily hanging out and meeting new friends and then they meet jack who annie quickly starts to fall for they end up going on a few dates but emily really doesn't like jack and their friendship starts to suffer as a result emily also tries to go on a few dates herself but none of them really work out and she doesn't feel the spark she was hoping she would this leads to a scene that i honestly think is really heartfelt and sweet the production value on it obviously isn't fantastic but the writing clearly comes from the heart as the two friends realize that emily is asexual and annie gives emily her full support this scene was apparently written based on real life experience and watching it you can definitely tell that the personal connection is there in the writing it's nice and honestly incorporating emily being asexual into the larger relationship story here and having it be in part this coming out story is a really cool way to incorporate the show's premise into the wider prompt it makes their sexualities important to the story and not just incidental to it while still letting the characters be the characters and have other interests and traits and relationships over time emily starts to really resent annie and jack and the two friends begin to grow apart i think this is the eighth time i've tried to film this week and i keep getting interrupted mostly by jack complaining about emily or emily complaining about jack he's always here seriously can't you should have a boyfriend ever clean up his dishes that he uses when he's here so inconsiderate see what i mean this ultimately culminates in annie leaving the school without a word emily later finds out she's enrolled at a different university the rest of the vlog is mostly emily and jack worrying about annie meeting new friends and ultimately growing closer together honestly the acting in this series is not stellar in a lot of cases after speaking to the creators we found out that the actor playing jack didn't actually read the scripts leading to some awkward improv at times like for example this actor kept talking about drill in time during takes randomly even though it wasn't in the script just because excise not having excited he's going full on drilling time she drilled dynamo right back into the stomach but after annie was written out so suddenly we were like oh god did something actually happen between these two actors to that end it was pretty convincing as a friendship fight the series ends with emily and jack getting together the big speech competition happening and annie finally making her own vlog clearing up what happened and apologizing for her part in it the final scene is emily calling annie and annie picking up with the assumption being that the two friends can finally reconcile the creators made some bonus follow-up videos a year or so later confirming this to be the case on the whole the all or nothing web series definitely isn't amazing like you can definitely tell that this was their first time working on a big project there are scenes that aren't lit properly awkward dialogue moments conversations that happen partly out of frame and just instances of awkward editing and or drill in time it's definitely not a series i'd compare to like the lizzie bennet diaries if you're looking for a high production vlog web series to watch but honestly for a project with no budget conceived of and created almost entirely by two people and filmed over one weekend it's not bad either there are moments that are clearly heartfelt and personal a cute story and honestly probably the best way to interpret a fairly limited prompt i've definitely seen way worse from people with way more time and money and it's absolutely not something to make fun of frankly the fact that they were able to make any kind of cohesive story with actual characters and a plot off of a prompt like all or nothing is impressive in and of itself claire wanted people watching this video to know that they were making it on very little time and no money and samantha wanted people to know that it was their first project and a great learning experience i think the main takeaway though from the actual all or nothing web series is just why it was able to get made and tell a decent story where the indiegogo version just wasn't besides the interpersonal drama between the cast members and the weird situation with the money disappearing there were just a lot of factors that made the indiegogo prompt clearly doomed to fail some of these have already been talked about the use of a sitcom format when they clearly didn't have the resources to make a sitcom is just one of the things but i think besides the weird backer rewards poor choice of medium and ridiculously low bald amount of money for their goal the main problem with the indiegogo project was the refusal to elaborate on or develop the show's core premise in the way that the vlog adaptation did we never got anything more about the leads except their identities and when the creators were asked to list what they were hoping to do with the show the only real answer that they could produce was the notion that it would be good for representation i have a feeling that when the creators thought this would be a fun premise to work off of they weren't really considering beyond that either that's obviously not to say that representation isn't good or that it's not something to strive for but there are kind of two problems here the first is focusing exclusively on representation rather than any desire to tell a good story overall and the second is focusing exclusively on the presence of representation rather than its quality so okay what do i mean by this in order to sort of explain where i'm coming from here i want to talk about representation on the whole and why all or nothing as a premise specifically got people so excited in the first place all right let's talk about representation it's drill in time going through all this there's still a question going through my head what was it about all or nothing that inspired so much in people what made people share this hundreds of thousands of times what about it was so appealing that at least two different groups of people decided to try and make a web series for it not to mention the dozens of almost started comic attempts based on this very premise it's worth noting that while the indiegogo was started very quickly after the original project went viral in 2014 the all or nothing series that did get made wasn't made until 2016 which is a long time for an idea as simple as pan and ace roommates to stick around well beyond the simple answer that the pun is very amusing a lot of it just comes from that desire to see any sort of representation at all lgbtq representation in the media in general isn't very good it wasn't in 2014 and to be honest it still really isn't while the years have seen an increase in representation for same-gender relationships other parts of the community haven't really seen versions of themselves on screen and this is especially true for folks that aren't like young white cis gay men tumblr used to use these comic sans powerpoints to talk about basically every social issue or pop culture property on the planet and this powerpoint from 2013 as 2013 as it is definitely highlights the fact that the atmosphere of lgbt plus characters at the time was kind of rough even the alternatives to mainstream shows like glee that the powerpoint talks about were well first of all it calls a netflix original alternative media and then it can only think of one other albeit good property that has any kind of representation at all and with orange is the new black okay it's a show based on the life of a real life woman the main character even named after her who very openly identifies as bisexual in real life and the show never says the word bisexual ever which is often the case for shows at the time and even now they either don't like labels or they're described as used to be gay or used to be straight and this was especially bad in 2014 when all or nothing started to get talked about pansexual and bisexual characters were still few and far between and the number of bi characters actually given any depth is even lower than that there was still that trope of these characters being nothing but shameless flirts rather than actual well-rounded people who are allowed to simply just like multiple genders and exist and do things in their story that don't relate to their attraction or fixation on the random british boy the writer wants to pair them up with and then they're either bi but not allowed to identify as bi because it's treated as a dirty word or gay but benedict cumberbatch can supersede that which reinforces so many stereotypes but the writers won't commit to either so it's just terrible representation for both groups and hold on sorry let me just cross this off do my daily irene adlerant done anyway my point is these characters weren't given much depth if they were even shown at all and there was a distinct lack of awareness in the general public for what labels like pansexual and asexual actually meant even shit's creek the most prominent show i can think of that actually has a character who is canonically 100 stated to be pansexual which didn't premiere until after the all or nothing drama spends an entire episode just trying to explain to the audience what being pansexual means yeah so you're just really open to all wines i like the wine and not the label does that make sense yes the reverse is also true for bojack horseman one of the few shows with a canonical asexual character that again wasn't yet around when all or nothing was big for a group of teenagers and young adults in the process of discovering themselves it's hard to not only not see yourself on tv but also not even have the general public be aware of what your identity even means this is really where the enthusiasm for all or nothing comes in this would be a show that theoretically would give proper representation to identities that otherwise wouldn't get focus it could even help dispel harmful or misleading stereotypes despite not being part of the original post the decision to characterize the asexual lead is super outgoing and flirtatious while the pansexual lead is socially awkward is just an accepted part of the entire all or nothing canon all of the artwork and content based on this premise i could find utilizes these characterizations in some way shape or form something about that part of the all or nothing premise really spoke to people like yeah there was nothing there but that very basic premise of pansexual and asexual person that defy some degree of existing stereotypes but consider that some people literally had never even had that before right what's really interesting is how that interest didn't just manifest in sharing the post or finding amusement in it but actual desire and demand to see the show made in some way shape or form and the odds of this happening were let's be real with ourselves very very slim even at the time that should have been obvious like realistically speaking no professional company like cbs or netflix or whoever was going to take this random idea off the internet and turn it into a show regardless of how popular that post was or how many requests for it they would get and then the fact that all or nothing didn't start out as a dedicated concerted effort by one creator but rather a bunch of people adding on to each other's ideas just meant that it was kind of bound to fall apart and then unlike something like say the ratatouille musical from a few years later that once again started out as sort of a joke and then spiraled into something bigger this didn't really have that central core premise that people could organize around which made it difficult to work out any real logistics as to what this would really look like and in hindsight it's easy to see that it's easy to look at all these elements and go yeah obviously a bunch of 18 year olds with no experience aren't just gonna make a web series based on a tumblr post but part of what made this so exciting was that this was happening on the website it was theirs it was theoretically this big collaborative medium made by the people of tumblr for the people of tumblr and similar to something like dashcon it's easy to just ignore the red flags and get caught up in that hype just because you're so desperate to engage with something that feels made for you both in the sense that tumblr felt like much more of a community back then and people didn't really know what its limits were yet and in the sense that if you belonged to either of these identity groups you probably never watched a single piece of media where a character shared your identity and obviously you can't boil down every concern these groups face to just a lack of representation but it still matters never seeing yourself in media is isolating it sucks to not have that role model or that character to look up to and it also sucks because audiences that don't belong to your groups will probably never get to see someone like you either which makes it easier for misconceptions about these groups to persist so you can see why this prospect was so attractive to people like people weren't stupid for being excited about it they were just desperate what that meant is that a lot of demands for representation on tumblr were definitely shallow but they were shallow in honestly an understandable way so one of it was people focusing on representation above all else like i remember i used to binge every single movie i could get my hands on that featured two women being romantically involved i wanted to see myself i would find a big tumblr master post of stuff like imagine me and you and saving face and even stuff like devs and just watch all of it and one thing that's really interesting is that these posts really didn't differentiate pieces of media by genre or plot or anything it would just be like here are lesbian movies so you'd get like kissing jessica stein which is bad in the same master post as like but i'm a cheerleader which is good or you'd get these depressing depressing stories listed as the same genre as fun campy romance and this was like kind of weird because that differentiation or concern for what the story actually was didn't really exist and that absolutely led to tumblr promoting some pretty bad stories just because they had some degree of representation but also it's understandable because the alternative was literally nothing and there was especially nothing beyond the bounds of like stories about skinny cis white people and there was also a focus on representation just existing and not much on the quality of that representation like i remember a lot of folks praising rent because it represented pretty much everyone even though a lot of that was kind of shallow or based in tired tropes i know a lot of people got into lgbt stories that didn't actually represent characters in the best way just because it was something people really didn't feel like they could afford to distinguish between good stories and bad ones or good representation and bad representation people just wanted anything and they were willing to favor the mere presence of gay characters above anything else about these stories and even if these characters were actually treated well by the narrative like yeah it was surface level but it was also understandable because the alternative to bad representation or good representation in a bad piece of media felt like well no representation and for a lot of folks online that was sincerely the worst option and obviously that's not to say that like indie creations with gay characters didn't exist at the time obviously they did but they were much harder to find and much harder to build a large fan base around so you can see why people still sought out more popular media that was easier to find and easier to find people to talk about it with [Music] so with that in mind why not take a chance on an indiegogo for a project specifically about pan and ace representation yeah it could end up badly but at the very least it would be something and that explains why the backlash to the indiegogo was so large and so legendary if this version of all or nothing got made and ended up being bad there would probably be some hate thrown its way jokes and memes and whatnot but to simply not deliver at all that's the worst case scenario it's a scenario where no one comes away winning where no one gets what they wanted even if what they want is just the basic concept of representation all in all this is really one of those situations where it's hard to be mad at anyone involved at least not legitimately mad like don't get me started the people who started the indiegogo shouldn't have asked for the money in the first place and they should have been responsible and paid everyone back but this isn't the case of some evil ill-meaning scammer desperately trying to con the tumblr user base this isn't a case of tumblr users trying to do something harmful or falling for some obvious ruse it's the case of a bunch of young lgbtq people thirsty for some form of representation feeling energized to try to put something out into the world and you can't be too mad about that honestly the main takeaway from this should just be to know your limits and know to approach these things reasonably both from a creator and audience standpoint if you're someone who has no experience making a series at all perhaps you shouldn't be asking for money in order to make such an ambitious series and in turn if you're someone who sees a project idea that excites you perhaps you know read up and think critically about what you're donating to and learn how to spot signs that the project isn't all that it seems to be you know things like flexible funding things like no real pitch document or budget allocation or clear vision just generally tend to be good signs of that it's been shown that something like all or nothing can be made a version of it did come out but it's all about knowing what's realistic and what's doable and how to work within the means of what you have basically if you want to make something like this you either have to give it your all or nothing i'd like to thank curiositystream for sponsoring this video basically curiositystream is a really cool streaming service that addresses our desire to learn with thousands of cool documentaries about science nature history technology and all kinds of fascinating things so for example if you like history and i assume you do because you're here there's this cool documentary about the woodstock bus that just looks at that period of a few days and sort of dissects it and there's this mystery at its core of just what happens to this iconic bus as these people try to find and restore it it's super cool and very in line with my interests and the best part is that curiosity stream has actually partnered with my streaming service nebula in order to help me and creators like big joel philosophytube cat black and more make exclusive content for nebula basically nebula is a collaborative platform run by me and lots of other educational content creators not only can you get early access to my videos and watch them without ads or sponsor segments but nebula also helps educational creators make videos that aren't best suited for youtube because of copyright issues monetization issues or just because it's best suited for another platform so for example i have a nebula original called debater theater basically it's where i talk about persuasion and debating techniques and how to learn both to be a more persuasive person and recognize when other people are trying to persuade you but i do it using examples from things like movie scenes ads and award acceptance speeches it's both a fun example of how persuasive rhetoric is everywhere and a great way to learn some of it for yourself if you want to watch debater theater or anything else on nebula or curiositystream all you have to do is go to curiositystream.com sarahzed and use my coupon code sarahzed at checkout you'll not only get access to curiositystream but by using my code you'll also get an email that includes full access to nebula so that's curiositystream.com sarahzed and use my coupon code sarahzed at [Music] checkout [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] on top of a big thank you to all my patrons i'd like to specially thank brent nudeson and lachlan newport for joining my 20 plus tier welcome

Channel: Sarah Z

Views: 1,858,892

Keywords: sarah z, internet history, fandom history, video essay, video essayist, tumblr, tumblr history, all or nothing, youtube, twitter, reddit, lefttube, lindsay ellis, jenny nicholson, sarah z video, sarah z video essay, sarah z internet history, sarah z orange is the new black

Id: J5BXUDxpDug

Length: 52min 13sec (3133 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 31 2021