Tumblr's Guy Fieri Themed ARG: The Flavortown Saga

hello friends and welcome back to another video today we are looking into some very recent tumblr history actually this story wrapped up a little over a week ago as of when i'm filming this the content that got me interested in looking into this is located in three tumblr tags the flavortown saga simply guy fieri arg and of course phileri this user ships valeri and do it for them happy flavor town happy fillery day love wins dear followers today i offer you nothing but guy fieri arg content tomorrow who knows some really interesting stuff going on here he was a skater boy he said see you later boy after you're done serving in the gulf war where we end up joining forces and getting engaged and working with civil rights groups to help us understand something that was so incredibly important so these tags are mostly filled with memes and jokes which are completely incomprehensible i realize you never really you never know with tumblr you come across some weird stuff but no this is completely incomprehensible even by tumblr standards i felt like my brain was melting within a few minutes of entering these tags but okay let's let's figure this out let's take a step back let's figure out what's going on here so starting from the very very beginning for those of you who aren't aware what is an arg it stands for alternate reality game wikipedia's concise definition for you is that it's an interactive network narrative that uses the real world as a platform and employs transmedia storytelling to deliver a story that may be altered by the player's ideas or actions the form is defined by intense player involvement with a story that takes place in real time and evolves according to the player's responses subsequently it is shaped by characters that are actively controlled by the game's designers as opposed to being controlled by an ai as in computer or console video games players interact directly with characters in the game solve plot-based challenges and puzzles and collaborate as a community to analyze the story and coordinate real life and online activities args generally use multimedia such as telephones email and mail but rely on the internet as a central binding medium so so all of these incomprehensible posts are the product of an arg that is going on on tumblr so what is it how do people discover it to answer that question i take you back to january 22nd 2021 also we're doing a wardrobe change because i'm toasty but before we get into it i need to tell you about this week's sponsor bessie bessie makes 100 waterproof shoes so whether you're dealing with rain snow or any terrible substance in between you don't have to worry about wet socks or bulky boots or any of the usual hassles and they are good for all seasons they're made of a dual climate material which keeps you warm in the winter and cool in the summer i have a pair of their weekend sneakers and my girlfriend has a pair of their everyday sneakers we've been doing a lot more outdoor adventuring this year because of the pandemic and i feel like we're going to be wearing them a lot soon with the nicer weather around the corner they're super comfortable i got them in all black so they go with literally everything that i own because you know in the past i've i have been known to suffer for fashion doc martens are not snow boots that went horribly for me so what i'm saying is that i feel very blessed to have this option that is both very functional and does not ruin my emo kid aesthetic wait i gotta do this excuse me so go check out bessie shoes you can use my code in the description below to get 25 off your order january 22nd 2021 it's guy fieri's birthday tumblr ran one of those like banner promotion things that you see at the top of your dash sometimes in honor of guy fury's birthday and it links to a blog called fiery frames postcards from flavortown absurd grotesque i saw you make contact larry what did the guy in the assembly line say we got season 2 episode 11 off the hook specials guy fieri guy fury diners drive-ins and dives all of the posts are tagged in great detail of like what episodes of what shows what guy fieri shows all of the screen caps are from um they all have post descriptions it's all very organized just your average very organized serious sky fiery fan blog you know the content that we all love to consume just normal content nothing to see here it really doesn't take long to realize that there is something a little bit off here with fieryframes.tumblr.com ranging from kind of surreal captions to full-on nightmare fuel posts but what really caught people's attention was a series of posts with the tag et in arcadia ego these worlds shift like a long day's journey into night calamities big and small a shadow biting its time waiting for the dreamer to dream so to very quickly simplify a lot of things at an arcadia ego translates to even in arcadia there i am arcadia is a concept going back to ancient greece of like this pastoral utopia kind of world and it's referenced in various poetry and art and the phrase even in arcadia there i am is generally interpreted to be referring to death as the thing that is present even in this like utopia kind of world so why is a guy fieri themed tumblr blog tagging its posts with that just the question of the day each of the posts with that tag has highlighted red words in the captions and and what happens next will shock you so here they've collected in point form all of the captions to those posts with the red words highlighted so they've got the full list but when you put all of those red words in order you get a completely new message carry my bones or dream the red word highlighted in that post originally was bones but then the post was edited and then it said dream afterwards so carry my bones or dream across the threshold soon it will be now you already have the map did you find me where is the world i know who you are good night there is a city with a key um and then some incomprehensible text which we'll get we'll get to what that was as well between wobble and not between acorns and loaves listen to the wind one part you see the second behind me parts of a hole six words three in the alternate i am the midnight caller hear the word of the gods i began walking relying on a map i did not comprehend find the intruder there is a city by the river a j v a z empty streets in the city search for the lost words am i the dreamer something hides here read the entire message connect the cities you know the secrets and then we have this that says i figured out a piece of the guy fieria arg this post is being edited before it said you know who you are in red text but now it says i did not know you this post is being edited too i don't remember the word what word was highlighted before but i remember it wasn't night like right now so they know the posts are changing and now there's kind of multiple messages going around and the post with the question marks in the caption had some mysterious script going on okay so update i got sent a post with another fiery frames post that is weird we're not totally sure on the script yet but i will let you all know when we get it if you have any ideas let me know help is greatly appreciated those are letters from the voynich manuscript and as yet undeciphered text and we have some pictures of it right there if it means anything at all it's probably an arbitrarily assigned english cipher i would be willing to bet the only link between the two is stylistic the text of the actual voynich manuscript has never been decoded has never been translated so they've just used the letters of that language and like assigned english letters to them and made it into a code people also very quickly came across another blog with posts to decode called fiery fiction auto-generated stories based on fiery frames images apologies if the ai misbehaves offensive posts are typically deleted quickly so they have like ai remixed versions of the fiery frames posts which i wonder why anyone would create such a thing so now the players of the arg have some audio and video posts to work with as well the content on fiery fiction is just in general very very weird and unsettling so people are hyped about all of this fast forward about three weeks now it's february 14th valentine's day and what do we get but another promotion banner that says simply otp not that weird i remember seeing it i didn't even click on it or anything because i was just like yeah it's whatever it's valentine's day of course well if only i had clicked on it it led to a blog called filari levin which was dedicated to the ship guy fieri and green m m dr phil everyone's otp hey what i just wanted to get another look at you you make my blood boil more than the water in the past a guy fury made me for dinner did phileri my beloved pyramid of needs the most basic of course being the larry then the tumbler of guy fieri arg in general and then of course his food and water and stuff you know i don't know and honestly the whole fillery thing is just at first glance it's just like yeah like that's regular tumblr nonsense that's not even that weird of a thing to come across but i was having a lot of trouble trying to figure out how it fits into the arg because like yeah the fillery memes were all over the arg tags but then at the same time there also seemed to be like an actual complex plot and characters who were not guy fieri or green m m dr phil going on so i was just like what why are these two things related the people running the arg seemed to be tumblr staff and people found images of guy fieri and green eminem dr phil in the tumblr source code i found some screenshots of it in this post that says how can anyone deny my tumblr staff being behind the guy fiora arg when both him and dr phil eminem are literally in tumblr's code right now so what happened what was the arg about what does any of this mean i got to a certain point with my research where i knew that i had to go to the flavortown saga discord server all of the content that i was finding on tumblr felt like it was kind of supplementary to what was going on in the real headquarters of this community which would be the discord server interestingly this did not give rise to like a tumblr community in this like a community on the site itself in the same way that a lot of the other tumbler-based phenomenon i've investigated on this channel have in fact somebody that i talked to described the flavortown saga community as like this very rare and unique opportunity for people from all different corners of tumblr from all different sorts of communities to come together who wouldn't maybe wouldn't have been friends otherwise so if you can't tell by the fact that i just mentioned that i talked to people i joined the server and there was certainly a hell of a lot more information about the arg on there but it was still mostly incomprehensible to me at first glance there was something about a map to flavor town there's a character called the dreamer the cipher from the voynich manuscript in that one post that i mentioned translates to this which apparently means something there's this whole letter which apparently is the conclusion to the arg so i had the option to spend probably days of my life trying to wrap my head around this myself and still possibly get it all wrong or crawl out of my lurker hole and actually ask the experts who had played through this entire thing so that's what i did so here's my understanding of the plot and as a disclaimer from what i can tell there's a range in how seriously people took it some people really read into it and some people did not and both are valid the main characters who were part of the story were three real surrealist artists and writers i'm so sorry about these pronunciations katie horna remedios vero and lenora carrington and also in the story was guy fieri who was apparently quantumly entangled with guideboard who is another writer the character who communicated with the players the most was katie who is the writer of the final letter who we will get back to she was lost and separated from her friends while traveling through another dimension called the divide she sees the players through her dreams and needs their help to navigate the divide to get her to a place called the threshold and of course as you do when you're trapped and lost in another dimension she communicates with them through the fiery frames and fury fiction blogs i wish our time and space overlapped but i am long since gone i am at the threshold thanks to you i could not have found my way here without you without the map you marked for me you the people in my dreams my adjacent travelers my friends i know who you are because i created you i dreamt you and i made you come to life i also found out that this was never actually intended to be an arg but when tumblr staff saw people getting super into decoding the posts from fiery frames and fiery fiction they decided to make it into one which is probably a big part of the reason why the plot is so interesting apparently at the beginning it was even messier like there wasn't really a plot to it at all which makes total sense if tumblr seth was kind of just improvising with whatever they'd accidentally created already but once they hit their stride apparently the arg was very fun and well run i guess i never thought that anyone would say this but tumblr staff you done it ultimately at the core of it is this concept of like this otherworld lost world utopia paradise kind of place arcadia agartha atlantis is tennis arcadia iterations of the same land separated by time space and dimension reincarnations of the same divine soil at in flavor town ego even in flavortown there i am the conclusion of the story basically says that the players have guided katie to her destination the threshold and in doing so also enlightened themselves to this concept of utopia arcadia flavor town i hope i will see you all here as well i hope you are able to dream and create guardians of your own to lead you home so it's like what if reality isn't reality what if dreams are how we access other worlds the style of writing is obviously very whimsical and vague there's definitely a deeper meaning to it if you want there to be and if you don't care either way it's still fun when i talked to a few of the people from the discord server there definitely didn't seem to be like one dominating explanation of it i was asking some questions about just the general plot and the final letter the meaning of the final letter and one person launched into a whole analysis including some of the things that i just reiterated and then another person who had presumably been following the exact same journey goes huh so that's what that was about i also ended up finding out i really like this part is that the february 14th promotion that led to the phileri blog was not actually a clue or part of the arg at all it was just there as an inside joke between tumblr staff and the flavortown saga discord server like i said it had been about three weeks at this point since the original promotion which directed people to fiery frames so the investigation was underway people were looking for clues left by tumblr staff so naturally the people in the discord server discovered those images in the tumblr source code the larry was originally just a meme in that discord server and then staffed at the february 14th post just as a little joke for them and suddenly thousands of tumblr users who knew absolutely nothing about the arg had a shiny new meme as well there are definitely still some mysteries left at the end of this though if this wasn't originally intended to be an arg what the hell was up with the fiery frames vlog being like that that blog was running for two years before this happened and continues to run now although admittedly the ed in arcadia ego posts started around the same time as that promotion ran so it's likely that even if the whole arg wasn't planned that was probably there as like a one one-off fun little code for people to find why were green eminem dr phil and guy fieri in the tumblr source code right it's got to predate the arg if the players found it while looking for clues left by tumblr staff i guess in this case look there probably really isn't an explanation except just yeah people are like that someone would do that tumblr staff you done it that's that's the last time i'm saying it feels weird so that is my very limited recap of the flavortown saga the guy fieri arg the explanation behind the feleri meme it definitely does not do justice to the weeks and weeks of people's lives that were spent investigating this and having fun with it but i also feel like this is the deepest that i can go without this video just devolving into the video version of so many of these memes this is my best attempt at making it make sense to my fellow curious tumblr users i honestly don't know that much about args in general i've never followed one myself but i'm my my curiosity has absolutely been peaked i think this is really this was a really really fun rabbit hole fall down and i definitely want to do hey pbrain you teleport next that being said next video finally get hyped after like i think like a year of me saying that i'm going to do this soon the next video i'm going to just swear to god i'm going to jinx it just because i'm saying it's the next video though is going to be the longification of girl girl at long last so unless something horrible happens and i burn down my house in the process i will see you there very soon my friends [Music] [Music] you

Channel: STRANGE ÆONS

Views: 143,108

Rating: 4.9914074 out of 5

Keywords: strange, aeons, STRANGE, ÆONS, tumblr deep dive

Id: Dau82JcVAuA

Length: 15min 2sec (902 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 11 2021