Alt Text
Panel 1: Shen is sitting at his screen tablet, holding his tablet pen. He looks at you, smiling, and says “Wanna know one cool thing about being a comic artist?”
Panel 2: Shen is now standing upright, the tablet pen having become giant in his hand. How gestures outwards with his other hand and says “You can draw yourself however you want!”
Panel 3: Shen magically "ting"s his forehead with his tablet pen, changing himself into a Sol Badguy-esque buff dude with a belt and a ponytail. He says “For example, I can draw myself like THIS!”
Panel 4: Shen again magically "ting"s his forehead, changing himself into a girl with a sweatshirt-dress, gym shorts, and choker. He says “OR like THIS!”
Panel 5: Shen winks, does a peace sign, and sticks his tongue out, saying “Bet THIS makes you feel some funny new feelings about me, huh??”
Panel 6: Life now has to hold a raging and frothing-at-the-mouth Shen as he yells “Bet THIS would make it easier to get you to go to my PATREON!!!” and points at you, trying to fight you. Life is saying “Calm down, man!!”
Yeah the only content creator I can think of that came close is contrapoints. And that feels different, it was a much more traditional “haha see how transgressive I am for regularly crossdressing in videos”. And it was right around the mainstreaming of trans people.
You can compare her to say PhilosophyTube who did what’s much more common, of starting transitioning off camera, not really showing anything of it except making a point to be a good ally in the early questioning stage, then coming out when she was ready.
I never got to see pre-transition Contrapoints, as she had already scrubbed her channel by the time I found her, and I never cared enough to try and seek out something she clearly didn’t want others to see. However, from the vibe I got, she seemed like someone who just barely escaped 4trans before 4trans became big. She is, at her heart, an edgelord who revels in controversy, so it does make sense that she had an egg phase.
You are right about PhilosophyTube, as by the time it was already obvious that something was up, she was already deep into her transition. Most other already famous creators did it like her, discovering themselves behind the scenes and only being visible in a closeted state rather than an egg state. F1NN5TER was a genuine egg who became so ingrained in the culture that some people still haven’t received the memo about her cracking. I’ve never seen anything like it.
Yeah tbph her content had a massive boost in quality right arounf where the video cull happened, so you aren’t missing much. Mostly just an egg dressed for rocky horror bowing to a shrine of Anita Sarkeesian if I remember correctly. And yeah her public persona had a lot of /tttt/ energy and she had been on there, but it hadn’t consolidated on 4chan yet back then. She’s always seemed to struggle with the push and pull of her own self consciousness and self esteem issues vs her philosophy focused brain that just thinks if everyone can talk things out with an open mind everything will be better, and being queen edgelord is how it manifests when she’s not being healthy about it (hence her describing twitter as more addictive than heroin having been addicted to both)
I think it’s also important to acknowledge how shortly after coming out she brutally lost an online debate to Blaire White, an experience I don’t think she’s ever rhetorically or philosophically recovered from. It taught her the raw shallow value of rhetoric and aesthetic over ideas. I suspect it contributed to her becoming the anti cringe, convincing herself she’s straight, very model of what /tttt/ thinks the ideal trans woman to be. The post “shame” era seems to involve a lot of her working on all that to varying degrees and regularly falling back to trolling. Fundamentally her public persona is messy and so of course her relationship with her gender on screen was going to be messy from the beginning honestly up until the past few years.
PhilosophyTube I think is a great contrast to contra. Her pre transition videos remain excellent and while her production quality has improved as she’s transitioned she’s talked about it being partly her healing from an abusive relationship. Unlike contra I’d feel sad if she were to delete her pre transition videos (and I highly doubt she ever would) in part because she was hitting pretty hard in them. While she’s been very open about her mental health issues as well you don’t really see them unless she’s told you where to look.
But yeah anyways that was long and largely tangential. I swear I’m too young to go on these old lady rants about how things have changed over the years. There are a few other trans artists I can point to who had things that in retrospect were signs like Suzie Orman’s fashion tastes (but it was only a sign because something was there) or some of Laura Jane Grace’s pre transition songs (yeah it’s proof of a different time that nobody was saying anything about “The Ocean” until she came out). But F1NN5TER and Contrapoints kinda seem to stand alone in how overt and public their egg phases were.
I get what you mean about being too young for old lady rants. I feel like I remember internet lore that most people have either forgotten or never experienced in the first place. Like people not knowing how fascist cultural movements work and getting duped by them again and again, and I’m all like “Really? These strategies aren’t even novel anymore. How do people keep falling for them so hard?” I guess the TikTok generation needs their GamerGate too, and I guess mainstream social media going mask-off has really opened the floodgates.
Anyhow, things have both changed and stayed the same. I don’t think anyone could have the same experience as F1NN5TER or Contrapoints. No egg will again exist on an internet where people are largely ignorant about trans people like Contra, and no egg anytime soon will think that trans people have a safe future like F1NN. If one didn’t crack because the common culture was in its infancy, and another didn’t crack because they were innocent and dense as a brick, the next one will probably repress themselves intensely while being unable to resist the internal pressure.
I’m imagining a “femboy” who gets big by being edgy and terminally online in some way. A fully left wing creator would likely be buried by current mainstream algorithms and face more right wing harassment for gender nonconformity. However if someone acts like the ultimate pick-me, an egg who openly resists the urge to transition, they might get held up as a beacon of how the right wants trans people to say closeted. Such an egg would get forced out of the right eventually, and probably transition to repping 4tran brainrot.