On Obsessions
and myself as a person
Hello, my dear blog readership, whom I greet in these dwindling days of 2017. It has occurred to me that I have yet to post anything thus far in this year and that, if I don't, it will be the first year without a post since my blog was created in the year of our Lord 2011. Thus, in an effort to maintain the Lande beyond the Violet Mist's connection to this realm, I find myself needing to write something. Of course, I'm well past the point of pretending that this is a regular blog, but it's a nice place to ramble and I'd like to keep it up somewhat, so here I am. Merry Christmas, by the way. I am starting this on Christmas day, though I'm sure I won't post it for a few more days.
Rambling introduction aside (and rambling post proper just beginning), I thought I might talk about my tendency towards cyclical obsessions, since it seemed the most natural topic at the moment, as I'm in one of the latter stages of what is at this point becoming a classic obsession cycle for me. I don't know how exactly it came to be, but I think it is now fair to say that I fall roughly into a pattern. I can describe it pretty well using my latest obsession: a youtube channel called "Door Monster".
You see, on November 27, now just shy of a month ago, youtube recommended a video to me called "D&D: The Tavern" by Door Monster. (You can watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8VwE92HqME, and I recommend you do before I continue on and potentially ruin the twist ending, if only by telling you it's a twist. Too late for that bit now but still, go watch it.). I watch quite a lot of D&D related videos, so it wasn't too unusual of a suggestion for youtube to give me, but the video quickly caught my attention with its cleverness and genuinely surprising twist ending, which then shed new light on the video, and it merited an immediate rewatch, which is relatively rare for a new video I stumble onto. Then, I watched another of their videos--Boss Monster--and found it also quite clever and rewatchable. The punchline at the end (this time not a twist) didn't mean anything to me since it referenced a game I know nothing about, but the generic fantasy concept of an undead accountant reporting to his boss monster on the status of their dungeon's profitability was sufficiently hilarious. This could be said to conclude what might be called the "falling in love" stage of my obsession cycle, the initial spark of obsession. Of course, an obsession doesn't start in two videos, and each subsequent video was important in deepening my initial fondness into true obsession. With Door Monster specifically, many of their sketches were self-referencing in a way that necessitated the watching of their other sketches to understand, and that effectively drew me deep into their web of interconnecting videos. After a certain point, the obsession is firmly established and the next step cannot be stopped.
Naturally, the next step is the binge. This is probably the sweetest phase of any obsession. I watched sketch after sketch on the Door Monster channel, following my interests at first and slowly expanding into their other sketches as my love for them as a channel deepened. In this way it could be said one obsession leads to the founding of another, and so my 'blanket obsession' with Dungeons and Dragons (which I first started playing about a year and a half ago now--the first game I was in was April 1, 2016, which I remember because the fact that it was April Fool's Day definitely played into things) has led to a series of sub-obsessions, such as Critical Role this last Summer and now Door Monster. Also worth noting is the way in which my obsessions tend to spike around academic breaks, which really is far from a coincidence given the nature of such obsessions.
The binge phase leads into but also interconnects with a handful of other phases, such as the researching phase. This comes after I'm deep into the binge and have probably exhausted most of the videos, at least the surface level ones--in Door Monster's case, that would basically be all of the newer sketches. I move from here into progressively more obscure things. It starts fairly shallow, with peripheral things, in this case, things like their community comments videos. I save images related to the obsession, screenshotting great moments, and begin building up a personal photohoard in a designated obsession folder. I watch the oldest things on the channel I can find, and begin to look for things that are more like them just hanging out. This is the part where I start to feel like I'm getting to know them as people, hanging out with them from a distance through the wonders of the internet.
One of the things that makes me feel particularly close to the Door Monster crew, actually, is that they acknowledge this phenomenon and relate to it themselves. In fact, in the comments section on Community Comments #61 (part of a series of videos in which the Door Monster crew responds verbally to comments left on their videos, which is a very nice touch in and of itself) one user, Salfur, thanked them for including her comment in the video, but noted that she was, in fact, a girl (Door Monster had assumed she was a he simply because the majority of their viewers are). This lead another user, PsychicRadroach, to note "I am so alone", apparently in reference to the minority of female viewers on the channel. The following exchange ensued:
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(You can perhaps guess which commenter I am in this exchange--yes, I themed my youtube account after this blog. You can also check me out on youtube if you'd like, though I don't do anything there but post comments and put together the occasional playlist. I have 7 subscribers, though, so that's kind of neat. It's probably more people than my blog readership consists of, but who knows. I definitely do more on youtube than on my blog, anyway.)
I would perhaps amend my comment to note that I didn't mean to imply that everyone must become a youtuber or 'internet person' to have friends, of course, though I fear that's how it sounded. Mostly what I meant was that I appreciated Kyle's acknowledgement that he'd been in the same place, and that this is something we all have sometimes. I definitely felt a deep sense of connection with the others in that comment exchange, and while this form of connection via 'mutual internet solitude' might be somewhat problematic, I still think it's a positive that we as humans can connect with people all over the world who are in this same place of hanging out with strangers on the internet.
This isn't the only time the Door Monster crew has talked about this matter, either; the group also addresses it as a societal phenomenon in their 43rd community comments video at 28 minutes and 53 seconds in (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RnKjSo4L14, or https://youtu.be/3RnKjSo4L14?t=28m53s to start at the specific part). "It's like hanging out with people by proxy," Kyle says, "I don't think it's a problem". Ian questions whether it's our generation "lowering the bar" for entertainment, but I like the thought that it just means we're more interested in people as people. I could make an entire separate blog post on this, honestly, the sensation of connectivity through the internet, and I'm sure plenty's been written on it already. I know it's perhaps not ideal, but I do think it's mostly a positive thing. I do also want to do better with hanging out with my real life/in person friends--in fact, that could be said to be my New Year's Resolution if I were making such a thing--but in college breaks, that's hard to do at all. Right now, my college friends are flung to the four winds--Chicago, Minneapolis, and all manner of other distant places--and the internet's the closest connection I have to them, too. My high school friends exist in nearby areas, but I'm just not as close to them as I once was. I'm closer to my best friend from middle school still, but she is actually farther from me than most of my college friends are because of the move. It's this weird, disconnected, liminal state of friendship that happens over college breaks, and I think it's probably fairly widespread just given the nature of college where people are constantly going back and forth. So, I do think it's fair for distant internet friendships to be there as a sustaining source in these inbetween times. After all, I'm basically cabin-bound with the icy roads and negative temperatures right now, and one must stave off the cabin fever some way or another.
Anyways, continuing on with the nature of obsessions and the researching phase. This researching grows more and more in depth as the obsession progresses, and could perhaps be used as the main measure of the depth of the obsession itself. After watching the mildly less viewed things like Community Comments, I begin to move deeper into things like podcasts where I find myself hanging out with the group and learning their older stories. Beyond that, I start to look the people themselves up. With Door Monster, I happened upon their personal facebook pages through a post on their public page where they were tagged. Two of the main members in particular, Kyle and Ian, had a lot of their facebook posts on public, I discovered, and I spent more than a fair amount of time scrolling through their facebook pages. This is the phase where I find the things that take some digging. For example, in a few podcasts, Kyle vaguely mentions a kerfuffle the channel underwent when they got scammed by a 'multi-channel network' called Power TV. He made videos where he talked about the predicament, but the scammers had managed to put out copyright strikes and other complaints against the videos and get them taken down on youtube. However, after much googling, I managed to find out that Door Monster also had a vimeo account where one could still watch said videos, and I learned all about the troubles they'd gone through. (Spoiler alert: if you're a youtuber, don't partner with these Power TV people; plenty of other accounts of people who'd been ripped off by them had come up in my searches, too.) The vimeo account was also handy in that it had a couple of videos not released on their main youtube channel, such as a trailer for a scrapped movie they had planned on making in middle school about 'really intense airsoft teams'. There's perhaps less breadth to my Door Monster obsession than some of the others I've had simply because most of their public lives centers on their youtube channel, in contrast to, say, David Tennant; in my obsession with the latter, he's been in many different shows which could each in turn present their own obsession cycle, such as Takin' Over the Asylum and, to a lesser extent, Jessica Jones.
These are good examples of what I would call side obsessions, another phase in the obsession cycle, where I get into smaller works as part of my larger obsession. I mentioned earlier that Door Monster was born from my Dungeons and Dragons obsession, but it's such a large genre that that's more like a blanket interest than a specific obsession, to be more precise. I see side obsessions as more closely tied to their parent obsession, as in the examples I gave about David Tennant, where the side obsession is actually essential to the context of the larger obsession it's tied to. With Door Monster, this would mostly be the Guards Themselves, their brilliant movie (which you can watch for free either on their youtube channel in four parts or on amazon video all at once). It's its own story with its own characters which I've grown close to, but it's also an essential part of the Door Monster experience. But I've watched the movie six times through now (which I believe is also the same number of times I watched my favorite episode of Once Upon a Time, "Skin Deep", aka the original Rumbelle episode, back in my first OUaT obsession cycle). I've made specific discoveries about TGT as well, in minor researching phases branching off the main one. I looked up fanart for it, though it was very limited since this is one of my more obscure obsessions (in contrast to larger mainstream obsessions I've had, such as the aforementioned OUaT as well as Doctor Who, both of which have a splendid overabundance of fanart). On Ian's facebook page, I also saw an article titled "9 Ways to Transform a Tie into a Stunning Knot!" which I realized seemed to be the source of the elaborate tie knots of one of the main characters from TGT, Noam. I proceeded to spend a few evenings learning to tie my Ravenclaw tie into trinity and eldredge knots, the two tie knots Noam can be seen wearing. Also via facebook I learned the origins of Tam "Kilt-or-be-Kilt" McTavish, an extra in the movie who was mentioned in one of the news scrolls (which I spent my fourth rewatch reading because the Door Monster crew had mentioned that there were jokes in there). There was a post of said extra in costume captioned "Name that vigilante!", and Tam "Kilt-or-be-Kilt" McTavish was one of Ian's six suggestions. Bonus points: this was also mentioned in their second Scarborough Fair roadtrip podcast. But I enjoy knowing obscure little facts about these things; even if I'm not a long-time fan like some fans who found Door Monster back at their origins (when they used to be called White Lightning HQ just because Kyle thought it sounded cool), I've at least become a deep fan in my just over a month's worth of obsession.
The Guards Themselves also happened to have a fantastic soundtrack which led into a miniature sort of obsession with the band who made it, Shadow of Whales. This was a much less deep obsession that essentially just consisted of listening to all of their songs, but it was also the branch of obsession that first led me to the next phase of obsession cycle, which might be called the productivity phase. This is the stage wherein I produce things--anything, really, that I produce in relation to my obsession (including, say, blog posts). On my fifth rewatch of TGT, I took notes of the songs that played because I had noticed that, while all of these songs were on youtube, no one had made a playlist of them yet, and that's sort of my youtube specialty at the moment. So, with the songs written down in order, I put them together into a playlist (which you can find here, if you were curious: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7okYRnJJtgN1DyZe3vZcsBbIjvUXX720 it's some great music, really). Then, I decided to drop a comment on both the first song on Shadow of Whales's channel and part one of TGT on Door Monster's channel, mostly to let other fans like me who were looking for such a playlist know that I had put one together for their watching pleasure. However, Shadow of Whales actually took notice of my comment, and the following wondrous interaction transpired:
And behold, I was on twitter. It wasn't long after this that I gained my 7th youtube subscriber, in fact. It's a relatively little thing, but still, it felt really good being acknowledged.
I've also made a tiny bit of art in this particular obsession. It isn't anything much, but one day I was just listening to the aforementioned Door Monster podcasts, and I felt the urge to doodle. I did it on doodle.ly, which has lots of errors and hasn't let me log in for months, but I can still download whatever I draw so I did that.
First I drew the Door Monster logo, which is very simple and easy to draw, even on the computer, which I find to be a more difficult place to draw than on paper. Also, I got the 5th edition D&D player's handbook for Christmas, which has a lovely elvish alphabet in it. I had been practicing writing my characters' names in both said elvish and in various editions of futhark runes, and since I was in that mood, I decided to write "Door Monster" around the logo in said scripts as well. Just "Door Monster" didn't go far enough around, though, so I wrote "Door Monster Tada", since there's a little 'tada!' at the end of each of their videos. I wrote the same thing in an amalgamation of futhark runes, mostly Norwegian-Swedish runes from my go-to rune resource, www.vikinganswerlady.com/callig.
As I continued listening to the podcast, I just filled the background in with patterns, softer ones on top to mimic the soft elvish script and sharper linear ones below like the straight, twiggy runes. It's not the best or most involved art I've ever done, but it was a fun little thing. I like it when obsessions drive me to creations, even minor ones. I've also started a tiny bit of fanfiction from this obsession--my own draft of season 2 of the Guards Themselves--but that's not gone very far; the major writing I've done relating to Door Monster is this very blog post. I realize I've never actually published any of the fan fictions I've started, and there's only one that's finished storyline-wise (Phineas and Ferb), so perhaps I'll work on publishing fanfic to my fanfiction.net in the New Year as well, though I'd still put 'interact with friends more' as my top goal.
As my obsession begins to dwindle, I start to enter a 'running on fumes' sort of phase. It's not that my passion for the subject is any less, but I'm running shy of materials. This isn't always the case, as with longer-running things I've been obsessed with, like Rhett and Link, Doctor Who, or Critical Role, I begin to peter out before their episodes do, and so this stage works slightly differently in those cases, where my interest is what's dwindling rather than the source material--which isn't to say that I'm not still obsessed with those things; I simply reach a period where my obsession becomes less active. However, in the case of shorter form obsessions, like Door Monster, Studio C, and Once Upon a Time, I start to reach a point where I'm caught up. I've now seen every video on the main Door Monster page, excepting parts of episode two and on of Altered Egos (their D&D play series), and most of their sketches I've watched multiple times. This is the stage where I potentially rewatch videos too much, burning out on them a little. I'm still working my way through their podcasts, but at this point I begin to revisit other youtube channels and/or TV shows, which is something that doesn't really happen in the binging phase. In that phase at the height of obsession, most all free time involves going straight to the thing I'm obsessed with and watching it, but this latter phase is distinguished in that I recommence watching other things. At the stage I'm in now, Door Monster is still my primary source, but I've also picked back up with watching some Tim Tracker vlogs, which this time of year help bolster my holiday spirit, and the other night I watched a few videos from Alltime Conspiracies, which somehow manage both to make me laugh and think. Eventually, this phase will lead me back into that free-for-all phase where I'm not dwelling on any one obsession in particular but just floating around from video to video, watching things from here, there, and everywhere. This liminal phase inbetwixt active obsessions is also the prime state to stumble upon a new obsession, and inevitably, the cycle continues from here. Sometimes this means picking back up on an obsession that has gone dormant; I've had two separate and intense Rhett and Link bingewatches, for example, across the course of two summers, though last summer was Critical Role's turn--I suppose Rhett and Link must've been the two summers before that, '16 and '15, if I remember correctly. It's hard chronologing my obsessions precisely, but that would seem to be where they lie.
Of course, with obsessions like this where I get caught up with them, I might add another stage--a "live action" phase of sorts. With TV shows with Once Upon a Time, I started a year or two behind but eventually caught up and spent a few weeks of Sunday evenings watching the show live on TV. On youtube, the first thing this really happened with was Studio C, the obsession that prompted the original creation of my youtube account. I watched every single one of their videos, many of them multiple times, and when I got up to date, I made my account so I could comment. The first video I commented on was the second Scott Sterling video, on the selfsame day I made my account and the video was released. They released every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 5pm, and for a while, I went on their channel right when the videos released. At that time it was just after classes for me, and it became a habit to go and watch each video as it came out and leave a comment. Studio C was also the first youtube channel I followed who responded regularly to their fans in the comment section, and I was excited to get in on that; Rhett and Link had done so on some very old videos I'd seen, but none in recent times. I started collecting replies from cast members, and I got quite a few of them--of the then-ten member cast, I got replies from, in order, Matt, the general Studio C account (which doesn't count to the 10-member total but was still noteworthy), Mallory, Jason, Adam, James, and Stacey. That included a couple of repeats, also. My goal was eventually to collect a reply from each cast member, but I tapered off after getting those six as it became less easy to be there right at 5 and quickly make a sufficiently insightful comment.
It's fun to be current on a show, but at heart, I'm a binge watcher. Keeping up with a show in real time makes one feel connected to other watchers and the fandom of the thing, as well as the thing itself, but it kind of becomes slow and dragged out for me. That's not to say that I can't watch things at a slow pace, it's just that obsession is a state of being dependant on the ability to bingewatch, I think. It just makes you closer to a thing when you're watching it all the time rather than a little bit at a time, and for whatever reason, that's how I enjoy things best. I used to try and save things when I was binging things, and I'd pull myself back from a binge in order to savor it better, but eventually I learned that I enjoy things more when I'm binging then when I'm savoring. For example, what feels like a long time ago now, I was binge-reading the last book of the Inkheart series, Inkdeath, at a breakneck pace. I got two thirds of the way through the nearly 700 page book (according to a quick google search) in a matter of days; I was deep, deep in the world of the book, but at that time, I worried I was going too fast. I'd run out of it and be left with nothing left. So, I put the book away for a while, telling myself I'd come back to it later. But I waited until it was too late. Months later, I picked back up where I'd left off based on my bookmark, but I had almost no idea what was going on. I'd killed the binge instead of prolonging it. I've gone back and forth on this matter over the years with a multitude of other things, but ultimately, I've found that I enjoy things best when I just binge while the binging's good.
With most things, there's fandom to expand the amount of material I have to delve into, and typically, the bigger the fandom, the easier it is to obsess. With some things, I do run into trouble with the lack of material--for example, with the book A Creature of Moonlight by Rebecca Hahn. It was a brilliant book, and I read through it much more recently, long after I'd passed the point of restricting myself on binging things. When I got to the end of it, I went online to look for fanart. There was almost none, just a couple of sketches by a single artist. There was no fanfiction that I could find for it. I considered making something or another, but nothing in particular came to mind. I did get to meet the author at our local bookshop, which was great, and it was a relatively small thing so I got to talk to her a fair bit while she signed my book. Another of my friends was there as well, and together we learned from the author the story of how the book was written and how Rebecca Hahn came to be an author and so on. That was good fun; then, out of material, I just moved on.
There's something to be said for the amount of addiction, perhaps, that's involved for me at times in my obsessions. After all, I've been told that addictive personalities run in my family on both sides, and there's history of whole hosts of assorted addictions, of which I was duly warned before I had my first drink this year. To date, I've still only ever had the one alcoholic beverage, and I'm certainly not very into that sort of thing, though I wouldn't be entirely opposed to having another at some point. But what I think I become addicted to is stories, and fandoms--people, even. Perhaps it's dangerous, but on the whole I think I'm learning to manage these things for the sake of my own enjoyment and benefit. When I make things and become productive from such an obsession, I feel even better about it; I'm being inspired to contribute something to the world.
I build a place for myself in the community around things, too, though sometimes those are difficult to maintain given the way I ebb and flow in and out of fandoms, into them deep and hardcore for a few months and then nearly gone the next. I'm still up to date on every Studio C sketch (though I haven't been pursuing their longer form things, like "YouTubers vs. Studio C: One Billion Views Challenge Video", which is an hour long and I haven't even started watching), but I don't get in on the comments right away and don't even always comment anymore, so I don't 'hang out', as it were, with the commenters I always saw in those comment sections, like qwerty02, who was sort of my internet friend in the comment sections. I like to think I'm building myself into the Door Monster fandom now, and at some point I'll be a recognizable figure in their comment section; they certainly recognize several of their commenters and I feel like I could build into that. There's only been one Community Comments video since I joined, though, and I didn't make it in. So, I'll be sticking close to those videos until I make it into a Comments video, probably, although my upcoming study abroad will complicate my up-to-dateness. I guess it's hard to say exactly where this obsession is going, but it's the one that's defined this Christmas break, for sure, and it's certainly not over yet. I'm not even fully into the up-to-date stages yet thanks to the podcasts (plus they have a gameplay channel), so I'm still in the dragging stages of the binge, but also with the up-to-dateness on the sketches enabling me to comment with full knowledge of their story world (one of the things that makes the Door Monster channel especially bingeable is the interconnectedness of their stories, which I can't recall if I discussed yet, though I meant to, but now I'm getting down to the wire on this year and so I think I'll plow on nonetheless).
On the whole, these stages overlap quite a bit, and they're essentially a simplification of a complex process. There are even some aspects I haven't gone into here, but I think I've covered the biggest one. And of course, anything I've had a true obsession with will always hold a spot amongst my favorites, though the obsession goes into a dormant state. I still think of myself as a Rhett and Link fan, for example, even though I'm not actively interested in watching their new episodes right at the moment. Sometimes obsessions come back around, and other times they stay away longer, but they do stay a part of me, and I think this look at my obsession cycle is also pretty explanatory of the way I interact with and enjoy things. There's certainly more to be said on the matter, and I'd like to look back over all this and probably add to it at some point maybe, but for the time being, I want to get this up with some safety bumper between it and the New Year. Plus, I have some Door Monster to bingewatch.
On behalf of the Lande which lies behind the shimmering veil of violet mists, I wish you a very merry late Christmas, a bountifully joyous year two thousand and eighteen, and many deep obsessions to draw you into their story worlds, enamour you with their tellers, and amuse you with their wonders.
The binge phase leads into but also interconnects with a handful of other phases, such as the researching phase. This comes after I'm deep into the binge and have probably exhausted most of the videos, at least the surface level ones--in Door Monster's case, that would basically be all of the newer sketches. I move from here into progressively more obscure things. It starts fairly shallow, with peripheral things, in this case, things like their community comments videos. I save images related to the obsession, screenshotting great moments, and begin building up a personal photohoard in a designated obsession folder. I watch the oldest things on the channel I can find, and begin to look for things that are more like them just hanging out. This is the part where I start to feel like I'm getting to know them as people, hanging out with them from a distance through the wonders of the internet.
One of the things that makes me feel particularly close to the Door Monster crew, actually, is that they acknowledge this phenomenon and relate to it themselves. In fact, in the comments section on Community Comments #61 (part of a series of videos in which the Door Monster crew responds verbally to comments left on their videos, which is a very nice touch in and of itself) one user, Salfur, thanked them for including her comment in the video, but noted that she was, in fact, a girl (Door Monster had assumed she was a he simply because the majority of their viewers are). This lead another user, PsychicRadroach, to note "I am so alone", apparently in reference to the minority of female viewers on the channel. The following exchange ensued:
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(You can perhaps guess which commenter I am in this exchange--yes, I themed my youtube account after this blog. You can also check me out on youtube if you'd like, though I don't do anything there but post comments and put together the occasional playlist. I have 7 subscribers, though, so that's kind of neat. It's probably more people than my blog readership consists of, but who knows. I definitely do more on youtube than on my blog, anyway.)
I would perhaps amend my comment to note that I didn't mean to imply that everyone must become a youtuber or 'internet person' to have friends, of course, though I fear that's how it sounded. Mostly what I meant was that I appreciated Kyle's acknowledgement that he'd been in the same place, and that this is something we all have sometimes. I definitely felt a deep sense of connection with the others in that comment exchange, and while this form of connection via 'mutual internet solitude' might be somewhat problematic, I still think it's a positive that we as humans can connect with people all over the world who are in this same place of hanging out with strangers on the internet.
This isn't the only time the Door Monster crew has talked about this matter, either; the group also addresses it as a societal phenomenon in their 43rd community comments video at 28 minutes and 53 seconds in (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RnKjSo4L14, or https://youtu.be/3RnKjSo4L14?t=28m53s to start at the specific part). "It's like hanging out with people by proxy," Kyle says, "I don't think it's a problem". Ian questions whether it's our generation "lowering the bar" for entertainment, but I like the thought that it just means we're more interested in people as people. I could make an entire separate blog post on this, honestly, the sensation of connectivity through the internet, and I'm sure plenty's been written on it already. I know it's perhaps not ideal, but I do think it's mostly a positive thing. I do also want to do better with hanging out with my real life/in person friends--in fact, that could be said to be my New Year's Resolution if I were making such a thing--but in college breaks, that's hard to do at all. Right now, my college friends are flung to the four winds--Chicago, Minneapolis, and all manner of other distant places--and the internet's the closest connection I have to them, too. My high school friends exist in nearby areas, but I'm just not as close to them as I once was. I'm closer to my best friend from middle school still, but she is actually farther from me than most of my college friends are because of the move. It's this weird, disconnected, liminal state of friendship that happens over college breaks, and I think it's probably fairly widespread just given the nature of college where people are constantly going back and forth. So, I do think it's fair for distant internet friendships to be there as a sustaining source in these inbetween times. After all, I'm basically cabin-bound with the icy roads and negative temperatures right now, and one must stave off the cabin fever some way or another.
Anyways, continuing on with the nature of obsessions and the researching phase. This researching grows more and more in depth as the obsession progresses, and could perhaps be used as the main measure of the depth of the obsession itself. After watching the mildly less viewed things like Community Comments, I begin to move deeper into things like podcasts where I find myself hanging out with the group and learning their older stories. Beyond that, I start to look the people themselves up. With Door Monster, I happened upon their personal facebook pages through a post on their public page where they were tagged. Two of the main members in particular, Kyle and Ian, had a lot of their facebook posts on public, I discovered, and I spent more than a fair amount of time scrolling through their facebook pages. This is the phase where I find the things that take some digging. For example, in a few podcasts, Kyle vaguely mentions a kerfuffle the channel underwent when they got scammed by a 'multi-channel network' called Power TV. He made videos where he talked about the predicament, but the scammers had managed to put out copyright strikes and other complaints against the videos and get them taken down on youtube. However, after much googling, I managed to find out that Door Monster also had a vimeo account where one could still watch said videos, and I learned all about the troubles they'd gone through. (Spoiler alert: if you're a youtuber, don't partner with these Power TV people; plenty of other accounts of people who'd been ripped off by them had come up in my searches, too.) The vimeo account was also handy in that it had a couple of videos not released on their main youtube channel, such as a trailer for a scrapped movie they had planned on making in middle school about 'really intense airsoft teams'. There's perhaps less breadth to my Door Monster obsession than some of the others I've had simply because most of their public lives centers on their youtube channel, in contrast to, say, David Tennant; in my obsession with the latter, he's been in many different shows which could each in turn present their own obsession cycle, such as Takin' Over the Asylum and, to a lesser extent, Jessica Jones.
These are good examples of what I would call side obsessions, another phase in the obsession cycle, where I get into smaller works as part of my larger obsession. I mentioned earlier that Door Monster was born from my Dungeons and Dragons obsession, but it's such a large genre that that's more like a blanket interest than a specific obsession, to be more precise. I see side obsessions as more closely tied to their parent obsession, as in the examples I gave about David Tennant, where the side obsession is actually essential to the context of the larger obsession it's tied to. With Door Monster, this would mostly be the Guards Themselves, their brilliant movie (which you can watch for free either on their youtube channel in four parts or on amazon video all at once). It's its own story with its own characters which I've grown close to, but it's also an essential part of the Door Monster experience. But I've watched the movie six times through now (which I believe is also the same number of times I watched my favorite episode of Once Upon a Time, "Skin Deep", aka the original Rumbelle episode, back in my first OUaT obsession cycle). I've made specific discoveries about TGT as well, in minor researching phases branching off the main one. I looked up fanart for it, though it was very limited since this is one of my more obscure obsessions (in contrast to larger mainstream obsessions I've had, such as the aforementioned OUaT as well as Doctor Who, both of which have a splendid overabundance of fanart). On Ian's facebook page, I also saw an article titled "9 Ways to Transform a Tie into a Stunning Knot!" which I realized seemed to be the source of the elaborate tie knots of one of the main characters from TGT, Noam. I proceeded to spend a few evenings learning to tie my Ravenclaw tie into trinity and eldredge knots, the two tie knots Noam can be seen wearing. Also via facebook I learned the origins of Tam "Kilt-or-be-Kilt" McTavish, an extra in the movie who was mentioned in one of the news scrolls (which I spent my fourth rewatch reading because the Door Monster crew had mentioned that there were jokes in there). There was a post of said extra in costume captioned "Name that vigilante!", and Tam "Kilt-or-be-Kilt" McTavish was one of Ian's six suggestions. Bonus points: this was also mentioned in their second Scarborough Fair roadtrip podcast. But I enjoy knowing obscure little facts about these things; even if I'm not a long-time fan like some fans who found Door Monster back at their origins (when they used to be called White Lightning HQ just because Kyle thought it sounded cool), I've at least become a deep fan in my just over a month's worth of obsession.
The Guards Themselves also happened to have a fantastic soundtrack which led into a miniature sort of obsession with the band who made it, Shadow of Whales. This was a much less deep obsession that essentially just consisted of listening to all of their songs, but it was also the branch of obsession that first led me to the next phase of obsession cycle, which might be called the productivity phase. This is the stage wherein I produce things--anything, really, that I produce in relation to my obsession (including, say, blog posts). On my fifth rewatch of TGT, I took notes of the songs that played because I had noticed that, while all of these songs were on youtube, no one had made a playlist of them yet, and that's sort of my youtube specialty at the moment. So, with the songs written down in order, I put them together into a playlist (which you can find here, if you were curious: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7okYRnJJtgN1DyZe3vZcsBbIjvUXX720 it's some great music, really). Then, I decided to drop a comment on both the first song on Shadow of Whales's channel and part one of TGT on Door Monster's channel, mostly to let other fans like me who were looking for such a playlist know that I had put one together for their watching pleasure. However, Shadow of Whales actually took notice of my comment, and the following wondrous interaction transpired:
And behold, I was on twitter. It wasn't long after this that I gained my 7th youtube subscriber, in fact. It's a relatively little thing, but still, it felt really good being acknowledged.
I've also made a tiny bit of art in this particular obsession. It isn't anything much, but one day I was just listening to the aforementioned Door Monster podcasts, and I felt the urge to doodle. I did it on doodle.ly, which has lots of errors and hasn't let me log in for months, but I can still download whatever I draw so I did that.
First I drew the Door Monster logo, which is very simple and easy to draw, even on the computer, which I find to be a more difficult place to draw than on paper. Also, I got the 5th edition D&D player's handbook for Christmas, which has a lovely elvish alphabet in it. I had been practicing writing my characters' names in both said elvish and in various editions of futhark runes, and since I was in that mood, I decided to write "Door Monster" around the logo in said scripts as well. Just "Door Monster" didn't go far enough around, though, so I wrote "Door Monster Tada", since there's a little 'tada!' at the end of each of their videos. I wrote the same thing in an amalgamation of futhark runes, mostly Norwegian-Swedish runes from my go-to rune resource, www.vikinganswerlady.com/callig.
As I continued listening to the podcast, I just filled the background in with patterns, softer ones on top to mimic the soft elvish script and sharper linear ones below like the straight, twiggy runes. It's not the best or most involved art I've ever done, but it was a fun little thing. I like it when obsessions drive me to creations, even minor ones. I've also started a tiny bit of fanfiction from this obsession--my own draft of season 2 of the Guards Themselves--but that's not gone very far; the major writing I've done relating to Door Monster is this very blog post. I realize I've never actually published any of the fan fictions I've started, and there's only one that's finished storyline-wise (Phineas and Ferb), so perhaps I'll work on publishing fanfic to my fanfiction.net in the New Year as well, though I'd still put 'interact with friends more' as my top goal.
As my obsession begins to dwindle, I start to enter a 'running on fumes' sort of phase. It's not that my passion for the subject is any less, but I'm running shy of materials. This isn't always the case, as with longer-running things I've been obsessed with, like Rhett and Link, Doctor Who, or Critical Role, I begin to peter out before their episodes do, and so this stage works slightly differently in those cases, where my interest is what's dwindling rather than the source material--which isn't to say that I'm not still obsessed with those things; I simply reach a period where my obsession becomes less active. However, in the case of shorter form obsessions, like Door Monster, Studio C, and Once Upon a Time, I start to reach a point where I'm caught up. I've now seen every video on the main Door Monster page, excepting parts of episode two and on of Altered Egos (their D&D play series), and most of their sketches I've watched multiple times. This is the stage where I potentially rewatch videos too much, burning out on them a little. I'm still working my way through their podcasts, but at this point I begin to revisit other youtube channels and/or TV shows, which is something that doesn't really happen in the binging phase. In that phase at the height of obsession, most all free time involves going straight to the thing I'm obsessed with and watching it, but this latter phase is distinguished in that I recommence watching other things. At the stage I'm in now, Door Monster is still my primary source, but I've also picked back up with watching some Tim Tracker vlogs, which this time of year help bolster my holiday spirit, and the other night I watched a few videos from Alltime Conspiracies, which somehow manage both to make me laugh and think. Eventually, this phase will lead me back into that free-for-all phase where I'm not dwelling on any one obsession in particular but just floating around from video to video, watching things from here, there, and everywhere. This liminal phase inbetwixt active obsessions is also the prime state to stumble upon a new obsession, and inevitably, the cycle continues from here. Sometimes this means picking back up on an obsession that has gone dormant; I've had two separate and intense Rhett and Link bingewatches, for example, across the course of two summers, though last summer was Critical Role's turn--I suppose Rhett and Link must've been the two summers before that, '16 and '15, if I remember correctly. It's hard chronologing my obsessions precisely, but that would seem to be where they lie.
Of course, with obsessions like this where I get caught up with them, I might add another stage--a "live action" phase of sorts. With TV shows with Once Upon a Time, I started a year or two behind but eventually caught up and spent a few weeks of Sunday evenings watching the show live on TV. On youtube, the first thing this really happened with was Studio C, the obsession that prompted the original creation of my youtube account. I watched every single one of their videos, many of them multiple times, and when I got up to date, I made my account so I could comment. The first video I commented on was the second Scott Sterling video, on the selfsame day I made my account and the video was released. They released every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 5pm, and for a while, I went on their channel right when the videos released. At that time it was just after classes for me, and it became a habit to go and watch each video as it came out and leave a comment. Studio C was also the first youtube channel I followed who responded regularly to their fans in the comment section, and I was excited to get in on that; Rhett and Link had done so on some very old videos I'd seen, but none in recent times. I started collecting replies from cast members, and I got quite a few of them--of the then-ten member cast, I got replies from, in order, Matt, the general Studio C account (which doesn't count to the 10-member total but was still noteworthy), Mallory, Jason, Adam, James, and Stacey. That included a couple of repeats, also. My goal was eventually to collect a reply from each cast member, but I tapered off after getting those six as it became less easy to be there right at 5 and quickly make a sufficiently insightful comment.
It's fun to be current on a show, but at heart, I'm a binge watcher. Keeping up with a show in real time makes one feel connected to other watchers and the fandom of the thing, as well as the thing itself, but it kind of becomes slow and dragged out for me. That's not to say that I can't watch things at a slow pace, it's just that obsession is a state of being dependant on the ability to bingewatch, I think. It just makes you closer to a thing when you're watching it all the time rather than a little bit at a time, and for whatever reason, that's how I enjoy things best. I used to try and save things when I was binging things, and I'd pull myself back from a binge in order to savor it better, but eventually I learned that I enjoy things more when I'm binging then when I'm savoring. For example, what feels like a long time ago now, I was binge-reading the last book of the Inkheart series, Inkdeath, at a breakneck pace. I got two thirds of the way through the nearly 700 page book (according to a quick google search) in a matter of days; I was deep, deep in the world of the book, but at that time, I worried I was going too fast. I'd run out of it and be left with nothing left. So, I put the book away for a while, telling myself I'd come back to it later. But I waited until it was too late. Months later, I picked back up where I'd left off based on my bookmark, but I had almost no idea what was going on. I'd killed the binge instead of prolonging it. I've gone back and forth on this matter over the years with a multitude of other things, but ultimately, I've found that I enjoy things best when I just binge while the binging's good.
With most things, there's fandom to expand the amount of material I have to delve into, and typically, the bigger the fandom, the easier it is to obsess. With some things, I do run into trouble with the lack of material--for example, with the book A Creature of Moonlight by Rebecca Hahn. It was a brilliant book, and I read through it much more recently, long after I'd passed the point of restricting myself on binging things. When I got to the end of it, I went online to look for fanart. There was almost none, just a couple of sketches by a single artist. There was no fanfiction that I could find for it. I considered making something or another, but nothing in particular came to mind. I did get to meet the author at our local bookshop, which was great, and it was a relatively small thing so I got to talk to her a fair bit while she signed my book. Another of my friends was there as well, and together we learned from the author the story of how the book was written and how Rebecca Hahn came to be an author and so on. That was good fun; then, out of material, I just moved on.
There's something to be said for the amount of addiction, perhaps, that's involved for me at times in my obsessions. After all, I've been told that addictive personalities run in my family on both sides, and there's history of whole hosts of assorted addictions, of which I was duly warned before I had my first drink this year. To date, I've still only ever had the one alcoholic beverage, and I'm certainly not very into that sort of thing, though I wouldn't be entirely opposed to having another at some point. But what I think I become addicted to is stories, and fandoms--people, even. Perhaps it's dangerous, but on the whole I think I'm learning to manage these things for the sake of my own enjoyment and benefit. When I make things and become productive from such an obsession, I feel even better about it; I'm being inspired to contribute something to the world.
I build a place for myself in the community around things, too, though sometimes those are difficult to maintain given the way I ebb and flow in and out of fandoms, into them deep and hardcore for a few months and then nearly gone the next. I'm still up to date on every Studio C sketch (though I haven't been pursuing their longer form things, like "YouTubers vs. Studio C: One Billion Views Challenge Video", which is an hour long and I haven't even started watching), but I don't get in on the comments right away and don't even always comment anymore, so I don't 'hang out', as it were, with the commenters I always saw in those comment sections, like qwerty02, who was sort of my internet friend in the comment sections. I like to think I'm building myself into the Door Monster fandom now, and at some point I'll be a recognizable figure in their comment section; they certainly recognize several of their commenters and I feel like I could build into that. There's only been one Community Comments video since I joined, though, and I didn't make it in. So, I'll be sticking close to those videos until I make it into a Comments video, probably, although my upcoming study abroad will complicate my up-to-dateness. I guess it's hard to say exactly where this obsession is going, but it's the one that's defined this Christmas break, for sure, and it's certainly not over yet. I'm not even fully into the up-to-date stages yet thanks to the podcasts (plus they have a gameplay channel), so I'm still in the dragging stages of the binge, but also with the up-to-dateness on the sketches enabling me to comment with full knowledge of their story world (one of the things that makes the Door Monster channel especially bingeable is the interconnectedness of their stories, which I can't recall if I discussed yet, though I meant to, but now I'm getting down to the wire on this year and so I think I'll plow on nonetheless).
On the whole, these stages overlap quite a bit, and they're essentially a simplification of a complex process. There are even some aspects I haven't gone into here, but I think I've covered the biggest one. And of course, anything I've had a true obsession with will always hold a spot amongst my favorites, though the obsession goes into a dormant state. I still think of myself as a Rhett and Link fan, for example, even though I'm not actively interested in watching their new episodes right at the moment. Sometimes obsessions come back around, and other times they stay away longer, but they do stay a part of me, and I think this look at my obsession cycle is also pretty explanatory of the way I interact with and enjoy things. There's certainly more to be said on the matter, and I'd like to look back over all this and probably add to it at some point maybe, but for the time being, I want to get this up with some safety bumper between it and the New Year. Plus, I have some Door Monster to bingewatch.
On behalf of the Lande which lies behind the shimmering veil of violet mists, I wish you a very merry late Christmas, a bountifully joyous year two thousand and eighteen, and many deep obsessions to draw you into their story worlds, enamour you with their tellers, and amuse you with their wonders.
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