Formerly Draxr · @Toncattsu
29th Jun 2020 from TwitLonger
My thoughts on the matter, and my entire LNC journey. Thank you for everything!
This turned out to be much longer than I thought, sorry!
Thought I'd post this for closure, and because some people were curious about my thoughts on this topic, am I okay, etc. I wanted to wait until everything (well, everything that could be) was presented first. I am also terrible at these topics and had a hard time articulating my thoughts into words.
One day after Cry's video was released, I was asked on stream "Do I hate Cry?" I wasn't exactly sure how to reply to that, till this day I still don't have an exact answer. I don't think "hate" is the correct word here because Cry has never acted in any malicious intent towards me. He was always so kind, generous, supportive and respectful towards me that I am absolutely crushed and destroyed to learn about these events.
I am not excusing any of his actions. He should own up for what he did. I am hurt, saddened, disappointed, disgusted and appalled at what he has done (and is still doing) and how he has treated people, especially those I thought in my eyes, were his best friends. I do hope that the victims and everyone involved find some peace and solace at the end of this.
I'm not sure if this will be a surprise to anyone, but Cry and I were never really close. By that I mean I wouldn't say we were *friends* in the traditional sense. We never really hung out, played video games, talked etc. I always had the thought that we were more like workmates, acquaintances, people that would just say "hi" to each other now and then. We had a friendly relationship and both mutually respected each other's work. We only ever talked to one another over voice once. This was on Discord, and it was also pretty recent.
On the day (and subsequent days) Cry's video dropped, I was honestly very very confused. Not angry, but confused. Here's why:
---JUNE 12th---
On the day of the birthday stream, I was streaming Animal Crossing. As this was happening, I caught word from some members in chat that Cry was acting very distraught and downright having a breakdown. I checked what was up and indeed he was in the middle of a meltdown. I was concerned and had no idea of the context. It was just sad. I closed the stream shortly after, as it was making myself and the viewers uncomfortable.
Sometime after we both finished streaming, Cry contacted me via Discord. He requested that I try to turn his stream into a video that he would upload onto his YouTube channel.
(https://gyazo.com/34dfe1f4fe4c3bff7a547562da2cef5d)
---JUNE 13th---
The next day, I was streaming and I thought to contact Cry again for more clarification about what he wanted the video to be about. I still hadn't watched the VOD yet so I was still a bit iffy about the context/details. Cry made the point simple, he wanted to say that it's not bad to express yourselves.
(https://gyazo.com/3e3dac88c65cd821570ff82586ff3b2e)
He reassured me that he was feeling great, and suggested that we hop onto voice chat to talk about it. I agreed to it as I thought it would be easier than trying to explain it over text. We hopped into voice chat, and at this point, I was absolutely nervous, excited. This was the very first time that I got to talk to him 1 on 1 in the entirety of 2013-2020.
(https://gyazo.com/e97e70023fc00c24f0a451bd2a30e7c0)
The VOD to the stream is now deleted, due to Twitch's automatic VOD deletion after 14 days(?) for affiliates. I do remember Cry sounding/acting like his normal self as if a massive weight had been lifted from his shoulders. Again he told me that was feeling great, and the message of the video was simple, he wanted people to not be afraid to express themselves. He did sound a bit preachy but I understood what he meant. At this point (2020) I didn't catch many of his streams and really only watched LNC, so his behaviour to me sounded normal (The day after, the LNC watched the PS5 trailers, so yeah... hindsight is 20/20).
Afterwards, he asked if I could have it done by Monday the following week (it was currently Saturday). No big deal, I now know the context, and I went ahead and got started. He also told me that he was going to edit the video too and put a disclaimer of sorts. I thought he meant that he was going to do a little "talk" at the beginning and then have it fade into the birthday video. Welp, I was clearly off the mark there.
(https://gyazo.com/727c46039f9e2047513f5ff2b6e452fd)
---JUNE 15th---
I got the video done, uploaded it onto Google Drive and informed him about it.
(https://gyazo.com/02a3974b756f96f69ea9c12420174271)
Days went by. I, as well as other people during my streams, were wondering when Cry was going to upload the birthday video I sent to him. I had no idea and I just waited.
A few days later Cry dropped 2 very distinct Tweets that I remember. I thought these Tweets were alluding to him releasing the video, and then doing TLOU 2. I was very excited. I thought "Hell yeah it's just going to be the birthday video, and we'll be going back to the old days again." Boy, did that line of thinking age terribly...
(https://gyazo.com/c4acc84a368d62a3e82a40675c4681fd)
(https://gyazo.com/dc95971d02802531581989aaa1db58f6)
Lo and behold, *that* video dropped and I woke up to people being very disgruntled, to put it lightly. I watched the video and was honestly confused, and had to read the comments/twitter replies for more context.
Here we are now... With all the news coming now almost every day. I just, HOW. How does someone manage to MESS UP this badly?!
I do not know what the future will hold. By the sounds of it, it's just going to get worse from hereon... I hope proper justice is served, and Cry gets the proper help that he needs. Please. (Man, I'm such a Libra. October baby, I just wish and hope that everyone/everything will get better despite how impossible that sounds right now).
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Now I would like to essentially write my entire autobiography about my experience with LNC and producing videos of/for them during 2012-2020. I figured because this whole journey was a very important part of my life, and we can close the book on this once fantastic ride. I ramble on a bit and get sentimental so I'm sorry in advance!
If you're just here to read about my thoughts on the topic, feel free to stop here! This is all me just spewing out my adventure.
2012, I was 16-17 years old, 2nd to last year of high school. At this time I enjoyed watching Pewdiepie and met Cry through the Cry of Fear co-op playthrough. I remember thinking that Cry was the developer of the game, how silly!
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAEJzweIRA4)
I'm not sure how I watched Cry, but the very first playthrough I watched of his was Corpse Party. I remember the poor emulation problems and having to voice act it all, good times... I remember The Walking Dead season 1 releasing, and people complaining about where the Corpse Party videos were. Anyway, I digress. I liked his commentary, the way he discussed topics, and how relatable I felt towards him. I never looked up to him or saw him as a role model however, I just enjoyed his content and his personality.
2013 came around, and I was playing Elsword and watching Late Night on the side. That one moment happened, and I got on Bandicam/Fraps? and recorded the screen. I don't know why I did, maybe because it was so god damn ridiculous that I just had to share it. I uploaded it onto my YouTube page and proceeded to randomly upload moments from the stream as I saw fit. At this time I was on my last year of high school and I didn't have a video schedule.
I will never forget that one night. That one moment that changed my life. I refreshed my video manager page and saw that my subscribers had suddenly jumped from 17, to like, 100. I was stunned, at awe, and wondered why. I looked at the *Time to go to bed Cry* and suddenly it had a bunch of views. I clicked onto the video, and see that Cry himself liked, and commented on the video. Words couldn't describe how happy I was when this happened. Later on, I learned that Cry AND Russ had subscribed to the channel too. As the days went on I started reading that people greatly appreciated the time I took to create these, how the videos made them happy. It was at this point, that I knew that I had to keep doing this, and I had fun too don't get me wrong!
Between the years of 2013-2014, the LNC boys started to take notice of my channel on the streams and I was getting all giddy. The community took notice too and I was just, happy. I will never forget the time when Cry said that he contacted Tasty Network (music company) to try and get me whitelisted from their network. (Yup, he played a lot of copyright songs).
2014 rolled around, and I was now in my first year of university. Videos were pretty sporadic as the jump from high school to university was pretty big. Nonetheless, I started taking the YouTube business seriously and uploaded substantially much more videos than in 2013. Partway through the year, I withdrew from the university as I wasn't happy with the courses I took and didn't want to continue. I took half of that year off and continued making more LNC videos. The Fallout 3 24-stream came, aswell as the announcement of sup guy plushies! I jumped at the first opportunity to buy those, and the stream/video ended up being very enjoyable too! First 24-hour stream I did.
2015. 2015 was probably one of the best year of my life, both personally, YouTubing and the LNC streams. I would compare this to like, going from standard definition to high definition, from ps1 to ps2. Hopefully, you know where I'm going with this. At the end of 2014, I tried enrolling at a different college institute (I have now graduated from that one) for 2015. It had courses that were relevant to my interests. Unfortunately (or fortunately?) they were full so I had to take the whole year off and enrol in 2016. I took this time and committed hard on LNC and the streams. I essentially watched every LNC live (or tried to) and got involved with the community and chat. The "Best of 2015" is probably still my favourite one out of the batch to this day. I was surprised at how many videos I put out. TGI Undertale AND the massive Phoenix Wright videos released during this year too. I am so proud with how those videos came out.
2016, the first year of college came around, and I was back in school. I don't really remember much of this year. I do remember our internet dying for like 2 months at the beginning of the year and I couldn't do anything. I think this heavily impacted my LNC experience. I was trying to ride the fun I had in 2015 but then this slapped me in the face. All I remember was that my motivation levels were dipping up and down sporadically at this point. However, the editing, the streams and the community reception kept reminding me why I did this in the first place. I also won't forget the ceiling fan incident, which had us dying with laughter and concern when it happened. Oh yeah, Cry's gall bladder exploded because of gas station chicken wings I think? Good times.
2017 to me was the second coming of 2015. I recall having extremely fond memories of this year in terms of LNC and everything. I got my groove back, and I managed to upload and beat the number of videos from 2015 and 2016. At this point, I don't remember specifics, but 2017 was just a solid year for me. I do remember playing Dauntless with Cry, Russ and Tolo. That was the very first time I *appeared* on stream. (Thank you Tolo for the invite!) Oh yeah, I can't forget, this was also the year I started streaming! I did the "voice reveal" and speculation between who I was started to settle. Maybe I should've kept that a secret? Haha.
A standout portion of this year was definitely the Yakuza playthrough and the 24 hour stream for it. That is also a video that I am very proud of.
2018, the final year of college. During this time my motivation levels were completely down. I started having a crisis about who I was, what I wanted in the future, am I going to be pigeonholed into just doing LNC stuff? I experimented with uploading Vinny stuff, I reached out to him and he was a nice and chill guy. I only uploaded the 2 videos because they were generally received with negative reception, so I stopped making them. For the final year of college, we had to do work for other people and get credits in order to graduate (it was like, X amount of hours got you X amount of credits). I was panicking because I didn't know what to do. This was when Cry jumped in the perfect time. He reached out to me via Twitter DM and asked if I wanted to be his editor for his NieR Automata playthrough.
(https://gyazo.com/6f345482a6d9a702384a841b79f7fd33)
I was so excited, nervous and humbled that he trusted me with this job. This was the first time he had an editor, and it was also my first time doing something professional. I bombarded him with questions and immediately jumped into the idea. He was so nice, generous and understanding throughout the entire endeavour; even when I royally screwed up the file naming and the upload order nearing the end of the playthrough. Also, I'll never forget "Draxr cut this out!" I went super hard on the editing, I wanted to make it perfect, and I learned a lot of things along the way too. I talked to my tutor about this work, and asked if it contributed to the work credits needed, it did. I was extremely happy to hear that, so I wrote an excel spreadsheet detailing all the hours and work that I did. It was a lot! 1 stream session took like 8-10 hours to do! The entire playthrough took 1 month to edit, once that was done, I created this giant as artboard that I submitted to my school. With that done, I had acquired all the work credits I needed to graduate from that year.
(https://gyazo.com/e6589a0637b0f8be8a6036f9027f1379)
(https://gyazo.com/227f130296d5742894700259411dec48)
The NieR experience definitely lit a fire in me and reinvigorated my motivation to start making videos again.
2019. Okay, 2019 had a rollercoaster of emotions. I got to play video games on stream with the boys and everyone else, nice! (Tabletop Simulator, I didn't talk much because I was nervous and was afraid of speaking *too much* and disrupting the stream). But then my channel got demonetized. A major source of income had just come to a complete stop. I was devastated, crying, in an absolute mess. I guess I got too complacent, and maybe it was foolish of me to rely on this for a long time now. I thought the reasoning behind the demonetization was because I didn't get permission to make the stream highlights. Technically, at this point, there was no explicit word from LNC that I had permission to make monetize their stream highlights. I turned to Cry, and he was just... extremely helpful with the situation, which I didn't expect. He recorded an audio file that tried to help me with the case.
Angel and everyone in the community were so supportive as well, thank you. Patreon right now is in a bit of a mess, so sorry about that.
(https://gyazo.com/8663898339cdec6e62052aad1305a81d)
(https://gyazo.com/aa22c39f523205ba16628cefaf5b534d)
To me, the epitome of the year was definitely The Room and Goofy Movie script reading/dub. Those took ages to do but boy were those some of the best times of my life. I think everyone in the community enjoyed them too!
I think that about wraps up my LNC experience. Of course, I probably missed a few details, but I look back at it with nothing but fondness. I will never forget those 24-hour stream videos I made, Yakuza 0, Phoenix Wright, Undertale, the sup guy plushies from 2014, the GOXLR shenanigans, TwitchCon, all those moments will always be cherished in my heart. I am devastated at how these current events have come to light and the fact that we'll never have those moments again just rubs more salt to the wound. Why, why did this have to happen?
I will choose to remember LNC as the group of pals that came together to play video games and shared with us so many memories of laughter.
Thank you. Thank you so much!
See you space leppy.
P.S. I forgot to mention that right now I'm doing okay! I've been enjoying streaming lately and it has been a lot of fun seeing new faces. Scott hooked me up with Arcadum and I may be making D&D highlights for him in the future. Nothing has come of it yet, but hey, I can wait! YouTube is still in limbo for an unspecified amount of time. I think I'll start creating Vinny videos again because that man is hilarious. I may upload some of my stuff too should I find them entertaining in any way.
I know some people have suggested I do some stuff from Russ/Snake/Scott's streams. I think Russ and Scott both have their own editors, and I think Snake would like to do his own thing. Russ especially, man you take all the time you need. I would like to give the trio time to breathe, and relax.
The boys, the victims, everyone, my heart goes out to you. You deserve all the time in the world to rest and recuperate.