Dan Howell and Phil Lester – mega stars of a cohort of mid-2000s Brits YouTubers who paved the way for what we today call the creator economy: are in love.
Yes, the terminally ill guy online, that’s right. No, people who had paid half attention to Tumblr trends for a decade, they hadn’t really confirmed it before. But don’t take my word for it, take it from them. And maybe you’ll learn something about yourself (and your fandom) too.
In a 46-minute satirical documentary on the “conspiracy”Cleverly evoking the popular YouTube format of the 2010s, the creative duo confirmed what fans have been speculating for nearly 16 years: that the creative partners, roommates, and best friends have always been romantically involved and have remained silent about it due to intense societal pressure. In less than 24 hours, the video was viewed more than 1.8 million times.
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The duo, named Phan, have been at the center of one of the Internet’s most fervent romantic conspiracies for over a decade. They spawned entire blogs and fan accounts, as well as a new challenge to what’s known online as “RPF” or “personal fiction,” a term for fan fiction that has grown to encompass an ardent belief that two real-life celebrities are actually in love with each other.
RPF is a taboo subject in many fandom spaces. Reminder Larry Stylinson – CALM DOWN – the decades-old conspiracy that One Direction’s Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson are secret partners. Both parties in the relationship have long denied any romance, with Tomlinson adamantly begging fans to stop their speculation and even blocking mentions of the ship’s name on social media. A decade after the group’s hiatus, and with one of the members tragically gone, Larry Shippers is still posting.
Not all FPRs are this extreme. In fanfiction, this is an extremely common category that is usually limited to the main cast of a fan-favorite TV show or random cross-sectional pairings between musicians and F1 drivers. In Hollywood, this can be an ingenious marketing tactic. Some netizens have speculated that Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell Anyone but you The press tour was an attempt to generate RPF buzz that could boost the film’s box office numbers.
But for many, the RPF fits too closely within the confines of real life. “Sometimes I felt like when I looked at Phil, I felt these people’s eyes in my head,” Howell said in the video, calling it a state of “apocalyptic constant stress.”
Howell and Lester push the limits.
At a time when celebrities are increasingly opposed parasocial relationships and calling the permissible fan behaviorit would be legitimate for the two YouTube phenomena to leave it there. Facing the camera and telling the fans – point blank – that it’s their fault. Many of them went too far (they did). That it was incredibly invasive to stalk them online (it was) and even more invasive to stalk their movements in public (bordering on a literal crime). It became impossible to separate their budding careers, lest a romantic association consume their individuality; they rejected promotional events and censored themselves in videos to keep personal information out of fans’ hands. To confirm the RPF conspiracy would be to validate quasi-abusive behavior. Think about it, Phan-dom.
Howell and Lester have spent too many years online and love their fans far too much to fall into this binary.
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A modern model for addressing parasocial bonding, Howell and Lester spend the first 30 minutes of the video telling fans what they already know, repeating their own behavior over a decade. It’s not really to shame them. They’re standing in front of their old apartment, where fans have scoured Google Street View specs to recreate it in incredible detail. They wear tinfoil hats while pointing at a conspiracy chart, filled with references only Phan Stans should know. They concoct the perfect ship in a laboratory. They knew about all this.
Then they turn the metaphorical camera toward the viewer and toward themselves. “A lot of the ‘bad guys’ weren’t bad people,” Howell says. “They were just young people who had absolutely no idea of the effects of their actions.”
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Howell had a complicated childhood, he explained, confined and overshadowed by an extremely homophobic upbringing. He now wants a new start, based on authenticity. Lester, who was in private before Howell, was there for him through it all – much like Phan was for their viewers. “This isn’t a video where you say, ‘I need to beat myself up about this. I feel so bad. I need to stop watching.’ It’s not about that,” adds Lester.
They repeat it because Dan and Phil, the duo, truly understand what fandom entails. They were helping design modern fan spaces with their peers in the 2000s and participating in them themselves, just as YouTube and the idea of a “creator” being a celebrity were coming to fruition. Combine that with what fandom can mean for young queer people, in particular, and the wishful thinking of a generation of equally closeted LGBTQ+ fans. It’s much more nuanced than you might think.
Fandom researchers have long explored the intensity and importance of fandom, even before the Internet complicated the relationship. In a Maintenance 2023 With Mashable, researcher Nancy Baym explained how previously normalized fandom behaviors are being actively renegotiated: “The expectation that you should be online to engage your collaborators, to show them these more private moments, has paved the way for a constant need to negotiate boundaries, which is part of a much broader blurring of lines between work and home, professional and personal, public and private. »
So, after 30 minutes, the partners reestablish the rules: shipping is good, fan fiction (“creative writing”) is good, but no delving into their private moments and certainly no sexual speculation.
Howell and Lester push those boundaries, rooted not in anger but in compassion for their younger selves — and for the fans who changed the trajectory of their lives. “Forgiveness and growth are a very important part of life,” Howell says, a point he later repeats. “In the same way that we want the people in our lives to give us patience, grace and the benefit of the doubt if we ever make a mistake, I need to extend that to the world.”
Watch the full video below – Worth every minute.
This article reflects the opinion of the author.
Chase DiBenedetto is the Social Good Reporter at Mashable.
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