this is about the Karina exit. you don't need to read it but I do need to get it out. but aside everything I say in here that is mostly directed towards Drawfee,
I wish Karina the absolute best, all the blessings, and all the healing.
that tough girl exterior has a soft inner (truly, a crab) and I hope she's got some people to wrap her up and give her some gentle love to deal with whatever has happened or is happening.
now, okay, listen. first and foremost I 100% acknowledge my relationship with Drawfee / [prior] crew is parasocial. I've never been Weird in their direction about it tho; I keep my ass in the comments and don't get overly friendly. it's also only my third parasocial relationship ever and I'm in my 30s. my 1st parasocial relationship developed in my early 20s literally died. I still follow my 2nd around (love u Plum). Drawfee is my 3rd and most recent. I didn't really watch YouTube at all outside of specifically seeking out songs or like ye olden memes (fucking kangaroos) before I attached to Drawfee 4.5yrs ago. so a lot of this experience is very new to me and I just sorta need to puke it out. you're not obligated to read, participate, or care. I'm not trying to start shit, just consider this a scream to the void.
I acknowledge & respect the request for privacy. I'm not banging on anyone's door demanding specifics. I'm not even demanding answers, per se - tho I'll get to that more at the end. but this is the Internet and these are Internet People - "niche internet celebrities" - so expecting everyone to just shut up and swallow a very sudden change with announcements that are entirely noninformation doesn't work. so yeah I have a lot of feelings and concerns and some amount of questions. do I expect answers? no. but this is a fallout for the community and pretending it's not is ignorant at best.
I woke up this morning to the announcement. literally the first thing I saw this morning on my phone just minutes after sitting up. I saw Karina's bsky post first. I happen to watch Drawfee every day, especially in the morning as I'm readjusting to being alive. so I saw this announcement while I had the October Patreon stream on. I read the announcement while Karina and Jacob were laughing together on my tv. I cannot accurately express the sensation that occurred. it was like I was standing on a falling block that I didn't know was a falling block until it was suddenly gone and I was free falling, confused bc wait my feet were just on the ground and I see the next step right there, what the fuck?? a very strange dissonance.
the tone of her post is clearly sad, comes across as mourning esp with the "logging off for a while" bit. my first thought was the fact that she's been burnt out for a long while. it hasn't been a secret, and she's taken multiple social & professional hits the last couple years alone. all the while she picked up extra slack when J&J went on parental leave. and we don't see everything that goes on behind the scenes, we don't know how they distribute[d] work, etc. but we do know she pulled extra weight over the last year one part due to the leave but also, for example, she setup the holiday event almost entirely on her own. plus she's the merch maker. I'm not saying she didn't consent or even volunteer to do these things but it's still a lot of work.
this is all on top of her simultaneously being the one who gets the most comms for that Patreon tier and absolutely getting the most heat from the fandom and critics alike. some of it I can kinda understand (people finding her personality abrasive) even tho I don't agree and some of it is absolutely just flat out fucking bigotry. so she has a lot of pressure on her all the damn time. her exhaustion isn't news. so I expected that to be the reason.
but... her announcement was.. odd to me. she didn't mention any reasons, despite how sudden it is. and while asking for privacy re health issues does make sense.. if it was a only matter of being too burnt out to keep up with the level of everything, I'd expect at least like... a goodbye stream? one final hurrah before she (hopefully) went to bed for a while.
so I bounced over to Drawfee's bsky to see what announcement happened there. and what I was met with was even fucking weirder. it is the most clinical feeling thing I have ever seen come out of Drawfee. and I have watched, quite literally, all of their content over the last 4.5yrs. sure I was new, but I attached to these people and their content hard and have seen all the eps and vods posted to YouTube (the autistic experience of playing the things you love over and over and over and over).
and yeah I'm not their friend so there's absolutely things I don't see. but this announcement is so far outside everything else I've seen from them tonally that it didn't even feel like Drawfee posted it. I can't even tell who wrote it; it has none of the tonal slants you can see in basically everything else. and the phrasing is also really weird to me a la "she will be missed by the community" and the Very Corporate "thank you for your efforts" type bit of it all. there's no heart or soul in any of the words, it's cold af, and I full on recoiled. if I had bounced to Drawfee and seen a post that didn't feel like it came from some outside entity I wouldn't be half as stressed about it as I am. but what we got is the type of shit I see big name corpos and bullshit startups alike do to people all the time and that is concerning as hell.
and here's where I get to the "wanting answers" aspect of it all. to be absolutely fuckin clear, Karina owes us absolutely nothing at this point. she's out. she's not part of the PR mess bc she doesn't need to be concerned about the way the company handles any of it anymore. her role in the way this was handled is complete. and, let's be so real, at least her post about it had Feeling.
Drawfee, on the other hand, does owe answers, actually. because they are a company who people give money to and knowing how a situation was handled by a company might (and in a nonzero amount of cases should) affect that choice for people.
I'm not here to speculate on what happened or even be nosy about it. but what I am saying is that this isn't and has never been just a group of friends doing a hobby show together. this is, again, a company. and their statement was, frankly, Bad. there is absolutely a sweet spot between keeping interpersonal business behind closed doors and explaining to the community whether the split was amicable, how it was handled if it wasn't, and why it was so sudden in any case.
that could've been / be as simple as a sentence in their post that said how much Drawfee loves her or will miss her - not pivoting those feelings entirely off to the community. or there were differences and it was amicable. or that there were differences and they apologize to the community for the suddenness of it all but cannot get into the details. just some examples. they had/have a lot of options. but the lack of taking any kind of stance or active accountability as a company is really the problem here for me.
they do still have time to addendum or update in some way but by this point the confusion and speculation about why and how this happened without a proper statement or goodbye has already done damage to their image and the community. I genuinely very much hope that in a few months or years we don't find out that some seriously bad shit did happen behind the scenes and anyone regrets continuing to support Drawfee as a company.
as for myself, I'm gonna follow the advice of someone I saw earlier who said to take a break from Drawfee content for a while. it's gonna be strange, but I think I'll back off for at least a month and explore other creators (probably ones that aren't a group..) and hope that this doesn't mean the end for Drawfee as an entity, though we certainly know it doesn't mean an end to Karina. 💛
