Pick me, pick me!! You say you can rant about "this guy" and I'm in love with "this guy" so if ya want I won't stop you from going on about "this guy" :))
hi katie!!!! hooo boy i’m glad u asked ;)
okay so like. we all know right, like we all know what ‘this guy’ means on an instinctual level, but have we ever really articulated it? bc like. if i asked u right now, describe what it means, you’d probs just be like……uhh well it means ‘this guy’?? bc ‘this guy’ has been so ingrained in us as a phandom we don’t feel the need to define it?
but let me just. let’s pretend. new phandom member, coming in, doesn’t have the ‘this guy’ experience. what does it mean?
first of all: when does dan do it? basically whenever phil does or says smth like he’s trying to get something (a prize/forfeit/all or nothing, dan to let him do smth, a #spon, etc etc) or if he’s done smth particularly quirky
okay, now what does he do exactly? it’s the gif, usually, and occasionally accompanied by the actual verbal ‘this guy’, and we get a head shake, a giggle, sometimes a thumb pointing at phil. not all are required for a ‘this guy’ moment but usually at least the head shake and giggle/a smile are present
but the fun bit, the bit i want to rant on, is why. ‘this guy’ is a nod to us, right, it’s not anything he might normally do in a conversation with phil bc who would he be ‘this guy’-ing to? here’s my thought: this is something that developed as a derivative of filming, and of dan wanting or needing a way to acknowledge phil without being too soft (side note, the stupid gagging noise he makes is another one of these things). it’s his lil wink-wink-nudge-nudge to the audience, an indicator of a place we might go and say ‘god phil’s such an adorable dork’ or ‘omg we love him’ or w.e. i wonder if this didn’t develop as dan’s way of coping with the fact that he isn’t just a viewer anymore - as a fan of phil’s before they started ~everything~ he could keysmash and fawn over phil being cute bc hey, he was just a nameless fan in the sea of phil fans. but now he isn’t, and he’s being watched, but he wants (or needs) to acknowledge it somehow, to point out phil being adorable bc he can’t help it, he needs everyone to know. look we already know dan thinks the world of phil, this is just an extension of that. a not-so-subtle way of him saying ‘god look at my dork being a dork, y’all better appreciate this’
gummygunk
stormborns
pixelskylines
turnnoffyourmind
