IMPORTANT ROUNDUP: asks, statistics, "good science", and "the follow up video". i would really appreciate if you gave me your attention span for this one.
an update i gave on youtube that i don't know if people here saw: i may be doing a follow up after all now that i'm slightly less freaked, because my data was way too much of a mess and i would feel guilty if people began taking it and running with it while unaware of the informality and weakness of my study. i am potentially working with some people on discord to do a pedantically objective demographic study that will help clear the air but it will take some time to come out. the sampling methods and the questions being asked are very different, but/as such, the percentages that are coming out of that one are admittedly less bleak; this is of course a good thing! i am not a defeatist i am not blackpill or whatever i WANT things to not suck. i very badly want them to not suck. this new study (at least in its current stage) is more about objective demographic measures and not necessarily the far more subjective or qualitative or "investment gauging" measures i considered in my original; although i believe strongly that these measures matter, i don't know if any metrics i originally considered can give an accurate picture. i guess in a way i wish i had either taken way more time on the data gathered, engaged with it differently, or presented the video solely as a matter of opinion, but i felt that no amount of talk piece would get me taken seriously. to be clear: all the data presented is the data i collected. the data i collected was collected in the exact way described by the video. i just am not sure that my methods produced results i may "responsibly" draw conclusions about, especially when people start taking them as gospel (guys please i tried to disclaimer not to do this....).
regardless of whether you agree with my rhetoric (and i of course agree with my own rhetoric), the truth of science is that research conducted with the intent of proving a truth the author is already convinced of (see: anything published by BYU about you know. lol.) is not good research. again, even if intentions are pure and that truth was held to be objective, setting out to prove it would be contrary to the philosophy of science and "good practice". even if these things are abstract to you, they do matter greatly to me, as this is my career path, and if i knew when i started that i'd hit 100k and not like. 500 people total, i wouldn't have taken the tongue-in-cheek approach i did.
i worried about whether or not it is irresponsible to leave the video up in its current form but i am also worried that with its current spread, any move on my part to take it down would see it reuploaded by someone else, at which point i would be powerless to provide disclaimers such as these. so it remains up, but with some added context like this in the description, and comments are still disabled to try and .... slow down the spread. i guess.
all that being said: as i will likely mention in my follow up, the inability to objectively measure "who cares about what characters" does not change the reality so many people have come to me to talk about. i don't know yet if i'll compile for the video the legitimately HUNDREDS of testimonies of people telling me they've been noticing this attitude in artist circles for years, but it will be trivial to do so if i want. even if these things resist the clear quantification i would like to be able to provide (i've always been a literal thinker), the impact on countless artists' and creatives' lived experiences is undeniable. there is also something ironic about the fact that, in making a video claiming the community secretly harbored misogyny, i have been targeted by all manner of explicitly misogynistic and homophobic harassment. i wonder if the video may have been received differently if i had clarified that i am dysphoric, or that i use any pronouns, or if i had made my cishet brother do my voiceover.
i don't really know where i'm going, this got meandering. i guess what i mean to say with all of this is: i am grateful to everyone who has felt touched or even vindicated by my video; i am grateful to everyone who has approached the topic with deep self reflection; i am grateful to everyone that has reached out with a newfound commitment to be the change. i stand by every opinion presented in my video and maybe one day i will make a pure opinion piece on this same topic where i really try and grapple with "why". i just wish i had been more careful to shove messy numbers into the world i suppose.
also, about asks:
good lord there is Many Asks. um. like Many A Lot. i don't know if i should reply to them individually publicly because this is meant to be an art account and presumably none of you want your dashboards flooded with them but i also don't know if people would be underwhelmed to receive private replies????? i considered grouping at least all the positive asks into one big post but i didn't want that to come off as dismissive(?). i hope everyone knows i have been reading them as they arrive but i just. it's a weird time for me right now mentally and i somehow picked the busiest irl period of my life to instigate all of this and the idea of how long it will take to actually reply to everyone is becoming a looming threat.
thank you to everyone that actually read all this. p.s. someone made a really thoughtful response that you should watch--it's in spanish but has english subs.