Can you explain what happened the week Dan flew home for Phil’s birthday during the WAD tour?
i think i explained this before but i cant seem to find it TT but don't worry, this time i will provide pictures
this post does a great job explaining what happened just before and why dan flying home so fast was kinda Crazy.
so obv phil's birthday is always a huge thing where dan gets him a cake with something stupid written on it and 2023 was no exception
when these photos dropped. holy shit it was nuts. first off, the pinof homage shacket. insane. next, the emojis dan uses in his tweet. like, the heart cake emojis were in everyones twitter display names for weeks. the cake is obv funny and incredibly phil, and the coffee mugs in the back of the second photo??? have little heart latte art???????????? fucked up!!!!????? this alone could have fed us for the rest of the year.
so a few days pass, dan is doing promo for the european leg of WAD yadda yadda. unfortunately, the iceland show gets cancelled, and this is significant because dan was really hyping up this show like it was meant to be the final show of the tour. and we also find out that pj, sophie, and phil were meant to meet up with dan in iceland and explore and see the northern lights, pj talked about it in stream (i cba to find the link rn but i will edit this post when i do)
dan then posted this story on instagram:
he was clearly going thru it, there were already issues with the show in nz, he was kinda hemorrhaging money and his management was really screwing him over a little bit. a bunch of ppl on twitter decided to get the hashtag #weloveyoudan trending just as a little like, hey man we see you and we're here for you. my very good friend sar @editingzone made a joke in one of her groupchats that if phil had access to the nuclear launch codes, nobody would be fucking with dan like this. and that ended up starting the hashtag #giveamazingphilnukes which phil tweeted about and posted on his ig story 😭
they didn't directly acknowledge the one for dan, but these two hashtags clearly went together so they both knew and heard their audience's support and were grateful (see dnptwt isn't all bad yall)
the next day, presumably as part of phil's bday week, they go to an apex legends competetive gaming event and post it on their ig story x
we thought aww it's cute that they're posting about their lil date, and keep in mind we were kinda getting crumbs in terms of dnp content at this point, like dan was just doing tour promo obv and phil i don't think had posted a video yet that year? it wasn't full radio silence but you know how phannies get when they don't post for two days lmao so this was a nice surprise
and then. the shoe pic.
and you might be thinking "but mr. yonpote, this is just a silly image of dan and phil pressing their shoes together." and you're right but i can't explain how life-changing this moment was for me. this was peak roomba-feeding at the time. just this little crumb of like, in the uber back home from their fuckin gamer date, took a silly photo of their shoes, probably wasn't even gonna post it on socials but then they just do. keep in mind, this was solo-dan era. this was when a lot of us thought that dan and phil™ was over or at the very least we would only get it sporadically. i genuinely didn't think the gaming channel would ever come back, and the way dan framed it in Why I Quit Youtube, it really seemed like dan was just gonna do his own thing and maybe show up on phil's channel every now and then like he'd been doing throughout 2021-22. so to me, this felt like a catalyst for the rest of 2023. phil kept hinting at the gaming channel and bringing up dan like, way more than he had since the start of the hiatus in 2018. and, ok this is just me speculating, but this felt like the moment dan was like, "ok what do i wanna do with my life right now? i kinda just wanna be with phil." at this point is when they start posting more of them just doing shit together again. there was a silly video on twitter of them just on a seesaw in IOM, they posted a bunch of photos from their trip to japan with bryony, like it felt a little bit more like oh we're seeing real dnp.
anyway then the gaming channel comes back and they do the tour and they canonize phan and here we are today! :)
