thebeeskneelix: explained
Hi, everyone. My name is Miles and I am the person behind thebeeskneelix.tumblr.com. This blog was created eleven months ago, and the time has finally come to explain why. Short answer: it’s an April Fool’s Day prank that became far more elaborate than I ever expected.
I have a friend whose tumblr is caffeinetooth.tumblr.com. Among her many positive traits, she is a wonderfully talented artist. She has done several memes where she takes suggestions of what characters she should draw and, as we watch a lot of the same television shows, I’ve anonymously suggested characters to her on numerous occasions. I know that she enjoys doing these memes, but I also know that on rare occasions there have been some people who had strange requests or who have been unnecessarily rude to her when making a request.
I also know that she enjoys April Fool’s Day. We went to college together and she regularly came up with creative and fun pranks. So, I had an idea. What if, for April Fool’s Day, I sent her a bizarre request for a drawing? It would have to be for a character on a show that I knew she didn’t watch, but I would get increasingly insistent that she draw this character and ultimately reveal that I was the one making the request all along. Unfortunately, I had this idea just a couple of weeks AFTER April 1st, 2015, but I thought it would be a fun prank and decided that I could wait until 2016. And while I waited, I could prepare. I knew that the bizarre request couldn’t be anonymous, or she might guess that it was someone that she knew. So I knew that I would have to actually make a blog for this prank. But then it occurred to me that if she was getting weird requests on April 1st, she might guess that the blog was a joke. So I didn’t just need a blog, I needed a blog that had clearly been around a while. It couldn’t have just a handful of posts, it had to have been created well before the prank went into action. All of this just in case she actually looked at the blog and went “Yeah, this seems fake.”
I knew I’d need the most random character I could possibly think of, and in a flash of brilliance settled on Neelix from Star Trek Voyager. When I was a little kid, my parents watched Voyager but it was on past my bedtime so I couldn’t watch it every week. Because of this, I have very little memory of the show, but did at least remember the general personalities of the characters. I knew that Megan had not seen the show, and also knew that she would not link me and the show together, so it would be perfect. I had initially planned to put a lot of thought into which character I’d make a fake fan blog for, but as soon as I thought of Neelix, I immediately realized I’d probably never come up with a better character for the purposes of this prank. So, on April 30th, 2015, thebeeskneelix.tumblr.com came into being.
When I first made the blog, I thought that my biggest problem would be remembering it existed. I imagined that every month or so I’d post a couple of things, and that I’d have something like fifty posts by the time next April rolled around. In reality, I had WAY too much fun with this and this is somehow my 451st post.
I really don’t know how this happened. It was very sudden. And I will admit that I have now become genuinely protective of Neelix (although perhaps not as much as this blog would imply). Along the way, thebeeskneelix’s personality became much weirder and stranger too. I think one of my favorite decisions was to have a rule that thebeeskneelix had literally never consumed any media other than Star Trek Voyager. So any movie, television series, or book that was mentioned would be something that thebeeskneelix had never heard of.
Perhaps the most surprising thing is that, somehow, I developed 25 followers. And I only know five of them personally (many thanks to my friends who served as confidants throughout this process!) To the 20 strangers who followed thebeeskneelix, I really hope you enjoyed this weird experiment, and seeing a daily post from someone who, for some reason, seemed to be almost disturbingly obsessed with Neelix. I’m also thankful to those who messaged me to ask if this was a real blog or not because those always made my day. Sadly, I can now confess that this was not a real blog. But I hope you enjoyed it nonetheless.
And so, that’s why this strange little blog existed. Again, I thank everyone who followed me and I really do hope you enjoyed this blog. I will be sad to not get into the mind of this odd character of thebeeskneelix again, but I’m going to immediately start rewatching all of Star Trek Voyager, something I put off until this prank had been completed but have really wanted to do.
Most importantly, I hope you enjoyed this prank, caffeinetooth! I hope that the messages from thebeeskneelix were suitably irritating for this hallowed prank-filled day, and that you are satisfied to know that I put in WAY too much effort into planning this. Happy April Fool’s Day!
