When I analyzed Snokoplasm, I really should have talked about how the Exo helper represents the idea of gaydar and like, treatment of closeted people. Especially given how much lately he’s been talking about his experiences in the closet, I think it’s important to look at Snokoplasm as, in its coding, specifically a story about a closeted individual. Who is then publicly, and with some judgement, identified with a stereotype that in his case allows a stranger to out him when he’s just trying to buy a necessary good.
It reminds me of his thing in COTY about coming out to people in shops, but from a sadder perspective. This Phil is not ready to be out and he’s being persistently confronted with his queerness in an environment that doesn’t feel safe, where he doesn’t have control, where he just wants to buy the thing and leave. And the Exo helper feels the need to assert being right about Phil’s queerness to the end, like it’s some victory to have correctly identified ~the blue snokoplasm guy~.
It just feels like I wrote a whole analysis but I didn’t get at the way that it’s a story about closeted experiences in a way that seems super related to his actual closeted experiences that were fresh at that time.
I keep staring at the pictures Dan and Phil have posted in the past forty-eight hours, and the ones from earlier this year, and the ones from Japan a couple of years ago trying to figure out what’s different about them - because there is a difference. But is it a difference in what they’re showing or a difference in how we’re seeing them, contextualized by what we know is a softer boundary they put between us and them now?
And that’s where I’m torn. Because to some extent it is that their selfies of them, standing close without their typical ‘posed picture’ expressions (Phil’s weird faces, Dan’s tight smile and peace sign) are rare. Even the picture they posted of the two of them from Isle of Man earlier this year had those sticker things on it. So two back to back days of photographs voluntarily shared and not tempered by anything, not even in the caption, is startling in its general normalcy.
But it’s also hard to explain to anyone how these pictures are different from all those other pictures. They are walking us somewhere yet still giving us no concrete directions. We’re (mostly) pretty sure where this will end up, but we still can’t rely on anything but gut instinct as to why certain things mean something. We as a fandom do what any fandom does, we fill in the blanks ourselves and then spend 75% of our time arguing between ourselves as to whose filled in blank is most right. We interpret the facts we do know and we run with them. Theories a majority agrees on tend to be the ones most supported by fact and circumstance; right now, there’s so much fandom has assumed to be right. They’ve got some kind of work project going on. They’re expanding the merch business. They’re moving. We’re feeding that context into the meaning behind these new, nice pictures they’re posting. We want (need) the narrative to mean something and build toward something. I mean, it makes sense. And yet I still end up going: should we?
Why? Because they’re still capable of gaslighting us; Dan’s proven in many small ways in even the past months, the past weeks. He can say the most sincerely cute story and add a sarcastic ooh, fanservice to the end and half the fandom immediately discounts the story completely. It’s frustrating to us, it’s beneficial to them. But these recent pictures are just them letting us in on their trip in a way they have done before but also haven’t quite done before. And they wouldn’t do that if it didn’t mean something, right? I mean, right. Right. (I think.)
Phil’s Own Fem!Phil AU & Violent Femininity in Phillippa
Long before there was the Norman makeup tutorial, before Phil talking about watching Louise's makeup vids, there was Phillippa. Uploaded in November 2009, Phil creates his own sort of fem!Phil AU with an ominous weird!phil edge. The Phillippa AU emphasizes a gendered lens on elements of Phil's persona and typical YouTube patterns, and even riffs on pieces of his own canon.
Visually, Phillippa is illustrated with an attempt at pigtails, smudges of makeup, and Mardi Gras beads. She's accompanied by Lioness, a heart-shaped pillow with other Phil appearances, and the edited-in image of a kitten's face that is emblematic of the cute/creepy vibe this vid plays with. As a '90s kid myself, Phillippa reads a bit violent Lisa Frank to me. In the first few seconds, we're introduced to Phillippa in silence, staring intensely into the camera. The mannerisms and intensity feel very weird!phil, and the expression is highlighted by the instantaneous shift to a smile when the audio and the lipsyncing begin.
The first thing Phillippa does, in the same breath as introducing herself, is express attraction to a man. Joe Jonas had that diagonal brown fringe, and while the primary effect of this bit is to jokingly place Phillippa into a bit of a teenage fangirl archetype, I wouldn't be surprised if Phil very much saw the Joe Jonas appeal.
Phillippa moves on to riff on a typical YouTube structure―the tutorial video―and a bit of Phil canon featured a month before in pinof: the cordless hammer drill. Phillippa starts as if to create a drill tutorial, but then she effectively proposes a masc!Phillippa AU that intersects with the Phil we know, but isn't just looking back at actual Phil. There's humor to the heightened masculinity that Phillippa describes Phil with because we know Phil's "show" and we know that the gendered line she draws isn't so sharp and clear. She describes it as "so manly," an echo of Dan's words in pinof; in both videos, the cordless hammer drill serves primarily as a way to laugh at the idea that Phil could be that type of "manly."
In her list of Phil's manly interests, we get the iconic lions, but also fighting and petrol and blood. And if we didn't yet with her interest in the hammer drill or her love for "blended unicorns" earlier, we quickly get the sense that Phillippa doth protest too much in her delineation of gender roles. She's very excited about the blood she lists as one of Phil's manly interests, and the kitten's eyes turn red before the image grows to block most of the screen briefly. (The cute fuzzy animal going demonic is a weird!phil bit I'm glad we got as recently as Bunny Biscuits.)
The sound of Phillippa's interest in blood is only surpassed by her disconcertingly long reaction to saying the name "Edward Cullen." The violent/cute vibe is very much Phillippa, so what could be better than a sparkly vampire? This moment is the second allusion to male attraction, and it transitions from the topic of blood back to the fangirl archetype and the idea that "sparkly things" are within Phillippa's realm of femininity. There's probably analysis to be done on Robert Pattinson masks, Living With Robert Pattinson, and Phil's Team Edward answer in the Friend Test. He justifies the latter in terms of liking vampires, which fits with the framing here, but we get a sense of attraction through Phillippa that is direct (and slightly creepy) relative to other appearances.
And so we reach... the makeup tutorial. In pinof, the cat whiskers are not gendered in any apparent way, and we see drawing on faces in a non-gendered way elsewhere (e.g., blindfolded cat face game). But the gendered element in Phillippa the focus, so the same act of drawing cat whiskers is presented as a "makeup tutorial." (We do see this association between cat whiskers and beauty YouTube recur a few months later in IF I RULED THE INTERNET...) The tutorial ends with fairly extended meowing, which, wherever you fall on furry discourse, isn't without its appearance in other Phil content. This meowing is marked as more ominous, though, with the kitten's eyes turning red again.
Phillippa leaves us with a return to her brand of violent femininity in "use unicorn blood to paint pretty flowers," but with a final statement (accompanied by traditional weird!phil visual effects) that could be from so many weird!phil vids without a gendered lens: "I want to eat your soul." Of course you do, Phil. Social constructions of gender could never change that.
Because @danslawdegree mentioned them in the tags before (I’m pretty sure that’s right but the reblog is gone so sorry if I’m wrong) and inspired me to analyze some weird!phil vids!
The brilliance of this video is in its use of Phil's own format (life anecdote chats and skits) to gradually immerse us in a weird world and show lots of things that we're never told. We have a familiar set, and the first words "Funny story" could be a "normal" vid, but we get a hint of what's to come in the star sharpied on his face and the tie tied around his head. We gradually get matter-of-fact info about the world, not being explained to us, but being taken for granted.
It ultimately becomes a story about differences in color perception, at least for the teller, which feels like a familiar, comfortable thing to ask followers about (even though this was many years before The Dress, and before D&P would argue about the colors of things on DAPG). But for us, it's about piecing together what we know about the world. A world with stores called A47 dedicated to the sale of snokoplasm, where Phil is served by a "new Exo helper," which sounds potentially like some kind of robot to me (if one who likes to argue with customers about color perceptions), but is only really distinguished by two diagonal lines across his face, a higher voice, and she/her pronouns.
Whatever snokoplasm is, it's something people in Phil's world keep on hand, since he assumes it's normal to restock when he runs out. It comes in one standard quantity, and it costs 14 million kropogans. The A47 sells multiple colors, which are associated with some kind of stereotypes about the user, implicitly related to gender expression (or possibly the body). The Exo helper in the store assumes that Phil uses blue (and won't be convinced otherwise), which Phil responds to with nervous laughter and defensiveness, and his arm muscles are evidence that he uses yellow (or green) instead. This muscle moment relates to the hammer drill, to moments of Phil joking about his own deviation from a kind of expected masculinity. We also get a sense that there's stigma against blue snokoplasm use, not just in Phil's defensiveness, but in the Exo helper's whispered assertion that "he's just gonna buy the blue snokoplasm off the internet." We don't get any info on gender or sexuality in this world, but we're watching from our world, where the discussion of blue snokoplasm has queer overtones. But the vid ends with Phil using the yellow (or green) snokoplasm, rubbing it on his face and emitting potentially technological noises. (Is Phil some kind of robot or cyborg too?) And it's ominous. His behavior is less human, his eyes wide, the sound cues building to a storm. Is all snokoplasm use like this? Is it specific to the color, or to Phil, or is he using it in an abnormal way? I don't think we know. But there's no blue snokoplasm in sight, and he's covering his face in the "normal" kind (smearing his sharpie), and it seems like it's not taking him anywhere good.
Dreams of the Future: An Amalgamation of All Things Weird!Phil
-Starts off with a Silver Button-style moral interactivity bit; by watching the video, you’re disobeying its very first lines. (Read that analysis for more; it’s largely relevant here as well.) More on this later.
-There’s a hint of flirty early Phil in “I don’t know if I told you already but you look really beautiful today.” It gets a creepy edge from the perspective of the end, when we know he’s stealing our soul with the camera. It also establishes us having prior interaction with him, before the start of the vid.
-”I must’ve figured out a way to talk to the past” presents his power as both accidental (he’s assuming rather than knowing what happened) and within his agency (”figured out”). I want to say he figures it out in the future’s future, but then how is he using it before then? Maybe he’s trying to present himself as less powerful than he is so we don’t suspect...
- Set in 2047 (when Phil will be 60). Future Phil dresses normally and films a video diary in the same bedroom even though they sleep in cryogenic chambers every night. (Foreshadowing bedroom-as-set? ha.) I guess this would slow aging? And potentially eliminate dying in one’s sleep.
-Robots everywhere. Of course, we have particular associations with WALL-E through phan goggles; this vid was between pinof and them watching WALL-E together in Dec.
-Sparkles when he likes something. Could be an Edward Cullen reference? And playing with effects, of course.
-Secret he immediately tells you in evil/distorted voice: he’s not actually human
-Phil with markings warns us against watching, listening to "normal” Phil with the camera and tell us he isn’t as he seems.(I swear we’ve seen similar markings in another vid, but the ones I’m thinking of look fairly different.)
-Phil has the ability to show us the inside of his head, an idea that gets a much less weird but still v. cool treatment in A Tour of My Brain years later.
-This ability in turn gives him time traveling abilities; definitely a theme. Traveling into the past to “warn you,” just as Sebastian does to Phil in Sebastian: Defender of the Universe. It seems equally ineffective because we, like Phil in that vid, ignored him at the beginning of this vid.
-Phil as Creator: He takes us to the beginning, “time to create something.” One Phil has “been on this planet for thousands of years” and another specifies “2047″; is time measured from his arrival? Also, we see The Basket in here; shout-out to that anon who saw Phil as Creator in that vid! I’m fairly convinced.
-That classic Daniel Ninoa music! This highlights The Basket connection, but also appears in a bunch of other Phil vids around this time.
-Phil as destroyer: Phil has collected our souls with his camera for the final plan to destroy everything. Things (e.g., Wall-e, the world) getting consumed by the garbage bag continues the thread of strong Basket connections. Phil-as-destroyer is, I think, broadly connected to his theme of responsibility for mass destruction. But the audience is to blame for watching, as in The Silver Button, and we don’t get remorse from Phil about it (which aligns it more with If I Ruled the Internet and less with The Basket).
-”Like dreams, not all stories have a happy ending.” Makes me wonder if Phil had a lot of nightmares. We hear about wacky dreams from him, but this also makes me wonder how much of his weird! content was inspired by his actual dreams.
-Earth gets consumed and then the eye opening parallels the shape. It feels like a reemergence, a sort of rebirth.
-Riff on “it was all a dream” ending, but it doesn’t fully allow for a sense of relief that it wasn’t real. He wants to wake up, and he seems to, but it ends abruptly and the surreal creepiness of it remains and in that way, it doesn’t undercut his story the way “it was all a dream” often does. We don’t actually know if everything’s okay or what the state of the world is.
-I want to talk about visual effects, but I don’t really know stuff. It’s a vid full of such striking visuals and weaving of classic/repeated Phil strategies (sharpie on himself, color changes, stop motiony things, and the snow effect we see in other vids, and voice distortion but that’s not visual) with ones that I’m not sure we see anywhere else in weird!Phil. The “seeing inside my mind” visual effect feels different, and his experimentation with ripping a garbage bag and stretching it over his face also isn’t ringing a bell for me with any other vids. (Actually, the face thing reminds me of a number of different visual effects in movies, but none that are clicking for me as a point of inspiration for Phil.) Not sure about the pouring things into a glass; it feels familiar from another vid maybe?
Found Footage and the Juxtaposition of Hope & Despair in Tape 6
This is Phil at his most found footage: choppy, with static and shaky, awkwardly-angled camerawork. It ever offers an explanation for why it exists on film (perhaps on an unknown tape, as per the title) without an implicit vloggerish approach; it stands out from other weird!Phil vids in that. Phil establishes himself as tasked with recording a surprise party, which gives us a home video angle.
But functionally, the work of fragmented, apparently nonlinear storytelling we get from Tape 6 isn't so different from other weird!Phil vids like The Silver Button. I'm not well-versed in found footage film, but the nonlinear nature stands out to me as not typically how film works (unless some person or force is going back and forth and recording over pieces). So I'm thinking that it might be somewhat unusual to have found footage storytelling that is non-chronological in this way.
As soon as we get Phil's character and the basic situation, we also get a sense that the character doesn't really know what he's doing in terms of filming, and various found footagey elements are a result of technical difficulties and just his lack of skill. Just eight seconds in, he cuts out mid-sentence and comes back in mid-sentence, talking about it working. This sets up a sort of status quo for the format, without anything sinister going on. Our cameraman just wants to show us a Twister beach towel and celebrate Tim's birthday. But the next time it cuts out, we get some trademark weird!Phil voice distortion and the ominous contrast of "I don't think I want to play this game anymore."
The quick jumps between "normal" cheery Phil and Ominous Phil where something is Clearly Going On is classic weird!Phil. It's a thing he does often and well, and while in some vids he physically illustrates the difference with costume changes, face markings, or a different accent, here (as in some others) it's all in his performance. Here we get both Ominous Phil and what may be "normal" Phil, later on, not enjoying the "awesome" time he predicted, but crying and upset over Carl (not one of the generically named friends mentioned earlier). The contrast of Phil's hope and his darkness (even just in shots of him biting his own arm) is where the heart of this lives for me.
It's worth noting that Phil uses four fairly generic masculine names in Tape 6 (he does tend to use them, including the ones here, in other vids as well), and three of them seem to me to be implied to refer to the recipient of the surprise party. Initially, we're told that the surprise party is "for Jack." Then we hear that, "only Tim's party can have a Twister beach towel" and "when Sam walks in, we're all gonna jump out like, 'surprise!'" The effect of this is, I think, lightly disorienting; we can't quite get a handle on who occupies this world with our cameraman, and when he cries about "Carl," I'm not sure if this is a new person or another name for Jack/Sam/Tim. Anyway. Back to something that resembles chronology.
For the first half of the video, we don't have any sense of what went wrong or where the glimpses of voice-distortion Phil and or Phil's despair come from. But the surprise party setup does lead to it, albeit a little hazily: Phil (as Jack or Sam maybe? He seems to be playing at least two characters at this point, as we move into the voice-distorted temptor and the tempted) receives a tiny present. With instructions.
The words "surprise" and "instructions" are highlighted by their repetition in this section. (Earlier, this is perhaps foreshadowed by the repetition of “I can’t get it to stay”; like with the choppiness and static, it gets introduced innocuously as camera difficulties before it gains ominous undertones.) Later, we get similar repetition plus more voice distortion on "Open it," "No," and "I can't." The latter repeated words are the focal struggle in the video (and "no" is interesting because it's repeated both in refusal to open the box and earlier, as a generic expression of distress), and "surprise" is a concept that gets a lot of focus in the setup and is built to as a turning point, so "instructions" is the one that seems the least intuitive to me. The repetition here seems to stress the importance of the fact that Phil was warned, but the choice of the specific word "instructions" is also interesting; as opposed to a warning (which is how I would interpret the text on the box), he calls in "instructions," which implies that it's instructing him on how to do something. How to destroy the world, or how to save it? We don't know who wrote the instructions or why. ("Instructions" could also imply that someone is telling him what to do. But they don’t actually say to open the box or not, just what will happen if he does.)
"Opening this box marks the beginning of the end. If you open this box, the entire world will be destroyed." It's another scenario where the fate of the world is in his hands for no apparent reason, where a simple action could have apocalyptic consequences. In this case, he's explicitly warned of that. And in this one, he calls it out more directly than most: "That's a lot of responsibility." Where in vids like The Silver Button and Sebastian: Universe Defender, he stumbles into destructive situations fairly naively (even with a similarly explicit warning in Sebastian), here Phil says no. Several times. This feels more along the lines of The Basket to me, in terms of showing internal conflict and acknowledging responsibility (albeit here it seems foisted upon someone innocent rather than The Basket's deeper entanglement), but also in the way the opposing points of view gradually bleed into each other, so the dark and light of Phil seem to speak in one voice. And the last word before Phil opens the box is "no." The verbal opposition is still there, it just loses real meaning along with control over Phil's actions.
And there's our moment of truth, with new visual distortions, the presence of a toy creature, and a return to the biting we saw in a briefer clip earlier. This seems to me to be the time that clip was from, now earned with the opening of the box. Without the hat, wrapped in a sheet, is another Phil, looking disoriented and lost rather than feral. And now that we have a sort of explanation (such that it is in the world of weird!Phil) for what's gone wrong, we cut back from the chronological nightmare to our cheerful cameraman, getting ready for the surprise. He's beaming and waving to the camera as it cuts out for the final time.
The choice to bookend the video with the optimism, to give it a cyclical structure without any illusion that the story itself is cyclical (at least to me it's very clear that the ending takes place earlier and cameraman Phil is definitely not going to have a great party afterwards), really works for me. It brings it back to that heart in the contrast, in the hopeful expectations and the destructive reality. Phil's hope and positivity at the end mean something different than they did at the beginning, even though the situation being set up is the same. He doesn't know anything more than he did, but we do. And going back to that after the dark side feels like going home to a safe place that just... can't be safe again. It feels right, but also just wrong in a satisfying way that feels right.
Tim's Adventure contains some things that are common in the weird!phil corpus (e.g., sharpie on his face, fantasy elements, people being eaten, very basic names) but some things that aren't. In the storytelling, we have the narration via silent-movie-esque title cards, and in content, we have a romance. (I believe the only other explicitly romantic relationship in 2008 Phil vids is in Psycho Boyfriend? And there isn't Romance to it.) "True love" between the eponymous Tim and unnamed stick figure. For whom no gendered pronouns are used. Based on the drawing of Tim and of the unnamed love interest, it seems to be love between a man and a woman, but the absence of not only a name, but also all singular pronouns seems noteworthy.
(I don't get queer overtones from, Tim though. Prior to his goal of true love, all we know about Tim is that he likes football, which may well just be motivated by the fun of bouncing a ball across Phil's face in sharpie. But it does also establish a fairly "normal" masculine hobby for Tim, and later he uses "all his strength" to build a bridge, while his love interest, beyond appearing to wear a skirt, does nothing. Even without pronouns, Tim's relationship is easily read as one of a male protagonist and the woman who exists to serve as his goal.)
I think the positioning of love as Tim's goal is potentially the most interesting element here; Tim actively "hopes to find true love" as the second thing we learn about him. It's not just an element of the plot, it's established as a key fact of his character, and a goal that isn't rooted in any other person. He doesn't meet [love interest] and want to be with [her]; he wants true love, and then it comes into his life ("sooner than he expected"). To me, this is reminiscent of "I wanted to go on an actual date. Does that make me lame?" as well as the inclusion of "<3" in his "things falling into place." Romance was something Phil knew he wanted in his life, a priority for him. While we don't find out any action Tim took toward his goal, we know that Phil, as soon as he was in a comfortable enough bubble to live out within it, put himself on a dating website. He used the internet to flirtily connect with people.He pursued the goal.
Rather than having obstacles in finding his true love, Tim is separated from [her] by a flood, which he overcomes by building a bridge. Their resulting "perfect moment" strikes me as reminiscent of the Buffy/Angel "moment of true happiness," although there's nothing particularly suggestive about it, so maybe the use of "moment" is a coincidence. But like Angel's moment, it's a turning point that dooms the relationship because they immediately get eaten by a dragon. (Maybe if Tim hadn't use "all his strength" to build the bridge, he would've been able to fight it?) I love the subversion of the "happily ever after" expectation by giving it to the dragon instead, and then closing with the meta nod of Phil washing his face. (Does washing his face mean he's responsible for destroying Face Land? I'm not sure, but I think eventually I'll dive into the videos in which he is definitely responsible for world destruction.)
The Silver Button starts with a recurring element in Phil's weird vids: the discovery of something that Phil interacts with in the obvious way to destructive effect (cf. Sebastian: Universe Defender and Tape 6, cases in which he has forewarning he doesn’t have here). In this case, we don't know why Phil is holding a leafy sphere (or how often he does, since he's surprised not to have noticed the button before), but it leads him to push the titular silver button. It seems like an act of pure curiosity that sets in motion the rest of the vid.
Apart from brief pain and Special Effects, the change post-button is a voice (American-accent Phil) that seems to come from within Phil and that warns him to run. A warning he questions, but doesn't even begin to act on. But then (after a shot of a snakelike creature) American-Phil-voice switches his advice to "close your eyes," which Phil does, and that, more than the button push, is when things get weird. Everything's black and white, Phil's wearing a headband thing, and he immediately recognizes this as "a change in dimension." [Side note, before this point, this Phil seems not to know what's going on, but from here, "it's all becoming clear" and he knows both about the monster and what needs to be done.] But what's far more unusual in terms of the weird!phil canon is the way things get meta: Phil can see thousands of people watching him.
Phil's videos, weird or not, often address the viewer directly, but here, Phil blends a typical YouTuber awareness of viewers with his weird worldbuilding: Technology in Phil's new dimension makes at least the visual exchange between him and his viewers two-way, and immediate. (Later, when he refers to what we're watching as both "this video" and "this communication," he seems to be walking the line of how literally he's acknowledging our world.) He positions the action of the story in the present, happening while you (the viewers) are watching it rather than at the time of filming. Functionally, he puts the story into an extra level of the present tense; he's not just recording a story with present-tense spoken text in its (past-relative-to-viewer) time of filming, but one that is actively set in the time of its viewing. In doing so, he challenges us to suspend our disbelief over not only dimension changes and snake-monsters, but also the relationships between the video and the viewer. Before his better-known forays into interactivity, he creates a sort of moral interactivity.
The Silver Button doesn't have annotations. It is one continuous video with one ending. And yet, the viewer has a choice: when to stop watching. Personally, I never considered stopping before the end, even when Phil guilted me with Janet-death in The Good Place vibes (or Milgram experiment vibes, but I wasn't following orders). Apart from the knowledge (despite all suspended disbelief) that we can't actually affect the end of the video, I think that's largely because we know what ending we get if we stop. There's a sort of Schrodinger's ending going on in the logic of the story; if we click away, we never know the ending and Phil might be okay. If we watch through, we have certainty, and Phil dies.
Oh man, I've had a lot to say and I haven't really gotten to the whole issue of Responsibility and Blame. Phil can see us both as a crowd of thousands and as individuals whose eyes and soul he can look into, and this combination of the collective and individual understanding of the viewer has interesting implications for responsibility and blame. What Phil needs is for everyone to stop watching, not just you. But at the same time, there's an immediacy to the way he pleads, his "what are you doing," that implicates you, the individual viewer. It's one of the keys to YouTubers as a cultural thing, the feeling of a one-on-one connection that we can get from watching people talk to their cameras. As many times as I've watched The Silver Button (always to the end), it's never felt like I escape blame for what happens to Phil because other people watched to the end too; it might make sense logically that the collective responsibility would take some pressure off, but Phil seems to blame each of us "selfish, selfish people." (There is, of course, some dramatic irony to the fact that outside of the story, in our real world, of course Phil wants people to watch all the way through. But the blame is assigned by character-Phil, not creator-Phil.)
And so, headband-Phil goes to a meditative place as color-Phil is killed by Balthazar (yes, I assume that's his name and he's like a Pokemon, saying his name for no apparent reason) and the surviving Phil hits the blame even harder: "You'll never be able to understand what you've just done." The line parallels The Basket's "I'm sorry for what I've done," prominently placed at the end, the theme of responsibility that weighs heavy in "what [pronoun]'ve done." While The Basket's line is the ultimate acceptance of responsibility, Phil doesn't take any responsibility here (even though he's the one who pressed the button and started this whole thing). And here it's clear that "what you've done" is really about the consequences of actions, not the actions themselves. The idea of "You'll never be able to understand" could, in theory, serve to soften the blame and excuse us in a sort of Biblical "they know not what they do" kind of way, but that's not how Phil delivers the line. It's ominous in how resigned Phil sounds and the implication that those consequences stretch beyond the death we've seen to something far worse. It highlights the final moment of the story, with Balthazar attacking the camera; he's still at large, and knowing the creator of this story, he might just destroy the world (and blame us for it—Balthazar's definitely not given any agency over his role as the murderer here).
