Happy Watcher-versay
For all my sweet baby angels who were not in this fandom a year ago, let me paint you a picture.
In 2018, the content didn't flow as much as it does now, but there were still lots of Instagram photos, or surprise pop-ups in other Buzzfeed videos. You never knew when you'd click on Curly's instastory and see him hitting on Ryan or Shane and Ryan tweeting about some terrible dream Ryan had where Shane died or when you'd see them in airports together and begin speculating where they would be ghosthunting next. Then at the end of season 5 of Supernatural, when Ryan and Shane say they’ll be back but without a clear date, and while saying “we do have a special for you in January” (which would be the sponsored Black Dahlia revisited ep), it felt a little odd and sad, since SPN had only been 6 episodes instead of 8, but oh well, they’ll still be around. Plus maybe that meant they were working on season 2 of Ruining History! So we went on with our days, watching an awkward Buzzfeed holiday special with Shane as the grinch and Ryan not there at all, along with Shane getting the actual worst haircut of all time for a bit and Ryan not there at all. The Black Dahlia ep was a nice little treat, though. But then a couple weeks later, the Buzzfeed layoffs hit and I cannot emphasize enough what a shitty, anxious weekend that was. Ryan was at Sundance with Mari and so his lack of presence with regards to the layoffs was weird and made me (and a lot of other people) anxious as fuck that Unsolved wouldn’t continue at all. Shane didn’t say much either, although he was quietly liking tweets from fired friends. Katie Leblanc did eventually post that Unsolved was not canceled, although the damage had been done. TJ had been laid off, only a couple weeks back from paternity leave, and it was just a shitty time to care about Buzzfeed stuff.
But a month later, the boys were back filming True Crime and then La Llorona with Curly and we hit another fandom mini-high. But, curiously, during the same time, Ryan was posting instagram ads and tweeting at a bunch of LA companies asking to do collabs and it seemed like our fears were true: Ryan had left Buzzfeed and Shane. He was doing Unsolved on contract but was going to venture out into the world and do his own thing, maybe acting or ~influencer shit. Shane was still popping up in some other Buzzfeed videos so it was the only logical conclusion we thought.
Every time a random Buzzfeeder I followed posted a shot from in the office, I’d try to scour the background for Ryan and Shane but I never could find them. Whenever they did post instastories, they were working from home, sometimes together, sometimes not. That felt weird, but we thought maybe Buzzfeed was allowing people to work from home more as a boost to morale after the layoffs. And we knew they filmed more Berry Boys stuff at Knott’s, where was that? And then after True Crime s5 ended, we went months without anything, besides the Annabelle sponsored episode. All summer, no videos of them at pool parties together, no tweets from other Buzzfeeders about them at all, nothing. A lot of the time, though, Ryan was visiting Mari on set so that helped explain his absences, but maybe not all of them.
August rolls around and the boys film s6 of Supernatural, ghost hunting in Florida and South Carolina. The joy of seeing them post weird pics of each other while traveling could not be overstated. Then Ryan tweeted that Shane was “irreplaceable”, even when faced with switching him out for Paddington. Things in the fandom were looking up! We didn’t know why they were only filming 14 episodes of Unsolved a year when they used to do twice that many and we didn’t know what the fuck they were doing with their time and Sara finally commented that Ruining History probably wasn’t coming back so what the fuck did Shane do with his time, especially now that it had been a year without the Hot Daga and just what was going on over there???
Season 6 of Supernatural came and went, a glorious 6 week run that included “it’s not like he’s my daddy”, face-touching, and Ryan’s Old City Jail freakout. But after Halloween, it was done and it was another month of lows of after such an intense high. When were we going to see them again? Was Unsolved coming to an end? Were they growing apart? A lot of future reunion fic popped up during this time, which I think is a good indicator of where the fandom was at, how we were coping.
Then, on December 8, 2019, Ryan, Shane, and Steven Lim all posted eye emoji tweets. Weird. Some thought it was a reference to an album coming out around that time, some assumed it was some sort of teaser for a BFU/Worth it crossover (Andrew doesn’t social media so that helped too). An odd crumb of content that we nonetheless ate up.
December 9th rolls around. At around 10am PST, a trailer goes up. And suddenly, everything about the past year shifts into place.
I cannot emphasize enough that no one, no one, though they’d ever leave together. They couldn’t pull a Try Guys, Unsolved was too expensive to shoot and they couldn’t buy out that name with just two of them. It never crossed our minds that they’d want to create new things together. That they truly do think of each other as irreplaceable, not just as co-hosts on their spooky show, but in all aspects of their lives.
So. Happy Watcher-versary, my darlings. It’s been a shit year, but made immeasurably more tolerable with these doofuses and this lovely fandom.
