#i don’t really expect empathy from 🥝farms or reddit but this is so odd. so so odd

[journalfen]

i understand that following lolcows is a morally dubious activity but what is happening to amberlynn reid at the moment is really making me think. i feel like i have nobody to talk to about it in detail so i’m making a post.

very very brief history; amberlynn reid (amber) is an infamous youtuber who has a following because she started to make youtube videos as a weight loss channel in 2013. she weighed about 300 lbs at the start of her channel and went on to gain significant weight (she weighed 572 lbs at her known highest weight and is about 500 now) while starting and stopping countless diets/weight loss challenges/lifestyle changes. she is a lesbian and has had several controversial relationships since the start of her channel. it’s genuinely impossible to recount the actual events in one post so for the sake of this, amber is a bad partner and learns very little from mistakes she’s made in previous relationships. there is a lot of information about her life because she documents it very thoroughly, and people are extremely invested in her life story, so i’m interested in it from a sociological point of view. lolcows and the communities that spring up around them are like bullying case studies, which is what i’m a bit crazy about currently.

amber has been presumably single since july of last year, and her last partner only appeared as a hand and disembodied voice in her vlogs. she unconvincingly faked a new long distance girlfriend starting in february of this year. shortly before what’s going on now, amber made a lot of content suggesting that her ‘valentine’ had cheated on her and they had broken up. these past few weeks she’s been teasing the introduction of a new girlfriend—a woman identified as tommy. relevant context about the community is that amber viewers are eager to have a new ‘side character’ to make her content entertaining again, because the consensus is that she’s been boring since her offscreen girlfriend started being the only other presence in her videos. amber is discussed on… the fruit farms, a community of people who will uncover public information about anyone to build a narrative about them. the excitement from the amber spectators and the inevitability of people investigating any new girlfriend’s identity meant that tommy’s personal identifying information and past escapades were revealed only days after amber first officially posted her face on her tiktok.

piecing together clues based on tommy’s tattoos and social media accounts, posters identified her as a woman who was a part of feeder fetish communities. that on its own was surprising, but it gets a bit sinister from this point. tommy ran a couples’ account in one of those communities with a woman who was about 1,000 lbs and passed away due to obesity related complications in april of this year, about three months ago. tommy and amber have been talking since june of this year. another woman who posts social media content focusing on her weight (i don’t know/care about her specific weight but she is similar to amber) revealed that tommy had been sending flirtatious messages with her even before then. i don’t think that tommy wanted her partner to pass away or anything, but it feels malicious to move between relationships with people who are near immobile and suffering from obesity related health conditions almost immediately after losing a partner to the same serious medical problems.

the community is obviously frothing over this development. there are a lot of opinions, but i’ve been very troubled by the amount of people who are dismissive of the potential danger of the situation because amber has supposedly consented to a relationship with a feeder with a shady past. amber made a video and a post ‘addressing the rumors’ where she confirmed that tommy’s late partner passed away, but denied the ‘rumor’ that she had a feederism fetish. it’s hard to say what exactly she knew before she entered this relationship. amber has repeatedly demonstrated that she is quite naive about being an online celebrity, has severe and deep seated issues with regulating her eating/lifestyle, and is a public figure who could easily be targeted by someone with less than pure intentions.

but because amber supposedly ‘knows what she’s getting into’, because she is a bit of a villain herself, because she struggles to maintain her health (and oftentimes, just straight up neglects it), amber can’t be a victim. because she’s ‘consented’, she can’t be blindsided by this internet stranger’s true colors. it’s reminding me of how people only want perfect victims with perfect circumstances, who are completely unaware that they’re going into dangerous relationships. nothing has even happened, but it’s reminding me how dark internet communities can become. it’s a complicated situation with so many overlapping fucked up subcultures/mindsets that show off the worst of the internet. there are countless reasons to dislike amber but it’s insane to me that people can look at an extremely shady relationship and just not care because of who is involved.