#netflix would ultimately ruin mark's channel

[laur-rants]

As we get closer and closer to the release of In Space with Markiplier, which will invariably be very successful, will be a huge, exciting thing that everyone will get some form of enjoyment out of, and is highly creative and innovative...

I’m seeing this weird, and slightly uncomfortable trend in Mark’s youtube comments that Mark should, for one reason or another, get a Netflix deal, and how cool would that be, etc etc.

And while however nice that thought may be... it is not a good thought to have. It feels as if people who continue to assert that Mark’s work would somehow be, I don’t know. Better? More accessible? If it was a Netflix original.And if people really think this... They’re missing the point of what Mark DOES, as a creator, on the platform he has chosen to create on.

Mark does not want you to have to pay for his content. Period. He wants, with all his heart, for his content to remain FREE AND ACCESSIBLE. Mark, as a creator, is someone I highly respect because he has a vision, and he has passion projects that yes, he pays people to help him create, but not only that, but he offers this content to the world, the universe, to anyone with access to youtube, FOR FREE.

No paywall. No membership. You get this because its FREE.

Netflix is not free. Netflix is exploitative to creators, it is horrible to its animators who never get paid enough, it is big budget, it does not properly promote its indie work that finds its way onto the streaming service, and when something does ‘poorly’ in their eyes (doesn’t get enough ratings) it is cancelled. It is not a website (though it can be watched on browser). It is a BUSINESS and it is a SERVICE.

Mark’s work, whether it be let’s plays or skits or drinking maple syrup by the jug, has been free content. He strongly insists that his work REMAIN that way. He wants his passion projects to be somewhere where NOBODY will pull the plug on him, where NOBODY will ‘cancel’ his next season (no i’m not talking about unus annus, im talking about his main channel, plus he CHOSE to delete that channel after a year, that was the point of that creative project in the first place but you never had to pay to see it), where HIS creative endeavors can flourish and inspire. He doesn’t need more money and he knows this. That’s why he doesn’t ASK for our money just to view his works.

To assert that his work would somehow be BETTER if it was streamed on Netflix is, quite literally, missing the entire point of Mark’s channel. This is his living, yes, he encourages people becoming members of the channel -- of course, as any patron-esque system would. But Mark never wants someone to actually have to PAY to see his work. He even puts out FREE COMMENTARY on anything he creatively makes, showing people how he edited Wilford Warfstache and Damien, and hyping up the actors and creators he collabs with. FOR FREE!!! I cannot stress this enough. People buy Blu-Rays with extended cuts and director’s commentary for $60-120 dollars a disk and here is Mark, giving more than that, for nothing more than a simple search and click on his youtube.

THIS MAN WANTS HIS WORK TO BE FREE. HE WANTS IT TO BE SEEN BY WHOEVER WISHES TO SEE IT.

So please, for the love of God, if you like Mark, stop asserting in his comments that he should go to Netflix. Netflix would give him nothing more than money (which he already has) and ultimately alienate his core audience (either because its on a different platform now, and thus removed from the competing platform, or because lo and behold NOT EVERYONE PAYS FOR NETFLIX) and would also cut into his core belief and his core purpose: To offer what he makes, for free.

I respect Mark a lot because he sticks by all of this so strongly. So strongly, even, that he is visibly distressed that In Space is seen by some as a paid service. It’s FREE! Mark’s work will always be free. And if we want it to stay free and accessible, the last thing any of us, Mark included, wants, is a Netflix deal. Trust Me.

[suiciderealestate]

I hope you’re doing well at a time when so many of us are not. I have to admit I didn’t think Hanna’s party would be the last place I would see you. I should have had more foresight, and even when I left without saying goodbye I knew I had made a mistake as soon as the door closed behind me. I should have known how precarious my situation was and how little time we probably had left together. I think you knew it and I knew it, but I was in denial of it. I became angry with you that night because one of the first things you said to me was that things would be ok if I left, that I could have the last of the two photographs of us from that night on Halloween before everything went to shit. I know you only meant to be reassuring, but it felt like you were rushing me out the door. I was reminded that in some way your kindness was a favor to me, based probably to some extent on a sense of pity you feel toward me. You didn’t need the keepsakes of our time together because you felt, maybe rightly, that they would mean more to me than they could ever mean to you. You didn’t need me. I was the only one who needed you. Any affection between us was a favor you were doing for me, which you made clear to everyone during the pregame to my "gone" party. And so I lost it, and I made such a scene when I should have instead recognized that you’re just a sweet, stupid boy who knows not what he does. You plod blindly forward and do your best to make people happy, and for me maybe your best would never be enough. I left New York two weeks ago. With the pandemic outbreak that followed I guess my timing was pretty good. There are a lot of cases in the Nashville area, too, but it feels safer here. 

Last night I had a dream about you, that we were together at work and having fun, that you knew I loved you and I knew I loved you and that it was just ok. I find myself missing you and wishing you missed me. You never once have messaged me first, ever in the course of our relationship, which is more telling than any empty words we ever exchanged about our connection, and so this deluge of sentiment feels all the more futile. If you won’t text or call me during a quarantine, when would you ever? You wouldn’t. But today I was watching a documentary on Netflix about Ivan the Terrible, the Nazi gas chamber sadist who gleefully murdered thousands of jews at a death camp in Poland. In the documentary they showed pictures of the piles of bodies and one of the bodies had a face that looked like yours. That sent my mind reeling what with all the news coverage of the pandemic and the rising body counts that only seem to multiply after the hospital beds run out. My mom told me a 25-year-old man in New Jersey with sandy blond hair who was handsome and had been a lacrosse player had fallen into a coma because of the virus. Once again I thought of you, and my quiet panic became a little louder. I was going through pictures the other day and found some I took of you during the Halloween party. Our relationship was good then, and I am reminded frequently that I ruined it. 

That being said, I wrote the following letter to you shortly after I confessed my feelings for you in their entirety on Sammi’s birthday, because my timing is always so incredibly dramatic. I kept the letter to myself because I knew it would put a strain on our relationship and I figured that at least the process of writing it would be therapeutic. You wrote your letter to Hanna. I wrote my letter to you. But when I had my little outburst at Hanna's party I nullified any preservative effect keeping this letter from you would have had, and by now my need for an elusive catharsis has only grown. You seem perfectly content to let me float away because maybe you have rightly determined that there is really nothing you can do for me. Your stated goal is not to love me but to help me, because what you harbor for me might most accurately be described as a simple kind of good will, and though you might have called it love once before out of a sense of obligation, I think it probably more closely resembles guilt. Since I don’t really see a scenario in which we will exchange easy communication at any point in the future, I have decided to let you have access to this letter. I am afraid to let you see the ugly extent of the length of my thoughts about you and how all of this ties knots in my mind, and so I am doing it in spite of that fear.  Even four months later most of the sentiments expressed here still hold true. I love you very much, David. As the world boils around us, I think of you every single day. If I ever see you again, I pray it will be under better circumstances. I still don’t know what those circumstances could possibly be, but if you ever find that you need me, I will be here for you until the day I die. Maybe after. 

- Mark

Dear David,

I am writing you this letter now because I have nothing else to lose, and it may be that I decided to leave Pier so I could write you this letter without any perpetuated emotional consequence. In writing this I only intend to share with you a truth that is often too difficult to voice, although we have already had a conversation in person that, while it devastated me because of my own frailties, gave me a newfound clarity that I think will allow me to say what I really mean. I still run your words through my mind like a comb over and over again. “I love you. You’re my best friend. We’re perfect for each other. I’m straight, and that’s where the wall is. I’m sorry.” My body is once again my greatest enemy.

You have always expressed a willingness to accept other people for who they are, and so I am going to do my best to tell you who I am, to get it all down here without the risk of sobbing uncontrollably into the crook of your neck in the pouring rain. It’s hard to get these thoughts out sometimes in a way that doesn’t feel self-indulgent. Sometimes I sit and talk to myself in the shower, talk to a version of someone else sitting there with me, sometimes me, sometimes God, sometimes other people. Today I sat and talked to you, and I guess it wouldn’t be the first time. Under the water, the words come more easily. I don’t know what it is about warm water that allows me to say anything I want to without difficulty, but as soon as I try to channel those thoughts afterward, it feels clunky and masturbatory, like I’m writing to appease something hungry inside of me that doesn’t know what it wants or simply can’t be sated.

I have come to understand life as a series of outer illusions that can ultimately be synthesized into a fundamental inner illusion. Physicality sets the parameters of our waking experience, the rules and guidelines by which we conduct ourselves in our mad spiral into oblivion, but I believe that the material world is carefully designed, and sometimes the design is specifically intended to obscure certain truths, or at least engender an experience that wouldn’t be possible if everything were made to be obvious. For me, the dichotomy of every human can be haphazardly reduced to body and spirit in a variety of fluid combinations that are rarely understood as they are. At our most basic physical levels, we are male and female, and our compatibility is governed by the nature of our spiritual and physical magnetism. 

I have lived my entire life as a cisgender man, meaning a man who presents himself as a man to the world, as by now you well understand. But for me, on an emotional level, our conventions of sexuality and gender are painfully reductive. Emotionally, I experience myself more within the feminine archetype, perhaps not as a female per se because my body is male and at this point we’re dealing mostly in the semantics of sex, but as a spirit who would maybe feel more at home in a female body and the conventions afforded to it. Emotionally I understand myself as female. Physically, I accept that I am male, but I don’t think it defines me or my compatibility with other people. I am also aware that I cannot impose my own conceptions of my personal eligibility for unconditional romantic love and affection onto other people.

When I confessed the extent of my love for you on Sammi’s birthday, you showed me real compassion. You are such a sweet boy, such a kind man, and I think that’s what makes me love you so much in the first place. I thought your emotional depth and kindness would allow you to experience me as the person I am, but you insist that you are heterosexual, a label that continues to mystify me, perhaps because I am so removed from it. Sexuality, for me, is more about intimacy than it is about penetration or anything else, but I admit that up to this point in my life I have also had a preference. To be honest, there is a part of me that understands where you’re coming from when you call yourself “straight.” Sex between a man and a woman makes perfect sense, whereas everything else sometimes seems like a misguided physical improvisation, as you often alluded to with your jokes about “fudgepackers” and whatever else. But when I feel that way, I remind myself that the most important element of sex is emotional intimacy. Sex isn’t just fucking. Sometimes it’s just stripping yourself down and being physically and emotionally naked with another person. I think I emotionally denuded myself around you, and to some extent I feel that you reciprocated. To me it just seems strange that two people can be completely naked with each other in one way and not in another. The disconnect doesn’t make sense to me, and it is that disconnect that has brought me so much sorrow.

I can continue to wax poetic. I can continue to wax academic. The ultimate problem is that words are never enough. They’re just little boxes that can only ever be approximations of true meaning — an apt analogue to so many other things — but sometimes true meaning can only be conveyed instinctively, telepathically, empathically. Throughout all this, I guess I just wanted you to see me and experience me as I see and experience myself. I felt like that was within you. Maybe you only ever wanted the same courtesy from me. I’m sorry if I fell short. I know you have strong ideas about who you are and who you’re planning to be. I don’t want to dictate your future. I only ever wanted this present moment with you, to love and worship you as the man I adore so much. You may have shortcomings, but they never distracted me from your essential manhood: your work ethic, your reliability, your deep ability to step outside of yourself and be vulnerable and emotional with other people. I loved you for everything you are, and nothing in the construct of your being seemed flawed, only human and worthy of love.

People spend a great deal of their lives wanting to live up to a version of themselves that they aspire toward. I wanted to worship that hidden part of you that lives beneath it. I wish that through my love I could make you feel more like a man, but I fear that you see any prospective intimacy with me as a subversion of the man you want to be. I’ve seen this complex for my entire life, and by staring into that void I think I’ve developed my own complex from it, reliving the rejection I suffered when I was younger over and over again, perhaps on purpose.  I’ve known deep connections with several men, some that manifested sexually, some that didn’t, but the meat puppet my soul resides in has never measured up to the vision they have for themselves, of who they’re supposed to be. It has happened repeatedly, but it never fails to break my heart every time. There are only so many times a person can break before they become broken. I had to leave Pier because every time I looked at you I felt those deep cuts. I felt how close we could have been. I love you and I believe you love me, and all I really wanted was a chance to validate that love and let it have its moment. How long that moment would have lasted is another question, but I don’t think real love can be measured by time.

The politics of identity that are put upon us as a society preempt those visceral connections far too often. When you pulled me in and held me and let me kiss your neck in the pouring rain, almost insisted on it, I could feel the way you are at war with yourself, just as we all are in some way or another at war with ourselves. Not whether you’re gay or straight, but whether or not your manhood could be eclipsed by the expanse of your emotional debt to other people. You want that same intimacy. You need it. You just don’t want to be gay. I don’t think you’re gay. I don’t even really know what it means to be gay. Gay is just one more word we get lost in. I don’t find myself attracted to most gay men. I don’t experience a fatal attraction to penises. The reason I identify as gay is because it makes it easier to conceptualize myself in a way that is simply more convenient for everyone. The reason I don’t identify as a  trans woman is because I don’t think I should have to change my body or the way I dress for my inner feminine vibration to be validated. Womanhood is too often dictated by the standards of our patriarchal society, and I was born with a gift that exempted me from those standards. And yet, perhaps the fetish of most men is adherence to the rules or an assimilated distortion of them. It is a fetish I cannot fulfill. 

I think the only wall between us lives in your mind. I think you have an idea of who you are and who you are supposed to be, and I think you would go to great lengths to protect that idea, because it’s all you know and it’s what you have been raised to know and it’s what you feel safe in. You are not your father. You are not just a product of your environment. You aren’t just a regular, typical white boy, as you’ve described yourself so many times. You are so much more and I feel it so much within you. Words and bodies and conventions are certainly walls that exist between us, but they can and should be broken down. The essence of the material world is spirit, energy, and the resonation of that energy. That is what sex and love really are. Not a 10- or 20-year plan. Not a haircut you can lean on for the rest of your life. Not a place to hide in New Jersey until the world burns. Not a stable woman who is only stable because she has had the unparalleled luxury of being able to be at rest in her body. I would never ask you to plan your entire future around me. I just hoped that one day you would let me love you without restraint. Maybe I’m selfish. Maybe what we’ve already had is enough. You told me that maybe in the next life we could be together, and while I believe in the scientific and spiritual precept that energy and by extension matter cannot be created or destroyed, I don’t know how our energy will transform when our bodies die. All I know is that we have this energy now. We have this connection now. Now is truly all we have.

I will always be your friend. Of course we’re friends. You’ve done me no wrong and have only ever been intoxicatingly kind to me, and I’m sorry if sometimes my resentments become evident, maybe painfully so. I resent the world we live in. I resent the language our society bestows upon our bodies and how they relate to who we are. I resent the conventions that kill so many easy connections between people. I resent the walls that are built around us, that we build around ourselves, yours and mine. But beneath all that resentment, I love you very much, and I think you love me, too. I hope that never changes.