![]() He is anti-PC, anti-social, and anti-couth. From the description on Filthy Frank’s YouTube channel:įilthy Frank is the embodiment of everything a person should not be. Even though both iDubbbz and Filthy Frank are closer in age to me than they are to Delphine, they seem to be part of a vanguard that has heavily influenced Zoomer culture, a chopped-and-screwed, deep-fried, endlessly remixed creative tradition that dares its consumers to take anything too seriously. It certainly mystifies me: upon reading that she counted YouTubers such as iDubbbz and Filthy Frank among her chief influences, I looked up videos by both and found them by turns boring, inchoate, and mildly repulsive (though Filthy Frank is a pretty decent musician). Unrelatable in that she was buried deep in the many valences of an extremely online culture defined by a so-ironic-it’s-unironic horseshoe effect that would probably mystify most people born before 1995. Relatable in that she was bullied by her schoolmates and spent a good deal of time alone, that she posted low-res cosplaying photos to various social media accounts, worked odd jobs, and was clinically depressed. Delphine is more than just a business-savvy e-girl troll who knows how to go viral on TikTok: she’s a true performance artist.ĭelphine’s early life, as pieced together from rare moments of unironic self-disclosure in her videos as well as the few interviews she’s conceded to granting outlets like The Guardianand Vice, is both highly relatable and not. Though, knowing Delphine’s work, I imagine she’d find a way to make this, too, a part of her life’s great raised middle finger of a performance. One video, called “ youngest swing artist x,” features a preteen Belle pulling off some truly acrobatic and impressive moves on a tree swing, and I’ll admit that the pearl-clutching mother hen in me spiraled a bit at the thought of her current audience finding this video and judging her for it. This means that the truly curious can find the YouTube channel she created as a kid named Belle Kirschner: said channel has only 311 subscribers-though the three videos have views in the thousands, numbers which likely accumulated as a result of the fame she’s achieved as an adult. Delphine does the same, while also blurring the lines among performance art, softcore porn, and the nebulous, Zoomer-y category called “content creation.”īelle Delphine is a fin-de-siècle-born Zoomer who, like many members of her generation, has a digital footprint spanning nearly half her life. Abramovic has always done a masterful job of toying with public expectations of her, managing the seemingly impossible highwire act of baring all and remaining in many ways a blank canvas. ![]() the widely speculated-about person obscured by the persona whose essential unknowability drives public interest in her art. I wanted to write a story that, like Abramovic’s The Artist Is Present, shows us two sides of a widely-admired creative mind: the “always on” performer and the vulnerable woman behind the mask-i.e. ![]() In facts, it’s Delphine’s Abramovic-like qualities that have shaped my fan fiction about her. To me, Delphine is more than just a business-savvy e-girl troll who knows how to go viral on TikTok: she’s a true performance artist, as worthy of gallery space as someone like Marina Abramovic. ![]() The story is about many things-parasocial relationships, how women are perceived both on and offline, how the expectations of capitalism and patriarchy can be leveraged to the advantage of the very people both systems are designed to oppress-but it’s also a fan letter to Delphine, a kind of game-recognize-game from someone who aims to subvert with his art, and who strongly resonates with the subversion in hers. Instead of positioning Delphine as the waifu in an obscure anime or a sexy alien come to colonize Earth, I’m imagining a likelier scenario for her: on the same night that her reply guy stalker traces her IP address to her condo and decides to ask her to marry him, she discovers that she sees her best friend as more than just a friend. I don’t doubt “Like and Subscribe” will join a robust canon of Belle Delphine “fic” for which I’m sure many an NSFW Tumblr and furtive anonymous Wattpad account have been created, but my story is probably quite different in its lack of imaginative extravagance. When I wrote “Like and Subscribe”-the second-to-last story in Bugsy & Other Stories-I fully intended it as fan fiction about Belle Delphine, the e-girl who has ingeniously exploited the peccadilloes of horny gamer dudes to the tune of millions, both in terms of followers and personal wealth (though it could be argued that those categories are fairly fungible in a world as digital as Delphine’s). Featured image: Belle Delphine on an episode of the Cold Ones podcast.
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