Tag Archives: youtube

Mrsleepypeople

Nationality: American
Age: 23
Occupation: Student

Description: A youtube channel that shows videos of someone playing with a woman’s eyes while they sleep, the video shows only the hand so the person behind the videos is unknown.

Background: The informant learned about this from Reddit.

Transcript:

BD: It’s gross and extremely creepy but to me extremely fascinating because it was on YouTube of all things. But basically there was a channel called mrsleepypeople (something along those lines) that was uploading videos where there’s a man playing with a woman’s eyes while they’re asleep. The channel creator was probably the person filming bc it was always shot from like a first person pov so you never saw him, only his hands. Er scratch that usually only his hands. But anyways yeah basically he would open their eyes and what not but they’d clearly be knocked out bc their eyes weren’t reacting to light or anything (also it’d always be dark in the room minus the camera light so there’s also that). I think the first video he uploaded was actually a couple sleeping together too? He was only messing with the girls eyes but was uh ballsy enough to do this despite her boyfriend/SO being right there. And the videos got progressively worse, with the notable escalation being where he uh… licks one of the girls eyeballs

And this was on YouTube for a few years. And apparently there’s a community around it that was also around

Me: Were there any theories on what was actually happening?

BD: Basically that it was very likely a fetish thing. Because of the type of comments it’d get. But then when either people or YouTube got wind of it finally, most channels got removed or deleted by the owners. But yeah essentially there seems to be a fetish community around sleeping women’s eyes, but as you may have already guessed it a) absolutely did not seem consensual and b) some of the other channels that were found to be within the community posted children and infants….

Me: Did we ever know who the person is?

BD: Nope, which is probably the worst part.

My thoughts:

While my informant has not confirmed the existence of the channel, I believe this to be true. The case reminds me of Jack the Ripper in many ways. Mainly the creep factor and the fact that the perpetrator is never identified nor caught. I think this walks the line for what can be considered folklore. It is a very real thing but I think the knowledge lies outside of public or institutional knowledge. So I think this gives off a feel of an urban legend in the sense of how strange and unknown it is.

Dan & Phil Fandom Inside Jokes

Nationality: American
Age: 13
Occupation: Student
Residence: Arlington, VA
Performance Date: 3/16/19
Primary Language: English

Abstract:

This piece is about an incident-turned-meme that is widely known inside the Dan & Phil fandom about Phil falling off a stage.

Main Piece:

“L: This is a thing everyone in the Dan & Phil fandom know about. On their most recent tour, Interactive Introverts, their first or second night – one of the first few nights, Phil one of the two main people, fell off the stage and into the audience. Someone saw it and now there are jokes about it and everyone knows about it. Like someone turned it into a Valentine’s Day card.

M: They made memes about it?

L: Yeah, like “i’ve fallen for you like Phil fell off the stage.” Like that kind of thing.”

Context:

The informant is a 13 year old girl who is part of a Youtuber fandom for the youtubers Dan and Phil. She regularly keeps up with their videos and social media posts. She even went to their latest tour and bought their merchandise. She has kept up with inside jokes in the fandom, such as this, that have become memes that only those in the fandom understand. She has stated her affinity for the pair comes from their approach to comedy and reliability.

Analysis:

This type of obsession reminds me of obsessions with boybands like One Direction or even earlier boybands like NSYNC and the Backstreet Boys. When One Direction was in their hayday, it was common for fans to have inside jokes about the specific members. The informant’s affinity for Phil over Dan also reminded me of this aspect of fandoms as well. It is common for a fan to prefer one member of a band over the others and almost “claim” them as theirs. This is more common in fandoms surrounding boybands or other musical groups than comedy groups. The fact that memes have been created from one specific moment and have lasted for awhile show how powerful the fandom can be.

 

3:00 AM Challenge

Nationality: Mexican-American
Age: 11
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: March 28, 2018
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

Instructor: Can you guys think of any legends or ghost stories that you learned at home or from friends?

(There were multiple responses from varying students, however this post focuses on a single student’s response)

 

Daisy*: “Does the 3 AM challenge count?”

Instructor: “well, that depends. What is the 3 AM challenge?”

Daisy*:  “It’s a youtube challenge. You have to stay up all night long, until three in the morning. And then you do normal things and they get weird, like, the lights turn off, or you get chills. Lots of people do it and make a youtube video of it”

Instructor: “Have you done the 3 AM challenge?”

Daisy*: “I did it with my cousin. It was hard to stay awake, but at 3 AM we went to make food, and my cousin went and cracked the eggs and he came back and told me that one of the eggs turned black when he cracked it, and at 3:01 it was back to normal.”

Instructor: “Why do you have to do it at 3 AM?”

Daisy*: “I think it’s because that’s when the devil comes out at night. So he is the one that makes all of the bad things happen.”

ANALYSIS:

This challenge is one of many that have cropped up among young youtube users and on other social media platforms over the past 5-10 years. However, this one is unique because it’s focused on a paranormal occurrence, rather than some sort of physical challenge (ie; the cinnamon challenge). All of the students in the class were seemingly aware of what this was, and many of them had varying accounts of either participating in the challenge or knowing someone who did. A quick youtube search under “3 AM Challenge” yielded an astounding 144,000,000 results, the most popular of which were centered about themes of demonic possession, and paranormal sightings at 3 AM. While the reasoning behind the precise time of the activity remains unclear, it is evident that many believe that it has a demonic of dark influence. There is no evidence that 3 AM has any significance in the bible or any other major religious text, however this seems to be a more recent adaptation of the concept of “the witching hour” which has historically taken place at midnight. What is most interesting is that even though this challenge seems rather frightening, none of the students seemed afraid of it, and most were boasting about how it “Wasn’t that scary”.

 

* The informant is a minor and was a participant in the JEP Program at USC. Daisy* is an alias to protect the student’s privacy.

MLG Remixes

Nationality: American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, California
Performance Date: 4/1/16
Primary Language: English

The informant is a 19-year old college student.

 

BW: An MLG Remix is hard to explain.. It’s like,, making fun of the culture of like middle schoolers on Xbox Live, and everything around that. There are these gaming channels on Youtube that celebrate the highlights in a game of Call of Duty or Battlefield or something–usually CoD, and then set it to Dubstep music. MLG Remixes make fun of that by adding lots of really loud dubstep, a bunch of songs piled on top each other ’till you can’t even hear them… and also a bunch of other symbols and reoccurring.. “motifs” you can call them. Like Mountain Dew, Taco Bell, Snoop Dogg, smoking weed–they usually all show up in these MLG Remix videos. They’re meant to be funny too, like over-the-top, hyper-crazy, ironic.

What does MLG stand for?

BW: Major League Gaming. That’s the whole crowd that they make fun of, because they’re so serious about video games.

 

Various MLG Remixes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxmnZ3zVGBY

 

And his name is John Cena

Nationality: N/A
Age: N/A
Occupation: N/A
Residence: N/A
Performance Date: N/A

Background

John Cena is a well-known WWE wrestler and Hollywood actor. In 2012, a prank call aired on a local radio station (“Z morning Zoo”) where the DJs repeatedly played a sound clip advertising John Cena’s wrestling career to a wife who was fed up with her husband’s obsession with WWE wrestling. Two years later (2014), the channel “RuinCommentsOfficial” uploaded a recording of the prank call to YouTube which gained over 20 million views. Another year after that (2015), the sound clip from the video resurfaced as a popular meme on on Vine, an internet platform where users can post 6 second video clips. Several other websites, such as Reddit and Tumblr, also contributed to this trend. Since then, hundreds of thousands of versions of the John Cena clip have appeared across the internet.

Context

The sound clip from the radio station prank call and a video of John Cena will pop up in the middle of a video which was seemingly about something unrelated to John Cena and WWE wrestling. There is usually no connection between the interrupted video and John Cena. Occasionally, the John Cena audio clip is mixed with a preexisting video meme.

Text

The prank call video that the meme originated from:

A compilation of John Cena vine:

Thoughts

Far more people participated in the spreading of the John Cena meme than actually watch WWE wrestling or are fans of John Cena, so there was a reason people were drawn to this folklore than actually had a personal investment in the subject matter. However, because of the way the meme originated, internet users were able to adapt the collective internet “inside joke” of the John Cena audio clip to fit into any other type of video that may interest them. Therefore, every person who came across the John Cena meme could contribute their own take on the joke and no one needed to even know who John Cena really was to join in on the laughter feel connected to the internet community.