What exactly do you think Digi was going through to make him so vulnerable to the trans bullshit anyway? He seemingly had his life in order before he went trans, and besides the "I wanna be a Loli" fetish shit he seemed pretty secure in his masculinity. was there something behind the scenes we never heard about? Or is it something that went wrong way before that?
Edit: Yeah, this is shorter, let's just run with that.
Disenchantment with anime. Running against a wall on what he had mapped out as his career path. And no plan B.
I didn't get up today intending to write two essays about Digibro, but I guess that's a consequence of being so late to the party; so, here is my thread-killing, final theory of who Digi really is:
I don't think it's that something bad happened behind the scenes. I think there is no "behind the scenes" with Digi.
Digi was a somewhat bright child who was naturally self-centered and prone to obsessing over niche interests. When he had issues getting other kids to see things his way (the stupid nintendo/sony shit) he always responded by doubling down on the assumption that he was right, a behavior he never suffered real consequences for ("the doctor said I was a genius") and continues to the present day. Digi managed to turn social rejection into a personal victory by being obstinate and only caring about friendly opinions (parents, school admins, himself) so he kept using using this strategy and it kept "working". As far as I'm concerned, Digi (mostly) stopped developing in grade school, with an emotional age in the late single digits.
He really needed help, and maybe someone tried, but either way he entered young adulthood with ingrained antisocial tendencies, few methods for endearing himself to other humans, and a shitload of anime trivia.
Digi's resistance to shame, lack of competent competition, and inexplicable talent for making videos made him leader of the MLP community almost by default, which only deepened his assumption that having an irrational faith in his own point of view would eventually solve all problems. During this time, he learned to hone his persona while learning the "narrative youtube"/parasocial game from Jess. This was the last moment Digi might have been able to salvage the situation, and their post-anime explosion in popularity ruined their fucking life.
By becoming famous, Digi managed to circumvent all the personal barriers which humans normally overcome by growing as people. If anything, getting more and more self-absorbed only aided his career (treating Geoff and Mumkey like shit made for good drama, and his ranting helped After Dark so much it turned into a direct source of income), and he made so much money that he literally couldn't piss it away fast enough to run out. He didn't have to learn how to meet women either; they just showed up, horny for a chance to snag a niche microcelebrity.
The problem is that it was based in nothing, because nobody actually wanted Conrad Collins, they wanted "Digibro", and "Digibro" didn't exist.
Becoming more abrasive after switching content created the illusion that "digibrony" had been a put-on and the person you saw on After Dark was a more "authentic" version of their personality, when in reality both were constructs. That brainless man-baby from the Oki interview? I'm about 95% sure that's as close as we've ever come to seeing baseline Digi: a socially disengaged moron who dismisses well-meaning criticism with childish lies and can't process the idea that he has to please people to get their money. Digi is just who Chris would be if he had a knack for controlling narratives (I assume understanding everything via media helped with this).
In the breakup video, May basically admitted that she had signed up to be Mrs. Digibro, only to be disappointed upon getting to know the real Conrad. Actually, despite all the collabs and crossovers, I don't think I've ever heard someone (in a position to know) say they like Digi as a person. Not Ben, not Gigguk, not even Riley. Did May ever say this? I almost want to go back and check. It's always "your videos helped me through a hard time," never a story about Digi being a good friend.
Where's Jess? The big brother figure who was always talking about how YouTube sucked ass and friendship was more important?
What about Don Jolly? I remember one of the last streams he did with Digi, May, and that one guy. Digi made a callous comment about how most people are NPCs which Don was obviously hurt by, eventually leaving the call when it became clear that Digi literally couldn't understand that complex emotions were not limited to a tiny intellectual elite. Don also tried to bring up The Variety of Religious Experience (an
actual intellectual achievement, which I read and was referring to in my earlier post) and just gave up after getting shouted over. Anyone with basic human empathy would have seen that Don was having a moment and needed to be reassured.
Because of his fame, Digi is constantly getting the trappings of a fulfilling life, but lacks the emotional capacity to turn them into something solid, so over the course of ten years he ended up with the façade of a charmed existence, when in reality he was drowning in horseshit. The money, friends, fans, and wife were all illusions or half-truths which he was too shit with people to see through (there was hardly a person in Digi's life who didn't benefit from his fame/career to some degree), and quality relationships got pushed away.
If any human on this planet outside of immediate family has a claim to Collins' loyalty and affection, it's Nate; and Digi destroyed their livelihood on a whim, setting back his life with Michelle by years. KH! was never going to happen because it was a fantasy to feed Digi's ego; they don't have the people skills or ethic to pull off a complex, multi-person project. Nate handled this with the patience of a Saint, hardly saying a word in public, and Digi literally doesn't care.
And, somehow, Digi managed to make his own content as fragile as his personal life. Very few people got into Digi's content because the quality of any one video was that impressive (maybe AssWar); they got lured in by controversial takes until they found themselves invested in the narrative. Digi was the bad conscious of AniTube (much like how Chris played that role for the internet in general), and there was a subversive fun in waiting to see what the community's resident autist would say about the latest fad.
This made his content a lot more engaging for committed fans, but also created a partial separation of any individual project's quality from the fan reaction to it, because they were getting a boost from the narrative/parasocial context. Digi's channel was more than the sum of its parts, but he was taking fan reactions at face value (even accounting for cynicism about his audience's intelligence) and ended up wildly overestimating his skills as a creator. Kusomega could not stand by itself in bookstores, and Whirling Dirvish would never make it as an unknown podcast, but both got a decent response because they were part of the "Digibro" empire, something Digi eventually forgot.
Digi got so used to the deck being stacked in his favor that he eventually came to believe that he could do any artform and find immediate success (you cannot use parasocial to improve music because it is too direct an experience, and it being the one, mysterious gap in fan response bugged him for years), not realizing that breaking kayfabe would be the career equivalent of severing his own aorta, as literally everything he had done in the last decade depended on fans believing that, even if "Digibro" wasn't
real, there was something human and worthwhile going on behind it, rather than the sad, boring reality.
Who knows exactly what triggered it (I still think May leaving him was important, although the transition came first), but Digi started to apprehend the horror of how hollow their life was, finally starting to understand that what they had thought of as cynical maneuvering on their part was actually fabricating emotional realities out of whole cloth. May never loved him, he never really cared about Nate, and the "exaggerated" version of his personality which the fans cared so much about was just a gimmick he used to make money which would never serve a real purpose and belonged to the IRS anyway. The talisman which Digi had been holding in front of him to ward off the hardships of adulthood turned out to be a cheap trinket, if not a monkey's paw, and he felt an overpowering urge to throw it into the ocean.
Digi felt so claustrophobic, self-disgusted, and doomed that, one day, the realization that he could just start over with a new persona and style of content (which had worked so well last time) popped into his head and got locked in as the next plan. When Digi-nee failed to take off, he dug in his heels and got more obsessive about controlling his identity, deciding to obliterate "Digibro" once and for all (but keep the audience, of course), either not understanding or refusing to believe that the character was an essential part of his career.
Digi built his first audience with MLP, then used his (considerable, if exaggerated) anime knowledge to convert it into a power base of anime fans. After this, he used his talent for narrative-construction to add a parasocial element, creating a core audience of committed fans who would support basically anything they did (within reason, or sometimes beyond it) and provided most of the Patreon money out of a misguided sense of loyalty.
In the beginning, he got fans because his work succeeded; but after a while, his work succeeded because he had fans; specifically, fans of "Digibro". So, when he dropped all of the mystifications which helped people believe in the character, he probably thought he was removing a block close to the bottom of the Jenga pile, when in reality he was kicking the table out from underneath it.
However, even as the fans left and the money withered to nothing, he never seriously considered admitting that he'd made a mistake (even when he made the humiliating decision to backtrack and make formulaic anime content, it's framed as an independent desire) because lurking underneath all the layers of bullshit, much deeper than YGG, May, the PCP, anime, MLP, or any of his other "adult" experiences, is the unshakeable assumption which he's been acting on for decades, and which created this mess in the first place: that he's special; and, so long as he refuses to admit he might be wrong, eventually he'll get whatever he wants.
It was all a detour, or maybe a dream, and now that all the nonsense has crashed back to reality they have returned to where time froze twenty years ago: Mother is stroking their hair, telling them that even if the other kids aren't playing nice, it's okay, because they'll always be her special
boy girl.
Like I said in that earlier post, I do feel like Digi has fallen back to their true level of development, and in a sense is picking up where they left off. Will they move forwards? No idea, but they are no longer moving sideways, so good for them; and if their future is fucked either way, it's probably a relief to see that all the cards have finally reached the floor.
Am I right about this? Maybe. There's no way of knowing, and if there was I wouldn't care. After all, my interpretation is as good as anyone else's, because Objectivity doesn't exist.
