OK, so I have skimmed the rest of the comments and here's a recap for future generations who don't want to spend a month reading this:
1. Mental health problems: Contra grew up upper-middle class and medicated to their gills by religious conservative parents, and meandered through life until they landed on a youtube career. They got diagnosed with pretty much everything, ADHD, OCD, anxiety, depression, bipolar, and eventually quit their meds and moved on to psychedelics and party drugs. They seem like they won't ever trust therapy/doctors, although they did go to therapy at some point and then quit. It looks like they were incredibly uncomfortable in their skin their entire life: they needed to get drunk to have sex with girls, then came out as bi and genderqueer and needed a shitload of drugs to have sex with a bunch of strange men, then they quit dating men and got addicted to opioids. It looks like they're still doing drugs a lot, but maybe not as much as a few years back. None of our business, but they do for some reason enjoy repeatedly divulging that information on camera and surround themselves with enablers, and they are also awful preachy for someone this unhappy. Their delivery makes it look like dark Mother imparting wisdom, but really it's just a confused, unhappy person bouncing around like a ping-pong ball with no sense of direction.
AFAIK Nick's never been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. He's garden-variety depressed and anxious, and while he's really obsessive and perfectionistic, I don't think it rises to the level of
clinical OCD. He may or may not have ADHD - that disorder was overdiagnosed in his generation, especially middle class kids whose parents wanted to put them on academic performance enhancing drugs.
More disturbingly, they ordered HRT drugs online and started taking them to bully the doctors into letting them get on hormones and do surgeries, thus avoiding getting a dysphoria diagnosis and at least consistent guidance by a medical professional. WTF. FFS this was a financially stable adult in their 30s, who lives in a very inclusive country with first-world doctors, what the actual fuck?!
It's just one more risky decision made by someone who does this a lot, and it was made with the expectation that HRT = euphoria beyond anything he'd ever known, and probably in ignorance of the potential risks. There were definitely some troons in his orbit showing him exactly how to obtain the drugs and where to get a dosing schedule. I don't think he was DIYing HRT for very long at all, he got a real Rx and some de minimus medical oversight like a month or two later.
2. Champagne socialism. They are Pink's cousin and may have had serious nepo backing before their channel exploded the way it did,
Incorrect. He was strapped for money when the channel got started and was elated when he got to a point when youtubing started to pay for itself and then some. Not sure if his family had cut him off or whatever but Nick was not rich when the channel got started and he wasn't benefitting from generational wealth, even if his cousin is famous. He was on Medicaid and lived in a tiny rowhouse apartment in a shitty neighborhood in Baltimore.
but it's unclear how close they are. They also make bank, something in the ballpark of $600k/year. When they got "cancelled", they in actuality gained followers, earning them an estimated extra $30k/year. Despite initially playing with leftist ideas in their videos, they have an awful lot of unpaid volunteers.
Nick has hardly any volunteers, not because he can't get them, but because he doesn't want their involvement.
It's one of the reasons his production times are so long. He basically does every aspect of production himself, and he has like one other collaborator (Zoe Blade, who does his scores.) Otherwise, writing, acting, direction, videography, sound design, lighting, costumes, set design, the works, is all Nick. He had some camera help, at some point, but I don't think he has since the pandemic.
They do seem to donate to charity a lot, but they also aren't transparent about their income OR donations and a lot of their spending is on frivolous bullshit like $1000 nails and archival designer dresses.
Correct and he gets upset if you ask.
As of a few years back they had a flat and a house, with a lot of really tacky furniture, and the whole place was a cluttered pigsty. They were marketed as a leftist messiah of sorts, but they veered off from that ages ago, so it's on their subscribers if they want to randomly make this person a millionaire for no reason lol. It looks like they hopped from bandwagon to bandwagon and eventually got a loyal fanbase who are okay with watching random memes and Contra getting drunk. It doesn't look like they're interested in commenting on current events or making any political/serious content ever again. Good for them.
The fans have a parasocial relationship with Contrapoints, and it overrides any kind of logic about getting a return on their investment in the form of regular video content or whatever. Many of them are also trans (or on the path to becoming trans) and Nick is like, aspirational content to them. (" OMG she's literally me. One day, I too will fill the rub with rhinestones and abuse opioid drugs to quiet the voices of self-doubt that plague me every waking moment.")
3. Grooming and narc behaviours. One of the more disturbing things in this thread is how Contra exploits people: they repeatedly use people, for free labour, or to get clicks/exposure and then throw them to the dogs. It looks like there may be a consistent lovebombing/ghosting/triangulation thing going on behind the scenes. They also dislike direct confrontations and instead make parodies of their enemies and repeatedly use those characters in their videos, for example Tiffany Tumbles/Blaire White.
Tiffany Tumbles is (IMO) more clearly a very self-critical depiction of Nick himself than it is of Blaire. It's also one of the last good pieces of art he made for his channel.
The first two hundred pages of this thread from hell have a lot of drama related to Theryn, Blaire White, Buck Angel and many others. They also have a lot of repeat stories about doing something to their fans on their livestream: they kissed Theryn, resulting in an engagement being called off, and made a barely legal kid divulge personal sensitive stuff on a livestream as well. Looks like they hover around young transgirls like Miss London, and their current (???) partner "Uwu" is much younger. Their fandom also has a bit of a parasocial thing going on.
ya think??
Yeah Nick has problems maintaining normal relationships. I would say though, the three people you mentioned represent three different kinds of drama Nick gets involved in: interpersonal drama (his weird lovelorn thing for Theryn that didn't work out, and yeah, he's basically the other woman in that scenario), Buck Angel (attempt at inclusivity that caused his audience to attack him because Buck Angel is transmedicalist, and most of Nick's audience is part of the postmodern trans vanguard) and Blaire White (I think this is plain old jealousy - Blaire passes better than Nick because Blaire is a diminutive half-Asian.)
He also wants to be famous and loves attention, but he also is a bit of an introvert and only wants to deal with other people on his terms.
4. Shady backstory. Before Contra, they used to be a bit of a fedora dudebro. Their older videos ooze frat fuckboy energy without a trace of femininity or homosexuality in them, even when they're wearing a fucking dress. They recorded boring atheist/skeptic rants, sent porn to feminists, and recorded themselves performing 1 man 1 bottle on blogtv. Did not see video evidence of that, for all we know it's someone's sexual fantasy. Nykys kept spamming all of that over and over and linking some dumb video with a bunch of drunk 20-year-olds being cringy. For what it's worth, Contra appears to have grown out of that sort of nonsense, but some of their rhetoric is still a bit incel-ish. Because of their delivery it's not very obvious until you see how they used to be. Vintage Contrapojnts is on page 173.
Nick is not an incel, at least not in the sense of having problems getting laid. He has problems with his desire and in determining what he wants.
5. Surgeries. Their face looks very off compared to a few years back. They did a hairline lift and nosejob and shaved off some bone of their chin and eyebrow ridge. I don't think they have talked about any other procedures, but it looks like they abandoned the idea of getting a neovag, which, honestly, good for them, that surgery sounds really risky and awful and doesn't appear to have many benefits.
IMO the FFS did very little to make Nick look like a woman, or even substantially different from how he used to look. He just looks "worked-on", if you get what I mean. The most noticeable differences to me are brow ridge and nose.
From some of the comments on here you'd think we're looking at Carrot Top or someone equally ugly, but idk. I don't think they look grotesque. They were an attractive dude and an okay to pretty looking lady, but the FFS has left some nerve damage in the cheeks, and it looks like they did something to their mouth since then: the corners look really weird, either bad fillers or JK Rowling gave them a Glasgow smile at some point. They also made their eyebrows smaller and died their hair a worse colour, and the whole thing just doesn't work with their face at all. Their eyes are also pretty puffy.
You only ever see Nick after he spends 25-35 minutes minimum on makeup (potentially way longer if he's doing a drag-kabuki look) and it's been that way since 2018. His no makeup face is like a state secret, if you see it he has to kill you.
6. Philosophy Tube randomly began to transition into them like a serial killer. It also seems like Contra themselves is transitioning into JK Rowling?
Oliver met Contrapoints, there was a consensual sexual relationship, and then sometime shortly after that Oliver ripped Nick's schtick and enjoys a comparable level of success, and Nick has never really forgiven Oliver for doing that.
Idk this person's whole life story is so surreal and messy lol, love it. Hope they stop fucking with hard drugs and their face.
常在河邊走哪能不濕鞋.
Translation: “Often walking by a river, one cannot avoid wet shoes.”
Meaning: Nick walks a path of transsexual deviance because he thought it would be the end of all his problems, and as a result, it's inevitable that he's going to do drugs and fuck around with his face and body in deleterious ways.
