Hey yo hi hello, I’m Hippie Rat and life is an ice cream. But don’t worry, whenever you’re watching my videos, that ice cream, is in the freezer, so you can take it slow and keep watching without worrying if it’s melting. [picks up phone] Yes? No. 35. You’re welcome. [hangs up] The ghosts unplugged the freezer.

In December of last year, a channel would sprout on YouTube that follows a man as he documents some strange activity taking place in his home. Tonight, we're going to explore what exactly is going on, and draw some theories as to what it could be.

These are, of course, not my words. This is, verbatim, the blurb at the top of the description of a video by Nexpo, formerly Nightmare Expo. Now, if you’ve witnessed the videos by the channel known as POSTcontent, you would know that “a man documenting some strange activity taking place in his home” and “draw some theories as to what it could be” is one of the worst ways to undercut this online art piece webseries. Can you imagine someone doing that to Marble Hornets? “Dude, like, why is there mothafucking Slender Man in these vidjas, my guy?” In fact, can you imagine someone doing this with...a movie or something? “So this guy has to watch over this hotel in the off-season and spooky stuff starts to go down. Let’s pimp this out.” Approaching content like this with such a superficial lens is really cynical to me, especially for something with a message like this.

Nexpo’s video is 30 minutes long and has garnered over 600,000 views. It cannot be ignored that Nexpo is an established YouTuber already, with over 500,000 subscribers, and he covered POSTcontent when POSTcontent had merely 100 subscribers, and since then that channel shot up to over 20,000 subscribers, and his full view count on his channel is over 300,000. In a perfect world all 600,000 of those views would translate to 600,000 subscribers on POSTcontent’s channel but of course that should not be expected. One thing most certainly should be looked at with a magnifying glass, however, and that is which video of POSTcontent’s has, at the time of scripting this video, the most views on his channel. When I’m writing this video, this guy has 12 videos up. That may change before I post this video, I’m not the fastest with this stuff, but as it is, his most viewed video has nearly twice the amount of views as his second most viewed, so you would assume this is an instance of this video having a specific shocking monster sighting or anything like that that would make it slightly more viral, like when The 15 Experience blew up over the Girl Goes Psycho During Makeup Tutorial video, or that there’s something particularly memetic about the video from a comedy standpoint, like how the two Alantutorial videos that have passed one million views were videos that had stints around the Internet for having silly titles. This video is kinda neither of those. It is called Eating Healthy, and is comprised of our protagonist eating a head of cabbage. Perhaps there’s something particularly silly about the simple bit this video is centered around that may have led to it having a couple runs in smaller online communities as a funny meme, or maybe the title led to a tad more points in the YouTube Algorithm, but I feel confident in applying a different theory as to why this did marginally better. Eating Healthy was the ninth video in POSTcontent’s repertoire. [“As of making this, POSTcontent has eight videos.” from Nexpo clip] And that’s not to dampen the timing itself, being posted the day immediately following Nexpo’s video analyzing the channel going up. So why does this video have twice the views of its eight predecessors? Why wouldn’t as many people who watched Nexpo’s video feel interested in experiencing those first eight videos themselves? Do I really need to answer it?

Nexpo’s video, simply put, is a replacement for watching the series on your own, so it garners twice as much attention as would end up applied to the series itself from anyone who would be introduced to the series for that reason. Now, this is not the only time this has ever happened by any means, and there have been countless arguments since the days of ThatGuyWithTheGlasses over whether or not this truly falls under fair use, and I’ve been guilty of creating videos that serve as replacements of experiences. The difference is, in most situations, that replacement of experience serves as context for analyzation. Nexpo’s video tricks your mind into thinking POSTcontent’s videos are being analyzed, but theorizing is not analyzing. Nexpo’s video is comprised of the uncut entirety of the videos on POSTcontent’s channel followed by play-by-play listing of the events of each video as he goes down the list, and eventually the analyzation of what certain parts of the videos represent. It’s vapid and accomplishes little except pointing out certain aspects of symbolism. What Nexpo completely and fundamentally fails to do is analyze the whole rather than the parts of the whole. Sure, this character is plagued by some sort of grief and mental illness and this is manifested by the monsters that chase him around, but why is the creator of POSTcontent creating this in the first place? What message is he trying to get across? Sure there may not be one and it could just be as clear cut as it is. A film project that looks like Hi I’m Mary Mary and Alantutorial mixed into one, but after watching every video from him, even just the ones available to the viewer when Nexpo made his video, it’s very easy to tell not only that there is an underlying message, but what that message is.

I’m making this video explaining this message because I recognize that since so many people took Nexpo’s video as a replacement experience, there is a lot of people who would fail to acknowledge the message simply because Nexpo also did. There are aspects that Nexpo got entirely wrong. Like when talking about “VLOG,” Nexpo explains that POSTcontent gets flustered by the creepy nightmare mystery man standing at the end of the hallway and this explains why he has to refer to a Logan Paul video to remember how to do the outro to a vlog, but no. The protagonist is unphased by said nightmare man, and is really only referring to the Logan Paul video because he forgot how the typical hypebeast outro goes. That’s not a sigh of relief, that’s a grunt of disgust. The question shouldn’t be “what does nightmare man represent?” The question should be “what is his motivation for making these videos if he is so disgusted by the nuances of them?”

This question should be given spotlight with every aspect of the channel. Themes should be uncovered, and no, a monster is not a theme in and of itself. With enough scrutiny one very common theme can be found: mental health and the self-help provided by the internet. Why would Logan Paul of all people be used as the example of a hypebeast outro? Sure he’s a recognizable one to go for, one of the first at the top of your head, but take the corpse imagery in the rest of POSTcontent’s catalog and juxtapose it with Logan Paul...and you’ll remember that Logan Paul has already done that for you himself. That doesn’t make this immediately a special targeted critique of Logan Paul, not by any means, and thinking that would just not quite be the right conclusion to make when you take the rest of the details of this channel into account. Instead of jumping straight towards Logan Paul’s suicide forest video directly, instead, let’s look at the aftermath. Not the apology, no no, I mean “Suicide: Be Here Tomorrow.” This seven minute video serves as a public service announcement dedicated to raising awareness and coaxing people away from the ledge. That’s good, right? On its own, yes. In context, it’s a marketing ploy. A save-face strategy to keep the Logan Paul name from being irreversibly destroyed in the fire that was filming a dead body and saying that action was in the name of mental health awareness. Would “Suicide: Be Here Tomorrow” exist if Logan hadn’t found that body? No. He is using the action of advocating for the self-embetterment of his viewers as a way to win points in the eyes of the internet. Fame and fortune.

You ever seen something pop up on your Twitter feed from a small account that randomly said something along the lines of “make sure you drink a lot of water because if you do you will feel less depressed,” and that tweet goes viral with thousands upon thousands of likes and retweets despite being such a mundane obvious thing? You ever seen a crafts channel milk dry the concept of making your own “stress relievers” you can sneak into class as a life hack, implying to vulnerable children that stress relievers are a vaccine that will magically prevent mental illness from forming in their developing minds, even though the crafts channel doesn’t truly care, they simply want to crack the unending pool that is child viewership on YouTube? You ever seen a story that doesn’t have much to say, but it fills that hole with a character to root for, and builds sympathy for that character by giving them a mental illness to overcome? Have you ever stepped back and realized just how fake it all was?

This is what POSTcontent is a commentary on. This is why one of his videos is a vague motivational speech over clips. The vague wording of this motivational speech ends up doing more damage to our protagonist than help when the phrase “it’s behind you now,” comes back to represent his mistakes haunting him. We see him constantly listening to music designed to calm the nerves, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the ever-prevalent “lofi hip hop radio - beats to relax/study to” stream gets featured as something the protagonist listens to in a future video in the series. This character aspires to reach a large following with his content explaining how to survive with the struggle he has, not to help those with a similar struggle, but because he’s seen people like Logan Paul, and how overly cheery he is, and he ascribes that to his success. Each video is short, a minute or two long, because rather than spending too much time saying what amounts to nothing, he will instead literally say nothing. [“This is a vlog, so you will listen to everything I have to say, so make sure to ring that bell.”] He introduces that he will be saying something, but since he has nothing to say, he cuts straight to the outro. This is the creator of POSTcontent expressing how empty these vlog videos are. How...vapid they are. [“Okay now hold on just a damn minute! Did you see that? Let’s roll that back once again.” from Nexpo video. Replay clip of me saying “It’s vapid and accomplishes little except pointing out certain aspects of symbolism.”] ...Yeah… A channel dedicated to critiquing YouTubers who have nothing to say...blows up by the hands of a YouTuber with nothing to say… It’s somewhat prophetic, don’t you think?

Going back to Nexpo’s video, do I think he is inherently wrong? I don’t know. I think his theory is somewhat justified by what currently exists on this channel. A murderer is being haunted by the literal ghosts of his past. The thing is, when looking at art, it’s commonly safer to avoid the word “literal.” Were the characters in MarbleHornets literally tortured by Slender Man? Not quite as much as a manifestation of illness. Was the family in This House Has People in It literally victimized by the contagious Lynx Disease? Not quite as much as fear and paranoia convincing them of such a case. Was Alantutorial literally kidnapped and forced to make YouTube videos? Not quite as much as monetization made the production of videos feel like an obligation to him, constraining his mind. Sure there’s some market that’s interested in knowing who had a motive to lock Alantutorial in a small room for so long, “maybe it was his brother who similarly kept him in hiding at certain times and wouldn’t want him escaping again,” but truly understanding the message doesn’t come from that information, because the concept of YouTube monetization cannot physically lock someone into a room until they make more videos for the platform.

And in the same way, giving POSTcontent that same literal analysis for theorizing leads to misinterpretations and frankly, plot holes. Every tutorial from POSTcontent is titled in reference to what issue you are dealing with when facing your inner demons, yet Nexpo misses this detail to an extent when looking at “Constraint Tutorial,” thinking the events of the video to instead be another encounter, but the way that the protagonist deals with what he refers to as an encounter is much different to how he deals with what he refers to as constraint. An encounter will only end when looking away and looking back, but a constraint gets closer and more powerful when that happens, it can’t be ignored, and instead must be blocked off. Each tutorial is in reference to a different situation someone with a diminished mental health can be in. You can be put in a situation where you encounter panic and anxiety that can only be driven away by fixating your mind elsewhere for a time. You can be in a situation where you are constrained by your own mind, and you struggle to find the energy to pull yourself away so that you may operate. You can find yourself staying awake at night, haunted by guilt or your regrets or the drive to do something that you would regret, and the only thing you can do is not think about it at all and be completely indifferent. Why the plastic? Why the ghosts? Why the rooms he doesn’t want to enter? Did he kill someone here? Maybe. Or maybe, he is just prepared for when he finally is pushed by his inner demons to kill himself. It’s a sobering thought, I know, especially when Nexpo’s theory implied that he was the bad guy. I’m not implying anything of Nexpo myself of course, except that he might have taken the wrong approach to looking at this series.

All things considered, thematic analysis is typically a better way to look at something like this than theorizing. With thematic analysis we understand this a lot better. The protagonist does not have perfect mental health, no one really truly does, and he has spent a long time struggling to keep his composure with the help of advice from people who don’t know any better. He now thinks that if he does what these people who don’t know any better do, he will be as happy as they make themselves out to be. The creator of this series understands, however, the vapid meaninglessness of those people, and is using this series as a tool to satirize them. [“Why is it called ‘POSTcontent’?” From Nexpo video]. Remember in the movie They Live, where the main character receives a pair of sunglasses that reveal the subliminal bare bones assets of media and their hidden intentions? Consume. Buy. Obey. Post. Content. It’s marketing, it’s media, it’s vapid, and it’s controlling. [“I really feel like this series is gonna take off” from Encounter Update.] Well, yeah, that’ll happen when more attention is brought to it, so Nexpo did do a solid job there. But I don’t know if it’s enough yet. Perhaps, once he blows up even more, the protagonist will see that when he does blow up, it may not help. In fact, it may make him feel worse as the pressure to keep up becomes more and more of a burden. Soon enough the protagonist may learn that the uppity tone from people like Logan Paul, is a facade. POSTcontent needs more attention than it has gotten, because then, as he continues to post content, we may be able to see his mental state, post-content.