People do tend to be extremely skeptical, especially of YouTubers - and rightly so.
Lindsay Ellis
I always thought of YouTube as this super-finite thing where trends ebb and flow.
I wanted to write a first contact thing and I vaguely knew I wanted it to be in a beating the beast vein.
Back in the '90s, whenever we were having '70s nostalgia, you could take the good with the bad. Like yeah, sure, Nixon happened, Watergate happened, but we also had bell bottoms and ABBA and 'The Brady Bunch.'
I'm always happy to be in Ireland in general, it's one of my favorite places.
The fact that I had spent so many years doing media criticism and thinking really seriously about theme and structure did definitely help. Doing that for several years indirectly built a lot of tools that I would end up using when writing my own fiction.
A lot of influencers who have made the pivot to publishing, they tend to be ghostwritten, they tend to be younger. It's a little bit of an uphill battle by nature of coming from YouTube.
There's just something, maybe it's the authenticity. I think that's the appeal and why people choose to watch really unpolished and unprofessional videos on YouTube over these multi-million dollar television shows.
We're not really allowed to admit that, maybe as humans, sometimes we need to revise our own histories and frame things in a more positive light than is true.
I want to decouple this idea that critique is hatred.
I want people to become more comfortable with deeper looks at the things that they love. It doesn't mean that you have to stop loving them, it just means that you have a more complete understanding of them.
