Upsetting Day: My Story Animated

New forms of media spawn new genres of storytelling. Television brought us the sitcom, the police procedural, the drawn-out public humiliation. Video games gave the world JRPGs, point-and-click adventure games, and Flopglopple abuse simulators. Streaming video first presented the vlog, then the head/cumshot compilation, and at last, the metrics-calibrated weapons-grade dopamine trap.

For tots, there's Cocomelon and Troom Troom, but what are people supposed to do when they outgrow shapes, colors, and self-defense advice for the suicidal? Sure, there's mobile games/TikTok/dating apps/Instagram/literally the entire world is just this now. But there's also My Story Animated. Sorry, "MSA" — the YouTube Channel Previously Known as My Story Animated.

MSA describes itself as "a digital platform that provides teenagers and adults the most interesting and life changing stories with [sic] the world." That means exactly nothing. That's how a lawyer would describe a PornHub channel he was defending on charges of human trafficking.

MSA has 24 million subscribers on YouTube, and its videos routinely reach millions of views within days of uploading.

Most of the channel's videos are basically wish fulfillment for teen girls. They're the female equivalent of those animes where a normal, nerdy guy is transported to the world of his favorite video game and becomes a sex god who beats ass and builds a harem of admiring entries from the Monster Manual. With tits, obviously.

I can only describe the aesthetic of these thumbnails as "anime mobile game ad-core." All of these girls look like they're about to be forced to choose between feeding their child and heating their rickety cabin on a frigid winter night. The titles, in contrast, are pretty pedestrian. Fantasies of overprotective boyfriends and transforming into mythical creatures are the bread and butter of YA literature for a reason.

Hold up, though, because there's something strange here. Did you spot it?

Nope, not that.

Not that, either. You're getting hung up on content, paying attention to the woman in the red dress. Chumboxes refined the art of getting clicks through lying about celebrity deaths and superfoods, and Instagram advertisers ramped it up with animated skin disorders and monster women. When you're fixated on the cartoon hand popping infected pimples on the face of a centauress hoovering up adventurers with her butthole, the other one is giving Meta a thumbs up that this works. We're all, inescapably, part of the problem.

There. Read that number in the bottom right-hand corner. This video has a runtime rivaling most Hollywood pictures. I'm scared. That's natural, though. Ours is an era ruled by fear, and being afraid of a YouTube cartoon is less embarrassing than the top three horrors of half the country. (Brown people, the New York subway system, and a transgender teenager playing sports.)

The video starts with our protagonist Meredith, a billionaire heiress, natch, being kidnapped by masked men who actually wanted to kidnap someone entirely different. "You stupid fools!" The kidnappers' leader yells when he realizes their mistake. We're going for veracity over literary value with this dialogue. Real kidnappers don't have Hollywood eloquence. If they did, they'd be in confidence games rather than the "grabbing strange women off the street" game.

It turns out they've kidnapped Meredith's bodyguard Carson as well, whom she fired for being too icily attractive.

Carson and Meredith escape, and then I begin skipping ahead at random because my brain is twisting itself in knots. On the one hand, this content is absolutely repellent to me — the way the main character never shuts up for more than a second, the uncanny, cheap animation, it all screams at me to close the tab. But simultaneously, I can feel MSA's tendrils probing around in my head, seeking purchase. How many were once like me, watching this to see what all the fuss was about or to make reaction content about how ridiculous it is? Remember: ironic viewing shows up just the same in the watchtime statistics.

Meredith and Carson get married and go into hiding for some reason and then Carson sternly tells her to eat her soup. Some time later it turns out that Meredith's boyfriend David was the one who told the Mafia to kidnap her because he wanted to get revenge on her father or something. Carson kills him, probably, and they live happily ever after.

Suddenly, we've got a completely different narrator and slightly different art style. I thought for a second this was a Rashomon-type situation, but it's actually a story about a second, unrelated billionaire who suffers from stuttering. I guess this video is a compilation? There's no title cards or sections in the timeline or description indicating the originals, though. It just jumps from one video to the next. The stuttering story — which doesn't even feature a bodyguard, much less marriage to one — cuts immediately into another about being a princess without more than a second spared to let the ending land.

My impulse was to chalk this up to slipshod editing, but that's my stupid idiot art brain talking. We're in the realm of content, and hitting pause means missed ad revenue. The lack of structured openings or endings as you might see in a traditional "story" are a deliberate tactic. It's the natural evolution of autoplay — there are no offramps on the slop highway.

Imagine an endless procession of Everybody Loves Raymond, devoid of theme songs and credits, going from final punchline to opening gag without giving you a moment to consider whether you would like to continue. Now imagine that Raymond is a different beautiful girl getting into palatial dracula intrigue and bodyguard-related romance in every episode. That's essentially what we're dealing with.

In a way, this is a relief. The idea of MSA cranking out feature-length animated Twilights for the TikTok generation on a weekly basis is too upsetting to entertain, especially because it's almost certainly already happening elsewhere on the internet. Thanks, OpenAI! How about another thumbnail?

What's that? You think we've had enough thumbnails? You think you're done with my thumbnails? You're calling the police? Go ahead. I'll steal my dad car to get away. My dad who is a car.

Most die young, and those who don't tend to commit involuntary vehicular manslaughter when things start getting hot and heavy. But some Turbo Teens make it long enough to reproduce.

Like the twisted quarter-car child of a car monster, MSA didn't just spring into the world fully-formed. Just because something's new to you, doesn't make it an overnight sensation. You have to commit to the hustle (underpay freelancers in countries with low wages) if you want to make it big (rake in ad revenue by exploiting the undercooked brains of teenagers). Five years ago, MSA's videos looked a lot different.

It's bizarre to see this aesthetic in play as late as 2020. It looks like something that would have shown up on the front page of Newgrounds twenty years earlier. It looks like it was created by a 13-year-old who once saw an anime wall scroll at a cousin's house and is doing her best to recreate the art style from memory in Shockwave. It looks like Link from The Legend of Zelda is going to pop into frame and yell "wasssssup" before killing Barney the Dinosaur. So how did we get from there to here?

Sidebar: yes, that's a story about Sacagawea. It's the second video in a two-hour compilation titled "How it Feels to Be the School Queen" and implies that she traveled to Australia. It also says that she "got married to a French man" at 18 after being sold into slavery by an Indian love rival and then freed by well-meaning Europeans. Sacagawea's timeless story went on to inspire countless young star beasts.

But we're getting off-track. What happened to MSA that took it from the best efforts of a lonely middle schooler in 1998 to anime Bratz dolls? There isn't a moment when things just suddenly shift. Instead, it's a slow, evolutionary process. In internet time, five years might as well be millions.

First, things started to get a little more sophisticated, with basic shading and less exaggerated character design. I've got to say, though; this is a terrible likeness of two dogs having a romantic spaghetti dinner. And the thumbnails are still all over the place.

By late 2021, the style is starting to coalesce into something recognizable as modern MSA. Take this video, where someone meets a famous YouTuber in real life and it is the best moment of her life. Said YouTuber is now disgraced and, as far as I can tell, never agreed to have her name or likeness used here, but you already knew both of those things.

Around then, the thumbnail style here was still tilting more towards "Western Instagram game ad" than faux-Japanese monstrosity. And there are more videos about hiding inside skin suits than I would have expected.

Gradually, though, the modern MSA aesthetic begins to emerge. Some of these still look like they're drawn by human artists, even.

Eventually, though, the carcinization of popular media fully takes hold. Domestication selected for cats that retained the features and behaviors of kittens into adulthood. Globalized internet algorithms refine every illustration of a young woman into a glossy-skinned doll with either big yabbos — or, arguably more troubling, a conspicuous absence of them — and gigantic eyes. I've been to Akihabara. I've seen the neoteny machine at work.

I called this slop earlier, but that raises a question: is it slop because it's popular or popular because it's slop? The first implies judgment of the critic, the second of the entire rest of the world. There's always been a lowest common denominator. Bemoaning the mainstream success of others is the last refuge of the embittered artist on the margins of society. But who's really superior here? I mean, I'm writing about MSA, they're not making videos about me. Not yet, anyway. It might only be a matter of time, given that they've branched out into straight up adapting the lives of YouTube celebrities without their permission.

This is the world we've built. This is why websites don't exist anymore: so that a mysterious animation company can make faux-autobiographical cartoons about real child influencers and their relationships with other real child influencers. This is the backbone of the global economy, and unimaginable though it may be now, we will one day speak fondly of this world to our grandchildren. "We had two hour videos featuring loosely connected scenarios about famous indigenous women and mothers slathering their sons' girlfriends with honey," we'll tell them. "Sure," they'll respond. "Now let's get you back to the poison mines, where we mine for poison to fuel God-Emperor Barron's endless holy war against China."

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