YTP

YTP is one of our major interests.

People might remember YTP as being crass, abrasive, and full of dated, insensitive humor. And yes, a lot of YTPs are difficult to go back to. It's interesting to try to reconcile that with what we like about the medium. Hidden behind those flaws might just be a vision of a better culture.

Remix culture

Remix culture is important! In recent times, creatives have had the chance to bring stories to life in more vivid and masterful fashion than ever, but in return, now corporations lay claim to culture. If you're a fan of a fictional world, its rightsholders probably pose massive restrictions on how you can release your imagination through it.

There's a ton of interesting stuff to be said about how fictive and kin identity interacts with this state of affairs, how copyright might be infringing on the construction of personal identity, but that'd be for a different page.

We're lucky that fanart and fanfiction is more or less normalized, but the broader situation is still creatively inhumane. There is certainly no reason for copyright terms to last longer than a lifetime. We might've been willing to wait the original 14-year term, but that's not an option presented to us. For as long as characters and settings are released into the public consciousness, that same public ought to be free to remix the contemporary works that inspire us and can deeply shape our cultural identities.

YTP is a way of doing that under the defense of parody and transformativity. Now, we aren't lawyers, and even to us, claims of fair use often sound like a thin veneer of plausibility over the old incantation, "no copyright intended". But at least it's something, it's a possible conditional defense to cling to.

In a lot of the best YTPs, the creator's favorite pieces of media double as clippings for a video collage of their pop-culture interests, and as unique inspiration for a grippingly psychedelic, thoroughly unpredictable comedy routine that could scarcely have been imagined before the spread of video editing software.

As an example, a lot of the best-known YTPs use SpongeBob as source material—including, of course, "Pride Patties" and "The Sky Had A Weegee!", which introduced so many people to the medium. Classic SpongeBob episodes are essentially comedy routines known by millions, played out by a cast of beloved stock characters. In that sense, YTPs are a communal evolution on shows like SpongeBob, building on the familiar scripts and taking the comedy to new, experimental heights. If those YTPs hadn't elaborated on such popular sources, the exercise would've been hollow and the world would be cheaper for it. These videos are quite arguably more culturally valuable than whatever SpongeBob has been doing since 2013 (1999 debut + 14 years).

Hotel Mario, Link: The Faces of Evil, and Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon are among the most culturally significant works in their respective franchises, having inspired multiple artforms and served as shibboleths in the dawn of the internet age

Autistic culture

YTP is a neurodiversification of mainstream media. This is where a lot of its appeal lies.

Yeah, this is a bold claim for an artform that often features seizure warnings, sudden earsplitting volumes, and various other forms of sensory abuse, let alone overstimulation. Somehow it still feels undeniable to us.

The very act of dedicating intensive, meticulous video editing skill to remixing a particular piece of pop culture—it just smacks of acting on a hyperfixation or paying homage to a comfort watch, right? There have always been YTPs mocking their source material, but the prevailing vibe we got during the golden age of YTP was celebratory. Making this stuff requires passion. Cutting up a cartoon episode and rearranging the pieces into a music video for an unrelated alt rock song—which happens surprisingly often, sometimes more than once per video—has to be the positive flavor of passion.

And even then, some of the more satirized sources clock our radar, like daytime television ads. Do the neurotypicals let something that specific and mundane take up that much mental real estate that they have to go edit a YTP about it? It's in the same league as a fascination with logos or OS boot sequences, speaking from experience.

Moreover, the dialogue editing takes these measured, professionally acted and rerecorded performances, and adds in vocal stimming and tics. Regardless of whether a given creator intends it that way, it can come across as a sort of representation of how we long to be able to speak if not for having been pressured into speech therapy and masking. And in turn, noises like SuS and JoJ are extremely fun to stim with. mu

Good YTP editing hits you right in the neurotype and has you hooked.

Meanwhile, PBS Idea Channel claimed as an axiom that YTP "defies both enjoyment and serious consideration."

"By design, they test an audience's patience, and even sometimes their physical tolerance." [plays the funniest clip we've ever seen]

While the rest of the thesis is agreeable, and the series makes some fascinating points and parallels, we find this part unintentionally quite hurtful. The original proto-YTPs like "I'D SAY HE'S HOT ON OUR TAIL" may have been intended to confuse and annoy, but YTP has been made for viewer enjoyment for most of its history now, and several creators took to the Idea Channel comments to express as much. Must every last niche autistic interest be scrutinized and misunderstood…?

Queer culture

YTP has a history of the "queer people are funny" kind of joke, which often just boils down to a kid's show character saying "gay" or something, played equivalently to splicing together a swear word.

YTP can also prompt viewers to ponder the status quo of culture. And naturally, over time, more queer YTPers have joined the scene and included edits that speak of our identities with a more sympathetic framing.

Now, hot take? Not only can these facts coexist, but it can still be deeply funny to make a cartoon say "gay" if you approach it from a different angle.

The media has long erased and demonized the existence of queer people—the Hays Code should ring a bell—and this is only just recently turning around. When YTP was developed and popularized, it was unthinkable for many of the often-edited sources, like videogame franchises and children's programming, to even mention queer identity, much less treat it with dignity or perspective or empathy. The sheer unexpectedness of doing so can be enough to spark a morbid sort of laughter.

The joke doesn't have to be that queer people exist. The joke can be on how weird and awful mainstream culture has acted about that fact, in ways that inevitably suffused through the media landscape. How needlessly awkward that can still make it to have constructive conversations about queer identity, about ourselves.

Even in the safest environments, where you know everyone already understands but you just can't manage to express what you are without feeling a social spotlight bear down on you and getting mad at yourself for being so pathetic, even though you know it's not you, it's struggling under the weight of every message the world has sent you.

What if it were so easy to get the words out. What if all the media you enjoyed hadn't hidden your existence from yourself.

Splicing together queer vocabulary can be rebellious, self-affirming, and reclamatory for people like us. That intent determines who gets to sentence-mix it, we feel. The more explicitly supportive edits are just more explicitly so. In the end, anything short of outright phobic can elicit the exact same sorrowful humor response grounded in oh… they wouldn't really have acknowledged us.

…This got raw. That should indicate how deep of an impact any form of video media can have on identity, television and film and YTP alike.

Keep the flame alive!

YTP is just really cool, okay?

So with all that said, go out and make your own! If you have so much as an iPhone, you probably have access to iMovie—it can be limiting, but there's still a lot you can do with it.

Sometimes we worry about the future of the medium. It can feel difficult to find good stuff these days, but that's probably also because our tastes in media have evolved. Either way, may YTP live on!

Techniques

The YTP community needs a new typology of editing techniques. The old lists of Poopisms aren't very broad, and list off jargon like "Tech Text" and "Stutter Loop Minus" that we've never seen used outside of this limited lexicography, despite referring to concepts that are useful to label. There is very little coverage of techniques developed since around 2010. And on the whole, substantive discussion of YTP editing is relatively sparse, despite that being the entire content and allure of the videos.

Earlier mediums have developed many convenient terms to discuss their style, form, and flow. YTP deserves a similar vocabulary.

We might expand this section into a more comprehensive and detailed glossary.