#htwins

//TPOT 14 Spoilers

They Reunited!

Michael Huang has just announced that he will be stepping down from his involvement with the "Battle for Dream Island" series following a controversy surrounding the unearthing of a deleted Twitter account that was purportedly owned by Huang.

The account contained tweets where the owner would make disparaging comments towards "BFDI" crew members as well as other object show creators, such as stating, "god the new episode was so bad it killed my grandma" about Inanimate Insanity.

Mr Huang has yet to confirm or deny whether he was indeed the owner of the account in question and while public opinion is split, people seem to believe the account was owned and operated by Michael Huang.

This is the intro to The Power of Two, where it appears in the series’ first video at 16:06. And it’s incredible! The animation is very dynamic and high-quality. The audio is top-notch. Every character in the show is shown.

The first video of The Power of Two, or “TPOT”, was released in January 2021. In just four days, it had 1.5M views.

[Image Description: a screenshot of TPOT Episode 1: “You Know Those Buttons Don’t Do Anything, Right?” The video was uploaded 4 days ago and has 1.5M views.]

So that raises the question: if the animation in the intro sequence is so good, and the video got so popular so quickly, then what is TPOT?

TPOT is the sixth installment of the YouTube show called “Battle For Dream Island”. The show has been running for eleven years now, and it’s still going.

[Image Description: a collection of all the intro sequences from each of the seasons of BFDI. The seasons in chronological order are BFDI, BFDIA, IDFB, BFB (twice), and now TPOT.

(Note: the “4th” and “5th” seasons both called “BFB” are technically the same season, but it’s easier to visualize the changes in video production when it’s in this format.)]

The show was created by the Huang twins: Cary and Michael Huang. This show has followed them for most of their lives! And in that time, the quality of Battle for Dream Island, or “BFDI”, has grown with them.

[Image Description: a collection of scenes from various BFDI episodes over the years. Notice how all the scenes have Pencil or Match in them, and how changes in art style between seasons are evident in their design.]

Cary and Michael came up with the idea of BFDI when they were just twelve years old. It was based off reality TV shows like Survivor and Total Drama Island.

However, BFDI was also its own unique thing: it was completely Flash-animated, and it used fictional “object” characters rather than actual people. They voiced every character, wrote every storyboard, and animated every scene.

[Image Description: Cary and Michael Huang in 2009. They were in the 7th grade, and this was the year they brainstormed the idea for BFDI.]

The show was a success. They had pioneered the “object show”: a show in which inanimate object “characters” battle for a common prize, and get voted out if they lose. The last one standing gets the prize.

Cary and Michael would continue to develop the show alone until they went on hiatus in 2013. They wouldn’t touch the show again until three years later, when they returned to the show in 2016 with a new season.

In that time, the two of them had graduated high school. Cary got accepted to Stanford University. And on YouTube, a bunch of other high-quality object shows inspired by BFDI had sprung up in its place.

Having not lost their fanbase in their absence, in 2017 Cary and Michael teamed up with a new team of animators, voice actors and storyboard writers to reboot BFDI with a fourth season: BFB. They were back, and back for good.

[Image Description: Cary and Michael Huang in 2020. They’re now college students, in their first year for a master’s degree as of the time of this photo.]

Now to make sure episodes of BFB were being produced regularly, Cary and Michael took a more resigned role. They went from being head of show management to simply being voice actors. Their new team took the bulk of the work.

Their roles as voice actors weren’t a small task, however. Because they had voiced so many characters when the show was first created, they continued to voice those characters when they recurred in later seasons.

[Image Description: all of the characters and their respective voice actors in BFB 1. Note how although there are eleven voice actors, Cary and Michael voice over half the characters in the episode (31 of 59 total characters).]

(Don’t worry, I’m allowed to talk about all this information because they made it public.)

And now it becomes clear why the animation in the intro sequence to The Power of Two is so good. Cary and Michael came up with the idea of BFDI, but they didn’t animate the new intro. That was the work of the animators in the new animation team.

[Image Description: all of the animators for TPOT Episode 1. Notice how although there are fourteen of them, not a single one is Cary Huang or Michael Huang.

(Also, just a fun fact, many of the people on this list had created object shows themselves back in the time of BFDIA. Their animation skill had grown so much as a result that they were eventually hired to the animation team of BFB.)]

The change in management from Cary and Michael to the team was also made apparent with the new “host”, Two! Although Cary and Michael created the character “Two” back in 2008, Two would be voiced be neither of them.

The real voice actor of Two would be Niall Burns. Also known as “XanyLeaves”, he started his own object show called “Object Overload”, which lasted from 2012 to 2013.

His animation got so good as a result of working on the show that he was hired to the animation team for BFB, and later got the voice of Two in TPOT! (Fun fact, XanyLeaves also made an MCYT animation recently! You can watch it here.)

All this raises another, perhaps more confusing question: we know now that BFDI is a cultural phenomenon, but... why? What is the appeal of BFDI? What made it so popular back then, and what makes it still relevant today?

At some point, the whole point of “Dream Island” stopped mattering. You don’t watch to see these characters winning Dream Island, because they’re never gonna show it on-screen.

Instead, you watch these characters to see the infinitely complex interactions between them. Every character has their own personality, and how they face new tasks or obstacles are the subject of entire episodes.

[Image Description: the 22 contestants competing in BFDIA. At this point, Dream Island didn’t exist anymore, but they didn’t address it until Episode 4, because it was so fun to see them compete.]

Plus, there was the interactive feature. The losing team of an episode was put up for elimination, and you would go to the YouTube comment section to vote for who you wanted to get eliminated in the next episode!

I discovered BFDI in the summer of 2014. At the time, I was browsing htwins.net because it happened to be the website that hosted “The Scale of the Universe 2”, which Cary created. (I saw Vsauce promote it in a video of his.)

I clicked on the “More” box in the bottom right of the screen, and lo and behold, on the top right-hand side, there it was: a link to the playlist of all BFDI episodes.

[Image Description: the Htwins website back in 2014. (“htwins” stands for “Huang twins”.) At this point, Cary and Michael were high school seniors.

Notice how there’s “The Scale of the Universe 2” in the top left corner. Also, the second part of BFDIA 5 happens to be just below that, I just didn’t notice it at the time.]

I was in elementary school at the time, so I couldn’t stick around for long. But now I was a part of the BFDI community. We were in the midst of their hiatus, would they ever come back? It honestly seemed like they never would.

But they finally came back. All it took was three years. I witnessed the release of IDFB, then BFB, and now TPOT. I voted in a couple of videos. A whole new community of people jumped on board with the creation of BFB, and now here we are.

So now that you know what Battle for Dream Island is, do you like what you see? If so, then you can join the fandom!

BFDI has an active community on YouTube, but it also has an active fandom on Twitter! Even Tumblr has it’s own little community, with posts that get dozens of notes each.

[Image Description: artworks of TPOT that I snatched off Tumblr today. They’re pretty good :)

Art by oodl3doodl3s, maaaak, leafirnn, and littlbigplanet.]

The first episode of BFDI, posted 11 years ago, now has 60M views. BFB and TPOT are still going on, and the series will continue to evolve. So I recommend you be there when it happens.

You can watch Season 1 of BFDI here! (warning: I recommend you watch it on YouTube and not Tumblr. This is the entirety of Season 1 compressed into a single four-hour long video.)

And you can watch Season 2, known as BFDIA, here. (warning: same warning as the previous one. This is a single hour-and-a-half long video.)

They are trying to make money through the advertisements of their merchandise. They feel that they want to pay these people because of their hard work and their commitment to the show. I understand that the show is gone through major changes but it’s still the same show that we all remember. It’s just changed over the test of time. It’s changed because Michael and Cary wanted it to change. This is their plan for the show, they wanted this. The entire crew of Jacknjellify wanted this to happen. 

This is the future of the show. Is it so wrong to want to pay your workers for the effort that they put in? I understand that not everyone is happy with this decision, not everyone can agree on everything. But is it truly wrong that they want to make money off of a show that they truly believe in and have passion for? Maybe in the past  not everyone agreed on the idea of BFDI. But why right now is BFB getting the backlash that it’s getting now?

I’m not trying to hide this from anyone but, it’s hurting my soul. It hurts to see a community like this.

Wasn’t BFDI one of the founding members of this community? 

Shouldn’t we have faith in Michael and Cary for what they’re doing? 

I’m not going to fight against the choices that they’ve made. I’m going to support them no matter what. 

I hope your remember that all this started somewhere. I hope you’re remember the Jacknjellify is making this content for us to enjoy. They’re not putting a price on it. They don’t expect you to support them, they just want you to enjoy their content.

 They make these videos and don’t expect a penny back. They make these videos for us to enjoy. I’m sorry for making this whole speech about how I feel about the object community right now. I truly just needed to get it out, amongst this chaos I want you all to remember why they make these videos. I want you to remember that it takes time and effort and dedication to make these videos to go out into the public. 

If channels like Animation Epic and JacknJellify have patreons and merch and need to make money to keep creating these shows, what’s wrong with advertising merch to further support the show?