the vintage phandom pre-grieving dnp’s heterosexual nuclear family endgame posts are so fascinating to me. here you have a bunch of young teenagers who are so, so obsessed with these two men. and many of them know/think/hope they’re together. but if they are, it’s a secret. and you will get bullied if you talk about it. it’s also 98% of what is talked about. but it becomes the culture to talk about it like a game—asking do you ship phan? while assuring everyone you know they’re not really together, it’s just for fun.
but it’s teenagers we’re talking about here. so the chain of logic goes, if they’re not together—which of course they aren’t this is all just for fun guys you don’t really believe they’re gay, do you, the vday video was a prank—then they’re probably not gay, and are in fact straight, and will end up with women and kids and a dog and a white picket fence like oh so many unfortunate YA protagonists in epilogues (the primary books fans had read atp, lbr)
so there was a whole cottage industry built around this emotional tension of fans caring so, so much about dan and phil now (back then), but “knowing” that it could never last because eventually they would move on to have the traditional signifiers of a happy life. youtube was seen as childish, no one knew if it was even possible for it to be sustainable for more than one, two, five years; dan and phil were of course straight so they would want to settle down with susan from the shop, and all the fun the teenagers were having was given an ambiguous, dramatic end point.
which means there’s dozens if not hundreds of posts out there talking forebodingly about dan and phil splitting up and getting married to other people, with an awkward undertone of forced happiness about it. we would all totally be happy for them if they left youtube and got with women, because they’d be happy, the posts all say, while writing about it as if it was a late stage cancer diagnosis
