Hi, everyone! I'm Kim, and this is the May 2026 edition of Kimbahly YouTube Newsletter. I'm very excited to share all I've been working on this past, um... year. It's certainly been a while, but I assure you that, throughout a maelstrom of serious life problems and numerous creative droughts, I've been working on a lot.
I've got plans for videos easily stretching into next year, and as someone who really isn't good with time pressure, that makes me, for lack of a better term, one happy Kim-per. My channel's next string of videos are no longer a panicked matter of "what" idea I'll go with, as was the case shortly after its liberation from Sonic the Hedgehog topic-dom, but a calm and excited matter of "which one." I've longed for days like these ever since my impromptu YouTube hiatus, starting in April of 2025, and I'm incredibly happy with the situation I've found myself in.
Let's get down to brass tacks, here. You've been waiting for videos, so here they are. I'm excited to share with you my next (and first) video on the Kimbahly channel:Otachan: An Anime YouTube Post-mortem.
An Otachan Emerges...
(A screencap of the video's title sequence, featuring the awesome logo I made by viciously stealing two free fonts online—an act roughly analogous to being a bad person.)
This video, as you can see by the title, focuses on "Otachan." If you don't know what Otachan is—which is highly probable, don't worry—it's an original YouTube anime webseries, conceived by English anime channel OtakuVs (ran by Yusef Iqbal) and animated by Studio Yuraki (with help from Collateral Damage Studios), formerly produced by the now-defunct Tonari Animation, and, as of a certain point, from what I can gather, partially animated by an in-house team (at least, they stopped explicitly crediting specific studios). If you're in the loop with all of the hot anime studio drama, I'm sure one of those caused you to raise an eyebrow. "Eeee-yup," I say, as I gesture wearily to the world.
Financially supported by ~666,000,000 YouTube subscribers and ~5,000 Patreon supporters (~$6,000/mo), OtakuVs has been publishing episodes of this professionally-produced, original anime for free on YouTube, on-and-off due to numerous financial issues (as one could imagine, given that premise), since 2019. Starting in 2011, nearly a decade prior to this incredibly—arguably, foolishly—ambitious endeavor, OtakuVs produced uniquely spirited content-farm-adjacent videos, from slop listicles to MVPerry styled "What ___ Says About You" videos (well, there's only one of those, but—BUT!—that video was an adaptation of an Amino post by user Sarcasm+Anime, if that makes up for it. What the fuck were these guys doing...?). These videos, though unassuming and seemingly belonging in an internet landfill somewhere, had clear passion and care put into them, even if subdued and suppressed by a thick veil of business-type cynicism and irony; they hosted an intricate weave of multi-video running jokes, characters and motifs that fostered, if anything else, a sense of continuity that endeared them to their audience. This, above all else, was what piqued my interest. And so, here we are.
In Otachan: An Anime YouTube Post-Mortem, I conduct the following, organized into an internet-friendly numbered list.
- A detailed analysis of the history of the OtakuVs channel (pre-, during and post-Otachan); an in-depth, episode-by-episode review of the entire webseries, all in an attempt to ascertain clarity on its rise, peak, and slow yet gruesome fade into obscurity, along with an analysis its themes, both intentional and unintentional (a.k.a., the misogyny);
- An empathetic approach to examining the Otachan project's continued (yet failing) fight for survival among its home platform's ruthless algorithmic pressure, touching upon corporate exploitation, industrial suppression of passion and creativity, and the mistreatment of workers;
- A character study of the early series' two main characters—Otachan and Cam—under the context of their implicit* lesbian* relationship, followed by an evaluation of its underlying intent, value as representation and what it personally means to me;
- A personal reflection upon what I was able to take away from the wider OtakuVs story, including how it changed my views on the internet as industry, helped me empathize with even the most soulless of content farms, served as both a word of warning and encouragement as I presently arm myself to delve deeper into the eldritch-abomination-like online industrial marketplace, and how it taught me to find meaning in mediocrity, as well as that meaning's worth in media analysis.
That's not all, obviously—I can't spoil everything, can I?—but I hope that, with that summary, you can come away with a better idea of what this video is all about. I've no updates on when it's set to release, as, unfortunately, I'm still fairly early on in development. I'm a good way through the writing process, and I've begun to edit together small portions of non-narrated video (adding and formatting outside footage, along with their corner credits, syncing / looping / mixing background music, etc.) as well as various other pre-production stuff (compiling music lists and sources, primarily). Preliminary research (most gruellingly, sitting through 6 hours and 7 gigabytes-worth of OtakuVs videos (which only accounts for what's public on their YouTube channel) is out of the way. The nightmare is far from over, though...
As a fun treat, here's a sample of the current script. This is in the first section, where I'm getting the viewer acquainted with OtakuVs. Subject to change, obviously.
"Part 1: OtakuVs FUCKING Sucks, and Here’s Why
There’s a lot of ways I could introduce you to OtakuVs. I could start with their founder; I could start with the concept of their channel; I could start with their distinctive style; I could start with how I discovered them, et cetera; but, if I’m gonna be honest with you, after gathering 7 gigabytes-worth of content, stored in a folder containing every public video on their channel, in chronological order, which I painstakingly sat through for a collective six fucking hours, much to the agony and total despair of my compadres, whomst I gleefully forced to accompany me, with little to no regard for their public cries for help, I came to a realization—just because you’re the viewer, that doesn’t mean that you’re off the hook. You’ve watched this far; welcome to my nightmare. Instead of introducing you with any of that, I’m just going to wheel out the old CRT, 9/11 style, step outside for a smoke break, and make you watch OtakuVs’s first ever video: “The 6 Girls You’ll Date in Anime.” Good luck.
“... This is you. And these are the six girls you’ll be dating throughout anime. The Young One.”
... Well, that was fast!
Seriously, though, I want to walk you through this—and, 1., no, I’m not making you watch the whole thing, I was joking, I’m sorry, we’ll go out for ice cream later, just give me a minute, and, 2., even though that looks really fucking bad, I’ll have you know that, later on in the video, they put “““you””” in jail. And hell.
Actually, I want to talk about that “you” for a second, because, for such an innocuous detail, it gives us a really good look at who their target demographic is here. The title, “The 6 Girls You’ll Date in Anime,” assumes that “you” “date” “girls”—which, fair play! Love wins, girls! Still, to get even more specific, we need look no further than frame #1, with the physical manifestation of this video’s viewer surrogate... This guy. Eugh...
This pretty explicitly places this video’s target audience into the role of a heterosexual man, and given the humor and subject matter, we can probably assume that they’re on the younger side, which... Ha! That’s, um, fine. I’m used to it! It’s, uh... not like I wanted to know the six girls I would date in anime! I’m here for THIS GUY! Aha! Ha! Aha! I’m... ha... ha... *Gollum noises* rr... I’m... rrrrrrrrrgh... I’m not mad... I’m not angry... RAYGHHH!!!!!! *normal* Seriously though, I’m not exactly complaining about this demographic being targeted, per se—like I said, it’s totally a fair play—but I do take issue with how that demographic is used to avoid having the video meaningfully engage with its own subject matter, and that, above all else, is what already gives me an inclination to categorize this in “content farm” territory.
After the first six seconds that I’ve already shown you, the video goes on to discuss and satirize various anime tropes—namely loli, tsundere and yandere characters—under the premise of the young, male viewer being romantically invol... HEY, KYN READER! IT'S ME, THE MONEY MAN! YOU MUST DEPOSIT $4.99 INTO MY MONEY HOLE TO CONTINUE THE PREVIEW. GUAHAHAHA!!!"
... Okay!
Speaking of pre-production—I got a new microphone in preparation for this video! Came into some spare money and decided to—with much pain, hesitance and agony—dump a portion of it on a Blue Yeti. It's certainly not the most advanced mic out there, but for my budget and in consideration of what I had previously (nothing, sans some rentals / highly contested studio space), I'm more than happy to take it. The average viewer won't care that I'm using what most people consider to be a pretty sub-par mic. It gets the job done, and that's all I care about. With this—now that I don't have to worry about when my next access to a mic will be, let alone its quality or how much time I have with it, if I can even make that time—my productivity has, theoretically (haven't started recording yet), fucking skyrocketed. The lack of a decent mic was my biggest hurdle for a long time, and it's finally gone. That period of uncertainty and scavenging for rentals wasn't a bad thing, I'd like to add, at least not entirely; it forced me to hone in on my writing skills, and since my last upload in December of 2024, boy, can you tell... shudders. That's an up-side that everyone is thankful for, I'm sure.
Well, that's about it! I've got lots of things planned—so many things that, at a certain point, you have to look back at your ever-expanding list of future video ideas and say to yourself, "how the fuck am I going to do all of this?" The answer, my friend, is simply "one step at a time."
See you next month!
-Kim