Chapter Text
Josh discovers Tyler’s channel on a Tuesday.
Not a special Tuesday. Not a Tuesday that feels like the beginning of anything. Just a regular fucking Tuesday in September when the LA heat makes his apartment feel like a microwave and he’s too broke to run the AC because Guitar Center pays shit and his half of rent is due in three days.
He’s scrolling. That’s all he’s doing.
It’s been one of those shifts. The kind where time moves like syrup and every customer interaction drains a little more of his soul. A guy spent forty-five minutes testing out drum cymbals, hitting each one with increasing aggression while Josh stood there nodding and saying “yeah, that one has a nice tone” over and over until the words stopped meaning anything. Another guy asked if they sold “Guitar Hero guitars” and got genuinely confused when Josh tried to explain the difference between a video game controller and an actual instrument.
Now Josh is home, collapsed on his couch in his work uniform because changing requires energy he doesn’t have. His thumb moves on autopilot through YouTube’s algorithm while his brain does absolutely nothing, which is exactly what he needs after six hours of helping wannabe guitarists who all think they’re the next Goddamn Jimi Hendrix.
A video shows up in his recommended feed.
The thumbnail catches his eye before he can scroll past it. Some guy with dark hair, mid-twenties maybe, frozen mid-expression with his eyebrows raised and his mouth slightly open. The screenshot behind him shows what looks like a commercial, all oversaturated colors and the desperate energy of a marketing team that got paid too much. The title reads: “why are insurance commercials like this???”
500k subscribers. He’s never seen this channel before. Never heard of this person. He’s gotta be good, though.
Josh clicks and the video starts. The guy appears on screen, sitting in what looks like a bedroom or small apartment. Warm lighting. A poster on the wall behind him that Josh can’t quite make out. The guy’s wearing a black hoodie, hood down, and his hair is doing this thing where it looks intentionally messy but probably isn’t.
Then he speaks.
“Okay, so.”
His voice is higher than Josh expected. Not high, exactly, but bright. There’s a rasp to it, like gravel underneath silk. A little croaky, the way someone sounds after talking for hours or not talking enough. Midwestern accent softening the vowels, making ‘okay’ sound like ‘ohkay’.
“I was watching TV last night because I make great life choices,” the guy says, deadpan, “and this commercial came on for life insurance. Which, already, you know. Fun topic. Nothing says ‘restful evening’ like thinking about your own mortality. But this commercial. This commercial had a talking baby.”
The delivery is so flat it takes Josh a second to register the joke. Then he’s smiling.
The guy continues. His timing is weird. There are these pauses between his sentences where he looks at the camera in a way that somehow looks both concerned and completely checked out. Like he’s waiting for a laugh track that doesn’t exist. Like he’s alone in a room and knows it and finds that funny in itself.
Josh watches him break down the commercial. The talking baby who apparently understands legacy planning. The funeral scene. The inexplicable cheerfulness of the whole thing despite being about death.
“Why does the baby act like he fucking knows me,” the guy says, zooming in on the baby’s face in the commercial. His voice goes up slightly, that rasp getting more pronounced. “Why is the baby at my funeral? Whose baby is this? Where are its parents? Is the baby the life insurance agent? Is that what’s happening here? Did they just cast an infant to negotiate my death benefits to my grieving loved ones?”
Josh laughs. Actually laughs out loud, alone in his apartment, at his phone screen.
The video’s eight minutes long. Josh loves every second of it. Then he scrolls down to the channel.
Tyler Joseph. That’s the guy’s name. Tyler.
Josh clicks on the channel page. The banner is simple, just text over a dark background. The about section says “i watch things so you don’t have to. or maybe so we can suffer together. from ohio.”
Ohio. That explains the accent.
There are dozens of videos. Years worth. Josh scrolls back and back and back. The oldest one is from three years ago. The thumbnail quality gets worse the further back he goes. Tyler’s hair changes. Gets longer, then shorter, then longer again. But the basic format stays the same. Commentary on commercials, reality TV, weird corners of the internet.
Josh clicks on a video from two years ago. This one’s about a reality show called Joe Millionaire where women compete to date a guy they think is rich, but is actually broke. Tyler spends twelve minutes dissecting the psychological horror of it, his voice staying flat and sarcastic even as he’s clearly genuinely disturbed.
“So the premise is that these women think this guy inherited fifty million dollars,” Tyler explains, “but actually he’s a construction worker. And if they still like him after finding out he’s poor, they win money. Which is just… It’s dystopian. It’s bleak as hell and they’re playing romantic music over it.”
He pulls up a clip from the show. Women in evening gowns stand in the gardens of a looming château. The bachelor, wearing a white cable knit sweater, rides in on a horse. It looks bizarre.
“Also they filmed this at a literal castle,” Tyler continues. “So these women are walking around thinking ‘wow, this is his life’ and it’s all borrowed. It’s all a TV set. To make matters worse, the women get called gold diggers in the promos. They signed up thinking it was a regular dating show and then got humiliated on national television. And we’re supposed to find this romantic? Or funny?”
Tyler’s voice gets even higher when he’s genuinely upset about something. He talks faster, tripping over his words slightly.
“Like the show presents itself as this social experiment but it’s actually just surveillance capitalism meets a real traumatic experience. Seriously! These are real people who have to go back to their actual lives after being turned into a joke on the national level. We’re watching these women get manipulated while wondering if they’re the manipulators, and the whole thing is designed to make us judge them for behaviors the show itself created.”
He says it deadpan, as if it’s just another observation. Tyler immediately cuts to making fun of one contestant’s dress.
But Josh sits there, frozen, feeling something twist in his chest. That was smart. That was genuinely smart analysis hiding under sarcasm.
Josh is hooked.
He watches another video. Then another. Time dissolves. His phone battery percentage drops. The sky outside his window goes from late afternoon gold to evening purple to full dark.
Tyler makes jokes about life the way other people make jokes about traffic. Casual. Constant.
In a video about a home renovation show, Tyler rants. He throws his hands exasperatedly, groaning: “The host keeps talking about ‘breathing new life’ into these houses and I’m like, man, I can barely get myself to leave my bed. I woke up at 3 PM today. I had cereal for dinner. I’m not qualified to have opinions about crown molding.”
The jokes land because they’re not really jokes. He’s being truthful, delivering every sentence with impeccable comedic timing. Tyler’s not faking misery for content. He’s just living out loud and it happens to be funny.
But there’s something underneath it. Something Josh can’t name at first. He keeps watching, trying to figure it out.
It hits him during a video about a furniture store commercial. Tyler’s in the middle of critiquing some ad when he pauses. Just for a second. Then he says, “You ever think about how we’re all just advertisements for ourselves? Like, we’re constantly marketing who we are to other people. Trying to figure out which version of us they’ll buy. And if they don’t buy it, if we can’t sell ourselves properly, then what? We’re just...” He trails off. Stares at the camera for a beat too long. His voice goes quieter. “We’re just discount furniture no one wants.”
Then he shakes his head, forces a laugh. He zeros in on a tattered couch they forgot to remove for the ad. “Anyway, I would be ugly as balls as a couch. On all levels except physical, I’m this one.”
The moment passes. Tyler moves on. But Josh feels like he just saw something he wasn’t supposed to.
He keeps watching.
Tyler talks about growing up religious in a video about a Christian reality show. He doesn’t make it a big thing. Doesn’t give it weight. He mentions it as a passing fact.
“Yeah, I grew up going to Church every Sunday,” Tyler says, his voice doing that thing where it gets a little higher, a little more strained. “And like, I don’t want to get into all of that because this video is supposed to be funny, but I will say there’s something very specific about being raised to believe you’re fundamentally wrong and then spending your whole adult life trying to figure out which parts of you are actually wrong and which parts are just, like, inconvenient to other people’s worldview.”
He says it fast. Runs the words together. Then immediately pivots to making fun of the show’s contestants who are competing to win a “Godly marriage.”
But Josh has already hit pause. He needs a second to digest that one.
He stares at Tyler’s paused face on his phone screen. Tyler’s expression is complicated. His eyebrows are drawn together slightly. His mouth is pressed into a line that’s trying to be casual but isn’t quite managing it.
Fundamentally wrong.
Josh rewinds. Watches that part again. Tyler’s voice saying those words. The way his eyes do something complicated. The way he speeds up his words like he’s trying to outrun them.
“...being raised to believe you’re fundamentally wrong...”
Josh’s chest does something uncomfortable. A twist. Recognition.
He knows that feeling. That specific combination of wanting to explain and wanting to never speak about it again. That sense of being wrong in a way you can’t quite name. Wrong in your bones. Wrong in ways that don’t have language yet.
Josh grew up in Church too. Every Sunday. Every summer at Christian camp where they would do trust falls off of picnic tables and sing to worship parodies of popular songs and watch kids cry and recommit their lives to Jesus for the seventh time that year.
He knows what it’s like to sit in a pew and hear sermons about sin and purity and God’s design. To hear that some ways of being are holy and some are abomination. To feel something inside yourself that doesn’t match what they’re saying you should feel. To wonder if you’re broken. If God made a mistake. If you’re the mistake.
Fundamentally wrong.
Yeah. Josh knows that feeling.
He realizes he’s been holding his breath. He exhales slowly.
Then he keeps watching.
Tyler’s YouTube catalog is three years deep. Josh scrolls through it. The videos get longer as time goes on. Tyler gets more comfortable on camera. The editing gets sharper. The jokes get better. You can watch him learning how to do this in real time. Learning what works. What resonates.
Josh finds a video from a year ago. Tyler’s talking about a documentary he watched about cults. His whole energy shifts. He sits forward in his chair. His hands start moving when he talks, gesturing, emphasizing points. His voice gets more animated, that rasp turning into something almost musical.
“Okay but the thing about cults,” Tyler says, and his eyes are bright now, actually engaged, “is that they work because they offer something real. Like, community. Purpose. Answers to questions that are legitimately hard to answer. The manipulation is obvious in retrospect but in the moment? When you’re lonely or lost or trying to figure out why you exist? That shit is compelling.”
He’s not doing the deadpan thing anymore. Tyler is actually excited about something, actually thinking out loud, actually present. The passion is impossible to miss.
He leans even closer toward the camera. His voice continues to rise and fall naturally instead of staying flat. He smiles, quick and bright, when he makes a point he’s particularly proud of.
Josh thinks about that smile. About what it would be like to make Tyler smile like that. To say something that breaks through the poker-faced persona and reaches the actual person underneath.
Then he thinks, I need to shut the fuck up.
He clicks on another video. Tyler’s back to the deadpan thing, shit-talking a cooking show where everyone’s aggressively wholesome. But now Josh is looking for those moments. Those flashes where Tyler drops the façade and becomes something more sincere.
There. When Tyler talks about music. His face changes. He mentions some indie rock band Josh has never heard of and suddenly Tyler’s voice is different. More genuine. Less performed. He talks about how certain songs feel like they were written specifically for particular moments of your life. How music can say things you don’t have words for yet.
His voice goes soft when he talks about it.
And there again. When Tyler makes an observation about human behavior that’s too accurate to be just comedy. He’ll be talking about a reality show and suddenly he’s analyzing power dynamics or attachment styles or the way people manipulate emotion for cameras. It’s smart. It’s insightful. It’s deeper than the joke format suggests.
Josh checks the time on his phone. It’s past midnight.
He’s been watching for four hours.
“Fuck,” Josh says out loud to his empty apartment.
Josh realizes three things simultaneously:
One: He’s been watching this stranger talk for four hours.
Two: He wants to keep watching.
Three: Oh no.
“Oh no,” Josh says again, louder this time, like saying it louder will make it less true.
This is parasocial. This is textbook parasocial. He’s developing a crush on someone who doesn’t know he exists, someone who’s essentially a curated persona designed for consumption. Josh knows this.
He’s self-aware enough to recognize the trap. He’s watched the video essays about parasocial relationships. He knows the statistics about loneliness and digital connection. He knows this is his brain doing the thing where it mistakes familiarity with intimacy.
He knows all of this.
Josh watches another video anyway.
Tyler’s wearing a hoodie that’s probably way too expensive. The sleeves are pulled over his hands, just his fingers visible. He’s talking about some documentary about pyramid schemes and he gets excited. Not the algorithm-friendly “GUYS THIS IS CRAZY” energy one would come to expect from certain YouTubers, but this same authentic joy once again palpable in his features.
He laughs at his own joke, and it’s higher than his speaking voice. A little breathless. It transforms his whole face, making him look younger. Makes the tiredness disappear for a second.
Josh wants to know what else makes him look like that. Wants to know what music he listens to when he’s alone. What he thinks about late at night when he can’t sleep. What makes him laugh like that when no one’s watching. The Tyler who exists outside these videos.
Which is pathetic. Josh really does understand it’s pathetic.
He falls asleep with his phone on his chest, Tyler’s voice still playing through his earbuds, talking about nothing and everything.
He dreams about voices he’s never heard in person. That he never knew before tonight.
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Josh wakes up to his phone battery at 2%.
The autoplay queue went through approximately fifteen more videos while he was asleep. Tyler’s voice is still going, tinny through the earbuds. Josh’s neck hurts from falling asleep sitting up. He knows his breath is bad.
He’s late for his shift.
“Shit,” Josh says. He rolls out of bed. Literally rolls, because standing requires more coordination than he currently has. He lands on the floor. His phone clatters next to him, Tyler’s voice cutting off mid-sentence as the earbud yanks out.
The sudden silence is disorienting.
Josh drags himself up. Pulls on yesterday’s jeans. He finds a shirt that’s probably clean. Gives up on his hair. It’s doing this thing where it sticks up in seventeen different directions and no amount of water is going to fix it.
Fuck it all.
Coffee. He needs coffee.
His roommate, Chris, is already in the kitchen, dressed for his restaurant job in all black. He’s on his phone with one hand, eating cereal with the other. He glances up when Josh stumbles in.
“You look dead,” Chris observes, not meanly.
“Feel dead,” Josh says. His voice sounds terrible; he hasn’t talked out loud in hours.
“Were you up late?”
“YouTube rabbit hole.” Josh pours coffee from the pot Chris made. It’s been sitting there for at least an hour, burnt and bitter. He drinks it anyway. Needs the caffeine more than he needs it to taste good.
“Ah.” Chris goes back to his cereal. “One of those nights.”
“Yeah.”
Except it wasn’t just one of those nights. It wasn’t a random rabbit hole. It was specific. It was Tyler’s voice in his ears for hours on end. It was the fucking laugh.
Josh still can’t stop thinking about it.
He drinks his terrible coffee. Burns his tongue. Doesn’t care.
“You working today?” Chris asks.
“Yeah. I’m already late.”
“Better go then.”
“Yeah.”
Josh doesn’t move. He stands in the kitchen, holding his coffee mug, thinking about Tyler’s voice. About a state he’s never been to.
“Dude,” Chris says. “You’re gonna be really late.”
“Right. Yeah. Going.”
Josh puts his mug in the sink and grabs his keys. His phone buzzes in his pocket but he ignores it. Probably his manager asking where he is.
He makes it to Guitar Center seven minutes late, which could be worse. His manager, AJ, makes a disappointed face but doesn’t say anything. He looks at Josh with this expression that somehow conveys “I’m not angry, I’m just disappointed” without any words. It’s worse than yelling.
“Sorry,” Josh says. “Overslept.”
AJ nods, still doing the face.
Josh’s shift is six hours of customer service purgatory. He helps a middle-aged guy pick out an acoustic guitar for his daughter who, based on the guy’s description, will probably lose interest after two weeks. He helps a teenager who thinks buying an expensive guitar will make him sound good. It won’t. Expensive gear doesn’t fix lack of practice. But Josh doesn’t say that. He says, “This is a great model. Very versatile. Got a nice sound.”
The teenager buys a $4,000 Les Paul. Josh loves getting commission from rich kids on Sunset Boulevard. It’s the only reason he still works this job, other than his passion for music.
He processes the sale and plasters on a fake grin as the kid leaves with this glow of excitement that’ll last maybe a month. Josh feels cynical about it. Feels tired.
His lunch break arrives and he decides to sit in his car in the parking lot with the AC running, two granola bars already shoved down his throat and counting.
Josh pulls up YouTube. Just one video, he tells himself. Just to see.
He watches three.
Tyler’s talking about a TV show Josh has never seen. Some reality show about people flipping houses. Tyler dissects why the host’s sweet moments are clearly scripted, why the editing is manipulative, why the whole premise is fundamentally dishonest.
Josh doesn’t care about the show. Has never seen it. Will never watch it.
But he cares about listening to Tyler think out loud. About following the way Tyler’s brain works. About hearing that voice, that specific combination of sarcasm and vulnerability and intelligence.
This is bad. This is so bad.
And Josh knows it’s bad. He should close YouTube. Should focus on literally anything else.
Instead, he examines Tyler’s face on his phone screen. The way Tyler’s eyes move when he’s reading something off screen. The way he bites his bottom lip when he’s thinking. The way his voice goes up at the end of questions like he’s genuinely asking, like he wants an answer even though he’s talking to a camera.
Josh thinks stabbing himself in the chest à la Romeo and Juliet would hurt less.
He goes back inside for the second half of his shift. Helps more customers. Smiles when he’s supposed to smile. Says “Let me know if you have any questions” approximately forty times. His brain is somewhere else entirely.
After work, Josh sits in his car again. The parking lot’s emptying out. The sun’s going down, turning the sky orange and pink and purple. LA sunsets are reliably beautiful, the one thing the smog actually improves. Josh barely notices.
He pulls up Twitter. Types ‘Tyler Joseph’ into the search bar.
Tyler’s account appears. @tylerrjoseph. 180k followers. The bio is eccentrically him: “i make videos about things that don’t matter / ohio / my coffee order is 4 blonde espresso shots with oat milk and nothing else.”
Josh scrolls through his tweets.
Tyler tweets like he talks. Same deadpan energy. Same sarcastic observations. Memes that are slightly too dark to be just jokes. Occasional vulnerability that he immediately undercuts.
“just remembered that embarrassing thing i did in 2019. gonna think about that for the next 6 hours instead of sleeping”
Posted three hours ago. 4,000 likes already. Hundreds of replies. People saying “same king” and “why are we like this” and “which embarrassing thing though”.
Tyler hasn’t replied to any of them.
Josh continues. The next tweet makes him smile.
“my barista asked if i was okay when i ordered my usual and honestly i don’t know how to interpret that”
8,500 likes. Someone replied “maybe it’s the four shots” and Tyler responded with “it’s definitely the four shots.”
Josh keeps going.
“shoutout to my car for starting this morning. we’re both barely holding it together but we’re trying”
That one has 5,000 likes. The replies are full of his fans relating to him and/or begging for his attention. Tyler has responded to someone with “my car is one pothole away from just giving up entirely. that could be a really powerful metaphor”
Josh finds himself smiling at his phone like an idiot.
Another tweet: “do u ever see something beautiful and your first thought is ‘i should take a picture’ but then you just. don’t. because you want to remember it as a feeling instead of a jpeg”
That one had gone viral with almost half a million likes. Despite the clear jackpot of a tweet, Tyler only responded to one person: “glad i’m not the only one who’s Like This”
Tyler tweets about Ohio. About winter. About how the cold feels good sometimes. About how he doesn’t think he could ever leave even though he complains about it constantly.
Josh’s finger hovers over the like button on a few of these. He doesn’t press it. That feels too revealing somehow. Like Tyler would see that one like among thousands and somehow know. Know what, Josh isn’t sure. Just know.
He locks his phone. Sits in his car in the Guitar Center parking lot. The sky’s fully dark now. His shift ended twenty minutes ago. He should go home.
He sits there for another ten minutes, thinking about Tyler’s voice. When he catches himself in the spiral, he quickly starts his drive home. Absolutely not.
Chris is on the couch when Josh gets back, watching some show Josh doesn’t recognize. The apartment smells like the Thai takeout Chris must have picked up on his way home.
“Hey,” Chris says without looking away from the TV. “Good shift?”
“Same as always.”
“There’s pad thai in the kitchen if you want some.”
“Thanks.”
Josh grabs a whole container, a fork, and goes to his room. Closes the door. Sits on his bed with his laptop.
Tyler’s channel stares back at him from his YouTube homepage. The algorithm knows what he’s doing. The algorithm is enabling him with recommended videos and “because you watched” suggestions. Tyler’s face is in thumbnail after thumbnail.
The idea hits him later that night.
Josh is lying in bed, not sleeping, thinking about Tyler’s face when he talks about things he cares about. Thinking about how badly Josh wants to have a conversation with him. A real one.
But Tyler doesn’t know Josh exists. Tyler has five hundred thousand subscribers. Tyler probably gets hundreds of messages a day. There’s no reason for him to notice Josh specifically.
Unless.
What if.
What if Josh started making videos.
Not to copy Tyler. That would be weird. That would be creepy stalker behavior. But just... what if Josh started making commentary videos, too. Similar topics. Similar space. Existing in the same sphere Tyler exists in. Contributing to the conversation instead of just consuming it.
What if Tyler noticed.
Josh stares at his ceiling. The idea feels insane and possible at the same time.
He could do it. He’s funny. He has opinions. He works retail, which means he has endless material about human behavior and capitalism and the slow erosion of his will to live. He knows how to talk. How to be entertaining. He’s been doing it his whole life anyway. Might as well do it for a camera.
And if Tyler happened to see his videos, or if they ended up in the same space, having the same conversations…
That wouldn’t be manipulation. That would just be… networking. Contributing to a community. Making content about things they both care about.
Right?
Josh’s brain is moving too fast. Ideas begin to pile up. He should make a list and plan this out. Should figure out exactly what he’s doing before he does it.
He sits up. Opens his laptop. The screen’s blue light makes his room feel colder.
He opens a new tab and types “how to start a youtube channel” into Google.
The search results load. Hundreds of articles. Tutorial videos. Reddit threads. Forums full of advice.
Josh starts reading.
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Josh gets in a few hours of sleep, but he wakes up with his laptop still open next to him and the decision already made in his mind.
He’s going to do this.
He needs recording software. A decent mic. The camera’s not as important. Tyler films on what looks like his phone and it works fine. Content is what matters. Voice. Perspective. Having something to say.
Josh can do this. He’s funny. People tell him he’s funny. His coworkers laugh at his stories about customers. Chris thinks he’s funny. Josh has spent his entire life watching people, analyzing behavior, understanding what makes things work or not work.
He can do this.
Should he do this? Different question. Harder question. Question he’s deliberately not asking himself.
He spends the morning going down rabbit holes, watching videos about how to make videos. The meta nature of it makes his head hurt. But he absorbs everything. How to frame a shot. How to keep people’s attention.
Microphones. USB mics. Blue Yeti. Audio-Technica. The recommendations’ prices range from $50 to $500. Josh makes $17.81 an hour at Guitar Center. He can’t afford $500. He can barely afford $50.
But there are cheaper options. There’s figuring it out as he goes.
Editing software. Final Cut Pro costs money he doesn’t have. But there are free options. DaVinci Resolve. Or he could torrent Premiere Pro. Everyone torrents Premiere Pro. Josh’s moral stance on piracy is flexible when it comes to Adobe’s pricing model.
Josh opens a new document and starts planning. His first video should be about something specific. Not too broad. Commentary on... what? He scrolls through trending topics. Recent commercials. Reality TV drama. The internet’s latest outrage.
That’s when the idea comes to him. A car commercial. Josh saw it last week; some truck company who was trying to sell masculinity and freedom. The whole thing was bizarrely nationalist, with slow motion shots of families and flags. There was a golden retriever that apparently represented liberty. And the music. The music was this acoustic country song that kept threateningly repeating “this is our land”.
It’s perfect. It’s absurd. Josh has thoughts about it. Josh has a lot of thoughts about it actually.
The words come easier than expected. His voice, or the version of his voice he’s constructing, sounds clear in his head. Sarcastic but different from Tyler. Josh is more… what? More willing to be stupid, maybe. Tyler’s humor is deadpan and observational. Josh’s is more physical, more absurd, more willing to commit to a bit.
He writes for an hour. The script takes shape. Commentary on the commercial. Broader points about nostalgia and how advertising sells emotions instead of products. Jokes about the dog. Questions about what freedom means when you’re financing a truck for seven years. A lot of observations about the music.
He types: “Can we talk about this dog for a second? This golden retriever that’s supposed to represent freedom? First of all, the dog is literally on a leash in half these shots. That’s the opposite of freedom. That’s just having a job. The dog shows up, does what it’s told, gets a treat, goes home. The dog needs to lock in. That’s not liberty, that’s LinkedIn.”
He keeps going. Gets sharper. Gets weirder.
“And the music. This country song about ‘our land’ playing while a truck drives through empty fields. Whose land are we on, though? Because I’m pretty sure this land belonged to someone else first. But we don’t talk about that. We just play guitar and feel patriotic about a vehicle that costs more than my yearly salary.”
It’s rough. It needs editing. But it’s there. It exists.
Josh looks at the time. He’s been writing for two hours. He has a shift in three hours. He should eat something. Should shower. Should do normal human things.
He keeps writing anyway.
By the time he needs to leave for work, he has a full script. Eight minutes of commentary and jokes. The stuff that’s been sitting in his head for years finally given a shape.
He saves the document and gets ready for work, but the script sits in his brain all day, words rearranging themselves, jokes getting sharper, ideas connecting.
By the time he gets home, he knows exactly what he wants to say.
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The first video takes Josh an entire evening to film.
An entire evening for eight minutes of footage.
He sets up his laptop on his desk. Opens Photo Booth because he doesn’t have actual recording software yet. The quality is bad. The lighting is worse. He looks washed out and vaguely undead.
Josh spends thirty minutes watching YouTube tutorials about lighting. Uses his desk lamp. His bedside lamp. Opens his blinds for natural light even though it’s already getting dark. Nothing looks perfect but it’s better than corpse-like.
He opens his script and reads through it. His hands are shaking slightly.
“Okay,” Josh says to his empty room. “Just do it.”
He hits record.
“Alright, we need to talk about this commercial I saw...” His voice comes out weird. Too high. Too nervous. He stops. Deletes the take.
Take two. “Alright, we need to talk about this commercial...” Better. But he stumbles over the next line. Delete.
Take three. He gets three sentences in before he hates how he sounds. Delete.
Take four. He forgets his line. Freezes. Stares at the camera. Delete.
This continues for twenty minutes. Twenty minutes of Josh starting, stopping, hating himself, hating the way he looks, deleting, trying again. His voice sounds wrong in every take. He can hear himself performing instead of just talking, and it makes him want to throw his laptop out the window.
Finally, he stops and takes a break to get a glass of water from the kitchen. The apartment is quiet. Chris is at work. It’s just Josh and his laptop. Oh, and his deep desire for Tyler Joseph to notice him.
He walks to the bathroom and looks at himself in the mirror. His eyes look tired. He’s wearing the same shirt he wore yesterday, a faded band tee that’s definitely needing a wash. But it’s his favorite shirt, and anybody who stumbles upon this video won’t know that he probably reeks.
“You can do this,” he tells his reflection. “It’s just talking. You talk all day at work. This is the same thing except no one can interrupt you.”
His reflection doesn’t look convinced.
“Tyler does this three times a week,” Josh continues. “He sits down and talks. And you’ve watched enough of his videos to know he’s not doing anything you can’t do. He’s just being himself.”
Except Tyler’s been doing this for three years. Tyler has half a million subscribers. Tyler knows what he’s doing.
Josh doesn’t know what he’s doing.
“Fuck it,” Josh replies to himself. “Just. Say the fucking words. Don’t think about how you sound. Just say them.”
He goes back to his room, sits down at his desk, opens his script, and hits record again.
He gets through the whole first paragraph without stopping. It’s not perfect but it’s there. He keeps going until he finally gets through the whole script. Eight minutes. One take. Done.
He plays it back. His delivery is a little stiff in some places. He says “like” too much. He blinks weirdly. But it’s there. It’s a video. It exists.
Josh downloads Premiere Pro. The torrent takes forever. When he finally opens the software, he immediately gets confused. He isn’t the most technically apt of people.
He sighs, pulling up a tutorial on how to import footage. Goes back to Premiere Pro. Imports his video. Stares at the timeline. Goes back to YouTube. Grumbles at a tutorial on how to make cuts.
This continues for three hours.
Slowly, piece by piece, he figures it out. He cuts his mistakes. Tightens the pacing. Adds the commercial footage he downloaded from YouTube. Adds text overlays for emphasis. Nothing fancy, but it works.
By midnight, he has a finished video.
Josh exports it, heart racing a little as the progress bar inches forward. Twenty minutes. He uses the time to create a YouTube account. @joshuadun. Simple. Clean. Nothing that screams “I’m doing this to get someone’s attention.”
The export finishes. Josh opens the file and watches the whole thing through.
It’s not terrible. It’s actually… kind of good?
His delivery is better than he thought. The jokes land. The analysis is solid. He sounds like himself. Like a version of himself he actually likes.
Josh uploads it to YouTube and writes a title: “this car commercial wants to sell you the american dream (the dog is a lie)”. Before he publishes, however, he stops to chastise himself.
This is insane. He’s starting a YouTube channel because he has a crush on someone who doesn’t know he exists, someone he’s watched for hours and hours like a creep, someone he’s studied and memorized without ever having a single real interaction. Someone he just started watching not even forty-eight hours ago.
Josh publishes it anyway.
Then he closes his laptop and stares at his ceiling and thinks about Tyler’s voice saying “music saved my life” and wonders what the fuck he’s doing with his life.
His phone buzzes with a text from Chris.
you alive in there?
Josh texts back.
yeah. making questionable life choices.
so a normal thursday
basically
Josh puts his phone down. Opens his laptop again. Refreshes his YouTube page.
30 views.
Probably half of them are him checking to make sure it actually uploaded.
He got one comment from his brother, Jordan, and nearly cackles: “this is funny but audio is kinda quiet”
Then he opens a new document and starts writing his next script.
━━━━━▷━━━━━
The videos become a routine that swallows Josh’s life in the best and worst ways possible.
He films after his shifts at Guitar Center, editing late into the night. Posts content every day. Josh checks the views obsessively, reading every comment.
He makes a video about a reality show. Then one about a fast food commercial that’s trying way too hard to be relatable. Then one about influencer culture and how everyone’s selling a lifestyle they don’t actually live. Each video gets a little better. His delivery gets smoother. His editing gets faster. He’s learning what works, what makes people laugh, what makes them want to engage.
His subscriber count grows slowly. 100. 300. 500. 800.
Each number feels impossible. It’s actually crazy to Josh; each new subscriber is a real person who chose to click a button because they liked something Josh made. It’s addicting in a way he didn’t expect, this feeling of creating something and having people respond to it. He wonders why he didn’t do this sooner.
Chris finds him editing one night, hunched over his laptop, third coffee of the evening sitting next to him.
“You’re still doing the YouTube thing?” Chris asks from the doorway.
“Yeah.”
“How’s it going?”
“Good, I think. I’m getting better at it. The editing’s faster now.”
“That’s cool.” Chris pauses. “You eating actual meals?”
“I had dinner.”
“Leftover pad thai doesn’t count.”
“It’s still food.”
“Josh.”
“I’m fine, Chris. I promise. I like doing this. It’s fun.”
Chris doesn’t look entirely convinced but he drops it. “Okay. Just. You’ve been really into this. Make sure you’re taking care of yourself.”
“I am.”
“Cool. Just don’t forget to like. Exist outside your laptop sometimes.”
“I won’t.”
Chris leaves. Josh saves his project after he realizes Chris is probably right. He hasn’t done anything except work and make videos for weeks straight. His neck hurts from hunching over his laptop. His eyes are ridiculously dry from screen time. He should probably take a break. Work-life balance and all that. So he goes out, hangs out with Chris for a few hours. Gets actual protein into his system. Turns back into a human being. That becomes a new routine.
His subscriber count keeps growing. 1,000. 1,500. 2,000. 2,500.
Josh comments on Tyler’s videos. Thoughtful observations. Funny additions to Tyler’s points. Nothing weird. Nothing that screams “I’m obsessed with you”. He takes the time to actually engage with the content, leaving the kind of comments Tyler seems to actually appreciate based on which ones he likes.
There’s nothing in the world that could prepare him for when Tyler actually hearts one of his comments.
Josh is at work when he sees the notification. His phone vibrates in his pocket, and the store is dead, so he takes the opportunity to sneak a glance at it.
Tyler Joseph hearted your comment.
Josh freezes. He stares at his phone like it’s speaking a language he doesn’t understand.
Then out of nowhere comes a customer asking an important question, but Josh isn’t hearing it. He’s staring at the words on screen. Tyler Joseph hearted your comment.
“...so which do you recommend?” the customer asks.
“Uh.” Josh blinks. Looks up. “Sorry. What?”
“Acoustic guitar strings. Which would you get for a beginner?”
“Oh. Uh. These ones.” Josh grabs a pack, some cheap brand of light strings. He hands them over. His brain isn’t working right. Tyler Joseph hearted your comment.
The customer leaves. Josh is still standing there behind the counter, phone in hand. He screenshots several times in rapid succession.
AJ walks by and gives him a look. “You good?”
“Yeah. Fine. Just. Yeah.”
Josh puts his phone away. Tries to focus. Can’t focus. Tyler hearted his comment. Tyler saw his username. Tyler acknowledged his existence in the smallest possible way and Josh’s entire nervous system is malfunctioning.
His lunch break can’t come fast enough.
Josh sits in his car with the AC running and swipes on the notification properly. He goes to the comment and sees the little heart icon. Solid, not outlined. Tyler hearted this.
The comment was on Tyler’s video about Joe Millionaire. Josh rereads his comment.
“wait so the producers told these women one thing, humiliated them for believing it, and then we’re supposed to judge THEM for being ‘gold diggers’? the call is coming from inside the house???? the real villain is fox television here”
156 likes on the comment. And Tyler’s heart.
Josh reads his own comment again. It’s normal. It’s the kind of comment lots of people leave. It doesn’t stand out in any particular way. Except Tyler noticed it. Tyler thought it was worth acknowledging.
Josh opens Tyler’s channel. Scrolls through recent videos and checks which comments Tyler hearts. It’s not many. Maybe one or two per video. Always the ones that seem to actually engage with the content instead of just saying “love this” or “you’re so funny.”
So Tyler saw Josh’s comment. Read it. Thought it was worth hearting. Which means Tyler might recognize Josh’s username if he sees it again. Which means Josh exists in Tyler’s psyche, however minimally.
Josh sits in his car in the Guitar Center parking lot, grinning at his phone like an absolute idiot.
━━━━━▷━━━━━
That night, Josh films a video about insurance commercials. It’s a different one than what Tyler covered. He took a different angle, told different jokes, but all-in-all, it had similar energy -- ads trying to make you think about mortality while staying upbeat about it.
He’s gotten better at filming now. Takes fewer takes. Knows his angles. Knows how to work the camera. The whole process that took him an entire evening the first time now takes two hours.
He edits quickly, now that he has muscle memory for the keyboard shortcuts. Josh knows which cuts to make, which jokes to emphasize with text, when to let a moment breathe.
He uploads it around eleven and immediately obsesses over the view count. 50. 100. 200. Better than his first few videos but nothing crazy. It’s normal growth for a channel his size.
He goes to bed and actually sleeps for once. Dreams about nothing he can remember.
When he wakes up, his phone is loud. It won’t stop pinging, the ringer being left on overnight so that Josh could wake up to his morning alarm. Josh scrambles to click on his channel when he sees that the video has over 150,000 views. What the fuck.
The comments are pouring in. His subscriber count is jumping. Three thousand. Four thousand. Five thousand. People are finding his channel. Subscribing. Commenting. Sharing.
“Holy shit,” Josh says out loud.
He scrolls through the comments. Checks social media and sees people following him on Instagram and Twitter and TikTok. People are sharing the video. Tweeting about it. Someone made a TikTok reacting to it. The algorithm is picking it up, pushing it to more people, snowballing in that way that doesn’t happen often.
And then Josh sees it.
He opens Twitter and there it is. Tyler’s tweet.
Tyler Joseph @tylerrjoseph · 7h
okay this guy gets it youtube.com/watch?v=dXSOXV2...
1K replies 2.3K retweets 8.6K likes
The link isn’t to the insurance video. It’s to a different one. The video Josh posted last week about reality TV and manufactured drama. Tyler must have gone through Josh’s channel. Watched multiple videos. Decided to tweet one.
Tyler Joseph, over 500k subscribers, Josh’s entire reason for starting this channel. Tyler tweeted his video.
Josh makes a noise that doesn’t sound human. High-pitched. Strangled. His hands are shaking so badly he almost drops his phone.
He reads the tweet again.
“okay this guy gets it”
Tyler gets it. Tyler thinks Josh gets it. Tyler watched multiple Josh videos and thought one was worth sharing with 180k followers. Tyler went through his channel. That means Tyler didn’t just stumble on one video. Tyler looked at Josh’s content intentionally. Tyler cared enough to explore.
Josh’s phone keeps flooding with comments. Subscribers. Likes. Retweets. Quote tweets.
Chris comes out of his room, hair sticking up, squinting in the morning light. “Are you okay? I heard you make a weird noise.”
“Tyler tweeted my video.” Josh’s voice doesn’t sound like his voice. It’s too high. Too breathless.
“The YouTuber you watch?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s awesome, man!”
“He tweeted my video.”
“I heard you the first time. That’s really cool, dude.”
Josh refreshes Twitter obsessively as the notifications pile up. His video is everywhere suddenly. The comments on the tweeted video are full of people saying “this is so good” and “how have I never seen this channel before” and “Found you through Tyler Joseph”.
15k subscribers. 17k. 20k.
And then he sees it.
Tyler Joseph followed you
Josh sits down on the couch before his legs give out.
“Dude,” Chris says, concerned now. “You look like you’re gonna pass out.”
“I might.”
“Want some water?”
“Yeah. Please.”
Chris gets water. Josh drinks it with shaking hands, staring at his phone. Tyler’s follow notification is still there. And it is not disappearing.
Tyler Joseph (@tylerrjoseph) followed you
Tyler knows Josh exists. Tyler watched his videos. Tyler shared one with thousands of people. Tyler followed his account. Tyler is now someone Josh is connected to, someone who will see Josh’s tweets, someone who might interact with him in this space they’re both inhabiting.
Josh spends the rest of the morning refreshing his YouTube page and seeing his subscriber count climb. 22k. 25k. 28k. That’s absurd. He cannot even attempt to process that Tyler noticed him. Holy fucking shit, Tyler Joseph has seen Josh’s face. More than that, Tyler fucking Joseph thinks he’s funny.
Chris makes breakfast: eggs and toast. Sits down next to Josh on the couch.
“So,” Chris says. “This is a big deal, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“You gonna message him or something?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Eventually. I don’t want to be weird about it.”
“Just. Be cool, yeah? Don’t overthink it.”
“That’s literally all I do.”
“Fair point.”
Chris finishes his eggs and gets ready for work. He leaves Josh sitting on the couch, staring at his phone.
Tyler Joseph (@tylerrjoseph) followed you
The words sit there as proof that Josh exists in Tyler’s world now. That the parasocial relationship just became something else. Something that could turn into actual connection if Josh doesn’t fuck it up.
Then, Josh gets a wave of guilt wash over his body, and it doesn’t leave. It sits heavy in his chest. Tyler doesn’t know why Josh started making videos. Doesn’t know about the crush, the obsession, the hours of watching and rewatching and analyzing. Doesn’t know about the engineering of this entire situation. Doesn’t know that Josh’s interest in commentary videos came second to his interest in Tyler himself.
Tyler thinks this is organic. Thinks Josh is just another commentary YouTuber who happened to make similar content, who happened to exist in the same space, who happened to get his attention through talent and good timing.
He doesn’t know Josh did all of this just to get noticed.
But it worked.
Josh feels like a fucking creep.
He stares at Tyler’s name in his followers list and thinks, what the fuck do I do now.