Is KimBee Over? (A Post Mortem on My Channel "Blowing Up")
The inaugural entry of my Substack where I reflect on making YouTube videos, and my complicated feelings on "blowing up". With great ultra-niche micro internet success, comes great existential crises.
A Substack, in the Big 26?
When you enter your 20s, you’re faced with many forking paths: starting a music career, getting a masters degree, going abroad, starting a podcast, or making a Substack. So far, I’ve avoided the first, I’m not old enough for the second, I’ll be abroad for most of 2026, and my friend hasn’t finished editing the podcast. That leaves me with just one option: a Substack.
One of the biggest problems I had in 2025 was that I wrote a lot, but none of it escaped my computer. By the end of the year, I had written hundreds of pages, but did not share them. Originally I was going to upload on YouTube, but that fell through because to be honest, I simply don’t like editing videos. Therefore, my top goal of 2026 is to do the impossible - actually publish my writing. Everyone can write their ideas, but maybe only two people consistently publish them.
I suspect that early on, most of the people reading this will be friends who associate me with my YouTube channel, so I feel the need to clarify the whole point of this Substack. Every time I’ve mentioned it, I get asked if this means that my channel is being killed. I don’t think this will be what puts my channel to bed. I’m a bit stubborn and want to finish at least a few more videos before I can even consider finally quitting. I told a few people that the next video would be the last one, but to be honest, I realized that I was lying a few days later. To celebrate not quitting, I want to inaugurate my Substack by taking a look at the previous era of KimBee.
I’ve developed a complicated relationship with my YouTube channel, because I’ve been making videos for 10 years. I started making video essays in 2019, right before I entered high school. At the time, I saw it as a creative outlet, but it has radically transformed over time. To provide a bit of context for those who don’t know me, my channel (KimBee) has over 4500 subscribers, and two of my videos reached over 200K views. Alongside this, I am an undergraduate student doing academic research on queer identity and how community forms. I had been doing YouTube for around 8 years and had a microscopic 400 subscribers, and then in the span of the year, jumped in subscribers. This piece heavily references my channel, so I suggest watching a video before reading this. I’m not close to being even a niche internet micro celebrity, but maybe in 10 years I will be. I started with game reviews, and slowly transitioned to video essays about my queer journey in relation to my favorite media.
All of this culminated with two of my videos “blowing up”. I kind of hate the concept of talking about my channel “blowing up”, because I’m not particularly large, however many people in my life refer to that as “blowing up”, and so for the sake of this piece, I will too. I sometimes get asked “isn’t it awesome that your channel blew up?” The answer is mostly yes, but having thousands of people watch you talk about yourself feels a little weird. This weirdness ultimately killed my channel for a while, because I was dealing with a lot of major life changes alongside wrestling with these emotions.
The Existential Horror of People Liking Your Writing - A 2024 Retrospective
To be honest, the whole point of the I Saw The TV Glow video was that I would be able to upload it and then put out a bunch of small, cute videos after. That video had resulted from a months long personal crisis, and it only got finished because I pulled an angry all nighter editing the entire video. Had I not sat there, focused on how I was more upset at the world than I was at DaVinci Resolve, it likely wouldn’t have ever been released. The final paragraph of the video opens with “At the start of this video, I said that writing about being transgender freaks me out, and that’s true, but that’s not the full story.” The whole reason I wrote that is because I felt like I finally understood why I wasn’t uploading as much as I had originally intended to in 2024. I had plans to capitalize on how much my channel was booming, but then spent most of 2024 lollygagging.
When Scott Pilgrim Vs. Queerness took off, I had a week long panic attack. At first, I thought it was really cool that my video was doing well. I remember going to watch American Fiction with my brother in the theater, and coming back to see that the video had exploded. Rather than a year of silence and a channel rebrand ending my chances of success, it actually boosted me. I attribute none of this to any specific quality of my work, but instead, three simple reasons: I capitalized on the momentum of Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, the title was funny, and Rowe did a great job with the thumbnail. However, my second semester of college started right after uploading it, so alongside this video taking off, my love life was in shambles, I had just started HRT, and I felt overwhelmed with coursework. This led to a miserable period where all of my writing felt a bit insincere.
A lot of people kept asking me what I planned to make next, and to be honest, I was originally just going to go back to doing what I had been doing beforehand: basic reviews. However, I started wondering if that was the wrong idea, and if I should keep walking down the path of queer videos. A lot of the comments also touched on how they liked the personal angle, which made me want to lean into that more. However, I was freaked out by seeing that I now had 1000+ subscribers, and was worried about the concept of so many random people knowing about my life. As a result, I wanted to formulate videos in such a way that they could be personal, but obfuscate who I actually am. I used to like being mysterious. All of the scripts that came from this era explored very contrived topics such as “Gender in Studio Ghibli”. I then got the idea to write about gaming forums, and over the span of a few days, I cooked up a script about them, but then made the horrific mistake of publicly posting about the video.
I never expressed the topic of the video, but I then proceeded to lock myself into believing “well this HAS to be the next video.” My confidence in this video was so high, that I even told one of my academic research mentors about it. At the time, I felt that I had made something great, but in retrospect, the video is severely underbaked. There’s a much deeper thesis that I could’ve pulled out of it, and I think that had I taken the opportunity to allow myself to rewrite the video after my first undergrad research internship, it could’ve been significantly more meaningful. There’s a trillion philosophical frameworks that I wish I applied to it, and also I learned more information about internet forums that would’ve sharpened my point.
I think that this video has the best thumbnail of a KimBee (good work once again, Rowe), but other than that, I think that its most significant quality is that it represents all of my worst tendencies. The audio is messy because I recorded it on my last day at home, the editing is a bit sloppy, and the history side of it is missing out on a few important pieces. I also think that my application of “Dead Internet Theory” could do with more nuance. I have much stronger reservations about “Dead Internet Theory” these days. In general, I have a strong interest in remaking this video. If I were to go back and remake any video, this would probably be the one. However, I think right now, it would be far too self indulgent to remake that video considering there has only been one video published since then.
I’m acting quite negative about this video, but I don’t think it is bad. I think it is significantly better than nearly every video that came before it, and while it represents my worst tendencies, it also represents my best ones. I used a history of gaming forums to dissect my personal anxiety about the current direction of the internet. Also, while I think that I applied “Dead Internet Theory” in a relatively uncritical way, I also think that the fact that I was even applying any theory to my videos was a step forward. I was learning how to use other frameworks to fit what I was talking about, and my academic research job helped me severely deepen that skill. This video only got finished because I was bored at home for a week, but I’m glad I finished it. It’s the video that I’m always the hardest on, but it’s because deep down, I know that I could remake it into one of my most interesting thought pieces - something that matches the Rowe thumbnail.
However, as previously mentioned, there was a 6 month gap between the script being finalized and the video releasing. A major reason for this is that I got an academic research internship. I originally anticipated spending my summer alone, living in a building with a bunch of sweaty, potentially transphobic Computer Science undergrads. Instead, I got to have one of the best experiences of my life. I made a wide variety of friends, some of whom will likely read this Substack (hi guys <3). So, instead of spending my time making videos, I was constantly going out, laughing, and doing all sorts of fun things. I think that this was an extremely necessary experience, because it ended up filling me with this new level of confidence by the end. I had gone from “I’m alright” to “I can make extremely interesting work, but I need to actually push myself”. Without this shift in self-worth, I think that my writing would’ve flat-lined in quality.
I grew up making YouTube videos (KimBee turned 10 last year), and I always felt some level of alienation from others because of it. People would often be weirded out by me having a channel, and this got even worse when I started writing. I’d get told how it was a waste of time. The combination of Scott Pilgrim vs. Queerness’ reception and my new friends made me realize “oh wow, I’m a weirdo but in a way that people enjoy.”
Yet again, parallel to all of this was another major event - life tends to not play out in an easy to follow sequence after all. In May 2024, I watched I Saw The TV Glow with a bunch of my friends, and it ruined me. We partied after seeing the movie, but once the night winded down, I remember sitting there, spilling my guts in a Letterboxd review. I gave it a 4.5/5 because the movie deeply annoyed me, but I didn’t know why.
I ended up seeing it 5 times in theaters, and started writing a video on it. My outward excuse was that I wanted to “cash in” on the hype, but ultimately, I was trying to make sense of being deeply affected. My channel has accidentally become a therapeutic outlet for me. Since 2021, my writing has always been tied into my current emotions, which is also why my videos got better. At 16, I couldn’t really vocalize my problems. At 19, I had been through enough therapy and AP classes that I could write a paper on them.
I kept trying to write about my problems, and the results were honestly a bit too dark. It’s one thing for me to write about something, but then to speak it out loud, and spend hours editing that speech? It can be a bit much. So, the first few drafts were shaped by uncertainty and feelings similar to survivor’s guilt. By September, I had finally worked out my problems, and I picked up the pen, certain of my future’s uncertainty. I finally let myself stop hiding behind media analysis, and spoke truthfully. I wrote about my identity and feelings of inadequacy. There was a level of uncertainty beneath the video - I was confident in the idea that I no longer knew what my future was. No longer was I trying to promise my new life direction.
I had settled the score with myself by writing a video about my anxiety for writing queer videos. It felt meaningful, and when I put it out there, it originally flopped, which made me happy. The first day capped out at 200 views, which was way more than I was getting pre-Scott, but a fraction of my subscriber base. I was satisfied with this, because it meant that a bunch of strangers wouldn’t see my messy emotions, and I still got the accomplishment of having put it out there.
However, the video then rapidly spiked in videos, and to this day, it remains one of the top viewed videos on I Saw The TV Glow. The comment section made me really excited, but then it got super serious, which scared me. People were coming out as trans, talking about abuse from their partners, and saying how the video deeply connected with them. I try not to over-dramatize all of this, because ultimately 200K views is a drop in the pond, and these are random comments online. I doubt these people ever think about me. Yet, I can’t deny that there’s a real anxiety to having such weighty words thrown at a video about your personal journey. Originally, I was going to drop a bunch of silly videos, but instead, I decided to walk away.
I Love Being a Weird Queer Archivist, Academic, Content Creator - A 2025 Retrospective
One of my newfound personal beliefs since summer 2024 is that I can’t afford to halfheartedly do things. By allowing myself to halfheartedly do something, I’m giving myself an out - a way to deflect criticism because “it was rushed”. The only way to get better is to put yourself out there and take criticism on the cheek. So, I decided that I wanted to address the reception of my I Saw The TV Glow video. On a surface level, that makes me sound full of myself - and that’s because I probably am. The video isn’t exactly topping the charts, but I wasn’t doing it because I felt an obligation to respond to a few comments. Instead, I wanted to do it because the thought made me feel empowered. I was 2 for 2 on my queer videos taking off, and I wanted my next one to be about queer internet culture. However, I didn’t just want to repeat what I did with gaming forums. Instead, I wanted to understand my position within it all. We’re all contributors to internet culture, and I needed to figure out what I wanted to be. Was my goal to be a “serious” writer, or did I just want to make silly, simple videos online? You can’t have both, and I needed to learn to stop freaking out over the repercussions of being serious online.
Alongside all of this, I underwent a brutal health crisis for the first few months of 2025 where I was in and out of the hospital, plus I had to stop HRT for a while. You also can’t forget about the start of the 2nd Trump presidential administration. As a result, I had this real mortality crisis where I wondered - why am I alive? I didn’t mean that in a depressing sense, but instead, if the world is going to be on fire, what do I want to get from the ashes? I realized that hiding underneath everything I do is an insatiable desire to build community. I write with the desperate hope that maybe somehow, it’ll make tomorrow even 0.000001% better. So, I asked myself how I could use my channel to do that. I took my newfound perspective and combined it with my rage over queer issues, and got to work.
The first video of this era was heavily inspired by the book The Two Revolutions: A History of the Transgender Internet by Avery Dame-Griff. I got the book from my friend, who was borrowing it from one of their professors. They handed me it and said something along the lines of “You should read this, it’s pretty interesting”. At the time, I was early in the process of a queer history research project. After reading the first two chapters, I sat there and said to myself “Goodness golly dude. What am I doing with my life?” This book delved into the history of trans people and the internet. Underpinning it was issues of class, race, and how tech companies have seized control of our lives. Reading this book helped me make so much sense of my own history, but I also realized something: so many queer people aren’t going to read this. There’s so many concepts in this book that are core to our current modern struggles, and yet, most queer people won’t learn a fraction of what this book is putting out there.
This made me consider my own personal privilege. To be openly queer online is an act of bravery, especially with how many transgender content creators get death threats. To build a following online where you get to talk about queer issues is a privilege, even if it results from hard work. If I am going to be so privileged to twice have videos reach over 200K views, could I use that privilege to shine a light on queer history? I’d like to believe that I’m slowly learning how to get content to succeed, and I don’t want that successful content to be just basic analyses of media. I want to learn how I can translate all of the incredible work done in queer academia to the audience that needs to hear it - the queer teenagers and young adults who are scrolling social media. That’s the type of person who needs that history, because when we know our history, we can make sense of ourselves. Nobody is teaching them queer history, and so they go through life disconnected from their roots.
When I started entertaining these thoughts, I also realized that these same thoughts are how I can add to the original text’s meaning. I am a thread of the very fabric that it is studying, which puts me in a unique position. I have one foot in the academia door, and another in the “social media influencer” door. The two things that I had always seen as contradictory were in fact complimentary!
I set out to capture all of this in one video titled Did The Internet Make Me Transgender? I envisioned a silly title and thumbnail as a way of drawing in a crowd of people - baiting them with the standard YouTube video essay stuff and then pipe-lining them down a history rabbit hole. I also gave myself strict guidelines, such as imposing a 45 minute limit, because otherwise a 2 hour long video is likely only going to take off in leftist circles. I wanted to see if it could reach a variety of queers. I touched on details such as government censorship, past internet spaces, the necessity of queer content creators, and the importance of physical community.
I didn’t finish the video, because over the summer I did some traveling and visited a variety of pride events, which gave me some new questions about myself. I was revisiting my identity crisis over the last few months under the new lens of wanting to be an archivist of queer history. If I’m going to be writing about queer history and going around speaking about it, am I the right lady for the job? After I got back from Chicago Pride, I sat down and poured my heart out onto the page, writing the first draft of Am I Queer Enough? in around one sitting. The whole point of it was to poke at questions about how transgender identity has been reshaped by the internet, but also tying this into historical struggle within the community. On top of that, I tied in the personal angle. Eureka! I finally had down the exact blend I had been trying to make - history, theory, my personal experience, and a dash of clickbait all in one video!
This video isn’t out yet, because I wanted to give it more time to bake. I was a bit burnt out, and the original intention was to make it a lower effort video. However, I decided that I want to make it my best one yet, and I wanted to reintegrate all of my new life experience into this video. It will come out at some point in the first half of 2026, but I’ve been far too busy with academic work and preparing for how busy 2026 will be. The last 3 months of 2025 were by far the busiest I’ve ever been, and I expect that the first 7 months of 2026 will make me look back and scoff at that. I also have another video pretty much done, and it talks about my relationship with one of my favorite games of all time - Halo CE. However, I’m being picky and want Am I Queer Enough? to be my first video for when I come back, because the script so heavily focuses on the large gap between videos.
I quit YouTube because I wanted to focus on my academic work, since that is the career I want. I seek to use my skill set to archive queer history and promote queer health, especially because the medical world is so often unsure of how to treat transgender patients. I came back to YouTube, because I realized that writing a paper is meaningless if that information doesn’t reach people. I’m deeply interested in learning how we can reach queer people to teach health information and history - two important aspects of queer existence that schools do not teach. Therefore, KimBee has become my experiment of sorts: what methods work best for outreach? This Substack is an extension of all of that, because it allows me to more quickly write about things rather than committing to spending months working on a video. That’s the point of all of this - an alternative outlet for me to talk about things that I don’t have time to make videos on. Maybe it all flops and my channel dies tomorrow. Alternatively, maybe I use it to teach 5 people about themselves, and those 5 people later make the world a better place. If I don’t try, the count stays at 0. No matter what, I also learn something new, and I’ll hopefully have another 70+ years to apply the lessons I learn from this year. So, onward to a productive 2026!
