SAD-ist, also known as sad-istfied, is a popular youtuber who has gained a subscriber count of 2.65 million as of November 30th, 2021 (SocialBlade). She makes animatics, which are videos of her art depicting a story set to music, and the topics are different popular fandoms. She started by making animatics of Undertale, then gained popularity by creating content centered around the musical Hamilton, and most recently has made videos of a Minecraft roleplay server called the dreamsmp. It was with this last fandom that she gained most of her popularity, and what she currently creates all of her content for.
There are many fan artists that have created stunning art and animatics within the dreamsmp community, but sad-ist is one of the most popular by far. After each main storyline arc, you can expect a video. These are highly anticipated, and many streamers even wait to watch the videos until they are live to watch along with their audience and react to it. She has become a micro-celebrity through her art, where she is "shifting the relationship from media consumption to production" (Marwick, p 6). She is engaging in the fandom as an active and empowered audience member, promoting involvement in the fandom rather than passive consumption of the content. Her actions have gained her celebrity status within the fandom.
Content creators from the dreamsmp have interviewed and talked with SAD-ist while streaming, asking about the process of creating her animatics and similar topics. There is an obvious breakdown between the distinction of audience and creator within this fandom due to its interactive nature. Fans can livechat during streams on YouTube and Twitch, and there have been a couple instances where fans could vote to decide the storyline using twitter polls. Some creators use fan-made music in their streams, and others post fanart around the Minecraft world. In rare cases, people can even donate to ask streamers to do something within the Minecraft world like name a dog or plant a tree in the donor’s name. This interactiveness creates perceived interconnectedness within the fandom and has helped SAD-ist gain fame as streamers recognized her art and encouraged their audiences to watch and subscribe to her channel.
SAD-ist is not the first artist to be acknowledged by producers within fandoms. There are many instances, especially in role-play based fandoms like creators who stream Dungeons and Dragons or YouTube fandoms where there is a lot of creator-audience interaction (see: reddit review videos). But what I think is so fascinating about her channel specifically is that it is sensationalized and admired greatly by the streamers on the dreamsmp. Content creators are ecstatic to see themselves drawn or their lines used in the animatics and are known to even ask SAD-ist to put certain lines in her animatics. This further solidifies the audience's view of perceived interconnectedness with SAD-ist's content specifically.
One of the most fascinating videos on SAD-ist’s channel is titled “‘Sunsprite’s Eulogy’ | Passerine Animatic'' which is based on an alternate-universe fanfic based around the family dynamic between four creators of the dreamsmp who are labelled as “sleepy boys inc.” or SBI for short. Intertextuality as described by Hall comes into play immensely within this video–it is impossible to understand the storyline without having read the fanfic. Additionally, fans need a basic knowledge of the content creators to understand the characters and the significance of how they relate to each other and the actions they take. The regime of representation that content creators have built around their characters is relevant for understanding both the fanfic and the animatic. The fanfic has nothing to do with the story of the dreamsmp, it simply uses the characters and imagines them in a new space. But still, many fans read this 75,000-word fanfic last spring, one streamer is in the process of reading it on stream, and 5 million people watched SAD-ist’s animatic.
The format of this video is the same as others on her channel. Minimal colors are a part of SAD-ist’s style, so as an artistic choice, the only thing that is colored is yellow roses, which play a prominent role in evoking emotion within the fanfic. Everything else is black, white, or grey. She is a very talented and innovative artist, and this video portrays that perfectly. Since SAD-ist has released her animatic, it has inspired an entirely new wave of content within the fandom where writers and artists work together to create fanfic and art that go together.
Textual poaching was described by de Certeau as a textual tactic for audiences to see themselves represented in stories when in fact, fanfic is much more diverse and empowering (Jenkins III). It is easy to see why SAD-ist's art would be described as poaching–even though it’s not in text form. She uses the storyline and audio clips of the content creators from the dreamsmp in her animatics. In doing so, she is creating her own content which is then further poached by redraws, which is a popular trend where other fan-artists rush to create redraws of some of their favorite frames from each animatic in their own style and share it on different social media platforms with the tag #sadistredraw. However, even if it is poaching, it is not harmful. In fact, fanart is beneficial to the community because it builds hype, bolsters creativity, and increases fan engagement–furthering the popularity and reach of the fandom.
SAD-ist has contributed to the dreamsmp fandom because of her engagement with the story as a fanartist, which has inspired other artists and creators, leading to further perceived interconnectedness as the fans make the content of the streamers into their own. Her work has paved the way for a successful career as an artist and I can't wait to see what projects she embarks on next!
Bibliography
Abidin, C. (2015) Communicative ❤ intimacies: Influencers and Perceived
Interconnectedness. Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology,
No.8. doi:10.7264/N3MW2FFG
Hall, S. (1997). Representation: Cultural representations and signifying practices.
Sage Publishing
Jenkins III, H. (1988). Star Trek rerun, reread, rewritten: Fan writing as textual poaching.
Critical Studies in Media Communication.
Marwick, A. E. (2015). You may know me from YouTube: (Micro-)celebrity in social
media. A Companion to Celebrity, 333–350.
https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118475089.ch18
SAD-ist. (2021, May 21). “Sunsprite’s Eulogy” | Passerine animatic [Video]. YouTube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gpFsnCz3HQ&ab_channel=SAD-ist.
Sad-ist's youtube stats (summary profile). SocialBlade. Retrieved November 30,
2021, from https://socialblade.com/youtube/c/sadistkar.
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