The bitch who keeps her receipts.
Influences: Green Day, Busted, blink-182, Avril Lavigne, Good Charlotte, My Chemical Romance, Fall Out Boy, Panic! at the Disco, Paramore, The White Stripes, Rage Against the Machine, Nine Inch Nails, Placebo, Twenty One Pilots
Emma Louise Blackery (born 11 November 1991) is a YouTuber and singer-songwriter from Essex, England.
Emma got her first following through a series of videos of herself reading the well-known erotic novel Fifty Shades of Grey that she later removed due to copyright, after which she opted to try out vlogging. Although she was known for uploading a mix of vlogs, skits and advice when she was first getting popular, her brand of content interest has touched on a myriad of subjects ranging from makeup hauls to educational videos on North Korea. Her content has also undergone significant change throughout her career, and along the way incorporated several now-defunct side channels for beauty (boxes of foxes), gaming (BirdyBoots) and vlogging (Vloggery).
Emma's current content generally consists of videos related to her music career, advice videos, and recurring gameplay (mainly of The Sims 4) that revives BirdyBoots as a series instead of a channel. Her sense of humor often entails heavy Self-Deprecation and employs a quite colorful vocabulary.
The reputation that she built discussing issues concerning identity and mental health led to her to write a book titled Feel Good 101, named after the video series in which she talked about said issues, that was published in fall 2017.
Although it wasn't how many people knew her when she first got famous, Emma actually started out as a musician, as her earliest YouTube channel (emmaforthewin
) was based around covers. She's been building a solid discography since the early 2010s that has gotten her recognition up to being a support act for Busted, having her EP featured front and center in an iPhone X keynote, and headlining tours for her debut studio album Villains.
Her main channel can be found here.
Discography:
- Human Behaviour (EP; 2012)
- Distance (EP; 2013)
- Perfect (EP; 2014)
- Sucks to Be You (EP; 2016)
- Magnetised (EP; 2017)
- Villains (album; 2018)
- My Arms Are Open (EP; 2020)
- Girl in a Box (album; 2021)
- Cannot Help Myself (EP; 2023)
Tropes that apply to Emma Blackery:
- The Alcoholic: Used as a running gag during her cooking videos, when she would invariably start chugging neat vodka halfway through. The joke was retired after the "Butternut Gnocchi" video because she legitimately gave herself alcohol poisoning due to depression-drinking after that one.
- all lowercase letters: How she portrays her name in her YouTube username. Also applied to "boxes of foxes".
- Berserk Button:
- She does NOT look like Cher Lloyd, okay?
- To a lesser extent, she has made clear her intense disdain for working in retail and waitressing.
- The image of her with yellow hair is BANNED.
- Bilingual Bonus: Emma has a knowledge of French that she got from studying the language in school. The T-shirt Emma is wearing on the cover of the Sucks to Be You EP has the message "je m'en fous" on it, which translates to "I don't care".
- Breaking the Fourth Wall: Done in quite tongue-in-cheek style in Your ASMR Friend. When Emma finally confronts the titular "friend", she retaliates by questioning Emma's judgment of people because of particular quirks or strange interests that they have. Emma replies by saying that she has her own ways of being happy, such as playing video games...to the point where she even has a channel called BirdyBoots that you can subscribe to. Yes, she does look directly into the camera when she says this, and yes, she does continue right on with the skit after saying this.
- British Accents: (Obviously.) Used to have such a strong accent that Brits can specifically identify her as being from Basildon. Since about 2014, it's morphed into a generic South England accent, probably from collaborating and living with several British vloggers.
- Can't Hold Her Liquor: Emma gets drunk on wine very easily, as revealed in Awkward Sexy Teenage Moments.
- Catchphrase: Her BirdyBoots intro was always "HALL-O, everybody! Welcome back to BirdyBoots!"
- Cluster F-Bomb: She does this a lot. Often unintentionally.
- Cordon Bleugh Chef: The running joke of the "Cooking For Singles" videos, which usually involve Emma taking a perfectly good basic food recipe and replacing the water with vodka, and adding cat biscuits. The video where she tries to make butternut gnocchi like a Sim reveals that Emma herself isn't exactly a terrible chef in real life, just not a great one.
- Crossover:
- Emma and Nerd³ had a series together on his channel called Demma Plays.
- She made several videos with KickThePj, who she described as the most creative YouTuber out there.
- She made a skit with PewDiePie parodying the media attention around the amount of money he makes revolving around her interviewing Felix, him establishing a "no questions about money" rule, and Emma being unable to find a single question that isn't about money.
- Emma has also been on one of Felix's podcasts with CinnamonToastKen, a long-time YouTuber friend of his.
- She's also participated in a few videos with Stuart Ashen and Barry Lewis, including a Doritos Roulette challenge.
- Curse Cut Short: Used occasionally, like in this Q&A.
- Deadpan Snarker: Has a very dry sense of humor that is a big part of her comedy.
- Embarrassing Old Photo: This video.
- Emo Teen: Her teenage years were highlighted in One of the Boys.
- Everyone Can See It: Both she and Luke invoked this after they announced they were a couple, saying it was pretty obvious from all the crossover videos (including a "boyfriend does my make-up" episode) that they'd been together for a while. There's also stuff like the creepy stalker shrine at the end of Just Girly Things which was released while the relationship was still a secret.
- Flipping the Bird: A penchant of hers.
- The Gadfly: A theme in 2017, of wearing intentionally the worst outfits she can findnote in public to get people's reactions.
- I Hate Past Me: Her screwups in the past are an essential part of her Self-Deprecation humor.
- Kaleidoscope Hair: For a long time, she kept on changing her hair color (pink, purple, red, blue, etc.). Then she shaved it all off for charity, after which she wore a couple of wigs to boost her self-confidence (as her hair was a big part of her life). Once her hair grew back, she kept it to a natural brown, bleached it blonde, dyed it orange, turned it a lighter shade of brown, changed to purple, turned it brown again (this time fuller and darker), changed to a rich blonde, and turned it back to a dark brown, which is the color she currently has.
- Lady Swears-a-Lot: Has quite the foul mouth. Apparently, one of her influences and reasons for it was watching South Park as a kid.
- Memetic Mutation: Invoked and acknowledged in her I AM A MEME video, where she showed a series of pictures (almost all of them Photoshopped) that were made from a photo taken from a shoot made in promotion for an event she was co-hosting at that time.
- My God, What Have I Done?: Her near-verbatim reaction to her decision to sacrifice Chloe in Life Is Strange after seeing its effects. She subsequently spends most of the ending and credits in tears.
- Mythology Gag: For her 1-million-subs
Milestone Celebration, Emma remade her dating rap video from 2013. - Naked First Impression: In one video, she described a time she was dancing around her apartment in a towel, which fell off while she was in front of a window, leading to a neighbor whom she didn't know getting a full view of her."Welcome to the neighborhood, motherfucker! Here's my vagina."
- Pretty Fly for a White Guy: Her dating rap, most significantly in her redux of the original, have her try as best as she can to look cool and fail horribly.
- Let's not forget this line:
"Wish I could be Eminem, but I'm not that black." - Rage Quit: The Sims in Real Life ends with Emma angrily quitting after her Sim starts panicking and drowning in a pool when she is instructed to get out.
- Self-Deprecation: One of the main cornerstones of her comedy, usually through railing on her past self.
- She really rips into herself in her roast rap, including "The Promise".
youtuber!Emma: Bitch, come on, at least I have something to give. "I promise you this", how innovative! - She really rips into herself in her roast rap
- Self-Empowerment Anthem: A lot of her songs fit squarely under this, the most famous being "The Promise".And I may not even know your name,
But I promise you I've felt the same. - Shameless Self-Promotion: See Breaking the Fourth Wall above.
- Silly Love Songs: "Go the Distance".
- Spelling Song: The post-chorus of "Agenda" ("A-G-E-N-D-A-A-A!"), although the "A-A-A" is pronounced as "ah-ah-ah" instead of "ay-ay-ay".
- "The Reason You Suck" Speech: A fairly savage one to herself in "Villains Pt 2".
- Yandere: Parodied in How to Become a Fangirl."...and put that knife down, young lady; their girlfriends are simply lucky."
- You Are Better Than You Think You Are: "Fear the Future"."And I want you to remember this, when you put yourself down
I cannot fear my future now that I have you around."
