Trivia / Lindsay Ellis

• Artist Disillusionment: Combined with a heavy dose of Celebrity Is Overrated; in her announcement of retirement from content creation on Patreon on December 27, 2021, she admitted to regretting her entire career in the public eye because of the negativity it brought her:
  "But all I know now is that being in the public eye at all is a losing game, and I regret all of it. I regret every time I’ve ever stood up for anyone - it always backfires. I regret every time I pushed back against something unjust - it was always just used to hurt me. I regret every time I ever stood up for myself - I never did it 'correctly’. I regret every time I showed any vulnerability - just more ammunition to be used against me later. I regret every time I ever tried to play the game with peers and colleagues - they will drop you the second you aren't popular on Twitter anymore."
• Author's Saving Throw:
  • She has gone on record to say that she regretted the crossover review of Moulin Rouge! because Doug Walker wrote it and her lines, where she says she only considers it a guilty pleasure, were his opinions, since she actually enjoys the film. In her essay of Phantom of the Opera she talks more positively about Moulin Rouge! and why it works as a film. She delves deeper into her love of the movie and its craft in the Musicalsplaining episode on the film, as well as into her regret of the episode. About the only criticism that she still stands by is that Christian is terrible.
  • Her Nostalgia Chick review of Hercules earned a lot of criticism for its mocking tone, despite her saying that it was flawed but she still liked it. In her video essay on Hercules she gets very technical on why she feels it doesn't work, while also praising its good points.
  • Any divisive statements she makes in her videos will often receive follow-ups or changed opinions later on via Twitter. Even in this very wiki any entries/opinions on certain subjects get edited or deleted based on her rotating opinions from Twitter posts.
  • A more humorous instance of this; in her Loose Canon retrospective on The Phantom of the Opera, she notes an amusing moment in the 1990 miniseries where Erik punches a fake deer in the face, but her joke^note "Let's watch that again!" flubs up due to a misplaced edit. Years later in "The Most Whitewashed Character In Literary History", while re-summarizing the material from said Loose Canon video, she takes the opportunity to play the joke correctly this time.
• Bury Your Art:
  • She quietly privatized "Dead Genres Tell No Tales", her essay on Pirates of the Caribbean, wherein she made several comments on Johnny Depp's real-world character, largely based on the highly publicized allegations of being a domestic abuser towards Amber Heard. Once he fired back with a defamation lawsuit containing new claims that Heard may have lied about the abuse and that she was actually the one both physically and emotionally abusing her husband, Lindsay took it down due to both the litigation being ongoing and "it not being worth it".
  • In 2022, her video "Mask Off" was unlisted as a result of the video ultimately not doing anything to stop the harassment she was getting and only making her a more obvious target.
• Cowboy BeBop at His Computer: On her Loose Canon video on the Wicked Witch of the West, she claims that MGM still owns the rights to 1939's The Wizard of Oz... except they don't anymore. Warner Bros. have owned the rights since MGM sold most of their Turner catalog to them in the late 90s. She also confuses the release dates of the Wicked Broadway musical and the similarly-titled, but totally unrelated movie Wicked (1998).
• Creator Backlash: In a 2022 interview following her online retirement, she went on record stating that she regrets posting her "Mask Off" video, implied in the article to have resulted from the video not mitigating backlash among some of her critics.
  "If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t have done it. I would have become the robot that ignores everything and apologizes for things … I wish I had just apologized."
• Missing Episode:
  • Her entire body of work as the Nostalgia Chick, aside from Freddy Got Fingered and the four-part review on The Lord of the Rings trilogy, was at first shifted over to a second channel to distance herself from it because she considered it worse than her work from 2015 onwards, and then privated altogether after the YouTube algorithm started promoting those videos around the time of her book release and confusing her potential new viewers. (Fans have kept the other videos alive in sites such as the Internet Archive and the Lost Media Wiki.)
• Reclusive Artist: Following her retirement from content creation in December 2021, Lindsay consciously stepped away from social media, with her next major public appearance being in June 2022 as a surprise VidCon panelist, where she noted that she may have to eventually return to social media for the sake of promoting her books, but will require additional care as to not provoke further controversy and reopen old wounds. She would make her online return in October 2022, but in vastly more limited capacity; her newer video essays are exclusive to Nebula, and her newly-reinstated Twitter remains "protected".
• Voice-Only Cameo: Semi common in her videos, especially any that involve large extracts from literature, where Lindsay's collaborators and/or fellow YouTubers read different characters:
  • Caitlin Doughty, Dan Olson, Natalie Wynn, David McCracken, Sarah Z, Elisa Hansen, Maggie Mae Fish, H Bomber Guy, and Jenny Nicholson give their voices to "characters" (Natalie is Zoey Ellis; Jenny is Addison Cain; Sarah is Dragons' Maiden; Harris is one narrator; Maggie is Blushing Books; David is Gideon; the others voice Facebook commenters) in "Into The Omegaverse".
  • H.Bomberguy reads J. K. Rowling's prose in "Tracing the Roots of Pop Culture Transphobia."
• What Could Have Been: She had planned to make a video loosely about The Weeknd's album After Hours. However, her departure and retirement from online content caused the video to get scrapped.
• Why Fandom Can't Have Nice Things: Her retirement stemmed entirely from a virulent hate campaign aimed at her following a comment she made comparing Raya and the Last Dragon to Avatar: The Last Airbender, which was accused of generalizing Asian culture.

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