Story: Stories from the Congo

The Vanishing Subscribers

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Two youtubers made videos everyday. They were called BekahBeauty and SamanthaSwatches.

SamanthaSwatches was a famous youtuber with over 1.2 million subscribers, but BekahBeauty has only 50K subscribers and was not growing. As BekahBeauty had no real interest in her channel, she had to pay for all her makeup and had no sponsors. Regardless, BekahBeauty kept on and looked up to SamanthaSwatches for inspiration and guidance. 

Yet SamanthaSwatches always looked down upon smaller channels, assuming they had no real talent with a lack of drive. Upon realizing SamanthaSwatches had no respect for her or her work, BekahBeauty flew out to California for Youtube's annual convention, Vidcon, determined to gain more followers to prove SamanthaSwatches wrong. Even though, BekahBeauty was not a big enough youtuber to be officially invited, she got a room in a near by hotel and hoped some her subscribers might recognize her on the convention floor. 

Exhausted from the walking all day long with no luck, BekahBeauty had plans to skip the parties going on that night and fall asleep. But right before she made her way out of the convention center, BekahBeauty was stopped by an even more famous beauty youtuber named DreamMUA. After spending nearly all night talking over different strategies to gain more interest, BekahBeauty finally felt as though she had a friend in the industry. Seeing DreamMUA set up a meet and greet with all her subscribers and do giveaways made BekahBeauty get a new spark of love for her work. BekahBeauty and DreamMUA spent the rest of the night imagining a huge crowd following BekahBeauty, while finally getting recognition for her videos. 

 The next morning remembering all the tips and tricks she had learned from DreamMUA, BekahBeauty sent out a tweet, instagram post, and snapchat story announcing her upcoming meet and greet set for that day. Also adding in a 100$ giveaway, per DreamMUA's must-do instructions. 

Finally when the time came to arrive at agreed place for the meet and greet, BekahBeauty found herself, not walking aimlessly around, but being greeted by over thousands of fans that wanted to take a picture with her. Amazed by all the love she was receiving, BekahBeauty reveled in the attention and new found fame.

Thus everyday of the two week long convention, BekahBeauty woke up early, sent out her posts with a time and place for a meet and greet, and went to find a 100$ gift to giveaway. With such a small youtuber making such a big scene, subscribers of other youtube channels found themselves hoping in line to get a glimpse of the up and comer. Eventually, word travelled and baffled at the attention an irrelevant small youtuber was getting, SamanthaSwatches made her mind up to stop by one of these meet and greets. 

But day in and day out, BekahBeauty's funds started to deplete with all the 100$ gifts she was giving away. Soon enough, BekahBeauty found herself letting the subscribers know there would be no giveaway at each meet and greet. And every time she would find herself feeling guilty as soon as she heard her followers felt as though she had lied to them. So she would run after one of her subscribers at the end of each meeting to hand them the gift after all. 

On the second to last day of Vidcon, BekahBeauty once again found herself at a crossroads, not wanting to give up anymore money but also wanting to keep her subscribers. After much back and forth in her head, BekahBeauty was down to the last subscriber in the queue when she burst under the pressure of having to give away so much. The young subscriber, freaked out by BekahBeauty's tone of voice, all but ran away from BekahBeauty. BekahBeauty, being reminded of the must do attitude DreamMUA had had, ran after the young girl determined to catch up to her. 

Yet after losing the subscriber in the crowd, BekahBeauty ran back to her newly-minted booth expecting to see another subscriber waiting to be handed a gift. Low and behold, the new booth, merch table, and most importantly the subscribers had all disappeared. Whispers of a low-life youtuber being too greedy held at hum around her. Alas BekahBeauty had nothing to look to until she laid her eyes upon SamanthaSwatches standing exactly where the new booth had been, casting a look of "told you so" upon her. 

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Author's Note:

This retelling is based off of a folktale from the Congo that tells of two brothers, ranked in different classes, suddenly become equally well off because of a foretelling dream; only for the younger brother to lose his newly gained wealth due to his stubbornness. Originally, this story proved to be really difficult to retell because I could not find a good framework to retell it in. Nonetheless, this piece continued to stick out to me so I set off on trying to change the structure of the story but retain the dynamics. The changes I made were to switch the brothers to rival youtubers and then once that was chosen the rest was a matter of finding parallels within both the original and my retelling. For example, in the original, the idea to "create a meet and greet and do a giveaway" (in actually, it was to go to a river and catch a fish, only to cut its head off to then eat) was given in a dream but I decided to make the dream into a side character instead. Many of the changes followed quickly once the main change of the framework was decided and I hope it made the folktale of the Congo a little more relatable. Hope you enjoyed my piece! 

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This story is based off of the story of "The Vanishing Wife" from Notes on the Folklore of the Fjort by Richard Edward Dennett (1898).