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As YouTube grows, and evolves, we’re seeing new types of content appearing. Long gone are the days of teenagers speaking to their webcams. High production value, a luxurious life style, and cash to flash, are easy viewing to stumble across without even meaning to these days.
Bring in ‘I am Sophie’. On February 14th this year, I am Sophie uploaded her first youtube video. Titled ‘The NEW QUEEN OF YOUTUBE – Channel Trailer’, the video introduces us to the aforementioned Sophie, daughter of a millionaire, and a millennial living the high life.
She talks a big game, and backs it up with Lamborghini’s, private jets, and mansions. Through all that though, she initially comes off as quite genuine, despite being clearly disillusioned due to growing up around so much wealth. She talks about, despite all the truly amazing things in her life, being unsure if she’s truly happy, or if she’s being her real self.
The video ends with the announcement of a vlog coming February 20th, and from there Sophie continued to regularly upload videos for several weeks. Over the next few videos, we see her ‘release’ a clothing line, plain black T-shirts and Hoodies, with Sophie’s small, minimalistic logo printed on them, for over $90. She posted on Twitter that these sold out in 20 minutes.
She seems to be another spoilt, disconnected rich girl, until fans noticed something strange in some of her later videos. As she continued uploading videos, many of them had short clips, short enough to miss if you’re not paying attention, of an unknown woman in an unfamiliar room.
Soon enough, discussion/drama youtuber Leon Lush made a video reacting to Sophie, who then created a ‘reply’ video, in which she demonstrated how ‘normal’ she is by attending two nights out, one at a ‘cheap’ normal place, the other at a ‘gorgeous place’ she has attended before.
This was the most shocking video at the time, since a few minutes in the video ‘glitches’ to the previously seen unknown woman, and also a shot of a man stood in the shadows in what looks like an abandoned building. Most shockingly, we see that the woman in this video is wearing one of the T-shirts Sophie released a few videos prior.
Sophie used other platforms to say that she doesn’t know whats happened to the video, and she may try deleting, and reuploading it. She claims the footage was corrupted, and her father has people looking into it. A now deleted tweet from Sophie also led to another video, the title was a string of code, broken down by users and found to say ‘I CAN SEE YOU’. The video was exclusively audio, someone saying ‘I can see you, Sophie’, slowed down 6x.
Things only get stranger, and creepier from there. Someone not used to YouTube would be genuinely concerned by videos such as this, but for those who have kept up with the platform its simply an ARG. Alternate Reality Games are popping up more and more often on the platform. They’re video’s, usually created by a team of people or a few creators, that leave clues and hints for viewers, as the story unravels in front of them in real time.
Using reality to create a visual story, usually one horror focused, isn’t the newest of genre’s on the platform, but I am Sophie especially tricked viewers. Most thought she was simply a parody of the luxury lifestyle vloggers we’ve seen popping up, and instead her video’s descended into a weird, creepy, alternate reality that none of us expected.
With so many of us staying inside, I am Sophie is an intriguing rabbit hole to dive down, especially with all the theories, and analysis content, that have been created from this series. It’s always most fun to catch these things as they’re happening, but theres no harm in catching up on it now!