GoAnimate/Vyond: A Bizarre Community With Sinister Secrets
When first viewing the GoAnimate (or as it’s now called, Vyond) Community, a sane man’s first reaction can only be “What the-” at least that was my reaction, my 5 year old son is a big fan of Caillou, he loves watching it on YouTube, but one time I walked in on him watching a very strange episode of Caillou, the animation was very different, think of a more poorly animated Family Guy, it had no voice acting, just robotic text to speech voices, and it featured the normally good-natured Caillou getting grounded (or as his parents put it, “GROUNDED GROUNDED GROUNDED”) for a ridiculous amount of time for apparently hitting Barney The Dinosaur, I was simply perplexed, I asked my son what on earth he was watching, he told me he was watching “GoAnimate”, the name sounded vaguely familiar (I think I did a university presentation using it), I asked him why he would watch something so bizarre, he told me he just found it funny.
Later that night I checked his YouTube history, it was filled with these sorts of videos, sometimes they’d be about Caillou, other times Dora, sometimes they’d even be about other YouTubers, but all shared a similar format and even creepily similar dialogue. I was just baffled, I looked up “GoAnimate grounded” on YouTube and found literally thousands of videos, some from a few days ago, others from nearly a decade ago, but they were all eerily similar despite being made by many different people.
I looked at some of these channels, they have a ridiculous amount of subscribers for the content they produce.
I just can’t wrap my ahead around this, why do so many people enjoy these types of videos? Hell, this particular person has been making the exact same type of video regularly for the past 7 years! But then I got recommended an interesting video…
While this video is mostly just criticising the “writing” in her videos (why anyone would care about that is beyond me) it reveals something interesting details about African Vulture, mostly that she is a grown woman (35 to be exact) that lashes out at children, judging from her actions, it seems that she suffers from autism, however this does not excuse her harassment of children, as she at least seems intelligent enough to know its wrong. The video also touched on the gossip surrounding the community, specifically, that it stretches back to at least 2015, is still on-going, and involves death threats and organised harassment campaigns, this worried me, I trust that my son doesn’t watch innapropriate videos, but how do I know the videos he watches don’t subliminally encourage harassment against other people? But still I dug further, I needed to get to the bottom of this, which lead me to the next video.
This video showcasing some comments made by members of the GoAnimate community on another platform (though I’m not sure which), it became apparent to me that these people have a very thin grasp on reality, most of these messages made zero sense, and the ones that did concerned me, one of the GoAnimate users named LukeAnimate (we’ll get back to him later) seems highly transphobic and seems to think LGBT is a “hate group”, another seems to love making death threats, this other one is begging for food in exchange for GoAnimate videos (yes really) and the end of the video shows members of the community harassing the website’s social media for not listening to them apparently. Oh I almost forgot, this video also provides written evidence that African Vulture, real name Sarah, is 35 years old, which made me really uncomfortable considering her obsession with kids getting grounded.
I was exhausted to say the least, and I’m sure you are too, how did we go from weird Family Guy Caillou videos to homophobia and schizoprenia? Well we’re not done yet, remember LukeAnimate? well I did some more digging and found what I feared the most.
LukeAnimate abused his autistic brother and forced him to make GoAnimate videos for him, I was shocked, my child was potentially watching videos made by what was essentially slave labour?? I asked one member of the community who seemed sensible about this Luke person and they linked me another video about him, they requested to be kept anonymous.
Going through this rabbit hole was an interesting experience, we went from Caillou getting grounded by robotic parents, to weird 30 year old women, to homophobia, and then slave labour. Now what have we learned today? Well, always look into what you’re child is watching, things that might look shallow can be deeper and darker than you could ever imagine.
