I agree with Scooby Don't too that Kyle's a toxic asshole, fully at fault for horrible treatment of fans and the manipulation he crafts through his vlogs creates the larger part of the misunderstanding; it's also fair to say that fans who are willing to do lots of great things to support him should be wary that most vloggers don't really care about supporters as much as they pretend to, at the end of the day they only care about their channel's numbers.
I agree with this.
There are several different issues at play here.
This whole situation began when
Kyle lied to everyone on camera about following CDC isolation rules, "dressing up for the Packers game", and then being exposed by the photo of him attending Cat's party.
This is what all these victim-shamers are forgetting.
At this point his supporters including myself weren't hurt because of
misunderstood friendship or not but because
he was claiming to follow the rules whilst blatantly violating them. Rules that were made and us mere mortals
are following often at great personal inconvenience and suffering, in the hope of
saving lives,
especially of people with underlying medical conditions like Kyle.
Supporters
including medical professionals who challenged Kyle about this were instantly gaslighted, deleted, blocked and ghosted, and are now smeared as
rude and
hateful. Again, I don't think this has much to do with the
misunderstood friendship thing, it's just a startling of lack of plain human decency on his part, a total lack of awareness that people were motivated by caring about
his welfare and total disrespect for
the truth and his supporters' feelings and reputations.
It's only at this point that the whole
influencers aren't your friends argument comes into play, and I object to it because it's Kyle's gaslighting excuse to move attention away from the way he lied on camera, tried to deny it, pretended like it didn't happen, contemplated turning his illness into a livestream jackpot until he was called out on it being tasteless, and so on and on and on.
I do think Kyle does
everything he can to establish personal connections with his fans. It's unfair to blame people for regarding him as a friend when he's encouraging
personal interactions in parks, gifting, ask me anything
personal sessions, birthday greetings, having private conversations, etc. He does this more than any other vlogger I have seen and it's a far cry from the behaviour of professional YouTubers like Adam Savage, for example. And it's tasteless of him and his defenders to try and smear people as obsessive to draw attention away from the issue here:
He's a liar.
Whether or not some fans misunderstood their level of importance to him is irrelevant to that, but it's what he wants us to think was the problem here. And even if they did, they are only to blame for caring too much, he has still been a callous bastard to them, and he's still a liar.