For Haleigh Masterton, the moment her stomach lining tore registered only as a dull ache. Nor did it slow her down any. It was simply another one of the many aches that came with the job and so it didn’t immediately strike her as a cause for concern. Those watching her live feed on YouTube might have noticed her grimace for a moment but that was no indication of the trouble she was in.
In the time between her stomach ripping open and Haleigh noticing she had consumed two pounds of canned tuna, a veritable fortune in oysters (covered in a blue cheese sauce), a cow liver, most of a heaping portion of black pudding, and an assortment of her least favorite vegetables. Not a single bite was enjoyable, though that was by design. The viewers didn’t want Haleigh to enjoy it.
That wasn’t why they were watching.
When Haleigh started her YouTube journey (as her mom jokingly refers to it) she began with video essays about women in film. Spotlights on actresses, directors, and even crew members that carved their own niche out of an otherwise male dominated industry.
Film was her first real love. She poured a lot of time and effort into each one and their quality reflected that. But they didn’t get a lot of views and she couldn’t understand why. The few comments she got were exceedingly positive. Yet it just didn’t seem to matter. She could find hundreds of video essays with lots of traction, yet hers never seemed to catch on.
So she changed her approach. She would still continue to work on her long-form essays but now every Thursday she would release a movie review as well. This way she could keep the focus on film and by producing more videos she had a higher chance of bringing in an audience. She fully believed that her channel could be huge if she could get it in front of the right eyes. After all, there were plenty of popular channels with far less polished content than hers.
Haleigh’s reviews were more laid-back than the essays. They had to be if she wanted to keep a weekly release schedule without losing her job. Instead of crawling the internet for information and relevant clips to include, she limited herself to only using whatever clips were included in the movie’s trailer and kept the review focused strictly on her opinion. This meant that for the most part the videos were her talking directly to the camera.
This was the first time she put her own face into her videos. She braced herself for a backlash of hate and weirdness typical of any and every comment section. While there was a little bit of ugliness for the most part the comments were kind to her. They were maybe a little too thirsty, really complimenting her looks and giving off a drives-a-windowless-white-van vibe. But she could live with that.
The reviews were successful at bringing in more views to the channel but they didn’t have the kind of impact that Haleigh had hoped for. When she was only posting her essays, after a week each video got about 150 views. Once she began doing weekly reviews, each video got about 200 views.
It seemed like nothing would grab an audience.
That is until she reviewed The Secret Life of Pets.
It started as a dull ache in her stomach but it grew until it encompassed everything.
She loved the movie. That wasn’t a surprise to anyone. She had a long history of loving animated features. Though what really stuck out to her was Snowball, the white rabbit played by Kevin Hart. She had a white rabbit of her own growing up and she was happy for an excuse to show the photos. She considered sporting a pair of bunny ears for the review, but thought that might get too distracting. Instead she settled on doing a short joke at the start of the video where she pretended to eat a carrot like a rabbit. The end result was less charming than intended but she left it in the video all the same.
It took less than five minutes for it to become the most viewed video on her channel. Ten minutes later it had more views than all of her videos combined. It was at six thousand views by the time she went to bed. It was at twenty three thousand when she woke. By the end of the week it was pushing eighty thousand. While that might not seem like much in a world where Baby Shark has fifteen billion views, it was more than Haleigh had ever thought possible.
She began trying to recreate the success. She tried making more videos about The Secret Life of Pets. When those failed to get any attention she busted out a dozen videos reviewing other animated features. These did only slightly better than the average so she tried a handful about rabbits. By this point she was starting to lose sight of her channel’s original purpose, yet she still couldn’t capture an audience. She was just about ready to throw the towel in — not just on trying to replicate the success she had but on YouTube as a whole. But as she was opening up her account settings to deactivate her channel she got a notification that somebody commented on one of her videos. Curiosity and the cat, she clicked the notification.
It read: “I’d (muk)bang her!”
Haleigh scowled. Why was she going to delete her account when it was viewers like that she was worried about getting? Was their views really that important to her? She had a few fans, people who had been around since she started uploading. Shouldn’t she keep at it for them?
This energy only lasted as long as her indignation. As the sting of the comment faded from her memory throughout the day, so too did her new found enthusiasm. She wasn’t ready to admit to herself exactly how badly she needed those views, nor what it said about her that she felt that way. An empty feeling took root in her guts.
Though that wasn’t the only thing that grabbed hold of her.
That comment…
When she first read it all she saw was a crude sex joke. In her indignation she had entirely ignored the bracketed (muk). Now she found herself fixated on it. It was clearly important to the comment, otherwise why bother to write it, but it meant absolutely nothing to her. Days later she was still thinking about it and checked which video it was for since she hadn’t done that yet. It was her Secret Life of Pets review. She scrubbed through the video but nothing stood out as relevant. So, taking a deep breath to steel herself, she jumped down to the comment section.
“I’d (muk)bang her!” was the top comment with over two thousand likes. That shocked her. It was more likes for a single comment than all her essays got combined. Not only that but the comment had nearly fifty comments amended to it. Most of them were for a time stamp in the video. There were time stamps scattered throughout the comments in general. They weren’t always for the same exact point, but they were all within the same thirty seconds or so.
She clicked the earliest stamp she could find.
Screen-Haleigh mimicked talking for a moment before reaching over and grabbing a carrot from off-screen. Screen-Haleigh then drew her lips back to fully expose her front teeth before aggressively nibbling away at the carrot, fast and shallow bites that left jagged strands of carrot littering her desk. This went on for twenty seconds longer than was actually funny.
She paused the video, clicked on the search bar and put in (muk)bang. The results filled her screen with stacks upon stacks of food. All kinds of different foods, especially Asian ones, all in absurd sizes. The larger the better, it seemed.
Before clicking on a single video, Haleigh already learned three important things just from the thumbnails. First, it was spelled mukbang. The brackets were only there for that guy to make his stupid joke. Second, it was an insanely popular genre. Millions of people tuned in to watch people eat, the more food the more viewers.
And, third, she needed to go shopping.
#
Haleigh screamed. She felt her body begin to sag, the weight of her limp bottom half dragging her top half down. She grasped onto the edge of the table to support herself, her eyes searching her image on the laptop screen for some kind of clue as to what was happening. The comments were going wild but the words were shaking too frantically for her to read them. She screamed again and saw the levels on her microphone peak. Then she was falling, the table coming down with her, trays of food clattering. Oyster shells fell like hail.
Something was burning inside of her. It hurt so much it drowned out reality. Haleigh couldn’t tell if she was still screaming. Broken plates, lumps of black pudding, and the rest of her feast were scattered around her. She tried to lift herself to her feet but her legs refused her commands. She desperately reached about for her laptop but couldn’t find it. It was either thrown farther away, or it was hidden under the blanket of food that seemed to cover every surface she could see.
“If anyone can hear me, send help.” She then proceeded to give away her home address. That was the last thing she would have ever considered doing on a live stream, but then she couldn’t have foreseen whatever the hell this was either. She had no idea what was happening to her but her legs wouldn’t work and her insides burnt. It was far beyond the worst heartburn she’d ever had before and, making mukbang videos for a living, she’d had some son-of-a-bitch heartburn.
“Please. Somebody. Help me,” she sobbed. God, she didn’t even know if her laptop was still working. In all likelihood it was laying smashed somewhere just out of view. Even if it wasn’t, the microphone on the laptop itself was busted. She had to use a USB mic. So even if the laptop did survive and even if it was still streaming, it seemed next to impossible that the microphone would still be plugged in. In which case nobody could hear what she was saying.
Which meant there was nobody sending help.
She was on her own.
She couldn’t believe how much food was in front of her despite cooking it herself. It took a whole day yet it would be gone within a couple hours depending on how shooting went. There were chocolate chip cookies and fried-chicken, two baskets of fries, a basket of potato wedges, a large garden salad, and a bucket of coleslaw.
Everything she needed for her first real mukbang.
Though she hadn’t been familiar with the term a week ago, she now considered herself an expert on the genre. She watched hundreds of mukbang videos over the last week. At points she had two videos playing, each sped up by fifty percent. They looked silly when they were going that fast but she wasn’t watching for entertainment.
This was her research. She was watching to see what topics people talked about. Turns out, its pretty hard to talk when you’re stuffing your mouth full of food.
Go figure.
She spent her week deciding what to eat for her first video. She started by listing everything she liked to eat. Then she went through and crossed out the foods she couldn’t cook herself. She selected the meal currently spread out before her from those remaining options and waited until she had a day off so she’d have enough time to make everything.
She was anxious now that the camera was rolling. She wanted to introduce herself and what she was doing. That was how her reviews worked. But this was different; instead of introducing herself, she grab the bucket of fried-chicken and tilted it so the pieces could be seen on camera. Then she began chowing down on a piece, followed by fries, cookies, wedges, salad, and finally coleslaw.
So much went wrong with the video it was a miracle that she ever got it posted. To begin with, she was not ready for the amount of food she had to consume. Part of her preparation during the week prior was to eat less food during her meals. The idea was to be hungrier than normal for the recording. Unfortunately that wasn’t what ended up happening. Instead her stomach began to shrink. Only a little, since it was but a week, but any shrinkage hurt her performance. Instead, as she would learn, she was better off training herself to regularly eat larger servings so a meal like this wouldn’t be such a shock to her system.
The other major mistake she made was in the cooking of the food. She spent the whole day cooking and was looking forward to enjoying it in the end. But she failed to consider if the food would still be good to eat when it came time to record. The salad and the coleslaw were fine. The cookies, too. But the chicken at the bottom of the bucket was an abomination of grease and the fries were disgustingly cold. She had settled on cooking the food herself to lower the cost but going forward she would have to give more consideration to temperature. As it was, half the meal was either too disgusting or unsafe to eat.
She wouldn’t have posted the video if it wasn’t for the cost of producing it. But it would be a shame if all that food and preparation was for nothing. She hid just how much food she was tossing out through clever editing, though this in and of itself made the video a little weird for the genre. In the end she posted it before heading to bed so she wouldn’t just sit there and refresh the view count every minute.
If the video didn’t do well then she could delete it and pretend it never happened.
Her legs refuse to obey. She tells them to stand. They flail across the tiled floor kicking and slipping. Her body rises a few inches then collapses back down. The movement causes her insides to slosh about, the fiery pain suddenly radiating out from new points.
She’s screamed herself hoarse yet can’t stop. So long as she has a mouth and lungs from which to draw breath, she will scream. It’s become a part of her now, and in some ways it’s a boon. Her stomach is burning, yes, but there’s also familiar pains like nausea and she knows that she would throw up everything inside of her if it weren’t for the screams occupying her throat taking precedence over all.
She needs help. Desperately so. But in order to summon assistance she first needs to move and standing has proven to be beyond her capabilities. Yet her legs did still work, if not very effectively. She might not be able to stand but it would be enough to push herself across the floor as long as she used her arms to help pull.
And so it is (pushing and pulling, her legs slipping and sliding, her arms growing exhausted by a strain altogether new to them) that she is able to move.
But where should she go? Her phone was on the charger in the other room where she put it whenever she recorded. The laptop was closer, somewhere hidden. She didn’t know how to place a call to emergency services through her computer, but she could shoot a message to a friend, hell to all her friends, and get them to call for her.
She could feel the strength fading from her body, or was it the exhaustion from the pushing and pulling? Either way she knew she had to act now or risk losing her only chance to be saved. So it was with renewed vigor that she began to pull herself across the floor, over the oysters, across the tuna, and through the black pudding, blue cheese sauce covering first her arms then her shirt, legs, and even her feet, a streak trailing behind her like the slime of a snail.
All this and her only reward: the laptop screen shattered into a million pieces.
For one moment, just a second, the screaming stopped and despair rushed in to fill the void. Then she was screaming again as she began the arduous journey to her cell phone.
Mukbang was the real shit.
What was she thinking making those essays? All the time and research she had to put into each one? The way she could only really make one if it was something she was truly passionate about? What even were those reviews?
How silly she was then.
Now she was getting so many views after she transitioned her channel to exclusively cater to mukbang.
She quit her job. Never thought that would be possible. Always figured she’d have to work two or three jobs for the rest of her life what with the way the world was going. Now she was self-employed. It hardly felt like work.
Although she did have to get up each morning and put herself together enough to stream her breakfast and that meant she didn’t get any extra sleep. Plus she did also have to stay up late to check her messages, update her socials, promote her channels, record Patreon exclusives. That often took half the night. But the reward was worth the effort. What were a few hours less each night when it meant she was her own boss?
Well, she also wasn’t on a medical plan. That was one thing she missed from being employed. Not that she had much use for it previously but it had become a problem now that she’d gained so much weight in such a small amount of time. She only started doing mukbangs six months ago? Eight months? She’d lost track of time. Looking back on those earlier videos, the essays she’d been unable to make herself unlist, she didn’t look the same. That woman, that was Haleigh. The woman she sees when she’s streaming herself eating three dozen bacon-eggers from A&W? That is somebody she doesn’t recognize. A woman without a name. She’s a face on a screen, something distant and impossible, both person and non-person. She is an exhibition in a digital freak show for an audience throwing their refuse, pity, and semen into the cage. That thing only exists so long as the camera is on. She disappears when it is off.
Then she’s Haleigh again.
#GirlBoss.
By the time Haleigh reaches the power outlet and see’s the phone charger dangling loose she is too exhausted to have an emotional response. She notes her disappointment, her anger, her fear, as clouds passing through the sky of her consciousness. She realizes this is the closest she’s ever come to enlightenment in the Buddhist sense.
Then the idea fades because there is no more time for unnecessary ideas no matter how profound.
If the phone isn’t in the charger then where could it be…
The car.
Her eyelids are heavy now, heavier even than the weight of her legs dragging across the floor or her heaving breasts scrapped sore as the world around her disappears so there is only the front door left.
The views are falling off again. But that’s okay. Old Haleigh wouldn’t have any idea what to do. New Haleigh is prepared. She’s been watching the numbers, reading the comments. She’s already put herself in the shoes of her audience and considered her channel from their perspective. She’s identified the patterns, tested her theories, and made her plan.
Haleigh’s old problem was a lack of vision. She didn’t know how to change her perspective. She saw her videos, the essays and even the reviews, as something that she was creating both for an audience and for herself. They were pieces of art. Maybe not to the world at large but in the way she conceived of them.
She wasn’t making art any longer.
Now she was making mukbangs.
She was not an artist or a filmmaker. She was a content creator and that’s what these videos were: content meant to be on in the background while people studied or worked, gamed or made supper. When she started to view what she did from this perspective, everything changed.
It wasn’t a problem for an artist, but a mathematician.
Now she sorted through data. Through trends. She made lists out of the comment section and sorted opinions into their respective buckets. Even the hateful comments could teach her something if she looked at them with the right perspective. She felt like Cyper in the Matrix watching numbers and determining reality.
Her views were falling.
But she was ready.
She had already noted the rise in views on her sushi video. Knew the exact moment the video blew up was when she ate octopus. She thought she knew why, too. So she ran an experiment. Not with octopus but with blood pudding in a later video on English cusine.
They loved it when she ate foods that disgusted her. At some point the audience went from cheering her on to cheering for her fall. And who was she to deny them?
She started making mukbangs exclusively involving foods she hated. Her disgust — the gagging sound she made as the flavors hit her tongue and her body revolted; the quasi-vomiting belches — took her channel to the next level.
It was sickening. But she had seen it coming and understood what they wanted. She had been the idol they were building up but now she was no longer in vogue and so it was time to bring her crashing back down to Earth. Hers was the bourgeoisie neck the proletariat craved.
Yet the numbers weren’t enough. Were they ever? What was her next move? Where did she go from here? She panicked and worried, lost sleep researching her options. Part of her hoping she never needed the fruits of this labor but then what was she really hoping for? To spend the rest of her life puking in her throat for the entertainment of strangers?
Haleigh came too in the hospital with no memory of how she got there. They asked her question after question. She answered them to the best of her knowledge, unsure why her answers should bring a look of such sadness to the doctor’s face.
She had been found on her front step. She made it half way down before falling unconscious. The door to her house open behind her. Thankfully she didn’t keep any pets.
It took two paramedics and a passerby to lift her onto the gunnery.
She scratches at the stitches running down her stomach even though she’s not supposed to. She can’t help but imagine them tearing open, her guts spilling across the hospital bed.
She’s a news item.
Famous.
Not just YouTube famous but like famous in a way her mother would hear about. She didn’t like that thought.
She already had a dozen voice mails sitting in her inbox.
She’s afraid to read the comment sections under the news stories. But she doesn’t need them to know her next move.
She’s been waiting for this.
Her time to document her road to recovery. The content phoenix risen from the ashes with new trend for her to devote herself too. Time to become a wellness influence.
At least until the views start falling.
Discover more from Writing Darkness
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.