ColeyDoesThings
is a YouTuber and comedian who does short video sketches on various fanbases, often making fun of (in a light way) common fanfiction tropes, types of fans, and fan culture in general. She shoots and records her videos by herself, switching between different 'characters' noted by different post-it notes stuck to her forehead with their characteristics written on them ("Just here for the memes", "Precious newbie", "Multishipper", etc.).
Her earliest videos on YouTube date to 2016, though her first video pertaining to fandom sketches "entering the voltron fandom like" was posted in April 2017.
This show provides examples of:
- all lowercase letters: All the video titles are all in lowercase to build on the No Budget aesthetic of Coley's videos.
- Becoming the Mask: "ironically shipping something to genuinely shipping it" tracks, well, a fan who starts out shipping two characters because they find it stupid but comes around to shipping them for real.
- Distinction Without a Difference: In the "bought a boy band" section of "reverse fanfiction tropes," Simon Cowell insists to One Direction that he didn't sell One Direction, someone else bought One Direction.
- Enemy Mine: After most of the "entering the kpop fandom like" is about how fractured the whole K-pop fanbase is and how the segments spend so much energy feuding with one another for various reasons, a non-fan shows up and asks for their help in combating racist shit online, in which all the factions agree to set aside their feuds for now to fight.
- Fangirl: She is in a lot of different fandoms. She even describes herself as a "professional fangirl" on her channel's About page, and some of her videos involve her freaking out over some of her favorite TV shows.
- Flanderization:
- "canon to fanon" details ways fan interpretations of various fictional character archetypes tend to get one aspect of their character played up into a single dimension.
- In the video "if i was a character in a fandom", Coley drinks wine, and the fans decide that that's her whole character.
- Forbidden Fruit: A classic example in "spite shipping" — being told they couldn't ship something only made the POV character ship it harder.
- Genki Girl: She definitely comes off as one.
- Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: Many of her videos regarding impressions of a given show's fanbase are titled "entering the [show name] fandom like".
- Inverted Trope: "reverse fanfiction tropes" depicts the opposites of various fanfiction cliches. For example, Love Triangle becomes a "hate triangle" with three people just screaming at each other, and the inversion of Hanahaki Disease has somebody eat a flower after confessing their love.
- Loony Fan: The more extreme segments of various fandoms get portrayed this way in many of the "entering the fandom like" vids.
- No Such Thing as Bad Publicity: In-universe, "spite shipping" is all about this trope mixed with Forbidden Fruit; namely someone shipping a pairing to spite someone who told them they couldn't.
- Oh, Crap, There Are Fanfics of Us!: "if team rwby reacted to the fandom" has a section with Coley cosplaying as Ruby, Weiss, Blake, and Yang reacting to finding... particular kinds of fanart of themselves online.
- Omegaverse: Played for Laughs in "omegaverse vs. alpha bro", a One Dialogue, Two Conversations scene where an Omegaverse fangirl and a self-proclaimed "alpha" male converse about "alphas" and "betas" in entirely different contexts. The alpha male mentions dynamics between men that the fangirl takes as Omegaverse ideas. It takes some time before they realize the fangirl is talking about a sexy genre of fanfiction.
- One Dialogue, Two Conversations: "Omega-verse fan meets Alpha Bro" has the two titular fans meet and carry on a conversation about their respective fandoms. Despite the alpha bro's hypermasculine aggression, it takes quite a while before they figure out the fan is actually talking about smutty fanfic.
- Only Sane Man: The various chaotic, sometimes extreme antics portrayed within various fandoms are experienced through a version of Coley who is often bewildered and sometimes terrified about what she finds behind the door.
- Prone to Tears: She cries very easily, especially when she's happy.
- Shared Universe: Coley started making a series of videos that portrays fandom concepts like ships, fanfics, fanart, etc. being turned into shops/stores or similar establishments which are usually at least implied to exist in the same universe. Most specifically, Fanfic Cafe (a coffee shop that creates fanfics as coffee), Ships R Us (a shop that sells ships to people), Fanart Parlor (a gallery that displays fanart), Build an OC (Build-A-Bear, but with OCs), Y/N Matchmaker (a matchmaking site where a matchmaker matches multiple Y/Ns to different characters), and Fandom Labs (the factory where these things are created).
- Squee: Since she is a professional fangirl, you can expect this to happen quite often in her videos.
- Straw Fan: The more extreme segments of various fandoms get portrayed this way in many of the "entering the fandom like" vids.
- Tears of Joy: She's prone to shedding these when talking about how grateful she is for her supporters and followers.
- There Is Only One Bed: Discussed. For her video "what is your fanfiction job?", Coley asked the Twitter fan communities what their ideal fanfic "job" archetype is. Among the many responses she reads in the video, nine of themnote reply they'd work in a hotel (or in one case, as a landlord) to invoke this trope on their favourite ships. Coley jokes that with so many responses like this, they can start an international "only one bed" hotel chain.
- Too Kinky to Torture: In "2 truths 1 lie fandom edition, after Coley tells her fellow content creators Kictor and Nadia that her sleep-paralysis demon, the Shadowman, climbs on top of her sometimes, they jokingly suggest shipping Coley with it. Coley states that she's "a monsterfucker for a reason", while Kictor and Nadia joke that the demon would stop haunting her and leave, with their roles being reversed with demon being the one haunted instead. To top it off Coley quotes Gojo's "This is where you're weak, right?" line, which was quoted earlier in the video when discussing a clip of him going feral making the rounds on Twitter.
- Worse with Context: Her video discussing the infamous Archive of Our Own Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation: Mo Dao Zu Shi fic Sexy Times With Wangxian, specifically how many tags it had.note "OK, so now armed with [the knowledge that the average fic has 17 tags and 11 is the most common number of tags], guess the number of tags Sexy Time With Wangxian had at its peak." (waits for viewer to make a guess) "Forty-four. Hundred."
