Daisy Brown
is a very... unusual YouTube channel about a girl named Daisy and her pet monster, Alan, who was allegedly created by Daisy's father.
Said girl is extremely sheltered and naive, while her monster is sickly and grotesque (and seemingly becoming increasingly more violent...).
The real nature of the series is difficult to peg, but most people agree that it appears to be an Alternate Reality Game. Turning on closed captions reveals subtle hints that things in this world are indeed not what they appear.
Daisy also has a Twitter account, here, which should be viewed in order to better understand the series.
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Daisy Brown provides examples of:
- Arc Words: "Hateful thoughts" tends to come up in this series often, usually in reference to Daisy dealing with intense negative emotions. Alan even lampshades it when he takes over Daisy's twitter, as he responds to a fan's tweet using the word "hateful" with "huh, not the first time I've heard that word today."
- Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Averted. While we never see her face, Daisy can be seen with bruises on her body as Alan gets more "mean." Not to mention the time he ripped out her hair...
- Bittersweet Ending: The episode "Final Video". Alan's dead and Daisy and Lithop are free, but Daisy is still painfully aware that she's not entirely sure what she'll do with her new freedom and while Alan absolutely deserved his death, Daisy is still somewhat understandably horrified at the fact that she was forced to kill him.
- Blue Boy, Pink Girl: Alan is Blue and Lithop is purple. In "The Calm Videos" the captions show that Daisy's father considers Alan to be male because he is blue.
- Cats Are Mean: Alan's excuse for killing Strawberry is that the cat would attack him whenever Daisy wasn't looking. Knowing Alan, he's most likely lying.
- Central Theme: Domestic Abuse, and the impact it leaves on people in that kind of situation. Daisy's father is revealed through captions to have abused her, and, as noted below in Does This Remind You of Anything?, her relationship with Alan gets increasingly more evocative of it.
- Conditioned to Accept Horror: None of the weird or gross things Alan does fazes Daisy, seeing as she's had to live with this stuff her whole life. At least until he starts to grow... She lampshades this in her third video, by mentioning that it didn't occur to her that monsters weren't commonplace.
- Does This Remind You of Anything?:
- Daisy's relationship with Alan is highly evocative of more grounded Domestic Abuse. He physically attacks her under seemingly little provocation, puts her in situations like locking herself in a room and regularly being chased outside, and destroys things beloved by Daisy like her garden and an innocent animal out of apparent spite. Daisy, in turn, tries to defend him even when it's clear Alan is being hurtful. The parallels become even more obvious once Alan is able to talk, as he uses his newfound ability to verbally insult Daisy over her personal issues. Perhaps not coincidentally, since her father had abusive episodes as well as the captions have revealed.
- The parallels become even more clear when Lithop is added to the mix, effectively giving Daisy a surrogate "child" or "younger sibling" to protect, whilst simultaneously boosting morale for her.
- Establishing Series Moment: Daisy's first upload is her casually showing how she feeds Alan, apparently not realizing that most people haven't even seen a monster before.
- Flower Motifs: Flowers, and plants in general, come up in this series often. Daisy herself is named after a flower, and her avatar is of a rose. Several of Daisy's videos show she has an interest in gardening, and Alan gains root-like growths as the series goes on. Daisy points out Lithop is named after a plant, and Lithop tells her that she is a mixture of human and plant DNA.
- Floral Theme Naming: As an extension of the above motif, each female character is named after a plant (Daisy, Rose, Strawberry, and Lithop).
- Gory Discretion Shot: While we do see the aftermath, Daisy killing Alan in self-defense is not outright shown, as the camera glitches and blacks out when it happens.
- Hope Spot: Daisy adopts a cat and names it Strawberry in one video and she enjoys its company for a while. Then, when Alan drives her out of the house, Daisy realizes that she forgot to take Strawberry with her and books it back home as fast as she can. She doesn't make it in time, and the next video is her placing a flower on Strawberry's grave.
- Madness Mantra: In "im outside" Daisy repeats to herself a few times that she's not afraid of cars. While this could be an attempt to reassure herself, she's also in shock from being chased away from the house by Alan (and, as she mentions, it's not the first time).
- Maternal Death? Blame the Child!: Alan tells Daisy that she killed her mother when she was a baby, as a way of bringing down her self esteem.
- Missing Mom: Daisy's mother died while giving birth to her. It's one of the major things Alan likes to torment her with once he's able to talk.
- Obviously Not Fine: In one video, Daisy is sitting alone in her room talking to the audience. She's locked herself in there, implicitly hiding from her pet monster Alan. At one point, Alan starts screaming and crying outside, which prompts an immediate "It's fine" from Daisy, despite that she's clearly uncomfortable and upset about what's going on. This remains a theme in other videos as well, where she insists to the audience she's doing well when all evidence points to things being... not fine at all.
- Oh, Crap!: In "im outside", Daisy rambles on for a few minutes until she realizes Strawberry is still in the house with Alan, at which point she cuts herself off and ends the video.
- Screaming at Squick: Played for Drama when Daisy sees Lithop's real face for the first time.
- Shout-Out:
- Between the mention of "Lynks Disease", Alan's namenote , a blue chair that can be seen in some videos, and the general format, it's safe to assume that the creator is a fan of Alan Resnick.
- "Another cooking video!" has Daisy show a Kitchen Princess book, and she mentions having gotten into the series.
- In one video, Daisy is shown wearing a The Great Gatsby t-shirt. Considering that one of the main characters is also named Daisy, it may also be suggesting a parallel between the troubled Daisy and Tom Buchanan relationship of the book and Daisy Brown's increasingly abusive relationship with Alan.
- In "Alan's Drawing", the hidden messages in the closed captions are a conversation between Daisy's parents about Las Meninas.
- Spotlight-Stealing Squad: In "Hateful Thoughts" it's revealed that Daisy views Alan as this. In reality it appears to be the other way around, as fans seem to like Daisy much more than Alan, who used to be the "focus" of the series.
- Wham Episode:
- "Alan is growing!" has Daisy talk about the bumps on Alan's body, only to gasp in shock as she notices root-like growths coming out of them.
- "Alan pulled my hair out", which is Exactly What It Says on the Tin. It's the first major incidence of Alan being violent.
- "Unexpected growth". Holy crap. Basically, Daisy's showing us her flowers when suddenly, Alan calls for her to come upstairs. When she gets to him, she discovers that he's grown bigger, he can talk and he might be a little bit mad at her. The whole situation is so shocking and unnerving that even Daisy herself is left terrified.
- "Hateful Thoughts". After Strawberry the cat's death and implicitly Alan taunting Daisy over her mother's Death by Childbirth, Daisy's Stepford Smiler facade finally breaks and she starts screaming, sobbing, swearing and trashing the house, ranting about how much she hates herself, how she perceives Alan as being better than her, thinking that her viewers only care about him and not her and asking herself if her father created Alan to be his "perfect" replacement child.
- "The Basement": Daisy finally stands up to Alan and he repays her by throwing her into the basement, which up to this point, Daisy has never been in because her father said it was off-limits. She explores a little after finding a candle and discovers that there are more monsters living down there. Fortunately, these ones appear to be good guys, but Daisy's still so overwhelmed by them that she flees the basement and seems to be on her way to a full on mental breakdown. And to top it all off, Alan discovers the other creatures after one of them, Lithop, tries to return Daisy's dropped camera. That can't be good...
- "Final Video": Inevitable, considering the title, but not many people expected Daisy to outright kill Alan in it.
- Wham Line:
- If you look at the captions for "Monster tries different Sugar sources for the First Time!!", you can get an early glimpse of Alan's true thoughts on Daisy. Keep in mind that this is only nine episodes in, and Alan is still essentially a baby.
(This foolish child.)(Frivolous and vain)(This world was built for me not her.)(And I was built for this world.)(Bitch.)(Entitled bitch.)(Stupid. Ignorant. You are the blind one.)- Courtesy of Alan in the "Q&A" video...
Alan: I didn't have to kill someone to come into existence... - Wham Shot: "Artistic video" starts out as a simple video about Daisy drawing, until Alan shows up with realistic pictures of her doing such. Daisy is appropriately disturbed, since it means he's no longer blind.
- Word of God: An unusual in-universe and The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You example; someone (presumably, but not confirmed to be Daisy herself) uses YouTube closed captions to give some weird introspective insights into Daisy's life and state of being. Some of the more disturbing ones include Daisy remembering (or at least interpreting) her mother's Death by Childbirth and her father in vicious denial of it.
