on a related note i read this article the other day and it scared the living shit out of me
From the age of 4, Annie LeBlanc has had every major milestone in her life documented on YouTube. Her parents are what are known as “family vloggers,” and since 2008 they have dutifully recorded every moment of her childhood along with their family’s life on their YouTube channel, Bratayley.
Fans have seen Annie throw temper tantrums, lose her first tooth, begin school, learn to ride a bike, and enter puberty. Naturally, when she began spending time with a boy for the first time at age 12, her online fanbase of nearly 20 million followers across social platforms freaked out.
the truman show except you’re a twelve year old girl and the villainous showrunners forcing you into a manipulated romance for publicity are your mom and dad
Though Annie has lived her entire life online, even her father, Billy LeBlanc, was amazed at the level of dedication teens showed to perpetuating the idea of a “Hannie” relationship.
“Fans immediately began sending Instagram edits,” he said. “These kids are very good at Photoshop. While Annie and Hayden’s relationship has always been innocent, the fans would take the two in certain poses and photoshop them together so it looked like an authentic photo.”
Fans constructed an entire false narrative of Hayden and Annie’s life as a couple, photoshopping them out on dates together, at the movies, attending fictional parties.
“They’ve photoshopped them together at prom,” Billy said, despite the fact that neither Annie or Hayden has ever attended prom.
“You’d see these images all over Instagram, thousands of them, and you’re like, I know that didn’t happen!” he said. “In the beginning [the shipping] was driven by a lot of photos that weren’t real, but as they began hanging out with each other in real life, kids would edit photos of them together. They’d take the two sitting next to each other, for instance, and scoot them closer together.”
like imagine knowing this is happening to your twelve-year-old child and rather than recognize it as a serious invasion of privacy and a major threat to her emotional health and well-being, you sign her up to star in a tv show created solely to stoke the mania around her friendship with another twelve-year-old
