Is Dan real?

Dan has actually been a carefully constructed vtuber all along.

Dan is a real human being. And a real hero.

Are we real?

I feel like the appropriate question for this topic would be "Is Dan a shoot or a work?".

You know I think Dan is the Most real.

The rest of us? We're cowards we won't dive headfirst into the dumb question or statement we just had we'll just pretend we know and hope it doesn't come up.

Unless you are a sociopath much of your outward personality is performative. So because Dan is very human, he is performative for sure. Moreover, many introverts or people on 'the spectrum' learn to be very performative because they have leaned that is how they can cope in social situations. Dan is very much Dan...but he is extra for sure...but I think that is all learned and is about fitting in (coping with the world), and his "Dan" performance is useful in his work. Understand this performance isn't fake, it honest and healthy.

Our health personalities are performative because we often change to please or displease people around us. Its might seem counter intuitive to "preform" for people we like, because we tend to think of "performance" as fake. Regardless, unless you are preforming to hurt other people - being performative is all about being closer to people. We tweak oursleves to mesh better with those around us. Sometime teh tweak is subtle sometimes is very pronounced and strong

The way we speak, the way we act, the amount we emote or hide from people changes for our audiences we - if you don't bend you personality subtly you either are distracted or have and antisocial mental disorder. Having a conscience and caring what other feel about you even if they are strangers means we do change who we are every so slightly for different people.

EX: Do you ever meet up with a group of close friends and drop into a mode of thinking or acting just for them? Its like you just picked up emotionally and in thought from the last tiem you saw them. That is you finding that performative groove you that is a worn path and falling into it. Or on teh other side when you significant other meets their friends so you suddenly feel less close to them or like they are a stranger? Yeah, the groove of personality for that friend group might be deep, older, more well worn...but more importantly not meant to mesh perfectly with you.

They ways our personality changes with other can be interesting to look at. Some people when they talk 'code switch'. In New England people from Boston might have a heavy Boston accent with family or when in the city and then code switch to a less pronounced general northeast accent in their suburban home.

Dan is himself. He has admitted to sometimes playing himself up a bit on camera but it’s more an enhancement of what is there and not a fabrication.

I love Dan. I hated him at first (meaning back in 2014 when he was first hired.) his lack of general knowledge could be incredibly frustrating and made me assume he was willfully ignorant. Over time, I came around on enjoying his shtick, and then realizing it’s not totally shtick. Then when he joined GBeast, him combing with Alex, Vinny, Jerf and eventually Abby was just the right balance. It was a bummer to lose him for a while as I didn’t really like twitch-style stuff (still don’t.) having him back as been nice. I do think he is playing up the dumbassery a little harder these days, as I don’t think he has a good foil now like he had with the GBeast team, and as such I’ve had to moderate my Dan consumption. But I still love the dork and not so secretly wish I had his lucky life.

Dan is lab-grown persona developed by a secret government research outfit that has been embedded into our minds by a blend of subliminal television and nanomachines.

Conclusion: we are all Dan Rycket.

He's an effective entertainer and a lifelong student of wrestling. He understands the value of playing the face, the heel, and the jobber. Does all of each to varying degrees depending on the situation. A very smart guy, despite what most people think. That's what makes it work. Not to say that he's completely insincere or Keyser Söze or whatever, but he's been an entertainer for some years and understands the art of doing it well.

Dan needs scissors. Sixty-one.

Dan Ryckerts live a 100 years, then quickly deteriorating and turning into a husk, but out of the husk a new Dan Ryckert is born that rapidly ages into an adult.

Dan is very real and he enjoys presenting himself as somewhat of a strange character to others because he surrounds himself with people that are fairly openminded about what you do with your time on this globe and therefore the fear of complete rejection is not as bad compared to having to blend in with career-junkies that boast about their position in life and on the stockmarket and how they are in a better spot than the other.

That's why he has 0 qualms on the latest Albummer to immediatly mention that Face/Off was such a major part of his wedding that they played it twice and his wife made everyone turn towards the projector to see the de-facing scene, how he went around the block listening to wrestling theme tunes to feel like a tough guy, didn't listen to any music past 1978 for a while because his dad said so, put away his dark 'wrestling past' as soon as he went to a new school and how he would always go to the bathroom right before a sex-scene popped off if he watched a movie with his mom. These are endearing stories to tell, but some people would rather keep those to themselves in fear that others might get a negative first impression of you.

Dan is a rare breed of person for whom ignorance and hatred are completely divorced. So in many ways, he is an "Average American," the kind of person who rarely, if ever, gets any kind of platform, and I feel like that's the source of a LOT of the confusion around him.

This is an oversimplification, of course, he's obviously very smart (intelligence and experience are two different things) and INCREDIBLY driven, but he has a lot of the hallmarks of someone who'd usually go into long-haul trucking and listen to way too much AM radio.

Because ignorance and hatred are so rarely separate things (sorry Mike Judge stans, Idiocracy is a farce, not a documentary), it seems bonkers that someone as open-minded, clever, and intelligent as Dan could also think that "egg whites are the shells," or that figs containing wasp eggs makes them inedible while Taco Bell meat is the height of cleanliness, or that "Logan" is a bad movie because it's a superhero movie. And most ignorant people also double-down, especially with a LOT of content on the internet to help them do that, but Dan instead chose to expand and open his mind and has very obviously internalized some important lessons throughout his life over the last decade (he no longer talks about how college is a pointless scam, he no longer declares Vince McMahon a genius and the best person ever, he no longer thinks art that he doesn't understand is bullshit and people only pretend to like it).

For his exact opposite, you need only look at The Nostalgia Critic, someone stuck in the 2000s mindset that nitpicks=critical thinking and that anyone who disagrees with him is flat-out WRONG. Someone who's never grown up or matured because they WERE relevant, and just stagnated. Someone who could look at "The Wall" and think that it's a treatise against school as its center message.

Maybe it's because I have worked service/retail for much of my adult life, but I can tell you: Dan's ignorance of stuff, even as far back as 2014, wasn't at all "weird" or "unusual." It's "average," and I think that should tell a lot of folks who think a) knowledge is an accurate predictor of success or b) who think they're stupid that neither of those things are true.

Dan is VERY real. He might even be THE REALEST.

Real and spectacu-

Just real.

Just gotta accept that he's human and real. He's one of us. There is something out there ready to Dan-ify us.

There are stupider people in this grand universe and they are all real.

Dan is a real human man.

Dan seems to not be afraid to take chances out of fear of failing, unlike most people. As a result, he has lived a pretty interesting life, and met a lot of interesting people, if the stories about him are to be believed. The guy almost got sick eating too much Taco Bell over the years, if that isn't human I don't know what is.

How can Dan be real if our eyes aren't real?

A real man would eat a hat

Dan’s a goof, but he’s also amazing and his life seems tenfold better than my own lackluster existence.

I've never seen Dan flub any of his lines, so if he's not real... He's a fantastic actor.

Dan is an actor who has been trapped in a Joaquin Phoenix I'm Still Here method acting style for 20 years. Or he's proof we live in a simulation.

He's the Nic Cage of gaming media

In 2013 i got to go to E3, where I had a brief interaction with various Game Informer personalities. I had mentioned to an extremely frazzled Jason "I just want to know if Dan was real." I was assured, in no uncertain terms, that Dan is a real person.

So if you trust Jason, then I have it on his authority that Dan is real.

...But of course, I never trust the media.

I'd say Dan is more realistic than vamp OR psycho mantis

Dan isn't actually too difficult to understand. It all clicked for me when he started talking about Greek and Latin prefixes during a video (Shenmue Endurance Run?). Dan is not a stupid person. Dan is a very intelligent person, and a talented entertainer. And he absolutely knows how to leverage his strengths. The fact that he has molded his life to suit him perfectly in almost every way is a testament to that. That's no accident.

Dan is also a person who is very open about gaps in his knowledge and experience. He's definitely good at playing that up and getting max entertainment value out of it. But if you've followed his trajectory, you'd know that he is demonstrably eager to learn and grow.

Also, he's behind some of the best stuff on the site. Steal My Sunshine forever.

If there's anything I am sure of, it's that Dan really is like that.

What I never understood is people trying to spin Dan saying wild shit as some virtue. He is a sweet and very entertaining individual (in part because of the people around him reacting to said wild shit) but c'mon. Dan is Dan for a reason.

dude, this somehow reminds me of Rick and Morty 🤣 either that or the matrix.

@korgothofbarbaria said:

Was going to say a similar thing: Dan has the key trait of intelligence, a genuine interest in the world around him, and he's got it in spades. When you pair that with unashamed honesty about ignorance on many topics, it can come across as stupidity. That's ABSOLUTELY unfair though. Dan can display ignorance (as we all can), but his drive to learn more and his willingness to expose that ignorance makes him one of the most honest and, by a certain measure, intelligent people on the team.

For what it's worth, I think we'd all seem a little stupider if we were as open and curious as Dan.

People ask "Dan questions" on this site all the time, just not in the same volume or with the same openness. He's a very, very smart person who is also the product of one of the worst education systems in the country (and the country on the whole ain't great about it). So he has a brilliant mind, but he wasn't taught well.

And yeah, as someone above said: I think the world would be a lot better if people were as open about what they didn't know and also as actively curious as Dan is. He's one of the only public figures I've seen who didn't marry the usually intertwined aspects of hatred and ignorance. He was ignorant, but didn't come off as hateful in the slightest. (I use past-tense because I think he's done a lot to correct that ignorance in the last couple of years).

@ben_h: He worked himself into a shoot, brother.

Dan is just a Midwest Andy Kaufman knock off

Dan is Dan. He makes life interesting.

"work" "shoot", does it matter?

Dan is Dan.

"Where does butter come from?"

"Is that what pirates do?"