Day 27: A Lost Piece of Yandere Simulator History (Patreon)

You've heard of YouTooz, right? They're a company that manufactures collectible figurines of popular Internet creators.

In 2019, I began speaking with YouTooz about the possibility of releasing a figurine. Because Ayano is my "mascot," and because one of my biggest dreams is to sell a physical figurine of Ayano, we started designing a Yandere-chan figurine together.

As you can tell from the concept art and 3D renders above, we had a figure fully designed and ready to be manufactured. We even had an announcement date and a release date planned. But, then, less than 24 hours before the announcement was set to go live...

I was given the "YouTooz Partner" role inside of the YouTooz Discord server, which instantly made a lot of people realize that I was going to be getting a YouTooz figurine. Some of those people were anti-YandereDev haters who had been brainwashed into believing in a false perception of me by drama YouTubers who had mischaracterized me. Those people began spamming YouTooz with messages telling them that I was a horrible person that they shouldn't work with. This really spooked YouTooz, so they put the figurine on hold.

It was very easy for me to quickly explain to YouTooz that those people were a delusional hate cult with zero credibility, that nothing they said about me was actually true, and that it was trivially easy to debunk any of the misinformation and false accusations that they enjoyed spreading about me. YouTooz, being a company composed of intelligent adults, understood the situation very quickly. However, they were very concerned about receiving harassment and bad press for working with me, so the figure was postponed indefinitely.

To be honest, I felt very hurt by their decision. YouTooz, at that point in time, had already worked with multiple very controversial creators; creators who had been accused of extremely egregious misconduct; creators whose inappropriate behavior and undesirable character traits were very well-documented; creators whose critics actually had valid evidence to back up their claims.

"YouTooz will happily work with creators as controversial as _____, _____, and _____, but they've gotten cold feet about working with me after receiving just a few stupid messages from some of the least-credible people on the Internet? Huh?"

I have to admit, that really stung.

Then, 2020 happened. The worst year of my life; the year in which the misinformation and false accusations about me went viral and reached millions of people, dooming me to face harassment and abuse on a daily basis indefinitely; mistreatment that still persists, even as recently as today.

For a while, YouTooz would periodically reach out to me to ask if I had made any progress towards repairing my reputation. However, there was always some new false accusation or unnecessary controversy creating perpetual drama. No matter how many years passed, it never felt like the "right time" to try selling a cute figurine...so, it just never happened.

I spoke with YouTooz recently to make sure that they wouldn't be upset with me if I publicly disclosed the story above, or shared the preview images of the YouTooz figurine that we almost manufactured and sold. As always, they were friendly and professional; they gave me permission to say and show everything above. Additionally, they were open to the possibility of working together one day in the future. They also let me know that they sell a lot of anime-style figurines these days, so if I do eventually sell a Yandere-chan figurine through them, it can look more like a traditional anime figurine (big open eyes, rather than the signature YouTooz closed eyes).

That's the end of the story of the unreleased Yandere-chan figurine...for now. But, before I end this post, I'll share two interesting pieces of trivia with you:

1. At the time that I reached out to begin working with them, YouTooz was a very young company; as you can tell from the "#34" on the render above, I first contacted them back when they had released less than 3 dozen products (they are now up to 460 products).

2. At the point in time when I contacted them, it was mandatory for all YouTooz figurines to have a consistent eye shape. I was okay with that, but I suggested giving Yandere-chan girly eyelashes so that she could have a cute and feminine appearance while still retaining the signature YouTooz eye shape. Even though the figurine didn't get made, a lot of subsequent female YouTooz figurines had eyelashes, which means that YouTooz must have really liked my suggestion.