Youtuber Lindsay Ellis Announces To Quit Twitter Because Of Online Harassment

Lindsay Ellis, a 37 years YouTuber and a best-selling author, quits Twitter and YouTube in December 2021 due to online criticism.

She has over a million subscribers on her YouTube channel, where she posts video essays and film reviews.

Lindsay was born in 1984 and grew up in Johnson City, Tennessee.

She began her career in 2008 as part of the Channel Awesome production company under the web name The Nostalgia Chick.

In 2014, Ellis quit Channel Awesome to focus on creating long-form video essays and her writing.

On her YouTube channel, Ellis frequently makes videos about Walt Disney Pictures films and a long-running series about the Transformers films and video essays about the film industry.

According to Ellis, her favorite topics are “things that are deeply flawed but have this really interesting potential.”

She published her sci-fi debut novel, Axiom’s End, in July 2020, and it quickly became a New York Times Best Seller.

In early 2020, Ellis began the podcast MusicalSplaining, where she talks about musicals with her co-host, director, and illustrator Kaveh Taherian.

The star has been targeted by online harassment throughout her career, which led to her retirement from YouTube and Twitter in December 2021.

Why has Lindsay Ellis quit Twitter?

On December 28, 2021, Lindsay Ellis announced on Twitter that she is quitting her career as a content creator.

She shared a Patreon blog post titled “Walking away from Omelas”, breaking the news to her fans.

According to her followers, this decision came after being “harassed to her breaking point” for an old tweet where she said Disney’s Raya And The Last Dragon was very similar to Avatar: The Last Airbender.

The tweet, which has since been deleted, was posted on March 26, 2021, and was quickly followed by another, where Lindsay explained she didn’t mean to imply that “all Asian-inspired properties are the same.”

What Did Lindsay Ellis say?

The two deleted tweets, which started a mass of online trolls, discussed Disney’s 2021 animation Raya and The Last Dragon based on traditional Southeast Asian cultures.

After seeing the film, Lindsay tweeted: “Also watched Raya and the Last Dragon and I think we need to come up with a name for this genre that is basically Avatar: the Last Airbender reduxes. It’s like half of all YA fantasy published in the last few years anyway.”

This triggered a surge of criticism, with people declaring her tweet suggested Avatar was the starting point of stories inspired by Eastern cultures.

She immediately shared a follow-up tweet: “I can see where if you squint I was implying all Asian-inspired properties are the same, especially if you were already privy to those conversations where I had not seen them. But the basic framework of TLA is becoming popular in fantasy fiction outside of Asian inspired stuff.“

In a Patreon blog post declaring her retirement from social media, Lindsay said: “I know now that being in the public eye at all is a losing game, and I regret all of it.

“It’s all hollow and brittle, and if there is one thing I’ve learned this year it is how eminently expendable I am.”