Every Day With HOOK Is a Happy One: How an Experimental YouTuber Became Our Fairy of Happiness
Morning, afternoon, evening, whatever time it is for you – it’s me, Mydondon. I’m guessing most of you already know who HOOK is, right!? I honestly can’t remember when it started, but I’ve been looking forward to her videos ever since, and she’s the one who fills me with energy every single time I’m feeling down! If you still don’t know who HOOK is, then keep reading!
What does “HOOK” actually mean?
When I first got to know HOOK, I kept wondering why she’d go by that name. But it turns out “HOOK” is a music term – it means your song is so good that people fall in love with it the moment they hear it. And HOOK has always wanted her videos to be the kind people fall for at first watch, the kind you look forward to a new episode of every single day – exactly like me right now.
From singer to “experiment” YouTuber: filling your stomach before chasing your dreams
At her university’s club fair, HOOK saw the guitar club perform, and watching the rock music club looking so cool up on stage made her want to be just like them – standing on that stage, singing the songs she wanted to sing. But liking something and having a talent for it are two different things. Even though she practiced hard right up until she was about to graduate, she still didn’t make much progress, and with no money to her name she decided to put music aside for the time being and started shooting videos to upload online.
So why become a YouTuber in the first place? Maybe unlike most YouTubers, at the very, very beginning she got into it simply because YouTube seemed like easy money. Before you can chase a dream, you first have to find a way to keep yourself alive – only once your stomach is full can you keep moving toward your goal. And that’s how HOOK’s YouTube journey began. In those early days she was still slowly figuring out her style, like her very first self-written, self-acted “Murder on the Orient Express trailer.” Back then her stuff was a bit like HOWHOW’s drama-club acting videos, and it was only later, thanks to her experiment-style videos – like the “plastic wrap” clip you can still catch in her outros today – that she started to get a little famous.
There was even a time during a job interview when the interviewer recognized her as the person who made the video piling on layer after layer of hair clay. Those experiment-style videos were loved by a lot of people and drew in a huge crowd of fans, but they also attracted a ton of abuse – people calling her just some brat messing around, or scolding her for not realizing how dangerous what she was doing could be. Her mood was pretty heavy back then, and she did think about whether or not she should give up. But she didn’t think she could quit that willingly, and clinging to the mindset of not wanting all that hard work to go to waste, she pushed through that low period.
The origin of HOOK’s One-Week Challenge
To her, all that suffering was always going to be part of the process – and it’s exactly because of that pain that she became who she is today. After graduating, she decided to move back home to cut out any unnecessary expenses and keep making videos. After that she kept producing experiment-style content, and to push herself she set a little goal: to hit 100,000 subscribers within a year. But… a year later she hadn’t quite reached 100,000. Still, she did have around 20,000-30,000 subscribers, and since she’d already grown, giving up wasn’t an option – after all, you don’t bail halfway once you’ve already lathered your hair, so to speak. So she decided to keep at it for a while longer and see what would happen.
Around that same time, she realized her experiment-style videos didn’t seem to be bringing in much traffic – they weren’t getting seen all that easily. So she decided to try out some fresh material, and after a lot of thinking she landed on the One-Week Challenge: every week, she’d take on the challenge of eating only one particular type of food. It was this series that got people to start noticing HOOK, and around then she also signed with VS MEDIA, giving her more chances to do what she loved and more opportunities to land sponsorship deals. And as I’m sure you fellow fans already know, she used the chance VS MEDIA gave her to make the “Love Lab” series. In September four years ago she finally hit her goal of 100,000 subscribers. Even after pulling off that achievement, she was still working hard to find a balance between work and downtime. During the time she was preparing Love Lab, she’d be at the office from 7-8 in the morning until 1-2 in the dead of night, still researching how to make her props – exhausting, but she was genuinely happy because she got to do what she wanted to do.
After that she kept doing the One-Week Challenge, and her subscriber count grew quickly over time. But after doing the challenge for so long, her body slowly started having problems – eating a single type of food often means missing out on all sorts of nutrients, which is why she’d often break out in a ton of pimples while filming the One-Week Challenge. So after some serious thought, she planned to cut back on how often she filmed it, switching to a One-Week Challenge or even a One-Day Challenge just once a month. In a way, the “King of Cooking History” series counts as a variation on the One-Day Challenge too (I absolutely love this series, especially the Titanic episode).
Historical Showdowns: collaborating with other YouTubers
So what filled the gap left by the One-Week Challenge? The answer is the National History Showdown! It turns out HOOK actually majored in history at university, and she genuinely loves the subject, so she decided to launch a history-themed series, inviting a guest from a different country in each episode to face off over that country’s unique history. History has always been a kind of boring subject to me – back in middle school I even hated the class, because to me it was just constant memorization. But while watching HOOK’s series, it’s hard to ever feel bored; instead it’s like listening to two friends tell stories, the kind that keeps you watching.
In that series you can also see a lot of new friends HOOK has made, and you can really feel that she’s someone who treasures her friends. During the pandemic she noticed that a lot of foreign YouTubers who were supposed to head back home couldn’t return to their own countries, so she just went ahead and invited all the friends she knew over to her place to celebrate the New Year together – letting them soak up a big helping of Taiwanese flavor. And while a lot of her older friends – like the Chang twins, Huo Bao, and Tommy – show up in her videos less and less these days, more and more new friends keep appearing in her life, like Peeta publicly showing off his relationship, Huang Daqian’s fried rice, and “I’m gonna shred this pineapple~~~.”
It’s not hard to see that HOOK found a new passion in her work – but she never forgot her original dream either: holding a guitar, standing on stage, and saying what she wants to say. At 750,000 subscribers, HOOK finally made that dream come true, self-funding her very own concert, debuting her first original song, and meeting many of the fans who had quietly been supporting her from behind the screen. And at 1,000,000 she held another concert – not just one show, but two. Every time I watch the documentary of those concerts I can’t help but want to secretly cry, because as one of her fans I can feel that loneliness and that emotion of working so hard to reach your own ideal. I really hope that someday in my lifetime I’ll get to see HOOK up on that stage too.
And out of all of them, my absolute, absolute favorite has to be this song, “The Fans’ Song.” It’s only because her fans have been there with her this whole way that HOOK was able to make it this far. “As you grow up, your attention toward me might slowly fade, so I don’t want to wait until no one wants to listen anymore to finally say what’s in my heart.” HOOK has always been our happy little fairy, and even though she keeps insisting she should be the one thanking us for sticking with her until this day, the truth is it’s because we have HOOK that we fans have the energy to keep living out every single day in this world happily!
“I’ve always admired people who have an ideal, no matter what that ideal is. But I really don’t get why there’s a whole crowd of people who love pointing fingers at someone brave enough to take that first step, telling them things like that’ll never work, that’s just impossible. Why be so quick to dictate how someone else should live their life? They had the courage just to take that step, and as long as they take responsibility for their own choices and aren’t hurting anyone else – why shouldn’t they get to do what they want to do?” To everyone out there running down the same road toward your ideal: with you here in the time before the sun rises, I’m not afraid of the dark anymore.
I’m Mydondon – see you next time, and angels bless you!
Read more of my articles (personal site): https://mydondon.net/
Introducing Taylor Swift (personal site): https://mydondon.net/entertainment019/
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