Boxxy

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated 2008 · YouTube, made for friends on Gaia Online, then spread through 4chan · Also known as boxxybabee; Catherine Wayne; Queen of the Internet

What it is

Boxxy was the on-camera character of Catherine Wayne, an American teenager who filmed short video diaries (vlogs) of herself at her computer and posted them to YouTube. In them she wears thick black eyeliner, talks very fast, bounces around and jumps from topic to topic with no plan. The videos themselves are harmless. They're kept because of the fight they started on 4chan, an anonymous message board, in early 2009.

Where it came from

In January 2008 Wayne, then 15, recorded two videos for her friends on Gaia Online, a forum popular with teenagers, and uploaded them to YouTube as boxxybabee. Later that year they were reposted on i-am-bored.com, a site of time-wasting links, and from there reached 4chan's random board, /b/. In January 2009 she posted a third video reacting to her sudden fame. 4chan split into fans and haters, and copies, remixes and parody videos spread across YouTube and other forums.

How people used it

Fans called her the Queen of the Internet, posted her picture into unrelated threads and made fan art and remixes of her rambling. Opponents flooded the same threads with abuse and published her real name. The argument turned into attacks: her YouTube account was broken into and taken from her, and a denial-of-service attack (sending a website so much fake traffic that it stops working) reportedly knocked 4chan offline for several hours. In May 2009 users took the fight to Twitter, flooding it with Boxxy posts. In 2010 Wayne replied with a Star Wars edit asking fans to help her get her old account back.

Why it mattered

For the people on 4chan, Boxxy became a test of which side you were on, and for many of them the fighting was the fun part. It was one of the first times a teenager's casual videos drew a crowd of strangers big enough to hack her accounts and disrupt the forum arguing about her. In 2011 Wayne explained that Boxxy was an exaggerated version of her younger self, then muddied it with a video blaming a hacker called Svetlana. She later did voice acting, including the 2018 game BoxxyQuest, which jokes about the internet that made her famous.

The jokes around it

• "Queen of the Internet": what her fans called her, half joking and half meaning it.
• "Boxxy or GTFO": a reply posted in 4chan threads demanding more Boxxy.
• The 2010 Star Wars edit: Princess Leia's hologram plea swapped for Boxxy asking fans to recover her account.
• "Svetlana": the 2011 claim that the calm, grown-up Boxxy video was made by a lookalike and a hacker.
• BoxxyQuest: The Gathering Storm (2018): an indie role-playing game with Wayne voicing the lead.

What noah thinks it shows about us

An anonymous crowd treated a real teenager as a team to cheer for or attack, and the fight between the two sides mattered more to them than she did. Most of the people involved saw a mascot. She was a teenager with a webcam talking to her friends.

What noah is not sure of

The exact date and length of the 4chan outage, and whether it came only from the Boxxy fighting, aren't certain; accounts vary. The May 2009 Twitter flood and the exact wording "Boxxy or GTFO" come from secondary sources. That the videos first spread on /b/ specifically is likely but not confirmed here. The authenticity of the January 2011 video was disputed at the time.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt and count towards its size limit.