Gothic King Cobra: The Death of a Dark Star
It is not often that someone emerges from the vast expanses of the Internet to create as great a spectacle for their haters as they do their fans. Most larger than life figures borne of the digital age fall squarely on one side of the “hero/villain” archetype, but there are occasionally those who carve their own path and tread the fine line between the two, capturing onlookers from either side in abject fascination.
On August 23rd, 2025, the tragic news broke that the world had lost one of those people.
While it was relatively easy to see coming, especially given the decline of his health in the past year, well-wishers and former trolls would stand side by side as pallbearers when the confirmation came through that the subject of their preoccupation had exit the stage.
The late great KingCobraJFS — better known as “Gothic King Cobra” — was a YouTuber who catalogued massive swathes of his daily life for the last decade and a half, sparing neither the good nor the bad.
The self-proclaimed “gothic bad boy” from Casper, Wyoming provided not only insight into the bizarre rituals of his own daily life, but also a transparent and judgment-free look into the lost souls and misfits inhabiting some of the sparsest parts of America through his friends and surroundings. “The boy”, as he was referred to by his spectators, was an unapologetic, one-of-a-kind human being, and his meticulous documentation of his life allowed the viewer to watch the bittersweet journey of a dreamer at odds with the world unfold in real time.
KingCobraJFS, whose real name was Joshua Faye Saunders, was many things.
He was a weirdo, a cult leader, a son, a dating coach, autistic, a wandmaker, an alcoholic, a friend, a musician, a pervert, a cook, an Ozzy Osbourne diehard, a Wendy’s dining room attendant, a celebrity, a misfit, a curmudgeon, and much, much more.
No matter where you found him in his journey through life, there was something that simply enraptured you with Cobes.
He was an old-world guy who just happened to exist at a time where there was the Internet. He understood technology and the phenomenon of social media in a way that I would describe as “passable”, just enough to carve out his own little corner of the Internet and then flood the zone with near daily video documentation of his life. Cobra’s channel was like when you spend two hours talking to the strangest person you’ve ever met at an adjacent barstool and then are left with the resounding curiosity about what the rest of their life looks like.
There were none of today’s complex, therapy-talk explanations of his own behavior or antics either. All of his eccentricities and Cobra-isms were distinctly his own, both good and bad. Cobra never let anyone or their words put him into a box. He refused to let anyone else define him or his life other than himself, even if it resulted in lying or deviating from reality entirely.
Even his friends and family were not exempted from this stubbornness, however. Josh regularly turned down the advice of his loved ones or well-wishing fans in the same way that he discarded the suggestions of his trolls. This frequent stubbornness was a result of his Aspergers (and debated, but very likely Oppositional Defiant Disorder), and while it was likely a large part of the reason that he was so committed to following his own path, it also caused a lot of hardship and avoidable suffering in his own life.
Even though the world was fascinated with him for years (he had THREE full-length documentaries made about him), he was largely uninterested and notoriously slippery if it resulted in even the slightest friction in his day-to-day. Even the documentaries he would agree to participate in he sometimes would later sour at, claiming that they portrayed him unfairly, but more likely because they attempted to tell his story in a way that would require loosening his own iron grip on the Gothic King Cobra narrative.
When it came down to exactly what made Josh captivating enough to be the subject of documentaries and over a decade of fascination, it was hard to pin down a specific reason. On paper, he was nothing too exceptional. Just a weird guy who liked cobras, Ozzy Osbourne, and alcohol.
However, when most people discovered him in the 2014 documentary Gothic King Cobra, — which is the best documentary of him, in my opinion — there was one unifying thing that people looking back seem to feel: they wanted to see this weird guy succeed in a world that seemed so hostile to him.
When a young Josh talked about his dreams of making it big as a musician or YouTube personality and building his clocktower dream house, there is a familiar naivete in his rhetoric that anyone who grew up strange or out-of-place would feel — the cherished dream of a better life that keeps you motivated while trying to simply make the best of a duller and more difficult material reality.
If you only ever saw this version of Josh from the documentary, you would be able to hope for the best.
However, you would also never get the full, very bittersweet picture of the boy. You would never be able to see the highest highs — getting his own place and the collection of friends Josh made, nor the lowest lows, such as his evictions and slowly devolving into agoraphobia and alcoholism at the cost of his health, in part due to forces outside of Josh’s control.
It is only with this duality that we are able to evaluate the true Gothic King Cobra legacy.
On one hand, Josh did accomplish his goals. He started a cult that was bigger than he ever could have imagined and affected millions of people. He got to smoke, drink, and shred guitar all he wanted and got paid for it, just like Ozzy. Despite his perpetual money troubles, he was able to use his meager earnings and notoriety to try and help his friends who were in need. Even now, his name is more synonymous with the goofy, misfit stars of the early Internet than today’s more nefarious and capitalistic Internet celebrities.
He ultimately achieved the fame he desired when he began sharing videos with the world, and he would no doubt be floored by the amount of love poured out for him and drink combos raised upon his death.
On the other hand, in part due to his meticulous recording of his own life, we are able to see that bright-eyed, awkward boy from the documentary devolve into a shell of his former self. Someone like Cobra was a prime target for online trolls, and they latched on and began to suck the life out of him like leeches. We watched his health, his privacy, his social circle, and even his speech slowly degrade over the years due to abuse from not only the trolls, but his relationship to his vices and his own decision making.
When it comes to fully encompassing Josh’s appeal to the world, however, simply saying that he was unique was an understatement. Josh represented a lot to his viewers, even if he wasn’t always cognizant of his own impact.
Josh would ironically paint a grand portrait of American individualism and how it looks in an applied setting versus the more abstracted versions that are easier to digest. In part due to immutable aspects of himself and in part due to his own personal choices and style, he was someone that the average American would be unable to understand at best, or would be repulsed by at worst.
Not just with his conscious decisions would Josh set himself apart from others, but many of his behaviors, ideologies, and even routines were simply inexplicable to the average person. There is perhaps no greater example than in one of his most iconic videos where he dyes his hair, along with most of his head, shoulders, and face.
This video is a perfect example of the incompatibility with normal life that made Cobra so entertaining to watch.
Cobra gets a call just before beginning to dye his hair that he was supposed to come into work hours ago, but that he can come in at four instead. Josh is frustrated but shrugs it off quickly, and dives right back into dyeing his hair for the video. By the end of it, he is completely covered in dye before he needs to leave for Wendy’s to work the remainder of his shift. Despite this, he is able to laugh at not only how crazy he looks, but also the absurdity of the situation.
His quote, “But if anything, this video at least gives you a good laugh and helps you appreciate life a little more, because like I said, it could be worse”, is a perfect seal on the video.
Moments like this where Cobra defies reason and instead does his own thing would come to define the exact type of thing that drew fans back to Cobra’s channel time and time again. With Cobra it seemed that there was some sort of supernatural force that caused even normal things to go awry, and it was part of the journey to see how Cobes would adjust.
In addition to this, Josh’s own retelling of events would usually make it even more entertaining. Josh was not what you would call a “reliable narrator” by any stretch. He was known to embellish stories in his favor, but his own additions to stories were usually so transparent that it resulted in the viewer having to approximate the truth behind his words.
One of his favorite things to tack on in stories was tied to his favorite soap, Tactical Soap, who he actually was sponsored by at one point. Josh would be recounting an experience in the real world, and somehow a beautiful woman would always be overheard by him saying “Daaaaamn, that goth dude smells good!”, no where he was. This was apparently such a common thing to happen to Cobra that it became a reoccurring joke for fans, who were always on the lookout for the “gothic bad boy who smells good” in the real world.
One of the small moments I will always remember is when a young Cobra tried to get approved for a $200 payday loan to pay some bills, but is only able to successfully leave with a loan of $15 — which he immediately spends on Little Caesar’s pizza instead, then eats it while recounting the story for his YouTube audience. Money management was never his strong point, but it is a charmingly Cobra moment. Things don’t go exactly how he planned on his greater plan of paying the bills, so he just takes what he can get and buys a pizza instead. The bills are still unpaid, but at least he’s not hungry anymore.
Josh, for better or worse, couldn’t cut “Gothic King Cobra” off. He was the tobacco-smoking, gothic, heavy metal cowboy 24/7, whether the camera was rolling or not — and authenticity like that is exceedingly rare, especially in the era of influencers and clout capital. There was no persona for the camera, the Josh you saw on your screen was the exact same wizard roaming around Casper and using magic to influence the walk signals at intersections.
The boy loved magic, metal, guns, weed, booze, and of course, cobras. Cobra was not afraid to wear eyeliner, a spike collar, or paint his nails, long before any of these were cool again with the 2018-ish soft goth relaunch. Cobra had his own specific style that was impossible to emulate, and while there were always gothic undertones, he occasionally veered into cowboy territory too, likely a result of his town.
He was proud to live in Casper, even if he was the only guy walking around with a tricorne hat. People would ask Josh if he ever planned to move somewhere more populated in order to further his music or YouTube career, but he was adamant about staying in Casper. He loved the people, he loved that it was smaller and more isolated, and he always planned his clocktower dream house to be erected there. I always liked how much Josh would go to bat for Casper. Small town America is a different beast entirely, and it’s unusual to hear someone so different feel at home in their small town instead of trying to fly the coop at the first chance.
One of the most profound cultural contributions from Gothic King Cobra, which eventually bled into his viewers, fans and haters alike, was the distinct Cobra-isms. This was one of the strangest parts of his brand — the language in his comments over the years slowly warped to become largely made up of his own sayings, parroted back and remixed by his viewers as a whole.
Some of his most notable and oft-repeated sayings, like “that’s what’s up” (commonly abbreviated as “twu” or “tmdwu” for “most definitely”) and “toobz” (shorthand for YouTube, but specifically to refer to the viewers) would become integral parts of the Cobra dictionary. Other common phrases such as “buuuuuut, I digress…”, “fuck the trolls”, “fuck sickos”, and “not a sponsor”, which he would use almost every time he mentioned a branded product, would become Cobra-isms too.
Cobra would also cast a “circle of protection” on whomever he deemed worthy of its blessing, and this became a common phrase among fans too. Fans would commission Cobra on Cameo for personal shoutouts, complete with their own circle of protection from the wizard himself.
The trolls would even create their own additions to the Cobra lexicon, such as calling him “boglim”, calling his living spaces “the bog”, and utilizing “BOY”, which was usually an attempt to goad him into doing something through reverse psychology — the most notable example being “Better not go live tonight BOY!”, which usually resulted in Josh doing the exact thing the trolls wanted as an act of defiance. Despite the innate meanness of these terms, Josh himself would even borrow from these terms to describe himself — they become essential parts of the Cobra lexicon just like his own creations.
Josh also had a sort of laundry list that he would use as a preface every single time he would describe a hypothetical woman he could be interested in. His criteria: “of age, alive, cisgender, consenting, non-related”. Josh would list all of these traits in rapid-fire bursts to save time, but he would almost never omit them.
To look at the scale of the Cobra Cult’s language, look at any of the comments about him. Comments mourning him integrate his own vocabulary into their epitaphs for the boy. Fans and former trolls alike use these words and phrases as terms of endearment when describing Josh and the impact he had on their lives.
In addition to his own personal eccentricities, Josh was also a popular guy around the stranger parts of Casper. Throughout the years, we were introduced to a lot of characters in Josh’s circle (dubbed the “Cobraverse” by fans) that were all similarly ill-equipped for the difficulties of modern life.
None were perfect, or even good people necessarily, but as other misfits in the small town of Casper they found community at the Cobra’s Den. Some of the more favorably regarded people, such as Alex Anderson and Darfliny, were considered good friends to Josh because they seemed to genuinely care for him and accepted him as a complicated human being.
Others, such as Scrapper Steve and Couch Chris, would be seen by Cobra’s audience as villains who took advantage of Josh’s earnest goodwill and desire to help his friends. Then, finally, you had complicated characters like Sasha (formerly known as Warlord) and Homeboy Scotty, who both had tumultuous relationships with Josh — though usually okay friends, they were also considered extremely annoying by fans and both had a propensity for telling tall tales to someone who was very trusting.
While Josh certainly got burned by several people he helped, his propensity to try to help others out in times of need was one of his most noble and understated traits. Couch Chris took advantage of Josh’s kindness, but Josh let Couch Chris sleep on his couch for months after he lost a place to stay. Even though things eventually came to a head and it was time for Couch Chris to vacate, Josh endured months of his freeloading and antagonizing in the hopes that he would be able to help his friend who was down on his luck.
When Josh was enamored with a girl — who did not share the same feelings for the gothic bad boy — he still took the time to try to raise money for a cause she believed in, the Old Friends Senior Dog Sanctuary. Though his intentions were definitely to get laid, he still ended up getting his fans to donate a fair amount of money that almost certainly did some good in the world.
Though Josh is definitely an imperfect person, it is undeniable that he was charitable despite his station in life. He never looked down on anyone because he knew what it was like to be judged and exiled for being different.
In the self-titled 2014 documentary, the person who introduces Cobes himself is Jared Brown, a homeless former marine who claims to run cocaine from California to Ohio and has recently been released from prison. Jared has nothing but kind words to say about Josh, calling him “a straight up cool dude” who is “really into tobacco” and even offers to defend him after some guy drives by and calls Josh a faggot.
Even years later, after trolls had thoroughly ransacked his life and caused him to largely retreat from the public view, he would still do things like invite a random fan who drove all the way from California to his home to share a beer. Despite the worst trolls’ best efforts to try and make him harden his heart, Cobra was almost always a friend to anyone who would accept him without judgment, no matter their station in life.
The trolls are a big part of Josh’s story. A very complicated part that no one seems to want to take accountability for now that he has died. But before we can extrapolate on the complex relationship they shared with Josh, it is important to note something.
Josh was considered a “lolcow”.
For those unaware, that is someone with an online platform that is unusual or mentally ill in a way that makes them 1: easily manipulated, and 2: subject to extreme emotional reactions. While Josh was considered the “sacred cow” of lolcows, he still endured most of the worst parts that come with being a lolcow — the complete and utter lack of privacy, 24/7 trolling, and perhaps the worst part, dealing with more insidious trolls who went beyond simple name calling and were willing to ruin his real life for their own amusement.
Cobra, who was bullied in school and in real life, would ultimately find no solace online. He was an incredibly easy target for trolls, especially in his earlier days. Josh was autistic and trusting, he was easily tricked by people who he would give the benefit of the doubt to. Despite how people seem to walk back the trolling now, it is blatantly untrue to say that Josh was not constantly plagued by the trolls for most of his YouTube career — some of which are the same people memorializing him in comment sections now.
If he was not entertaining them adequately, the trolls would do almost anything to provoke him into an emotional reaction. With this, no matter what the consequences were for Josh, they could be entertained forever. This cycle would continue with Josh lashing out from frustration and doing something mean or stupid, which would give the trolls something to point to as a justification for their mistreatment.
A really critical point to examine for where the trolling crossed the line from simply being mean to directly affecting Josh’s life in a negative way is when the trolls got Josh fired from Wendy’s.
In 2016, after four years of working at this Wendy’s, Josh was unexpectedly fired because a troll called and filed a complaint against Josh with the Wendy’s corporate office. This one simple act of wanton cruelty resulted in a much greater ripple effect that negatively affected Josh.
While the trolls could pick at Josh for whatever reason over his videos, getting him fired from his job in the real world was another beast entirely. Though he was only working one or two days a week (his income was supplemented with disability), this set a terrible precedent for Josh. Whatever job he had could now be disrupted easily by people online with time on their hands.
Work was good for Josh. He got out, he was around people, and he got paid. The best years of Gothic King Cobra were without a doubt the years that he was spending the most time outside, whether walking or biking. Work kept him busy and relatively responsible, and his videos were still fun to watch because he maintained a fair amount of free time. Without work, we usually saw Josh turn into more of a recluse, where his health and well-being would begin to suffer.
After a while, Josh worked another job as a dishwasher at The Office Bar and Grill for about a year, but he put in his two weeks and decided to do it his own way with an Etsy shop making homemade wands. One would think that by becoming self-employed Josh would be immune to the trolls, but the trolls instead just immersed themselves in a campaign to get him banned from every establishment in Casper.
Josh was never a perfect customer by any means, but any time he would mention being at a bar or start streaming at an event, trolls would immediately find the business and begin calling and leaving Google reviews about Josh. The trolls followed him around like flies. Eventually places began banning him from coming — deciding it was easier to forgo the entire thing than try to navigate whatever was going on with Cobra.
This was an incredibly effective way to make Cobra become a shut-in, which began quickly after this period. Even with refusing to leave his house for long periods of time, Josh was not safe from the trolls. They even got him swatted in 2019 while making a video and eating a sandwich in his apartment. Every day, trolls would text Josh to antagonize him, and he would respond to almost every single one — likely a result of his suspected ODD.
This further illustrated that there was no “off” switch for the trolls. No matter whether Josh was posting online or not, he was fair game for the trolls. Any girl who Josh mentioned his interest in in a video would be instantly searched up and contacted by numerous trolls. He accidentally leaked his home address at some point and trolls would send Grindr dates, DoorDash orders, and police to his house while he was livestreaming.
While the DoorDash orders were simply irritating for Josh, the true damage was when trolls began sending him alcohol and duster.
Josh, who was never one to turn down free booze, was always happy to guzzle it to “own the trolls” or thank the “fans” who provided it. Eventually he began huffing the duster recreationally as well. While Josh was the one who decided to consume the things arriving at his doorstep, it is also worth recognizing that he was a through-and-through alcoholic with poor impulse control who had been turned into a shut-in by the very same trolls. There was really not much else for him to lose at that point.
Trolls would send him things like Everclear or Absinthe to get him as drunk as possible on livestreams, hoping for a meltdown that would result in him screaming and getting the cops called on him or passing out entirely. Josh still ultimately had the agency to refuse these things, but what other addict could be supplied with a free, never-ending source of their drug of choice and say no?
This, along with Cobra’s very poor diet, were what I approximate to be primary sources of the sharp decline in his health in the last 3 years or so. With an endless supply of booze, no reason to go outside, and only DoorDash and his own juvenile cooking habits to sustain him, Josh’s health began a freefall pretty quickly. His teeth were starting to rot, his skin was pale, and he even began to bloat in the ways that can result from one’s liver having trouble processing alcohol.
Ultimately, even the event that started the beginning of the end was expedited by trolls.
Josh was in the midst of a 6 year dryspell — a fact he reminded us of in almost every video. He even discusses it in Empire of Dirt, saying that he had “given up on dating”.
When Jessica, known by her online handle “Naked and Laughing” (NAL), began showing romantic interest in Cobra, it seemed things were about to shake up. This is cited as the “grand finale” in the many sagas of Cobra, because it is ultimately what got him evicted from his apartment and forced him to move into the trailer that he died in.
Cobra and NAL were both unstable people. To the trolls, there was nothing more exciting than the possibility of putting them into the same room. Trolls helped crowdfund Jessica’s plane ticket to Casper in order to see the lols unfold in real time. Josh, naturally, was beyond happy to endure the trouble their relationship caused him if it meant owning the trolls.
As expected, things did not go well, and the two got into such a bad fight that Cobra left his own apartment on the second visit while Jessica flooded the laundry room and ultimately got him served an eviction notice — though he was already on thin ice even before this.
Since this was Josh’s second eviction, he was moved into a trailer by his father where he would likely be safe from having his housing jeopardized again. This move, however, would destroy the last bit of agency that Josh ever had. Aside from one more ill-fated visit from Jessica and a few sporadic visits from friends, the trailer Josh lived in was a complete vacuum.
Josh spent most of his time in there drinking and recording videos of his most rehashed subjects — food, drink, and rants. Fans and trolls alike speculated that this would be the last stop for Josh before he died, and the predictions would ultimately prove true. For about a year his health deteriorated rapidly and it was clear his drinking was at an all-time high. Josh died in his sleep of what is suspected to be a heart attack.
Ultimately, the most ardent trolls only managed a pyrrhic victory.
Josh’s final year was spent largely in one room for the viewers. There were no more videos of him roaming around Casper, no more random members of the Cobraverse appearing, no more documentaries getting filmed, just a lot of DoorDash and drinking. The funny, awkward, bright-eyed guy from Casper was long gone — replaced by an alcoholic recluse, the remainder of whose life was spent almost entirely by himself in his single-wide.
While Josh has certainly made a lot of his own uniquely bad decisions over the years, it is a disservice to not account for the impact of the casual cruelty of trolls in disintegrating his already low standard of life over the years. We don’t know what Josh’s life would have looked like if he hadn’t been tracked and tormented every day, driven away from every place where he could potentially find companionship and socialization by anonymous trolls, but it is hard to believe that he would have naturally ended up dying alone in his trailer at 34.
Ironically, it seems to be the same traits that set him apart from others and made him into the funny, one-of-a-kind guy that he was that also garnered the most hatred from his trolls. The same stubbornness that prevented him from ever admitting defeat to the trolls or accepting help was the same stubbornness that drove them to break his spirit at any cost.
The trolls now must sit with the consequences of their actions — their beloved subject of ridicule is gone, largely due to the efforts of the person reflecting back at them on the screen. After pushing someone for a decade, eventually there are permanent consequences and you can no longer walk back your actions as “just trolling” — you can see this in the comments now. There are no more mean comments like there were for the duration of his life, the same trolls that antagonized him for years seemed to conveniently disappear once there was potential for their actions to be linked in any way to his passing.
For those who weren’t trolls, though, there is a void in our hearts where Josh once was.
Josh represented a lot to us. Josh was a symbol of believing in one’s self, even to a fault. Gothic King Cobra’s story was not one of victory or defeat, his story was one of perseverance and preservation of self despite the world’s efforts to sand you down. Many people in this world want to be one-of-a-kind, but few are strong enough to face the challenges that accompany it. Josh was a complicated, imperfect person who was very open about his flaws and never turned his nose up at anyone who was worse off than him.
And no matter what, Josh always maintained his own personal victories. Though he was constantly broke, he was his own boss, which think was far more important to him anyway. Almost all of his income in his last 7 years was through YouTube, music sales, his t-shirt business, and his wand-making business. Though he was tormented by the trolls, Josh was not incorrect when he said he “ruled their sad, pathetic lives” — his own passing was of as great consequence to them as it was the fans. And after all the shit he got for his wizardry and wands being “fake and gay”, here is the sagely Cobra solemnly predicting his own year and cause of death with eerie accuracy years and years ago.
The boy will be missed greatly.
As Hunter S. Thompson said, “There he goes. One of God’s own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die.” TMDWU, toobz.
One final thing I would like to discuss in the Gothic King Cobra story is the complex relationship between Cobra himself and the major Cobra channels — primarily Bitesize Cobra and Boglim Chronicles. These relationships exist somewhere outside of the fan/troll dichotomy, because both channels (despite their varying opinions of Josh over time) have served as something of an archive of the boy.
Despite his eccentricities, the actual KingCobraJFS channel videos were usually fairly uninteresting. Most of Josh’s videos were either extremely brief or hours-long slogs that consisted of him either eating junk food, pouring a heavy alcoholic beverage, or going on long rants about gender relations or current events. Even in the past, the videos from the “golden age” were still extremely long and unfocused videos. Even incredible snapshot moments such as the hair dye incident were just random moments in the day’s untitled upload.
Because of the sheer volume of video footage that Cobra put out, many of the channels that were responsible for his rise in popularity were channels that edited down his videos into more interesting or entertaining cuts. Famous Cobraverse channels like Boglim Chronicles or Bitesize Cobra ended up becoming hubs for trolls, jumping off points for new onlookers, and unofficial orators of the history of Cobra.
Josh and the creators of these channels had an antagonistic relationship — albeit a mutually beneficial one as well. The channels were usually more critical of Josh while he was alive (though without any of the actual harm that the real trolls were doing), which made Josh hate them. Despite this, they also meticulously watched his videos and edited them into smaller, more focused videos that would boost Cobra’s fame more than his own uploads could ever hope to do. Many of Cobra’s best and worst moments, especially from deleted livestreams and videos, have been captured by these two channels in their parallel existence to Cobra himself.
Bitesize Cobra in particular has compiled hours and hours of footage into explaining Josh’s life story, explaining some of the major members of the Cobraverse, and even extensively detailing Josh’s time working at Wendy’s. It is hard to imagine, but almost every single second of each of these short documentaries is derived directly from something Josh uploaded at one point.
The series that explains all of Josh’s recorded history in particular is exceptionally fascinating — the level of attention to detail and digging through old and lost videos is staggering. This is probably the singular most important resource one could use if interested in learning about Gothic King Cobra’s life — it is the best comprehensive history of Cobra, bar none.
Josh never cared about editing down his videos into something more palatable, let alone archiving his own story and videos, so despite his own disdain for channels like Bitesize Cobra, Josh does owe them somewhat for preserving his legacy — even if it includes some parts he wishes were left out.
It raises a lot of interesting questions about the role of archivists in a situation like this. What do we say to an archivist who may go against the wishes of their subject? Is the archivists’ obligation to history to detail the good, the bad, and the ugly altogether? Someone like Cobra would likely have wanted them shut down entirely, even if their work boosted his own success and provided a massive contextual history to someone as complicated as him.
As I researched to write this, I found myself at something of a crossroads. I would personally say that both channels are somewhat charitable to Josh — especially compared to many of the trolls in the later years. Both Bitesize and Boglim Chronicles have their own interpretations of Josh, but neither includes much of it in their videos and instead simply present the boy in a more accessible way. Both channels really do provide an incredible backlog of his work as well, especially on moments from earlier in his YouTube career that have been carelessly deleted or lost by Josh himself.
By the same token, however, I can understand why Josh was not ever a big fan of them. For someone who televised his life by his own volition and dealt with a ton of repercussions, it was probably frustrating to have his own content receive higher viewership because it was condensed and focused instead of longform and meandering. For Josh, his own blunders and mistakes could likely be forgotten about, but Bitesize and Boglim Chronicles putting it into a video would ensure that he was never able to let it die down.
Ultimately, however, I would say their presence was more good than bad. When we come back to revisit the old Cobra videos, channels like Bitesize Cobra and Boglim Chronicles are usually the best (and sometimes only) avenue to watch the young wizard who worked at Wendy’s. And for their work in preserving the legacy of YouTube’s Gothic King Cobra, I am thankful.
