This Kid Cosplaying as an Apology Video Was the True Star of VidCon
July 15, 2019Every year, the vloggers of the world gather at VidCon, an event where fans scream over their favorite stars from YouTube and now TikTok to flex the platforms’ relevance IRL. The convention's tenth anniversary this weekend included a stacked list of "featured creators" that might not ring any bells unless you spend a lot of time following the overshared online lives of vloggers. (It's where attention fiends Tana Mongeau and Jake Paul announced their wedding date via poem, for example.)
Amid all those small screen stars, an unexpected attendee stole the show. A video posted on Twitter by The Atlantic journalist Taylor Lorenz on Friday shows a kid, known on Twitter as @PugLoca (with the display name "Apology kid @vidcon"), dressed in highly meta fashion as a YouTube apology video.
In the short clip, which now has over 700,000 likes on Twitter, PugLoca's head pokes out from a hole in a piece of cardboard that's printed to look like a YouTube video titled "My apology." While feigning tears, he says, "I'm sorry for making a TikTok at my grandmother's funeral. I'm sorry for filming a dead body." Around him, the costume is full of all the tropes of an influencer apology: a blurry couch background, 5 million downvotes, a box of tissues, and plenty of ad breaks.
As we've written about before, apology videos are so common on YouTube that they've basically become a joke, spinning off an entire genre of reviews, memes, round-up videos, and now cosplay, too. To be fair, PugLoca isn't the first to do the apology video costume; that's credited to JacksFilms, who posted "I'm an Apology Video for Halloween" in October of last year, but PugLoca is clearly a fan judging by the link to JacksFilms merch in his Twitter bio and the fact that his pinned tweet is a video from VidCon of JacksFilms cheering him on.
Even if he's not the first to the joke, we applaud this kid's bravado for going all in and making fun of influencers, right on their home turf. If he was on YouTube, we'd like—and maybe even subscribe.
