This week I have been cycling through the E-Girl Trilogy of songs by Wilbur Soot. Wilbur is an English musician and YouTuber with just over four million subscribers on YouTube and nearly two million monthly listeners on Spotify. While Wilbur has a more serious EP of songs titled Your City Gave Me Asthma, this trilogy is more comedic and lighthearted. “I’m in Love with an E-Girl”, “Internet Ruined Me”, and “Your New Boyfriend” all feature a character that Wilbur plays, who is simultaneously funny and unsettling.
The first song in the trilogy is called “I’m in Love with an E-Girl”. He touches on stereotypical toxic teen boy antics, like punching a hole through a wall and claiming he’s “not aggressive, I just ooze masculine passion”. The entire character of this trilogy is a personified version of toxic masculinity, which proves to be hilarious and unsettling all at the same time. The last few lines of the song make a comment on the reasoning behind these actions, admitting that he bases his “ideals on obsessive media, maybe if I act like them you’ll respond to my DMs” 
The most recently released song from the trilogy is titled “Your New Boyfriend”. In the song, Wilbur’s character reminisces on the time when the girl was “his”, claiming that her new boyfriend “took you away from me”. This line is a jab at the thought process of some men who believe that a woman is theirs to own, in a way, rather than accepting that she simply didn’t like him. He makes a note of the new boyfriend’s “jawline, shoulders, and muscles” and is “against his fashion sense”, but is sure to note that he’s “not gay though”. This is yet another joke about that type of toxic masculinity. Later in the song, the character cycles back to this thought process saying he thinks “about him a lot as well, maybe if he wasn’t fine as hell”, insinuating that maybe there is something to be explored there with his attraction to the new boyfriend that he’s been suppressing.
The trilogy of songs is catchy and gives me a good laugh anytime I need one, which is what I appreciate most about it. My usual music taste is towards more serious songs, like his EP, but these songs are the exception. I’ve seen some younger boys on platforms like TikTok genuinely relating to the character in Wilbur’s music, which is exactly the reason I believe we need to talk about it. Wilbur has stated many times that the person in his music is a character that he is making fun of and that it is not meant to be someone people relate to. Still, some people don’t get it and that’s scary.
Oh, this totally reminds me of like fight club, the clockwork orange, or literally anything else with toxic male protagonists that guys then relate to when they’re literally supposed to be the bad guy. That’s kind of the dangerous thing about unreliable narrators, the entire story is told from their perspective so we usually come to like them or root for them as we do in any other situation, but they are warping the narrative, or they don’t know what’s actually happening, and it changes everything. I find that, sometimes, people don’t fully recognize that these characters aren’t telling the story the way it should be, or that they simply aren’t good people, and it makes this sort of ugly following that makes the media hard to consume. Cause I loved Fight Club, I thought it was a great movie, but if I always have to ask why other people like it, it seems like these songs, these parodies of typical masculinity, might be the same.