Kelly Cartera

Kelly Autumn Cartera(born Jonathan Andrus; December 16, 2003 [age 18]) is an American YouTuber and internet entrepreneur best known for her various webseries on the platform, including AndrusTV and Hey Emry!. In 2019, Cartera temporarily left YouTube, with intent to create her own video hosting platform, Viare, however she has made breif returns to YouTube in November 2020, and in July 2021. Cartera is transgender.
==YouTube==
===Jonathan Andrus===
Cartera joined YouTube at the age of nine in 2012, with an account simply under her own name at the time, Jonathan Andrus. However, she would not began to upload to YouTube until November of 2015. Cartera upload a range of content to the Jonathan Andrus channel, as she learned and perfected her editing skills. Especially of note and popularity (comparatively popular for her channel, at least) were her stop-motion animation videos, and her fake movie trailers.
Cartera continued to upload irregularly to the Jonathan Andrus channel until mid 2018, when she abandoned the channel to move on to larger projects, her various webseries.
===AndrusTV===
On June 29, 2018, Cartera launched AndrusTV, her first official webseries. Compared to her previous content, AndrusTV proved groundbreaking for Cartera, having more guests than before, recurring characters, animation interacting with live action characters and environments, among other noticeable changes and improvements in content quality and style. Because of this, AndrusTV and by extension Cartera were able to gain some small amount of recognition and a decent following. At it's peak, AndrusTV held 1.75k subscribers. Some of the notable and most viewed videos from the channel include "Bill Todd For House of Representatives" (a political satire video), "What's In Jonathan's Mail" (in which "YouTube" sent Cartera a paper play button for reaching 100 subscribers), and "The Spooktober Anthology" (a Halloween special which remains Cartera's most viewed and most liked video ever).
With the success of AndrusTV, several off-shoot channels were created; Gary the Ghost (planned to be a spin-off series based on a secondary character named Gary), AndrusMusic (a channel for uploading audio tracks used in the series), and Miscellaneous2 (a secondary, personal channel of Cartera's).
The last episode of the first season of AndrusTV was uploaded to YouTube on January 30, 2019. A little more than a week and a half later, a teaser³ for the second season was released. Despite numerous attempts to bring the second season to life (even attempts in early 2020 at an AndrusTV film), AndrusTV has remained on permanent hiatus ever since. Reasons as to why all attempts at more AndrusTV episodes have failed remain unclear. Most likely, the conception, and later creation, of Viare, and Cartera beginning to (based on social media history; see next section for an example) confront being transgender were major reasons to AndrusTV's hiatus.
Since it's final upload, changes have been routinely made to AndrusTV's canon, with some episodes and trailers even having been deleted. Many of these deleted videos are still viewable, having been archived by a fan account. One of the precluded videos actually depicts Cartera coming out as transgender, though it is treated as joke to make fun of EA Games, which may suggest that its deletion is directly linked to Cartera being transgender in real life.
===Hey Emry!===
In summer of 2019, Cartera started another webseries called "Hey Emry!", on a channel of the same name. The show initially only ran three episodes before the channel as a whole was eventually deleted. Cartera has not cited a reason for the cancellation of the show's initial run.
On November 30, Cartera recreated the Hey Emry! channel and uploaded a new episode of the show, branding it as the "second season". She also reuploaded the third and final episode of the first season of the show to the channel, claiming it to be "all that remains of Hey Emry!'s original run". The second season of Hey Emry! consisted of four episodes uploaded weekly between Thanksgiving and Christmas of 2020.
The second season premiere, "Back 2 School Part I", proved to be a milestone for Cartera, as it was the first video of hers to use her new name and acknowledge her dysphoria.
===Excucio Cartera===
In late October of 2019, Cartera created another eponymous channel, using her common pseudonym at the time, Excucio Cartera. Though Cartera's face was the channel's profile photo, none of the videos showed Cartera in person, a practice no other channel of hers had with-held. This, combined with this being the fact that this was Cartera's first and only time using a pseudonym on YouTube without seeming to portray a character, suggests that this was around the time Cartera began to either question or alter her identity in relation to being trans. Reddit posts from the time, from a now-deleted account presumed to have belonged to Cartera, further corroborate this.
After the final upload to Excucio Cartera in November of 2019, Cartera left YouTube, but returned a year later for the second season of Hey Emry!.
=== Kelly===
On June 29, 2021, Cartera created a third eponymous channel; Kelly. According to the channel's about section, it will be a personal channel of Cartera's uploading a variety of content - similar to her previous eponymous channels. The channel's first video was uploaded on July 6, 2021, followed by another video on July 9. No videos have been uploaded since, even though Cartera had promised a permanent return to YouTube.
== Viare ==
===Background and Creation===
Over time, Cartera became disgruntled with YouTube over the platform's demonetization policies. When YouTube announced in May that it would begin abbreviating subscriber counts, Cartera viewed that as the last straw (despite the fact that she had never experienced demonetization nor subscriber count abbreviation because all of her channels had less than 1,000 subscribers at the time of YouTube's announcement).
On May 25th, Cartera uploaded an eight-minute rant video to Miscellaneous2 entitled "Goodbye YouTube?". As the title suggests, in the video she touted the idea of leaving the platform due to all the changes made since she first arrived on YouTube. Later that same day, Cartera expressed her anger personally to her brother, who agreed with her that YouTube's policies were a problem. The two conspired to create their own video-hosting platform called Viare. Work on the new site began later the next month.
===Present Status===
Since it's creation began Cartera has served as the de facto head of marketing for Viare. According to the official Viare wiki, the site is currently in it's testing phase. Several release dates have been given, but ultimately, have all been pushed back. The latest given date is summer of 2021, however, a lack of recent information despite the purported specified timeframe, and Cartera's return to YouTube through her "Kelly" channel, makes it seemingly unlikely that the site will launch when stated, if at all.
The platform has business accounts on YouTube and Twitter, but both have largely remained inactive. Cartera runs all of Viare's business profiles on social media. Cartera's channel Miscellaneous2 was converted into Viare's official YouTube page. On September 12, 2020, Viare's first YouTube ad campaign launched. The first and so far only ad has received over 750 views as of June 2021.
On September 24, Cartera stated in detail in a Twitter thread that whether or not she would return to YouTube depends solely on the success or failure of Viare when it is eventually released. A few of her first Viare videos will be simultaneously uploaded to YouTube as a way to entice viewers to sign up for Viare.
==Personal Life==
Cartera was born in New York, but currently resides in North Carolina.
Cartera has an interest in politics. In 2018, she petitioned the town of Harrisburg, North Carolina to adopt a town flag. She would sometimes mock politics or current events in past YouTube videos. She did not endorse a candidate in the 2020 United States election, but she did advocate against and mock Donald Trump's claims of election fraud on social media.
Suspicion that Cartera might be transgender arose in early 2020, when a Reddit account used to advertise AndrusTV videos (presumably owned by Cartera) began making comments about being a trans-woman and became active in LGBT Reddit communities. The account was deleted in mid 2020. Not long after, a Twitter account by the name of Kelly Cartera spiked in activity (For about a year prior, Cartera used the alias "Excucio Cartera" on Twitter). Cartera first indirectly publicly disclosed being transgender in August 2020 on Viare's official wiki site, Viarepedia, by writing about herself being trans on her wiki page. In early October, she posted a picture of herself to Twitter, on the Kelly Cartera account (providing further confirmation), with the caption "the before", suggesting it possibly being a before and after comparison, probably relating to her transition. On November 30, 2020, she referred to herself as "Kelly" and acknowledged having dysphoria for the first time in a YouTube video.
==Footnotes==
1. Due to deleted videos and even deleted accounts, it is hard to get an accurate number on the total number of videos Cartera has uploaded to YouTube. 70 roughly equates to all those still publicly visible, with a margin of error accounting for interpretation as to whether or not re-uploads by unassociated accounts qualify in the total.
2. Cartera maintains Viare's official YouTube page and all it's uploads. She will also upload her Viare videos simultaneously to YouTube for the first five weeks after Viare's lunch as a part of Viare's marketing.
3. It is debatable as to whether the video "Foreshadowing (The Sign)" is to be considered just a teaser for AndrusTV season 2, or the first episode of AndrusTV season 2. The dispute arises from previously mentioned changes to the show's canon.
==References==
Category:Vlogging YouTubers
Category:Animation YouTubers
Category:Review YouTubers
Category:American YouTubers
Category:Users who joined in 2012
Category:LGBT YouTubers