Caroline Konstnar

Caroline Arielle Grossman (born: ),https://www.amazon.com/prime-video/actor/amzn1.dv.gti.006542a1-7fd9-4e92-b2f6-9d75febd3d43/ better known online as Caroline Konstnar, is a American YouTuber. The word ‘konstnär’ means ‘artist’ in Swedish, referencing her Swedish heritage, and her artistic passion and skills.
==About==
===Background===
Caroline was born in Florida and moved to New Jersey with her family. She also lived in Russia for a bit while studying at a ballet school there. She was home schooled from a young age until around high school.
Caroline is bisexual, as she has openly said on YouTube and Instagram.https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1210383052?t=00h57m39s
She has an older sister named Talia who has Chromosome 18q- Syndrome and an older brother named Joey who has autism.
Caroline is of Jewish, Czech and Swedish origins. Her mother is from Sweden and also performed ballet, and she likely inspired Caroline to do the same. Her mother is the executive director of a charity which aims to promote equality, acceptance and inclusion of people who face discrimination or exclusion as a result of their appearance. Caroline has narrated a celebratory video for the charity.
Her family have two Labradors; a yellow one named Lloyd and a black one named Millie.
She celebrated her Bat Mitzvah at a synagogue in Ridgewood, New Jersey. She donated money that she received to charity. 
She attended MineCon 2015 in London, England with her brother and parents.
In May 2022, Caroline said on an Instagram story that she had caught COVID-19.
===Ballet===
In 2016, Caroline won gold in the scholars classical section at the South African International Ballet Competition, and donated her winning prize money to Zama Dance School in Guguletu, Cape Town in South Africa.https://4crdug1m1izqix01u1hvesh1-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/11-march-2016.pdfhttps://www.pressreader.com/south-africa/cape-argus/20160308/281556584921185
She moved into her own apartment living alone when she was 14 so that she could be nearer her ballet school, since her family lived in New Jersey but her school was in New York. She said on TikTok that she was able to live there as her parents were paying her rent. Little care was taken to keep her apartment clean, as was evident from the videos she made while living there. 
===Bipolar disorder===
When she was 17, Caroline was initially diagnosed with bipolar disorder, which led to her taking a break from posting videos after suffering from a manic episode and being admitted to hospital, which she talked about in the video ‘i say inappropriate things - corncast’.
She moved back into her parents house when she was suffering with a mental break, coincidentally in time for the COVID-19 pandemic. She reported some improvement with medication. 
Upon starting college at Columbia where she studied psychology, she moved back to her apartment in New York.
After trying different medications with varying results, Caroline eventually stopped taking her medication entirely, and it was later found that she had been misdiagnosed and did not have bipolar disorder.
===Religious views===
Caroline is agnostic, but calls herself very superstitious. Speaking about Judaism, Caroline considers herself to be “a pretty secular Jew I would go so far as to say that I am... ‘culturally Jewish’, but agnostic in practice”. She continues by alluding to an interest in the history and culture of the Jews, but implied that she did not like the lifestyle restrictions that came with it. Speaking about religion in general, she said in a Twitch stream, ‘I wish I could have religion... [religious people] have something that makes them happy.’ 
===Art and style===
A big part of Caroline's videos and the way that she grows and maintains her audience is her style of humor. She accomplishes this by being outlandish without being edgy. Her humor is dry and lowbrow while still remaining interesting and not unappealing. Caroline also makes many pop culture references from beyond her years; despite being born in 2003, she makes references to older celebrity figures. Caroline refers to herself as a boomer born in 2003, due to her interest in older pop culture and her apparent struggle to use technology. Caroline said in a Discord voice chat in November 2019, “I don't think I'm an internet person, like I think people assume I am because I s***post but I'm more familiar with, like, boomer culture.”
She edits her videos with Adobe Premierehttps://www.reddit.com/r/carolinekonstnar/comments/c3ykxr/aesthetics_of_her_videos/eruqsxx/?context=3 on her Apple Mac laptop.
==YouTube==
Caroline originally started her videos on Instagram, where she had been previously posting her art. She made short skits that improved over time as she grew older. She spoke about this on Twitch saying, “I never intended to do well on YouTube... or end up doing Twitch or anything like that, I only just wanted to be an artist... and I remember there was a point in time when I had this epiphany, I was looking at my Instagram analytics... and I realized that people were only responding to the videos, the funny videos I made every other month, and not the art that I was posting, and I was like ‘I wonder what happen- what would happen if I just start only posting videos’. And here we are today... the point is that I ever really intended to pursue a career specifically in entertainment, comedy let-alone, um though I like entertaining generally speaking, it feels limited in terms of like, um, the creative potential.”
Her videos began to be met with backlash from people who didn't like that she is Jewish, and they mass flagged her videos, causing several of them to be removed. Since her Instagram page was suppressed due to the reports, she decided to move to YouTube. She said on Twitch, ‘When people started posting my s*** on iFunny, I just had so many anti-Semites flooding my Instagram... There's just a lot of anti-Semitic people [on iFunny]... they came from 4chan too.’
Speaking about producing videos that featured her being herself, as in the CornCast episodes which at the time had all been deleted, Caroline spoke on Twitch in 2021 saying, ‘It's really just about making money... almost like sexualizing yourself, objectifying yourself. You know exactly what's gonna attract people and then you turn yourself into this entity that... is simply for the surveillance for the observance of like a large group of people, and that's weird, it's like I no longer am myself, and especially if you're selling your own personality, then you're commodifying, like all of your characteristics and all of your traits, and you can't grow from there, so especially if you're young and you capitalize on that, it can be difficult to continue.’
Caroline has been accused of being an industry plant. While the definition of this term is somewhat elusive, it generally refers to someone who has their interactions falsified to look as if they are more popular than they really are, or it is someone who is secretly managed and produced. The argument does not hold up as Caroline has demonstrated a wide understanding of various internet sub-cultures and identified a niche to market her videos towards. Caroline has experience with making videos on an old channel. The ‘evidence’ that is pointed to in favor of her being an industry plant is Caroline's acting roles that she did when she was younger, but mostly this is just born out of either anti-Semitism or misogyny, or a combination of the two.
===First video===
Caroline's first ever video was a Minecraft skin tutorial on an old channel, before she started making and uploading skits.
The first known video on her current channel was titled ‘CornCast: Makayla and I Yell’, uploaded 03/30/2019.
===Series===
Caroline's first series was called CornCast, which was a podcast style discussion of random topics, sometimes featuring her friends as guests.
Caroline first gained popularity with her video “It's Prom”, uploaded 04/17/2019. It is a song about high school prom with a VHS effect added, parodying music videos of the 90's. “It's Prom” was originally uploaded to Instagram, but it was removed.
This video spawned two series, the VHS Mini Series, and more music videos - though not always in the same style. The VHS Mini Series started off as a compilation of short clips from Instagram and then later became a format for smaller skits that were too short to be uploaded on their own.
Caroline went on to make more music, initially in the same style of humor. She also released a slightly more serious album to YouTube and other streaming services titled, 'This Is Underwhelming at Best', which she also posted to her main channel in a video titled 'I Made an Album (This is Underwhelming at Best)'.
In 2021, Caroline made a video on Instagram containing an email address she made for fans to send their problems. She read and responded to some of these emails in a series of YouTube videos known as ‘Advice from’.
===Fake Pregnancy Fiasco===
After an extended absence, Caroline returned to YouTube in April 2024, claiming that she was pregnant in a video titled ‘I have an announcement....’, the thumbnail showing her baby bump. She explains that she is going to keep the baby despite the fact she is young, because she fears she won't be able to conceive again if she gets medical intervention. The last picture, purportedly taken at 26 weeks, was one of several Polaroid snapshots she displayed. The video was well produced, and people genuinely believed that she was pregnant, being confused by her appearance on BFT a few weeks prior where she had been seen smoking with no visible bump.
Caroline followed up with a video titled ‘I lost the baby...’ in which she says that it was a joke, she wasn't actually pregnant, and that people should stop feeling connected to her on a parasocial level. “The joke is you connected to something that wasn't real, and I have become something that isn't real.” She then announced the launch of her Patreon. 
Some people were upset about her lying and manipulating her audience,https://www.dexerto.com/youtube/youtuber-caroline-konstnar-slammed-for-faking-13-week-pregnancy-to-promote-her-patreon-2675697/ as well as her click-baiting a miscarriage, while others said it was on-brand even if it was in poor taste. She said on The C Suite group chat, “it's never my intention to upset people, so it's especially difficult to receive backlash when I knew what was coming”.
Caroline posted a video to Patreon titled ‘Responding to Backlash’,https://www.patreon.com/posts/104512169 addressing the criticism. She reflected on the reactions, acknowledging that some criticisms were valid, but others misunderstood the intentions behind the joke. She discussed the dynamics of creator-audience relationships and the manipulative power of social media, especially highlighting how people blur the lines between the real and online world. She said that she wouldn't be explaining the meaning behind the joke publicly because people wouldn't change the way that they thought of her. 
Despite the backlash received, she didn't apologize and commented on the role of social media in shaping people's perception of reality, and the performative nature of online personas. She said that “It totally makes sense why people would think that this was a sincere attempt at making money, but I don't think that they consider that a sincere attempt at making money would be for me to continue to fake the pregnancy”, and that the inclusion of the Patreon promotion at the end of the video was ‘intentionally tasteless’.
She stressed the importance of artistic expression and questioned the effectiveness of cancel culture, arguing that public reaction and personal growth are more valuable than conforming to societal expectations. She said, “The implications of a person being able to put on a song and dance on social media, and have it be really emotionally provocative to the extent that an audience would empathize with the character, that they see on the screen and believe that it's real because there is this expectation that what you're watching on social media is real... that to me is f***ing wild.”
==Collaborations, interviews and other YouTubers==
In October 2019, Caroline was scheduled to be interviewed by Brittany Ventihttps://twitter.com/BrittanyVenti/status/1188909121644482566 on Brittany's YouTube channel, but Caroline cancelled the interview after speaking with Brittany beforehand and discovering that she was actually playing a character.
In November 2019, Caroline collaborated with fellow YouTuber Anthpo, in two videos across their channels, and another on Anthony's second channel in November 2021.
On December 8, 2019, Caroline did a live show with 1 Minute Talk Show at the Market Hotel in Brooklyn.
Caroline did two collaborations with Aiden Wall and Cherdleys on Aiden's channel in 2020, the first in June and the second in November. Interestingly, the first video's thumbnail can be seen in one of the promotional videos for the live event from the previous December, meaning that they had filmed and edited the video long before uploading it publicly.
She also hosted a video for Know Your Meme, where she talked about the milk crate challenge. Speaking about this in a Twitch stream, she said, ‘That was the most millennial work environment ever, they were all super nice, they were very helpful, they were creatively allowing me to do what I wanted, I don't know how concerned they were with the quality of the content, but at the same time I was like if I ever came here...’, but she never finishes her sentence before being distracted by something else.
Caroline collaborated with House Plant Band in a video titled The Worlds Dumbest Puppet Show (SONG), for which the band composed the music and she sang and made a puppet show style video for it.
In June 2023, she made three videos with Oompaville and mentioned moving to Texas.
She later did move to Texas in August 2023 to join a content group named Best Friends Today under Rooster Teeth, alongside Sammie Mayti and Will Mahony. She moved back to New York after Rooster Teeth shut down. In May 2024 Sammie and Will announced that they had purchased the channel and would be continuing to make content.
In a Twitch stream, Caroline spoke about being in contact with Hila from H3h3productions, saying it was at a stage where her mental health had improved but she was wasn't feeling completely better yet. She implied that Ethan and Hila wanted her to take a job role on the H3 Podcast, and that they tried to discourage her from going to school for a further education, and she felt that they didn't know what was best for her. Caroline recounts that following a manic episode, she sent them an idea for a YouTube series by email, ‘I don't really remember what I sent in an email, but it was a good idea. I sent them an idea for like a YouTube series, and they never responded to me, but I think it's cause of the way I wrote it, which was just f***in' like manic and crazy and overzealous, but it was a good idea, like thinking about it now it's still a very good idea.’ Caroline continues by saying that the way that “they spoke to me, it didn't rub me the wrong way, like from the stand point of like being a content creator, it's like if that's my job that's how I would speak to a future employee, but it was like, not ‘don't meet your heroes’, it was just like I... was not prepared at that time to have them in the sense that they would be employers so it felt abrasive when they spoke to me, but it wasn't at all, I was just sort of like, oh my God these are the pe- this is how I know them to be when they're entertaining, but when they're working it's different... It just felt like they were telling me not to go to school out of self interest, um which was bizarre, and this was like the first time when like, Trisha had really left the podcast, I remember that, and they were kind of like, ‘well have you been watching?’ I was like, ‘no’, and I had planned to watch the podcast so that I was sort of in the loop about joining, I guess? But I didn't and it seemed as though they were a little offended, when I was just like ‘I didn't- I have no idea what's going on’ [Laughter] Um, so yeah I- I love them, I don't really watch their content anymore.”
She also said on Twitch that CallMeCarson had sent her a DM on Instagram, but she didn't say what the message was or when it was sent, even when asked about it later in the stream.
She also criticized Paymoney Wubby for sexualizing her when she was younger, though this was in the context of her talking about how she had been sexualized a lot for the past few years and that Dennis was generally a great person.
==Outside YouTube==
Caroline was an actress for several TV shows, such as Boardwalk Empire and Louie.https://www.imdb.com/name/nm5230984/
She started off online posting art to her Instagram, where she would also post the occasional sketch. Due to the popularity of these videos she started making more.
Caroline has been performing ballet since age four and has participated in many performances since the age of ten. She was in the background of the Disney+ show On Pointe.
===Twitch===
In September 2021, Caroline announced she would begin streaming on Twitch every other Friday night, hoping to change to every Friday night at some point in the future. She posted the announcement on Instagram in a video where she employs the trope of Talking To Herself - a trope common to her Instagram - where she jokes that she is becoming a cam-girl. Caroline focused on her chest in the video as part of the joke, saying in the description that ‘sex sells’.
The streams themselves showed Caroline drawing or painting, while talking with the chat and answering questions. She would often change topic mid-sentence, or read questions aloud and never answer them and would constantly get distracted by something else. Caroline mentioned being diagnosed with ADHD when she was younger, but then said that it turned out she did not have ADHD, she was ‘just crazy’. As time went on and she got better at streaming, this became less of a problem and Caroline focused more on the chat, however she also stopped drawing and painting.
Caroline introduced donation incentives for people who sent her money on stream, with $100 to receive two emails per week which would later be named ‘Only Mail’, $1000 to get Caroline's phone number, and $3000 to go on a date with her if the donator lives in New York or New Jersey, however it is unclear if the last two are serious.
Initially the donation requirement for the TTS was $1, but following complaints on the subreddit that the constant interruptions from people donating was distracting; the donation requirement was increased to $5 and the TTS was removed, replaced with the text appearing on screen and Caroline would read the messages aloud.
Caroline stopped streaming in November 2021 without notice.
==Deleted videos==
Caroline deleted or privatized most of her videos from her channel in 2020, due to her not wanting potential college admissions to see her older content, as she explained in an Instagram live stream. She said that she was embarrassed by her old videos, saying, “At the time when I was making them, I just wanted money and I wanted attention, and I wanted power... and so I just started making s*** that I knew people would want to see... and now looking back, I'm like ‘why?’” The response from her fans was that people genuinely enjoy her content, even if she doesn't.
After the videos were deleted, people began re-uploading them to YouTube, to which Caroline asked people to refrain from, saying on Reddit, ‘I know you find them funny, but... please respect my future, and my decision for changing the course of the content I produce.’https://www.reddit.com/r/carolinekonstnar/comments/jafaq7/please_take_down_or_refrain_from_re_uploading_my/ After a few months, several videos were relisted, and she began making new videos.
In November 2021, Caroline deleted another video from her Advice From series, saying on Reddit that she didn't like it and she wanted to make a better one,https://www.reddit.com/r/carolinekonstnar/comments/qx36n4/the_latest_advice_from_caroline_episode_was/hla0vxb/?context=3 clarifying that it was not deleted as a result of the criticism of the video from the subreddit, where there were complaints that the video was boring.https://www.reddit.com/r/carolinekonstnar/comments/qr6i7j/did_you_find_carolines_last_video_funny/
==Community==
User Doctor_Rainbow started a subreddit r/carolinekonstnar, which Caroline used in order to communicate with fans. The subreddit is frequented with memes related to Caroline and discussions of her content.
In early 2021, Caroline posted a video to Instagram in which she joked that men should be less angry and focus their attention on being better. This video was met with immediate backlash, and people mass flagged her video causing it to be removed for hate speech. Caroline apologized on both Instagram and Reddit, and was met with criticism, though some people defended her saying that she hadn't done anything wrong. In a stream on Twitch later that year, Caroline said that she had been struggling with misandry earlier in the year but had improved.
The moderators of the subreddit also made a Discord server named ‘Korn Field’ in April 2019, which Caroline promoted in her video descriptions. However the Discord server was raided in July 2019 and the moderators made a new server, this one named ‘Children of the Korn’. The server name is a reference to the short story of the same name by Stephen King, in which a couple in a failing marriage attempt to repair their relationship and encounter a group of children who are part of a cult, and perform sacrificial rituals to corn. In a Twitch stream on October 9th 2021, Caroline said that she does not know if the server is still online or active. As of late 2021, the server is still active, but it has completely moved away from being fans of Caroline's videos, and is now just a regular community Discord server. The new video releases are no longer announced.
The following week on October 18th 2021, a new Discord server named ‘The Korn Cob’ was started by Reddit user jambaiter who promoted it on the subreddit.https://www.reddit.com/r/carolinekonstnar/comments/qgleir/i_made_a_new_caroline_konstnar_discord_server/
In May 2024, Caroline created a Patreon where she talked about her absence from YouTube and trauma in her life. The higher tiers also allow access to a private group chat named ‘The C Suite’.
===The ‘Reddit video’===
Sometime in mid-2019, Caroline asked people to submit content to her subreddit for her to react to in a video, which was titled 'I went on reddit and it was just ok'. Unfortunately, one of the submitted items was a video of animal abuse which managed to slip through the gaps of the moderators. Caroline included the clip in her video to YouTube. Upon facing backlash, she censored the clip using the blur tool built into YouTube and commented ‘...laughing at animal abuse is obviously tasteless. But I kept it in the video because I thought is [sic] was fake’. She then deleted the video after facing further backlash.
Caroline addressed it in her video ‘Let's have a deep talk - Corncast’, saying, “I think people need to expect that I'm going to do things that will seem problematic; that I'm going to make mistakes. I'm gonna do things like laugh at a cat getting chucked out a roof... I think it goes without saying that it's it's wrong, it's immoral, I understand that it comes off as disturbing, or it speaks to my character, who I am as a person, how I could be so cruel and disconnected from humanity? But that's not the case everyone has emotions and everyone has thoughts and... sometimes our emotions are not connected with our thoughts, that's a given in this case. My brain said ‘absolutely not that is a big no-no you're cancelled’, but my emotions said ‘that's kind of funny’.”
===CornCraft===
The moderators of the Children of the Korn Discord server also started a Minecraft survival multiplayer server for the community, which has been going since early 2021. Despite some people saying that it is an anarchy server, it has always had rules preventing theft and griefing.https://discord.com/channels/589881854073765908/607574347988860948/608360406414655705
====Season 1====
=====World 1=====
The Minecraft server featured a Nether hub that was used for fast overworld travel to different sections of the map. The players were divided among the sections, each with its own alliances and rules. The main sections were Virginland, Corpville, Kingdom of Goldenrod, and The Floating City above the spawn. Virginland was disorganized and many members split off into their own smaller sections, some of which were never completed before the server restarted. The Floating City received some criticism from the server members, and was blown up by the moderators.
=====World 2=====
World 2 did not have grief protection and was strictly for trusted members. It was largely operated by MonVardsMaryte, and featured a village and an underwater bunker.
A server plug-in was used to allow users access between the two worlds.
Following the Nether update, the moderators made a new world, replacing the existing ones.
==Merchandise==
In the video to YouTube ‘I want your money but I have no talent’ Caroline advertised her merchandise, being two T-shirt designs sold through Mercht. The T-shirts are no longer being sold, as of June 2019.
In 2021, Caroline made a video on Instagram where she mentions that she is thinking of making new merchandise. This was more or less confirmed when Caroline talked about looking at e-commerce websites in an Instagram story, presumably for the purposes of selling merchandise again. In the video “What it's like to be a famous YouTuber - Corncast”, she alluded to not being satisfied with the quality of the print from the original line of merchandise.
In a Twitch stream she said, ‘I do kind of want to go back to producing artwork a little more... substantially... selling artwork is kind of a part of that if you want to do that professionally, you're gonna have to sell it... I think I've found a new way to sell art that is both entertaining - and very cynical.’
Caroline has sold painted and drawn art on Instagram through commissions.
==References==
Category:Comedy YouTubers
Category:American YouTubers
Category:Users who joined in 2018
Category:LGBT YouTubers
Category:One million subscribers