Draft:Lily Orchard

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Lily Orchard

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Lily Orchard is a Canadian YouTuber whose channel focuses mainly on media analysis and fan culture. Although it is undeniable that some of the hatred she receives comes from transphobia, it is important to note a decent chunk of the criticism of her not only comes from people who are on the left politically, but some of whom are themselves transgender.

Plagiarism allegations

Lily has been accused of swiping ideas from other sources, ranging from a simple homage to outright plagiarism. Early in her career, she used the same as the popular series for The Escapist Zero Punctuation, and she has began using that art style once again more recently.

Lily has also been caught directly plagiarizing, especially earlier in her career. In 2017, YouTuber Aeron Tempest uploaded a video looking at six different videos Lily had done for her "In a Minute" series, where she riffs over cartoons while dramatically editing them down, and found over ninety-percent of the jokes she told were lifted directly from TV Tropes. Those who watched her older content noted how she "copied lines from Yahtzee, Moviebob and Jim Sterling on numerous occasions."

Controversial videos

Tropes vs Sheldon Cooper

In 2018, Orchard released a video, "Tropes vs Sheldon Cooper," that was criticized as promoting negative stereotypes about autism. The video highlights two depictions of autism that she feels are "accurate": Sheldon Cooper, of the American sitcom The Big Bang Theory, and the Netflix series Atypical. Both shows have been widely criticized as featuring poor representation. A 2018 study evaluated 26 fictional characters by the DSM-V, finding that many, including Sheldon, displayed more diagnostic criteria than was typical.

Orchard argues that characters like Sheldon are "useful" for educating the public about autism while less stereotyped depictions would be "cheerleading":

But, ultimately, this is all a waste of time. Nothing Sheldon could possibly do would ever be good enough for some people. Most of these people don't actually want an accurate or useful look into autism. They ultimately don't care about good representation or representation that helps anyone. What they want is cheerleading.

Toward the end of the video, she argues that autistic people just need to "put in the effort" to be less autistic:

Just like in real life, these three characters' [Sheldon Cooper, Sam Gardner, and Rainbow Dash] symptoms can cause problems for them. It can interfere in their life in small or substantial ways. And they have to learn to adjust and cope with that. They have to learn the skills that everyone else picks up naturally. They have to find new ways to process information their brain otherwise struggles with processing. In real life, every single person with autism has to go through this process, regardless of the severity of their symptoms. And this can either be extremely easy, to the point of trivial, or extremely difficult. It relies on two factors. One: the willingness of the support system around you to properly educate you. And two: the willingness of yourself to put in the effort to learn. And that second one is the problem here. Every now and then, you come across an autistic person who doesn't want to put in the effort. Who wants to just give up and expects everyone else to just bend around them. This is not a symptom of autism. This is a lazy and unmotivated person who just happen^[sic] to have it. These are tiny, tiny, tiny minority of people and you can easily spot them because out of the massive, diverse pool of studies and research surrounding autism that have been done over the past few decades, they have read none of it, and they are always ranting about Autism Speaks. Their sole dubious claim to expertise regarding autism is the biologically unimpressive achievement of having it.

The video also sees Lily criticizing people who consider Twilight Sparkle, one of the main characters on My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, to be autistic, noting the absence of people saying the same thing about Rainbow Dash in spite of her being a better example of what somebody with autism acts like. According to her, the reason for this is because Rainbow Dash has to learn how to cope with her alleged neuroatypicality and grow as a person while Twilight does not; it should be noted she gives no examples of this occurring. In the same regard, her description of Twilight is flatly untrue, as one of the symptoms of autism is that a person "May have no interest in others at all." A lack of desire to interact socially was the entire reason Twilight was sent to Ponyville, as established in the very first episode of the show.