Meet YouTube's Unlikeliest Hero

The meme-producing, viral-video-pushing nature of YouTube made a young boy who likes Star Wars and ghosts into an Internet rock star—and, just as quickly, a martyred hero when his channel was inexplicably suspended. YouTube’s “Lukeywes1234” was just another kid making videos with his grandma when prankster site 4chan took a shine to him, upping his subscribers to 15,000 and resulting in an abundance of mashups and tribute videos before YouTube yanked his channel, Salon reports.

4chan declared revenge in the form of YouTube Porn Day, flooding the site with, yes, porn. Sure, it’s “juvenile,” writes Mary Elizabeth Williams, but “there's a sweetness to the whole insanity as well. A boy puts up videos of himself, shot by his grandma, posturing as hero, and in the process actually becomes something of an unlikely hero. Why? Probably because, along with laughing at the amateurishness of the whole enterprise, people feel a real sense of fondness for a sweet kid goofing around with his computer.”
(More lukeywes1234 stories.)