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Phan is the slash ship between Phil Lester and Daniel Howell from the YouTube fandom.
Canon[]
2009-2010[]
Phil Lester created his YouTube channel in 2006, posting his first video that same year. As one of the earliest adopters of the site, Phil slowly grew to a level of popularity considered substantial for the time period. One of Phil's early viewers was Dan Howell. Dan and Phil first interacted in early 2009, when Dan contacted Phil over Twitter asking for help with his budding YouTube career, as well as trying to connect with him to become his friend. They continued to talk online, connecting on shared media interests, before eventually meeting in person and becoming friends later that same year. Phil eventually became one of the first people that Dan came out to. The two eventually moved into a small apartment together in Manchester in 2010, after they began collaborating on their respective channels and realizing that their collaboration was making more money than their individual content.
2011-2014[]
The pair continued to live together and collaborate until they were contacted by the BBC in 2012, where they were asked if they would be interested in hosting a radio show together for the company to connect budding online audiences to traditional media. The men were hesitant on the venture but ultimately agreed, becoming the first YouTubers to have such a job offering. The show, titled "The Dan and Phil Show," ran for two hours every week from January 2013 to August 2014 on BBC Radio 1, and operated as a request show, where fans and listeners would have the opportunity to send comments or song requests via social media to Dan and Phil directly. The two combined the traditional request show radio format with their sketch ideas from their channels, taking breaks from playing popular music requests to engage the audience in small games. This format also emphasized the idea of the radio show as both an auditory and visual medium, where fans were encouraged to watch a live feed of the pair as well as having the potential to listen to them on a radio station. The show was met with cautiously positive reviews by critics, as the idea of employing YouTubers in a position of traditional media was immensely novel at the time. However, in 2013, the pair won the Sony Golden Headphones Award for the show. During this time, the two also took the money they earned from their channels to move into an apartment together in London in order to be closer to the BBC recording studio.
On September 12, 2014, after leaving their radio show, Dan and Phil posted the first video to their new gaming channel, DanAndPhilGAMES. The two would post regularly to that channel, reintroducing a segment from their radio show known as "Dan vs Phil," where the two would compete in a video game and keep track of the winner on a makeshift leaderboard. Also in 2014, the pair began their venture of hosting the Brit Awards livestreams. Finally, the two worked with Phil's brother to found IRL Digital Ltd., created to be an independent company used to sell merch products. This venture resulted in the Dan and Phil Shop, where the two would sell joint merchandise.
2015-2018[]
In March 2015, Dan and Phil announced that they had co-written a book together, titled The Amazing Book Is Not On Fire (TABINOF), with an accompanying tour of a similar name, The Amazing Tour Is Not On Fire (TATINOF). Dan and Phil became among the first YouTubers to write books, as well as the first YouTubers to embark on an international tour. TABINOF became a New York Times Bestseller in months and TATINOF featured an original song that was later given a gold record disc after the two sang it for the Stand Up To Cancer charity. TATINOF ended in 2016, and became the largest-scale tour from YouTubers ever. October 2016 saw the two release a film version of the show, as well as a documentary of their journey throughout the process through YouTube Red. After that, they also released a photo book of the experience in November, titled Dan and Phil Go Outside. August 2015 also featured the pair creating the phone app "The Seven Second Challenge," which exploded in popularity at the time, although the two discontinued and deleted the app in 2019. Dan and Phil also dabbled in the realm of acting during this time, featuring in small voice acting cameos in the UK theater showing of Big Hero 6 in 2015, although their small dialogue roles were cut for the American versions and UK DVD and digital releases. In 2016, the two voiced two gorillas in an episode of Disney's child show "The Lion Guard."
In late 2017, Dan and Phil announced their second tour, titled Interactive Introverts. The show started in 2018 and was another international show, which toured to 18 different countries, making it another one of the largest tours created by YouTubers in history. They then released the film version of the show on DVD with the BBC in December of 2018. During that touring time, the two also continued to still post regularly to their gaming channel and main channels, as well as having to move to their second London apartment between tour legs, as well as creating and selling a board game called Truth Bombs in October 2017, the same month that the two announced their second tour. After the pair finished touring, they announced to their audience that they would be stepping away from their gaming channel and putting it on an indefinite hiatus.
2019-present[]
After their tours, books, videos, games and acting ventures, Dan and Phil fell mostly silent in 2019. Recently, the two have spoken about feeling immense burnout and exhaustion after the 2015-2018 period of their careers. However, as well as this, both were beginning to entertain the idea of coming out to their audiences. Dan released his long-form video essay on his sexuality, aptly titled "Basically I'm Gay," on June 13, 2019. The video featured a full retrospective on Dan's life up to that point and the struggles with internal and external homophobia at each pivotal moment in his personal life, as well as his career. The video explains also that a large portion of his YouTube career was spent under intense stress and guard over fear of him being outed, especially when his and Phil's fanbase grew and started shipping the two. He did take a moment to acknowledge this fact. He confirmed the pair had been romantically involved and spoke about when they first met, but declined to comment on their present relationship (beyond calling them "real best friends, companions through life" and "actual soulmates"), noting that both he and Phil prefer privacy in that facet of their lives. On June 30, 2019, Phil uploaded his own coming out video, titled "Coming Out To You." His video was much shorter than Dan's, and was admittedly less formal and in-depth than Dan's, according to Phil. He did not mention his and Dan's relationship, neither past nor present, although both thanked the other in their video descriptions for support or help on creating their videos. From there, the two continued their hiatuses from their channels and included their other social media accounts in this hiatus as well.
In early 2020, the two began moving to a fully purchased home that they revealed they had been building and designing for years. Unfortunately, as construction and moving was underway, COVID began and the two had to put their move on hold as construction slowed as well. Around this time, Dan and Phil created a podcast-style show on the app Stereo to keep them engaged with their audience and each other during the stress of the pandemic. This small series lasted for most of 2020, before the two were able to move again, and the show ended. The two moved into the home in 2021, although construction continued until late 2021 to early 2022.
Despite (or perhaps because of) living together in this current "forever home," Dan and Phil rarely collaborated between 2021-early 2023. Having abandoned their other joint channels, the two only collaborated rarely on Phil's channel, when Phil needed assistance for the execution of a video idea. Fans had requested numerous times that they collaborate more, in the style they did prior to their 2018-2019 burnout period.
As of October 15, 2023, the pair indeed returned to collaborating through the resurrection of the DanAndPhilGAMES YouTube channel with the video "Saying Goodbye Forever," in which they showed the both of them physically mourning the death of their channel, before it physically resurrected itself through the Dil character, their shared Sims character from their Sims gaming videos. Where the channel previously hosted exclusively gaming content, Dan and Phil now also use this channel as a place to post any videos in which the both of them are featured, like baking videos and behind-the-scenes vlog content, genres of content that would have been posted to one of their respective solo channels in years past. With no other public projects revealed and now with a team of editors, the two post more often on the joint channel than they had previously, prior to the channel's hiatus.
Fanon[]
Phan was one of the biggest ships in the mid-2010s in online spaces. The ship was popular at the same time as many slash band ships, like Fall Out Boy, My Chemical Romance, Twenty One Pilots and Panic at the Disco. Despite fanfiction existing for decades prior to this spike in shipping behavior, this time period was integral for the modern way in which fanfiction and general fandom is viewed and understood. Phan shippers were at the head of this exponential growth of fanfiction and shipping culture.
Notably, different to band ships, fans were always able to connect to Dan and Phil directly with their shipping content. In fact, Dan and Phil would often be confronted with this content in livestream or other social media formats. Years later, in his coming out video, Dan explained that the 2010-2015 time period in his and Phil's careers was incredibly traumatizing for him because of the intensity of fans approaching him questioning his sexuality with shipping content. He expanded on this statement by saying that he has always appreciated the fan effort put into fandom and shipping content, but being badgered with queries about the sexuality he was already debating was stressful and traumatizing.
Because of the longevity of the ship, the pairing has a massive amount of fan content connected to it. This content includes fan art, fanfiction, fan edits and other artistic ventures relating to the two. On AO3, Phan is the most popular ship for both Dan and Phil's character tags. For several years in the past, Phan was the most popular YouTube ship on AO3. This has since changed after 2019, following both their hiatuses and the rise of other YouTubers, notably Dream and GeorgeNotFound's slash ship, which was the ship to officially overtake Phan as the most popular YouTube slash ship on AO3 and other similar fandom spaces like Tumblr and Instagram.
Fandom[]
- FAN FICTION
- Dan Howell/Phil Lester tag on AO3
- Phil/Dan tag on FanFiction.net
- Phan stories on Wattpad
- FORUMS
- Phan on Urban Dictionary
WIKIS
- YOUTUBE
- DanAndPhilGAMES JOINT YouTube Channel
- DanAndPhilCRAFTS JOINT YouTube Channel
Lists[]
| 2nd | 2015 | 2016 | |
| 3rd | 2018 | ||
| 4th | May 1st 2017 | May 8th 2017 | May 15th 2017 |
| 5th | May 22nd 2017 | Jan/June 2017 | |
| 6th | 2019 | ||
| 8th | May 29th 2017 | ||
| 17th | MAR 1st 2021 | ||
| 21st | 2014 | ||
| 41st | 2020 | ||
| 62nd | 2021 | ||
Trivia[]
- Dan and Phil have been aware of the ship, and have been known to occasionally read the fanfiction made about them in the past.
- Phan was overtaken as the most popular YouTube slash ship in 2020 by DreamNotFound. The ship has since held its popularity, but has no longer come close to retaking the title that it held for nearly a decade.
[]
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| YouTube/Ships • YouTube/Users | ||
| SHIPS | het | Brierson • Emidus • Melix |
| slash | Boyinaroom • Breddy • Codel • Delitoonz • H2OVanoss • Parvill • Phan • Toppyth | |
| friend | Corpsekkuno • Desert Duo | |