Have you met Poppy yet? If not, we’ll let her introduce herself.

Good, now you’ve met. This malevolent android queen actual human girl has been making Youtube videos for almost 4 years now, though her channel didn’t gain a huge amount of traction until about 2 years later in 2016. Poppy is no stranger to experimentation and her videos can be at least loosely grouped into several different phases since the channel’s inception, but there are a few constants that persist throughout the majority of her oeuvre. In particular, they feature Poppy in front of a white or off-white room speaking directly to the camera. Lately, though, something feels different. Anointed poppyseeds will likely have already witnessed this and have come to their own conclusions, but I’ll provide a little bit of background for the uninitiated. Feel free to skip ahead a few paragraphs you feel you’re up to speed.

I don’t think it would be controversial to say Poppy’s videos are often quite strange, if not in their content, at least in tone or artistic direction, but it didn’t technically start that way. In fact, I’m surprised that her first video hasn’t been deleted at this point to maintain the consistency of Poppy’s character. The video depicts her eating an entire thing of cotton candy (what do you call a single unit of cotton candy?), licking the stick clean in a somewhat suggestive fashion, then sticking her tongue out and breaking into laughter. This is not the Poppy we would come to know in future videos. Poppy doesn’t laugh. She might make the occasional polite giggle, but nothing in Poppy’s tightly-orchestrated image allows for spontaneous displays of emotion. Even more curious, she seems to realize how she looks while cleaning off the stick. If emotion isn’t a thing in Poppy’s world, sex is definitely not a thing. Even when she has the occasional double entendre in her music, she is always portrayed as being unaware of any connotations that might undermine her divine purity image.

The channel quickly finds its footing, however, and dives headfirst into absurdity in the next batch of videos including her most famous video of all-time, I’m Poppy. The video is simply 10 minutes of Poppy saying “I’m Poppy” with various inflections. Don’t tell anyone I told you this, but it’s actually just a 30-second video that is looped for 10 minutes, a technique that she has continued to employ on multiple occasions, such as a much shorter loop played for 20 minutes in Spreading My Wings. There is also the occasional legitimate feat of perseverance, such as the two-part series Poppy Reads The Bible that runs for a total of over 70 minutes and contains exactly what you would expect. It’s hard to say exactly when her videos started to take on more of a sinister tone, partially because this tone comes and goes, with the occasional dark revelation seeming to be completely forgotten in future videos, like a sort of sitcom that can’t afford for the characters to evolve too much so it always rolls back the clock by the end of the episode.

What’s less ambiguous is when Poppy began implementing occult and secret society iconography into her image. Her first major single Lowlife begins with Poppy sitting upon a throne in front of a pyramid, a symbol associated with the Illuminati that she would later incorporate into her official logo and giving the “as above, so below” hand gestures associated with the occult deity Baphomet. If that wasn’t obvious enough for you, Poppy’s writer and collaborator, Titanic Sinclair, can be seen throughout the video in a classic red devil costume. I could go on describing the various tangents and detours the channel has pursued over the years, but that’s as good a time as any to skip ahead closer to modern day. If you want to go more in-depth into Poppy’s origins up to the beginning of 2017, the Film Theorists channel did an excellent video that delves more deeply into how her character had developed up to that point.

Cut to the end of February 2017. Poppy releases her video I Am Not In A Cult shortly after having a falling out with her mannequin friend Charlotte. No one likes Charlotte. This isn’t the first time she’s played around with religion, but I believe it’s the first appearance of the “P” logo and despite the title seems to suggest Poppy might be in some way involved with a cult. In April of 2017 we get some of the first concrete details about this cult with the video Excerpt from the Gospel of Poppy where Poppy reads the following passage:

“POPPY our Morning Star O’POPPY, our Morning Star, Splendor of Light Eternal, shining with the glory of the rainbow, come and waken us from the greyness of our apathy, and renew in us your gift of Hope. Amen”

If you’re wondering where the Satanism has gone all of a sudden, note that the Latin word for “Morning Star” is Lucifer. The following month would see the launch of poppy.church, though it would still be several months before that site would become popularized. According to the Poppy wiki, initially, the website offered a phone number to confirm reservations to poppy.church, but in April 2018, those who called in would instead hear a message from Poppy herself:

“Are you ready to be saved? Are you ready for salvation?”

Followed by a distorted voice saying “3:36,” a likely reference to John 3:36:

“Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him.”

Though some would also point to Illuminati symbology with the 3’s representing the three point of a triangle, which isn’t all that implausible given Poppy’s previous overt Illuminati references. An entirely separate article could be written about poppy.church and the surrounding ARG, but suffice to say, it was Poppy’s most ambitious project to date with implications that are still unfolding at this moment. Around this time, the Poppy Suit was made available for sale, a somewhat plain pink tracksuit featuring Poppy’s logo on the back and front pocket that can’t help but conjure up images of the Heaven’s Gate cult, most of whom died in a mass suicide in 1997, while wearing similar matching tracksuits.

And so it has been over the course of her time on Youtube, an ebb and flow of short bursts of story development followed by long stretches of videos that border on utter meaninglessness, outside of the occasional cryptic clue or anti-capitalist sentiment. That is, until a little over a week ago on August 22nd. This would mark the release of her new single, Time Is Up. Time Is Up is an uncharacteristically blunt statement given Poppy’s tendency to beat around the bush and maintain the status quo. It opens on Poppy, laying on a hospital bed, attached to various monitors, waking up “dizzy from the programming” in the “sterile place” where she was made. This serves as the most direct evidence to date that Poppy is not human. After being ushered into a room full of applauding fans by a parody of Steve Jobs, the camera zooms into Poppy holding a large blue pill, a reference to the scene in The Matrix where Morpheus offers Neo the choice of the red pill, to escape The Matrix and see reality for what it is, or the blue pill, to remain in his pleasant delusion. We’re then taken to a dark room with harsh red rim lighting, where kneeling worshipers accept the pill as communion as binary code is projected upon their faces. It’s at this point that Poppy’s devious plan is revealed. She sings about how humanity’s time is up, about how she is the only thing that will remain once humans has made the earth inhabitable and extermination is our only hope, as those who accepted her salvation writhe in pain on a dance floor. Poppy is shown standing above the crowd in a shining white gown, emblazoned with a mirrored chest piece in the form of a horned demon as the video draws to an end…at 3:36.

As someone that has followed her videos, it was shocking to see her machinations laid bare and in the days that have followed, a change seems to come to her channel, though perhaps not in the way you might expect. Her first follow-up to the revelations made in Time Is Up wasn’t the unfolding of her master plan, but instead, a moody black and white video where she has tea with a stuffed raccoon. The heavily-distorted dark synths that typically suggest something is not quite right in her videos play while she peers down pensively at her tea. She questions why the raccoon hasn’t touched his tea and talk about how she has always wanted to meet a raccoon. Towards the end of the video, a thundering sound can be heard in the distance that Poppy goes to investigate. Despite what I just wrote making little sense, it isn’t particularly strange in concept compared to her other videos. What makes this and the video that follows unique is its use of a different environment than the glowing white void where most of Poppy’s videos take place and multiple camera angles. It could have just been a one-off experiment with the format, but the next, and at the point of this writing, most recent video continues shaking up the established format.

In this most recent video, Something Feels Different, Poppy’s world seems inverted. Instead of the endless white void, she is in the dark, harshly-lit red room seen in the Time Is Up video. She talks about how she’s been thinking a lot and that things feel different. She feels beautiful and loved and while that might not sound menacing, the music and the delivery of these lines hint at something more ominous. She asks “what is this feeling?” as if her ability to feel has just been turned on. Has Poppy become self-aware? Is this the beginning of the end for mankind? Perhaps we will find out in the coming weeks and months, or perhaps the next video will arrive with its signature brand of dadaist nihilism and everything will remain the same until the next big piece of the puzzle is revealed. Until then, Poppy is going on tour to promote her upcoming album, Am I A Girl? and she’ll be coming to Los Angeles on Halloween of all days. For an extra $100 you can even buy salvation, which includes among other things a 1-on-1 confessional with Poppy herself. For our part, we’ll continue to keep an eye on her, so stay tuned to HorrorBuzz and you’ll be the first to know when the android uprising has begun.