TikTok, YouTube, drag and a World of Xtra

London – It was never Stan Fukase’s intention to go viral on TikTok.“When the pandemic started, I started making TikTok videos like everyone else,” he says over a video call. “I was never expecting to be famous or anything.” Stan Fukase, known on social media platforms as ‘World of Xtra,’ acts as a bridge between non-Japanese people and those in Japan’s LGBTQ+ community. | COURTESY OF STAN FUKASE Yet after a brief dabble with the dance videos that TikTok is famed for, it was a video making fun of how drag queens greet each other that went viral, gaining hundreds of thousands of views. As Fukase began to post on TikTok more, however, those numbers started to pale in comparison to the thousands of followers he was gaining daily. At one point, Fukase, under the alias @worldofxtra, had the fastest growing TikTok account in Japan. Currently, he has close to 600,000 followers on the platform.Born in Japan but raised in the Philippines, content creation was not a part of Fukase’s original plan. Although he’d started a YouTube channel at age 12 for a hobby, he put it on hold to concentrate on pursuing a career in the medical field. Attending…
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