The Rise And Fall Of A Mukbanger YouTuber: Between Obesity And The Drama That Sells

25/05/2023

He is Nicholas Perry. But to the online world where he makes a living, he's best known as Nikocado Avocado.

Before he became the well-known American internet celebrity, he was a vegan, and a violinist. It was his ambition to became a musician, and that he dedicated his effort to achieve that dream.

While Perry had the musical talent, it was difficult for him to make a living in New York City, a city of talented and competitive musicians.

"I was just a small, little fish in a huge sea," he said.

Since then, he started redefining his definition of success, by creating his own.

Nicholas Perry aka. Nikocado Avocado
Nicholas Perry aka. Nikocado Avocado.

Born in 1992 in Ukraine, Nicholas Perry, a Pennsylvania citizen, majored in performance in college. And following his graduation, he pursued his ambition of becoming a musician, by becoming a violinist.

But realizing that his income as a freelance musician wasn't enough, Perry who also worked as a Home Depot worker, moved to New York City in 2013, in order to pursue his dream of playing in a Broadway orchestra. However, he had the disadvantage of being a newcomer in the industry, and that he was surrounded by too many talented musicians that came before him.

He found it difficult to compete, let alone being recognized.

In 2014, Perry's Facebook friend who was also a vegan, traveled from his hometown to meet him.

They fell in love, and began a relationship.

It was this man who influenced Perry, and he was also the person who told Perry to create his own YouTube channel.

This was when Perry became the "Nikocado Avocado." On his first YouTube channel, he vlogged about his vegan lifestyle and his music performance. But this didn't last long, because Perry became frustrated of what he became.

On September 2016, Perry uploaded a video explaining that he stopped being a vegan, and accused the vegan community for his decision.

He described them as “unbalanced, hostile and mentally unstable”.

This time, after opening himself up, and also his diet to eat animal product, Avocado shifted his focus, and started creating videos about mukbang on YouTube.

Read: 'Mukbang', The Trend Where People Eat A Lot On The Internet

Mukbang is an activity that involves a person on the internet eating a huge meal in front of the audience, in one sitting.

Mukbang which is a Korean (먹방) portmanteau for "eating" and "broadcast". The act is usually done through a webcast, using platforms such as Afreeca, YouTube or Twitch, with the person eating a variety of food.

The trend is said to have spread and popularized beyond South Korea by Simon Stawski, a Canadian blogger who co-founded 'Eat Your Kimchi', after he moved to the country in 2008.

Mukbanging first came years before 2014, but it wasn’t until 2015 that it became the internet phenomenon that crosses continents.

And here, Avocado began his mukbang career from 2016 onwards, becoming one of the first American men to partake in the trend.

Nicholas Perry aka. Nikocado Avocado
The price Nikocado Avocado has to pay to achieve internet fame.

As a result of this newfound freedom of eating, and the pressure of life, Avocado quickly gained weight due to his binge eating.

And because of this poor diet, besides obesity, he also developed a number of mental depressions, erectile dysfunction and a loss of libido.

Also, Avocado is sometimes seen wearing a CPAP mask, which is designed to deal with sleep apnea, and claimed to have broken three of his ribs due to coughing too hard.

In 2019, he said that this is "something that never happened to me until I started doing mukbangs," or that "I can’t fall asleep because I feel like my digestive tract is on fire."

In 2021, he even told his viewers that he is classed as disabled and rides a mobility scooter.

While many of his fans were worried, to the rest of the world, Avocado is known as a YouTuber who gained at least 100 kilograms in front of the camera.

From his years of eating unthinkable amounts of food, the practice made him rich and famous, but also sick.

And his audience of millions can’t stop watching.

Nicholas Perry aka. Nikocado Avocado
His passion was to become a musician, a violinist. But to pursue fame and fortune through clicks and viewership, he had to ditch his dream.

However, Avocado took advantage of some of his newly-found disadvantages and low moments by making vlogs out of them.

And using clickbait strategy, he encouraged high viewership to his videos.

Avocado became the target of body-shaming, setting an example of how a YouTube would do anything for their followers, in order to get the fame and fortune they crave.

Perry who was once a vegan hero, became a slave of high calorie carbohydrates.

Perry claimed to have experienced an unhappy childhood, and that he was adopted, and was "in and out of therapy since I was five years old."

He once narrated how much it cost him to process the decision his biological parents made to abandon him. And that as a teenager he was diagnosed with OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder) and ADD (attention deficit disorder).

In an interview in 2021, Avocado admitted that some of his emotionally turbulent videos were actually based on self-orchestrated conflicts.

Avocado credited his studies and experience in arts for giving him the ability to do what he did.

Avocado tends to overexpose his miseries to achieve as many views as possible. He claimed that his husband was unfaithful with 12 men and transmitted STD to him, surprising everyone that they were married.

But later, he claimed that the marriage visa was rejected, which was then continued with more drama.

A lot of his videos show him crying and screaming, or suggesting a mental breakdown.

Avocado knows that his audience wants him to be like that, and for the sake of viewership, he obliged.

YouTube is full of compilations.

In an interview in 2020, he said that "YouTube has been a way to create a character and offer entertainment. What you see on camera is completely exaggerated to get clicks. People watch wrestling and know it’s fake."

"They know reality TV is fake, but that doesn’t stop them from enjoying it. I’m smart enough to know that drama sells. Orlin has increasingly practiced these fake food fights, cheating crises, and breakups with me. It doesn’t reflect our relationship in real life at all.”

"I am always two steps ahead. This has been the greatest social experiment I have ever known," he confessed.

"It is exciting to be a witness, to observe all these sick, unbalanced, disoriented beings, wandering the internet in search of stories […] I feel as if my life has positioned itself in the place where I am, monitoring ants in an ant farm. One follows another. It is fascinating. Just look at all these consumers, all these lost and bored people who consume whatever they are told to consume. I am the villain."