Grian also appeared very early into Sam's youtube career, though under a different name. The Hungry Games (Minecraft Machinima) - Part: 2, April 16th 2013, was the first video that Grian appeared in on Sam's channel. At this time he ran a channel called craftedmovie, where he uploaded a bunch of minecraft machinima much like Sam and Taurtis did. Both Taurtis and Grian were very close to Sam, and all three of them liked collaborating and making story driven content together. So it makes sense how these three would end up making a minecraft roleplay together just three years later based on Yandere Simulator, which at the time was an extremely popular game that would easily generate lots of clicks. But little did they know, this series would prove to be Sam's most popular creation to this day.

As mentioned before, Yandere High School is inspired by Yandere Simulator. I had said based on previously, but YHS is, in truth, nothing like Yandere Simulator outside of names and having a yandere. In YHS we follow two young men, Taurtis and Sam, as they go through high school in a town in Japan where for some reason no one speaks Japanese. However, strange things begin to happen as their teacher's wife goes missing and is later found dead. We watch as Taurtis, Sam and later Grian uncover the dark side of not only the town, but themselves as well. I could easily get into an in depth explanation of every single thing that happens in the series, but there are people who have already done a much better job at that then I ever could have, such as Kate Michelle who made a video recapping YHS for its ten year anniversary. I personally think the best way to experience Yandere High School is to watch all the episodes and then move onto Tokyo Soul, but Grian fans have no attention span unless it involves their fav so watching that video will already make you more of a YHS fan than 99% of the fanbase ⊙▽⊙

Can you tell I'm not a fan of Grian fans in the YHS fandom?

Sam, Grian and Taurtis are a really interesting bunch with continually changing dynamics and characteristics that surprisingly works. The show is a comedy first and foremost, where no one bothers to keep track of certain facts or even details about their characters which can cause a lot of confusion about what's canon and what's not. In the first episode of the series, Sam says that he's a good student who gets good grades. However, as the series goes on we see his character get dumber and dumber to where all of the main trio (except Grian but also him too sometimes lol) are idiots. Does this mean that Sam just got dumber throughout the series and was at one point a model student? Maybe. Another interpretation could be that Sam is just making up things to brag about, which we see him do a lot in the series.

Many things are just up to interpretation like that which can lead to very different views of the characters from fan to fan, all of that to say the trio are very fluid characters that adapt to whatever scenario they're thrown in. Generally though, Sam is a loser who tries to appear cooler than he is while thrusting himself and his friends into danger for frivolous reasons, Taurtis is a goofball who's much more popular with his peers than Sam and acts as both a voice of reason and an instigator towards Sam, and Grian is the self proclaimed sane one of the group who ends up being the butt of many of their jokes and is also a bit of a dweeb. I want to dive into how they change when switching over to Tokyo Soul, but I want to make a dedicated Tokyo Soul page so I'll keep this one just about Yandere High School lol.

Anyways, Sam and Taurtis are constantly bickering and sabotaging the other, but it's apparent how much they care for each other by how they act whenever they're separated for any reason. Their bond is so strong that even in the midst of a severe mental episode, Sam is able to identify that the concussed "Jerry" is strangely more Taurtis-like than the "Taurtis" he's been hanging out with for a week, saying that if it weren't for "Taurtis" already being his best friend, "Jerry" would be. Taurtis and Grian's relationship is usually them clowning on Sam and objecting to any ideas he has while still going along with it. I'll write more about this whenever I next rewatch YHS and take more in depth notes about how the characters interact with each other :P. Sam and Grian's relationship is the second most interesting dynamic to me in Yandere High School, with Sam and Grian having been friends before the events of YHS apparently which makes me have so many questions already. While Sam certainly torments Grian and puts him through hell, at certain times Grian encourages it and will act maliciously when coaxed on by Sam. We see this during the last(?) beach episode, where Sam tells Grian to ask out Chan to prom and never show up. Grian does so, which leads to Yuki becoming Sam's girlfriend and being the catalyst of the entire latter half of the series. Grian and Sam's relationship is very complex and back and forth, reminding me of Kyle and Cartman's relationship in South Park. Speaking of South Park..

There are quite a few similarities between South Park and YHS that I had noticed when watching all of South Park for the first time. Mainly, just how much Sam resembles Cartman in personality and actions. Both are narcisistic assholes who are quite mean to their friends at times while being upset whenever they're rude back, both do bad things then in their head rewrite it so that someone else had done the bad thing, both have fat jokes made about them, both continually get away with being devious, both trick their friends into helping them with horrible plans, and both have cthulhu as a friend who they want to destroy the universe with. There is definitely more connections between the two, but those are the things that came to mind as I'm writing this. Grian is like Kyle in some ways, both thinking of themselves as morally righteous and better than their "evil" friend while going along with his idea, bailing him out of it and sometimes being on the same level as the "evil" friend. Taurtis doesn't really resemble anyone in particular from South Park, but I feel he's a bit like Kenny in that he's the "evil" friend's best friend and going along with his ideas for his own self gain, being perverts who somehow pull, and WON'T STOP DYING AND COMING BACK . Considering how much of a movie nerd the real life Sam England is, I wonder if some of the YHS characters was inspired by South Park. It's probably just a coincidence, but I like being delusional