Viewers most likely judged Kynt and Vyxsin before the premiere of The Amazing Race 12 even began. The reason: Kynt and Vyxsin are a very goth couple, embracing the aesthetic devotedly, going nowhere without the goth make-up and the goth outfits. However, once the season kicked off, viewers likely got their expectations blind-sided – Kynt and Vyxsin were as normal, kind and likable a team as one could hope for. On The Amazing Race 12, the duo immediately became fan favorites and looked to be one of the favorites to win the game, until they were eliminated from the game this past Sunday. Kynt and Vyxsin were kind enough to speak with us at BuddyTV this morning to discuss their time on the show.
Hey, this is Oscar Dahl from BuddyTV, and I’m here with Kynt and Vyxsin from The Amazing Race. Kynt, Vyxsin, how are you guys doing?
Kynt: You’ve got goth kids!
Vyxsin: You’ve got us.
Were you two always big fans of the show? Why did you decide to apply?
Kynt: Oh yeah, The Amazing Race has been one of our favorite TV shows for a significant amount of time. It’s one of the few shows on TV that can hold our ADD attention span. Vyxsin and I thought it would be perfect for us. We both love to travel, we get severely claustrophobic if we stay in one place too long, and we’ve always been road trip junkies, so we’re adept at traveling on the fly. A lot of times I’ll find out about a music festival or a sci-fi convention going on in another state, and I’ll call up Vyxsin and be like, “This is a great event. We’ve gotta hit the road, let’s go!” So we’re accustomed to road tripping, traveling on the fly. We knew this show would be perfect.
So once you guys were cast on the show, how important was it for you to be ambassadors for the goth world? Was that something that was on your mind?
Vyxsin: It definitely was. Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s a big surprise or secret that goth culture gets kind of a bad rap in the media at large, and just in some of mainstream America’s household opinions. I guess it was sort of our hope that, through the experience of being on the show, that maybe we could alter people’s opinions just a little bit for the better.
Kynt: We wanted to show people that goths aren’t depressed, socially inept basement dwellers. This culture is intelligent, artistic, and just plain fun, quite honestly. That’s the underlying reason why we’re goths, because it’s fun. It’s that simple.
I know at least on our site you guys have a lot of supporters, probably the most of any of the teams. Have you been surprised by the amount of positive feedback you’ve received since the show started airing?
Kynt: We’re both humbled and flattered by it, quite honestly. It’s wonderful.
Vyxsin: Yeah, it has been really incredible to see how supportive…I mean, goth people aren’t in general huge reality TV fans, but we’ve had so many people MySpace us and tell us that they had never seen the show before, but they’re watching because they know that we’re on it. That’s just so cool. Then people who love the show, who maybe have never even met a goth person, have written us and let us know that they’ve enjoyed watching us as well. We’ve just felt so supported, and it’s been really a wonderful and positive experience all around.
Kynt: One of the most memorable fan reactions that we’ve had so far was when we were at one of our favorite pizza parlors recently. A lady came up to us, told us she was 75-years-old, and that when she saw the first episode of The Amazing Race and saw us, she was very frank with us and said, “I did not like you all.” She was like, “I don’t know what the goth thing is about, I didn’t understand it,” but she said, “By episode three, you were the team I was rooting for.” She was like, “Now we love you guys, the grandkids cheer for you.” It’s been great to know that we were able to get people excited.
Once you got on the race and you were competing along with everyone else, what was the most different from your initial expectations?
Vyxsin: I’ve heard a lot of other teams from past seasons say this in interviews, and I just have to echo it because it’s so true. Whatever you think, sitting in the living room watching the show, it’s so much more difficult doing it in real life. Oh my goodness. As you’re watching the show, everything is condensed down to about an hour’s worth of television time. When they show the little plane, drawing a little line across the country, saying “The teams now fly,” the flights sometimes are 14 hours long. Or the teams now run up this hill, and it could be a four or five mile run and it looks like about 15 seconds. Everything just takes longer, it’s always hotter, or wetter, or colder, or heavier, or…I don’t even know. It’s definitely a lot more intense than ever I imagined watching it before.
Kynt: The Amazing Race experience is very authentic. Like she mentioned, what you see on TV is a condensed version of a leg that might have taken multiple days. We have so much respect for Bertram Van Munster and the people behind this show, and their creative vision. It’s a hard show to pull off, it’s intense. We’re jumping from nation to nation, country to country. We really respect the people behind it.
Let’s talk about the other teams for a second. You guys have always been pegged from the beginning as one of the more likable teams. But this season there’s been a couple teams, namely Jennifer and Nathan and Ronald and Christina, who have been pretty tough to swallow, watching them on TV. Was that your sense when you were along with them, or is that a product of editing?
Kynt: No, I feel like the editing of the season is very accurate. I mean, everything that it shows us saying and doing, we really did. But honestly we just tried to stay away from any of the pettiness, stay out of the drama and interpersonal conflicts, and focus on ourselves. Focus on racing, focus on completing tasks, getting the best flights possible. As opposed to whispering, “Oh, what’s so and so doing? What’s that team doing?” We tried to just be the island of Kynt and Vyxsin.
Vyxsin: That was definitely a strategy of ours going into it. For us, the race was much more about Kynt and I doing our best at the different tasks, completing them as well as we could and as quickly as we could, and moving on to the next thing. More so than getting too involved with other stuff. A lot of times too, you don’t always know what’s going on with the other teams when you’re racing, because you do spend time with them, but at the same time there’s a lot that goes on that you don’t know. As we’ve been watching the show, there’s a lot that’s been said and that’s happened that we weren’t even aware of until we’ve seen the show. So there’s been a lot of surprises for us too.
Kynt: Just like in our real life, we deflect the drama. We have no interest in it. They can whisper about us, call us names all they want. We don’t care.
Do you guys have a favorite spot that you visited while in the race?
Kynt: Wow, that’s a difficult question. There were so many beautiful places.
Vyxsin: I would happily move to any of the places that we lived in and live there for a year or two. Any one of them, in a heartbeat. I feel like, honestly Croatia was just so picture postcard beautiful, and I think was probably one of my favorite places. Especially thinking just how much that country has been through in the past few years, and to see it looking so modern, yet also historic, it’s just lovely. It was a really neat experience to be there.
Kynt: My favorite place in The Amazing Race was the magical village in Lithuania. There were little elves and vagabonds and dwarves, muppets in costumes, that was unbelievable. It was great because when we arrived there we were the only team there, so we actually started playing with a lot of the little critters. One of them invited us into their home and we went in, then me and Vyxsin looked at each other and realized, oh, we gotta race.
Vyxsin: We were eating biscuits and drinking tea, and we’re like, “What are we doing? Oh my God.” It was very like Alice in Wonderland. We got enchanted.
Kynt: We did. Their spell worked on us, because when we arrived there, momentarily we stopping Amazing Racing. We started interacting with them and dancing around, and like she said we kind of had to snap our fingers and be like alright, let’s get back to racing.
Kynt, Vyxsin, I appreciate you guys stopping by. Do you have any final thoughts or anything you’d like to say to your fans out there?
Kynt: We’re just so thankful for this experience. It’s such a blessing to get to travel the world, and to do so in front of millions and millions of people. This is something we’re going to appreciate for the rest of our lives, and be so proud of. This adventure may be over, but the pink and black attack will never stop racing.
Alright guys, I appreciate you taking the time to talk to us, and good luck in the future.
Vyxsin: Happy New Year!
Kynt: See you at BuddyTV.
-Interview Conducted by Oscar Dahl
(Image Courtesy of CBS)
Senior Writer, BuddyTV
