Starmen.Net

with every youtuber geting into drama i come to the conclution to on you tube there is no one you can trust

TRUST NO ONE
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yea i just have trust issues

I’ve done some digging on a few youtubers. A lot of the big names have little dedicated hater communities! The funniest one to me is the Cinemassacre/AVGN one. James Rolfe doesn’t really… do anything. But he has an entire little anti-fandom of criticizers.

Now, there are things to criticize about AVGN, especially after Screenwave jumped in, but this reddit community mostly just complains about James Rolfe’s hairline of all things. Like, that isn’t fair, man lol. That’s a good sign, though. When a community dedicated to dig up dirt on you can only come up with criticisms of the show and its production, or (unfairly) the appearances of the crew? Screenwave sucks though. They suck.

The one that affected me the most (in terms of youtubers at least) was probably the Channel Awesome controversy. I was a huge HUGE fan of Doug Walker. Like, legit looked up to him as a critic believe it or not.

Art can be enjoyed separate from the artist. Also, putting something that someone said in their teens on display is just… bad. I remember a thing of people trying to cancel CaveTown because they found the Twitter account he used as a teen and it was like…wildly antisemitic. He then grew up, became a better person, and tried to forget about that era of his life. But then someone dug it up and showed it to the world on TikTok. People were crowding him left and right despite the fact that he didn’t believe any of those things anymore.

Moral of the story: Feel free to dig up stuff on your own, but definitely think of the human being you’re putting into the spotlight when you publish that stuff.

There’s also another layer for people getting canceled for things that aren’t even problematic. Matpat making gibberish sounds and one kinda sounded like the n-word, Will Wood’s “cry like a baby with autism strapped to a ceiling fan” lyric (I have autism 1 and most of my friends are autistic too. We all love that line and I have never met a single person to find that offensive), or, as much as I dislike Taylor Swift’s music, canceling her for not getting involved in a political movement is so dumb. The whole idea of deeming people problematic or canceled feels off, unless it’s someone like JK Rowling who has ADMITTED to inspiring the goblins off of Jews. She has room to grow, as all people do. Hell, even Kanye’s getting better when it comes to antisemitism (though, his reasons may be a bit…odd). But that’s an actual example of someone who I will agree is okay to be publicly known as problematic. She said those things publicly and takes pride in them.

Well, with Hogwarts Legacy specifically, the game itself has problematic content.

Hogwarts Legacy might be a great game otherwise, idk, haven’t pirated it. But as a Jew I find it hard to engage in really any Wizarding World media comfortably. Besides fanfics, fanfics address the conflict great. Props to fanfiction.

I think better examples of loud antisemites who keeps that out of their art are Kanye West, HP Lovecraft, Pink Floyd, Roal Dahl (though I do have my thoughts on the character of Willy Wonka, I don’t think it’s half as bad as the goblins), and pre-apology CaveTown (bro’s cool now, he was just an -- as a teenager, as people tend to be). JK Rowling is too much of an idiot to leave her bigotry out of her work.

This also doesn’t just apply to antisemitism, obviously. It’s just a topic that I personally feel like I get a say in. Take the movie Peter Pan. That -- has a whole CONTINENT of problems. The portrayal of indigenous North Americans being nothing but barbarians who do drugs is… definitely something. Not only that, but Peter Pan takes failing the Bechdel Test as a challenge. The second Wendy appears, every single woman and girl in the movie is instantly jealous of her and tries to MURDER HER because they see her as competition. Also Wendy herself is a motherly figure to every fricking boy in the movie. All in all, lots of problems. When someone doesn’t want to watch Peter Pan out of discomfort, it’s not “oh Walt Disney made a self-insert who had a Hitler moustache and was a bad person”, but rather “this movie itself is so insanely problematic I don’t want to feed this content to my eyes”. KISS is an outwardly transphobic band but none of their songs are saying “Hey if there’s a girl who used to be a boy, kill him!” or something. So pirating their stuff is fine. I personally love their music.

Hopefully this analysis made sense and can be useful. It might just sound like rambling, which, in part, it is, but I believe that there is a method to separating art from artists that should be shared with the world.

Lotus of the Umbra:

Except JK Rowling is actively using her platform to push back human rights and sees any consumption of her work, even piracy, as endorsement.

This isn’t a case of, “oh, I disagree with their views but I still love their art”; this is supporting someone who not only exposes transphobia, but also directly funds and associates with far-right, “anti-woke” groups. Hell, she even supported an antisemitic YTber (Magdalen Burns) that spread conspiracy theories about “Jewish millionaires funding the trans cabal”. Even HP fans have harassed and doxxed trans people online.

I inherently side-eye any HP these days because of her transphobia.

Exactly, yeah. And the media itself enforces her beliefs, not just her platform. We’ve seen her make money-loving Jewish characters, nerdy and backstabbing ambiguously east Asian characters (forget ethnicity. Cho Chang is a Korean first name with a Mandarin surname iirc. She might go back and say Cho’s bi-ethnic or something, but looks to me like she just didn’t really care), an ambiguous-ethnicity Black character named --ing Kingsley Shacklebolt, etc. God knows what would’ve happened if she knew trans people existed when she wrote the books. It goes beyond what she supports (both with and without regard to her work), but also what said work says about groups of people.