An Extremely Spoony Story - III

Well, Saturday I'm begging you, baby...

Previously.

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Noah Antwiler and other Channel Awesome contributors Benzai, Paw, and Shawn Faust. Year unknown.

When we last left Noah Antwiler, the man was standing at what looked to be the peak of his career. By the turn of 2011 into 2012, with over five years of successful content creation and four years of flying the Channel Awesome banner, he had reached the high water mark. It’s a funny thing, success; a fickle mistress. She finds you when you least expects you, lifts you up to places you could have never imagined, and, just as abruptly as she swept into your life, she can waltz right back out of it, leaving you alone on your long, long plummet back to Earth. You’ll be at your zenith, and you never even knew you were there until you’ve hit the bottom again.

But, even long before the muses turned on him, the lofty pedestal Spoony had clambered onto among the vaunted pantheon of top contributors to Channel Awesome had begun to crack.

In 2010, Spoony was awarded the title of Funniest Person to Follow Online by Mashable.com. Even at the time, I’m not sure how much of an honor this really was - Mashable wasn’t a site I was aware of at the time, and, doing a brief bit of research now, it seems to be little more than a bargain bin Buzzfeed. Regardless of the prestige, Spoony was not about to let anyone forget that he was, indeed, the Funniest Person to Follow Online of 2010, according to the good people at Mashable. All two of them, I presume.

Now, to be fair, I am told that this award did carry some weight, back in the day. Apparently, Mashable, too, was at it’s peak level of influence at the time, and winning this award - especially in a field that was so crowded - was quite a pretty feather in Spoony’s cap. And that was not lost on him. He made sure to make mention of it on the splash page for his site, in the header for his site, in his signature on the forums, in his bio on Twitter - if there was somewhere he could put that he won that award, he would.

So, you think that Spoony would have celebrated, right? He would have taken to the forums of The Spoony Experiment and personally thanked each and every person who had supported him over the years. All those little people, those faceless names who threw money at him, month after month, kept him fed, kept him supported, ensured that he was able to do what they did… you think they’d recieve a shred of gratitude, yeah?

The thank you that fans got has since been lost to time. It was uploaded to The Spoony Experiment alone, and was promptly deleted within hours. While the exact contents are unknown to most, what is known is that the video was almost half-an-hour of Spoony expressing a few seconds of gratitude towards his fanbase before promptly tearing into them.

What follows is from a thread on The Spoony Experiment’s forums titled, An Appeal for Manners, posted by Spoony on December 17th, 2009 - ironically, only ten days before his own birthday, and shortly following the deletion of the video mentioned above.

I debated with myself for a long time whether or not to post anything about this matter. I thought it might be feeding the trolls. But I think this needs to be addressed.

First of all, thank you all for the extraordinary support and well-wishes this year, that helped me win the Open Web Award for Funniest Person of the Year. I’m truly touched and honored by your support, and hope that I’ll continue to earn it.

That said, the celebration is tainted a great deal for me because of a few bad eggs out there who continue to post cruel and hateful things on the blog and on the forums. I’m very, very upset right now. In fact, some of the comments lately have left me completely outraged. I’ve taken down my latest video and I don’t intend to remake it, because honestly, I’m not in the mood. I don’t feel like being funny, and you don’t want to see me in front of a camera right now. These wanton emotional attacks on hard-working, innocent people have to stop. I don’t mind if you come after me; in a way, I open myself up for it. I’d prefer it if you didn’t insult me, of course, but I can take it. Where I draw the line is when you make hateful, ignorant comments against my friends, family, and loved ones. These belligerent, crude comments have caused more harm than you know. It’s not fair. It’s not warranted. There’s no call to ever say such awful things to anyone, and I’m tired of it.

And I know that I’m only addressing a scant few people out there. I have thousands and thousands of fans, almost all of whom are astoundingly generous, kind, and supportive. I know you’re good people, and I never get to thank these fans enough. It sucks that I have to stop the presses, drag the whole party down, and give these cowards the attention they don’t deserve.

The post goes on for several more paragraphs, each more bitter, vitriolic, and hateful than the last, lambasting the users of his own forums for their conduct, especially when it came to talking about himself, his acquaintances at Channel Awesome, his brother, Miles, and, more than any of them, his girlfriend, Scarlet. To an outside observer, this may not seem unwarranted; it is fair to say that, then just as now, the denizens of the net are not exactly known for being the most scrupled, disciplined, or polite, and if they were taking pot shots at Spoony’s extended social network, that really wouldn’t be appropriate.

But, here’s the thing - for the most part, people weren’t talking smack about these people. Not his friends at Channel Awesome. Not his family, not his brother. The only person that they were legitimately criticizing were Spoony and his girlfriend, and, if you were on the forums at the time, you’d understand why.

Now, even though I visited The Spoony Experiment quite frequently, I never went on the forums or discussion boards. When Antwiler started posting his content on Channel Awesome, I rarely went there at all. The war that had been waged in the forums on Spoony’s own site was something that I and a good portion of his fans, especially those who only knew him through Channel Awesome, were wholly unaware of.

I’ll say it like it is - Spoony did not take criticism well. He never did. Even the most polite, well-intentioned, and constructive criticism leveled at him was often met with disdain, disregard, or disinterest, if not outright hostility. Over the years, Antwiler had developed a reputation for carelessly wielding the banhammer in his forums and regularly striking down anyone he thought was causing trouble… which was just about anyone who had anything even slightly critical to say about his content or conduct. The only person worse was Scarlet herself, who, as webmaster of the site and chief admin of the forums, took down even more people than Spoony, and gained an unsavory reputation for having limited patience and an even more limited temper.

And by 2010, unfortunately, there was plenty to justifiably criticize Spoony for. His reviews, while still boasting quality head-and-shoulders above most of his peers, had begun to come slower and slower, and the long-winded, rambling vlogs came faster and faster. It was easy to say that all the time that Spoony spent talking to a camera about whatever came to mind could have been spent working on the content that actually kept current fans satisfied and new fans coming in.

As mentioned previously, even though some vlog series - namely his Dungeons and Dragons vlog, Counter Monkey - were enjoyed by his fans, others… well, remember how I said we’d touch on it again? Here it is. Infamously, his wrestling vlog, Wrestle Wrestle, was notorious for being upwards of four hours a piece and borderline unwatchable. If you did not watch an unhealthy amount of professional wrestling and spend upwards of hundreds of dollars on every Pay-per-View event from every wrestling promotion in business, from the big boys with the WWE to the most rinky-dink indie promo operating out of a high school gym in rural West Virginia, you probably were not gonna know what the fuck Antwiler was rambling about if you fired up a Wrestle Wrestle vlog¹.

Worse still, when the bigger reviews were released… well, they’d changed in their execution. I touched on this briefly before, but there was this… trend, you could say, that became very, very popular among the angry internet critic crowd where it wasn’t just enough to review a movie or a video game. Oh, no - you had to tell a story.

I believe that the trend can be traced back, as all things in the scene can, to the tastemaker, trendsetter, and mack daddy of them all, James Rolfe’s Angry Video Game Nerd, in which the eponymous Nerd’s reviews were frequently interrupted by side characters, often taken from the subject of his review.

This is still peak comedy to me.

Over time, as his episode roster expanded, something of a lore developed, with various characters - both pre-established and original - floated in and out of the small, self-contained stories that Rolfe began to tell in his videos. The thing with Rolfe was that, as the progenitor of the entire genre, when he did things, he tended to do them well. If you couldn’t tell from the fact he’s wailing on Bugs Bunny, he didn’t take it that seriously.

This could not be said of the Channel Awesome crew. These people weren’t just making silly, self-referential, tongue-in-cheek skits; no, these people… they were auteurs. They weren’t just critics. No - they were creatives. And they had their own stories to tell.

What started as small sight gags, short skits, and slap-stick comedy quickly devolved into long, overarching, and complicated plots rife with various pastiche characters all played by the content creator that soon became more of a focus than the actual review parts of the reviews.

Spoony was not exempt from this. While he was never quite as devoted to his own internal mythology as, say, Linkara or the Doug Walker, it was still there, and people didn’t really want to see Spoony engage in poorly choreographed fights on a greensceen with himself dressed in cosplay - they wanted hear his analysis of whatever content he was reviewing. Bit characters that had once appeared for short gags like Doctor Insano became staple bits of his reviews. More and more, Doctor Insano became a frequent presence in this videos, and even spiraled out into other content, often appearing in Linkara or Nostalgia Critic videos. And, while it was funny at first, the gag, the character, the whole bit wore out its welcome to many very fast.

Spoony as Doctor Insano and Doug Walker as one of his character, The Bum, at a convention, no doubt harassing a cosplayer for video content.

This, I assume, is a trait he picked up by being close to Linkara, who, as I mentioned before, is the undisputed king of turning a nominal review into an hour-long homemade tokustatsu² special.

While I wasn’t the biggest fan of the story aspect to Antwiler’s videos myself, compared to Linkara, they never seemed to be as intrusive or oblique or overly complicated. Trust me, the man in the hat and his magic gun will get their own write-up one day, but, for now, if you want to see an example for yourself, I’ve provided one below.

This video is all of the story bits taken from Linkara’s videos, commentated by Lewis himself. It is over three hours long. What this amounts to is three fucking hours of a movie spread into bite-size pieces across hundreds of videos recorded over the span of years.

While, clearly, there is an appetite for this sort of storytelling if Linkara’s continued success is anything to go by, there was an equal or greater fraction of Spoony’s audience - and the Channel Awesome audience as a whole - that found the whole schtick more grating than anything.

At the time, Spoony was also jet-setting across the country to collaborate with other Channel Awesome contributors. These collaborations, while great ideas in theory, were only great if you liked both of the people featured in them. Many of his fans did not like all of the people he collaborated with. Because he collaborated with fucking everyone. Not all of them were bad, mind you. Some of these projects were fairly good. But, for the most part, he was spending weeks, if not months, putting his own content on hold to play-act and shuck-and-jive with the no-names of Channel Awesome. There’s something to be said about his willingness to work with others, but, at the same time, it wasn’t exactly what many of Spoony’s fans wanted to see.

But, it didn’t matter what Spoony’s fans wanted - it all came secondary to what Spoony wanted.

I’m of two minds when it comes to this. Every content creator, regardless of what they produce, has the right to make whatever they choose. If I decided to shift focus and change this publication to reviews of beer, wine, and cigars, I would be entitled to do so. If I wanted to sprinkle in bits of my own original fiction about my evil twin who comes and steals my booze and smokes and write about our epic battles in the streets of Seattle, I wouldn’t be wrong to do so. If I wanted to stock my articles with side-characters like Boo Boo the Clown and my mechanical doppelganger Mecha-Ape, it’s my publication, I can do that, and screw you if you don’t like it.

But my audience is not entitled to continue engaging with my content if they don’t like it. I can write whatever I damn well please. But the audience can also read whatever they damn well please. And if they don’t want to read reviews for beer, wine, and cigars, or read about me going to Saturn’s moons to kill my mechanical simian arch-nemisis?

Well, I know you would still read my articles, because you love me, but, hypothetically speaking, you wouldn’t have to, and I’d be remiss to be mad at you for not wanting to read it, especially if you have no interest in overwrought space operas and alcohol. I wouldn’t be mad. Just… disappointed. No, no - it’s okay, it’s okay. You don’t have to apologize. It’s fine. I see how it is. But, I mean… don’t you feel guilty? I thought what we had was special.

It’s actually why I created another Substack for my fiction writing. I know not all of you would be interested in my fiction writing, so, I’m not going to clog up the pipeline of what you do want to read from this publication with it. But, uh… y’know, if you do wanna check it out, here’s a link. I’m not saying you have to, but, like, if you feel so inclined, I mean… I wouldn’t say no. It’s right there. No pressure.

Being a content creator is no different than any other service-based profession. Think of it like a restaurant. If I’m serving burgers, burgers, and more burgers, and people love it, that’s great. But if I overhaul my business overnight and begin serving only half-assed vegan cuisine like kale-nuggets and soy-protein-patties… could I justifiably be angry if my customers abandoned me overnight? The inverse holds even more true. If I serve vegan fare and suddenly pivot to wild game sausages, I’d be stupid and ignorant if I was surprised, mad, or both that, suddenly, my vegan clientele has no more interest in my food.

Simply put, you can sell whatever you’d like, but you can’t always expect the audience to have an appetite for what you’re selling if you change your base product, and I really don’t think you can be mad at them for going elsewhere if what attracted them in the first place is no longer being served.

Antwiler was not just mad that his change in content production and style had begun to rub his audience the wrong way - he was livid. Most of this criticism was completely well-intentioned and only written out of both concern and support for Spoony. No one wanted to see the man fail, outside of a few bad actors; a few that would soon become a lot as more and more people fell off from the Spoony wagon, driven away by his increasing hostility towards any and all criticism. Of course, it wasn’t just jilted fans that started to take the piss with Antwiler, either; trolls from other corners of the internet, seeing a popular content creator thrashing about and caterwauling like a wounded seal, smelled blood in the water.

It was not difficult to get under Spoony’s skin.

Remember how I said that Antwiler had a way of coming off as a friend? I mean that in every way. After all, sometimes, when you go out to grab some drinks with a buddy, the conversations don’t always stay light, airy, and insubstantial. One minute, you might be discussing the NFL’s playoff picture, only for your buddy to turn dour and begin spilling his guts all over the table about his relationship problems at home. Now, this is perfectly acceptable for a friend to do - it’s what friends, quite literally, are for. They’re a support network.

However, just like how you do not want to tell some random stranger that you just met at a bar about your deepest insecurities, you also do not want to start opening up and divulging your deepest, darkest secrets and personal struggles to the wider internet. Unfortunately, Antwiler didn’t quite seem to grasp that. He had a penchant for oversharing, especially in his vlogs, often diverging off the given topic he was talking about and instead veering off into tangents pertaining to his personal life. It’s part of why there was so much information surrounding his struggles with employment, mental health, relationships, parents, and, strangely enough, his brother’s job as a member of the Mesa Police Department. In a way, it was endearing to hear so much, and made him all the more relatable, putting a very human backstory to an internet figure who, in a lot of ways, seemed larger than life. However, his chronic oversharing also handed trolls all the ammunition they would ever need to stab him at his weakest points.

Sadly, I suspect that this constant need to overshare and use his audience as a sort of surrogate friend, if not an ad hoc therapist, was due to a lack of meaningful friendships and a wanting support network in his life off the internet.

Still, don’t mistake these cracks in the facade as debilitating injuries to his career; at this point, Spoony was still very much riding high on his success. Outbursts and trolling aside, he was still a beloved member of the Channel Awesome cadre, and, even if the reviews weren’t as sharp or focused as they once were, he was still turning out top-tier content that rivaled that of anyone else on the site. It was around this time that his Ultima retrospectives would kick into high gear, and Spoony would produce some of the best content he’d ever put out.

It’s hard to pin-point exactly when the lugbolts began to pop off the wheels and the whole thing started to come apart, but 2011 feels like a good as spot as any. It was that year that he and his girlfriend, Scarlet, would split.

Understandably, Antwiler did not take this well. Not only was Scarlet one of Antwiler’s first serious relationships (if I remember correctly), and perhaps the longest he had been in up until that point. She immediately severed all ties with The Spoony Experiment, effectively abandoning it and leaving it to fall into disrepair in the years following her departure. Spoony’s outbursts online became more frequent and increasingly unhinged as he spiraled into a very public depressive episode. Vlogs changed from innocuous rambling to drunken screeds. His Twitter activity increased exponentially, and it seemed as if he was picking fights on the platform the same way a depressive drunk might try to start a brawl in a bar just to take his mind of whatever was ailing him. Before, Spoony had openly admitted to being diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and it didn’t take much suspension of belief to think that he had stopped taking whatever medications had been keeping him stable.

Around this time, I remember a vlog he recorded with Lewis Lovhaug - Linkara - and Channel Awesome contributor Justin Carmical. Though I’ve yet to bring up Carmical, the man went by the moniker of JewWario - yes, really - and made content that predated even James Rolfe’s Angry Video Game Nerd. The man was an oldhead on the scene if there was one.

Remember him - he’s going to be important, down the road.

I can’t find it for the life of me today, but it is very deeply burned into my mind. I imagine the three were together collaborating on a new video, but part of me also wants to believe that Lovhaug and Carmical were truly more than just work acquaintances with Antwiler and had come to help him through some dark times. In this video, the three gave their thoughts about the newest Twilight movie at the time - Breaking Dawn Part I, I believe. Spoony sat on the floor in front of a coffee table, with Lovhaug on the couch behind him and Carmical off camera. About mid-way through, Spoony, who was already several beers in, begins to reminisce on how he and Scarlet had watched all the other Twilight movies in theater, and how much fun they’d had riffing on them. As he does, he begins to choke up on camera, and admit to some pretty dark thoughts. Thoughts that he’ll never have another girlfriend. Thoughts about how profoundly alone he felt. Thoughts that, as soon as Lovhaug and Carmical went back to their respective home cities, he’d be left alone with Mesa with nothing but his thoughts. Lovhaug awkwardly, though genuinely, tried his best to console Antwiler. I remember him saying, Come on, man… that’s not true, in that unmistakable tone of someone helplessly watching their friend spiral, knowing full well they don’t have the words to or ability to help in any meaningful way.

The three of them sit in silence for a long, long minute, with Spoony looking straight down at the table, head cradled in his hands, appearing as if it’s all he can do not to cry then and there.

To say it was deeply uncomfortable would be an understatement. Why they even chose to publish it, I’m not sure. But, to me, I’ll always remember it as a raw, unflattering, and unfiltered look at a man in free-fall.

If there was any bright spot to this time, it would be that Antwiler would come into possession of a dog named Oreo.

I think it may only be a slight exaggeration to say that Oreo was just about the only thing that kept this guy from going off the deep end. Pretty much everything on his Twitter feed for months was either him mouthing off to concerned fans, telling them that he didn’t need help (and even if he did, what did they care?), him posting some of the most bleak shit you’ve ever read in your life, or pictures of Oreo. So, of course, trolls began to try and get Animal Protective Services involved to take Oreo away. Fortunately, these attempts were unsuccessful, because I’m pretty sure if they were, Spoony would have had a Waco-style standoff with the Phoenix SCPA agents that came to take his dog.

Again - uncomfortable doesn’t even come close to describing it.

As his behavior both online and in reality would become increasingly acerbic, unpredictable, and vitriolic, things between himself and other contributors at Channel Awesome would come to a boiling point in May of 2012, when Antwiler would post the tweet that finally brought his relationship with the site crashing down around him.

For context, JesuOtaku was another Channel Awesome contributor, who was dating a man named Nash, who’s radio show - which is still going on, by the way - was also featured on the site.

Pictured: Nash Bozard of Charleston, S.C., who has the most Southern name I think I’ve ever heard in my life.

What exactly spurred Spoony to make this tweet, I don’t know, though this is just one of many tweets in a chain in which he was (perhaps drunkenly) spouting off about dirty and perverse things. It wasn’t the first time he’d made uncouth remarks on Twitter - far from it - but it’s definitely bad business practice to say you’re going to chain your co-worker to a pipe in a basement and, well… you can fill in the blanks.

That’s JesuOtaku in the middle in a screencap from one of the Channel Awesome movies that has not aged well.

Another Channel Awesome contributor, Alison Pregler - better known by her screen name, Obscurus Lupa - was quick to jump on the topic.

Of course, Spoony replied as he often did to criticism, which is to say he immediately resorted to posting a deluge of venom-laced tweets that were equal parts self-loathing whinging and sarcastic ad hominem attacks against anyone and everyone who had something to say about his behavior.

At the time, I remember thinking that Pregler was simply sticking her nose in business that didn’t have anything to do with her and being offended on JesuOtaku’s behalf and stirring trouble for the sake of causing problems, since, if I remember correctly, JesuOtaku, for her³ part, didn’t really pay attention to it at the time and shrugged it off as an off-color but ultimately irrelevant joke.

However, in recent years, as more information has come to light about the behind the scenes drama at Channel Awesome, it’s been alleged that Spoony had a history of making skeezy, sleazy, and lewd comments about female contributors in their presence. While much of the drama and allegations are questionable in their own right, as I’ll hopefully illustrate in another article, I will say that, regardless of Pregler’s intention, she was right about one thing; Spoony’s comments were really not a good look. Not for him. Not for anyone else at Channel Awesome.

A lot of people felt bitter towards Pregler for the events that followed, characterizing her as a nosy shrew that kicked off the beginning of the end of Channel Awesome, but I think that might be too harsh a judgement to pass. I’m not a fan of Pregler’s content, and she always has struck me as something of a busybody, I don’t think she was in the wrong, here. Spoony, in the throes of his manic depression, had been saying a lot of off-color things on Twitter about a lot of different things. This wasn’t the first time he’d said something that most would define as creepy. Far from it. If it hadn’t been Pregler that said something, I’m fairly certain someone else would have, and the Channel Awesome superiors would have had to intervene at some point, if not over this incident, then another.

I have little doubt if this tweet hadn’t lit the fuse that led to the events to follow, it wouldn’t have taken long for another to do it, instead.

However, I don’t think Spoony’s behavior wasn’t anything that an apology and better behavior couldn’t have papered over, given his status on the site. As the day wore on, however it became abundantly clear that an apology was not forthcoming, and hope that Spoony might shape up rapidly deteriotated. Spoony began to fling shit in all directions as more and more of his Channel Awesome comrades took turns either trying to reign him in or tell him to shut up. If he was standing in a hole, he grabbed a shovel, and brother, he began digging. Frantically.

On June 21st, 2012, almost a month later, it was announced that Spoony and Channel Awesome had parted ways.

Spoony, for his part, has consistently claimed that it was a mutual agreement. Since this event, he had said numerous times that he no longer needed Channel Awesome, and that the partnership had simply run its course. Like most of what Antwiler has said in the Post-Channel Awesome years, I take that with a whole box of Morton’s Coarse Kosher Salt. After all, if it was really a mutual decision, he certainly didn’t seem happy about it. Before the ink was even dry on the papers, he was already on Twitter, attacking anyone and everyone that came into his sights, especially other Channel Awesome contributors.

Free of his contractual obligations to Channel Awesome, he promptly began to attack other creators on the site.

Again, to quote Doug Walker - That bridge… has officially been burned.

But this was a blade that cut both ways. Now that he was no longer a contributor of Channel Awesome, he could say whatever he wanted about them. But they could say anything they wanted about him. The knives came out for Antwiler from his erstwhile co-workers. Some took to Twitter in order to post what they really thought of the guy. The most notable example of this was from Channel Awesome contributor Jason Pullara - known as LordKat - who published a scathing, twenty-minute long diatribe in which he laid the blame for his blackballing from the illustrious world of games journalism for Spoony’s erratic and obnoxious behavior. The video is still extant, but, apparently, exceedingly difficult to find, since I’d post it here otherwise for you to listen for yourself. I remember it well, however.

It’s been said that much of Pullara’s whinging sounds more like him trying to ascribe his own shortcomings and failures, and those of Channel Awesome’s video game content division, Blistered Thumbs, to Spoony. I’m not sure if I entirely agree, but he does heap much of his own inability to cut into the video game industry on his association with Antwiler.

Given that today, over a decade later, Pullara’s only real claim to fame seems to be doing the podcast circuit and airing more and more dirty laundry from his former Channel Awesome comrades, I believe much of what he has to say is also best considered carefully before settling on a conclusion.

This will become relevant in the future, whenever we get around to talking about the greater scope of Channel Awesome and the movies, but, when it comes to doing research on these events, you quickly find yourself running into a consistent problem - almost none of the people from Channel Awesome can be trusted. Not entirely, at least. Their words absolutely cannot be taken at face value. I think some former contributors are more honest than others. I think some of them don’t even think they’re lying, and have internalized whatever their own perception of events may be to be the definitive way things played out. When it comes to the hot and juicy gossip pertaining to most of these characters, whether it be Doug Walker, Noah Antwiler, Lewis Lovhaug, or any other contributor, you’re best off taking any claims made about anyone from the site with a mountain of pink himalayan sea salt. If a story wasn’t corroborated by multiple parties or witnessed on camera, there’s a not insubstantial chance that it’s either been exaggerated, taken out of context, or outright fabricated.

That being said, Pullara cites a specific example of Spoony’s behavior that acted as a catalyst that would inevitably bring about the fall of Blistered Thumbs within Channel Awesome. For context, Blistered Thumbs was a division within Channel Awesome that was intended to corral the video game-centric reviewers and content creators under a separate name. There was a serious attempt by the contributors to make Blistered Thumbs a respected presence in the gaming space. As was often the case with Channel Awesome, however, their ambition outstripped their abilities - what they were, in essence, was a bunch of amateurs LARPing as journalists. Video game journalists, at that, which is a laughable as the concept to begin with.

This amateur approach, while something of Channel Awesome’s entire appeal, was a net detriment to Blistered Thumbs. Simply put, actual industry insiders had trouble taking them seriously. With consummate professionals like Joe “Pissed Pablo” Vargas who seemed to have one single shirt in his closet and who’s entire schtick was basically What if the Angry Video Game Nerd was Mexican and said Fuck Even More, it’s truly a mystery as to why they were never considered anything more the Pee-Wee League to IGN’s Major League Baseball.

Joe Vargas, better known a Angry Joe, Angry Alejandro, Pissed Pablo, Peeved Pedro, Fuming Francisco, Cross Cristobal, and, of course, Enraged Enrique.

Well, in 2010, the contributors to Blistered Thumbs would be invited to E3 - the now (thankfully) defunct electronics expo that was, once upon a time, effectively Ramadan for video game addicts. After years of floundering and being reduced to a glorified joke, it’s almost hard to believe that not only was E3 a very serious and respected event, but one to which receiving an invite to attend was the gaming equivalent of finding a Golden Ticket in your Wonka Bar, right down to being invited into the whimsical workshop of a certified lunatic and watching people meet horrific, often disturbing fates.

Anyways, if anyone thought about taking Blistered Thumbs seriously as a respected source of video game news, analysis, and critique, it was all but shattered when Spoony and Angry Joe rocked up to the venue. You see, this year, Spoony was very excited to see what was in store; one of his favorite game series of all time, X-Com, was receiving a relaunch after many years of dormancy. However, after viewing the trailer and being asked his opinion by co-host Joe “Angry Alejandro” Vargas, Spoony reacted in a perfectly normal and completely socially acceptable way - by hollering at the top of his lungs in the middle of a convention space.

Needless to say, when they returned for E3 2011, they did not attend as a coherent, journalistic entity, but rather disparate individuals. I don’t think Spoony’s comedic outburst was the sole reason that Blistered Thumbs was basically relegated to the minor leagues, but I can’t imagine did anything to endear them to anyone in the industry. To be perfectly transparent… I thought it was pretty funny at the time. I still do think it’s funny, but not in the same way I did when I was fifteen, that’s for certain.

As a brief aside, Pullara’s screed landed him on the wrong end of an NDA he had signed with Channel Awesome. This spoiled his working relationship with the site, and, even if it hadn’t, he was equally as hostile towards “Angry” Joe Vargas as he was Spoony. In my humble opinion, Vargas is a man who opens his mouth and quickly and firmly inserts his foot inside of it just about every time, and I have little doubt that he was probably acting a fool in public at E3 as well. However, Vargas was also the de facto head of Blistered Thumbs, so, needless to say… it didn’t end well for Pullara.

Blistered Thumbs as a coherent entity would limp along until 2014, slowly bleeding contributors until finally being put on indefinite hiatus by the Channel Awesome management. Needless to say, I don’t see a reunion coming any time soon.

If you’re noticing a lot of backbiting, gossip-mongering, and generally immature backstabbing and turn-coating reminiscent of the immature high school bullshit you ever saw… well, let’s just say that, unbeknownst to us fans, it turns out that behind closed doors, Channel Awesome was one of the largest high-school bathrooms on the internet, and the unassuming contributors some of the most petty and vindictive mean girls lurking inside of it.

Again - we’ll touch on it again in the future. But, for now, Channel Awesome’s role in Spoony’s story is effectively finished.

I will also note that, despite parting ways with Channel Awesome, Spoony was not totally exiled from the site. Even though he would never participate in another site-wide anniversary collaboration, or have much to do with the majority of the contributors, he was still on friendly terms with Walker and Lovhaug, and still made a handful of cameos in their videos for the next year or two. However, the power trio, as all inevitably do, began to drift apart.

While doing research for this article, I read that the last time Lovhaug/Linkara and Spoony ever seemed to have talked was a brief twitter exchange in 2017; the two men both tweet with an unhealthy regularity, so, no, I’m not digging through thousands of tweets to find it. But, around 2019, I did actually sit through a Q&A panel with Linkara at a convention that we both happened to attend, and I remember someone asked him about Spoony. They asked if they were still friends.

His response was a slight, recalcitrant smile, a shake of his head, and the reply of, “I haven’t talked to Noah in a few years.” He shrugged, and added something to the effect of, “He’s doing his own thing, now. I hope he’s doing well.”

That was hard to hear for my inner-fourteen year old who still harbored some hope that these men I enjoyed seeing together so much were still chums. It was like finding out that the Three Stooges had all grown apart, with Larry Fine going on to be a moderately successful independent act and hearing him say that Moe had basically sealed himself in a dark room somewhere to drink himself to death. But, believe me - once we get to 2019-era Spoony… you’ll see why Lovhaug didn’t want to make much more of a comment than that.

Yet, still, amidst the turmoil of 2012, there was hope for Antwiler yet. By the end of the year, Spoony’s fears that he would be alone forever were allayed when he begin seeing a woman named April.

April was, to say the least, a controversial character. But I think any woman who dated Spoony was destined to be. Unlike the reclusive Scarlet, she didn’t seem to be scared of the fans, and, I may be remembering things wrong, but she wasn’t nearly as hostile towards them, either. At least, not in the early years. She appeared in many of his vlogs, which, naturally, alienated even more of his audience, as they didn’t come to Spoony’s channel to hear April’s opinion. That’s one of the reasons that I never watched any videos that she was in for more than a few minutes, at most.

There was also no shortage of accusations leveled against her - that she was cheating on him, that she had a cuckolding fetish⁴, that she was using him for money or clout, so on and so forth. Was any of it true? I don’t know. But what I can tell you is that she acted as a stabilizing agent in Spoony’s life that, at the time, he was desperately in need of. Speaking from my own experience, having been both the stabilizer and the destabilized at different points in my life, staking your own mental well-being on a significant other or romantic partner is never a good idea and always, without fail, ends poorly for both parties. However, I will say that, sometimes, you need someone to give you a hand and support your weight while you find your feet underneath you. And, for the most part, April seemed to be that with Spoony. Regardless of whatever faults she may or may not had, I think most of her negative aspects were played up, and, ultimately, that she was a positive influence on Antwiler’s life.

For a while.

In 2013, Spoony would buy a house in Aurora, Illinois, outside of Chicago, and move from his long-time home of Mesa to live with April. Ironically - and perhaps a bit sadly - despite only being a half-hour drive from Doug Walker, the two never reunited.

The content, too, continued to come. Though Antwiler still heavily leaned on padding the time between reviews with vlogs, when his reviews did drop, they were longer, funnier, and better produced than any of his previous work. In a way, severing ties with Channel Awesome might have been a boon, as no longer having obligations to travel across the country to film collaborations and rub elbows with other contributors. Spoony’s mental state, though still fragile, seemed to even out for a while as well; partially due to April’s presence, and, I assume, no small part in getting back on his medications. I can’t say that it was good; after all, he was still tweeting like an absolute madman, and much of it wasn’t pretty.

This is from 2021, but it could have reasonably been from any year of the past fucking decade.

Anyways, in 2013, Spoony would release what I and many other would consider his magnum opus - the ultimate conclusion to his nineteen part Ultima Retrospective, Ultima IX. I would highly recommend that, if you have the time, and it at all sounds interesting to you in any way, you watch the entire series. Here’s a video of all of them condensed into one documentary-style format, with all the skits and ancillary material trimmed out.

It’s four hours long. Have fun!

The Ultima IX review itself would rival this in length, spanning ten parts and going deeper into depth on the game than Spoony ever had when it came to anything else. It was as informative as it was hilarious, and, believe it or not… touching.

If you take anything away from this series on Noah Antwiler - if you watch any of his material - I cannot stress enough that this is what it needs to be. It’s only six minutes long, and, more than anything, it perfectly encapsulated exactly what made Spoony’s content so special. I won’t even explain what it is. Just watch it.

This is why, for all his faults, for all his foibles, for all the bluster, for all the unhinged rants, for all the crass jokes and mental meltdowns and theatrics and histrionics and generally all the fucking drama, people kept coming back. It’s why people still hold a shred of goodwill for the man. And, if you watch it, I hope you see it, too. I hope you understand what about this man, for all his faults, made him so well-liked for by so many.

I’ve said it many, many times, but I can’t stress it enough - Spoony, more than any of his contemporaries, felt real. He felt human. Perhaps all too much.

As 2013 would come to a close, Spoony managed to limp out to the other side; battered, bruised, but not defeated. He was still regularly attending conventions, hosting Q&A panels, and generally seemed as if the spat between himself and Channel Awesome was little more than a stumbling block on his way to greater success. In fact, he closed the year with an in-person interview none other than Lord British himself.

He had a new dog. He had a new girlfriend. He had a new house in a new city and a new lease on life. For all the ups and downs, for all the curve-balls and tumult of the past two years, he was releasing the best content he had ever made in his career.

And it was going to be the best content he would ever make. This was it. This was the high water mark.

It was all downhill from there.

1. As someone who’s never had much interest in professional wrestling and, even now, is more interested in the business dealings and behind-the-scenes drama, there was literally nothing for me in those vlogs.

2. A Japanese television and/or movie genre that makes heavy use of special effects, usually action-oriented. Notable examples are Kamen Rider and Super Sentai, the latter of which would go on to be adapted into Power Rangers in America. Lewis, unsurprisingly fucking loves Power Rangers.

3. In the intervening years, JesuOtaku has transitioned from Hope to Jacob Chapman, so I’m aware these pronouns are outdated.

4. Unfortunately, there was some truth to this one, it seemed.