I honestly had no idea of the behind the scene drama with Spoony. I remembered enjoying his Final Fantasy reviews, though I admit that these "angry critic" stuff is the one thing that I used to love that I can no longer watch anymore.
I think most former fans are in the same boat. I know I am, and most other comments have said the same thing. There was a time and a place for it, but it's long outlived its shelf life. I have no idea how the Nostalgia Critic is still managing to have sustained success with the bit so many years later.
All the stuff I heard about Spoony's drama was gathered through the grapevine. I've never actively used Twitter, so I missed all of that. I didn't watch him regularly enough to visit his site, much less the forums, and that's of little surprise considering that even though I watched a handful of the Channel Awesome creators, I never even went to their site except for a couple of peeks during the ACTA/SOPA days.
But even though it was through the grapevine, the fact is I still heard about it. It still made its way into the forums I did hang out in, still showed up in the comments sections of videos, still got picked up by the one or two people that I occasionally ran across who had the next new exposé handy to talk about in a moment where I was just a little bit too bored and felt like indulging in some drama in the background while washing dishes. I remember that's when the door was cracked open far enough that even the guys like me who were lounging on the couch and never watched more than four of their contributors regularly - Nostalgia Critic, Cinema Snob, Pissed José, and Anime Abandon in my case (bonus points if you can guess which of those four I stopped watching first, doubles if you can guess who I occasionally still watch) - were able to catch a glimpse at the filthy mess behind the scenes.
It's a shame that's how it often goes, especially in the case of someone who really did have some serious high points like Spoony. That last video you link really does attest to why people liked him so much.
Let me guess... Cinema Snob and Anime Abandon? I was never a fan of Cinema Snob for no other reason that I didn't like the content he reviewed (he seems like a decent guy, and was the only person with the fortitude to actually stick by Doug Walker post-Change the Channel fallout) but, unlike the rest, he seems to still be doing exactly what he's always done. I still watch Anime Abandon every now and then, too. Bennett strikes me as one of the few contributors who had a genuinely level head and any real knack for, you know, actually reviewing things. His contents only improved over the years.
You're right that I still watch Bennett, and I do agree with you on the consistently improving quality of his content. Cinema Snob was the last of the other three that I dropped, though, because I actually do enjoy those crazy exploitation films. Usually in much the same way that I enjoy a bad horror film, which is to say for the laughs, because that's what many of them ultimately are. Angry Joe was the first of them that I dropped, because the veneer of what he gave was the fastest to fade away. Early on I found him insightful and amusing as the, as you so well put it, Mexican AVGN that reviewed current games and was willing to call out new releases from bigger companies when they were piss poor.
That lasted for about two years before I found myself getting progressively more bored and relegated him to a background watch, and then another year and a half before I stopped watching almost entirely. I peeked back for a couple reviews after The Force Awakens came out for the sake of curiosity, and found myself even less impressed since that was the point at which his game footage was entirely lifted from his live streams. Even that element of production value that kept me going for that last year was gone by that point, so Joe got his permanent buh-bye from me by then.
Last time I checked on Pissed Jose he was doing a lot of movie and television show reviews, but also a lot of streaming - the final place all internet has-beens go to die in ignominy. No real effort. No real expenditure. Just sit there in front of the camera and ramble. Obviously not all streamers do that, but it's the path Angry Alejandro has chosen to take. Along with... well, you'll see next time.
Brian Niemeier pins experiences like Spoony's with Ultima III as one of the defining traits of Generation Y: their formative experiences are based not on their parents or the world around them, but on their toys - the best ever made, but now they're spending the rest of their lives trying to get back to that.
All of Channel Awesome is afflicted by thus syndrome to some extent, but you can tell that Spoony's condition is nigh total.
I've been exposed to that idea by David V. Stewart's writings; I think they're friends, actually, but I'm not entirely sure. There's certainly something to it. I think that it's gotten worse with following generations, and now, Gen Z doesn't even have memories surrounding toys or the surrounding zeitgeist but rather wholly immaterial experiences online. At least Spoony's story about Ultima III ultimately tied back to his brother, which I feel roots the story in some kind of humanity that's lost with interactions with faceless, anonymous online strangers. I suppose there's a humanity to that, too, albeit a different kind. I'm of two minds on the validity of it all, really. It's something worth contemplating while I solemnly stare out over the lake with a cup of coffee. You know. The kind of place you solve the world's problems :P
I would actually say that Spoony's condition is total but he's not the worst offender. I can think of other, lesser contributors to the site that made him look like a minor case. There's one late-comer to the site who comes to mind that really typifies the condition in a way that makes one wonder if the man is capable of viewing anything outside of the lens of pop culture and media, but I think his story is best left for another day.
An interesting article about the 'glory' or 'gory' days of youtube fame, I remember at one time admiring these men's ability to achieve such heights of fame and now I understand it comes with its own costs.
I gotta say I feel a lot of pity for Noah Antwiler and kind of secretly hope he doesn't come back to youtube, and instead focuses on his own journey. The man needs stability and happiness, let him have that.
Honestly, the best course this story could have taken is if he left YouTube, DEFINITELY deleted his Twitter account, and did anything else, but that was unfortunately just never going to happen. Antwiler might just be one of the most stark depictions of what I call "terminally online" - the man lost so much to the internet that it's all he has left, and really, tapping it is his only real viable source of income. It is pitiable, and I really wish that, even today, he'd find it in himself to walk away, but... well, we'll get to the end of his story next time.
Ah okay, thanks really do hope he finds peace. I'm interminably online but looking to shift careers to prevent me from being in this situation, so that I only use it for info, plugging my serial novels and research.
Really love your article (it falls under research in my view). Kudos to you mon ami
I'd never heard of Spoony before, so I watched his Ultima series after it was mentioned in one of the previous articles. His style doesn't really work for me; too much eye-rolling and trying to act (though I probably would have liked it as a teen). But as reviews the first several were really good. He did a good job of describing the games and the progression of the series, and his affection for those games is obvious. By the time he got to IX, it was just too much yelling and swearing (I don't mind strategic swearing, but it got to be every other word), so I gave up before the touching part. I could believe he made that one in the middle of a breakdown.
He did me a favor, though: now I know better than to buy the last few Ultima games, and just fire up 4 or 5 again if I'm missing the series.
Yeah, that's exactly what I was talking about when I said his videos shifted very dramatically over the course of his tenure with Channel Awesome. He progressively became less of a reviewer and a lot more of just another sarcastic, snarky, swearing caricature bogged down with a bunch of proprietary lore. I still think the Ultima IX review is, ultimately, impressive in the scope, scale, and effort he put into it, and I don't think it's exactly bad, but it is a far cry from his earlier, more informative reviews.
So I know I said before I'd never heard of Spoony until now, but I definitely remember that infamous tweet about chaining what's-her-nuts in the basement.
The whole 2010-2016 period really was the golden age of the Youtube network/co-op. Yogscast, Normal Boots, Polaris, and of course Channel Awesome, all of them really started to get into their respective grooves around this time. I was online too late to see Channel Awesome at anything near its peak, or to catch any of the subsequent drama (like most zoomers at the time, I was stuck firmly in the Minecraft Youtube ghetto). Now, a decade later I find in darkly interesting, albiet wholly unsurprising - there seems to be a dark something intrinsic to nerd culture that causes petty, teenage girl drama to proliferate anywhere they gather in numbers for more than a year or so.
>In the intervening years, JesuOtaku has transitioned from Hope to Jacob Chapman, so I’m aware these pronouns are outdated.
You know how that joke goes about nerd communities, HRT, and crack?
I've always wanted to look more into the Minecraft Youtube Ghetto, but every time I think I have even the base-level understanding of what happened, I find an entire wikipedia about Scrungle's Adventures or something and then it turns out Scrungle was sending lewd pics to fourteen year olds and the whole enterprise was stacked top to bottom with grooming and sexual misconduct, so... probably won't happen. It was a golden age of creativity, though, and, unfortunately, one which I don't suspect we'll ever see again. At least, not on that platform. Most of the conditions that set the stage for the absolute explosion of online creativity circa-2009 just don't exist anymore. Something's been beat out of the internet and, by proxy, the human spirit. It went beyond YouTube and expanded into all forms of fandom, as it was the same time that you saw the immense supernova of creativity that spiraled out from fandoms like Supernatural, Dr. Who, Homestuck, the Creepypasta community, even Pokemon and so many others that I'm forgetting. Not all of it was good, mind you, most of it wasn't, but, to quote Dickens... it was the best of times... it was the worst of times.
That being said, I have a theory as to why this kind of caustic behavior in so many nerd circles. Maybe one day I'm refine it into a proper theorem, but I suspect that most of the people that are involved in these circles - especially the Channel Awesome crowd - are... not the most socially well-adjusted, to say the least. They're emotionally stunted, immature, and often not well socialized, which results in a group of people who fundamentally do not know how to act like adults because, on some level, they really aren't. I don't know if the thin skin and narcissism displayed by so many of them is a symptom or a cause, but it only exacerbates the interpersonal conflict that arise when so many of these people are in close proximity to each other. The internet also just seems to generally bring out the worst in people, too, which I'm sure has something to do with it.
I remember that Yarvin floated a theory back when he was writing on UR - and, of course, never brought it up again - that the effervescent explosion in the production of cultural products that the West saw from 1960 onwards was actually due to the slow breakdown of the social bonds that Western society rested upon (I would personally push the date back further, perhaps to the pivotal year of 1918, but I digress). Much like how a chemical reaction releases energy by breaking the bonds between atoms, tremendous social energy was created by breaking down the bonds that held people connected to on another in society. This energy found release in the tremendously productive and open industry of mass culture, and fueled the brilliance of the age. Now, as we run out of social technologies to sunder and taboos to break, that brilliance fades away.
There are a couple of things I would nitpick with that theory (the date range being just one of them) but as an explanation for why that internet explosion faded out, I do think that it provides (part of) the answer. Our cultural production as a society had been built upon the civilisational equivalent of burning furniture to warm the house for a half-century by that point, and we had already run out of moveable objects to burn. In fact, like a pack of gypsy squatters, we had begun to pull up the floorboards. That is, by 2010 or so, so few boundaries were left to transgress that the reaction which had heretofore given pop culture its power had begun to gutter. This was observable in the rather lacking mainstream media output of that decade compared to its priors. What the internet did was, by opening up cultural production to the masses, provide a method to eke more brilliance out of the remaining reactions - provide more heat from less fire. But, as the fire dwindled, so to inexorably did the heat.
As for nerd interactions, I couldn't have said it better myself (I should know, that was, or is, me).
I feel it, as well. I think at some point or another, we've all been there. There's also a lot of deep lore to remember, so it's easy to forget - I was surprised at how much I'd forgotten myself, as I rediscovered some of it when I was doing research.
I go more into it in the next part, but rest assured, I do agree that Spoony's tale is a sad one and, despite what it might sound like, I really harbor no ill-will against him. He was fighting demons, and, in most of those fights, he clearly lost. A lot of people do delight in his suffering, but I'm not one of them. In an inverse of the famous line from Caesar, I come not to bury Spoony, but to praise him. He's a man with many faults, but he wasn't without his praiseworthy moments.
I honestly had no idea of the behind the scene drama with Spoony. I remembered enjoying his Final Fantasy reviews, though I admit that these "angry critic" stuff is the one thing that I used to love that I can no longer watch anymore.
I think most former fans are in the same boat. I know I am, and most other comments have said the same thing. There was a time and a place for it, but it's long outlived its shelf life. I have no idea how the Nostalgia Critic is still managing to have sustained success with the bit so many years later.
All the stuff I heard about Spoony's drama was gathered through the grapevine. I've never actively used Twitter, so I missed all of that. I didn't watch him regularly enough to visit his site, much less the forums, and that's of little surprise considering that even though I watched a handful of the Channel Awesome creators, I never even went to their site except for a couple of peeks during the ACTA/SOPA days.
But even though it was through the grapevine, the fact is I still heard about it. It still made its way into the forums I did hang out in, still showed up in the comments sections of videos, still got picked up by the one or two people that I occasionally ran across who had the next new exposé handy to talk about in a moment where I was just a little bit too bored and felt like indulging in some drama in the background while washing dishes. I remember that's when the door was cracked open far enough that even the guys like me who were lounging on the couch and never watched more than four of their contributors regularly - Nostalgia Critic, Cinema Snob, Pissed José, and Anime Abandon in my case (bonus points if you can guess which of those four I stopped watching first, doubles if you can guess who I occasionally still watch) - were able to catch a glimpse at the filthy mess behind the scenes.
It's a shame that's how it often goes, especially in the case of someone who really did have some serious high points like Spoony. That last video you link really does attest to why people liked him so much.
Let me guess... Cinema Snob and Anime Abandon? I was never a fan of Cinema Snob for no other reason that I didn't like the content he reviewed (he seems like a decent guy, and was the only person with the fortitude to actually stick by Doug Walker post-Change the Channel fallout) but, unlike the rest, he seems to still be doing exactly what he's always done. I still watch Anime Abandon every now and then, too. Bennett strikes me as one of the few contributors who had a genuinely level head and any real knack for, you know, actually reviewing things. His contents only improved over the years.
You're right that I still watch Bennett, and I do agree with you on the consistently improving quality of his content. Cinema Snob was the last of the other three that I dropped, though, because I actually do enjoy those crazy exploitation films. Usually in much the same way that I enjoy a bad horror film, which is to say for the laughs, because that's what many of them ultimately are. Angry Joe was the first of them that I dropped, because the veneer of what he gave was the fastest to fade away. Early on I found him insightful and amusing as the, as you so well put it, Mexican AVGN that reviewed current games and was willing to call out new releases from bigger companies when they were piss poor.
That lasted for about two years before I found myself getting progressively more bored and relegated him to a background watch, and then another year and a half before I stopped watching almost entirely. I peeked back for a couple reviews after The Force Awakens came out for the sake of curiosity, and found myself even less impressed since that was the point at which his game footage was entirely lifted from his live streams. Even that element of production value that kept me going for that last year was gone by that point, so Joe got his permanent buh-bye from me by then.
Last time I checked on Pissed Jose he was doing a lot of movie and television show reviews, but also a lot of streaming - the final place all internet has-beens go to die in ignominy. No real effort. No real expenditure. Just sit there in front of the camera and ramble. Obviously not all streamers do that, but it's the path Angry Alejandro has chosen to take. Along with... well, you'll see next time.
Brian Niemeier pins experiences like Spoony's with Ultima III as one of the defining traits of Generation Y: their formative experiences are based not on their parents or the world around them, but on their toys - the best ever made, but now they're spending the rest of their lives trying to get back to that.
All of Channel Awesome is afflicted by thus syndrome to some extent, but you can tell that Spoony's condition is nigh total.
I've been exposed to that idea by David V. Stewart's writings; I think they're friends, actually, but I'm not entirely sure. There's certainly something to it. I think that it's gotten worse with following generations, and now, Gen Z doesn't even have memories surrounding toys or the surrounding zeitgeist but rather wholly immaterial experiences online. At least Spoony's story about Ultima III ultimately tied back to his brother, which I feel roots the story in some kind of humanity that's lost with interactions with faceless, anonymous online strangers. I suppose there's a humanity to that, too, albeit a different kind. I'm of two minds on the validity of it all, really. It's something worth contemplating while I solemnly stare out over the lake with a cup of coffee. You know. The kind of place you solve the world's problems :P
I would actually say that Spoony's condition is total but he's not the worst offender. I can think of other, lesser contributors to the site that made him look like a minor case. There's one late-comer to the site who comes to mind that really typifies the condition in a way that makes one wonder if the man is capable of viewing anything outside of the lens of pop culture and media, but I think his story is best left for another day.
An interesting article about the 'glory' or 'gory' days of youtube fame, I remember at one time admiring these men's ability to achieve such heights of fame and now I understand it comes with its own costs.
I gotta say I feel a lot of pity for Noah Antwiler and kind of secretly hope he doesn't come back to youtube, and instead focuses on his own journey. The man needs stability and happiness, let him have that.
Honestly, the best course this story could have taken is if he left YouTube, DEFINITELY deleted his Twitter account, and did anything else, but that was unfortunately just never going to happen. Antwiler might just be one of the most stark depictions of what I call "terminally online" - the man lost so much to the internet that it's all he has left, and really, tapping it is his only real viable source of income. It is pitiable, and I really wish that, even today, he'd find it in himself to walk away, but... well, we'll get to the end of his story next time.
Ah okay, thanks really do hope he finds peace. I'm interminably online but looking to shift careers to prevent me from being in this situation, so that I only use it for info, plugging my serial novels and research.
Really love your article (it falls under research in my view). Kudos to you mon ami
As do I, as do I. Thanks for the kind words, they're appreciated :)
I'd never heard of Spoony before, so I watched his Ultima series after it was mentioned in one of the previous articles. His style doesn't really work for me; too much eye-rolling and trying to act (though I probably would have liked it as a teen). But as reviews the first several were really good. He did a good job of describing the games and the progression of the series, and his affection for those games is obvious. By the time he got to IX, it was just too much yelling and swearing (I don't mind strategic swearing, but it got to be every other word), so I gave up before the touching part. I could believe he made that one in the middle of a breakdown.
He did me a favor, though: now I know better than to buy the last few Ultima games, and just fire up 4 or 5 again if I'm missing the series.
Yeah, that's exactly what I was talking about when I said his videos shifted very dramatically over the course of his tenure with Channel Awesome. He progressively became less of a reviewer and a lot more of just another sarcastic, snarky, swearing caricature bogged down with a bunch of proprietary lore. I still think the Ultima IX review is, ultimately, impressive in the scope, scale, and effort he put into it, and I don't think it's exactly bad, but it is a far cry from his earlier, more informative reviews.
So I know I said before I'd never heard of Spoony until now, but I definitely remember that infamous tweet about chaining what's-her-nuts in the basement.
The whole 2010-2016 period really was the golden age of the Youtube network/co-op. Yogscast, Normal Boots, Polaris, and of course Channel Awesome, all of them really started to get into their respective grooves around this time. I was online too late to see Channel Awesome at anything near its peak, or to catch any of the subsequent drama (like most zoomers at the time, I was stuck firmly in the Minecraft Youtube ghetto). Now, a decade later I find in darkly interesting, albiet wholly unsurprising - there seems to be a dark something intrinsic to nerd culture that causes petty, teenage girl drama to proliferate anywhere they gather in numbers for more than a year or so.
>In the intervening years, JesuOtaku has transitioned from Hope to Jacob Chapman, so I’m aware these pronouns are outdated.
You know how that joke goes about nerd communities, HRT, and crack?
I've always wanted to look more into the Minecraft Youtube Ghetto, but every time I think I have even the base-level understanding of what happened, I find an entire wikipedia about Scrungle's Adventures or something and then it turns out Scrungle was sending lewd pics to fourteen year olds and the whole enterprise was stacked top to bottom with grooming and sexual misconduct, so... probably won't happen. It was a golden age of creativity, though, and, unfortunately, one which I don't suspect we'll ever see again. At least, not on that platform. Most of the conditions that set the stage for the absolute explosion of online creativity circa-2009 just don't exist anymore. Something's been beat out of the internet and, by proxy, the human spirit. It went beyond YouTube and expanded into all forms of fandom, as it was the same time that you saw the immense supernova of creativity that spiraled out from fandoms like Supernatural, Dr. Who, Homestuck, the Creepypasta community, even Pokemon and so many others that I'm forgetting. Not all of it was good, mind you, most of it wasn't, but, to quote Dickens... it was the best of times... it was the worst of times.
That being said, I have a theory as to why this kind of caustic behavior in so many nerd circles. Maybe one day I'm refine it into a proper theorem, but I suspect that most of the people that are involved in these circles - especially the Channel Awesome crowd - are... not the most socially well-adjusted, to say the least. They're emotionally stunted, immature, and often not well socialized, which results in a group of people who fundamentally do not know how to act like adults because, on some level, they really aren't. I don't know if the thin skin and narcissism displayed by so many of them is a symptom or a cause, but it only exacerbates the interpersonal conflict that arise when so many of these people are in close proximity to each other. The internet also just seems to generally bring out the worst in people, too, which I'm sure has something to do with it.
And, yes - I use that joke a lot :P
I remember that Yarvin floated a theory back when he was writing on UR - and, of course, never brought it up again - that the effervescent explosion in the production of cultural products that the West saw from 1960 onwards was actually due to the slow breakdown of the social bonds that Western society rested upon (I would personally push the date back further, perhaps to the pivotal year of 1918, but I digress). Much like how a chemical reaction releases energy by breaking the bonds between atoms, tremendous social energy was created by breaking down the bonds that held people connected to on another in society. This energy found release in the tremendously productive and open industry of mass culture, and fueled the brilliance of the age. Now, as we run out of social technologies to sunder and taboos to break, that brilliance fades away.
There are a couple of things I would nitpick with that theory (the date range being just one of them) but as an explanation for why that internet explosion faded out, I do think that it provides (part of) the answer. Our cultural production as a society had been built upon the civilisational equivalent of burning furniture to warm the house for a half-century by that point, and we had already run out of moveable objects to burn. In fact, like a pack of gypsy squatters, we had begun to pull up the floorboards. That is, by 2010 or so, so few boundaries were left to transgress that the reaction which had heretofore given pop culture its power had begun to gutter. This was observable in the rather lacking mainstream media output of that decade compared to its priors. What the internet did was, by opening up cultural production to the masses, provide a method to eke more brilliance out of the remaining reactions - provide more heat from less fire. But, as the fire dwindled, so to inexorably did the heat.
As for nerd interactions, I couldn't have said it better myself (I should know, that was, or is, me).
I feel it, as well. I think at some point or another, we've all been there. There's also a lot of deep lore to remember, so it's easy to forget - I was surprised at how much I'd forgotten myself, as I rediscovered some of it when I was doing research.
I go more into it in the next part, but rest assured, I do agree that Spoony's tale is a sad one and, despite what it might sound like, I really harbor no ill-will against him. He was fighting demons, and, in most of those fights, he clearly lost. A lot of people do delight in his suffering, but I'm not one of them. In an inverse of the famous line from Caesar, I come not to bury Spoony, but to praise him. He's a man with many faults, but he wasn't without his praiseworthy moments.