An Extremely Spoony Story - IV

Just leave me alone.

Pictured, left to right: Noah “Spoony” Antwiler, Lewis “Linkara” Lovhaug, and Justin “JewWario” Carmical

We have to talk about JewWario. I struggled with whether or not to include this information here or save it for another article, but, after much debate, I felt as if the context for what was to come, and to set the stage for the next era in Spoony’s story, and Channel Awesome as a whole, it is best addressed here. So, we have to talk about JewWario.

Better known by his screen name, JewWario, Justin Carmical was a creator based out of Colorado Springs that had made a name for himself in the early days of YouTube with the You Can Play This series, where he showcased imported games from Japan and, in many cases, provided instructions on how they could be obtained and played in meaningful ways for western audiences. JewWario was an early adopter of the internet critic format and predated most in the field, even James Rolfe, the Angry Video Game Nerd, which is probably why his persona was remarkably less angry and very even-keeled compared to his compatriots. In fact, JewWario was one of only five or six channels that the Angry Video Game Nerd channel was subscribed to circa 2007. Only a small portion of the overall YouTube laity would claim that JewWario was their favorite critic, but, much like that one obscure band your one friend who’s really annoying about music is always bugging you to listen to, he was your favorite critic’s favorite critic.

Later, JewWario would join Channel Awesome in 2008, and would expand his content to include reviews of Japanese tokusatsu series as well as other gaming related media. Around 2013, Carmical would depart from Channel Awesome, and was working on a fan-funded tokusatsu movie of his own, ominously and perhaps prophetically titled, Farewell, FamiKamen Rider, which continued the story from his videos featuring his own masked tokustatsu hero, FamiKamen Rider. Even though Carmical would never reach the levels of popularity enjoyed by Rolfe, Doug Walker, Lewis Lovhaug, or Noah Antwiler, he maintained a sizeable and devoted fanbase of his own and enjoyed modest but sustained success. Frequently cited as being friendly, amiable, outgoing, and generally just the kind of guy that everyone wanted to be around, he won many friends among his peers and was a deeply respected figure in the online critic circle and among fans of Channel Awesome. Despite this, Carmical was known to struggle with depression, and his personal life was wracked with financial troubles.

On the night of January 24th of 2014, Justin Carmical would write a letter to his wife and his fans, enter his bathroom, and end his life with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.

The outpouring of grief and condolences for his family was immediate, and there were many. Almost every contributor to Channel Awesome current and former released a video to speak about their experiences with Carmical and pay tribute to his legacy among online content creators. There was even an in-person memorial at MAGfest that year, which was a gaming convention that Carmical attended yearly. Reportedly, the event was standing room only.

You didn’t hear a single negative comment about the man. You never really did even before he passed, either.

Spoony was quick to upload his own tribute to Carmical. It was not a well-received video. While the contents themselves are innocuous, many accused Antwiler of exploiting the tragedy, as he left the video monetized, which meant that he could collect ad revenue off the views. This was later changed, but only after a fuss was made about it. Others also accused Antwiler of faking his sympathy and over-emphasizing, if not lying, about how close to Carmical he was. Frankly, I don’t believe this. As previously mentioned, when Antwiler was going through his very rough and very public break-up with Scarlet, it was only Lewis Lovhaug and Carmical that seemingly made the effort to seek him out in person and spend time with him. In fact, of all of JewWario’s online friends, Antwiler would come into possession of the Wario hat that Carmical wore in almost all of his videos, which was an icon of his online persona. He would display it prominently in the background of all of his videos going forward. Simply put, I don’t think Antwiler was insincere in his grief following Carmical’s sudden and completely unexpected suicide.

Four years later, in April of 2018, the now infamous Change the Channel document was released by former Channel Awesome contributors; a ledger in which past and current contributors lobbied a myriad of complaints about the management of Channel Awesome. This document revealed an unsightly and heretofore unknown amount of drama and conflict that had transpired behind the scenes of the collective, and a wide range of allegations were cast among a wide array of individuals, ranging from the manager of Channel Awesome, Mike Michaud, Doug Walker, and Rob Walker - younger brother of Doug and frequent actor in Nostalgia Critic videos - among others. Overnight, all but three of almost a hundred collaborators and contributors resigned from Channel Awesome.

In the document, an individual only specified as Jane Doe made claimed that she had been sexually abused by an unnamed Channel Awesome contributor. Compared to many of the other allegations, this was the most shocking and the most severe. When the Channel Awesome staff replied with their own statement, succinctly titled Our Response, many of these allegations were addressed. Jane Doe’s was the first. The staff of Channel Awesome released chatlogs and other material in which they disclosed the swift and immediate termination of the collaborator in question when these concerns were raised to them, in contrast to the claims that they had dragged their feet on the issue and tried to cover it up. When these materials were disclosed, they took great efforts to redact and censor the names of those involved.

Still, keen eyes noticed that these chatlogs were dated on February 12th, 2013.

Justin Carmical “parted ways” with Channel Awesome on February 15th, 2013.

In the intervening years, more allegations would come to light regarding Carmical’s sexual impropriety with a shocking amount of young women. It was revealed that he hosted a private Skype chat for young, female fans of his - many of them minors - which he called his kittens and with whom he would regularly engage in obliquely sexual role play. In private messages, he would receive illicit photos from these girls. In return, he would send illicit photos of himself, as well. It would also be revealed that he sexually assaulted and potentially drugged a woman at MAGFest 2013 - held in January of that year - in her hotel room. According to the victim’s testimony, in a particularly lurid detail that makes my skin crawl, Carmical had been carrying a Pokemon plush with him the day of the incident as part of his Pokemon trainer cosplay. When a member of the Channel Awesome staff came to her room and was confronted with the events that had transpired the night before, they were initially dismissive until they were presented with said plush toy, which Carmical had left behind in the victim’s hotel room after the act occurred. Their response was to bury their face in their hands and, with a long, protracted sigh, say, Not again.

The finer details and chain of events described by the victim would later be corroborated by multiple sources who were present at the event, and a former memeber of Channel Awesome management staff later did confirm that the subject of the chatlogs and Jane Doe’s story was, indeed, Carmical. The full scope of Carmical’s improprieties are still unknown in their entirety, but it is speculated to be extensive.

In my previous article, I commented that many allegations and anecdotes made by former contributors about their time on the site and other members of it are best taken with a pinch of salt, but enough information surrounding Carmical and his actions has been verified by both personal attestations and concrete evidence from the time that there is very, very little reason to doubt their legitimacy.

To say that these revelations tarnished the once sterling image and fondly remembered history of Channel Awesome in its heyday would be an understatement.

I relay this information not only to show the severity of just how dark the tumult churning behind the curtains at Channel Awesome truly was, unbenknownst to the audience, and the spectacular fashion in which the site would finally implode, but also to demonstrate the particular conundrum Antwiler faced in the aftermath.

Some accused him of faking sympathy and exaggerating his friendship with Carmical. Yet, when it was convenient, this view was altered by some, who alleged that, no, Antwiler was good friends with Carmical, and that there was no way he could have been unaware of his conduct. A few aspersions were even made - in bad faith, I presume - that Antwiler himself was involved, in some way.

There is no concrete evidence to support any of these claims, and, frankly, they seem to me as malicious claims made by bad-faith actors who simply wanted to cast aspersions for the sake of doing so with whatever ammunition they could find. Whatever the case may be, I highly, highly doubt that Antwiler was aware of any sort of misconduct on Carmical’s part.

However, this particular event and the allegations surrounding it illustrate just how dramatically public perception of Antwiler had changed between 2014 and 2018. Come 2018, it would be four years since Antwiler had posted a review. 2014 would be the last year he made content of any real substance. As of today - 2024 - it’s been over a decade since Antwiler has posted one of the video reviews that brought him his initial success.

In 2014, Antwiler would release a handful of reviews - less than he ever had in the previous years - and instead shift his focus to taking a stab at his own film-making endeavor. He announced that he would be making a Spoony Movie, which was met with great excitement from his fans. Rapidly, his income via Patreon swelled, ultimately peaking at over $5,000 a month. Without adjusting for the cut that Patreon would take or taxes, that would come to roughly $60,000 a year - no small sum for a man who made videos on the internet. This was more than almost all of his other erstwhile Channel Awesome contributors, most of whom were lucky to pull in over a grand any given month.

Many promises were made. Rewards for support were established. None would ever come to fruition.

Trouble would begin to brew in earnest when Antwiler took to Patreon to announce that, when he said he intended to make a Spoony Movie, he hadn’t really meant that it was going to be a Spoony-centric movie that focused on the character and persona he’d established over the years; just that it would be a movie made by Spoony, or Noah Antwiler. In fact, he wasn’t even sure what the movie would be. He had some ideas, but… well, he’d figure it out as he went along.

This revelation did not sit well with fans. Many felt mislead by the vagueness of Antwiler’s initial announcement, and disappointed that the movie would not pertain to the character and lore presented in the Spoony Experiment videos, which, I will say, I thought was what seemed to be pitched during the initial announcement. Things would continue to sour as months would pass, and none of the rewards promised to financial supporters would materialize. Infamously, Antwiler had established a Patreon-support reward for backers of a certain amount that would entail regular streams in which Antwiler would play the game Cards Against Humanity with either friends or financial supporters.

As 2014 rolled into 2015 with no notable content to speak of and no Patreon rewards forthcoming, financial backers began to drop out, and Antwiler’s impressive Patreon haul would begin to slowly dwindle. Many fans expressed their dismay and disappointment, leaving comments that promised the moment that he began to make content again or follow through on his Patreon rewards, they would return. Even more were sincerely, genuinely, and transparently apologetic and regretful that they were withdrawing their support, but could simply not justify paying him money with no tangible return on investment. There was very little vitriol. Very few seemed mad - most were simply disappointed.

Antwiler, in turn, made it clear that he didn’t want the door to hit them on the way out.

Though he had always been something of a Twitter junkie, Antwiler’s presence on the site increased dramatically, as did the bitterness of his output there. His demeanor swung wildly between manically joyous and aggressively hostile, attacking almost anyone and everyone that would come into his mentions on a bad day. Personally, I calculated an average 640 tweets a month, though other sources claim that, given the uneven frequency of his tweets, he could easily average over a thousand tweets a month at his peak.

In fact, around this time, he was so terminally hooked to Twitter that he made an account where he role-played as his dog, Oreo.

Relics of this account are few and far between, as he deleted it in the wake of Oreo’s passing, but if you want an idea of what it looked like, this is about it:

You know the type - that intolerable heckin’ hooman doggo pupper bullshit that’s popular on Reddit. This strange habit isn’t unique to Antwiler. In fact, I recall when Beto O’Rourke established a Twitter account where someone on his campaign staff pretending to be his dog when he ran for the Democrat ticket in 2020.

This is politics in America today.

Fun fact: I actually got blocked by this account, too, because I replied with this, and only this.

I guess O’Rourke didn’t appreciate that. Fun stuff.

Anyways, I’m sure you can guess how Antwiler’s financial supporters felt about paying this man’s rent so he could not follow through on the promises he’d made to them, and instead sit on Twitter for literal hours pretending to be his fucking dog.

And yes - they were paying his rent. No small amount of controversy was made about the fact that the five grand he was raking in a month was most likely not financing the movie he had promised, but rather paying the house note for his fancy new digs in Aurora, Illinois. Here’s the house in question.

Four bedroom. Two bath. In a decent neighborhood. I can’t fault the guy for wanting to buy a house, but, for just him and his girlfriend, it seemed as if it was a bit much, especially when he was doing quite literally nothing to justify his rapidly diminishing income.

And it was diminishing.

As 2015 rolled into 2016, and 2016 into 2017, no new content was on the horizon for Spoony fans. Not reviews. Not the movie. Nothing. The only content Antwiler released during this time were livestreams, where he would sit in front of a camera in a dark room and play video games on stream with very little commentary. When he did make commentary, he only opened his mouth to bark at the audience. The vitriol he expressed is, quite honestly, staggering, and I’m surprised that he was able to scrounge together even a modest audience.

Then again, as the years progressed, an ever-growing portion of his audience consisted of trolls who only watched him stream to take the piss. Some were jilted fans who were bitter that he’d stiffed them in such flagrant and arrogant fashion. Most, I suspect, were just there to poke, prod, and watch him squirm. It wasn’t hard to get a reaction out him. Not at all. All one needed to do was ask, So, when’s the next review coming out? or When’s that Cards Against Humanity stream? and he’d pause the game so he could start banning people.

Wind him up - watch him go.

One particular trend around that time was poking fun at an incident that involved his brother than, honestly, isn’t actually funny at all.

Antwiler and his brother, Miles.

Antwiler’s brother, Miles, had been a presence in his vlogs since Spoony began making them, and a frequent guest in his content. No one really minded Miles. He seemed like a decent guy. Miles made a living as a cop with the Mesa Police Department, eventually working his way up to the position of Sheriff’s Deputy under the lead of the infamous Maricopa County sheriff, Joe Arpaio. Given that both Miles and Noah are of a left-leaning political slant - something that the latter made explicitly clear during the Trump years - it’s a bit funny to imagine Miles working under one of the most notoriously right-wing sheriffs in the country. Of course, after Spoony’s content came to a stop, so did appearances of Miles. No one really heard much from the guy.

But, in 2017, details came to light around an event that transpired in January of 2011, in which Miles shot and killed an illegal immigrant named Filipe Ramirez Castillanos. Castillanos not only shot at the police that had reported to the scene to investigate claims of domestic abuse - with an AR-15 - but also jumped in his car and tried to run Miles down, which Miles promptly put a stop to that with his own piece.

I think anyone with any sense can agree that Miles did the right thing in this situation. He stopped a violent criminal and saved not only his own life that night, but likely others as well.

However, the story was just another that could be used as a cudgel by the trolls against Antwiler in his streams. Suddenly, the chats in his streams were filled with #JuanButNotForgotten, #JuanInAMillion, or #JuanceInALifetime, which, I can’t lie - #JuanButNotForgotten has lived in my head rent free since I first saw it. That didn’t matter to Spoony. Multiple times, he stopped the stream to tell the audience just how much he didn’t care and just how much it didn’t bother him, which was, of course, obvious, given that he addressed it so many times.

While his Patreon income continued to erode, the bills continued to come. Though information is scarce, one can only assume that April, Antwiler’s girlfriend, was having to pick up the majority of the slack, as she worked a day job while Antwiler did not. April, for her part, defended Antwiler on Twitter, often to her own detriment. Infamously, there was this post on her Facebook, in which she addressed the laundry list of accusations leveled at both herself and Antwiler.

I have to think that the accusations of her only being in it for the money and to ride on Antwiler’s notoriety are false, because she stuck alongside him long, long after both his money and his fame had dwindled to little. I can’t imagine that he was an easy person to be around in these days, either.

In 2019, however, things would come to their logical conclusion.

It’s worth noting that, afterwards, his Twitter presence became exponentially darker. It had always been something of a place he could revel in his own self-pity, but if it was bad before, it only got worse from here.

Antwiler’s Twitter became so infamous for the sheer excess of miserable, self-effacing, depressive content that someone set up the Sad Spoony Tweet Generator on GitHub, which is so startlingly accurate that they’re basically impossible to discern from Antwiler’s actual Twitter content. Here’s what it gave me.

Given that there’s only so many combinations of sad words in the English language, I wouldn’t be surprised if, at some point, he actually posted this.

Shortly after his split with April, Antwiler would face foreclosure on his home. The house was short saled by the bank, which suggests that they were so eager to get rid of it that they did so at a loss, and for significantly less than Antwiler’s remaining mortgage. This would result in Antwiler returning to Mesa, Arizona, to once again live with his parents. Before he left Illinois, however, life had one last gut punch for Antwiler.

Literally.

The above video is footage of a car crash in which Antwiler was responsible. Though it’s not easy to make out, there’s enough evidence from eyewitness testimony to know that Antwiler was blithely lying to the cops when he said he didn’t run a red light. This event forced him into further financial turmoil, as he was not only made to buy a new car in order to make the drive back to Arizona, but adding even more to his ever-growing medical bills from the injuries he sustained during the accident.

Erstwhile and jilted fans were quick to mock the incident as the first entertaining content Antwiler had made in years.

As if things couldn’t get worse for the man, in 2021, life took extracted another heavy toll with the passing of the one constant figure that seemed to bring Antwiler any joy - Oreo.

I’m not making a joke when I say this - the fact he didn’t do anything drastic after this is somewhat amazing. It’s not an understatement to say that, through everything, Oreo was the one thing that seemed to keep Antwiler afloat. Without her, he didn’t have much left. Beginning in 2021, Antwiler would effectively disappear from YouTube, ceasing even the livestreams that served as the only content he’d produced in years.

He was still on Twitter, though. Naturally. However, even his presence there diminished, speaking to just how severe his withdrawal in the wake of Oreo’s death truly was. The most despairing piece of content in this entire sordid saga, I think, is this.

Even Richard Garriott - Lord British himself - was told to go fuck himself when trying to help. In fact, Garriott made many attempts to reach out to Antwiler via Twitter and offer support, all of which was met with the same result.

In the sparse appearances he had made on stream before Oreo’s passing, the degradation of his physical state was as painfully apparent as it was shocking.

I’m not saying this to be mean or cruel or ridicule the man - really, I’m not - but he looked, simply put, terrible. Sickly. Pallid. Hair, unwashed and unkempt. Face bloated from excess alcohol consumption. To compare the Antwiler of 2011 to the Antwiler of 2021 was to gaze upon the face of ruin.

So, that begs the question: where is Noah Antwiler today? What is he doing? Is he doing anything at all?

Well, the short answer is yes. Antwiler is, predictably, still very active on Twitter. Even if he dialed back his almost obsessive posting habits, he was never completely absent from the platform. As of this writing, his last tweet was posted only forty minutes ago.

In 2023, Antwiler reappeared on the channel of actor Curtis Craig. Craig had played the lead role in the full-motion video game Phantasmagoria 2, a review of which was one of Antwiler’s most popular and notable pieces of content from his halcyon days. Craig interviewed Spoony, who appeared in both better spirits and better shape than he had when he had abruptly disappeared from YouTube. In this interview, Antwiler makes the claim that he’s getting back into content creation.

As of this writing, nothing has materialized.

Antwiler has, however, returned to streaming, and does so once every week. While it’s a far cry from his former content, and his audience has shrunk to a skeleton crew of several thousand at best, it is, I suppose, a start, if nothing else. While he rarely appears on camera, when he does, he still looks better than he did in 2021. He apparently has a new dog, as well, and regularly appears on Curtis Craig’s channel as a collaborator and, seemingly, a friend. Recently, he has taken to uploading new content to his long dormant YouTube channel. These are, however, only content from his Channel Awesome days that never made it to the site, or re-uploaded old reviews that appear to have very little, if any, editing done to them. It would appear that, for the moment, Antwiler seems to be riding what small amount of goodwill he still possesses with the wider public by tapping in to their nostalgia for better days. For now, that nostalgia for a time, an internet, and an audience long gone seems to be all that he has to offer.

---

Except I don’t think that’s true.

One of the most surprising things about revisiting Antwiler’s work was just how quick it all happened. I was there from the word go back in 2007, and it did not feel as if his career effectively ended only six years later. The entire Channel Awesome golden age was, in essence, between 2008 and 2012 - only four years. Maybe it was my own perception of time, or perhaps there were other factors, but I feel as if I remember these people and these things being a part of my life for much longer than they really were. Perhaps it was simply a formative period in my life, and much of these people’s content to form the bedrock of an embarrassing amount of my own humor to this day, leaving an impact on my own sense of self that vastly outstrips the time of their presence in it.

It’s jarring to see that’s how many years we had of The Spoony Experiment; six. Especially when his former compatriots, Doug Walker, Lewis Lovhaug, and others, are still going strong all these years later.

This is, after all, quite literally one of the worst videos ever published to the internet. It was so bad that it actually made the Nostalgia Critic relevant again.

I may not care for either of their more recent work, but I have to give credit where credit is due; much can be said of Walker and Lovhaug, but you can’t say they don’t have a serious work ethic.

Four years, six years - that’s a very brief span of time in the grand scheme of things. This isn’t to diminish any aspect of Antwiler’s work. I have no doubt he slaved for hours over his computer working on his reviews and other materials for all six years of his own little golden age. In that time, he put out hours upon hours of content, which are still fondly remembered by many former fans to this day.

And I think he still has more to offer. I think that, if Antwiler ever found it in himself to get back on the proverbial horse, he could make great content again. It might not be the same. It might not rise to the same quality as his older work. But, somewhere, I think that spark he displayed and the passion he had for his work is still there. Dormant, yes, but only that. Watching his interview with Curtis Craig, it’s clear that he still has the gift of gab and a sort of irascible charm that, while greatly diminished, still exists.

I don’t think the road to redemption would be an easy one for Antwiler to tread. Over the years, he’s developed an unsavory reputation. Many of his fans turned their backs on him years and years ago, and I don’t see the distrust he fostered with most of them being undone any time soon, if ever. And, really, none of that is unwarranted.

When and where Antwiler is still discussed, there’s one question that inevitably arises, and it’s the one that most people seem to want to talk about more than anything else pertaining to his work - is Noah Antwiler a good person?

I’ll be perfectly frank - the short answer is no.

Antwiler, from the beginning had an ego. From the beginning, he had remarkably thin skin, and was almost incapable of accepting or receiving criticism with grace. His work ethic in recent years has been abyssmal. For many of his streams, it was painfully apparent that it was all he could do to bother getting on camera, booting up the game, and play it without totally collapsing in on himself. For years, he lied to his fans, making false promises that never came to pass. He even lied to the cops and completely shirked all responsibility in his car accident, which could have easily resulted in multiple casualties. For years, he’s continued to slap away all hands extended to help him, insult, berate, and abuse the fans that continued to stick by his side, and quite possibly use the money that they donated specifically to fund his movie to instead pay for other things. His behavior towards others on Twitter, his livestreams, and elsewhere is, simply put, unacceptable. When others tried to hold him responsible, whether they be erstwhile friends or fans, he constantly hid behind the shield of mental illness, depression, and other health problems, often leaning on them as a crutch to make excuses for his poor behavior.

But, there are very, very few people who can be said to have been all good or all bad, and I sincerely think that Antwiler is not among them. Like most of us, he’s a complicated figure. To give him some grace, here, I do understand that he is clearly a man in pain, who is suffering and battling his own demons; that may explain why he lashed out at others, but it doesn’t excuse it. The man let his worst impulses dictate many of his decisions over the past decade. The results speak for themselves.

But, I don’t know him personally. I don’t know what’s really in his heart. His actions speak loudly, but, at the same time, the internet only allows us a glimpse into the lives of certain individuals, and often times, it becomes easy to forget that they have lives outside of it; especially someone as terminally online as Antwiler.

And, if this seems like I’m trying to hold a struggle session for Antwiler - I’m not. It does not make me happy to have to type any of that, but I would be both remiss and dishonest to not disclose the full extent of his poor conduct over the years. Despite everything he’s done, despite everything he’s said, despite all the awful, unflattering, and unsavory information I discovered just while doing these articles, I still hold some affection for the guy.

Cliche as it sounds, but his content helped me through difficult times of great adjustment and change in my life. They gave me something to laugh about when I didn’t always have much to laugh about. This is to say nothing of the fact that his content educated me on more niche elements of nerd culture that no one else would have talked about at the time, and his sense of humor, acerbic wit, and verbosity rubbed off on me in a way that influences the very article you’re reading now. I think that, without Antwiler, I probably would have never taken such an interest in writing my own critiques, criticisms, and analysis, and, for that, I still harbor no shortage of gratitude for the work he produced.

Believe me when I say I take no joy in Antwiler’s fall from grace, and I do not want to revel in his shortcomings. He is, as we all are, human, and for all his faults, all his mistakes, and all the wrongs he’s inflicted on others, I think he deserves a modicum of grace. He may not find it on the internet. I highly doubt he will. As much as I’d like to imagine a future where Antwiler begins to make content again, if only to sate my curiosity to see what it would look like over a decade later, I think that his best course of action, in my heart of hearts, would be to delete his Twitter account, sever his ties with the past, and move on to build a meaningful life outside of the internet.

He, and the entirety of the collective contributor base of Channel Awesome, had their moment; a moment that is definitively, unquestionably over.

This isn’t to say that they can’t do more, they can’t make more, and that their content can’t be good or popular or even profitable - some creatives release their best works near the end or at the terminus of their careers - but, as a cultural force, the angry critic scene is spent, and those who still persist in it are anachronisms of a different time and a different culture and an entirely different internet that, for all intents and purposes, doesn’t exist anymore.

There was something about the entire Channel Awesome movement, if you could call it that, that wasn’t just entertaining - it was genuinely inspiring. Even though I’ve long outgrown the style of humor typified by the contributors at the time, even though I’ve long since stopped watching the content produced by (most) of the former members of the site, looking back, there truly was something special about the whole thing that made it unlike anything that came before, and I highly doubt anything like it will ever happen again.

Yes, it was cringe. But, in that cringe, there was freedom, and in those moments, there was happiness.

We’ll talk about that another time, but, for now, in closing, I think that Antwiler’s presence was part of that je ne sais quois that made the whole thing so much fun. Each of the contributors played their own role in making the site what it was. Some were more influential than others. Some were just window dressing. Some were just along for the ride. Some were even hanger-ons that could never stand on their own two feet and perpetually scampering along in Doug Walker’s shadow, hoping to stumble upon a crumb of clout in his wake.

Oh, E-Rod… no one ever wanted to talk about you. But I do.

But Antwiler was at the cutting edge of all of it. He was up there with Doug Walker and Lewis Lovhaug, perhaps not steering the ship, but setting the bar for quality that the other contributors either strove to meet, or could only ever dream of meeting. He had success many of his peers never saw, and never would see. Without him, I don’t think that Channel Awesome would have been… well, at the risk of sounding dangerously corny, quite so awesome.

Ultimately, I come not to bury Antwiler, but praise him. Yes, he may be - to be brutally honest - an asshole. And the consequences of being an asshole have clearly been playing out in his life for quite some time, now. I think the man has been punished enough. Rather than celebrate and revel in his misery, I wrote these articles to show another side to his story that is rarely discussed these days.

Channel Awesome, in a way, is somewhat mythical, now. Much of its story, both the rise and the fall, is shrouded in half-truth’s and legend. The figures that populated the tales of triumph and calamity, the people, now mythic, and, like the warriors and great men of old, who’s deeds were immortalized in folks tales and songs sung by bonfires. These people, dorks though they may be, were, in some sense, the protagonists of these internet fables and legends. Antwiler, like so many figures of legends, is a tragic one. The songs we sing of him now are often dirges and lamentations of a man humbled by both the fates and his own hubris.

But, the thing is… Antwiler’s story has yet to be finished. He’s still alive. He still has time to change. There are chapters to his tale that are yet to be written. Whether they are chapters of further destruction or redemption remains to be seen. I can’t say which path Antwiler will take, and, like many others of his time, I have my suspicions which of the two he will. But, I will say that I hope that one day, the song of Noah Antwiler will be those of a kind that speak of a man who fell low and found the strength to pick himself up again. I hope that one day, we can smile when we tell the extremely spoony story of the internet’s spooniest bard.

Cheers, Noah. Whatever path you tread, I hope you find happiness and fulfillment at the end of it.