I thought Preston Jacobs had interesting ideas and theories about ASOIAF, although he seemed to get far more up his own ass as time went on.
When his videos started to seem to be a majority of clips from whatever shitty podcast he co hosts, I started to tune out since his goofy liberal views would seep through often and it was generally just boring. I'd still watch his theory stuff though.
Recently he started doing solo podcasts from Taiwan, since I think he works at the US Embassy there. Someone told me he actually talks about ASOIAF stuff on there, so I gave one a listen. He spends the first 10 minutes talking about football (zzzz) and then someone asks about trans women in sports, and he has the most boneheaded opinion that "No onecares about womens sports, no one ever cared about womens sports, so why all of the sudden womens sports being used as an excuse to bash trans people?" and goes on and on about how nobody cares about womens sports, it's a fake issue and anyone that claims it isn't is a bigot.
When someone points out to him that women competitors care about women sports, he doubles down by saying, and I quote, "Sure, the women who compete care, but you have to weigh what is more important. Like entertainment for....for...people who care about womens sports? The women who are competing? Or, you know, like people who want to live their life? And...you know...are very persecuted....and....you know...are stuck in this situation where they believe they are...you know...a different gender or sex inside from what they show on the outside."
He looks super uncomfortable during this point, and is repeatedly rubbing his head and looking distressed. He ends it with "So I mean, which people do I think have the bigger...if I'm sitting here in a utilitarian sense who am I making happier? And who am I improving the life of the most? I'd say....you know...probably the trans people. I...I think they win over women in sports."
Just completely killed whatever intelligence I thought the man might have had and made it clear he's just an NPC autist.
I wonder if people realize when they say this that they're directly saying the mental health and physical well-being of men is more important than that of women? You can say a vapid line like 'trans women are women' but that's not factually true. It's not memeing, but hard, biological fact that a trans woman begins as someone who is in every physical way a man, that then develops a mental issue either via psychology or actual brain deformity and becomes convinced they're a woman. Society has determined the best way to treat this is to tell the man that they are a in fact a woman and do everything they can to cater to this delusion so that they can live comfortably despite it, but you are
actually catering to the mental health of a man over that of the women he's competing with. In theory it's important that he views
himself as a woman, but that's no excuse for
you to think that.
I can't think of any videos in particular that have made me unsubscribe or stop watching youtubers. Usually it's something stupid they do that's not in their video, like butt into a tweet war or political slapfight somewhere with a bad take. I dropped a lot of Youtubers because they saw the Vic controversy that involved them not at all and decided to include themselves and attack him for woke points. It costs nothing at all to look at a hot button topic full of landmines and go "I don't want to involve myself in that."
I'm just about done with Markiplier, and probably would have unsubscribed last year if he didn't start an oddly satisfying Power Wash sim playthrough. He's just gotten
so pretentious over the years that it's hard to enjoy anything he does, because he's too busy trying to elevate THE CRAFT. I also immediately dropped some co-op game he played with Bob and Wade when they decided to drag on some stupid joke about 'covid deniers' in a fire fighter sim game. The last thing I want to see in a kooky goat simulator type gameplay video is current world politics. He used to be a lot better about keeping his opinions to himself and dodging drama, but he's done more and more BLM/Do Better type videos and it's just not worth it for the scraps of good content left. His side channel Unus Annus was just a year of him making really low quality vlog style skits every day and then jacking off on camera about how it was meaningful art that underscored the finite and beautiful nature of life just because he deleted the channel afterward. But not the merch!
I'd rather just watch Jacksepticeye and Pewdiepie play almost all the exact same games he does in almost identical ways. Jack's gone downhill since he's lost some of his high octane energy, but he's still not nearly as pretentious as Mark is.
Actually, now that I think about it, there was one video I did drop a youtuber for. I watched this one guy for a bit a few years ago. He did weird party games and such with his friends, but without quite the sheer level of obnoxious "HEY KIDS!" channels do that with these days. His titles and thumbnails got obnoxiously clickbaity and in one video he defended making a video title implying his wife's water broke (when it was just some computer that broke, I think) with tired old excuses about how youtubers
have to clickbait and he doesn't have a choice but to do that - but obviously he had
no idea people would think "It broke!" with a picture of his wife's face on the thumbnail could mean her water broke. I unsubbed and left and the only time I looked back at it was when he had a video addressing why he wasn't in the youtube rewind that year. Someone had to timestamp where he actually addressed it, because 90% of the video was random vlog things, and the answer was about thirty seconds long, nine minutes into the video. I imagine it's only gotten worse from then, but I don't know because I've never gone back to look.
There's been a few instances where I never really 'picked up' a youtuber but was still in the early stages of considering it when they did something dumb and lost me. A few gamers blind-playing popular games ruined their playthroughs by either bringing on 'guests' who were not blind to the game, or casually mentioning politics, but I can't remember most of those names. Pretty much all of the anti-Marvel/reactionary reviewers have lost me over the past year or two when they doggedly say every single MCU release is bad and terrible and a flop, no matter their actual quality, purely because someone said something behind the scenes that offended them. When a whole bunch of them made videos sucking the dick of the awful Snyder cut for Justice League simply because 'the right people' were behind that one, I cut them off entirely. I wasn't subbed to any of them, so I just went into my YT history and deleted their videos so I wouldn't get recommended any of their stuff in the future.
