Philosophy Tube / Oliver Lennard / Oliver "Olly" Thorn / Abigail Thorn - Breadtube's Patrick Bateman.

[Mudkipcorn]

Happened across this interview:

[...] He describes most of the press there as 'cis-het conservatives' who apparently were 'fighting against' the 'queer' audience; he says the 'queer' audience ended up 'dominating' the others. It's not really clear what he means by any of this, but I'm guessing the serious drama critics were there just quietly doing their job, while those reviewing for obscure trans activist blogs/podcasts were obnoxiously cheering throughout. [...]

What a truly bizarre and myopic way of framing things. What kind of playwright/director/star sees their audience in such combative terms? I think you're right in presuming his meaning. Kinda hurts. I myself have been very engaged in theater at a few points in my life (including, briefly, in London) and there's nothing worse than seeing a play with an overly vocal audience (performing while hearing inappropriate audience reactions is also painful and can hurt one's focus and confidence as well). This is awful whether the performance/play itself is great or utter shit. It's the epitome of cringe and it has gone close to ruining otherwise great evenings for me.

The TRUE and HONEST theatergoers kept mostly silent and the political and theater-naive crowd treated it like a live stream chat or sportsball game. I highly doubt anyone in the audience was conservative in any political sense. Being conservative in the sense of behaving in a site-appropriate manner is a good thing, Olly. Being 'cis-het' s neither here nor there. It's just how some (most) people are.

I had expected, perhaps naively that the respectable side of the theater world wouldn't indulge in blind praise of The Prince merely because it scores diversity & representation points. On the whole, I think I've been mostly proven correct but the alt side of the theater or (as your above description suggests) the people of trannydom that don't give a flip about theater have both nevertheless covered it cloyingly without really putting much care in judging it as a piece of theater.

I do care about theater so it's easy for me to trigger myself over all this and I should probably just relax.

Also, his strained voice in the interview probably just comes from vocal exhaustion. He's just done a play where I have to assume he spoke a number of lines, many of which were in his woman voice and that'd put strain on anyone.

 

[The Jackal]

Also, his strained voice in the interview probably just comes from vocal exhaustion. He's just done a play where I have to assume he spoke a number of lines, many of which were in his woman voice and that'd put strain on anyone.

That seems a reasonable explanation. As a (pretty deep-voiced) man, having to put on this fake, high-pitched approximation of a woman's voice 24/7 seems unendurable to me. It would get physically uncomfortable very quickly, I'd probably lose my voice, it would sound extremely annoying to me and everyone around me - and for what? You just end up sounding as convincingly feminine as a pantomime dame, or Terry Jones in drag in a Monty Python sketch.

 

[White-Kettle Shufflepunk]

Again, the way people talk up Shakespeare as being oh so trans is very revealing. Men playing women in his plays had nothing to do with "queer identity" it was born from women not being allowed to act on stage. The in-story cross-dressing in his stuff was basically the comedy version of ninjas dressing like stage-hands in Japanese plays.

 

[Mudkipcorn]

Again, the way people talk up Shakespeare as being oh so trans is very revealing. Men playing women in his plays had nothing to do with "queer identity" it was born from women not being allowed to act on stage. The in-story cross-dressing in his stuff was basically the comedy version of ninjas dressing like stage-hands in Japanese plays.

Men playing women should be seen as a limitation of the medium. Obviously there was no technical limitation preventing women from taking to the stage but, in Shakespeare's England, there were enforced social restrictions, stemming of course from misogyny. Amongst other things, one thing brilliant artists like to do is play with the limitations of their medium by calling attention to them, testing them, or otherwise toying with limitations that their audience will be well aware of. We see this a lot in early cinema and still see it today in novels, plays, movies, and even video games. It's one mark of a great artist that they don't only tell moving stories but also show some consciousness of their medium and play with, critique, or otherwise critically it in creative ways. It's meta, man.

Not the most original or genius aspect of Shakespeare, but his common theme of crossdressing/assuming the opposite gender is, imo, a fairly smart way of calling attention to the limitation he had to work with. You could even say there was a political/creative freedom message rolled into it. Maybe he was criticizing the absurd stricture against female actors by highlighting (through various plot points in several plays) the fact that young men are playing women who are sometimes playing boys. I have no idea if it meant to criticize that or not but some people have taken that reading.

 

[White-Kettle Shufflepunk]

Oh, of course. But what we can be sure of is that when Shakespeare wrote male actors playing female characters who cross-dressed as women, he wasn't thinking "This character is just like Abigail Thorne, hecking valid woman from Future-Current-Year."

 

[Mudkipcorn]

Oh, of course. But what we can be sure of is that when Shakespeare wrote male actors playing female characters who cross-dressed as women, he wasn't thinking "This character is just like Abigail Thorne, hecking valid woman from Future-Current-Year."

Right. I don't want to sound too sympathetic to Abby or those who love 'queering Shakespeare', but there is something to the notion of playing with or interpreting him in that way. Playing devil's advocate a bit here, but they aren't making something from nothing. If you do believe that Shakespeare was criticizing the exclusion of women from the ranks of actors, it's easy to make the argument that just as women were unfairly kept from being their true selves/filling certain roles in the past, today transers are unfairly marginalized and prevented from being their TRUE and HONEST selves. I don't really buy into that but there it is.

Of course Shakespeare wasn't thinking of troons and it's worth remembering that, at the end of the day play, the women are always allowed to come out and reassume their actual identity. That's not a very pro-troon message but take a surface level look and you'll see Shakespeare playing with gender identity. And playing with gender and sexuality is kind of the definition of 'queer' as many people understand the word today.

Edit: And crossdressing aside, I do buy into the readings that some have made about their being a certain degree of homoeroticism in some of Shakespeare plays. That's queerness right there though it doesn't really require any re-interpretation. And back to the plays as originally performed, there was in a sense always a lot of homoeroticism as every heterosexual pairing was/would have been seen by some in the audience as gay as fuck, given that each would have involved a teenage boy and a man.

I'll put a lid on my Shakespeare sperging. For now.

 

[EverlyB]

Olly saw us calling him a narcissist and has now doubled down on a "who, me? I deserve this praise?" shtick. But going on about "I can't believe you think I'm so great!" is just the flipside of going on about how you're so great. A real non-narcissist isn't so I-focused. Just go make theatrical YouTube videos that get 1M+ views and make a play that gets an award for trans inclusion - there's nothing that sounds contradictory about that. Also, just do your livestream, bro; you know your fans who'd be interested are going to watch it.

 

[cia-log]

Its these moments where the mask slips and the desperation to be liked comes through that I really almost feel bad for Olly. I don't know what his parents are like but I wonder if their jobs meant they never paid him much attention and he grew up feeling like he wasn't good enough.

 

[Snakebottom]

Its these moments where the mask slips and the desperation to be liked comes through that I really almost feel bad for Olly. I don't know what his parents are like but I wonder if their jobs meant they never paid him much attention and he grew up feeling like he wasn't good enough.

Nah he’s got too much undeserved confidence for that. He was clearly a pampered wee lad, constantly praised for everything and now that is an addiction. If he’s not being praised by others, he fills it by praising himself.

 

[Boris Blank's glass eye]

Its these moments where the mask slips and the desperation to be liked comes through that I really almost feel bad for Olly. I don't know what his parents are like but I wonder if their jobs meant they never paid him much attention and he grew up feeling like he wasn't good enough.

Doesn't he have two older brothers, both more successful than him? With the "right" set of parents that might have left Chube with inferiority complex.

 

[The Jackal]

Not the most original or genius aspect of Shakespeare, but his common theme of crossdressing/assuming the opposite gender is, imo, a fairly smart way of calling attention to the limitation he had to work with. You could even say there was a political/creative freedom message rolled into it. Maybe he was criticizing the absurd stricture against female actors by highlighting (through various plot points in several plays) the fact that young men are playing women who are sometimes playing boys. I have no idea if it meant to criticize that or not but some people have taken that reading.

I don't really buy that there's any such "message" attached to it - whether Shakespeare was for, or against, or indifferent to the fact that women were banned from performing in plays is something we will never know, because we don't know what he thought about anything. Shakespeare's work is an ideologically empty vessel - people argue that he's Catholic, Protestant, anti-Semitic, proto-Marxist, etc, etc. Some even argue that Shakespeare isn't Shakespeare. You can take whatever inference you want from his work, but in the end it's purely speculation. I do think that Shakespeare and his audience must have been very aware of the irony in his cross-dressing comedies that when male and female characters swapped genders, on the stage it was simply men or boys appearing more or less effeminate.

What's strange to me is that if Ollie wanted to do TRA Shakespeare, why didn't he choose one of the plays like Twelfth Night which explicitly deal with crossdressing and role-swapping and instead went for Henry IV?

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Typical immodesty in his Twitter blurb - in what world are his YouTube ramblings equivalent to a degree? A degree in what, navel-gazing?

 

[White-Kettle Shufflepunk]

Shakespeare's work is an ideologically empty vessel - people argue that he's Catholic, Protestant, anti-Semitic, proto-Marxist, etc, etc. Some even argue that Shakespeare isn't Shakespeare.

Kyle Kalgreen is a stupid git, but the video he did about the Independence Day guy's Shakespeare truther movie is still good fun if you want a run down how crazy the last camp gets.

 

[Boris Blank's glass eye]

What's strange to me is that if Ollie wanted to do TRA Shakespeare, why didn't he choose one of the plays like Twelfth Night which explicitly deal with crossdressing and role-swapping and instead went for Henry IV?

You're expecting too much from "TRANS POWER" man - I reckon he's too shallow for any actual artistic endeavour. He had to go for the most instantly recognizable play and tropes as he simply doesn't know the words subtlety and guile. Going by the reviews his play was extremely on the nose spelling everything out for the audience in a desperate effort to both stroke his own narcissistic ego and pander to a potentially imaginary crowd.

 

[White-Kettle Shufflepunk]

What's strange to me is that if Ollie wanted to do TRA Shakespeare, why didn't he choose one of the plays like Twelfth Night which explicitly deal with crossdressing and role-swapping and instead went for Henry IV?

Joshua Moon/random British mothers/every respectable feminist in the UK: I shall be sent for soon... at night.

 

[fax machine]

What's strange to me is that if Ollie wanted to do TRA Shakespeare, why didn't he choose one of the plays like Twelfth Night which explicitly deal with crossdressing and role-swapping and instead went for Henry IV?

Same reason why he does a podcast about James Bond: because he's obsessed with archetypal masculinity and his failure to embody it with any great success. I can't play Bond, so he's a racist/sexist/imperialist cad and my friends and I are heroes for killing him. But also watching his complete filmography and wolf whistling at the girls. Henry IV is right smack dab in the middle of his comfort zone: a story about men fighting wars, seeking honor through violence, contesting the legitimacy of their power and the continuation of their lines. It's all there waiting for Olly to dig in. It gives him plenty of chances to call bullshit on patriarchy while reveling in the glow and consequence of the patriarchal phenomena he dreams of claiming for himself. He gets to play both a powerful warrior AND a fair lady much desired and loved. Wish fulfillment both ways.

He'd never do Twelfth Night — that's too much about a woman. And a comedy would undercut one point of doing Shakespeare in the first place: to establish him as a Serious Person creating Legitimate Art.

 

[scathefire]

Ok so due to a change in how Vimeo works, all of the videos in the OP are now broken (god only knows why Icasaracht decided against embedding them directly). Since he's banned he's no longer able to fix it, but fortunately the most important clip in there has been located, so I'm going to reupload it here for posterity.

(i.e. he says that he has never had gender dysphoria)

 

[AfghanBlue]

I’m amazed, listening to that What The Trans podcast segment, just how there’s nothing to him other than. Glib superficiality and bragging.

There’s NO need to repeatedly mention standing ovations- which really isn’t in any way unlikely for this kind of performance with a very clear targeted audience there to see their YouTube fave, lol. Olly knows form his Trans POWA cringe Mussolini posturing, that this topic nets him back pats too.

But it’s like he’s unable to just listen ahead to what he’s gonna say and think - does this sound a bit too self congratulatory as well as adding nothing of interest to the conversation? “If Abby says it’s good it’s good” like ugh just, listen to yourself.

This is why you havent really ever had friends.

Just stop sucking yourself own dick for two seconds- you don’t even have to actively do anything to be a better person, merely cut the constant & egregious boasting out.

Also, I assumed the podcast was two trans guys. Absolute Lol when I went to look at the picture of them. They are physical and psychologically fragile, and though their podcast is tedious myopic propaganda with zero wit or personality, save again glibness- they are hulking decidedly AMAB’z , and the fact that they DONT put on a bullshit voice makes em warm to them on seeing them; I guess cos it feels, rightly, like someone isn’t trying to trick you.

When someone speaks in a put on voice, higher or lower, your brain flags up alarm signals, because someone is trying to bullshit you, disguise themselves.
It’s funny every time Olly is alongside these kind of transwomen, not to mention the detrans girls who have painfully fucked, male sounding voices, because it just paints his lie writ large in ever bigger letters- that is NOT your voice and you are psychotically lying with every literal syllable you put through it in that creepy pantomime dame falsetto.

especially the fact that he started talking like that immediately, and can’t resist the opportunity to “show off how he can do his pretend dEaDvOiCe’’ - he seriously can’t help himself lol and it underlines the lie and thus ups the creep factor again.


Lmao I do think Deadvoice is the funnniest Ollyism.
Obv the Tube drawings are the best creations that stem from around him, but in terms of things he’s penned, Deadvoice is a comedic classic, it can’t be denied.

@scathefire OOP is banned? Shame, why? Probably decided against embedding them because the video embedding on kf is a fucking mess crapshoot - possibly because it seems to be in incredibly hi fidelity? And probably some other reasons. But it barely if ever works for me to be able to watch an embedded vid here.

 

[cia-log]

Nah he’s got too much undeserved confidence for that. He was clearly a pampered wee lad, constantly praised for everything and now that is an addiction. If he’s not being praised by others, he fills it by praising himself.

A lot of times when children aren't shown the proper support and affection they compensate by becoming their own biggest fan, so to speak. It's not a good substitute for receiving support and validation so deep down these kids still feel like they're not good enough, but they suppress those feelings very stubbornly.

Confident people can accept criticism. Every time Olly reacts to criticism it's clear he's constructed some version of reality where all of the praise he gets (real or imagined) is genuine and everyone who criticizes him even a little has some kind of agenda. Maybe I'm wrong about Olly's insecurities but I don't see why someone would spend their time trying to convince themselves that even mild criticism comes strictly from evil people unless the question was regularly in the back of their mind.

So yeah, every time Olly starts doing the whole "I'm a successful educator and entertainer and playwright and philosopher and a trans icon and one of the most recognizable and influential political figures in the UK and they're talking about making me a model!" I can't help but wonder if he's just saying out loud what he wishes he heard from his parents, considering how frequently he does it.

Then again maybe his parents are lovely people and he's just annoying. You can never tell with British aristocrats.

 

[scathefire]

@scathefire OOP is banned? Shame, why? Probably decided against embedding them because the video embedding on kf is a fucking mess crapshoot - possibly because it seems to be in incredibly hi fidelity? And probably some other reasons. But it barely if ever works for me to be able to watch an embedded vid here.

He got banned because he enjoyed poking the bear too much. Or rather, the slobbermutt. That's one of the main ways to get banned from this site, is if Josh decides he dislikes you.

 

[Neko GF]

Oliver's justification for being a coward and not challenging le evil gender criticals:

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