Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Caesar.
Rich was never the sort of person you’d think would change the world. For the most part, he was exceedingly average, a man whose defining feature was his website and the discussion forums within it. Rich’s success was mostly the result of dumb luck rather than the dividend of extraordinary insight, ambition, or skill. And yet within that man, there was a spark of something that attracted other people to him. He was a competent comedian, but his true superpower was his ability to attract others in collaboration. Despite Rich’s laziness, the Something Awful front page used to upload lots of interesting content every day. The forums demonstrated the Internet’s ability to create interesting things by facilitating the work of many hands. It's this Rich whom I mourn, even as I rue the person he became.
It’s very easy to be angry at Lowtax. His public persona as a wry Internet insult comedian belied a truly angry soul. His obsession with ‘vindication’ in his final years was born from what he perceived as a universal betrayal, starting with the writers and creators he worked with, to his best friend, the community he founded, his lovers and wives, and finally from his own daughters. Lowtax’s waning days were a lonely and depressing affair, with a washed-up Rich trying and failing to entertain a tiny audience that was mostly there to be amused by his pain. While it’s obvious from the outside that Rich was largely the author of his own distress, from his point of view it felt like a mutiny. Lowtax ended his life in deep despair and physical pain, alone in a shabby basement apartment, like a punchline to one of his own jokes. It is a pitiable end for someone who had every opportunity to pursue a good life, and rejected it.
When I review Rich’s Let’s Plays, I see a person who should have lived, whose sense of humor was still sharp and who still enjoyed his own life. I see a father who once enjoyed a good relationship with his oldest daughter, and who once was happy to share his passions with her. I see a friend who was there for his own in time of need, and who put up with Shmorky’s chaos for longer than anyone ought to. I see a man who, by some gift of charisma, was nearly always in a relationship with a series of funny, intelligent women. I see someone who had a director’s gift for attracting talent to build his empire. I see someone whose comedy and remarks were smart enough and funny enough to attract a community with tens of thousands of active users. It’s not accidental that Josh often compares the Kiwi Farms to SA Forums: Chris-Chan was discovered on SA, the model of obsessively documenting Internet eccentrics was developed there, and Kiwi Farms is populated in no small proportion by former SA goons. All of our lives as denizens of the Internet were shaped by SA, and therefore by Lowtax. Whether you would have him rest in peace or piss, we should acknowledge Rich’s impact.
None of my apologia is meant to imply Rich didn’t have a terribly dark side. He did. He beat his wives, he cheated, he melted down and lashed out at his own forum community, squandered the wealth he had come into, alienated himself from his own children, and ultimately wrote off any possibility of a better future for himself in the ultimate act of self-sabotage. Just like when he got his ass kicked by Uwe Boll, Rich invited his own downfall by failing to maintain a steady relationship with his forum community, expecting people to work for free for his benefit, chose a trans-furry-pedo-deviant to be his best friend and content co-creator, and expected his fans to continue to hand him money even as the forums turned into a tranny clusterfuck powered by outdated software. Rich was more interested in wasting money on whatever would make him feel good in that moment rather than investing in his own business or personal wealth. If he had spent the best years of his run more wisely, Rich could have sold SA and had enough money to take an early retirement and still have enough to set aside a generous college fund for each of his children. Instead of investing in his own business or anything practical, Rich blew every dollar he received on expensive gourmet food and leasing top-trim cars, which made him dependent on continuing Patreon support and vulnerable to changes in the tide of public opinion.
Rich’s final weeks appear to have been consumed by despair. In these final streams, Rich looks terrible, and his lively sense of humor had been replaced by depression, desperation, and a melancholy fixation on the past. It is not a stretch to see that Lowtax felt betrayed by everyone: his wives, his best friend Shmorky, his children, his community. Instead of eating $45 hand pies, he was subsisting on gas station hot dogs. (If there were any friends left to him that could have helped, Rich either didn’t reach out to them, or they didn’t notice his distress.) As a comedian whose work was best when he could bounce off of others, watching him host poorly attended streams alone is painfully sad. But even here, Rich was the author of his own misery. He was prescribed antidepressants, but because of the diuretic effect of alcohol they mostly passed right through him. When it became evident to him that his ‘vindication’ would never materialize, his sources of financial and social support had run dry, and his own comedy had become an exercise in publicly humiliating himself for less than the price of a medium one-topping pizza, Rich blew his brains out. He thought things could never get better for him, would only worsen, that everyone important to him had betrayed him, and therefore self-murder was a viable avenue to taking back control and avoiding further humiliation and pain.
In Dante’s Inferno, the seventh ring of Hell is reserved for suicides. Suicide was considered so sinful to the Church that persons ‘convicted’ of suicide were not eligible to receive the rites of a Christian burial. It’s not hard to see why. Suicide harms not only the victim, but also everyone around them in ways from which they can never truly recover. Rich’s suicide the ultimate act of disrespect to his dying mother; he forced her to bury him as her own life was coming to its end. Rich’s erstwhile friends had to inform the community that once loved him of his suicide, and the community in turn donated money to Rich’s children in condemnation of his death. I believe that Rich wanted his ex-wives and ex-girlfriends and ex-friends and ex-community to feel sorry for their part in his death, but he only made them terribly angry. Lowtax premeditated his suicide, intentionally depriving his own children of a father to spite their mothers. A parent who commits suicide leaves a horrible curse upon their progeny, which goes:
‘I have abandoned you to life and chosen death for myself. If you should ever wish to do the same, by my act, you have my permission.’
What an awful legacy.
Although I hate to speak ill of the dead, there are so many times in Rich’s life where he said and did things that were completely unacceptable. If he were still alive, I would probably be a-logging him. He was abusive to his wives, he treated his staff like shit, he was a spendthrift, and he was an absentee father to the community he created, as well as his literal children. He ended his life in an attempt at spiteful retribution to everyone he felt had hurt him. I recall watching a video he made after his Ashli left him: Lowtax had come home after traveling to another state for a tryst with another woman to find his home empty. Rich’s response to this situation was to make a video walk-through of his home, complaining how his wife hadn’t cleaned up the house before leaving for keeps with their child. Anecdotes like these show the sexist, abusive, angry, self-involved person Rich was.
Is there grace for Richard Kyanka? I hope so. Not only because I have fond memories of laughing my ass of reading SA as a teenager, but because I have faith in salvation for everyone, including bitter fuck-up atheists who died alone in despair. Rich would have hated this because he hated religion, especially Christianity, but that does not mean God hates him. Nobody on this side of the veil knows if there is an afterlife, but if there is, then Rich has an opportunity to change his mind and accept salvation. Should there be no afterlife, then God fondly remembers each soul he created, long after us mortals have forgotten their name and legacy, as a father loves his children.
Amen.
