Which brings us, of course, to the most recent debacle, in the Completionist video. Moon Channel’s goal, since the outset, has been to produce video essays that come from the heart, but engage the mind: that are thoughtful but also genuine, and meaningful. As the Channel’s About page says, I’d like to produce content that is “serious without being anxiety-inducing, mature without being condescending, and wholesome without being overbearing.” The Completionist video, and frankly speaking, all of the law-review style videos thus far, in hindsight, have been to some degree anxiety-inducing, condescending, and overbearing. I do not desire to be the internet’s lawyer policeman, nor it’s contrarian, though each of the videos have panned out this way. I intended the Law Review episodes to be short, easy to edit videos. I chose that format because of sponsors, which is a very cynical decision to have made. Sponsors want two videos a month, and being able to occasionally produce a shorter law review video is a great way for me to work a little less. The Completionist episode, however, had a sixteen-thousand-word script with notes, and a run time of nearly an hour. The twenty-page address you’re currently reading has about 6,400 words, by comparison. Now, I stand by my legal analysis of course, but I didn’t do all the homework I needed to do, and I don’t mean with regards to the phone call or what have you: all of that is moving goalposts anyhow, and frankly, it’s a bit silly.
No, I didn’t do my research on the people involved. I mention in my videos that I have no idea who Jobst, or Mutahar, or Jirard are, and that I built my arguments based on their published videos. I stuck my head into a matter that has absolutely no concern for the law because it was never about the law: it was about the clicks, the drama, and emotions. I have stirred the pot and ruined the soup – this is a fundamentally different matter than, say, Nintendo v. Pointcrow or Nintendo v. Dolphin or Nintendo v. SmashBros Community. Hm, I never noticed that pattern, by the way. Interesting, that. But I digress: not unlike how Jobst, an expert on speed running fraud, might be a bit out of his element making legal accusations, I have conflated drama with law, and invited controversy, which is not what the Channel set out to do. Law is very complicated, and it’s not as clear cut as many imagine it to be. Lawyers exist because the law can be argued, and indeed, for every plaintiff, there too must be a defendant. Yellow journalism, however, drama, as it were, has heroes and villains. And I ran up to the show’s hero and smacked him square across the face, just as the final act was winding down. Of course, the audience is mad: I’ve ruined the show. And I did so out of ignorance of the circumstances.
This is a good lesson for Moon Channel. I feel like I’m getting to know you, the audience, better and better. But, with regards to people I don’t know, perhaps it’s better if we take a gentler approach in the future. In hindsight, I was a bit snarky towards PointCrow and HungryBox too, even if I hadn’t intended to be. And HungryBox happens to be someone I greatly respect, and admire: he’s a really wholesome guy, in arguably the world’s most toxic gaming community. He builds his community up, and he doesn’t tear others down – we could all stand to be a bit more like H-Box, myself included.
If we do more law reviews in the future, which so far is the plan, I’ll try to keep a more top-down perspective and give more of an overview without encouraging any conclusion against one party or another. In the Completionist video, I think the overwhelming majority of people feel that I was harder on Jobst and Mutahar than on Jirard in a way that is unfair. Speaking candidly, I was much harder on the accusers because they’re the accusers: in law, as we say, the defendant is innocent until proven guilty, and the burden of proof is on the accuser. I said in the beginning of the Completionist video that the law isn’t like YouTube, but the opposite is also true, and I didn’t consider that. YouTube isn’t like the law: it’s like media. It’s about controlling narratives and emotions, not facts. And that is just not what Moon Channel’s about. If a response to the Completionist video comes out, it is likely that I will simply ignore it. I am not above a little pettiness though: if the video is negative enough, I have drafted a response video of sorts already. But, even then, I am loathe to deploy it. The lawyer in me, the brain, wants to dissect everything that Jobst has ever said line by line, after handling his content so far with the kid gloves… but I can’t bring myself to be upset at this debacle. Volleying response videos back and forth, trading careful jabs: it is all grotesquely immature. The not-lawyer in me, the soul, we’ll say, knows that the right thing to do, the righteous thing, even, is to simply turn the other cheek. That’s right: lawyers can have souls. Sometimes.
In any case, I accept here that the fault of the matter lies with me: I didn’t know what I was getting into, and I didn’t do the best job I could’ve as a result.
