- Joined
- Jan 4, 2020
You ever see the Game Grumps playthrough of Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door? It's pretty infamous in that they're bad at the game, but one of the Grumps, Arin, gets particularly upset by people sending them e-mails, telling them how to play better. When his partner, Dan, takes up their advice, Arin proceeds to have a salty rant about it. "Jokingly" he mocks the criticizers. Okay, cool, now we can move on, right? Later in the playthrough, around three months in real-time, Arin again brings the issue up, again, "jokingly", pretending to berate Dan for "not playing perfectly."I only caught a few minutes of the stream today, but at one point Phil made a joke about WWE Champions. While the characters were out fighting, see, Bulma is sitting in the capsule "playing WWE card games, spending $140k and looking for a Hulk Hogan Card! YEAHHH BROTHERRR! ACK ACK ACK!" He loved it. Cackled and then peer into the chat to watch the reaction.
He then proceeded to shit on detractors. A couple of people said that nobody said it was $140k, but Phil fired back immediately (it wasn't a cheer, he zeroed in and found it in chat), "OH YES THEY DID. Someone said it the other day! Why would I even HAVE that kind of money!" He then continued to shit on detractors for constantly ramping up the amount. That's the kind of idiots he is dealing with.
So he's definitely using the amount as his semantic dodge. He didn't say anything about not spending money on the game, he just mocked the amount. There's no way the person who cheered that was not deliberately handing him an out.
My point is, you know someone is stung by what you say to them if they keep trying to throw your own words back at you, especially if they try to twist it into "See, it's a joke now, we're laughing at you!", and not just simply dropping it. Phil's handwaved and ignored plenty of criticism in the past, but this time it's different. He's desperately trying to weave a narrative here.
TL;DR This whole thing has been a sniper round to his nerves. We're on to something.