but we all know he will just blame harassment again, instead of actually releasing her on time for once...
Of course he will. It's because he always blames something or someone else that it's hard to sympathise with Alex because his whole track record is explaining away his lack of productivity for some reason other than himself, nowadays it's harrassment. Not to mention the evidence to suggest that he doesn't work nearly as hard as he claims, and with how willing he is to let complete strangers know that he's cripplingly depressed on his Discord, Discord DMs, and on his own development blog - usually completely unwarranted, the harrassment excuse feels emotionally manipulative and disingenuous.
I still can't wrap my head around the fact that Alex is too much of a shithead to actually know what he is doing... I mean, does he genuinely believes a hate and shame 2 would repair his reputation? It would just destroy it more, but he is apparently too moronic to realize that... I mean, i'm not one to judge usually, i am a cringy idiot most of the time myself, but nobody appears to be capable of surpassing Alex's levels of stupidity and cringe, maybe only other lolcows, but he is certainly one of the most moronic individuals i have met, and that is certainly something coming from me...
Alex clearly has a chronic compulsion to try and justify his actions. He's a public figure, willingly or not, and when a public figure feels the need to constantly respond to criticism (which especially in Alex's case usually ends up making him look worse), or censor it when he doesn't, it just leads to a downward spiral for his reputation the more he does it. With the cavernous hole Alex dug for himself it would be a miracle for him to turn that around with Hate and Shame 2, especially because he's prone to strawmanning arguements like he did with Hate and Shame, or avoiding the real criticisms, such as his attempt to address his work ethic with "Why are you playing video games instead of working?".
For the latter video, he makes out as if people expect him to always be working. But the question never was whether Alex was allowed to stream when he wasn't working, but whether he actually does any productive work when he's meant to be working. The video for reference:
The only way I can see him building his reputation back up is to simply change his own behaviour for the better. I feel it would be best for him to go radio silent for a while, knuckle down, and stop streaming. But he doesn't seem to see anything wrong with his behaviour (not for a lack of people trying to tell him), so keeps doing it. And if past testimonials are anything to go by, he still acts like he did in his 20s; the socially inept degenerate young adult with an addiction to anime and video games - yet ironically is astronomically bad at them, and over-uses the ban button.
People only dug up the mountain of evidence of Alex's past and present mis-deeds only because he built himself up such a reputation over the years. If he didn't have so many screws loose people wouldn't give a shit about him and everything would be hunky-dory. When he responds to criticisms regarding his past behaviour, he either provides his own versions of events without any counter-evidence, or dismisses it in a way that doesn't seem like he learned from it in any meaningful way. He didn't even provide receipts of the conversation that went down with "N" about the sex license, so he could manipulate that story any way he wanted to.
