This is pure speculation, but I always wonder whether Digi's last few years on youtube would have played out differently if the currently airing seasonal anime had been different, i.e. better. The bread and butter of an anituber is discussing seasonal shows, but when those shows are soulless, low quality, and leave nothing to be discussed, what is to be done in its place? I know Digi has always been the "human content machine" and explores different fields/genres to evolve his "art." While I do agree with previous sentiments that coronavirus probably played a part in his descent into madness because of the increased amount of time spent indoors on the internet, I think the other side of that is the anime production aspect. A lot of seasonal shows were either delayed weeks, ran into issues, or postponed to future seasons entirely, which makes the material he works from even more scarce and low quality. Personally as an anime fan I noticed that I started losing interest in anime around the time Digi stopped producing as much content, and I think that's no coincidence. I think older anime fans are probably really jaded. For a casual watcher this just means finding a new hobby, but for Digi, who relies on flashes of inspiration from the shows he watches to produce content, this requires an entire restructuring of your livelihood, which he clearly can't handle.
I have to disagree. I'm the last person you would call a recency fag and I think anime had several ups and downs over the span of
decades but I don't think anime is any more "soulless" today than few years ago.
Weebs are typically young (teenagers to early 20s), easy to impress and fickle. Today anime is the best shit of all times and the universe and all other universes but tomorrow they lose interest. That evolution happens over a span of two years typically. And that gives you a constant stream of people whose narrative is "anime isn't as good as it was in the olden days" ("olden days" then being 2018 or something).
Now funny enough Digibro's recent anime phase didn't last much longer than 2 years either. He was all into MLP for some time until his fallout with the brony community. That must have been around mid 2015 when Jeff's
Horseshoe Finale came out. And I'd argue by the time
Digibro left VB he had already mostly lost interest again. Maybe I'm a bit to strict with the dates here but the phase really wasn't that long. And it was all long, long before the coronavirus for sure. His patreon has been in decline for a long time already.
What rightfully gave Digibro his anime guru creds btw (compared to the average weeb) was his autistic focus on anime for the time he was into it and even more so the fact he had a first anime phase
before the MLP arc giving him a somewhat broader time horizon.
Anyway, starting with his roadtrip there was less and less talking about anime and more and more let's plays, ramble streams and personality cult. His decent into madenss began back than at the latest. Tragically, his loss in interest coincides with his breakthough on patreon. I guess his line of thought then went "anime is boring ... those people must be here for me and only me". Wrong, I think. They were there for SAO and K-On and whatnot because they had found out about his content
up to that point only recently. What makes his content worse is that Digibro knows demonstrably less about non-anime things than the average person living in the real world. He doesn't even have the internet skills he boasts about as you can seen from how he erratically follows conspiracy theories he stumbles across or some "you are 14 and I am deep" pop philosophers and aphorists.
And it doesn't even matter if anime suddenly turned to shit last Friday or in 2017. There is always a stream of young weebs who gobble up anything. He could've just catered to them. He could also just have impressed his audience with his actual knowledge about the field and the revelation that there is anime older than a year. He could have talked about the 2000s and early 2010s. Kenny Lauderdale makes much, much more views than Digibro by infrequently talking about obscure 80s OVAs for heaven's sake.
So, rant over. This might sound like a career advice but I'm convinced that ship has sailed. It's more like a post mortem analysis.
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