The Kenobi thing pretty much exemplifies what TFM has become. I had intentionally avoided all the spoiler talk, woke worries and reviews - luckily none of that shit even appears in my recommendeds any more. Last week watched the first three episodes in a single sitting and thought it was pretty good all things considered. Not perfect but serviceable. Then I checked Youtube and was taken aback by the hyperbolic disaster reviews from the usual suspects. It's not that bad and its only the thrid episode for crying out loud. The black chick over-acts and isn't very good overall but that isn't so much a diversity-hire thing as much as a casting swing-and-miss.
Very predictable that the Star Wars hate machine had to be turned back up to 11 to re-engage whatever outrage grift remains from their audience.
They managed to turn being a waypoint on the road down Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's
Five Stages of Grief for fans of Star Wars and "geek culture" into a lucrative YouTube career. Somehow I don't think there is any rational reason for them to react to the current genre culture offerings the way they do at this point apart from YouTube's algorithm. The one exception might be giving
The Orville too much credit because they like it and Gary knows one of the producers while giving
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds not enough credit because they hate nuTrek and don't know basically everyone involved. Honestly, I'd ask a friend or even visit one of the threads here before trusting their takes. I haven't watched the Star Wars show yet but they're dead wrong about
Strange New Worlds. nuTrek is shit generally, but that show's been remarkably solid these past few weeks and it's mostly episodic so you can take it and leave it.
As a side note, everyone’s favourite dirt-eating e-thot grifter is monstrously conspicuous by her absence on FNT. Is that purely down to allegiance to EVS? Considering her ties to Mayr and Jeremy, as well as her Star Wars schtick, it’s otherwise inexplicable that a fame-hungry individual wouldn’t seek to appear. I also noticed how short and sweet she answered a Mayr podcast superchat when asked if she would be attending the FNT meet-up.
Anna brings nothing to the table that they want. Any potential audience she could bring or connections she could help broker are redundant or irrelevant at this point. On top of that she has two major liabilities in being friends with Jessie Milestone and
@FROG. Of the two females that appear on FNT weekly, one of them is being paid explicitly as a producer and employee of the show and the other, Chrissie Mayr, if not being paid outright is being paid in "exposure" (always a red flag) in exchange for providing a connection to Anthony Cumia / Compound Media. Both of these women look miserable every week and Chrissie appears like she's having a panic attack under the crushing weight of her profound lack of chemistry with the "show".
In a world where you can openly cuck to a Hollywood filmmaker on one of your own streams and then lie to your audience about what they just saw - the same audience you spent countless hours courting with talk of "Without Respect We Reject" - while in the same few month span go on to receive embarrassingly large superchat "donations" for doing what is now demonstrably bullshit, I'd imagine some sense of unreality sets in and with it comes weird notions of who you're loyal to and what you owe and why you owe it. I'm not sure these spineless fucks can tell you what they do for living without uttering the phrase "content creator." Jeremy Griggs did unironically dub Gary the "Joe Rogan of geekdom" at the end of one of the recent FNT's, so there's that. At the end of the day, though, I don't think the FNT guys have any desire to associate with anyone not playing the YouTube game or bringing something they want to the table and CG isn't playing the YouTube game, they're playing the indie comics game.
They know how the Snyder thing made them look. They know that the people who don't need them necessarily (
@FROG and
@YoungRippa59) were the only ones to level honest criticisms and refuse to buy the "it was for charity" cope. They know on the other side of that was George Mohlo and his "beautiful soul" with more $500 superchats as well as fun meetups where they're not the fans, they're the stars. I think for Gary, a 50 year old ex-con taking it "one day at a time" and doing his newly discovered conservatism
California style in Texas, having a
pragmatic approach to the friends he makes along the way probably makes sense and by that I mean giving zero fucks about anybody but himself. If that's true, then Ethan's "zero" comment and Gary's seemingly disproportional reaction was most likely due to the fact that that's probably what Gary thinks of Ethan and Anna and the rest of CG, just judging by how he's treated them and others. All this, so he and Jeremy can sit at a meeting with Glen Beck or whichever conservative media mogul will kick the tires on FNT and they can say "Yeah, we had Zach Snyder on. He was great" instead of "we stood up for the fans and ourselves".
With only ~52 shows a year they want to make sure every ass that they kiss is an ass that counts. Anna's may be nice or whatever, but for the game they're playing, it just doesn't count.
