Omorka's Lair

There are fans (mostly but not exclusively dudes) who reflexively gripe about what I will loosely call "host segments" in YouTuber videos.

Now, I get griping about them when they run on forever and consist mostly of the host or hosts either complaining about a thing or aimlessly farting around in whatever passes for their studio. I also get being annoyed about them when they're supposed to be comedic and they fail at being funny, although humor is subjective enough that if no one is being hurt by it I don't see the point in taking time out of your day to tell the creator you didn't think it was funny.

But when the creator is trying to tell a story, or craft a character (who isn't just them with a little contouring for the camera), or build a world? Or all three? Why in the dick would you decide to gripe about it in the comments, especially if you have nothing else to say? Just zoom ahead to the talky bit and let the creator play, damn it! Even if it's objectively bad - and it usually is for their first year of doing it - at least it's going somewhere, building a what-if, instead of just being a buttmonkey for views like most YouTube jockeys.

I didn't understand it when whiny fanboys did it to MovieBob in the second iteration of the Game OverThinker series (and yeah, those were awful until he got two arcs under his belt and never rose above slapdash, but he took constructive feedback about what he was actually doing wrong like a champ; pointless guff got no one anywhere), I don't understand it when people still do it to Linkara now (and those got away from awful pretty quickly; by three years in he was doing an adequate job and has only continued to improve), and I don't understand when fans do it to Captain Disillusion (and his were already all the way up to mediocre at the get-go and have only gotten better). If you're not there for the fiction frame, either ignore it or use the thumbs Ninhursag gave you to fast-forward to the review/essay/explanation. Let the creators have their fun, and let those of us who are here for the lore have ours.

Those of y'all who have followed me for a while know that the Spouse is as big a geek as I am, but largely in different fandoms. For example, he's much more (or, from a different perspective, less selective) of an anime fan than I am. While we do have some shared fandoms (we were both Whovians before being a US Whovian was cool), for the most part we head to different panels at cons.

The Spouse actually got me into Channel Awesome and its siblings, more or less by accident; someone linked him to one of Todd in the Shadows's reviews, and he got really into them, then started showing them to me. I was curious about the people who were showing up in the cameos and crossovers, so I started watching some of the other producers; the Spouse did the same for Rap Critic but seemed content to stop there for a while. I'm not sure which of us landed on Chez Apocalypse first, but I started mainlining Brows Held High while the Spouse went for Folding Ideas. Eventually we ended up both watching the others' discoveries. I went from there to the CA anniversary movies, which the Spouse declined to watch on the grounds that he was interested in the reviews themselves, not the fictional bits (we'd run into the same issue when we'd discovered MovieBob a couple of years before - Spouse didn't want to watch the Game Overthinker reviews because of the storyline bits).

I more or less goaded the Spouse into watching the Brad Tries reviews by accident, and from there he picked up the Midnight Reviews and then the Cinema Snob reviews on his own. He seems to be enjoying those, but is much less interested in the Film Brain reviews, either BMB or the Projector ones, which seems odd to me, since the Spouse is as big an Anglophile as he is a Japanophile and Film Brain's reviews are pretty review-y rather than riff-y.

Anyway, the Spouse is a much bigger comic fan than I am - I've mostly been a Marvel girl since before puberty, while the Spouse has ranged across multiple publishers for roughly the same amount of time and has been more interested in the creators. So he'd been aware of Linkara for a long time, but not particularly interested in watching him. When I started marathoning At4W last summer, the Spouse was vaguely interested in what I thought, but not at all interested in watching with me - mostly because he was actively turned off by the storyline, again. However, because this last year or so has been so light on storyline because of the movie, the Spouse has sat through several episodes with me and gotten interested enough to watch some, but not all, of the back episodes. On the one hand, I'm happy to share this with him. On the other hand, the skipping around drives me absolutely batshit, especially when we jump from a relatively recent episode all the way back to the early ones where the sound is awful. There are positives to sharing a fandom with one's spouse, but I really wish he'd either just watch the new ones as they came out or attempt to watch the old ones (even if he skips the ones he'd not interested in) in chronological order.

So, I'm currently watching Atop the 4th Wall from its beginning to where I got interested enough to start watching it (about three months ago). Its creator, Lewis Lovhaug, started it in late 2008, and as far as I can tell he was 21, maybe just barely 22, and just out of college at the time. (He looks even younger in the first handful of videos, like a teenager, but by the early 2009 ones he looks properly post-college-and-what-do-I-do-with-my-life, at least.) He's been updating it on a regular weekly schedule since then. I, uh, I have a lot to get through.

I've also watched a fair amount of the Channel Awesome shared universe stuff, including various crossovers, but specifically the three anniversary movies - Kickassia (which I confess I didn't finish because the sound was terrible), Suburban Knights (IMHO the best of the three despite its technical limitations), and To Boldly Flee (IMHO the most interesting of the three, despite being more deeply flawed than SK). And that means that I've been spoiled for a few bits of Linkara's (the character Lewis plays in his reviews and the shared Awesomeverse) background.

I'm somewhere in February of 2010 and I just hit the first review where those spoilers matter.

( Spoiler cut just in case anyone else didn't want to be spoiled, even though the statute of limitations has run out on this one )