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After this and his video on Nostalgia Critic, I nominate Folding Ideas as the official critic of other youtube critics.
oh somebody finally debunked nazistalKKKia critic? im gonna have to watch that
It’s a really good video https://youtu.be/rokAtlFGa7Y
Oh no what did the nerd do now? I thought he was one of the rare good youtubers?
This is more of a career retrospective than a callout, although the video doesn’t pull any punches in critiquing the Nerd’s stagnation as a video creator, he also calls out the haters for what they are and concludes that Folding Ideas is in fact very similar to AVGN at the end of the day.
I feel like AVGN is just mentally over the YouTube channel, he doesn’t enjoy it anymore, but he still needs it as a stream of income. I just assume that he enjoys time with his family and barbecues, and the channel is just a job. I don’t blame him, but I haven’t watched him in many years.
I’m just spitballing here. But this feels like a common problem in capitalism: it ties us to a job we don’t love and drains our emotional energy. Arguably, AVGN is doing better than most of us, and he’s probably relatively unhappy.
A lot of people who made internet videos in that earlier era got typecast as their initial persona, and while a few managed to evolve into something more mature Rolfe is one of the ones who couldn’t, so his only options are to keep playing the character that makes money or else retire from the game altogether. It must suck and it also must suck that when he was at his highest popularity he couldn’t make nearly as much money as internet creators do now.
Nothing too bad, he just ended up a (prominent, genre-pioneering) youtuber instead of a film director and he seems to feel greatly ashamed about that.
I don’t think the conclusion is that he’s ashamed of it. Near the end the guy brings up how a lot of James’ movies are just reiterations of his childhood creations. He seems to enjoy “improving” his existing work, or just making it over and over again, despite the reception. He mentions how this mentality was always present but people act like its some recent downfall.
I do feel funny that some of AVGN’s fans get upset that his quality has been low. I just stopped watching him.
I went back and watched some AVGN after watching this vid, and the quality is literally exactly the same. The only thing that’s different is that I have nostalgia for the older episodes that I don’t have for the newer ones.
They get upset beyond that lol. There’s a whole sub dedicated to parasocial conspiracy theories
It’s kinda weird how for all the video’s repeatedly saying that you can’t take anything about AVGN at face value and assume that the nerd is James Rolfe, people in the comments are doing the same exact thing to Dan Olson the man playing Dan Olson the Youtuber. The most obvious example is the diorama who Dan Olson the Youtuber claimed that he made out of obsession with AVGN. But from the credits, the diorama is attributed to 4 people of which Dan Olson the man is only one of them. And my hot take is that the diorama was probably mostly made by Kristi O based on her handle @komakesthings. And it’s far from feverish obsession. If anything, it’s closer to a cold business transaction where Dan Olson the man commissioned a diorama to be made by Kristi O with the other two presumably giving her screenshots of the AVGN’s room to work with since she doesn’t seem like much of a gamer nerd. And of course, we cannot neglect the fact that the video has two writers. Like, maybe 95% of the script was written by Nathan Landel and Dan Olson the man is just an actor playing Dan Olson the Youtuber, so everything that Dan Olson the Youtuber says has nothing to do with what Dan Olson the man actually thinks.
I’m looking forward to you 90 minutes video essay, “I Don’t Know Dan Olsen”.
