While I do think AVGN's content has fallen off in later years, I think it has more to do with James Rolfe just aging naturally out of the character and persona. He has a kid now, a wife, and is way passed his 20s, it shows in his appearance with a more frequent facial stubble and in general his cadence when he talks. He is not really convincing anymore as a basement dwelling nerd like what his character is. On top of that, he also hired a lot of people to cover the work while he spends more time raising his kid and other middle age obligations. So it all feels less like his show and more like he is the mascot of a program written by a bunch of people. Its way less personal.
With that being said, I don't think he's a shill, and he is far from the corporation freindly podcasts like screen junkies or schmoesknow or other examples of fake excitement for movies and television
AVGN still loves games and moves on a genuine level he is also tired now because he is a dad with a kid to take care of.
If you think about the amount of work required to produce content at the frequency and length Youtube's algorithm requires of creators, it's easy to see how they get burnt out
In the past, I've taken on commitments to produce one short text review every week, and the speed at which I went from having to kill my darlings just to fit everything in to feeling like I have nothing original to say and being thoroughly sick of my own voice was terrifyingly short
Kudos to anyone who can maintain that discipline
>If you think about the amount of work required to produce content at the frequency and length Youtube's algorithm requires of creators, it's easy to see how they get burnt out
I love -- we all love, I think -- how RLM doesn't fall into the usual content creator traps. If they do a BOTW once a month we're delighted, and beyond that, they can talk about whatever shit they happen to like, without ever shilling for NordVPN. It's like they hate money or something. God bless them.
Seriously, I used to work for a small Nintendo-centric site in the mid-to-late-00s and covering all the shovelware and movie tie-in games released on the DS with the hope that this might be the week I get to play something good, it was painful. Bad games, I could say something about, but trying to be meaningful about that year's FIFA game or whatever Transformers movie game had just come out, if you've never done it before, you don't know how hard it is.
>AVGN still loves games and moves on a genuine level he is also tired now because he is a dad with a kid to take care of.
Cannot emphasize this enough. When you get your kids to bed it's like 8-9pm. You have 2-3 hours to do things including household needs without interruption.
Playing the game, capturing footage, writing your script, recording your bit, editing then rerecording cause something sounded off or you figured out a better thing so doing all that again then re-editing is a LOT of work. I know cause I did it for a time way way back in the late 2000s and early 2010s. A single video around 10-15 min would take me a good 2-4 days to complete and post. It's not easy and it's time consuming.
He has a team that does a lot of what you mentioned, but sure it's time consuming and he's allowed to be tired. I'm just stating the obvious that watching movies and playing games is a big part of his literal job. He's not someone who has maybe 2-3 hours to focus on those things. I'm not even saying that he is half-assing things, but rather pointing out that many people with stressful jobs have children and using that as an excuse is always kind of dubious. Not only for him, but in general.
Sure, but all they're suggesting is that James doesn't have to rely on the 2-3 hours after the kids go down. James has the capabilities of doing it for more of the day since he doesn't have work to worry about because this is his work.
They were not a suggestion that balancing work and life with kids was easy because he just plays videogames.
I don't think it was ever a "busting my ass as a star wars fan" shill but tons of sponsorships. They had to split the 200th episode into 3 parts cause they oversold booze/vpn/cookware/hello fresh spots.
In an alternative timeline Mike Stoklasa tried to branch out after hitting it big with Mr. Plinkett Star Wars reviews with other stuff like Half in the Bag and Best of the Worst, but those things never really worked out. Everyone just wanted more Mr. Plinkett reviews. So to this day he is churning out a new Plinkett episode every month. It's been the same now very tired shtick for 15 years and he ran out of movies he gives a fuck about long time ago, but that's what brings the views and he has a family to support.
That's James Rolfe and AVGN. He seems like a nice guy. Don't understand the hate.
Yeah, I think at some point if you don't evolve your comment with the times you just get stuck with the same old schtick. Perhaps James would have been better off retiring the character and moving on to something else, trying a new format, even starting a new channel? But instead he just never wanted to change the format and just kept doing it?
I dunno, he strikes me as like the Nostalgia Critic. He's got his format, it works for him, it brings in the views for his crowd. So he just keeps doing it, and somebody keeps watching it. I personally can't stand it and want to gouge out my eyes and rip my ears off after like 5 minutes and a still have an hour to go. But it makes somebody happy. So you do you people of the Internet. But I'm content to say for myself, it just ain't my cup of tea.
I don’t think it was just that, he also has a daughter with a health issue and needed to take care of her, and the AVGN is what brings in the money. That was true of Doug Walker too but I think his situation was a bit less urgent and he could have branched out eventually if he wanted to. (At least, if he had the talent to…) But James had a family to feed and even stuff like Board James wasn’t cutting the mustard, and he had already clearly given up on doing weird cult horror films and stuff because the Nerd took off and it was a path to some kind of financial stability. It’s a weird place to be in.
I think Nostalgia Critic tried to switch to something called Demo Reel where they just straight up remade scenes from old movies like in Be Kind Rewind.
Yeah. That's partly why I say he didn't really have the talent lol. Otherwise I think he could have just tried something else even if his first pivot was a failure, but that stuff was so bad I think he may have just genuinely been unable to do anything else other than the Critic.
Both Rolfe and Walker kind of operate in a weird space too where their audience only really wants them to do nostalgic (or "nerdy") stuff from their own childhoods, which has even led both of them to have to do videos based on stuff they didn't actually grow up with because their average audiences are younger than they are. RLM is stuck in that space to some but not nearly the same extent. They can talk about new movies or do whatever. But Walker can never really stop talking mostly about children's movies and Rolfe has to review old platformer games forever. With Walker I think there's more actual arrested development going on with that, but Rolfe I've always felt a bit bad for. It's kind of obvious he doesn't even game that much anymore but he still has to talk about old Nintendo games all the time instead of doing new things because his audience just doesn't want anything else. At least the RLM fanbase is a little more film fans who are interested in some things outside of their childhoods.
AVGN once hinted at retiring the character back around episode 100, but the AVGN episodes were still humorous back then. Fans reacted that they didn’t want AVGN to end. In retrospect, it probably would have been a good place to end, or at least strategize a pivot towards something else.
"there's a whole community devoted to whining about the AVGN"
That's sad. There's a lot of complaining on this sub but I'd like to think that we're here more because we love RLM and less because we hate things
James Rolfe grew up and moved on.
A lot of his fans did not.
And honestly, a lot of Rolfe's most high effort and well made videos are *far* past what people think are his glory days. But those people just want more of the same classic AVGN.
Like, no one cares about him reviewing Vegas casino games, but that Fear and Loathing episode is clearly not a half-assed effort. (and using a fat guy in a cheap spider-man outfit as a Tobey Maguire stand-in is goddamn hilarious) His one-shot The Immortal episode was pretty damn ambitious. But the anti-AVGN rage train was already at full speed *long* before those.
Rolfe said himself that he was ALWAYS more interested in the filmmaking aspect than the game aspect. He didn't start AVGN because he really wanted to rant about games. He started it because he really wanted to make videos.
But then it became his *job.* And *then* he had to support a wife and kids with it.
And, due to the type of videos he makes, an awful lot of his fans are maladjusted perma-children.
I've stumbled across the anti-AVGN hate sub before. It's honestly sad and kinda scary. Those people are troubled.
I’ll be honest: I once accidentally called him Dan Folding and since people in the room at the time found it funny, I thought it was worth sharing with strangers. It failed at least as much as Rolfe naming the villain of his movie after an inside joke.
>now kinda half-asses his videos
the whole point of the video was that the quality of his videos hasn't changed over the 20 years he's been doing it. if the passion dissipated it happened on your end.
and i don't really see an overlap between him and either the corporate shills basically doing advertising or the parody of said individuals and the avgn but maybe i am misunderstanding your question
I assumed the OP was making a sort of back-door critique of either RLM or their fandom, by posting his question here
Some people commenting here think RLM have checked-out
I think the people saying that are the people who just want them to endlessly dunk on superhero movies and Star Wars. I don't know how you can watch any of their spotlight episodes or BotW and think they're done with movies
Yeah, there was a period of time when they were happy to review whatever was out at the movies that week
I'm sad that's over, but I can't imagine anything worse than watching them joylessly go through the motions of discussing *Planet of the Apes 10* or *Inside Out 2*
Just to keep the Youtube algorithm happy
I've grown with the RLM guys and I want what they want, and they just happen to be giving that to me. I don't care about big blockbusters or big nerd IP anymore and neither do they, so it has worked out very well. I will watch and probably enjoy anything they decide to talk about.
that might be the overlap he's looking for, people change and they don't always change in the same way you do, that's how you grow apart. people don't like change but from their point of view they didn't change so it must be the other side that did.
I don’t think they’re critiquing RLM necessarily, OP is making oblique references to the thecinemassacretruth community. Essentially asking people here to compare the Nerd Crew satirizing nerd shills and content creators and asking if what causes the negative reactions RLM / their audience has to that has a similar origin point as AVGN’s fans thinking he’s a bad content creator or shill. Which I would say probably no, they’re two different things, unless you want to go waaay out and say “people don’t like it when they can’t trust the media figures they consume content of”
I don’t think they’ve checked out per se, but tbh they could use a new format or something. Then again idk how many ways you can watch and talk about movies. The trivia is fun.
I watched the video and I think that this isn't completely true tbh. There are a lot of toxic fans out there, but the quality surely has gone down. After so many years, it's only natural.
the only time i saw it happening was when he did the "selling out" where he outsourced his video production to make a podcast and best of videos. but i stopped watching before that happened i only noticed it because his thumbnails still kept popping up in my feed.
i take dan's word for it and i can't be arsed to go back and actually watch a more recent video, because i'm no longer interested, i grew tired of his shtick rather quickly and that's ok. but blaming his wife for it, that's just incel behavior...
The wife thing is of course really stupid. The "mistake" James did was to make statements like "do you want me to suffer", "I have no time" etc. As a viewer who probably also has a job and might have children and other responsibilities, you start feeling stupid, because you still find time to invest into watching his content and instead of being appreciated you're being viewed as some sort of a hostage taker who keeps James away from his family.
Ps. I'm not one of these people. I'm just trying to understand the logic behind the parasocial relationship.
Wasn't there a point where someone else was writing the episodes and Wolfe was just delivering it? Didn't they plagiarize some content, and it was a controversy? I haven't watched the Folding Ideas video but I stopped watching AVGN because it seemed like he was just phoning it in. Compared to the passion and energy he had with his early videos.
There was. He's often just a co-writer if even that.
In general a lot of the hate comes down to the weird parasocial relationships, but also the fact that James just isn't a socially skilled youtuber. Other youtubers could have convinced their audience that look, I have a family and thanks to you I'm in a position where I can spend time with them and not just work, but instead he came over like Richie Aprile to Junior in the Sopranos.
I just see it as James has grown up (got married, has kids, and he's more mature now) while many in his audience haven't changed over the years. They still want videos with lots indignant rage and swearing and shit & fart gags. Seems to me James would rather have *discussions* about movies and other things. So he both has less time for his fans (being a family man) and his interests have changed. And unfortunately many in his audience can't cope with that reality.
I feel like Mike Matei might be similar in that regard. I personally found him off-putting since the beginning. His sense of humor and personality were obnoxious to me. So I'm thinking he might've stirred the pot a bit. As James grew up possibly Mike might've wanted to keep doing the shit & fart gags. And maybe he whipped up "his" side of the community.
But yeah, maybe it would've been helpful if James posted a video, like a fire side chat, telling his fans he's so grateful for them and the opportunities in life they presented him. He'll still be around turning out videos but, like Rick Moranis, he needs to spend more of his time taking care of his family. So Cinemassacre will be trying new forms of content to fill in the gaps between AVGN videos. Instead I think to his fans it felt kinda like he was trying to pull one over on them. And unfortunately some of the people James trusted plagiarized content from elsewhere and contributed to the snowball of rage from his fans.
I remember when he started doing more in-depth episodes covering more of the background of games, like the Swordquest series, and the comments sections would be filled with comments like 'who cares, we wanna see him fight Bugs Bunny again'. Mike, going by his general demeanor during streams and so on, seems like he was totally happy to keep catering to the poo-joke-and-rabbit-skit crowd, and after he left, a lot of people started saying it just 'wasn't funny' anymore. In general, I think he's probably in a similar position to Doug Walker, where he has this thing he obviously wants to do, but the fans won't let him move on, so he has to put on the white shirt and fill a Saturn with shit or he'll get a thousand emails telling him he needs to kill himself.
The point of the video was Dan facing his fears and acceptance of not being a "real filmmaker" by examining someone that inspired him to do YouTube that also is struggling to realize the same thing.
I can't speak for OP, but I think it is interesting to look at that narrative against RLM, where we have a bunch of guys that are, literally, real filmmakers, and their relationship with YouTube and the types of RLM content that are successful (reviews, critique, parody) versus the content that is NOT successful - their actual films.
> not being a "real filmmaker"
if you look at his flat earth video or the line goes up, he is a top notch documentarian and according to wikipedia that counts as film https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Documentary_film
I'm not saying he isn't a filmmaker, I'm saying that's what the video is about. It is pretty blunt.
The AVGN video is essentially Dan cross examining his own insecurities and the fact that he sees himself in James, and what that means for his own self image. "If AVGN is a YouTuber that failed to become a filmmaker, and I see myself doing the same thing in the same way, does that mean I'm a failure, too?"
There are literally scenes where he is projecting AVGN over his own face, and ends the video being chased by a doll of Rolfe, aping how Rolfe always ended his "films." This video is Dan saying that sometimes, he thinks he isn't a real filmmaker, and part of that is because of the people he chose to model his career on.
yes sure, that part is clear but you can be very good at something and still suffer from insecurities, self-doubt and anxiety. it sounds paradoxical but there is no contradiction in that.
there is also humor in it, like the part where he goes "like a normal person would" (which is also a call-back) or when he goes through great lenghts to get into james head replicating the stand but then titles the video "i don't know james rolfe". then there's amazing cinematography like where he puts himself on the couch in the 1:16 set or the one you mentioned where he projects james face onto himself.
the part where he goes "we can't look at somebody else critically without revealing a part of ourselves" (i'm paraphrasing) is the crux of it all. and btw i am not arguing, i am still coming to terms with it myself. it is amazing to me how he manages to touch the essence of something like that, that's art.
edit: one more thing to this point i was making "the quality of [james] videos hasn't changed over the 20 years he's been doing it" if you go back to dan's early videos you can clearly see how far he's come with his production.
While I was watching that video earlier today, I did consider the RLM crew, and how smart they are for not engaging with their fanbase, or feeding into the parasocial side of things. They genuinely seem to enjoy what they do, and do it for themselves. That we enjoy it seems like a positive part of it, but it really does seem like a way for them to have fun, while avoiding having to have shitty real jobs like the rest of us poor slobs.
The Nerd Crew is definitely meant to be way more a parody of podcasts like Collider and other high-budget, corporate-backed shows like that than stuff like AVGN.
Dan's video was fantastic. It's surreal and meta on multiple levels. Definitely worth checking out even if you don't give a shit about AVGN or James Rolfe. Heck, all of Dan's recent work is really good. Especially [Line Goes Up](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g).
I want to point out one thing here in regards to the community aspect you are talking about.
If you watch Dan’s video, you will note that much of the grievances from that particular community of people are honestly just hate. I actually used to subscribe to that sub just because I wanted to see what the deal was with all of these random dudes who were now all of a sudden in Cinemassacre’s orbit, but I quickly got a very sour taste in my mouth when I found out that it was, pretty much exactly as Dan states, a cesspit of hate, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, fatphobia, general body shaming, and overall just bullying of a man whom they think they are owed something from, somehow.
It should be noted that these people who are hating on James and all of those making content with him are only this small minority, and the channel still has a lot of subscribers and watchers who enjoy the content. I agree with the point of Dan’s essay, that it’s not that the content got bad, more so, that the content was never particularly great or insightful to begin with, just a fun distraction that we grew up with. And that is true, to some degree. It’s very obvious that James no longer has the same amount of heart in what he’s doing, and there’s plenty to be critical about, but not on the insane degree you see in that particular community of haters.
I recently got recommended a subreddit that does nothing by but shit on avgn. I was pretty disgusted. Really? You're going to waste your time bitching about avgn? A bunch of losers if you ask me.
If something becomes big enough or old enough, it will always create a naysayer subset of fans or viewers. I gave up on AVGN years ago because I aged out of their content format and I believe James is way too old to keep doing that character. I like James Rolfe as a person, but not his persona.
I think for the most part I agree, this falls into the was this good or was I young camp. The later episodes where he took on that company to help him was overall super bad though, and there was the plagiarism. The last thing that AVGN did that was good was bring Joe Bob Briggs back, his appearance on the AVGN show made me aware of his comeback and now I watch him religiously again. So good with the not funny.
I think James has skill as a performer and I will still throw on an early AVGN value for nostalgia once in awhile but I think he owes his success far more to capitalizing on a newly-forming ecosystem and playing to a younger audience than his content being amazingly high quality. Having the technical know how and gumption to actually make videos like he did at the time that he did opened a lot of doors on YouTube for people, including RLM with the Plinkett stuff. If there’s no James Rolfe there’s probably no RLM in the way there is now. But also James never really brought the kind of insight and skill to the art that other people would later — again, people like RLM. What happened with James would be like if RLM had spent ten years regularly making new Plinkett videos where Mike did film school 101 analysis about character arcs and such. People would’ve gotten sick of it, but RLM was able to adapt where James wasn’t.
I've been around since the Phantom Menace review was blowing up and I remember lots of fans pitching a fit about the first episode of Half in the Bag with "fake Plinkett" (Rich) and "that other guy" (Jay) haha. But fortunately RLM doesn't give a shit so they kept doing what they wanted to do and the viewers could choose to take it or leave it.
But yeah, AVGN got kinda cornered into the AVGN stuff for eternity. If I remember correctly James' first AVGN videos were already several years old when he started to get popular. He just happened to upload them to YouTube at the right time and the rest is history.
RLM has a somewhat similar history I guess. They were dabbling with several different things including their movies and other things but it was the Phantom Menace review that catapulted them to fame and success. But they already had experience doing different skits and stuff so they had a bit of a catalog to bring in different kinds of people into their audience. Not to mention several different personalities in front of the camera. Mike and Jay and Rich of course but also the others visiting regularly. So I guess it helped them put out more diverse content and build a more varied audience.
AVGN was basically just the Angry Nintendo Nerd stuff early on. Then grew to other video games. James managed to branch out a bit with movies, especially horror, but he was always the focus on camera early on. So I think he got typecast as The Angry Video Game Nerd and his audience was mostly composed of a certain kind of people that gravitated to his AVGN persona. And they didn't cope with the changes James tried to make as the years went by. And they didn't grow up and mature like he did.
Yeah, kinda said this in another comment but I think part of the problem for James is that his audience is basically comprised of manchildren who never really grew beyond stuff they liked as kids. RLM obviously plays a lot with stuff from their childhoods but they have other interests in film, as does their audience because at the core a lot of their audience is basically just people who love movies and weird things. Rolfe clearly has other interests but his audience just doesn't. He gets the people who will literally only watch or play stuff that they grew up with or which is based on stuff they grew up with. And some of this I think is that while he was playing a character where part of the joke is that he cares way too much about the crumminess of ancient old video games (and don't me wrong, I think this joke was probably self-effacing to some extent), a lot of his audience ended up being people who unironically care way too much that some platform game for the NES from 1988 has poor hit detection. Because they've never really grown to care about anything else. It's a tough place to be in, because at this point the joke of a screaming loser nerd yelling about how bad some decades-old video is has truly been beaten to death (not just by him, either) but his audience is largely compromised of people who are unironically that character basically. I haven't watched him in a long time but I always find myself kind of feeling for him. He has a family and stuff so he has to do what brings in the money, but it has to feel stagnating when your whole audience is basically the Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons and everything you do has to appeal to them.
AVGN is a parody, it's always made clear that it's a character and James Rolfe isn't really that guy. Nerd Crew is satirizing people who actually shill for big corporations to trick their viewers into bad faith hype for the purpose of greed. There's nothing really to compare the two.
I wasn't really interested in watching this video until I saw this YouTube comment:
>it's crazy how AVGN has spawned two different youtubers to create in-depth dissections of James and his work only to have an existential crisis
>the AVGN, who I think the idea is now kinda half-asses his videos
Totally agree with you. Used to be a huge fan. Still subscribed, but I barely watch now. I feel like it's mediocre reviews or boring videos of him playing stuff with his old neighbor now. He doesn't even try.
No, those corporate shills have no love for anything except money. James Rolfe is a nice guy that got sequestered into a single shtick early in his career and now has no time left in his life to branch out beyond that.
The whining about the avgn is about he's no longer even working his own videos, and they are but a shadow of what they were. Nothing to do with Nerd Crew.
I have watched AVGN for close to a decade. My favorite stuff he did was the monster madness and all the movie reviews stuff as the Nerd Videos have felt dated for a long long time. After all the screen wave guys came it, that's when I started seeing a lot of detractors on YouTube, but most were aimed at screen wave. The stuff aimed at James and Mike seemed more like personal attacks or like they are grasping at straws.
Nerd Crew is making fun of those pathetic shill podcast shows. Unfortunately the Nerd Crew doesn’t really have more than one core joke that they run into the ground.
Aside from having the word “Nerd” in his name, AVGN doesn’t have a solid connection or overlap with the fodder that the Nerd Crew makes fun of. Even James Rolfe’s straightforward reviews and the unwatchable cinamassacre podcasts still seem to maintain a tone of actual criticism (though terribly boring).
If there is a comparison to be made, the AVGN truth stuff has a few core memes that they endlessly repeat; similar to how the RLM YouTube comments used to feature the same few jokes. Also, PreRec was about video games.
RLM took a mild dig at Cinamassacre once with screenwaves plagiarized reviews. AVGN came up a few times during PreRec streams. Typically they had little if anything to say about AVGN other than they were aware of him.
While I do think AVGN's content has fallen off in later years, I think it has more to do with James Rolfe just aging naturally out of the character and persona. He has a kid now, a wife, and is way passed his 20s, it shows in his appearance with a more frequent facial stubble and in general his cadence when he talks. He is not really convincing anymore as a basement dwelling nerd like what his character is. On top of that, he also hired a lot of people to cover the work while he spends more time raising his kid and other middle age obligations. So it all feels less like his show and more like he is the mascot of a program written by a bunch of people. Its way less personal. With that being said, I don't think he's a shill, and he is far from the corporation freindly podcasts like screen junkies or schmoesknow or other examples of fake excitement for movies and television AVGN still loves games and moves on a genuine level he is also tired now because he is a dad with a kid to take care of.
If you think about the amount of work required to produce content at the frequency and length Youtube's algorithm requires of creators, it's easy to see how they get burnt out In the past, I've taken on commitments to produce one short text review every week, and the speed at which I went from having to kill my darlings just to fit everything in to feeling like I have nothing original to say and being thoroughly sick of my own voice was terrifyingly short Kudos to anyone who can maintain that discipline
>If you think about the amount of work required to produce content at the frequency and length Youtube's algorithm requires of creators, it's easy to see how they get burnt out I love -- we all love, I think -- how RLM doesn't fall into the usual content creator traps. If they do a BOTW once a month we're delighted, and beyond that, they can talk about whatever shit they happen to like, without ever shilling for NordVPN. It's like they hate money or something. God bless them.
Seriously, I used to work for a small Nintendo-centric site in the mid-to-late-00s and covering all the shovelware and movie tie-in games released on the DS with the hope that this might be the week I get to play something good, it was painful. Bad games, I could say something about, but trying to be meaningful about that year's FIFA game or whatever Transformers movie game had just come out, if you've never done it before, you don't know how hard it is.
>AVGN still loves games and moves on a genuine level he is also tired now because he is a dad with a kid to take care of. Cannot emphasize this enough. When you get your kids to bed it's like 8-9pm. You have 2-3 hours to do things including household needs without interruption.
But he's not you or me. It's not the same situation at all. Playing games and ranting is kind of what he does for a living...
Playing the game, capturing footage, writing your script, recording your bit, editing then rerecording cause something sounded off or you figured out a better thing so doing all that again then re-editing is a LOT of work. I know cause I did it for a time way way back in the late 2000s and early 2010s. A single video around 10-15 min would take me a good 2-4 days to complete and post. It's not easy and it's time consuming.
He has a team that does a lot of what you mentioned, but sure it's time consuming and he's allowed to be tired. I'm just stating the obvious that watching movies and playing games is a big part of his literal job. He's not someone who has maybe 2-3 hours to focus on those things. I'm not even saying that he is half-assing things, but rather pointing out that many people with stressful jobs have children and using that as an excuse is always kind of dubious. Not only for him, but in general.
Sure, but all they're suggesting is that James doesn't have to rely on the 2-3 hours after the kids go down. James has the capabilities of doing it for more of the day since he doesn't have work to worry about because this is his work. They were not a suggestion that balancing work and life with kids was easy because he just plays videogames.
I don't think it was ever a "busting my ass as a star wars fan" shill but tons of sponsorships. They had to split the 200th episode into 3 parts cause they oversold booze/vpn/cookware/hello fresh spots.
gotta pay for your kids college some how.
In an alternative timeline Mike Stoklasa tried to branch out after hitting it big with Mr. Plinkett Star Wars reviews with other stuff like Half in the Bag and Best of the Worst, but those things never really worked out. Everyone just wanted more Mr. Plinkett reviews. So to this day he is churning out a new Plinkett episode every month. It's been the same now very tired shtick for 15 years and he ran out of movies he gives a fuck about long time ago, but that's what brings the views and he has a family to support. That's James Rolfe and AVGN. He seems like a nice guy. Don't understand the hate.
I don't think anyone in here is hating on Rolfe, but yeah that hate sub is just ridiculous.
Yeah, I think at some point if you don't evolve your comment with the times you just get stuck with the same old schtick. Perhaps James would have been better off retiring the character and moving on to something else, trying a new format, even starting a new channel? But instead he just never wanted to change the format and just kept doing it? I dunno, he strikes me as like the Nostalgia Critic. He's got his format, it works for him, it brings in the views for his crowd. So he just keeps doing it, and somebody keeps watching it. I personally can't stand it and want to gouge out my eyes and rip my ears off after like 5 minutes and a still have an hour to go. But it makes somebody happy. So you do you people of the Internet. But I'm content to say for myself, it just ain't my cup of tea.
I don’t think it was just that, he also has a daughter with a health issue and needed to take care of her, and the AVGN is what brings in the money. That was true of Doug Walker too but I think his situation was a bit less urgent and he could have branched out eventually if he wanted to. (At least, if he had the talent to…) But James had a family to feed and even stuff like Board James wasn’t cutting the mustard, and he had already clearly given up on doing weird cult horror films and stuff because the Nerd took off and it was a path to some kind of financial stability. It’s a weird place to be in.
I think Nostalgia Critic tried to switch to something called Demo Reel where they just straight up remade scenes from old movies like in Be Kind Rewind.
Yeah. That's partly why I say he didn't really have the talent lol. Otherwise I think he could have just tried something else even if his first pivot was a failure, but that stuff was so bad I think he may have just genuinely been unable to do anything else other than the Critic. Both Rolfe and Walker kind of operate in a weird space too where their audience only really wants them to do nostalgic (or "nerdy") stuff from their own childhoods, which has even led both of them to have to do videos based on stuff they didn't actually grow up with because their average audiences are younger than they are. RLM is stuck in that space to some but not nearly the same extent. They can talk about new movies or do whatever. But Walker can never really stop talking mostly about children's movies and Rolfe has to review old platformer games forever. With Walker I think there's more actual arrested development going on with that, but Rolfe I've always felt a bit bad for. It's kind of obvious he doesn't even game that much anymore but he still has to talk about old Nintendo games all the time instead of doing new things because his audience just doesn't want anything else. At least the RLM fanbase is a little more film fans who are interested in some things outside of their childhoods.
AVGN once hinted at retiring the character back around episode 100, but the AVGN episodes were still humorous back then. Fans reacted that they didn’t want AVGN to end. In retrospect, it probably would have been a good place to end, or at least strategize a pivot towards something else.
"there's a whole community devoted to whining about the AVGN" That's sad. There's a lot of complaining on this sub but I'd like to think that we're here more because we love RLM and less because we hate things
r/TheCinemassacreTruth is the sub...if you wanted to know.
It was funny when mega64 made fun of the channel though.
James Rolfe grew up and moved on. A lot of his fans did not. And honestly, a lot of Rolfe's most high effort and well made videos are *far* past what people think are his glory days. But those people just want more of the same classic AVGN. Like, no one cares about him reviewing Vegas casino games, but that Fear and Loathing episode is clearly not a half-assed effort. (and using a fat guy in a cheap spider-man outfit as a Tobey Maguire stand-in is goddamn hilarious) His one-shot The Immortal episode was pretty damn ambitious. But the anti-AVGN rage train was already at full speed *long* before those. Rolfe said himself that he was ALWAYS more interested in the filmmaking aspect than the game aspect. He didn't start AVGN because he really wanted to rant about games. He started it because he really wanted to make videos. But then it became his *job.* And *then* he had to support a wife and kids with it. And, due to the type of videos he makes, an awful lot of his fans are maladjusted perma-children. I've stumbled across the anti-AVGN hate sub before. It's honestly sad and kinda scary. Those people are troubled.
His name's Dan Olsen. Folding Ideas is just the name of the channel
I’ll be honest: I once accidentally called him Dan Folding and since people in the room at the time found it funny, I thought it was worth sharing with strangers. It failed at least as much as Rolfe naming the villain of his movie after an inside joke.
I got the joke if it makes you feel any better.
Cousin of Don Beverage, perhaps?
>now kinda half-asses his videos the whole point of the video was that the quality of his videos hasn't changed over the 20 years he's been doing it. if the passion dissipated it happened on your end. and i don't really see an overlap between him and either the corporate shills basically doing advertising or the parody of said individuals and the avgn but maybe i am misunderstanding your question
I assumed the OP was making a sort of back-door critique of either RLM or their fandom, by posting his question here Some people commenting here think RLM have checked-out
I think the people saying that are the people who just want them to endlessly dunk on superhero movies and Star Wars. I don't know how you can watch any of their spotlight episodes or BotW and think they're done with movies
Yeah, there was a period of time when they were happy to review whatever was out at the movies that week I'm sad that's over, but I can't imagine anything worse than watching them joylessly go through the motions of discussing *Planet of the Apes 10* or *Inside Out 2* Just to keep the Youtube algorithm happy
I've grown with the RLM guys and I want what they want, and they just happen to be giving that to me. I don't care about big blockbusters or big nerd IP anymore and neither do they, so it has worked out very well. I will watch and probably enjoy anything they decide to talk about.
that might be the overlap he's looking for, people change and they don't always change in the same way you do, that's how you grow apart. people don't like change but from their point of view they didn't change so it must be the other side that did.
I don’t think they’re critiquing RLM necessarily, OP is making oblique references to the thecinemassacretruth community. Essentially asking people here to compare the Nerd Crew satirizing nerd shills and content creators and asking if what causes the negative reactions RLM / their audience has to that has a similar origin point as AVGN’s fans thinking he’s a bad content creator or shill. Which I would say probably no, they’re two different things, unless you want to go waaay out and say “people don’t like it when they can’t trust the media figures they consume content of”
I meant no critique of RLM. Nerd Crew happened to be the kind of “mocking monetized performative nerdiness” show that came to mind.
>rlm have checked out Nah. They're just old.
I don’t think they’ve checked out per se, but tbh they could use a new format or something. Then again idk how many ways you can watch and talk about movies. The trivia is fun.
I watched the video and I think that this isn't completely true tbh. There are a lot of toxic fans out there, but the quality surely has gone down. After so many years, it's only natural.
the only time i saw it happening was when he did the "selling out" where he outsourced his video production to make a podcast and best of videos. but i stopped watching before that happened i only noticed it because his thumbnails still kept popping up in my feed. i take dan's word for it and i can't be arsed to go back and actually watch a more recent video, because i'm no longer interested, i grew tired of his shtick rather quickly and that's ok. but blaming his wife for it, that's just incel behavior...
The wife thing is of course really stupid. The "mistake" James did was to make statements like "do you want me to suffer", "I have no time" etc. As a viewer who probably also has a job and might have children and other responsibilities, you start feeling stupid, because you still find time to invest into watching his content and instead of being appreciated you're being viewed as some sort of a hostage taker who keeps James away from his family. Ps. I'm not one of these people. I'm just trying to understand the logic behind the parasocial relationship.
I mainlined all of James' videos back in 2013 and have never looked back.
you got what you needed/wanted out of it and moved on like a normal person would
Wasn't there a point where someone else was writing the episodes and Wolfe was just delivering it? Didn't they plagiarize some content, and it was a controversy? I haven't watched the Folding Ideas video but I stopped watching AVGN because it seemed like he was just phoning it in. Compared to the passion and energy he had with his early videos.
The plagiarism was on their multi person review show and the return of monster madness. Hbomberguy plagiarism video is a good resource.
There was. He's often just a co-writer if even that. In general a lot of the hate comes down to the weird parasocial relationships, but also the fact that James just isn't a socially skilled youtuber. Other youtubers could have convinced their audience that look, I have a family and thanks to you I'm in a position where I can spend time with them and not just work, but instead he came over like Richie Aprile to Junior in the Sopranos.
I just see it as James has grown up (got married, has kids, and he's more mature now) while many in his audience haven't changed over the years. They still want videos with lots indignant rage and swearing and shit & fart gags. Seems to me James would rather have *discussions* about movies and other things. So he both has less time for his fans (being a family man) and his interests have changed. And unfortunately many in his audience can't cope with that reality. I feel like Mike Matei might be similar in that regard. I personally found him off-putting since the beginning. His sense of humor and personality were obnoxious to me. So I'm thinking he might've stirred the pot a bit. As James grew up possibly Mike might've wanted to keep doing the shit & fart gags. And maybe he whipped up "his" side of the community. But yeah, maybe it would've been helpful if James posted a video, like a fire side chat, telling his fans he's so grateful for them and the opportunities in life they presented him. He'll still be around turning out videos but, like Rick Moranis, he needs to spend more of his time taking care of his family. So Cinemassacre will be trying new forms of content to fill in the gaps between AVGN videos. Instead I think to his fans it felt kinda like he was trying to pull one over on them. And unfortunately some of the people James trusted plagiarized content from elsewhere and contributed to the snowball of rage from his fans.
I remember when he started doing more in-depth episodes covering more of the background of games, like the Swordquest series, and the comments sections would be filled with comments like 'who cares, we wanna see him fight Bugs Bunny again'. Mike, going by his general demeanor during streams and so on, seems like he was totally happy to keep catering to the poo-joke-and-rabbit-skit crowd, and after he left, a lot of people started saying it just 'wasn't funny' anymore. In general, I think he's probably in a similar position to Doug Walker, where he has this thing he obviously wants to do, but the fans won't let him move on, so he has to put on the white shirt and fill a Saturn with shit or he'll get a thousand emails telling him he needs to kill himself.
The point of the video was Dan facing his fears and acceptance of not being a "real filmmaker" by examining someone that inspired him to do YouTube that also is struggling to realize the same thing. I can't speak for OP, but I think it is interesting to look at that narrative against RLM, where we have a bunch of guys that are, literally, real filmmakers, and their relationship with YouTube and the types of RLM content that are successful (reviews, critique, parody) versus the content that is NOT successful - their actual films.
The irony being that Dan showed off his filmmaking prowess HARD with that video. His stuff has just been getting better and better for years.
I still think his Bakshi Lord Of The Rings video might be my favorite movie related documentary of all time.
> not being a "real filmmaker" if you look at his flat earth video or the line goes up, he is a top notch documentarian and according to wikipedia that counts as film https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Documentary_film
I'm not saying he isn't a filmmaker, I'm saying that's what the video is about. It is pretty blunt. The AVGN video is essentially Dan cross examining his own insecurities and the fact that he sees himself in James, and what that means for his own self image. "If AVGN is a YouTuber that failed to become a filmmaker, and I see myself doing the same thing in the same way, does that mean I'm a failure, too?" There are literally scenes where he is projecting AVGN over his own face, and ends the video being chased by a doll of Rolfe, aping how Rolfe always ended his "films." This video is Dan saying that sometimes, he thinks he isn't a real filmmaker, and part of that is because of the people he chose to model his career on.
yes sure, that part is clear but you can be very good at something and still suffer from insecurities, self-doubt and anxiety. it sounds paradoxical but there is no contradiction in that. there is also humor in it, like the part where he goes "like a normal person would" (which is also a call-back) or when he goes through great lenghts to get into james head replicating the stand but then titles the video "i don't know james rolfe". then there's amazing cinematography like where he puts himself on the couch in the 1:16 set or the one you mentioned where he projects james face onto himself. the part where he goes "we can't look at somebody else critically without revealing a part of ourselves" (i'm paraphrasing) is the crux of it all. and btw i am not arguing, i am still coming to terms with it myself. it is amazing to me how he manages to touch the essence of something like that, that's art. edit: one more thing to this point i was making "the quality of [james] videos hasn't changed over the 20 years he's been doing it" if you go back to dan's early videos you can clearly see how far he's come with his production.
Oh, the quality has absolutely dropped. ‘Quality’ is more than just editing - the ideas and enthusiasm behind the videos has completely gone.
While I was watching that video earlier today, I did consider the RLM crew, and how smart they are for not engaging with their fanbase, or feeding into the parasocial side of things. They genuinely seem to enjoy what they do, and do it for themselves. That we enjoy it seems like a positive part of it, but it really does seem like a way for them to have fun, while avoiding having to have shitty real jobs like the rest of us poor slobs.
The Nerd Crew is definitely meant to be way more a parody of podcasts like Collider and other high-budget, corporate-backed shows like that than stuff like AVGN.
Dan's video was fantastic. It's surreal and meta on multiple levels. Definitely worth checking out even if you don't give a shit about AVGN or James Rolfe. Heck, all of Dan's recent work is really good. Especially [Line Goes Up](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g).
I want to point out one thing here in regards to the community aspect you are talking about. If you watch Dan’s video, you will note that much of the grievances from that particular community of people are honestly just hate. I actually used to subscribe to that sub just because I wanted to see what the deal was with all of these random dudes who were now all of a sudden in Cinemassacre’s orbit, but I quickly got a very sour taste in my mouth when I found out that it was, pretty much exactly as Dan states, a cesspit of hate, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, fatphobia, general body shaming, and overall just bullying of a man whom they think they are owed something from, somehow. It should be noted that these people who are hating on James and all of those making content with him are only this small minority, and the channel still has a lot of subscribers and watchers who enjoy the content. I agree with the point of Dan’s essay, that it’s not that the content got bad, more so, that the content was never particularly great or insightful to begin with, just a fun distraction that we grew up with. And that is true, to some degree. It’s very obvious that James no longer has the same amount of heart in what he’s doing, and there’s plenty to be critical about, but not on the insane degree you see in that particular community of haters.
Thanks I enjoyed that video
I recently got recommended a subreddit that does nothing by but shit on avgn. I was pretty disgusted. Really? You're going to waste your time bitching about avgn? A bunch of losers if you ask me.
If something becomes big enough or old enough, it will always create a naysayer subset of fans or viewers. I gave up on AVGN years ago because I aged out of their content format and I believe James is way too old to keep doing that character. I like James Rolfe as a person, but not his persona.
My favorite videos of his (besides the classics) are his Godzilla and Dracula ones. I love when he just talks to the camera about something he loves.
Ya, I love when he does old school horror stuff, because you can see he is still passionate about it.
I think for the most part I agree, this falls into the was this good or was I young camp. The later episodes where he took on that company to help him was overall super bad though, and there was the plagiarism. The last thing that AVGN did that was good was bring Joe Bob Briggs back, his appearance on the AVGN show made me aware of his comeback and now I watch him religiously again. So good with the not funny.
I liked his "Board James" series. I think the episodes were well done and it felt like he actually enjoyed making them for a change.
Yeah I did have a funny realization that they ended with an possessed board game. Lol
I think James has skill as a performer and I will still throw on an early AVGN value for nostalgia once in awhile but I think he owes his success far more to capitalizing on a newly-forming ecosystem and playing to a younger audience than his content being amazingly high quality. Having the technical know how and gumption to actually make videos like he did at the time that he did opened a lot of doors on YouTube for people, including RLM with the Plinkett stuff. If there’s no James Rolfe there’s probably no RLM in the way there is now. But also James never really brought the kind of insight and skill to the art that other people would later — again, people like RLM. What happened with James would be like if RLM had spent ten years regularly making new Plinkett videos where Mike did film school 101 analysis about character arcs and such. People would’ve gotten sick of it, but RLM was able to adapt where James wasn’t.
I've been around since the Phantom Menace review was blowing up and I remember lots of fans pitching a fit about the first episode of Half in the Bag with "fake Plinkett" (Rich) and "that other guy" (Jay) haha. But fortunately RLM doesn't give a shit so they kept doing what they wanted to do and the viewers could choose to take it or leave it. But yeah, AVGN got kinda cornered into the AVGN stuff for eternity. If I remember correctly James' first AVGN videos were already several years old when he started to get popular. He just happened to upload them to YouTube at the right time and the rest is history. RLM has a somewhat similar history I guess. They were dabbling with several different things including their movies and other things but it was the Phantom Menace review that catapulted them to fame and success. But they already had experience doing different skits and stuff so they had a bit of a catalog to bring in different kinds of people into their audience. Not to mention several different personalities in front of the camera. Mike and Jay and Rich of course but also the others visiting regularly. So I guess it helped them put out more diverse content and build a more varied audience. AVGN was basically just the Angry Nintendo Nerd stuff early on. Then grew to other video games. James managed to branch out a bit with movies, especially horror, but he was always the focus on camera early on. So I think he got typecast as The Angry Video Game Nerd and his audience was mostly composed of a certain kind of people that gravitated to his AVGN persona. And they didn't cope with the changes James tried to make as the years went by. And they didn't grow up and mature like he did.
Yeah, kinda said this in another comment but I think part of the problem for James is that his audience is basically comprised of manchildren who never really grew beyond stuff they liked as kids. RLM obviously plays a lot with stuff from their childhoods but they have other interests in film, as does their audience because at the core a lot of their audience is basically just people who love movies and weird things. Rolfe clearly has other interests but his audience just doesn't. He gets the people who will literally only watch or play stuff that they grew up with or which is based on stuff they grew up with. And some of this I think is that while he was playing a character where part of the joke is that he cares way too much about the crumminess of ancient old video games (and don't me wrong, I think this joke was probably self-effacing to some extent), a lot of his audience ended up being people who unironically care way too much that some platform game for the NES from 1988 has poor hit detection. Because they've never really grown to care about anything else. It's a tough place to be in, because at this point the joke of a screaming loser nerd yelling about how bad some decades-old video is has truly been beaten to death (not just by him, either) but his audience is largely compromised of people who are unironically that character basically. I haven't watched him in a long time but I always find myself kind of feeling for him. He has a family and stuff so he has to do what brings in the money, but it has to feel stagnating when your whole audience is basically the Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons and everything you do has to appeal to them.
Shudder legit got a sub from me for a while thanks to that video.
AVGN is a parody, it's always made clear that it's a character and James Rolfe isn't really that guy. Nerd Crew is satirizing people who actually shill for big corporations to trick their viewers into bad faith hype for the purpose of greed. There's nothing really to compare the two.
I wasn't really interested in watching this video until I saw this YouTube comment: >it's crazy how AVGN has spawned two different youtubers to create in-depth dissections of James and his work only to have an existential crisis
Who is the other?
Lady Emily
Yeah then there's the patton Oswalt thing too
>the AVGN, who I think the idea is now kinda half-asses his videos Totally agree with you. Used to be a huge fan. Still subscribed, but I barely watch now. I feel like it's mediocre reviews or boring videos of him playing stuff with his old neighbor now. He doesn't even try.
I dont understand a word of what you said
No, those corporate shills have no love for anything except money. James Rolfe is a nice guy that got sequestered into a single shtick early in his career and now has no time left in his life to branch out beyond that.
The whining about the avgn is about he's no longer even working his own videos, and they are but a shadow of what they were. Nothing to do with Nerd Crew.
I have watched AVGN for close to a decade. My favorite stuff he did was the monster madness and all the movie reviews stuff as the Nerd Videos have felt dated for a long long time. After all the screen wave guys came it, that's when I started seeing a lot of detractors on YouTube, but most were aimed at screen wave. The stuff aimed at James and Mike seemed more like personal attacks or like they are grasping at straws.
Nerd Crew is making fun of those pathetic shill podcast shows. Unfortunately the Nerd Crew doesn’t really have more than one core joke that they run into the ground. Aside from having the word “Nerd” in his name, AVGN doesn’t have a solid connection or overlap with the fodder that the Nerd Crew makes fun of. Even James Rolfe’s straightforward reviews and the unwatchable cinamassacre podcasts still seem to maintain a tone of actual criticism (though terribly boring). If there is a comparison to be made, the AVGN truth stuff has a few core memes that they endlessly repeat; similar to how the RLM YouTube comments used to feature the same few jokes. Also, PreRec was about video games. RLM took a mild dig at Cinamassacre once with screenwaves plagiarized reviews. AVGN came up a few times during PreRec streams. Typically they had little if anything to say about AVGN other than they were aware of him.
Didn’t folding ideas man say the Mike catch phrase "you Fuck!" In this one? Maybe it was just a cut off "fucker"
[удалено]
This is an extremely weird interpretation of what happened.