Arin himself once famously told his peers to shoot him if he ever made a lets play channel. About a year later, Arin would go on to start Game Grumps with Jontron; but unlike most of their time, the show managed to gain popularity while retaining status beneath the surface of Youtube's mainstream—in tern maintaining respect from their home communities—they wouldn't be condemned as sellouts and traitors just yet. Both Jon and Arin seemed wise to the irony of what they were doing—Game Grumps kind of became what JFK taking office was to Irish Americans: here were two creatives with their own lets-play channel maintaining their roots in representation of the cultural backgrounds they came from. Game Grumps was a wink back to the Newgrounds crowd and all others of Anti-normie creed. Without the synthetic aura of youtube friendly sellouts, Arin and Jon were just two friends playing games from their childhood.
The videos were real, authentic and unlike these obligatory runs of the latest indie fads where every video is supposed to be its own special package.
Game Grumps was cool at the time because you could really get to know both Jon and Arin having listened through hours of chats, stories and friendly debates. They were real people in the sort of way a pink haired youtube cash cow with millions of subscribers and a face cam wasn’t; they didn’t need a face cam; flashy jump cuts were something for the short attention spans of the normie surfe. The difference between the number of views the Game Grumps actually got and how these views were distributed compared to more popular lets-players is testament to this. Corporate lets-players operate with long single videos, so those of the audience don’t have to invest themselves into going through a series of episodes—these videos will get around 5m to 20m on a good day, mainly from people unsubscribed from the actual channel themselves. On the other hand the average Game Grumps video with Jon and Arin received around 100k, but 100k of loyal fans returning consistently for each ten minute instalment of whatever game they were playing. Even now, currently with 5m subscribers they still maintain around this average, with the rest of the 4.8m sticking around for the occasional animation or Best of. Shortly before the Adpocalypse, Jon would end up leaving Game Grumps; a cataclysmic event for a channel beloved by its base in a way incomparable to fans of the sort of hair-players which Youtube favored.
The chemistry dynamic of Game Grumps is to have in one aspect a slicker and more romantically apt archetype—as was to an extent once manifested by Arin; to complement this, Jon was the Josh to Arin’s Drake; he was the energetic and comical sidekick; less of a fuckboy, but the funnier and actually edgier of the two as it stood; so when Jon left and some musician no one had heard of became Arin’s new sidekick, it’s only natural that mixed reactions ensue. Looking at Danny’s past content, it could be said that he was a bit of a goofball himself in being part of a group called Ninja Sex Party; wearing a personality which seemed to lack any sense of seriousness in its comical flare.
With this in consideration, at the time it seemed he would just fill in for the Jon archetype and everything would continue as normal. Funnily enough, Danny, *the outsider, would end up taking Arin’s place as the straight edge sex icon smiling with a charming charisma. As it stands now, both Arin and Danny have featured on Youtube Red, making them closer to the hand which feeds them. They even became unfunny enough to be viewable by normies, once purified with a less down to earth and more conventional style. Arin got a golden streak in his hair and that was that—Game Grumps was normie shit.
If you think about it, Arin had less of a reason to become this sort of character archetype given his background was one of the relatively tame and generic humour found in his cartoons along with his sincere passion for game design in the old Sequelitis videos. On the other hand, Danny came from a background of singing songs about dicks, yet he had become the agent of order to Arin’s chaos. Arin even once remarked in a clip which I cant seem to find anymore about how he had come from being a well respected animator to that guy who gets mad at video games.
There is however a difference between Arin’s shock humour and Danny *Sexbang’s “sincere” demeanour. The reason Arin uses things like weird sex to shock Danny is because by Arin’s intuition, such things are shocking and distant from normality. In this, there is a sincere and an absurd of which the former is separate to. Game Grumps is split between two sentiments—its default mode is generally casual, but every now and then conversations would lead towards deeper subject matter shifting Danny and Arin’s moods to something more serious: like when Danny talked about his history with meds in the Wind Waker playthrough or whenever he goes off about The Last Unicorn—which is this sort of ugly looking film from the 80s he has a reverent affinity for—Danny after all was now the more emotionally legitimate.
The difference between Arin’s model of shock humour and Danny’s default sentiment is that Arin doing something like talking about eating ass exists in stark separation from legit feels; that's the point, it’s absurd and that's why it's funny. Dan on the other hand is someone who can disavow Arin’s raunchy sex talk for being vulgar, but at the same time make sincere arguments for why women shouldn’t wear tops in public or creepily glorifying the behaviour of ape societies in the wild, emphasising how they do it in front of the “little kid monkeys”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMCrymrdQTc
Unlike Arin’s use of sexualised shock humour, Dan’s statements about free love and public nudity aren't ironic and aren’t part of an energy separate from a more serious tone. Danny will casually talk about being invited to porn conventions or who his favourite stars are; to him, The Last Unicorn and his enthusiasm for the industry exist as of a single feeling. Testament to this is one of Dan’s occasional serious monologues from the Breath of the Wild playthrough, where he goes off about eating ass and how he would explain what tossing salad is to his younger nephew.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujAJe-CnwyI&t=76s
The monologue progresses towards a more serious tone as Danny gets into how he was always a strong believer in world peace. The speech ends with him stating that if unity is what man should strive for, then tossing each other's salads' wouldn’t be a poor place to start. Here is where we notice a shift within the dynamic; its where we see Dan fail to separate absurdity from sincerity, even if for a moment. Had he waited a little longer he probably would have gotten away with it, but for about a second too soon at the end of his speech he managed to insert an anecdote combining both the sincere and the profane within a single mood before breaking the ensuing aura of deadpan confusion with another topic. This ending flourish, despite being satirically delivered was in fact sincere, continuing the previous tone regarding his interest in a we are the world scenario. It has to be asked after all this why he pretends to project such aversion to Arin’s sexualised shock humour. Maybe because Arin’s intentions are and always have been to operate weird sex jokes as a form of shock humour, under the preface that such practices are indeed weird and perverse, something which Danny with his porn trivialisation and hellbent tolerance might fundamentally disagree with on a deeper and internal level. Maybe getting rid of such sentiments is just another little evolution as of Game Grumps's cultural progression further into conventionalism. Things get more positive and more fine, more cool and alright; and at the end of it all, Danny will smile at you and thank you for watching, reminding you to stay positive yourself. Maybe Danny wants to shout out some band at the start of a video or commemorate a musician who died—after all Danny is the happy go lucky stoner from the 80s, the reliable shoulder to cry on, the type of conventional person who celebrities tell nice stories about after they die.
But some people don’t smile, because their lives never gravitated round the intentions of a Disney wonderland; some people sneer at that sickness with hot bile—one less commercially viable figure of internet history...
Bob Magrann was a member of Silvermania—a comedy group composed mainly of cynical millennials; Bob on the other hand was in his late 40s when the group started to reach its peak. At face value, Bob is a greying pissed off fat guy of German and Irish descent, carrying a face with a grizzled concentration as if to visibly reflect hardship. In now archived videos we can hear him allude to heavy drug use and an interest in rock and roll as can be seen in his skill with an electric guitar. He casually alludes to abuse suffered in his childhood as well as deceased friends lost in drug sprees. Despite being a minor aspect of the group, the affect of his presence brought them into the limelight with their fake Gabe Newell interview in which Bob portrays a raunchy caricature of the game dev. Bob used his own persona to portray Gabe Newell as a fat and unapologetic bastard carrying a merciless smoulder and a stiff frown, contrary to the more approachable nature of the actual Gabe Newell. Bob has to his disposal a persona of a hateful waste equipped with a capacity to use wit in the execution of his shock humour. The goal of shock humour is to celebrate behaviours unconventional to norms: Bob revels in the reminiscence of his past sexual exploits and pulls all most deviant potentials from discourse. What's key in Bob is that he embraces open representation of not practices which he enjoys which happen to be degenerate, but practices because they are degenerate: flaunting them has the comedic effect of absurdity.
It’s no secret—in 2016 Bob Magrann got busted for CP during a raid. This implication renders him egregious to both me and I’d assume pretty much everyone else reading who isn’t some kind of Nihilist, however Bob by his default nature is no Nihilist. Pedophiles on Discord servers might call themselves Nihilists to excuse themselves of being morally wrong by removing morality as a whole, but this is a practice which Bob never submitted to, even before getting caught: “You guys are better off not watching that stuff, you're only going to hurt yourself on the insides”. When Bob says, “I've seen the ultimate worst” he means that it is to his awareness the worst. The point isn’t that Bob is safe, it’s how he considers his own behaviour in relation to other cultural developments: in this, the underlying psychology of Bob’s evil of a wholesome moral gradient and Dan’s good of a defaultly degenerate moral gradient can be analysed. Bob roots his ego in shock value and horror, generating his own self understood agent of impurity: “Oh my god i’m so disgusting”. Everything about him from his nature to what he goes on about is impure, but that's only because a gradient of purity does exist within the cultural intuition for it to be so. As such, the imprints of the cultural default he arose from in becoming a deviant exist to be seen. It only goes hand in hand that someone with a nature to be in awareness of his own degeneracy would also keep up a Keto diet—something which does exercise self control; or even just his love for cats and animals: “Stop killing fucking animals, kill other people instead”. For instance, Bob likes to talk about how he wants to bang every tranny; he may do this with an embraced sense of his own repugnancy, but having sex with transexuals isn’t something condemned outside of social convention in modern culture—a time after Bob’s, a trend wave of straight men proclaiming preferences for traps in semi ironic meme culture would ensue. The difference between Bob and someone like Danny is that Danny wouldn’t even regard being in a straight relationship with a transexual in jest, only as he would the nature of any other relationship, because to him the type of Thai ladyboys Bob talks about getting aids from are on par with accountants and social workers by a logic of tolerance. By this same logic, Danny—the conventional nice guy isn't too much less of a degenerate than Bob—the self proclaimed degenerate. The only difference is that one considers their nature to be default and the other, even if egregious understands their behaviour to deviate from normality; hence why they feel emboldened to be a loud caricature of such debauchery, when really most people, including Danny engage in such things with a sense of formality as they would any other casual practice. Bob Magrann is a degenerate, but his degeneracy revolves from a moral intuition which facilitates him to consider himself as such—default intuition goes a long way.
Bob tells us in a video that he’s laughing on the outside but crying on the inside— Danny does both within the same mentality—the difference is that his crying and laughter exist of a mindset which can only contemplate an interest to a drive for pleasure, one which develops social charm and extraverted good will in its service. Bob may at face value come off as more of a hedonist in his own right, but no matter how self destructive, pure indulgence doesn't admit to itself for the rest of us to judge as we may, at least not when prefaced by a healthy default.
Very enjoyable read, hats off.
ReplyDeleteI think the title alone was enough to reel me in, but I was hooked with the contents in this as well, good piece.
ReplyDeleteDamn i was not expecting such a good read, went on way too long setting up the point about dan but by the time you got to bob it was all perfectly clear and well worth the read.
ReplyDeleteI totally think dan has more skeletons in his closet.