Channel Awesome, AVGN, and other web review shows

Captain Krupp

I honestly have to be the only one who doesnt think the manga is THE way to experience One Piece. I honestly love the anime and I'm starting to resent people that diss it all the time.

Robby

@Captain:

I honestly have to be the only one who doesnt think the manga is THE way to experience One Piece. I honestly love the anime and I'm starting to resent people that diss it all the time.

Thats because while the anime has the benefits of color and motion and voices and music, which are huge, and legitimate reasons to prefer it! That pacing is absolutely abysmal and just murders the story, far worse than the padding of Drag On Ball did.

There's absolutely things to like about the anime, and if they did what every modern series does of only doing 25 eps a year, it'd probably be fantastic. But as a relic or the old model, and where they just refuse to do real filler arcs when they have a chance, well… it suffers for it.

Even using the fan edited version that cuts all the filler its still pretty slow because even with the filler removed, the canon scenes are still slower and a little more awkward and drawn out than they generally should be. Flashes of great animation or energy in there, some inspired bits, but man does it take them five minutes to do a one minute scene.

I watched the last few episodes to see how they handled Yamato, after hearing everyone talk about what a huge jump in quality Wano was... and wow I could not sit through a whole episode without getting bored. It's bad.

Lord Starfish

@Robby:

Thats because while the anime has the benefits of color and motion and voices and music, which are huge, and legitimate reasons to prefer it! That pacing is absolutely abysmal and just murders the story, far worse than the padding of Drag On Ball did.

There's absolutely things to like about the anime, and if they did what every modern series does of only doing 25 eps a year, it'd probably be fantastic. But as a relic or the old model, and where they just refuse to do real filler arcs when they have a chance, well… it suffers for it.

Even using the fan edited version that cuts all the filler its still pretty slow because even with the filler removed, the canon scenes are still slower and a little more awkward and drawn out than they generally should be. Flashes of great animation or energy in there, some inspired bits, but man does it take them five minutes to do a one minute scene.

I watched the last few episodes to see how they handled Yamato, after hearing everyone talk about what a huge jump in quality Wano was... and wow I could not sit through a whole episode without getting bored. It's bad.

It's a bit of a pick your poison scenario at this point, really; The anime is often too slow, the manga is often too fast. Sometimes the anime manages to capitalize on how the manga just skimmed past a scene and actually give it some proper focus, other times you get Luffy angrily staring at soup for 15 minutes straight. 994 though, was absolutely, unambiguously an improvement over the source material. The fact that Kiku and Kanjuro's fight was entirely off-screened in the manga was aggravating. (And also

! made it a lot harder to buy that he really was dead. Like, really? You've been developing this "One of us is a traitor!" plotline for years and then the traitor in question is killed off-panel? Yeah no.)

Robby

Yes, in cases where Oda completely off cameras a fight, and the anime actually picks up on that and fills in the gaps, its an improvement. Anything they do with Jack will be a vast improvement over what the manga did. And if that's where they put their energy it might even be the superior version.

But when they add new scenes that are just bad and made up whole cloth? Or they fill in every little gap to the point it spoils surprises or slows pacing to a crawl? (Some things were cut and left off-camera for a reason!) Or when they take the existing scenes and also drag those out? Holy crap that scene where Ulti rode down the stairs and yelled at P1 before clashing with Luffy? Or when Luffy faced off against Yamato? These should be fast kinetic moments, quick moments, and instead they're just… stretched into entire scenes and really long.

When the openign recap of the previous episode paces better and feels better than the actual episode, something's gone wrong.

I stopped watching the anime long long ago, like I said I was mostly curious to see how they handled Yamato and the great improvement in animation everyone talks about... so I only have the handful of eps to go by, but its largely still the incredibly abysmal pacing that made me drop it a decade ago.

I'm a lapsed fan, and I came back to the show for the first time since probably the Supernovas, (and I stopped watching after Enies Lobby) and after three weeks of curiosity (it took three weeks to get the equivalent of Yamato's opening scene!) I've already stopped watching it again. I didn't even see the scene you're talking about. maybe its amazing and fantastic, I don't know, because I was so completely and utterly bored and unimpressed by the previous episodes. Nicer animation only carries so far.

And I don't see that same problem at all in My Hero or Demon Slayer or Promised Neverland (season 1...) or Jujutsu... because they aren't trying to stretch 20 episodes of content to fill 50. They're taking a year of manga and doing 5 months of anime with it and that works great.

Lord Starfish

The pacing is really kind of a crapshoot. One week it's solid, with either little filler or filler that's actually entertaining in its own right, (Kiku VS Kanjuro is one such example, the entirely unnecessary yet still fun "Tank Commander Chopper and Gunner Usopp VS Big Mom" fight was another) and the next we get ten minutes of staredowns before anything happens. Granted at this exact point in time they're a bit stretched thin for content to begin with; The early Onigashima chapters are mostly just a lot of dilly-dallying around with a few brief skirmishes until… the exact point in which the latest episode ended. When you have fifty different fights happening at the same time, most of which are barely shown in the manga, then the anime might have some room to play around a bit more. Though even then… it seems to generally cope better in non-action chapters. The Oden flashback was generally paced really well for example... at least up until the point where Oden spent two full episodes in boiling oil. That was rough.

'course, switching to a MHA style approach or alternately having 10-minute episodes would help remedy this a lot... but alas, Shueisha is a business and there's no financial incentive for them to do this since the show is immensely profitable as it is. And so we are left with a show that has made great strides in pretty much every other respect since the Wano arc started, (well, the sound design is also still pretty ass) but which cannot overcome the pacing problems that come with having to produce four episodes a month based off a manga that publishes on average two or three chapters in the same timespan, and which has a story that is so interconnected that there's absolutely no room for substantial filler arcs.

andre

Yeah, I think the anime is more than fine if you're watching it weekly, but it's also a disappointment at the same time. It's no as bad as it was in Dressrossa, but the pacing still can be horrible. Overall Wano has been strong, but filler or a break would just make the quality so much better.

Md-Martin

I recently caught up with the Boruto anime and it still amazes me how it continues to have the same problem Naruto Shippuden had, which is the reverse of One Piece's problem with pacing.

Naruto Shippuden and Boruto SPEED through canon material. Every once in a while they'll extend a moment from the manga a bit further, and will usually add a bit more to fights. But they'll rush through it, and then have 9 months of pure filler material.

Compare that to One Piece which drags out its canon material to the highest extent with tons of padding filler, instead of original arcs and character filler(for the most part).

I wish both could just meet in the middle somewhere.

I still think one of the biggest missed opportunities for One Piece was not using the timeskip as a chance to animate the cover stories. The Manga took a two month break and helped give the feeling that time has passed away from these characters.

The anime just chugged on the following week. They could have kept making episodes, spent time adapting the cover stories to give themselves some breathing room. But nope, who needs canon material to adapt when you can just kill full minutes of time with long reaction shots.

Robby

So since everyone was talking about it, I went ahead and watched the next couple episodes. Yeah, that Kiku showdown was good… and the scene where the scabbards are running down the hallway in black and white to confront Kaidou was fire. That was fantastic and super well done.

But then everything else... the wayh they'd take canon scenes, start building up emotion or momentum with them... then just stop short, cut away to a different scene for 15 minutes, then cut back to it... that's really rough. 2 or 3 solid minutes don't make up for 18 bad.

Or like, when the manga does a fast cut away to a new scene for two pages, then cuts to a new scene for two pages... that works because its FAST and keeps pace and momentum up and it fits the pacing of a 7 minute read. . But when you stop and stay in those scene changes, and each one takes several minutes, (inevitable because if you have the actors back in the studio just for one scene, then you gotta use them!) and it just loses something.

But the absolute worst was like when they did the Orochi head cutting scene. That should have been a fast, brutal, SURPISE moment, followed by reaction shots. Instead they made it slow, and showed all the reaction shots first, and tried to make it a fake out that Momo was killed... and then beheaded Orochi... and it completely ruined the moment. I get what they were trying to milk and why they did it... but turning a fast brutal surprise into a slow fake out twist is just really emblematic of the problems.

But they're entering the part of the story where they have nothing but fights to filler with, so in theory they'd have a ton to work with and tage towards anime pacing. In theory.

It definitely has highs! but its not worth the lows.

Satsuki

To me the only reason to watch the anime would be for the voice acting. Because OP has wonderful VAs. The only complaint I ever had was that one of my favorite voice actors (Jouji Nakata) played one of my least favorite characters (Hody Jones).

Really though, now I only read the manga and watch clips.

RoboBlue

If you watch it weekly with friends it's still a fun experience but One Pace is just better in every way.

Robby

Don Quichotte De Flamingo

HEATXZ

Phelous Reviews The Banned Episode Of Darkwing Duck Hot Spells where Gosalyn makes a Deal With The Devil

Riddler

It's so stupid that episode was banned and isn't available on Disney + now. Silly sensitive Christian Americans..

Thank the devil I have all episodes on my harddrive anyway.

HEATXZ

For the 13 Anniversary of Atop The Fourth Wall Linkara Reviews Spiderman Web Of Death

Also Linkara has release the schedule for upcoming episodes including Secret Origins Month and The Winners Of Event Comics Month IV(April 2022 will be focusing on Reediting History Of Power Rangers Videos for Youtube)

11/8 – Detective Comics #359(Batgirl Barbara Gordan)
11/15 – The X-Men #4(Scarlett Witch and Quicksilver)
11/22 – Batman #1(Catwoman and/or The Joker)
11/29 – LATE NIGHT DOUBLE FEATURE: Exorcist Prequel Night
12/6 – Spider-Man Holiday Special 1995
12/13 – The Adventures of Chrissie Claus #1
12/20 – Sleigher: The Heavy Metal Santa Claus
12/27 – Still Another 15 Missed Opportunities of AT4W
1/3 – Ultimate Power #9
1/10 – PATREON: Adventures of Superboy 3×05-06: Roads Not Taken & 4×07-08: Know Thine Enemy
1/17 – PATREON: Batman: The Killing Joke Animated Adaptation
1/24 – Just Imagine Stan Lee Creating the JLA
1/31 – LATE NIGHT DOUBLE FEATURE
2/7 – Week off to restore ContentID-claimed videos (HOPR, a few AT4W, etc.)
2/14 – PATREON: Chew #1, #12, #18, and Secret Agent Poyo One-Shot
2/21 – Youngblood: Strikefile #3
2/28 – Patreon Viewers’ Choice Week(Doctor Who Related)
Event Comics Month IV: Secret Metal Armageddon II
3/7 – Armageddon 2001
3/14 – Secret Invasion
3/21 – Civil War II
3/28 – Dark Nights: Metal
4/4 – HOPR Month
4/11 – HOPR Month
4/18 – HOPR Month
4/25 – HOPR Month

TrowaAyanami

Not gonna lie, watching James Stephanie Sterling go on this brutal, vicious rant on NFT's is the kind of energy I love to see!

HEATXZ

Linkara starts this years Secret Origin Month with Detective Comic Issue 359 the First Appearance of Batgirl Barbara Gordon

TrowaAyanami

Don Quichotte De Flamingo

200!

Gizmo

Totally Not Mark, a YouTuber who cover One Piece for the first time in 2020 throughout its run, just lost 150 of his videos on YouTube

He’s being really transparent about the situation on his twitter. I’m curious to see how this goes.
[https://www.twitter.com/TotallyNotMark?ref_src=twsrc^google|twcamp^s erp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor](https://www.twitter.com/TotallyNotMark?ref_src=twsrc^google|twcamp^s erp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor)

–- Update From New Post Merge ---

Also because of that Daniel Greene stopped covering One Piece for solidarity until YouTube starts protecting its content creators better against cases like this

--- Update From New Post Merge ---

It’s a shame Mark’s analysis videos were really solid and it was fun watching a seasoned content creator go through One Piece for the first time

kevo_koma

Huh, well that sucks.

Must be absolutely devastating to wake up and see sucha large portion of your income vanish into the ether.

Makes me wonder how the various reaction channels survive. Some of them have millions of survive and all they do as go, "oo, aa, wow, so good".

Unlike this guy who seems to have actually been providing valuable content.

Shame his shit was down. I enjoyed the few OP content I have bothered to check out.

Can't help but feel like this is the result of an employee/intern being tasked with taking down as much toei content as possible.

Kaiolino

Gizmo

I don’t know how I feel about him writing a letter to Eiichiro Oda about the situation. He ultimately isn’t really playing a part in all of this, is he?

wolfwood

I imagine the old ass Japanese men in charge of this going -What is the internet?

Trying to appeal to these people that his react channel should get to exists seems like trying to explain a meme to my grandmother.

Robby

The guy's videos were LOADED with clips and samples. Like he doesn't talk to the camera and then do 5 second cutaways for quick examples, he just plays the footage over the whole thing.

It sucks for him but its zero surprise he got flagged and it could have been avoided easily by just… not using footage? Like every review ever that existed before youtube?

This isn't exactly new. Team Four Star has had this problem for years. Linkara's Power Ranger videos are constantly taken down. Nostalgia Critic and the like all got banged pretty hard years ago and had to start changing their formats to be less clip intensive or in 5 second bursts. Nintendo flags basically all content related to their games.

I'm pretty sure Greg explicitly warned about this exact thing could happen if you used footage and art, and got shit on for saying it and suggesting you find alternatives.

Japan has different fair use laws than elsewhere... and even if they didn't he had so much footage he was skirting it anyway. You can disagree with it all you want, and sympathize with the guy. It absolutely sucks that his livelihood is being arbitrarily screwed over like this. The rules need changing absolutely, but for the time being they ARE the rules, work with them. Toei DID have some grounds to strike him since he uses a TON of footage. It's unfair and shitty, but easy to see why it was flagged..

Obviously a human looks at the footage and can see that its fair use review, but... it's not super transformative.

And yes, I've heard the argument "But they also flagged his drawing videos!" I checked out one of the ones that was still up and that had a bunch of anime footage and screenshots in it. For no reason. I have no idea much the others did, but the one left I can see at least isn't just "pure drawing". If his flagged videos were free of footage then I don't know what to say.

Don Quichotte De Flamingo

Second part

HEATXZ

Phelous finishes his Ninja Turtles The Next Mutation by doing a review of the Power Rangers In Space Ninja Turtles Crossover :D

kevo_koma

@Kaiolino:

I don't understand why he thinks Oda can do anything.

Pretty weird.

Also, I am pretty sure he used alot of footage from these animes.

I assume he knew that its kind of not acceptable to do that, but did it anyway.

Oh well, it still sucks that his source of income is tanking though. I am really curious to see if his appeal to the Japanese people will amount to anything.

I can just imagine someone approaching a Toei top official and trying to make an appeal for some random youtuber from abroad. Chances are incredibly low they will give any kind of shit.

Gizmo

Resolution to the Totally Not Mark situation. TLDW, the situation got big enough for YouTube to finally intervene and the compromise was for Mark’s videos to be banned in Japan but be fine elsewhere, leaving Toei to be free to sue Mark’s videos only if they go through another country’s legal system. Apparently Toei was trying to note copyright strikes on the videos too instead of just flag fair use which would have made his channel banned (3 flags result in a ban, but the difficulty of Toei going through that was rough)

Nobodyman

In other news, Suede's entire channel got taken down. I know he'd been having legal issues with his Pokemon videos for a while, but…jeez.

Robby

Also, during the forum downtime Lindsay Ellis quit making videos forever apparently. Not just for youtube but for everything. The constant amount of toxicity and abuse was just too much.

Like 1 hour of twitter threads around her and I was sick and done. I don't know how she dealt for a decade and a half.

Nobodyman

@Robby:

Also, during the forum downtime Lindsay Ellis quit making videos forever apparently. Not just for youtube but for everything. The constant amount of toxicity and abuse was just too much.

Like 1 hour of twitter threads around her and I was sick and done. I don't know how she dealt for a decade and a half.

Damn. I didn't even hear about that. Fucking sucks. I'm really gonna miss her videos, but I hope things go better for her in the future.

Robby

This was the post she made at the end of December about it.
[hide]Walking away from Omelas This was going to be a YouTube video, but I just don’t have it in me to invite that kind of scrutiny, to be the last in the sick, sad line of YouTubers who get all weepy on camera and cry about how they just can’t do this anymore, boo hoo hoo. I had planned to move video content to Nebula, but I realize now that doing that is just keeping wounds wide open. My life ended nine months ago - what has been taking up bandwidth ever since then has been a ghost. It’s almost funny, how many people will insist that I have "lost nothing" (you know, because subscriber count is the only metric for success and cancel culture doesn't exist). One YouTube channel chugging along on algorithmic inertia is not success - it’s just an engine driving on fumes.

Many will say this is being melodramatic, that my live isn’t over, that there was absolutely nothing stopping me from brushing myself off, building back up goodwill and shutting up and playing the game. And I tried that; in a way I suppose it’s good that I did, because I needed to learn the hard way that that was never going to work. There is no un-fucking this. You can’t find the energy if there is nothing left to convert to it. You can’t be a better person if you are nothing but the hollow shell of one.

2021 has been the worst year of my life. I am traumatized by it. To this day I still have people scolding me by how I handled it, that I should have handled it differently, that I should have “controlled” my “stans”, as if I had the capability to know what any of these people were even saying to strangers on Twitter while I was shitting blood for weeks on end. The worst thing about this whole thing is that I can’t even admit this trauma because of all the rhetorical devices people have already come up with to dismiss it. That centering my own pain is evidence of “not listening” (does it occur to these people that you can listen, and disagree with other people’s conclusions?) That I’m weaponizing my “fragile white womanhood” or whatever to say that having thousands upon thousands of people who you have never met hate you and say whatever will get them the most updoots is traumatizing. That people I used to know would sit there and lie about me on Twitter dot com to the tune of thousands of retweets and tens of thousands of likes, and I just had to sit there and take it. My favorite are the people who dismiss any potential harm I might have incurred as justified because I am a “wealthy, white woman” (I am not wealthy), while these same people’s hearts positively bleed for Britney Spears.

These people don’t see how similar these talking points are to the same Boomer, bootstrap parenting style that I thought most of us had agreed was abusive - that you need to toughen up, accept your punishment, accept that even if the reaction was outsized that you did SOMETHING wrong, because where there’s smoke there’s fire. Grow a thicker skin. These same people who always crow about “believing victims” telling victims of public dogpiles that they do not deserve to claim their trauma, let alone to process it, because they deserved it. There is no such thing as cancel culture. There is no incentive/reward structure in places like Twitter to call people out. There are no updoots/favs/follows/retweets for hotting a take on whomever is trending.

I reread the 2015 essay “Hot Allostatic Load” for the first time in years last night, and I could not stop crying. Even reading some of these passages now, I can’t stop crying. This was written from the perspective of a trans femme and discusses some rhetorical devices used to demonize trans women specifically, which obviously does not apply to me, but some of it is spot on:

One of the most common tools of exclusion is through mobbing, which is rarely talked about because unlike rape, murder, etc, it’s not easy to pin it on a single person (or scapegoat). Mobbing is emotional abuse practiced by a group of people, usually peers, over a period of time, through methods such as gaslighting, rumor-mongering, and ostracism. It’s most documented in workplace or academic environments (i.e. key points of capitalist tension) but is thoroughly institutionalized into feminist, queer, and radical spaces as well. Here is why it is horrible:

It has an unusually strong power to damage the victim’s relationship to society, because it can’t be written off as an outlier, as some singular monster. It reveals a fundamental truth about people that makes it difficult to trust ever again. People become like aliens, like a pack of animals that can turn on you as soon as some mysterious pheromone shift marks you for death.
The insidious nature of emotional abuse: How do you fight ostracism and rumors? They leave no bruises, they just starve you.
Mobbing typically occurs in places where the victim is trapped by some need or obligation: work, school, circles of friends. This can prolong exposure to damaging extremes.

For these reasons, PTSD is an almost inevitable outcome of any protracted mobbing case.

The Isabel Fall case is almost a textbook example about how online mobbing harms people, and how the people who participate in these mobs never engage in any self-reflection — when some people read Fall’s “Helicopter Story” and questioned the trans bonafides of the author in early 2020, Twitter did what Twitter does and ruined Fall’s life, death by a million cuts, no one single person even beginning to question whether they did anything wrong by jumping to the worst possible faith interpretation of both the text and the author. After a profile written by Emily VanDerWerff was published late in 2021, were lessons learned about the way we use Internet mobs to tear down people we don’t know because of situations we don’t understand? No — one of Fall’s detractors, Neon Yang, became the new scapegoat du jour, using some of the exact same tactics used the prior year to attack Fall.

I’m not going to touch on Yang’s original comments about Fall or the pushback to them, but what was downright charming in its lack of self-awareness about that whole situation was the way people used Fall’s trauma to hurt Yang, the way they invoked Fall being checked into the hospital while Yang said whatever about Fall and “Helicopter Story”, all while having absolutely no idea what was going on in Yang’s private life. What’s particularly galling is how many people accused Yang of “Sending a trans person to the hospital with PTSD” while apparently being completely oblivious to the fact that they could be very well doing the same thing to Yang, a nonbinary trans person. There was no lesson learned on the nature of mindless dogpiling, just Twitter doing what Twitter does - failing to examine systems of abuse while continuing to perpetuate them by laying into a new scapegoat.

Again, a quote from Hot Allostatic Load:

Feminist/queer spaces are more willing to criticize people than abusive systems because they want to reserve the right to use those systems for their own purposes. At least attacking people can be politically viable, especially in a token system where you benefit directly by their absence, or where your status as a good feminist is dependent on constantly rooting out evil.

When the bounty system calls for the ears of evil people, well, most people have a fucking ear.

Something else that was also inevitable - I was going to quit YouTube. I knew I couldn’t do it forever, that I was running out of steam, that I was sick of the increasing dehumanization inherent, that I just didn’t have anything to say about movies anymore. The plan was always to end with Love Never Dies, since it seemed like the best place to end, with some semblance of energy rather than keeping on until I've withered away to nothing. What happened to me in March and April hastened it, but this was always inevitable.

My initial plan was to leave YouTube for Nebula, but I realize now that this is only entrenching myself in a more intimate form of harm rather than the broad, buckshot kind that YouTube invites. I won’t go into detail (not right now, anyway), but I can’t do video content for them either. I can’t make content period. I just can’t do this anymore. There is no healing as long as there is attachment to the thing that makes you suffer, and the thing in this case is being in the public eye at all.

What I wanted was to quietly disappear, but since this is a platform where people are paying me to make content, I feel like I have to make a statement. If it were just me by myself I would just sign off and say goodbye and that would be it, but I have a team who depends on my company for health insurance, and including dependents I supply full benefits for eight people, and here in the US employer-based insurance is often the only feasible option. Saying to everyone “sorry about your children, but they can’t have insurance anymore because Twitter makes me sad” just doesn’t seem like a fair deal (none of them incidentally know I’m posting this).

So the only thing I can do for now is keep this page active with the loose promise that someday I’ll figure out something in the future to make up for this, while asking you please stop messaging me apologizing for not being able to subscribe anymore. You don’t owe me anything. This Patreon is, like my own life and career, just running on fumes.

But all I know now is that being in the public eye at all is a losing game, and I regret all of it. I regret every time I’ve ever stood up for anyone - it always backfires. I regret every time I pushed back against something unjust - it was always just used to hurt me. I regret every time I ever stood up for myself - I never did it “correctly.” I regret every time I showed any vulnerability - just more ammunition to be used against me later. I regret every time I ever tried to play the game with peers and colleagues - they will drop you the second you aren't popular on Twitter anymore. It’s all hollow and brittle, and if there is one thing I have learned this year it is how eminently expendable I am. The good, progressive cis, straight, wealthy white men keep on trucking and coming out on top because deep down, they know that the systems they profess to stand against ultimately exist to benefit them.

And to all the people telling me I need to grow a thicker skin or remove myself from the conversation altogether - you are right. I don’t have it in me to do the former, so I shall do the latter.

Hope your new year is better than this.[/hide]

SHe's made another one about a week later about how she's trying to find a path forward and is sorry for upsetting those that were actually positive towards her, but its hard because she wants to keep writing, but her name, and all the baggage with it, are on her books. So it's.. hard.

Like I said, the day she posted that it was trending on twitter and I spent an hour or two beating down trolls and defending her and I was pretty broken in under a day. And I've modded this forum for a decade! For her to be harrassed and abused and exposed to that much toxicity constantly all the time, just… cripes. Even with staff to try and filter it out and ignoring twitter and youtube comments that shit still gets through into her emails and private messages and... ugh.

Md-Martin

@Gizmo:

Resolution to the Totally Not Mark situation. TLDW, the situation got big enough for YouTube to finally intervene and the compromise was for Mark’s videos to be banned in Japan but be fine elsewhere, leaving Toei to be free to sue Mark’s videos only if they go through another country’s legal system. Apparently Toei was trying to note copyright strikes on the videos too instead of just flag fair use which would have made his channel banned (3 flags result in a ban, but the difficulty of Toei going through that was rough)

I'm glad he was able to get a good enough resolution to this.

Hopefully it being big enough to have gotten ACTUAL people from Youtube to step in (as opposed to just back and forth emails of automated procedures) will lead to a bit of reform on how they handle this.

Because as Mark pointed out in one of the previous vids of the situation, Youtube HAD the ability to give content creators the ability to chose which countries to not allow their vids to be viewed in (avoiding Japan's strict copyright laws), however only gives this ability to bigger companies' pages. Not smaller content creators like Mark.

With all that said, and as a fan of Mark's videos, he was pretty fucking dumb with getting himself in this situation though. Of course I feel bad after all the hours he put into his videos, the money to pay his staff to help make content just to be removed, and of course Toei going after his Patreon as well. He was well aware of how Toei was with the copyright stuff, had talked about it in comments on other videos in the past etc.

And then he kept making content the same way and surprise it fucked him over for a while. Should Toei(and other IP holders) be aggressive like this to a fan who is giving your product free advertising? Absolutely not. Should Japan's copyright and fair use laws be updated? Absolutely. Should Youtube have addressed how unfair their copyright system is for content creators? Yeah, they should have fixed that a decade ago.

But I mean he KEPT making videos with manga panels in them. Knowing that was the biggest factor in the videos getting taken down. The dude talks to Team Fourstar. Those guys dealt with the Youtube/Toei bullshit every year they worked on DBZA. And what are they doing now? Still making content, but not in a way that will put their channel(and livelyhoods) in jeopardy. At least not to the level or frequency as it had been.

I think Mark was absolutely genuine in his frustration when he talked in his video about having employees and the position it put him in to not having income from his videos. But it's hard to feel too bad about Mark himself when he kept doing the same action and just expecting different results.

And then of course you had him writing a letter trying to address ODA HIMSELF to "lead the change", as he said. Which is REALLY cringeworthy. Begging a millionaire across the world to step in and solve international legal copyright issues between the companies publishing his product and a Youtube channel is….something else.

But maybe I'm wrong. He got the attention to Youtube. They found that Toei HAD been violating Youtube's own rules and had been getting away with it for sometime, and stepped in. I wish him the best of luck, and will continue to watch his videos.

Daz

The Lindsay Ellis situation is so goddamn dispiriting, especially because it seems to have left her in a dark, pessimistic place. I sincerely hope she can get some sort of help processing this, though sadly "handling fallout from being an online content creator" must be a comparative new field in the realm of therapy

Note this is abolutely not to frame Lindsay as "crazy" or something crass like that, but because I know firsthand that therapy can help mend such wounds on the soul, at least a litte

Robby

Oh yeah, absolutely nothing wrong with getting a therapist. It's not just for "crazy" people. Lots of people have normal baggage and issues that they just need… help with.

maxterdexter

I still flinch whenever someone says “squints” a year later over the discourse surrounding that movie. I hope she can begin healing now.

Robby

First Brows Held High in some time!

You probably don't have time for a nearly 2 hour video just summarizing League of Extraordinary Gentleman but… wow it went places over the years.

...I think I'm glad I stopped after the second series.

The first 90 minutes are just summarizing all the series, then the last half hour is Kyle talking about... other things.

Pachylad

Kyle left a sour taste in me after the whole controversy with him and Jourdain Searles last year.

Nobodyman

Kaptainkristian posted a quick video about Cowboy Bebop's connection to Blade Runner.

EDIT: Kyle Kallgren recently reuploaded one of my favorite videos he's ever done. If you haven't seen it before, check it out, especially if you're a Beatles fan.

Satsuki

Technically not part of his "What If?" series or a review, but I had to post this b/c of the One Piece references:

And yes, a National Anthem really could be seen as a country's OP.

HEATXZ

Phelous Reviews The TMNT Anime Super Turtles OVA

Nobodyman

For all you Doctor Who fans, Linkara recently did a review of Logopolis, the Fourth Doctor's final adventure (not a comic adaptation, the actual episode). He also talks a little bit about the current run of Doctor Who and the recent developments that have happened.

Mr. Hide

Lady Emily takes an empathetic almost-2-hour look at the controversies of post-movie AVGN, from his drop in quality to his new co-stars to the ravenous hatedom of Cinemassacre Truth.

What I love about this video is that it's less a finger point at James's current work and more someone jumping back into AVGN after years away, discovering how much things have changed, and trying to understand everyone's mind-sets and how fanboys should handle their idols changing with age and priority. Definitely a must-watch if you're really into Lindsay Ellis or, friend of Emily, Sarah Z.

edit- Before someone posts, "Controversies?! Aw no, what did James do?! I thought he was one of the good ones!" He hasn't hurt anyone. The backlash is mostly reactions to his current body of work. Actually, the propping up of James as the internet patron saint of kindness and decency is briefly brought up as a reason why some people want to knock his reputation down a few pegs, and why such reputations are probably not that healthy a thing to give someone.