Transcription
So, tell me about a weakness of yours. A common tactic with this question is to write a strength but word it as a weakness, like, “Oh, I usually am such a perfectionist with my work that I’ll give up all of my spare time to make sure my [__] gets done at the cost of me own family [__].”
Them after I posted my first video discussing the character of Grade and the confusion surrounding it, I got quite a few comments from people saying that they were upset to see Grade falter to these sorts of petty, real-world comments because they used to like him and enjoy his content. You see, it’s really easy for us to turn on someone like Leafy because I’ve never seen a single video of his that I’ve ever even been able to easily sit through. His content is terrible, and when it came out that he was supposedly just as bad behind the scenes, we were totally open to that being true. But when someone we like turns out to be terrible, it takes some time to accept it. The only reason that anyone refused to believe the allegations against Bill Cosby was because most of us grew up watching at least one of the shows that he was involved in. If the same allegations had transpired against someone like Kenny G, everyone would have just been like, “Ah, okay, that makes sense.”
Grade A Under hasn’t committed anything close to a Bill Cosby offense. I suggested in my first video that Grade A has apparently not been playing a character at all; that his controversial real-life interactions being very close to how he writes his actual videos means that the person who we presumed was being played up as a persona was, in fact, completely genuine. Since then, I’ve read that there are some truths in that statement. It would seem that he’s constantly playing half a real character and half his honest persona, which muddies the water quite a bit in terms of what Grade we’re constantly seeing in each of his videos. In his latest video, is Grade overreacting to drama as a joke? Is it the same Grade who ranted about interviews as a gag, or is it a new Grade who wants us to take his word seriously while still keeping up the same tone and demeanor?
Well, in the end, I’ve decided that I don’t really care. Let’s just pretend that it’s definite that the real-world Grade and the YouTube Grade are two different people. Let’s accept, just for this argument, that the white void persona of the Grade A series is just that—a persona. Under these pretenses, is it suddenly fine for Grade to transition from videos where he’s just joking about pretty universally held concepts that won’t offend anyone to topics where there are variant opinions and nuances that the video is not going to be willing to accept? My answer is no—not as a moral take, a definitive statement, but simply as a critical opinion. Personally, I think I made a mistake in ever trying to expose anyone. I don’t think that’s what my channel is about. I don’t expose people. And when people say that Grade should stop doing drama videos, they don’t say it because they think that he should be above those petty squabbles or should remove himself from other people’s business; they say it because his drama videos are fundamentally terrible. They don’t fit the genre, they don’t have any backing, they rarely even present a coherent argument, and worst of all, they’re boring—so, so boring you can’t even imagine.
Gr’s drama videos are stuck in a particular limbo. They’re not as funny or as inherently relatable as a lot of his other content, but they’re also really terrible examples of how you should try and present a point of view. They’re not really amusing or entertaining, but it’s hard to take them seriously as attempts to talk about topics to real people. Grade’s “Everything Wrong With YouTube” series is perhaps the one that he’s the most openly proud of. It’s the one that he uses to constantly defend himself from people who disagree with the direction of his channel, and for seemingly a very good reason. From the outside, this two-part series looks like it’s based around discussing the many policy problems with YouTube. However, partway into the first video, Grade stops to discuss an incident where a reactor channel showed off his content and he wasn’t able to make any money from that person’s video, and you think to yourself, “All right, that’s a pretty solid example.” And then he talks more about this reactor, and more about this reactor, and more about this reactor. And then, after 11 minutes, he’s finally done ranting about this dude. He goes back to talking about reaction channels, and nope, he’s still talking about the guy again. He went back. Why did he do this?
I don’t have that much of a problem with Grade making fun of or complaining about YouTubers that he doesn’t like; it has proven to be mildly entertaining in the past. The annoying thing is when he tries to advertise this as a good deed that he is doing for the community, or when he tries to act as if riffing on the content creators means disproving what they have to say. The series in question I’m discussing wasn’t entitled “Reaction Channels Piss Me Off Part Two”; it was called “Everything Wrong With YouTube.” Whether you dislike him or not, Tyrone, the reactor, is not one of the biggest problems with YouTube. In fact, I would go as far as to say that no one person is in the top 500 things wrong with YouTube. But according to Grade, not only is he a prime example of what’s wrong with YouTube, he is in total 30% of what is wrong with YouTube. Why spend this much time discussing someone who doesn’t even have anything to do with the title of your video? All right, I’m doing that thing again, aren’t I? The thing where I ask a question but the answer is blatantly obvious.
Grade A Under loves drama; he adores it, and there’s nothing wrong with that. He loves to blow off steam on people that he doesn’t like, and he pulls such great satisfaction from just roasting them unapologetically and calling them names and sending his fans after them. But he doesn’t like it when people call it drama or when they call his channel a drama channel, so he puts up barriers around his content so he can say what he did was good drama and that he fought to make YouTube great again. To this day, Grade still acts as if this two-part series was a legitimate exploration of the many issues that YouTube has, but it’s really not; it’s just structured to be a list of people that Grade didn’t like at that time. Most of the fair use videos were about how too many people were getting shut down and claimed with copyright. Grade’s video is about how he would like to shut down more people. Doug Walker says that YouTube needs to stop treating users like they’re guilty before innocent. Grade says that we need to reverse what we’ve done, but do it to more people as well. You just have to understand: compared to h3h3’s “Where’s the Fair Use,” this video is so unhinged and unprofessional, and I’ll be honest, embarrassing for the community. Even though the aim is to help fix the [__] website we’re on, you still get some brain-dead idiots complaining that this is all drama and you’re just doing it for the views. The drama video that I did make two months ago got the CEO of YouTube, Susan Wojcicki, to tweet at us and start listening to us about how to make YouTube better. Who was telling me not to waste my time making my “#MakeYouTubeGreatAgain” videos back in February, telling me that they wouldn’t get YouTube to listen or change anything? Unlucky me.
Both Grade and his fans have always been quick to defend his content and deflate his haters by saying that he has changed YouTube for the better and that his social movements have been a great success. Specifically, I got several comments on the last video telling me that Grade was better than me and that I couldn’t dislike his content because he helped make YouTube better. No, he didn’t. About three months ago, PewDiePie released a video where he discussed the many problems that he has with the YouTube comment system. One of the things he suggested YouTube do is add an option to assign certain other accounts as moderators of different comment sections, so that more than one YouTuber could be assigned to filter out spam for a video. Can we please just have moderated comments, please? And within two weeks, YouTube announced that they were adding this as a feature. Okay, now go to Grade’s “Everything Wrong With YouTube” video and point me to a single suggested change to the site that has actually been acted out. I can’t think of a single thing. Oh, actually, just give me one sec… Oh, look, Tyrone’s channel is still up, and that’s like most of his videos, so I guess no one really did listen. What that means is that, objectively, PewDiePie himself, Fred 2.0, has done far more to help and change YouTube than Grade A Under could ever even hope to.
But Quinton, wasn’t it really more about getting YouTube to notice these problems, to listen to us? Well, they noticed, they sat down with you, and they listened to you, then they patted you on the head and walked right out the door, and that was seven months ago, and we haven’t heard a word since. But by God, keep showing off those two tweets. I mean, when leading a social movement, actually changing anything or doing what you set out to do—that’s totally relevant. What really matters is getting tweeted at by famous people. Like, at this point, I know I’m really harping on this one issue, but it’s because he mentions it like every other video. You guys do realize that there’s like an 85 to 90% chance that this woman didn’t actually watch Gr’s video? In fact, I’m going to go ahead and change that diagnosis; I’m going to boost that to 100%. I guarantee you she did not watch your video because if she had, I absolutely assure you she would not have referenced you in any way, because no one sits through 40 minutes of you ranting about Tyrone Magnus and then says, “Wow, we really need to attach ourselves to this video and send out the idea that we agree with everything that they’ve said.” No, no, no, no, no. She got tweeted at by a bunch of Gr’s fans; she thought it must be important because a lot of people were involved, so she just included it in her tweet to silence people, to get people to stop bothering her. That’s what happened. Let’s be real.
Grade has several equally interesting and equally [__] tactics to use whenever an opposing argument rises up into the playing field. One of his all-time favorite things to do is to present someone else’s argument that he disagrees with and not still get people calling me a drama [__]. Some people expected me to get involved in this drama for some reason, link that argument to a person or persons, all because of these three idiots, and guess who put that “F” in people’s heads—the real question—and then proceed to spend the rest of the video attacking that figure. This way, he gets to rant about a YouTuber he doesn’t like for 20 minutes, and at the end of the day, he can still say that it was analysis and commentary and not drama. I’ve said it before, and I’m going to say it again because it’s true: if your response to an argument is to ignore it and then to attack the character of the person saying it, then you aren’t making an argument; you’re activating the airlock and sucking all of the nuance and intelligence out of the room. You’re making an anti-argument. I’m not saying that Grade has to be wrong just because I disagree with his style of video making. In fact, the most disappointing thing is that I often do agree with his videos, but I simply can’t bring myself to support an anti-argument because it is the cancer of the commentary community.
If Grade is going to talk about a topic or someone else’s opinion, there’s this odd sense amongst some people that he’s thus removed it from existence. No matter how poorly he represents the argument or how badly he fails even then to actually explain why it’s wrong, his fans will be sure to comment that the person who brings up the argument is a [__] because Gr already wiped it off the table. It must be amazingly useful to be able to rebuild your opponents one strand of hate at a time so that they can be just light enough to easily battle, but just visually close enough to fool others into believing that the scale is correct. If you hear about this channel for the first time, you’ll presume that they’re all hacks who don’t ask for permission and don’t show highlights if they don’t get the permission. But neither of those two things are true. This channel actually sets out to do both of those things and discusses the video at the end. If you know the full story on Grade, Leafy, and Keemstar, you’ll question everything that he says in his latest video. First of all, do you see this difference? Yeah, I’m not Leafy. Leafy made this video for whatever reasons he did, right? But Leafy’s reasons aren’t my reasons. I love Reddit, but my subreddit, some of their [__] expectations are ridiculous. One person said, “Why do you like Keemstar? Why don’t you hate Keemstar?” He was able to get an offer on the table for me that would have been worth six figures—like, over $100,000. So, while you made the video, great, he said some insanely racist [__] against minorities, and he was also calling someone a pedophile. Oh, this once called someone a [__]. They don’t care, and it was on Battlecams. You go on Battlecams expecting that… I’m not justifying it at all, but for this loser to tell me you shouldn’t like someone who offered you a six-figure deal because they called someone the N-word in the past and they falsely accused someone of being a pedophile for three hours… I don’t give a [__]. But I’m supposed to stay someone’s friend after I’ve seen them tick in this many boxes? I don’t give a [__].
But if you’ve heard none of these facts outside of Grade’s channel, you’ll trust the assertion that Grade isn’t Leafy and thus he isn’t involved in the situation. Grade A Under’s arguments are only built to be sustainable in his pocket reality. In the real world, his statements are inconsistent. In the actual YouTube landscape, he often comes across as hypocritical and inconsistent. Keemstar’s dog [__] reporting and his false pedophile accusations, which is not only irresponsible as [__] and a shitty thing to do, right, but is [__] illegal. Which is not only irresponsible as [__] and a shitty thing to do, right, but it’s [__] illegal. When reality is at play, it’s hard to figure out what he’s even trying to say. But if you’re learning about the entire world and how the universe revolves around it from his point of view, then you’re not going to notice any of these discrepancies.
So, why did I bring up Grade’s character in the first video? Essentially, I had planned to talk about how the confusion of the supposed real-world self makes it hard to read how we’re supposed to take many of his videos. It seems to me that if any other content creator talked about other users on YouTube in the same way, they simply would not get away with it. But this guy, apparently, it’s fine when he does it. Is it a joke? Is it serious? Does he want his fans to go after the people he makes fun of, or does he want them to realize that it’s all just an act? No one seems to be able to answer these questions, and that’s bothersome because, whether people like to admit it or not, people look up to this cartoon character that’s represented on Grade’s channel. They see him as some sort of YouTube icon that represents prime values. If anything, the comments from my first video are the ultimate example of why this is a problem. Grade is a voice for YouTube; he’s fixed YouTube; he is their idol, their role model. His arguments are sound and absolute; he crushes all enemies and wins even if he doesn’t raise a single finger. These are developing minds that look up to Grade and how he interacts with people, how he argues, what he says. This isn’t something to take lightly. At least on other channels that attack people as a joke, they’ll put a disclaimer or tell people occasionally not to take it too seriously and not to go after these people. But with Grade, there’s no fog on the glass window. You see why this is a problem, right, Quinton? Why didn’t you just close the tab? There’s plenty of other videos on the internet. Why watch the ones you hate? Because I’m a critic, and my job is to say if I like something or not, and I’m not going to distance myself from saying that something is bad just because it’s inherently popular.
You see, Gr’s content is a lot like Futurama. People like to pretend that Futurama was sort of consistently great from the beginning to the end, but really, somewhere in the middle, it started to be totally unwatchable. But we really don’t like to admit this because we like the idea of it being a perfect show that we’d love to see brought back. Grade’s content is a lot like that. We all think positively of Grade; we want to look at him as a role model; we remember all those times that he landed on the front page of Reddit and how proud of him we were. We don’t want to admit that he might have been wrong or he might have made a bad video. But just because you like it doesn’t mean that I have to refrain from analyzing why I don’t. If your response to every review that you ever see is to say, “Well, if you don’t like it, then don’t watch it,” then I refuse to take you seriously. If you disagree with my points, bring some of them up; describe your side of the situation, but don’t say that I’m just an idiot for having this opinion, or that I don’t have the right to an opinion, or that my opinion means less because I only have a thousand subscribers. If you’re not prepared to have a real discussion, then I’m not prepared to talk to you.
Grade A didn’t fall from grace or lose his groove because people stopped liking him; they didn’t stop watching because he was an ass to his fans. The transition mainly happened because his videos started to be a whole lot weaker. It doesn’t mean that he’s ruined or that he’s wrecked or exposed. Honestly, if he just starts to make better content and stops being such a giant ass in every way, then I could see him making a rebound, or a redemption, or whatever you guys are going to call it. Will this happen? Can Grade ever really change? Is there life after drama? I don’t know, man. I make [__] pizza for a living. Jesus Christ.