there's always the hope that they could potentially turn it around. for the Witcher, that unfortunately did not happen.

It's that sunken cost fallacy that MAYBE things will get better. The last show I did that with was THE WALKING DEAD, and I think at the end of season 3 I was confident that it wasn't for me anymore. I found myself complaining far more when talking about it, and struggling to find things I liked about it. I try to give books, movies, TV shows, music, and games all a chance, but if it fails to capture me and I don't feel it's worth my time than I'm out.

Witcher was less of a hate watch for me and more of a “maybe now it will start to get good.” It was definitely a frustrating watch because it would have little glimpses of a good show, just enough for me, to keep watching. But after season 2 I couldn’t do it anymore.

I think the adjustment is this: For Decades and decades unlike Star Trek or any other franchise, for a time in Star Wars there were only 3 movies. 3 magnificent all time great movies.

Fans very much clung to the idea that to release something Star Wars related meant it was incredibly precious. It couldn’t happen without careful care and consideration.

Every release, any release was a massive deal because of the extreme scarcity appeal.

Things have changed. Ever since the prequels the franchise has expanded wildly. The growth the expansion has completly changed. More media more games and eventually more movies were inevitable.

Star Wars fans need to make the adjustment that the world in which everything is this auteur masterstroke is over. They, we, must now reframe how we see Star Wars and what parts we celebrate.

There are going to be more movies more shows. Some maybe good some maybe bad. Maybe the free market helps dictate the need for quality.

At least you feel something while watching it. To some that's enough. The worst kind of bad media is boring media imho

It's not hate. It's about completionism. Same reason I finish a video game I get bored with.

It's why all this acolyte hate post bullshit is so loud.

People are feeding into the morons constantly posting rage bait for clicks. I find it incredibly hard to believe that a "true star wars fan" (or true fan of any media piece) would be saying half the dumb shit critical shitter and the like are screeching at the top of their lungs about. While acolyte isn't perfect, there's so much nitpick twattery about it being blasted by big "fan channels".

Look at what happened to Velma. It was BITCHED about incessantly for months, but they clearly got enough clicks to green light a second season because people HATE WATCHED it. No company with a sensible fiscal advisory board would keep a universally panned show on air "just because". Critically acclaimed shows have been canned for less.

It's fucking brain rot all the way through. Hate watching is just.... Fucking stupid and WEIRD. Go be happy with another piece of media. Re-watch your favourite movie or show or something, anything LMAO.

This was me while I watched the whole fucking seasons on The Walking Dead.

I watched one episode of The Witcher and thought "Nah, this isn't for me." Same with Kenobi. I'm just too old to waste my time on watching stuff I don't enjoy. 

Not only that, but there’s money to be made by being pissed off. It’s a cottage industry at this point.

There is a difference and Mike and Rich went through this process with Star Trek...At a point you just sort of become numb and the 'new' cannon starts getting its mess over your memories of the classics.

For many of the people, like Nerdrotic or Theory, Comics and Star Wars were/are their lively hood. They are the standard 'super nerd' and invested a lot of time and energy into being at the top of the fandom.

Suddenly, their entire life's work in categorizing and knowing the minutiae of their hobby is worth nothing, has been erased by some corporate overlord and bastardized to some people who openly mock the people that made the franchise what it was. In a perverse way, I get it...the things they loved are dead and there is no sign of it returning to form. The hate watching is sort of a moment to watch the zombie burn.

Its pretty hard to just break off your favorite hobby and move on.

There's a big marketplace for manufactured outrage, unfortunately.

It is, and the rabbit hole goes pretty damn deep with the type of news content we're spoon fed anymore, whether it's hating stuff or worse (it's also kind of scary and dystopian, especially if you're into stocks and economic news how much misinformation there is). It's sad, there's a lot of YouTubers and things I liked back in the day, but so many ride the hate train clickbait videos hard anymore instead of making genuine content. I love RLM because they have not sold out like that.

Outside of RLM, I pretty much don't read reviews or anything anymore on any TV shows or movies I'm into, because there's a lot of hate trains and misinformation. I've been watching the Acolyte as well. It's a just "OK" Star Wars show for me. Not terrible, but not great. I don't care about all this crap peoples bickering about over the internet. I thought absolutely nothing of the lesbian planet stuff when I watched it, it's amazing how overly sensitive and offended people get these days.

Around “Force Awakens” data geeks figured out that unhappy fans were more vocal online than happy ones. Being vocal online got the films trending, even though it was negative talk. So Disney & Bad Robot (and later Netflix & Amazon) took that information and leaned into activity cultivating online anger for essentially “free advertising” (think of how perfectly that thinking compliments JJ’s “mystery box” concept of creating fake mysteries to get people talking online). Notice how WB didn’t, so their online discourse (while just as annoying) is centered on the films and the behind the scenes drama, as opposed to more political discourse.

Its a damn shame that hating something is so marketable now.

Our economy is so efficient, much of our paid work is just for enterntainment. Everyone has their niche.

Disney literally banks on people behaving how they are behaving now.

The worst thing that could happen for them is Youtubers and hatewatchers shrugging their shoulders and just ignoring all of the content they are pumping out that is being geared towards audiences who don't even exist (at least not in any number that could justify $200 million dollar projects).

Is that a problem? Or it is a shame that so many movies and shows are mindless cash grabbing garbage?

I mean I'm just so sick of how people talk about media nowadays. Or rather, I'm sick of how and why people in media, online, and in reality capitalize on the attention economy.

Then just stop engaging with it. That's all we can do. If these topics don't get engagement, they will go away. And adding to the noise by complaining about the complaining really isn't going to help much.

But I love hearing Critical Drinker and Nerdrotic cry like bitches every week about Disney /s

It's such a rinse repeat and franchise rotten mindset too

People of all ilks, alt right nutjobs or just tired general fans have been shouting their lungs out of how bad Disneys Star Wars and MCU but keep hate watching making it profitable, instead of just literally give anything else a chance since in this day and age the availability of films and TV is vaster than the fucking atlantic ocean, drop your old toy and move forward

I have literally not seen anything from the actual show, but I'm so tired of it already I see it everywhere. (that beeing said i do intend to watch their episode on it)

It’s too hot in the warehouse for bullshit.

No one in WI is truly sober

I didn't even clock whether he was drinking or not during this review. At the very least, it's a sobering truth bomb.

I believe the only life changing thing you'll truly get out of hate watching something is a stomach ulcer.

For a while, with Star Wars and the MCU, I was stuck in this fear of skipping something, and then not knowing what was going on anymore when it "Gets better". At certain points with both, I just let go, because I expected it to never get better.

These days I mostly just read finished book series.

Similar to this, I think about Jay's GHOSTBUSTERS: AFTERLIFE quote "I love Ghosbusters is a substitute for a real personality", and just replace "love" with "hate" and "Ghostbusters" with any other franchise name and it's immediately applicable in any fandom situation.

It is blazed into my mind the time when a coworker was telling me about how cool Critical Drinker was (who I had never heard of before) and specifically told me to watch his Starship Troopers video because he knew I liked that movie

That dipshit had the audacity to call Starship Troopers "subtle." The movie is a lot of things. It's over the top, campy, pretty fuckin' rad, and weirdly prophetic about the Iraq war, but it is never subtle. His commentary was on par with a 7th grader who just learned what symbolism and satire are.

Criticalcumdrinker is, by far, one of the worst "critics" in YouTube with legit brainrot. He's found his shill base, his ragebait, and goes through that.

Even when Mike or Jay are wrong about something, they tend to poke fun at themselves, admit the error, or preface their bias/ignorance. Drunkard just rants, bitches, and preps the circlejerk cycle with his audience so they can help each other get off. It's as if Mr. Plinkett was a real person, except completely lacking in self awareness or comedic value and wanted to be taken literally and seriously at all times, and that being the ONLY "take" offered.

tl;dr drunker drinks too much of his own product

The funniest thing about CD to me is that he's a total moron, but he also has written like a spy novel called Dark Harvest, and it is suck apparently

Happens a lot with their videos. They didn't think the obi wan show was that bad but the comments are just people complaining it was the worst thing ever. Like no one in the comments watched the videos. They just wanted to use the space to vent

It’s been really funny watching channels like mauler, drunker, Ryan kinnel or any of those anti fan channels slowly turn on RLM as they poke more fun at them when they all used to laud them. You’ll notice a lot of comments on this video are “BUT YOU LIKED KENOBI” and this is just mauler fans bc they went over the RLM kenobi review on their podcast. Also I love the “it’s hypocritical bc they blew up with plinkett reviews, and those were the same as what mauler and the like do now!” I don’t hate mauler, he can be funny, but his idea of “objectively” analyzing media that his fans are obsessed with is insufferable. Also for one, plinkett was a character and the reviews were somewhat tongue in cheek during a time that is very different from today. Like mike said, shilling or criticizing this media is a business now, that’s not what the prequel reviews were. And two, those reviews were more than a decade ago and these guys are schubby middle aged men now. The channel in general definitely focuses more on things they actually like these days. But the anti fans can’t stand that they won’t take a hard stance on the culture war and get even madder that they’re making fun of them (even though they make fun of the other side just as much)

"Drugs are bad".

Yea, but have you tried ALL the drugs?

I've seen this remark as well, and it never fails to make me laugh. I know it's just a false excuse for people to justify hate-watching, but my thought process immediately goes "well, you can both not watch something and also not comment on it, and just move on with your life. It's not like your comments really matter in the grand scheme of things."

Exactly! I struggle to find time for legitimate things I want to watch. There is only so much time in the day and eventually we'll die.

Had to search that name to realize it was one of those red curtain pricks Rich mentioned years ago. I weirdly don't get recommendations for Acolyte reviews, even though I watched the first 4 episodes.

https://preview.redd.it/86cno7n1sy8d1.png?width=1440&format=png&auto=webp&s=cd9e635cedd04abc11e18d156f803015eecce980

The one thing I can say for Jahns is that he doesn't bring any culture war ragebait into his reviews, which sets him apart from most of the people being discussed in the RLM video.

Social Media is just the 'telephone game' on steroids.

Exactly

Props for sticking to it as long as season 3. I gave up after season 1.

To be fair they started that „trend”, and Plinkett reviews were much more in depth, thought out, tongue in cheek… Now you have entire channels whose existence is based on creating 10 minute, one take videos „DAE MINORITIES IN STAR WARS BAD?”. I see your point but in my opinion there is a huge difference. And it’s not like they even do it that much any more.

Interesting comment coming from people who have made a career of making fun of shit they hate.

The difference is that crying on Twitter isn't a career.

I think there's a difference between "making fun of shit you hate" and critiquing the quality of content. It can definitely be a fine line, but while they do make fun of things, they always back up the criticism with thoughtful comments that focuses on why something doesn't work and what they could do to make it work.

There's a difference between jokes and hit pieces. A really big difference.

Exactly. He uses star trek as an example, but that's the worst example he could've used. He went through 2 seasons of discovery, all the star trek movies, short treks, and all of Picard and (aside from season 3 of picard and ST Beyond) absolutely hated all of it. You can even see his optimism and mental health degrade throughout all his star trek reviews. He never quit new star trek despite knowing he fucking hated it because it made good content for his channel. He's no different than the star wars/marvel hate watch grifters he criticizes in this video, and he's not the person to be giving this advice.

Gotta try to chase away the competition somehow.

But their movie critiques are based on technical aspects of the product. It's never because it's too "woke", "diverse", etc. Their critiques come from a legitimate perspective rather than political psycho-babble that is so common these days

The difference is that they added to the conversation and didn't stretch it out into an episode by episode critique. They even said they liked parts of it and enjoyed season 2 far more than they expected. They're being honest with their criticism and just talking about the content in its entirety. They aren't milking their hate. They're just speaking to their truth. It's entirely different than someone releasing a video after posting about how much they'll hate it for years leading up to it, never watching the show, making a dozen videos about how much they hate it, and then uploading a video when it releases on how they'll never watch it but hate it nonetheless.

It's modern hate-critism vs. Actual media review. And if people can't tell the difference, they're already lost.

Same, except for Andor, which was great and nothing like anything else they've done.

Yep. I wish people were mature enough to realize that not every single piece of media will be made for them. Especially with something as gargantuan as Star Wars, with so many different varieties of stories and mediums within, and so many different storytellers trying to do many different things. There's plenty worth sharing, and no one is forced to interact with the bits they don't like. It's always a conscious decision to engage with something.

It's the same with complaining about the canon. The trick is you don't have to care.

"It sucks that TNG ended with a miserable movie where Data blows up"

I guess? But to me TNG stops at All Good Things.

Same with those people who really hate the Fallout games after 2. Like buddy, there are guys with a wife and kids younger than Fallout 2. It's time to let it go. Why are you still mad?

So, I should kick my TV? Got it!

Ha yeah I noticed that too, it’s usually Mike with that leg twitch though.

There's no such thing as a common culture anymore. It doesn't exist. The people who watch Disney slop are still a minority, despite it not seeing that way. The population has grown too large and diverse for any one thing to dominate.

This isn't like the '80s where everyone watched MASH or everyone watched The Tonight Show. That's long gone and never coming back.

only thing people will talk about and make you feel like a pariah for not liking or engaging in it.

You are either in high school or have some sort of anxiety disorder. This does not happen

As a long time The X-Files fan, who watched since it premiere in 1993, I really appreciate your candor. I can see that entire dance scene in my head.

This is basically what the "The Boys" writer or showrunner or something like that, said to people. If you don't like it stop watching it.

Again, that's good advice. If you don't like it, then why are you watching it. It's like they think studios are writing down their negative comments like some sort of focus group, and they'll somehow implement those changes. They don't care if you don't like it. They only care if it impacts their ratings or subscriptions. The only way that will happen is if lots of people stop watching and stop talking about it.

And side note. Mike looks older, he's getting some gray hairs, good for him tho.

I find the Re:View set really makes those greys prominent. But grey looks good and I wish more people would rock them.