I mean...good fucking god, this is a clusterfuck to unpack. Both as a former fan of Channel Awesome (the “former” part dates back to...well, the most recent episode I’ve seen by The Nostalgia Critic, not counting the commercials stuff, was around 2015, so let’s say that for ease) and as someone who spent time trying to run a website myself (no disrespect to the other guys with that comment: I know that part of our problems were me being an incompetent leader). Throw in the fact that I REALLY don’t like getting involved in controversies and, well...you can see why all of this makes me feel a bit like I’m lining myself up for an execution. In some ways, I feel I already have: this whole thing has pretty much made me feel ashamed to have even been a fan of Channel Awesome at all and it’s put a very sad look back on a time which was already troubled and painful for me to live through.
However, I feel that I should tell my story. Now, this story doesn’t have any personal encounters with members of Channel Awesome (I mean, I’m a Brit and I don’t do conventions, so my interaction with members of the site is basically restricted to two emails: one to Bennett the Sage about whether he had any plans to do a review of Highschool of the Dead and one to Linkara, asking him to confirm how comics worked for stories set in the future from an established storyline while doing a review on Iced Earth’s Plagues of Babylon album), but it is a story that has a lot of personal weight for me, because, in many ways, it’s the story of how I started doing reviewing...and it’s why I almost feel ashamed to be a reviewer any more.
Let’s step back to the very beginning of this whole story: late-2010. At the time, I was 17 (I turn 25 in just over a month now, if you particularly want to know) and I had been browsing TV Tropes. I’d been faintly familiar with The Nostalgia Critic through occasional entries on the site on pages I’d read, but I’d never actually taken the time to watch an episode of the show. So, I decided to look and see what he’d done for episodes. I opened what was then thatguywiththeglassis.com and, after a quick search, found the entire list of episodes of the show. I noticed that one of the episodes was of Quest for Camelot, a movie which I’d actually rather liked and I decided to watch the review. I wasn’t entirely sold on it at first, I’ll admit, but I found it amusing enough and carried on watching. The show grew on me and I eventually found myself casually coming home from school for the rest of my school year to watch new episodes whenever they went live.
Now, I should take some time to clarify what my home life was like at the time, because quite a few people may very well be wondering why this silly little video review show meant so much to me at the time, especially as I was WAY too young to especially remember much of the stuff that was being covered on the show. I don’t think I would be exaggerating much if I said that my home life for a good amount of my life has been somewhat troubled: my mum and dad had very unpleasant arguments on a not-infrequent basis up until they started divorcing in 2006 (more on that later), I’d had to leave my entire social life (including my then-best friend and a girl who I held a MASSIVE soft spot for) in London to move to Alnwick (if you don’t know where that is, don’t worry: you’re probably the same as most of the U.K. on that front!) when I was 5 or 6 years old (which might not sound like a massive problem on paper, but I was RIDICULOUSLY shy until lately, so losing what few friends I had hurt me a surprisingly large amount), I had to endure bullying pretty much constantly from the moment I arrived in the North-East of England (which I actually got caught up with doing myself at first to a minor extent, but grew out of it in middle school), I had two friendship groups implode around me (one because I refused to carry on play fighting with them and they turned into some of my bullies and the other one because of an argument that blew way out of control and caused me and my then-best friend (not the same as the one in London) to be the only real social circle we had in school), my parents began a divorce which calling “messy” would be an understatement (put it this way: how many divorces have you heard of where the kids had to have their own lawyer assigned to them because that was the only way their voices could be represented fairly and it STILL didn’t help things much? If your answer was “none” when you read that question, it’s now “one”, because that was genuinely the situation for me and my sister...and that’s not even the full story of what went on!), I had a horrific suicide badly shake me up (which I didn’t really move on from until a few years back), my stepmother turned incredibly passive-aggressive (to be fair to her for a few seconds, she had a REALLY unpleasant condition which made her have constant pain in her right hand and unable to use the hand, so some of this was likely down to the condition causing her a huge amount of frustration) and, due to a massive screw up by my sister around Christmas 2009, she’d been kicked out of my dad and stepmother’s house to live with my mum (which meant that I was basically living in a house with someone who was near constantly passive-aggressive to me)...oh yeah, and my close friend from high school had had to go to a new place of study entirely, so I was basically going through my last high school with nobody to talk to (though, luckily, most of the bullying had faded away by this point).
That’s just the summary of everything up to around late-2010. To be fair, there were good things from back then (I was enjoying performing folk music, I was helping to run a Warhammer 40,000 club as well as being part of several choirs and I had been involved in a youth theatre group which meant that I did several musicals, to say nothing of my experiences with traveling abroad which meant that I got to see France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Turkey and the U.S.), but most of my memories involve a lot of painful times and my way of coping had been to retreat into myself. I basically tried my best to blend into the scenery in school and I spent most of my time in the library just reading manga, not even caring about my studies or my future. Combine that with my thoughts going into territory that, with the benefit of hindsight, were pretty clear signs that I was suffering from depression and suicidal thoughts (I felt that I was cursed to never find happiness, that my entire life was just a thumbnail sketch of a life being drawn by one who didn’t know what life really meant, that maybe it would be better off if I just disappeared forever) and it was pretty clear that I was in no way in a healthy state of mind. I will admit, I did not help matters by refusing to speak to anyone, but, when you are 17, incredibly shy and trying your best to pretend everything is fine even as you know that it isn’t, you aren’t going to speak up and cry out for help. You’re just going to try your best to keep going in the hope that maybe, just maybe, something will change from the better.
That’s not my complete story of pain and misery from my past, but that’s not what we’re going to discuss. All I will say is that I did have more unpleasant stuff happen after that...and yet, thanks to some of the wonderful people I’ve met since late-2010, I’m now the happiest I’ve been for years.
Anyway, I continued to watch The Nostalgia Critic from late-2010 and it was a series which I really enjoyed. I watched a few other series as well (Atop The Fourth Wall and the stuff by Todd in the Shadows caught my attention early on and I grew to watch Film Brain, Anime Abandon and MikeJ on an infrequent basis), but The Nostalgia Critic was the big draw for me at the time. When I went to college in September 2011, I wasn’t able to watch the series because of various reasons, so I basically caught up with it whenever I was back home and I still really enjoyed it. When To Boldly Flee came out, I actually enjoyed it (not enough to really do much rewatching of it, but I did like it overall) and the end of The Nostalgia Critic was a really sad moment for me and my best friend (who I’d got into watching the show).
Demo Reel, despite not being a series I really LIKED, was not a series I actually wanted to see the end of. It had some great moments and it felt like a nice move to branch out from what Doug Walker had done before. I definitely wasn’t one of the people who quit the site entirely because there was no Nostalgia Critic any more or screaming for the return of the show: I actually liked seeing something different. That said, when the show came back, I was happy to see it return.
However, I was slowly growing more and more frustrated with the new Nostalgia Critic. The skits that had been present pre-To Boldly Flee just were not working for me (a TINY number of episodes since the 2013 return had the skits work well for me), the barbs which had previously been harsh, but funny, felt like they just were turning unpleasantly judgemental, snobby and unnecessary while still being harsh (in other words, harsh potshots which were no longer funny), the new studio the episodes were being filmed in felt like it was distracting from the reviews rather than contributing anything and there was a general passive-aggressive vibe to the entire series which felt unpleasant to me. I slowly felt myself losing interest as the weeks went by until I finally gave up in 2015 when the Christmas with the Kranks episode came out. I dipped into a small number of episodes in 2016, but my only attempt at watching an episode in 2017 was the commercials episode (which I don’t think I finished watching) and nothing in 2018.
Surprisingly, the drama about the departure of Obscurus Lupa wasn’t the tipping point for me. This wasn’t pleasant, certainly, but I mainly avoided it (though having my own blog to write for at the time meant that I had other priorities, so that probably explains that to some extent). I also heard LordKaT’s stuff on his show which was put into a YouTube video, but I didn’t want to believe it at all because his entire attitude was so god awful during the whole thing that I literally went “dude, get the fuck over yourself, because you have an attitude problem the size of China and you don’t seem willing to look at yourself to see whether you’ve caused any of the problems you’re blaming others for” and quit out of it.
So, you might be asking why this means so much to me. Well, the rumours had reached me that something wasn’t right with Channel Awesome over the last few years (with the big one that struck me being when Bennett the Sage released some deleted scenes for a crossover of 2008’s Speed Racer with The Nostalgia Critic in 2016, where he strongly hinted in his opening commentary that something had happened during the making of the crossover and yet seemed very evasive about discussing the details), but I didn’t even know the #ChangeTheChannel thing was happening until I looked on YouTube and noticed that MikeJ had put up a video saying why he’d left Channel Awesome. Curious to know more, I looked online and...well, let’s just say that it basically exposed just how fucked up everything was and the fact that it was accompanied by Linkara, Suede and Todd in the Shadows (among others who have left since I started writing this) leaving and having everything they’d done for the site completely wiped without a single explanation for what had happened just left me appalled.
The thing is, when I finally made myself sit down to write this (which was around the time of Channel Awesome's non-apology on Twitter), I thought that would be the end of it. Indeed, I have written this ending several times and I thought that things had finally reached the end of their painfulness. But then things turned really, REALLY unpleasant. I don't usually say "trigger warning" for stuff, but this...this one might well warrant it.
For those of you reading this who weren't aware of Channel Awesome until after 2014, allow me to talk a little bit about what the site was like at the time. See, before 2012 and the release of To Boldly Flee, Channel Awesome generally came across as akin to a community. While most people were Nostalgia Critic fans, there were other content creators who interacted frequently with each other and that helped keep things fun to be in. When NC retired after To Boldly Flee, though, that spirit felt...not gone, exactly, but it definitely wasn't as present any more. That had NOTHING to do with how the other contributors were acting, I should stress: it purely came down to the fact that the big draw of the site was no longer there and things felt more empty than they used to be. Demo Reel wasn't bringing people back (as a reminder, I didn't mind Demo Reel: the last few episodes actually showed some good potential and the whole concept, while nothing new, was at least entertaining enough to keep me occupied) and things just felt less...well, fun. Granted, I was myself going through a situation involving poor management (in this case, my second and final year of college) when this happened, so I wasn't able to contribute as much, but it felt like things had changed. Maybe it was the loss of Spoony and his fans as a result, but it felt like things had definitely changed.
It was during this time that I started to watch videos by That Dude in the Suede, a content creator who had always been kind of on the edge of my radar (and, admittedly, still is). The thing that really drew me in was his video on the first Pokemon movie (which I liked for nostalgia reasons and being a then-retired fan of the franchise: thankfully, the retired is no longer the case now!), but the second one and third one really drew me in. It was a really fun little series that had Suede teaming up with two other contributors (later three, but we'll get to that later) to review all of the movies in the franchise and, while it took a LONG time for episodes to get made (it was basically a yearly thing), I always enjoyed those videos. Having Linkara on board was already a great thing in my book (though I will acknowledge that his anger over the fourth movie did seem a bit much to me, even at the time), but it was also the first time I really watched something with JewWario in it. I actually liked him in those videos, but I never got around to really watching anything else he'd done. When he left Channel Awesome in 2013, I didn't really pay it too much mind: if I'm honest, my only real thought was "Who's gonna replace him in the Pokemon reviews?", which would later be answered by JesuOtaku (who I was never a fan of, if I'm honest, though good for him for getting involved with Anime News Network since he left the site!) when the review of the fourth movie finally came about.
This review, however, would not come out until JewWario committed suicide via self-inflicted gunshot wound. Having had to handle suicidal thoughts myself for a good while (thankfully, not so much nowadays: it's now more on a VERY occasional basis rather than near-constantly), that news shocked me and, while I didn't feel the sense of loss a longtime fan of his would have had, I did notice how much everyone was torn up in the community was over his death and I definitely felt like his loss was a tragedy.
Now, with that in mind, let's get to the most recent development in this situation. See, between writing much of this and now, Channel Awesome decided to respond to the document (in a way which was VERY much not helping their case, I should add). One of the things they conspicuously did NOT discuss was accusations that someone connected with the site had been involved in sexually grooming female fans of the site...but the truth on that, because of their own poor redaction of sensitive information when trying (and failing) to dispute that they handled allegations of inappropriate sexual behaviour towards a content creator from a then-producer, would later come out. See, they left the dates of when the discussion happened uncovered and left the first letter of the name of the content creator uncovered, meaning that people started to put two and two together and realised the truth that Channel Awesome's higher ups had been hiding for over five years.
That truth? That JewWario had been grooming fans of the site (at minimum: there's at least one story come to light that indicated he'd molested a fan as well).
That is pretty bad in its own right, but, if you were around when JewWario committed suicide, you'll remember that many of the site's contributors were heartbroken over his death and talked of how wonderful a guy he was, which the general fandom backed up with their own stories, and did tributes to him. It is now very clear, considering the comments from some of the ex-contributors having never known this was the case until the story from the fan was told to them, that the higher ups knew all about this and did not tell the other content creators the truth. Not even as an internal memo or subtle warning to avoid him. The site basically hid the truth about what JewWario had done from the rest of the site and let themselves profit off of his death by letting their content creators do tributes to the guy...without telling them the truth about him.
On top of that, the reason the truth was revealed was because Channel Awesome did not handle their evidence properly and left hints which made it possible to figure out the truth. So this has not only come out against the wishes of JewWario's victim who told their story (she specifically had asked he not be named), but also against the wishes of JewWario's family (who, to the best of my knowledge, were completely unaware of any of this).
...If you read all of that and are absolutely furious at Channel Awesome's behaviour and sheer incompetence, then you are not alone. I was completely numb after all of this, nearly broke down into tears when going over everything with my girlfriend and woke up feeling pissed off over everything here. I mean...how the fuck do you justify hiding the fact that one of your ex-contributors was a sexual predator to everyone else on the site, even just on an internal basis?
I was originally planning on sitting this all out until it had finally all ended just to make sure nothing more came out after publishing this, but, honestly, after that, I don't think there is any point in holding back. Frankly, after all of this, there's very little chance of anything coming out which will make Channel Awesome come out of this all looking any good. JesuOtaku has hinted that there's other sexual allegations which have yet to come to light, but, frankly, if that is true (which I personally doubt, but, after the revelations with JewWario, I could believe anything happening at this point), then Channel Awesome still deserves the lions share of the blame for helping keep those secrets quiet for so long, as, by not bringing them to light sooner, they put innocent people at risk of being sexually abused by someone in a position of power, having potentially sat on this knowledge for years. Which, any way you look at it, is absolutely scummy behaviour.
At this point, Channel Awesome is pretty much dead. While some contributors have not made statements confirming their departures from the site yet, so I'm going to avoid counting them until those statements are made, the simple fact of the matter is that the site is confirmed to have lost over 80% of its content creators in a space of less than a month (potentially, at the time of writing, it may have lost everyone except for Guru Larry...and he's outright admitted he's staying because he wants to be the last one standing, so we can discount him staying as meaning anything serious) and there's talk of some news sites wanting to report on this (not just geek news sites: Salon, a US website which tends to focus on stuff like US politics and pop culture, may very well be covering this shortly, which could easily end up making this escalate into being a larger news story depending on what other news sources read the article and decide to run stuff on it). It's HIGHLY unlikely that anyone will want to start doing stuff for Channel Awesome now, considering the stuff the higher ups have been willing to do behind-the-scenes to their contributors and the stuff they've been hiding which is now coming to light, and bad publicity from big name sources could easily end up creating a situation where being openly fond of Channel Awesome paints you in a HIGHLY negative light. Kind of like still being a Lostprophets fan, now I think on it...actually, considering the illegal sexual stuff that's come to light on JewWario's side and the stuff I remember related to LordKat sexually taking advantage of a woman on a stream, that comparison might actually hold more water than I originally thought!
And this was all avoidable. That's the thing that makes all of this so insane: the ex-contributors stated that all they wanted was a sincere apology for their ill treatment, so a little humility from Channel Awesome, an acknowledgement that what happened back when they were on the site shouldn't have happened and a simple "We're sorry all of that happened" could have prevented so much of this from happening. Whether it would have been for the best had that happened, considering the revelations behind JewWario is stuff that, frankly, SHOULD have come to light ages ago, is hard to say, but the simple fact of the matter is that Channel Awesome really fucked themselves over here. They might want to claim otherwise, but they really have no one to blame except for themselves.
It's probably too early to officially say "R.I.P. Channel Awesome"...but, at least for me and a good amount of former viewers, this really is the end of the line. I had been holding off on unsubscribing from the channel because of how infrequently I am on YouTube and because I don't like unsubscribing from channels in case something pops up which might be of interest and worth my time (heck, despite how much I despise PC elitism, I still follow TotalBiscuit!), but, after all of this...I have.
And I ain't ever coming back again.
I'm Nemo Atkins...and Channel Awesome can go fuck itself.
Let’s step back to the very beginning of this whole story: late-2010. At the time, I was 17 (I turn 25 in just over a month now, if you particularly want to know) and I had been browsing TV Tropes. I’d been faintly familiar with The Nostalgia Critic through occasional entries on the site on pages I’d read, but I’d never actually taken the time to watch an episode of the show. So, I decided to look and see what he’d done for episodes. I opened what was then thatguywiththeglassis.com and, after a quick search, found the entire list of episodes of the show. I noticed that one of the episodes was of Quest for Camelot, a movie which I’d actually rather liked and I decided to watch the review. I wasn’t entirely sold on it at first, I’ll admit, but I found it amusing enough and carried on watching. The show grew on me and I eventually found myself casually coming home from school for the rest of my school year to watch new episodes whenever they went live.
Now, I should take some time to clarify what my home life was like at the time, because quite a few people may very well be wondering why this silly little video review show meant so much to me at the time, especially as I was WAY too young to especially remember much of the stuff that was being covered on the show. I don’t think I would be exaggerating much if I said that my home life for a good amount of my life has been somewhat troubled: my mum and dad had very unpleasant arguments on a not-infrequent basis up until they started divorcing in 2006 (more on that later), I’d had to leave my entire social life (including my then-best friend and a girl who I held a MASSIVE soft spot for) in London to move to Alnwick (if you don’t know where that is, don’t worry: you’re probably the same as most of the U.K. on that front!) when I was 5 or 6 years old (which might not sound like a massive problem on paper, but I was RIDICULOUSLY shy until lately, so losing what few friends I had hurt me a surprisingly large amount), I had to endure bullying pretty much constantly from the moment I arrived in the North-East of England (which I actually got caught up with doing myself at first to a minor extent, but grew out of it in middle school), I had two friendship groups implode around me (one because I refused to carry on play fighting with them and they turned into some of my bullies and the other one because of an argument that blew way out of control and caused me and my then-best friend (not the same as the one in London) to be the only real social circle we had in school), my parents began a divorce which calling “messy” would be an understatement (put it this way: how many divorces have you heard of where the kids had to have their own lawyer assigned to them because that was the only way their voices could be represented fairly and it STILL didn’t help things much? If your answer was “none” when you read that question, it’s now “one”, because that was genuinely the situation for me and my sister...and that’s not even the full story of what went on!), I had a horrific suicide badly shake me up (which I didn’t really move on from until a few years back), my stepmother turned incredibly passive-aggressive (to be fair to her for a few seconds, she had a REALLY unpleasant condition which made her have constant pain in her right hand and unable to use the hand, so some of this was likely down to the condition causing her a huge amount of frustration) and, due to a massive screw up by my sister around Christmas 2009, she’d been kicked out of my dad and stepmother’s house to live with my mum (which meant that I was basically living in a house with someone who was near constantly passive-aggressive to me)...oh yeah, and my close friend from high school had had to go to a new place of study entirely, so I was basically going through my last high school with nobody to talk to (though, luckily, most of the bullying had faded away by this point).
That’s just the summary of everything up to around late-2010. To be fair, there were good things from back then (I was enjoying performing folk music, I was helping to run a Warhammer 40,000 club as well as being part of several choirs and I had been involved in a youth theatre group which meant that I did several musicals, to say nothing of my experiences with traveling abroad which meant that I got to see France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Turkey and the U.S.), but most of my memories involve a lot of painful times and my way of coping had been to retreat into myself. I basically tried my best to blend into the scenery in school and I spent most of my time in the library just reading manga, not even caring about my studies or my future. Combine that with my thoughts going into territory that, with the benefit of hindsight, were pretty clear signs that I was suffering from depression and suicidal thoughts (I felt that I was cursed to never find happiness, that my entire life was just a thumbnail sketch of a life being drawn by one who didn’t know what life really meant, that maybe it would be better off if I just disappeared forever) and it was pretty clear that I was in no way in a healthy state of mind. I will admit, I did not help matters by refusing to speak to anyone, but, when you are 17, incredibly shy and trying your best to pretend everything is fine even as you know that it isn’t, you aren’t going to speak up and cry out for help. You’re just going to try your best to keep going in the hope that maybe, just maybe, something will change from the better.
That’s not my complete story of pain and misery from my past, but that’s not what we’re going to discuss. All I will say is that I did have more unpleasant stuff happen after that...and yet, thanks to some of the wonderful people I’ve met since late-2010, I’m now the happiest I’ve been for years.
Anyway, I continued to watch The Nostalgia Critic from late-2010 and it was a series which I really enjoyed. I watched a few other series as well (Atop The Fourth Wall and the stuff by Todd in the Shadows caught my attention early on and I grew to watch Film Brain, Anime Abandon and MikeJ on an infrequent basis), but The Nostalgia Critic was the big draw for me at the time. When I went to college in September 2011, I wasn’t able to watch the series because of various reasons, so I basically caught up with it whenever I was back home and I still really enjoyed it. When To Boldly Flee came out, I actually enjoyed it (not enough to really do much rewatching of it, but I did like it overall) and the end of The Nostalgia Critic was a really sad moment for me and my best friend (who I’d got into watching the show).
Demo Reel, despite not being a series I really LIKED, was not a series I actually wanted to see the end of. It had some great moments and it felt like a nice move to branch out from what Doug Walker had done before. I definitely wasn’t one of the people who quit the site entirely because there was no Nostalgia Critic any more or screaming for the return of the show: I actually liked seeing something different. That said, when the show came back, I was happy to see it return.
However, I was slowly growing more and more frustrated with the new Nostalgia Critic. The skits that had been present pre-To Boldly Flee just were not working for me (a TINY number of episodes since the 2013 return had the skits work well for me), the barbs which had previously been harsh, but funny, felt like they just were turning unpleasantly judgemental, snobby and unnecessary while still being harsh (in other words, harsh potshots which were no longer funny), the new studio the episodes were being filmed in felt like it was distracting from the reviews rather than contributing anything and there was a general passive-aggressive vibe to the entire series which felt unpleasant to me. I slowly felt myself losing interest as the weeks went by until I finally gave up in 2015 when the Christmas with the Kranks episode came out. I dipped into a small number of episodes in 2016, but my only attempt at watching an episode in 2017 was the commercials episode (which I don’t think I finished watching) and nothing in 2018.
Surprisingly, the drama about the departure of Obscurus Lupa wasn’t the tipping point for me. This wasn’t pleasant, certainly, but I mainly avoided it (though having my own blog to write for at the time meant that I had other priorities, so that probably explains that to some extent). I also heard LordKaT’s stuff on his show which was put into a YouTube video, but I didn’t want to believe it at all because his entire attitude was so god awful during the whole thing that I literally went “dude, get the fuck over yourself, because you have an attitude problem the size of China and you don’t seem willing to look at yourself to see whether you’ve caused any of the problems you’re blaming others for” and quit out of it.
So, you might be asking why this means so much to me. Well, the rumours had reached me that something wasn’t right with Channel Awesome over the last few years (with the big one that struck me being when Bennett the Sage released some deleted scenes for a crossover of 2008’s Speed Racer with The Nostalgia Critic in 2016, where he strongly hinted in his opening commentary that something had happened during the making of the crossover and yet seemed very evasive about discussing the details), but I didn’t even know the #ChangeTheChannel thing was happening until I looked on YouTube and noticed that MikeJ had put up a video saying why he’d left Channel Awesome. Curious to know more, I looked online and...well, let’s just say that it basically exposed just how fucked up everything was and the fact that it was accompanied by Linkara, Suede and Todd in the Shadows (among others who have left since I started writing this) leaving and having everything they’d done for the site completely wiped without a single explanation for what had happened just left me appalled.
The thing is, when I finally made myself sit down to write this (which was around the time of Channel Awesome's non-apology on Twitter), I thought that would be the end of it. Indeed, I have written this ending several times and I thought that things had finally reached the end of their painfulness. But then things turned really, REALLY unpleasant. I don't usually say "trigger warning" for stuff, but this...this one might well warrant it.
For those of you reading this who weren't aware of Channel Awesome until after 2014, allow me to talk a little bit about what the site was like at the time. See, before 2012 and the release of To Boldly Flee, Channel Awesome generally came across as akin to a community. While most people were Nostalgia Critic fans, there were other content creators who interacted frequently with each other and that helped keep things fun to be in. When NC retired after To Boldly Flee, though, that spirit felt...not gone, exactly, but it definitely wasn't as present any more. That had NOTHING to do with how the other contributors were acting, I should stress: it purely came down to the fact that the big draw of the site was no longer there and things felt more empty than they used to be. Demo Reel wasn't bringing people back (as a reminder, I didn't mind Demo Reel: the last few episodes actually showed some good potential and the whole concept, while nothing new, was at least entertaining enough to keep me occupied) and things just felt less...well, fun. Granted, I was myself going through a situation involving poor management (in this case, my second and final year of college) when this happened, so I wasn't able to contribute as much, but it felt like things had changed. Maybe it was the loss of Spoony and his fans as a result, but it felt like things had definitely changed.
It was during this time that I started to watch videos by That Dude in the Suede, a content creator who had always been kind of on the edge of my radar (and, admittedly, still is). The thing that really drew me in was his video on the first Pokemon movie (which I liked for nostalgia reasons and being a then-retired fan of the franchise: thankfully, the retired is no longer the case now!), but the second one and third one really drew me in. It was a really fun little series that had Suede teaming up with two other contributors (later three, but we'll get to that later) to review all of the movies in the franchise and, while it took a LONG time for episodes to get made (it was basically a yearly thing), I always enjoyed those videos. Having Linkara on board was already a great thing in my book (though I will acknowledge that his anger over the fourth movie did seem a bit much to me, even at the time), but it was also the first time I really watched something with JewWario in it. I actually liked him in those videos, but I never got around to really watching anything else he'd done. When he left Channel Awesome in 2013, I didn't really pay it too much mind: if I'm honest, my only real thought was "Who's gonna replace him in the Pokemon reviews?", which would later be answered by JesuOtaku (who I was never a fan of, if I'm honest, though good for him for getting involved with Anime News Network since he left the site!) when the review of the fourth movie finally came about.
This review, however, would not come out until JewWario committed suicide via self-inflicted gunshot wound. Having had to handle suicidal thoughts myself for a good while (thankfully, not so much nowadays: it's now more on a VERY occasional basis rather than near-constantly), that news shocked me and, while I didn't feel the sense of loss a longtime fan of his would have had, I did notice how much everyone was torn up in the community was over his death and I definitely felt like his loss was a tragedy.
Now, with that in mind, let's get to the most recent development in this situation. See, between writing much of this and now, Channel Awesome decided to respond to the document (in a way which was VERY much not helping their case, I should add). One of the things they conspicuously did NOT discuss was accusations that someone connected with the site had been involved in sexually grooming female fans of the site...but the truth on that, because of their own poor redaction of sensitive information when trying (and failing) to dispute that they handled allegations of inappropriate sexual behaviour towards a content creator from a then-producer, would later come out. See, they left the dates of when the discussion happened uncovered and left the first letter of the name of the content creator uncovered, meaning that people started to put two and two together and realised the truth that Channel Awesome's higher ups had been hiding for over five years.
That truth? That JewWario had been grooming fans of the site (at minimum: there's at least one story come to light that indicated he'd molested a fan as well).
That is pretty bad in its own right, but, if you were around when JewWario committed suicide, you'll remember that many of the site's contributors were heartbroken over his death and talked of how wonderful a guy he was, which the general fandom backed up with their own stories, and did tributes to him. It is now very clear, considering the comments from some of the ex-contributors having never known this was the case until the story from the fan was told to them, that the higher ups knew all about this and did not tell the other content creators the truth. Not even as an internal memo or subtle warning to avoid him. The site basically hid the truth about what JewWario had done from the rest of the site and let themselves profit off of his death by letting their content creators do tributes to the guy...without telling them the truth about him.
On top of that, the reason the truth was revealed was because Channel Awesome did not handle their evidence properly and left hints which made it possible to figure out the truth. So this has not only come out against the wishes of JewWario's victim who told their story (she specifically had asked he not be named), but also against the wishes of JewWario's family (who, to the best of my knowledge, were completely unaware of any of this).
...If you read all of that and are absolutely furious at Channel Awesome's behaviour and sheer incompetence, then you are not alone. I was completely numb after all of this, nearly broke down into tears when going over everything with my girlfriend and woke up feeling pissed off over everything here. I mean...how the fuck do you justify hiding the fact that one of your ex-contributors was a sexual predator to everyone else on the site, even just on an internal basis?
I was originally planning on sitting this all out until it had finally all ended just to make sure nothing more came out after publishing this, but, honestly, after that, I don't think there is any point in holding back. Frankly, after all of this, there's very little chance of anything coming out which will make Channel Awesome come out of this all looking any good. JesuOtaku has hinted that there's other sexual allegations which have yet to come to light, but, frankly, if that is true (which I personally doubt, but, after the revelations with JewWario, I could believe anything happening at this point), then Channel Awesome still deserves the lions share of the blame for helping keep those secrets quiet for so long, as, by not bringing them to light sooner, they put innocent people at risk of being sexually abused by someone in a position of power, having potentially sat on this knowledge for years. Which, any way you look at it, is absolutely scummy behaviour.
At this point, Channel Awesome is pretty much dead. While some contributors have not made statements confirming their departures from the site yet, so I'm going to avoid counting them until those statements are made, the simple fact of the matter is that the site is confirmed to have lost over 80% of its content creators in a space of less than a month (potentially, at the time of writing, it may have lost everyone except for Guru Larry...and he's outright admitted he's staying because he wants to be the last one standing, so we can discount him staying as meaning anything serious) and there's talk of some news sites wanting to report on this (not just geek news sites: Salon, a US website which tends to focus on stuff like US politics and pop culture, may very well be covering this shortly, which could easily end up making this escalate into being a larger news story depending on what other news sources read the article and decide to run stuff on it). It's HIGHLY unlikely that anyone will want to start doing stuff for Channel Awesome now, considering the stuff the higher ups have been willing to do behind-the-scenes to their contributors and the stuff they've been hiding which is now coming to light, and bad publicity from big name sources could easily end up creating a situation where being openly fond of Channel Awesome paints you in a HIGHLY negative light. Kind of like still being a Lostprophets fan, now I think on it...actually, considering the illegal sexual stuff that's come to light on JewWario's side and the stuff I remember related to LordKat sexually taking advantage of a woman on a stream, that comparison might actually hold more water than I originally thought!
And this was all avoidable. That's the thing that makes all of this so insane: the ex-contributors stated that all they wanted was a sincere apology for their ill treatment, so a little humility from Channel Awesome, an acknowledgement that what happened back when they were on the site shouldn't have happened and a simple "We're sorry all of that happened" could have prevented so much of this from happening. Whether it would have been for the best had that happened, considering the revelations behind JewWario is stuff that, frankly, SHOULD have come to light ages ago, is hard to say, but the simple fact of the matter is that Channel Awesome really fucked themselves over here. They might want to claim otherwise, but they really have no one to blame except for themselves.
It's probably too early to officially say "R.I.P. Channel Awesome"...but, at least for me and a good amount of former viewers, this really is the end of the line. I had been holding off on unsubscribing from the channel because of how infrequently I am on YouTube and because I don't like unsubscribing from channels in case something pops up which might be of interest and worth my time (heck, despite how much I despise PC elitism, I still follow TotalBiscuit!), but, after all of this...I have.
And I ain't ever coming back again.
I'm Nemo Atkins...and Channel Awesome can go fuck itself.
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