Fish and Cherries Productions

JESUS BLOODY FUCKING CHRIST!!!!!

Those four words couldn’t be more perfect in summing up the massive storm of e-drama I just witnessed in the last 48+ hours. It’s absolutely mindboggling. I’m going to skip over the clever segue I normally do and dive right in. The Spoony One of That Guy With The Glasses and other internet fame has become the center of a massive controversy on Twitter and everyone has just watched him hit rock bottom. And honestly, watching someone who used to be one of my favorite reviewers go into a self-destructive crazy has come as a real blow to me. I hate to quote True Capitalist Radio unironically but, “Ah’m jaded, fer Christ sake. Ah mean, AH’M DEPREEEEEEESSSSSSSED!!”

All right, let me pedal backwards and bring everybody up to speed. The Spoony One, or Noah Antwiller, is a comedic internet reviewer with his own site called the Spoony Experiment and a big name on That Guy With The Glasses, the website I’d hoped to be picked up on). Friends of mine who don’t frequent either site might remember him as the man who reviewed Yor: The Hunter From The Future and the Warrior comic. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t owe a lot of my comedic timing in my reviews to him and his quirks. Anyway, when Spoony started out, he was pretty humble; he would constantly thank his fans for where he was today and even though he had a temper, he would always be described as one of the nicest people on the sets of there crossovers.

As time went on, though, things… changed, for lack of a better word. Not on the set, I believe he was still a gentleman there. But his twitter account told a different story. A lot of his feed became surprisingly negative and confrontational. More often than not, it would be a string of posted. He did a play-by-play bile spit at everything he hated about the recent Oscars, even lashing out at some fans who pointed out fallacies on his part. He called everyone who didn’t like the ending of Mass Effect 3 stupid for not seeing the ending coming and brought the confrontation to a live stream. He berated people for liking Cabin in the Woods and was rude to people (and co-workers) who asked him politely not to spoil anything, again bringing the confrontation to his live stream. Volatile, yes, but something I hoped he would get better with in time. Turns out, it was only the beginning.

So here’s where the story gets ugly. A little while ago, he made a very off-color joke on Twitter to one of his female co-workers at TGWTG (her name is omitted out of respect). It basically said, “If things don’t work out between you and your boyfriend, I can take you down to my basement, chain you to a pipe, and show you some good loving. My way.” Ignoring the fact that you probably shouldn’t even be saying that in private to someone (unless you’ve known them for years and it’s referencing some kind of inside joke), it’s definitely not something you want to say in a place as public as Twitter, especially when it’s in full view of her boyfriend. He apparently apologized in private, but that’s not where the story ends. Another female reviewer by the title Obscurus Lupa (her name is not omitted because she has not behaved in a respectable way in this scenario) called Spoony out on the comment and things started to heat up as it got brought to everyone’s attention. As a result (or because of something different), Spoony got suspended from TGWTG for four weeks. He said that he agreed with the decision and that should have been that.

But then he… snapped.

There’s no good way to say it, he just flew off the handle in every single imaginable way. He made post after post just raving and even for him, the tweets were vile. Case in point, and I quote, “See what kind of thin-skinned cunts I have to work with?” He and Lupa got into it, Lupa’s boyfriend burst into it too, and the whole thing just degraded exponentially. The man was going on a full self-destructive spiral with rant after rant at his opponents and even his friends and fans, talking in a way that I haven’t seen anyone above seventeen talk. To give you an idea of how jarring of a change this is, it’s like if I suddenly started doing cocaine and ran out of Horton Plaza naked and screaming, “FUCK THE MEXICANS!” To make matters worse, he actually started lashing out at the coworkers and fans that were trying to help him. Whenever someone would say something like, “Dude, seriously, get help, it hurts me to see you like this,” he would respond with something like, “Advice accepted and ignored, now fuck off.” Jesus Christ, MovieBob isn’t this tactless. I can’t believe I just said that with a straight face. Someone actually showed less tact than Bob “Everyone who thinks Metroid: Other M is bad is just a japanophobe racist/The people who made BioWare change the ending of Mass Effect 3 are whiny crybabies who will hurt gaming” Chipman! When the hell did this world go upside-down?!

As of now, Spoony and TGWTG have parted ways and official story is that the reason wasn’t because of the lewd comment. But I’ll be damned if it and the drama that followed wasn’t a massive straw that prepped his back for breaking. If this were a retrospective on the matter, I would talk about how Lupa was out of line for attacking him for something that happened a month ago and for bad-mouthing him on a live stream that night and basically just adding fuel to the flame. But this musing is titled The Self-Destruction of the Spoony One, so we’re talking about Spoony. And in that regard, there is no excuse for him treating his friends and fans like that, not Lupa, not his depression, not any lingering issues, not anything. There are some people who say that, because he posted it on Twitter, that it’s his business, not TGWTG, and that it’s just between him and the offended party. The problem with that is that not only is Twitter a very public place to wave your dirty laundry, but when your office is the internet itself, you can’t just say whatever on there.

And what does this mean for me? It’s shaken me up quite a bit, to be honest. Seeing one of my favorite comedians and partial idol just destroy his own reputation and berate the fans that he once praised is the most humbling thing I’ve had to experience. It’s gone past being depressing and become downright heartbreaking. This blow has been so hard that I’m not even sure I want to continue doing videos anymore. I feel like my faith has been shattered, but faith in what, I couldn’t tell you. The system? This whole fiasco seems to prove that the system works; guy makes inappropriate comment, acts like an asshole, and he loses his job. The internet? If anything, this has shown me that the internet community is slowly beginning to stand up against misogyny. The friendliness and family nature of the website that I hope to get picked up by? Honestly, apart from a few, most people turned away from Spoony when he went rabid and even then, some of them are still his friends. The maturity of Spoony and/or some of the other reviewers? I could have told you that was obvious from a mile away. I really don’t have an answer or a way to convey how I feel, but it seems like the business I aspired to join became a lot more hostile and if internet fame is going to make me tear out my friends’ throats like that, I want no part in it. No, don’t tell me that I’ve got friends and a good support network. Charlie Sheen had those and look how he turned out. No, don’t make a “winning” joke right now. The man was in danger of losing custody of his kids and getting cut off by his father. He is not “winning” by any stretch of the imagination.

I have no idea how to end this post, just like I have no idea what the future of TGWTG will be. Nobody came out of this looking good, except for the original offended party. It’s her I feel bad for, too. She was involved in, at worst, a little behind the scenes drama that could have just been repented for and moved on from, but instead we got a virtual nuke of a situation. Reputations will forever be ruined, some friendships will never be repaired and all I’m left with at the end of this post is a flickering screen in front of me and an empty microwave dinner tray to my side.

I hope that when we die, we go to Equestria. Even when the ponies were kids, they behaved more like adults than this.

EDIT (10/2/12): As of a few months ago, Spoony and Lupa have officially made up and moved on, as evidenced here (http://www.twitlonger.com/show/i6dop4) and here (http://obscuruslupa.tumblr.com/post/26601307257/apologies-and-moving-forward). Both have also acknowledged that they acted poorly in the situation and are putting the whole thing behind them. On top of that, Spoony seems a lot more balanced, which probably has to do with the new medication he’s taking. So we can safely put this incident behind us and look towards a brighter tomorrow.

Disappointment is a hard thing to deal with, especially when we’re younger, but we mostly get better with age. Mostly. Today’s topic revolves around the hot button geek topic of late, Mass Effect 3. This latest line in the spectacular game franchise by RPG juggernaut BioWare was the most anticipated game of the spring which, put alongside the most anticipated movie in my circles (The Avengers), made this look like the geek season. However, while my playthrough of the game continues to be pretty enjoyable, I can’t help but hear about the uproar and controversy that’s surrounding the game’s ending, an ending which fans at best find controversial and at worst are forced to transform into Spoony and scream “BETRAYAL!!!”

Now, I haven’t played the ending yet… and let me be clear, that is NOT an invitation for spoilers. If I see anything that even looks like a spoiler, I’m deleting it without question until I finish the game. As I said, I haven’t finished the game, but this whole fiasco is enough to make me arch an eyebrow. I’m used to fans raging about not getting their way, but when the more level-headed people are feeling betrayed as well, something’s definitely gone wrong. It’s funny that I say level headed because that’s not what I’m going to be talking about. No, there’s something else that’s come from this whole mess: someone is actually bringing the matter to the FTC in an attempt to sue BioWare for the ending.

To this, I propose a question…

…really?

Really??

Have we seriously let it come to this? Have we become so entitled that we’re actually going to use legal action to justify our bitching and moaning? Because that’s exactly what this is: whining. Yes, I know that this person is justifying it by claiming false advertising because we were promised seventeen different endings and we only got about four, but this is still taking it too far. It’s a game. It hasn’t caused any harm or physical danger to the player, not counting any wayward idiots who try to swallow the disk, it’s not toxic, and it’s (most likely) not oppressing our freedoms in any way. And no, having a game live up to its hype is not a constitutional right.

Is it even worth pointing out that this course of action will do more harm than good? BioWare has already hinted that they’re going to fix the problem (or that the ending isn’t actually the ending or something, it’s vague but hopeful). But if you’re suing them for who knows how many dollars, they might lose the money they were putting into doing just what you wanted them to do. How is that helping anyone but your own self-righteousness? Again, though, I must reiterate that this entire lawsuit is being filed over a game! You can hammer on about broken promises and false advertising, but suing a work of fiction is just petty. By that logic, I could sue Ubisoft for the 2008 Prince of Persia game for promising me a chance to save the world and in the end, [SPOILER WARNING] making me undo all the progress I’d made. Hell, the NAACP had more cause to sue the makers of Transformers 2 for their incredibly offensive comic relief. If they didn’t do that, then you have no right suing for not liking the ending of a simple game.

But it’s not just a simple game, is it? It’s Mass Effect, the game that blew our minds and took us from Omega to Mars, from the Council to the seediest bars, and from the reaches of space to the pillars of asari grace. Arguably, it’s the Star Wars of today’s modern gamers and reputed to be the game “so good that even Jack Thompson couldn’t fault it.” That’s why people are so up in arms: we love Mass Effect. We fell in love with the characters, the worlds, the plots, and that gorgeous view of the blue sun on Solcrum at the end of Tali’s mission in #1. As such, we really care about the game and really want it to get the ending it deserves. But this isn’t the way to go about it. All this is doing is giving gamers the reputation of being utterly petulant and not to be trusted with the respect that we demand from our game developers. Besides, this is BioWare we’re talking about, the company that put in Blasto the Hanar Spectre because the fans loved the idea and retconned a freaking tie-in novel because it got its in-universe facts wrong. Never let it be said that they don’t care. Besides, that’s more respect than George Lucas gave to the Star Wars Expanded Universe and we haven’t sued him for Jar Jar Binks.

Mass Effect: a game so good that fans will sue to make it better.