Media Literacy Died For A Cheap Laugh
We all like a good laugh, and if there’s one infinite fount of riff-worth material, it’s mainstream entertainment. Whether it’s Hollywood, TV networks, or the games industry, they just can’t stop making horrendous decisions we have to either laugh or groan at. A sharp wit can cut through the sheen of professional presentation, getting to the heart of what’s really important. That is, until that wit is, over time, worn down, and carefully shaped into a cog for that very same corporate machinery. What once made us laugh is now part of the very system that vexes us to no end.
Everything is chewed up and beaten down into easily consumable pulp for us to all nod our heads to. And we let it happen, without realizing. It’s not simply a matter of outgrowing these comedy series, but a painful duet of audience and creator, racing towards the cliff edge.
Take for instance, Screen Junkie’s Honest Trailers. To their credit, when they first started out, the titular honest trailers were sometimes bitingly on point. While their other content was often far more dated (such as a terrible ‘silicone’ joke made at a cosplayer’s expense during a convention interview), the trailers were steadily increasing in quality, until one key video: Captain America: The Winter Soldier.
The creators themselves even admit in the video that it’s hard to say anything bad about the film. Which raises a great question: then why are they? It’s one of the most universally beloved superhero films. It doesn’t really even need a trailer like this. They attempt to emphasize there’s high demand for it at the beginning with a whopping… eight comments. Even nine years ago, that’s hardly a groundswell. Regardless, Screen Junkies forced a litany of nitpicks “because Honest Trailers is a comedy show”. Obviously, this was simply a matter of talking about the popular thing for a click.
If this sounds familiar, you’re not wrong. It’s a pitfall a number of channels on YouTube in particular have fallen into, even those with the best intentions. Even if there’s nothing to be said, they have to say something. That way you’ll get paid for watching The Latest Thing. It’s a method that’s worked out to a depressing degree for the far more infamous CinemaSins.
The only real difference between CinemaSins and Honest Trailers is that rather than simply bloating their videos with filler, the latter became “what do most people on Twitter and Reddit think?” It doesn’t matter if those opinions overlooked obvious examples to the contrary or actively ignore key moments of the story.
It doesn’t matter that Birds of Prey regularly integrates exposition into the main dialogue to not stop and explicitly hammer home “this is exposition!” What does matter is that it’s poppy and breezy, so somebody called it the Buzzfeed of superhero movies. The irony is that even the writers are starting to feel exhausted by their audience, as demonstrated early into the Ahsoka Honest Trailer video, where they outright ask if the audience’s tastes have grown since watching The Clone Wars in 2008, sigh, and go on with the video for six more minutes.
This is framed like a joke but it’s really not. We’ve reached across to the other side of the bell curve where these sorts of comedic ‘analysis’/’honest’ shows are demonstrably growing tired of their own audiences… for having the exact sort of reactions to media they helped engender. They’re not wrong for criticizing something, but how they go about it is, ironically, rather Buzzfeed-esque fluff, including a montage of Ahsoka and Sabine sighing. It’s as if no one considered for even a second that comedy wasn’t the priority of audiences, but instead, confirmation bias.
Did they really think that people wouldn’t emulate the opinions and observations of the media they enjoy from something that makes them laugh? We live in an age where whole projects can be deemed dead on arrival by how poorly they’re portrayed in memes before releasing. And even if you’re well-received by audiences, critics, or even both, you will still find your project ripped to shreds, not for genuine flaws, but for the sake of generating content.
Except the convenient get out of jail free card harnessed time and again is also “it’s a comedy show, not a review!” so it shouldn’t be held to the same standards as a traditional review. Hell, when the director of Skull Island is explaining basic filmmaking in response to this sort of content (in his case, CinemaSins), maybe it’s time to stop pretending you understand even basic media critique. I’m not demanding you read fifty books on the topic but at least have an argument that makes logical sense.
And to be perfectly clear, this isn’t an issue exclusive to films and television. If anything, most early games ‘criticism’ has aged about as well as milk from 2009 in the Sahara Desert after being nuked a few times for good measure.
Zero Punctuation is a foundational series for modern internet comedy. Yahtzee has generated an entire slew of internet slang shorthand for the gaming landscape. Some of his videos have been celebrated even by the developers he skewers. Both first as a fan and as a coworker, I laughed along with several of them as well. Except, after the implosion of The Escapist, when I felt compelled to revisit his videos, I couldn’t help but notice the same troubling concerns.
Bioshock 2, now considered by many to be the series’ peak, is portrayed as a super cynical cash grab. Core fundamentals for game balancing are jeered at even though other aspects of the game directly address and explain those decisions. Easy to understand creative decisions are presented as though they’re illogical madness.
Confusing arguments like this start to pile up. Lara Croft’s portrayal in Tomb Raider Anniversary is apparently “too cold” despite having a game-long arc about not wanting to kill people while being quite blithely witty. The entire opening of Dead Space 2’s review is a near-minute long rant about how vents that most players don’t even look inside aren’t fully modeled or textured. Mirror’s Edge commits the apparent crime of having a concise runtime.
Mind you, Zero Punctuation did mature over the years Yahtzee demonstrates far more nuance in his later Extra Punctuation columns. That maturation, however, didn’t quite translate to those ravenously consuming every scathing line. Much like Honest Trailers, there’s a genuine intention behind a motivated creator, but again, the demands of the format (and the target audience) actively get in the way of something more substantive.
This has grown to be such a problem that J. Stephanie Sterling has spoken on how their Jimquisition fanbase actively engages less with positive perspectives, and the algorithm encourages this to no end. What’s the easiest way to package negativity? With a joke. Except it doesn’t have to be this way.
Perhaps the best example of this is GoodBadFlicks. Series creator Cecil Trachenburg manages to roast and praise countless projects while staying completely clear. He goes out of his way to differentiate when he’s actively reviewing something seriously or for comedic effect, and on the odd chance he melds the two, it’s very specific. He uses everything from runtime variances to a different delivery and visual format tweaks — all while communicating clearly what’s on offer without compromise. When Trachenburg loves or hates something, you know it, and can explain why. There’s a clear balance and coherence that’s sadly pretty rare.
It’s not that you can’t be funny while talking about media, nor is it that everything lambasted is some misunderstood gem. It’s that you have to take off the clown mask sometimes and be straight with people. You have to be able to say “No” to something that isn’t worth ragging on. Great comedy calls as much for shock and wit as it does restraint. If you’re producing work to fit an assembly line mold, it’ll feel like it. You’ll cut corners, make mistakes, and not give some pieces what you need to.
Take for instance, Pointless Hub. It has all the hallmarks of a channel rolling around in the trash, but in the same breath, each video understands that part of the comedy is in surprising the audience. Cody calls out the absurdity of Hollywood with the energy of someone finding their pet doing something stupid, going “Awwww, you little doofus! You wasted millions to let M. Night make The Last Airbender!”
Yet he’ll also defend the background artistry and Dev Patel’s performance in M. Night’s infamous bomb. He’ll also bring up the much better received animated spin-off to Godzilla (1998). You don’t just get a scathing, empty feeling by the end of experience, but a sense that something could be learned, that something material was exchanged besides vitriol.
And again, this isn’t something exclusive to the realm of film and TV. Civvie 11 doesn’t exclusively call every game trash. While he began with low hanging fruit, he’s sequestered that era of content. He’s gone so far as to publicly state that he actively avoids garbage games now unless they’re so bad that they’re hilarious, and doesn’t want to punch down on newer studios just getting started.
Civvie also gives himself the length of video necessary to assess something fully, incorporating unique framing devices. Even as he rips some games apart, it’s with a great deal more coherence and relevance to what will actually impact players. Even if that game is an absolute mess of contradictions like Daikatana.
Maybe now that Yahtzee’s starting over with FullyRambleTronic, he’ll find that balance within a fresh setting. Perhaps Honest Trailers will again, some day, actually be more than a compilation of buzzwords. Until then, one thing we all have to remind ourselves is that no matter how funny something is, if your audience doesn’t get it, is it worth it?
A word from the author: This week’s column was particularly hard to write. It’s always a challenge reflecting less favorably on content you once enjoyed, but that’s part of growing up. I don’t want the takeaway to be that anyone should feel bad for enjoying these shows, but to consider what sort of media criticism we’ve been rewarding that has, in turn, shaped our entertainment landscape. If I had an answer for how to solve the situation, I’d offer it. As it stands, the best we can do is reflect and adjust our course with the benefit of hindsight.
Press E For Everything is an ongoing column covering all manner of geeky/nerdy topics that you can support through Patreon! Its author, Elijah Beahm, has covered games and other entertainment mediums for over a decade for sites and channels such as Unwinnable, Dualshockers, The Escapist, GameCritics.com, Boss Level Gamer, and Unabridged Gamer.
