Crime Games: An Answer to the Mobster Movie

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The trifecta is complete

Before we begin, hope you all had filling Thanksgiving festivities for those who celebrate. I went through a slight hiccup with frozen food, but the other stuff was taken care of, so nothing to worry about. Now to the post.

If you’re looking at the title and thinking, “didn’t you do this two weeks ago?” Technically, yes I did. But that was about true crime, documentaries or media next to documentaries about real life crimes that have happened before, i.e. the Five Families, the Winter Hill gang, Al Capone, Bonnie and Clyde, and countless other criminal figures of yesteryear, all of them inspiring many of our fictional crime lords and kingpins in other media like Gus Fring and Don Eladio in Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul, Clay and Jax Teller in Sons of Anarchy, or for this post, most of the GTA and Mafia games’ lineup of characters. These are long-running series with colorful casts so allow me to preview the short version:

If I were a documentarian, I’d put characters like Tommy Vercetti in the bin of “Amalgamation of Prior Characters Seen in Media.” And not just him; other GTA protagonists and/or GTA moments have taken inspiration from movies released in the past. Some of the games take place in a specific time period and thus take inspiration from movies released around the same time. This video from WatchMojo.com lists different examples:

Channel: WatchMojo.com

Some of these may be easter eggs, but it goes to show how many fans of [Insert Movie Here] work or worked at RockStar. Call it a tradition to sneak some of these in, but they come in full force in GTA V, coupled with call backs to older games, including but not limited to:

  • a car that references James Bond on its license plate, equipped with spy gadgets
  • the cargo train’s registration number on the front referencing the year of the PS2’s highest selling video game (San Andreas)
  • Lester listing off successful heists initiated by prior protagonists; one of those characters being recruitable for a job later in the game
  • Michael’s special ability calling back to the bullet time mechanics of Max Payne
  • and if you wanna get technical, the five-year release gap between GTA’s IV and V, also calling back to CJ’s opening lines in San Andreas

As for real-life inspirations in the GTA series, well, that’s complicated. Vice City provides the easiest example taking inspiration from 1983’s Scarface which is a remake of the 1932 movie of the same name which was about its real-life namesake, Alphonse “Snorky/Scarface” Capone.

From my research, GTA’s influences do call back to high crime eras in American (and sometimes British history), but don’t take direct inspiration from any named criminal or mobster, comfortable to let Hollywood do it for generations before developing a love-letter masquerading as a video game. Sounds like a bit of a letdown, but a series that collects controversy like Yu-Gi-Oh! cards would probably try its hardest to let the games speak for itself, hence why RockStar’s problems weren’t in the headlines until later. Gratuitous cartoon violence was still thought of at the time as limited to Hanna-Barbera cartoons, so facsimiles of someone’s granny legging it after a gun goes off, or rural folk from D[bell noise]k-Fart, NorCal going hog wild thanks to cheat codes would be unheard of in the series’ early days.

I doubt it was much the same for the Mafia series, since that one could sneak past unnoticed, and if it did, the Mafia movie comparisons were proudly warn on its chest like a veteran’s war medals. You didn’t need to convince me that Tommy Angelo was Al Capone or that Mafia II was The Sopranos. It admits that by way of the title, and in stride. The Mafia series also heavily fictionalizes real-life locales, but thankfully offers more than the New York-Miami-Los Angeles trifecta that contemporary media blows its load over. It may just be me, but as a native New Yorker, I could do with a lot less New York. If a thousand monkeys can eventually produce Shakespeare, surely it can take a greater than or equal to number of monkeys to make modern-day Amarillo, Texas more exciting. The Coen brothers achieved that with Fargo back in the day.

So getting away from the usual three, Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven’s titular city is meant to be a fictionalization of Chicago in the 1930s, during and after Prohibition. Mafia II takes place in the mid-1940s and early-50s in Empire Bay, a fictionalized version of several East Coast cities, but having the trademark Mid-Atlantic accents that later defined New York and, depending on who you ask, Baltimore. Mafia III comes right out of left field by throwing the player into the Deep South in the 1960s, stuck between the counterculture movement at home and Vietnam abroad. Specifically, it creates a more in-depth though still fictional version of New Orleans, this time known as New Bordeaux, complete with all the neighborhoods that are said to be in New Orleans, though as I’ve writing, I’d never been. I wouldn’t mind a trip though, I hear Mardi Gras is a hoot.

So while the RockStar series is content with pure fiction, the Mafia series uses history as a jumping ground. Having said that, crime games have proven to be more imaginative than just these examples; I just have a lot of expertise in this field as an avid player of both GTA and Mafia. I believe I said this a few weeks ago, but this isn’t exclusively an American or British thing. Throw a dart on a map, and the country the dart lands on may have something next to a fictional depiction of organized crime–even if it’s beat out by a more popular neighbor. Consider how the western populace learned about organized crime in East Asia or the former Soviet Union, or how crime and law enforcement probably goes back even further than Hammurabi and Babylon.

And obviously not all crime games put you at odds with the law; sometimes it’s you flashing the badge instead of blasting away at the guys who do. Followers already know about my love life with Max Payne, but I’ve definitely watched more crime drama shows and played more games where you are the law. One of the earliest games I played called back to Max Payne: may I present to you Stranglehold:

Full disclosure, I have this game (I don’t remember how I got it, it might’ve been from a bargain bin at Target or Game Stop), but I don’t recall ever finishing it. I’d play it again, but I need to check if it’s backwards compatible with the Xbox One before I try, or failing that, emulation or a YouTube Let’s Play can be found to catch me up to speed.

All I remember is that famed Hong Kong cinema director John Woo was contacted by Midway Games, makers of NFL Blitz and Mortal Kombat, to help produce a Max Payne clone with the likes of Chow Yun-fat reprising his role as Inspector Tequila from the 1992 film Hard Boiled, which I haven’t seen. Not that seeing the movie first would put me in the right head space to play the game since I started with the game, but if it helps me get an idea of who Tequila is supposed to be then it’s a good thing it’s in my long-ass watchlist because I’ve got some time to kill.

Traditionally, video games based on movies have been notoriously terrible, but some select developers have tried their best with the material given, sometimes even expanding on the formula established. I know that RockStar paid homage to the 1979 cult classic film The Warriors with a 2005 video game based on the movie, and I remember having fun with Stranglehold, so not all of them are crapshoots.

A more memorable game featuring Hong Kong-based Triad groups came out a few years later. We all know it as Sleeping Dogs, developed by the now-defunct United Front Games and published by the still-in-business Square Enix.

This one does have the Max Payne style of combat and maneuverability. In fact, it’s not comparable to Max Payne aside from the fact that both the respective protagonists are law enforcement officers deep undercover in an organized crime syndicate, but I’m getting ahead of myself. It’s meant to be a spiritual successor to the True Crime series.

Sleeping Dogs is set in contemporary Hong Kong where the protagonist, former San Francisco police officer Wei Shen is transferred to the Hong Kong Police Force to go deep undercover in the Sun On Yee. This presents an interesting dichotomy for Shen as he’s caught between two loyalties: the Triads and the law. I’d elaborate even further, but this ventures into spoiler territory and from what I recall the latter half of the game doesn’t stay as close to this as it originally set out to. This review has more insight.

Channel: The Escapist

Then there’s L.A. Noire, which I’ve mentioned at length or featured videos and articles that have mentioned it at length before, especially the development side of things.

The gist of all this would have to be that life influences culture, I guess. This all had to come from somewhere and the North Side Gang wasn’t gonna emerge from the dirt like Adam in Genesis. But it’s a generally good way to comment on contemporary society. Other times, people just wanna tell a story and whether a million people find it mediocre or one hundred start a fan club around it, the primary focus of entertainment had been fulfilled.

For crime dramas, that succeeds in spades taking home more gold than the original California 49ers. Part of the downside to the crime drama is that it’s come under scrutiny before for inspiring similar crimes, and not just the true crime genre. Violence in media is heavily scrutinized and when it’s in a video game, it’s a media circus that brings more attention than what was previously projected. I know I’ve harped on this before, but I feel that it bears repeating. Sorry to leave on a sour note, but calling back to a video put out by Alternate History Hub: the news should stop glorifying and perpetuating violence. It’s shown time and time again to do more harm than good.

Last thing, before I properly close off: I wanted to make a post about the fourth chapter of Boruto: Two Blue Vortex, but Thanksgiving preparations kept me from properly preparing the notes. I’ll try to get one out sometime in the next week, ideally before next week’s post.

Military Novels: A Recent Discovery of Mine

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Practically just started

Before we start, concerning last week’s surprise destruction of The Escapist’s video team, the YouTube channel Clownfish TV (which I’ve recommended before) uploaded a video a few days later that I contemplated dedicating a post to, but ultimately decided that it wasn’t worth it. The minds behind the channel are staunchly independent of any corporate oversight and maintain this position above all else for a better deal in the long-run. The Escapist was bought by a conglomerate which complicated things, and while the team of Kneon and Geeky Sparkles have zero love for dishonest games journalism, part of what motivated a possible post would’ve been to correct the record and clarify what actually went on… or at least I would have.

After sitting back and analyzing what the video concerned, I realized that most of the criticism was elsewhere on The Escapist site and that one’s opinions seldom influence business rules especially from the outside looking in. For me, it didn’t feel like that because the comments section was what got to me.

It’s worth noting that this tends to be the nature of YouTube communities; channels do have their dedicated base and this often leads to biased echo chambers with again very little influence on what goes on in the afflicted realm. Also worth keeping in mind was that reporting on pop culture in any capacity is merely another day in the office for Clownfish TV. Malice can’t be assumed all things considered. As for the community, the one piece of advice that works for me is to get the entire story before judgment is passed. Get all the context and then give your final thoughts.

Now for the real topic I want to write about: military novels. Personally, I’ve never been all that interested in them, and since I’ve been around on r/Army, reading the occasional news stories of controversies surrounding the special forces community in particular, I’ve held a dash of skepticism to go along with what describe as a Heroic Tit-wank in Print form. If you don’t know, special forces like Army Green Berets or Rangers, Navy SEALs, Recon Marines, Air Force Combat Controllers and all of them tend to get the Hollywood treatment more often than not. I’m not saying they don’t deserve the recognition for their sacrifices, their missions, their stories, but they’re not exactly a monolith.

For every Medal of Honor recipient of any capacity like Dan Daly or Ralph Puckett or Alwyn Cashe, there’s also these guys making fools of themselves:

Credit: Getty Images

Credit: Getty Images

Clearly, the worst or more embarrassing stories of the military’s finest aren’t reflective of everyone including the HR folks or the intelligence or signal branches or anyone else who sees it as just another job, but sometimes it gives me pause for thought. As a history buff, I do like military history as well. The Elusive Samurai motivated me to research the Kenmu Restoration and the Ashikaga Shogunate in medieval Japan, for instance, and more than once I’ve done some light research on Civil War battle orders or even the Roman Empire, among numerous other things.

Channel: Metatron

Before even entertaining the idea of the military as a whole, the movies and whatnot all seemed so cool. Call of Duty and Battlefield led the way in cinematic experiences and memorable characters. After watching some more movies, and going to basic training myself, it’s safe to say that if you’ve been in the military — any military — you’re preconceptions are going to be challenged and your newfound knowledge on how things go in the real military will ruin a lot of movies for you.

Prior to shipping, I thought the boot camp portion of Full Metal Jacket was the highlight of that movie, primarily because of the characters: Joker, Pyle, Cowboy, and Gunny Hartman all make that movie, but stepping back from that, it’s divided first into how Marines are trained (sort of), followed by an active combat deployment to South Vietnam. The greatest irony of that movie is that for an anti-war film, so many incoming recruits watch and quote it ad infinitum, and expectedly so. The actors are the highlights of the movie and if it wasn’t for R. Lee Ermey and the jelly doughnut scene, then it probably wouldn’t have the same influence as it does almost 40 years post-release.

In the veteran community, lots and lots of media is heavily scanned and scrutinized based on what we’re all taught in boot camp and when we go off to train for the occupation we chose or have chosen for us based on test scores. This explains why movies like Generation Kill and the Hollywood misfit In The Army Now are more beloved amongst veterans and servicemembers compared to something like Zero Dark Thirty, American Sniper, or The Hurt Locker. Even vets who’ve never deployed to a combat zone (yes, this happens, ask around) will tell you that an overwhelming majority of the time is spent waiting to do something and that something goes by exceptionally fast. Such urgency…

Also, fair warning: the military has a frat house mentality. Keep in mind the ages of the people signing up.

So I’ve been rattling on over about military/war media and the reception based on the community viewing it, but I haven’t mentioned what I’ve been reading. As I said, I hardly ever had an interest, even in passing about these kinds of things, and even over time, now that I’ve been in a military training environment, I trend quite lightly these days. You’re drilled day and night about how to properly wear a uniform and even mishaps in film can get a vet’s dander up more so than stolen valor incidents.

I try my best not to overanalyze this stuff or make a monolith or standard-bearer of military/war media since a lot of it is for the public and like a lot of their real-life units, the special forces movies tend to play by their own rules. My rule for whether I should give something a watch or a read is wide reception. Even if the community hates it, it’s not good to let those opinions overtake or form future opinions on XYZ. But so far I have been enjoying Generation Kill, and I do like Saving Private Ryan and Dunkirk. Some of these I’m introduced to by proxy and they wind up being pretty good.

For Generation Kill, I went for the book first for comparison to the HBO miniseries. Nearly done with the book and the show so I might come back with some final thoughts. And getting back to controversies in the special forces community, there was one book that caught my eye. I don’t remember how I found it, but it’s called Code over Country by Matthew Cole. It’s based on the wide range of corruption and lax oversight within Navy SEAL Team Six. Once I get my hands on the book and get through reading it, I’ll try to make an effort to give my thoughts. Bear in mind, most vets and servicemembers won’t run into anything close to a special forces unit and for security reasons, most of what they do isn’t revealed until after the fact, so corroborating what I hear will have to be done by way of news reports like those featured on Military Times or its branch specific variants.

This post was kind of a misnomer all around, but before I close off, I want to make a case for the manga series Golden Kamuy.

I say this is a military series for a lot of the obvious reasons: veterans of a major war (Russo-Japanese War), active duty soldiers in uniform, commanders doling out orders by their judgment, and more. But it also takes the tropes of traditional westerns like those of the Clint Eastwood or Dances with Wolves variety.

I have a post in the pipeline regarding Golden Kamuy itself so look forward to it in the next few weeks. I’ll elaborate further on my case then.

The Escapist’s Dire Straits

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Bad luck for Escapist Magazine

I planned on making a post about this soon after the news came out, but I was waiting on more information relating to the news to come out. I was also busy with other real-world stuff, so if I’m able, this should be up either late Monday night or early Tuesday morning.

If you hadn’t heard yet, The Escapist’s video team resigned en masse following the firing of their editor-in-chief Nick Calandra. Nick’s firing was preceded by The Escapist’s parent company Gamurs placing impossible deadlines and goals for him and the team to meet and when he didn’t live up to those standards, he got the sack. Everyone, myself included, sees corporate avarice biting them in the ass with this since Nick oversaw a close-knit ship since most of his coworkers quit to join him for greener pastures. For more information on the situation from last week, see this video by YongYea:

Channel: YongYea

Gamurs bought the site in 2022 and seem to now be regretting their decision to axe Nick and by extension the entire video team. Some of The Escapist’s recent additions like Cold Take, Stuff of Legends, and other stuff is still available to view on the channel and seem to predate the The Escapist as told by some of the video team’s recently resigned members, but one of the major casualties out of this was the popular review series Zero Punctuation. Yahtzee explained in a stream last week that he was going to continue reviewing video games on his site, Fully Ramblomatic, which also predates ZP’s lineup in The Escapist, but whether The Escapist under Gamurs’ wing is gonna toss it for good or try something with the ZP license, I can’t say with certainty. All I know is what everyone knows about it in that Yahtzee couldn’t take ZP with him which is why he’s reviewing on Fully Ramblomatic. It might retain the Wednesday noon schedule as ZP but again it remains to be seen.

As for where it’s all going to go, the team relaunched and got back to business as usual by launching Second Wind.

https://twitter.com/nickjcal/status/1721947986735812769
Account: @nickjcal

This isn’t sponsored or anything. I’m making this to say that as a fan of ZP and of The Escapist’s other shows, like Jimquisition, the aforementioned, Stuff of Legends, Cold Take, 3 Minute Review, their livestreams, etc. that it’s terrible that the owners were so tunnel visioned that they’d axe a well-beloved member of the team, but looking at how well they bounced back into the fold on their own, I’m happy that they haven’t been too badly affected by the surprise changes.

Also, I’m putting this up as a YouTube recommendation. After the controversy earlier this year with Blair Zon of the iilluminaughtii, I expected another redacted recommendation to be controversy related or if the channel was mysteriously vanished. While I will keep my recommendation up for The Escapist until further notice, mainly as an archive, I’m also recommending Second Wind because the main video personalities have migrated their to continue their craft unimpeded.

https://www.youtube.com/@SecondWindGroup/featured

As it stands, the channel has yet to set everything up, but by December or even January, it should start looking like a proper YouTube channel so get ready for that.

True Crime/Noir Media

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My third favorite genre

There’s no question by now as to what I like. Most of my posts here have a video game or animanga focus, but let it be known that I have more in store than Japanimation and rhythmic button-pressing. It’s the title of this post which I should clarify. While I used to gravitate mainly mobster/organized crime centered media, for the most part the characters and organizations therein were largely fictional or fictionalized. Stop me if this sounds familiar: mobster movies tend to require a bigger commitment compared to video games like the Mafia series, select GTA games, or the video game version of The Godfather. All solid series and franchises in their own right still, but even within a genre we each have our preferences.

But obviously fictional media interpretations of the Mob didn’t come from nothing. Crime fiction as a genre’s always been there, just look at the westerns. Lawmen, gunslingers, outlaws, big names like Billy the Kid, Bass Reeves, the Earp brothers. Whatever the criteria is for crime media, if it involves someone stepping on the law to get to a goal while someone else representing the law is stopping at nothing to stop them, then by all accounts it’s a crime movie… which probably means Lord of War falls into that too by my standards.

Yuri Orlov may as well have been Major General Smedley Butler: they both had rackets on three continents.

And this is quite apt, as Yuri Orlov was said to draw inspiration from the real life Merchant of Death Viktor Bout. And he’s not the only fictional criminal to be based on a real mobster. Sometimes the real life mobster themselves is fictionalized. If you know anything about Prohibition, you no doubt know about Al Capone and his ability to fool the cameras at least until St. Valentine’s Day. And since that time and following his death, countless movies have come out with him as the prime inspiration.

As for how I got to this genre, that’s really hard to say. At first, I thought it was from the GTA series, but looking back that’s probably inaccurate in my case. Movies? Kind of… my grandma does have The Godfather trilogy and numerous westerns, but I didn’t see some of these until I was at least 12. TV? Definitely not, my mom barred me from watching Family Guy until I was a teen due to sexual content. So in lieu of a true origin, I’ll explain some of my favorite media pieces from this genre. Starting with a game that puts you in the same boat as the law instead of against it.

Post-WWII, Los Angeles, war hero turned LAPD lawman Cole Phelps fights crime in the City of Angels. This is how it starts, but later in the game a conspiracy spearheaded by some of the city’s top officials is underway. The game gives the player glimpses of this in a string of newspaper clippings that can be found during gameplay, coupled with an interspersing of Cole’s service in the Marines during the war. Once everything is put together by the end, you have a near-perfect storyline.

I say near-perfect because the development of this game bogged down its own potential. A video game director who’s behavior would be welcomed in a Brazilian junta; a poorly populated 1940s rendition of L.A.; a finnicky motion capture technique that made interrogation impractical; a piss-poor implementation of a penalty system; and most disturbing of all, a dead studio.

Mechanically, it had great and interesting ideas, and if given the room to spread (read: taken out of McNamara’s hands at the time), these ideas could have inspired future developers for the better. Instead, it and the firing of Jason West and Vincent Zampella of Call of Duty fame unearthed a culture of toxicity that the video game industry is still trying to shake off. No matter the intention, eight years in the inferno for a paradoxically half-baked product tells anyone reading up on Team Bondi all they need to know about how things were handled from beginning to end.

To my knowledge, we haven’t had a story that nightmarish before or since then, but there’ve been several close calls. Needless to say, the behind-the-scenes drama that unfolded at Bondi is why I put L.A. Noire so low on my personal tier list. Without the crunch and a better management of time (and perhaps sacking McNamara), L.A. Noire could’ve turned out better than what we got in our timeline.

For a series I’d put firmly in the middle:

So far, I’ve had three different hot takes:

  1. Kratos was right mostly
  2. Boruto’s not that bad mostly
  3. Chainsaw Man is predictable

We’ve got another on the list: The Godfather is Mid. And depending on who you ask, this is either sacrilegious or moot. It’s an influential novel and movie trilogy. It adds nuance to otherwise dastardly characters. It’s a source of inspiration for numerous directors on the big and small screens, but to me, much of this is a little lost in translation. It’s like playing GTA III after reading a list of all the game that have drawn inspiration from it, narratively or mechanically.

It’s not so much that I think it’s unbelievable (as in the laws of logic would never allow it), or that I think it’s terrible (clearly false), or that I’m saying it’s overrated, though others have said that before. It’s more like before and since The Godfather, there’ve been truckloads of mobster movies that I think did better than The Godfather. It might be the emphasis on subtlety that bogs it down for me, but a visual medium like film–while capable of telling instead of showing–should still show instead of tell, or in this case, show more than it tells. From what I remember it was 2/3s tell and 1/3 show.

But it does its job phenomenally well. Inspiration, references, inside jokes (even bad ones); I haven’t found a single person who hasn’t heard of the franchise in one form or another. It took the tropes of the old 1930s and 40s noir films and put new spins on them while also inventing some of their own. Watch a mobster movie or TV show made in recent memory, there’s a good chance that it’ll draw at least one thing from Mario Puzo’s novels or Francis Ford Coppola’s movies.

At this point, I’ve thrown shade at a big movie, suggesting I think there’s something better. Well, not exactly better but more so one I like a whole lot more than The Godfather:

For this one, I was a bit late. The other stuff I’d known about for years; I was first introduced to Black Mass the year it’s film adaptation released.

Channel: Warner Bros. Pictures

In the lead up to the release I read the book by Boston Globe journalists Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neill, intent on getting the full story of it’s star, James “Whitey” Bulger. Interestingly, the movie released a few years after the F.B.I. closed in on him in the summer of 2011 after 12 years on the lam. At first, I thought that the idea was exercised shortly after his arrest in California, but ever since the book was published in 2000 (and of course re-released 15 years later for marketing purposes), different ideas were thrown around to get an adaptation off the ground, but they didn’t exactly take off until 2015.

For my take, I’m sort of glad we got the final product that year as opposed to, say 2005. The movie mostly focuses on Whitey’s activities between 1975 and the mid-80s, but the epilogue detailing Whitey’s and his associates’ fates after the fun’s over is what sticks with me. Some of them snitched and got comparatively lenient sentences, others were thrown in jail for life or were sentenced with lifelong shame for colluding with Whitey Bulger himself, and the rest of the snitches were released earlier than the others for cooperation and continual good behavior.

As for Whitey himself, well as previously mentioned, an unnamed source warned the F.B.I. field office in L.A. that he was seen in Santa Monica, and he faced the consequences of his actions to the tune of two life sentences plus five years and a civil asset forfeiture of his riches totaling $25.2 million and another $19.5 million in restitution. Unfortunately for him, he’d fully serve these sentences on October 30, 2018 when he was bludgeoned to death by another inmate. Seems it was only fitting that his end was as grizzly as his life and leadership of the Winter Hill Gang.

As it stands, this is really the only mobster story that concerns an Irish mobster instead of Italian ones, and I’m always looking for stories on other mobsters the world over, not necessarily Cosa Nostra style. As of writing this, I’m trying to do some research on the Triads and the Yakuza for a story idea I have set in East Asia and concerning some of these characters. Fingers crossed, the research I do on these serves me well when I open a new Word document and get to typing. And it’ll also serve me when it comes to researching organized crime in other parts of the world. I know that they’re all there, it’s just that perhaps that I’m a New Yorker, a resident of the city where arguably the Mafia started and thrived, the origins of the Mafia and subsequent media genres thrives in this city, and most mobsters here being Italian or Jewish (see Kosher Nostra/Jewish-American organized crime for more details) sort of colors my view and at times my expectations of organized crime rackets, even fictional ones I hear about or create myself.

I also want to give a few honorable mentions to a few other properties I either haven’t seen but heard were good or I have seen but haven’t given them a proper ranking yet.

  • Casino (1995) — owing to what I’d been talking about with mobsters inspiring Hollywood, Frank Rosenthal’s gambling prospects were an interesting choice that I believe paid off quite well.
  • Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998) — it meets my personal criteria of a crime movie and while I’ve neither read the book nor watched the movie, the premise seems like it’s worth a watch or read or both. If you’ve read the book, watched the movie, or both, don’t spoil me. I wanna go in blind.
  • To Live and Die in Los Angeles (1988) — also meets my criteria, but deals more with high crimes. I’ll rank it properly once I see it… in 10 years.
  • Fargo (1996) — The cinematic equivalent of you don’t have to do anything wrong for a plan to cock up disastrously. If anything, if anyone before this thought the Upper Midwest was to chaste for criminal behavior than digging through news archives of high profile crimes should change that perception. Fun fact: I watched this prior to typing my third manuscript. I anticipated a few scenes where the characters would pass the time talking about recently released movies and this was up there along with Waterworld, Fatal Attraction, and Pretty Woman. Fargo didn’t make the cut, as I recall.
  • Miller’s Crossing (1990) — You can’t really go wrong with the Coen brothers. The synopsis itself sounds quite complicated, wait ’til I see it in action; and finally;
  • No Country For Old Men (2007) — another Coen bros. flick, I saw this at a relative’s house a few years ago, and as cool as it was then, I think it’s worth a rewatch. I don’t know why films did and some still do this, but quiet mumbling as dialogue interspersed with operatic action noise is goddamn annoying. Dramatic or not, it makes me feel like I’m getting long in the tooth when a dialogue scene is near mute while the action scenes have the loudness of artillery volley fire.

Quite a list to try and rank properly. Maybe I’ll come back to this in the future.

Long-awaited Update

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Doing what I should’ve done about a month ago.

Hello, subscribers and tourists catching this on the fly. I’m known as the one who publishes ironically non-controversial takes on entertainment, mostly video games and animanga as of late. As I recall, the only hot takes I have on hand are these three:

1. Kratos did nothing wrong (sorta)

2. Boruto is slightly above average, and;

3. Chainsaw Man was predictable (to me)

And some others that might be expressed in the future. I’m writing to inform you all of something I should have updated everyone on in October 2023. After ten long years, I’d finally self-published my book. It’s called Dawn of Freedom. It’s a fictional crime story set in the early 2010s in New York, which was modern-day when I wrote it years ago. I’d struggled trying to navigate the publishing world and had to rewrite the manuscript multiple times, but I pushed through and saw it come to print. If you’d like to check it out, I have an Amazon link below for you.

PROOF: Dawn of Freedom https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CJSWNHSG?ref=ppx_pop_mob_ap_share

Available in print and ebook form.

The Hunt for Unsung Manga

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I’ve come across a lot of manga series over the years, and while I don’t remember all of them, if I had something similar to My Anime List, I’d probably rank the ones I’ve read or heard of in terms of read (past tense), reading, going to read, or no interest; and based on what I’ve recommended across this blog this year, I’d say that there’s going to be a lot of series that the average manga reader has never heard of or can’t find through conventional means. However long you’ve read manga or watched some of their corresponding anime, you’ve undeniably heard of series like Naruto, Bleach, Dragon Ball, or One Piece. And you know some recent trendsetters by name: Attack on Titan, Sword Art Online, KonoSuba, My Hero Academia, etc.

But be honest with me: before reading some of my entries from this year, did you ever know about Wave, Listen to Me? Or Rokudenashi Blues? How about House of Five Leaves? Mashle? Black Torch? No? Well, that’s to be expected. Some of these have only recently gotten their well-earned press and praise and the others rode that ship ages ago. Rokudenashi, for instance, is from the 1980s and it shows.

Only JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure still looks like this.

This quest of mine to find and screen through manga we’ve never heard of or haven’t heard much about is in equal measures personal and exciting. Personally, I don’t mind much of the series that get praised online these days or even IRL, but sometimes the praise can be a bit much. Although I enjoyed Chainsaw Man, my previous excursion with Black Torch by Tsuyoshi Takaki subconsciously colored my perception of the anime. It took me a while to realize how similar they were in structure, but fortunately for Tatsuki Fujimoto, CSM is more comical in comparison. Takaki’s manga seems to have been a victim of the times.

As for the excitement, call it the general sense of joy that comes with discovering something new. And it’s not these are hard to find. Google and Bing are likely to have them indexed and sites like Mangadex may have it in the archives. As for discovering the series myself, some series were the result of accidental Google searches. Others came from digging through the Manga Plus front page or reading an article about supposedly underrated series.

This one specifically came from when I was trying to Google Do You Love Your Mom, AKA the MILF-sekai.

Alternatively, there’s online forums dedicated to discussing manga, the most common one for me being Reddit. It is worth keeping in mind that sites like this will have a younger audience (i.e. early middle school to middle high school age), so what was popular when you were graduating is gonna be seen as old by the time some of these users are your age. I’m writing from personal experience and the weight of this gap is felt for me, but hey, at least Yu-Gi-Oh! and Pokémon still make the rounds, even through memes.

Another point to bear in mind is availability. There’s a difference between knowing the name of a series and knowing where to read it. Mangadex is a weeb’s go-to for series that are running but can’t be easily found, but there’s a chance the series in particular is available to the public in some form or another elsewhere. The only barrier in that aspect would perhaps be the age of the reader or just a trip to the local bookstore. Any Barnes & Noble employee worth their salt would know better than to let a high schooler go home with a raunchy series, but let’s be real there’s always a loophole. Grab a friend who’s older than 18 or go online like everyone else.

Going back to Mangadex, there’s no shortage there of the big four genres of Shonen, Seinen, Shojo and Josei, but if you want something 18+/hentai, then Mangadex will not help you. Even these sites have their limits, and that’s fine. Digging through a pirate site that’ll have what you’re looking for is tricky. In my experience, some pirate sites are overridden with pop-up ads that open a new tab bursting with malware, and it isn’t always when looking for hentai. Some Korean manhwa get scanned and translated into multiple languages by groups advertising these services on donation/contributor sites like Patreon, and many of the pirate sites that they end up on are all third party hosts.

Other sites like Webtoon or Toomics do host them free of all the issues that come with a pirate site, but sometimes have a string or two attached. I’m not lambasting these sites for putting walls up to entry. That’s what deserves praise. It may sound odd of me to admit to pirating while also condemning it, but I’ve been clear on where I stand on that. For some things that, thanks to the passage of time, have grown increasingly difficult to find conventionally, piracy is the most convenient* way to experience it firsthand; and I apply these same rules for series that have concluded or ongoing series that aren’t available in your region (*it’s not always reliable though).

For something ongoing, general or NSFW audience notwithstanding, if you’ve got the means to do so, it’s heavily implored that official releases are supported and as tempting as it is to head for the raw, untranslated version, I won’t act like I have the authority to stop you but for some series, unless you can read and speak fluent Japanese or Korean, I don’t recommend pulling double duty running the dialogue and speech bubbles through Google Translate. Depending on how it’s written, straight translations will contain slang and references that are gonna get lost that way. Translate has gotten better over the years, but it’s no substitute for a structured class. And finally, these languages have scripts that can and do show up as calligraphic works of art. I find it beautiful, but tracing the damn characters into Translate, especially on mobile, gets tedious quickly.

Now I’ve not abandoned or wholly used uncommon means of getting to my favorite series. I recently downloaded the Shonen Jump app on my phone and I have a tab on my computer logged into Manga Plus, and true to the title of this week’s post, I’ve discovered a new manga series that I’d like to explore further called Beat & Motion.

Take this as more of an exploration for how to discover new or underappreciated series and my experiences doing so. My method of doing so, though, is quite slapdash and haphazard, so if there’s a more sensible way of going about this, use that method to the fullest extent. Only go on sites you trust, and please use a VPN of some kind. Opera and its GX variant go a long way, but if you have the means to my recommendations come from those that I’ve seen sponsored on YouTube including but not limited to Dashlane, Atlas, Express, Nord, and Private Internet Access. I like to think everyone is in wide agreement that nothing ruins the fun of reading manga/watching anime more than when a simple mouse click puts you on a site with malware on it.

But of course remember to have fun with what you find.

Black Lagoon Motherf[sheep noises]r

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*gunshots*

This series needs no introduction. It’s famous in the animanga circle for its name, its reputation, its characters, its violence and most of all its f[Boost mobile chirp]ng swear count.

Channel: Edwin De Paz

It’s mostly famous by its anime, but it started off as a manga by Rei Hiroe in April 2002 and has run ever since in the Seinen manga magazine Gene-X, for far, far longer than the anime and its OVA ever did. The clip above (which is understandably though unfortunately age-restricted) is one I will see sometimes on YouTube or Reddit because of course. It’s badass, it’s f[monkey screeches]ng awesome, but around the gratuitous gory action is an appropriately mature story.

I don’t remember when or how I learned of Black Lagoon, but I think it was through some WatchMojo clips about anime gunslingers that introduced me to the series, and it wasn’t until I was in the middle of college that I got around to watching it properly. Before we begin describing the series, no matter your opinion on subs or dubs, I heavily implore you to watch it however you can in English. I mean zero disrespect or offense to the original Japanese VAs, but the writing of the dub makes all the swearing necessary. F[gun cocking]k hits far harder in this anime when accompanied by the sounds of a firing range in comparison.

The premise is this: in the mid-1990s, Tokyo-based salaryman 25-year-old Rokuro “Rock” Okajima and a department chief are hijacked in the South China Sea by a trio of pirates onboard the Black Lagoon PT boat and calling themselves Lagoon Company. The chief leaves Rock to his fate and he joins up with Lagoon Company’s members consisting of Vietnam vet Dutch, Chinese-American gunslinger Rebecca “Revy” Lee, and South Florida computer programmer, Benny.

As the fourth face of Lagoon Company, Rock is the glorified diplomat if Dutch is unavailable, especially since there’s an equal or greater amount of time on land than on sea, mostly in the fictional border city of Roanapur, Thailand. This base of theirs is also home to many more organized crime syndicates the world over including but not limited to Colombian cartels, Russian and Sicilian mobs, the Triads, and the Yakuza.

As for the cast of characters Lagoon Company faces, it’s quite a mixed bag. Just about everyone in the story is motivated by coin, though there’s a fair few who have their own ideals and tenets, not all of them savory or agreeable. Criminals, extremist organizations, drug lords, and general psychopaths are drawn like moths to flame.

Hiroe’s inspiration for Black Lagoon was inspired in triplicate: news reports about piracy in the South China Sea from the 1990s (hence the setting), the writing drew from a variety of influence like Stephen King and James Ellroy, filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino and John Woo, and overall crime noir and Hong Kong action cinema, and other mangaka like Kenichi Sonoda who created Gunsmith Cats (another series I wish to cover one day) and Akihiro Ito who created Geobreeders.

The characters and setting are all diverse in appearance and in skillset, especially protagonist Rock who skirts by on a lack of battle sense with the powers of negotiation and diplomacy. The setting of Roanapur among other places would make the guy an ill fit since he’s not really seen as bloodthirsty as the others, but then again, the wider cast of characters is exactly that unpredictable, or (spoiler incoming) you wouldn’t really expect a guy like this to be an arsonist, would you?

Speaking of which, this speaks to the creativity of Hiroe, understanding that there’s no bog-standard look for a criminal. Some dress in suits, others are tattered, and the rest are casually dressed. The same goes for some of the child characters in the show. Conceptually, almost everything is thrown into the kitchen sink when designing a character and putting them in the story.

As for the chapters themselves, Hiroe has stated in interviews that unlike mangaka who release weekly chapters, he employs a slower approach, often taking as long as a month to release a new chapter, and normally for two reasons: to avoid burnout experienced by mangaka of several popular series still running, and also for mental health reasons. For what its worth, if the research for the series has him glued to news screens and snippets combing over crime on international waters, then it can get daunting keeping it plausible yet exciting. Or if its a series of other things that see him taking multiple hiatuses from Black Lagoon, then whatever happens, the series already gets high praise online and in real life from Japanese and western audiences alike, and not to sign a Death Note of sorts, but even in the worst case scenario, his flagship series will progress toward an ending, even if it isn’t him specifically who will finish it.

Someone will be there to finish it, with him or for him. And no matter what, Black Lagoon started with a bang and I sure hope that when it eventually ends, it ends with a f[swords clanging]ng bang.

This week’s recommendation is the YouTube channel RunJDRun.

https://www.youtube.com/@runJDrun/about

RunJDRun is the gaming channel of John David “JD” Witherspoon, son of late comedian John Witherspoon. Beginning in June 2009, he hosts Let’s Plays primarily on this channel either by himself or with friends, but also has commentary videos on video games or just in general. JD also has a podcast that he co-hosts with his friend Paul. He normally uploads daily, and like his father, he also has TV appearances and performs stand-up from time to time in the Los Angeles area.

Boruto: TBV Chapter 3

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Trickle down exposition

I haven’t forgotten about this month’s release of the latest chapter. Just spent the last two days studying it and organizing my thoughts so far. Based on what I saw of this chapter, we have more exposition of what we saw in the first two chapters followed by a last-minute twist.

Of the things introduced and explained in the chapter, Boruto expands on what the Uzuhiko technique. The basics are that it’s tied to the planet’s rotation. If hit with the Jutsu, the afflicted will be hit with a semi-permanent sense of “the spins,” so to speak. It can run for as long as the Jutsu caster (read: Boruto) desires, or until the afflicted (read: Code) dies — and this new teenage Boruto seems to be happy with the latter.

A technique that causes whoever’s hit by it to nearly infinitely spin in some manner… that sounds familiar…

Honestly, not the first time the franchise made a JoJo reference.

So let’s backtrack a bit in regard to the Rasengan. So far we have the following users:

  • Jiraiya
  • Minato Namikaze
  • Konohamaru Sarutobi
  • Naruto Uzumaki
  • Boruto Uzumaki
  • Sasuke Uchiha*
  • Kakashi Hatake

For Sasuke, he used it as a demonstration before asking Boruto if he could develop it himself. After that, he went through an intense and heated training session from Konohamaru before revealing to Sasuke the results of admittedly three days of training. Before him, Naruto worked on the Jutsu with Jiraiya’s guidance for little over a week, and before him, Minato developed the Jutsu over the course of three years.

Furthermore, Minato’s direct legacy has accidentally or deliberately put their own spin on the Jutsu, no pun intended. Naruto developed the Rasenshuriken, a powerful Jutsu that was unfortunately shelved as a double-edged sword, at least until the Akatsuki brought Pain to the Leaf Village.

For Boruto, the first of several variants had come in the form of the Vanishing Rasengan, though he didn’t acknowledge it until he, Sasuke, and the Gokage fought Momoshiki in the other dimension.

So this Jutsu keeps Code immobile yet conscious to answer a question on Boruto’s mind: the location and status of the Ten Tails. Keep this nugget in mind, it’ll be important toward the end. Just as the interrogation gets moving, Leaf ninja respond to the rogue ninja in their village, among the responding party is the object of Boruto’s vengeance: Kawaki. Speaking of Kawaki, he was in contact with Shikamaru who gives him the go-ahead for a kill order, but the opportunity is missed when Code summons a claw grime to escape through.

Earlier I wrote that Boruto was asking about whether Code knew the location and status of the Ten Tails. Out of concern for the safety of the world? Well, let me clarify: the tone of voice suggested by the panel was less of a desperation and concern and more of a boast, as if to say that after 2.5 years of training and keeping an eye out for Code, Boruto is finally one step ahead. This is where that twist comes in: before Code could get away, Boruto planted a mechanical toad on Code’s person.

Credit: Shueisha, Mikio Ikemoto, Masashi Kishimoto

Kawaki lost his chance to deliver the final blow and will most likely blame Boruto for allowing him to run off, but the last panel reveals why he allowed him to get away. Observe:

Creator: Shueisha, Mikio Ikemoto, Masashi Kishimoto

So now we wait for the week of November 20 to learn how this happened to the Ten Tails. Was it Boruto’s doing? Borushiki? Did he learn it from Sasuke? However we get to that answer it will likely be over the course of the next few months. As far as this chapter goes, it steadily creeps back into the trickle down expositional method that seems to be more emblematic of Kishimoto than Kodachi who seemed to employ what I believe was a healthy zigzag pattern of storytelling.

Clearly, I’d like to see more of this from the succeeding chapters, but it’ll probably be until at least January or February when we get more of these types of answers, and while this is largely fantasy, some of the answers to be revealed may ironically be less fantastical than whatever theories are out there proposing. But we’ll get them soon enough.

How I Found VTubers

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Like most things, it was slow and steady

The topic of VTubers is somewhat old hat as of writing this so nothing I write will be new, but my posts since the beginning have mostly always been like that so structurally, nothing’s changing. As for the topic itself, others have mentioned VTubers in the past before and more succinctly so I won’t go into the history as much here. But in case you’re curious on what VTubers are, Gigguk is down below to catch you up to speed. Granted, the video is from October 2020, but all things considered the landscape hasn’t changed all that much.

Channel: Gigguk

All in all, there’s some debate over the beginning of VTubing, but it’s widely accepted that the VTuber Kizuna Ai is the one to spread the idea and popularize it worldwide. Kizuna Ai debuted in November 2016, and many more have followed, mostly of Japanese origin though several from outside Japan, notably the U.S. and U.K. have had their own similar debuts. It wasn’t until 2020, that I was exposed to many of the VTubers mentioned in the video above and the talent agencies (known as tarentos in Japan) that host them and these days many of the notable and newer ones have in some manner populated my feed.

Call me paranoid and nonsensical, but I’d never had that much trust in a machine or any such program. The irony to this was that when I was in Army boot camp initially, I was set for a military occupational specialty (MOS) that would’ve had me working with telecoms networking at the time and here I am with a man vs. technology complex. It’s not all that special, humans have always looked at the strange and foreign with suspicion, but for me it’s just irrational. When I was 16, I binged all the Terminator movies in the lead up to the great disappointment known as Terminator: Genisys and I’ve always chalked that up to the reason I look at new tech with the stink eye.

Nowadays, I don’t really mind the direction AI tech is going since most of the time we’re merely putting in silly prompts and in my case, general history questions. Could we one day mess around and find out Skynet style? Who knows? We’ve got to wait and see. For my exposure to VTubers, it wasn’t around 2019 going into ’20 that I’d gotten more exposure, mostly by proxy through the Trash Taste Podcast when the boys invited VTuber Mori Calliope to the show.

Channel: Trash Taste

And it wouldn’t be the only time a VTuber appeared on the podcast or even individually with the boys on their own channels. Speaking of Kizuna Ai, Joey had her on his channel a few years ago. Gigguk did a few rare collabs with the likes of Hime Hajime, and followers of CDawgVA, the thickest Welsh boy, are very familiar with his dear friend Ironmouse and the pathetic VTuber Rainhoe. These are all jokes, of course. Check them all out when you have the time.

I’d say that VTubers like these helped introduce me to others in my feed as well as the talent agencies that host them. As explained by Gigguk in the first video here, some of the appeal of VTubers comes from the personality themselves and/or the associated lore, other times there’s something unique that comes with VTubers especially in the realm of video gaming where you’ll find a lot of them, and the rest of the time they’re recounting humorous or embarrassing stories or otherwise screwing around. No matter how many clips I find in my feed, this one of VTuber Amano Pikamee making a JoJo reference is always a personal favorite of mine.

Channel: Giobun

But even outside the realm of traditional entertainment, sometimes YouTubers outside Japan have jumped aboard the trend themselves for a variety of reasons and purposes. Back in April, I recommended the YouTube channel Rev Says Desu for his commentary on controversies in and around the anime community, notably in online forums like Twitter. Rev himself uses a VTuber model in his videos and often due to the nature of the content within his videos, he’s normally subject to demonetization at the least and harassment at the most, largely because many of the people he puts on blast from Twitter are a minority of firebrands. Most of Twitter isn’t like that I’m aware, but this is more of a problem of popular and social media giving a lot of power to people who demonstrate that they shouldn’t have it. An age-old bugbear that should’ve been exterminated years ago.

On a more lighthearted note, the messing around, joke around, fun type of VTuber is the kind that has its appeal the world over and has inspired individuals outside Japan as well as English language options being made available for Japan-based VTubers, including but not limited to those associated with the Nijisanji and/or Hololive agencies, sometimes spawning collabs and memes especially in forums like r/Animemes or its sister forum r/goodanimemes. For a while, Gawr Gura and Watson Amelia were featured quite a bit in these subs as one example.

Creator: phdpigeon

And there’s lots more fanart and such to go around.

For my mileage, I’ve come to accept that VTubers are another arm of Japanese pop culture jumping ship and spreading to the rest of the world and rapidly. As Gigguk had mentioned in the above video, some would argue that it’s a fad, a passing fancy, but 2024 is down the street and we still have VTubers debuting these days long after Kizuna Ai helped break the mold, most likely with aid from pioneers from years before. Whatever comes after VTubers I think it’ll be a while before we see it.

This week’s recommendation is a channel known as The4thSnake.

https://www.youtube.com/@The4thSnake/about

I’ve mentioned this channel on other posts before. This channel is dedicated mainly to fighting games, their lore, and individual plot points, but takes it a step further by mentioning the plots of specific characters over the course of a series’ timeline, clarifying messy plot points, among other stuff. The4thSnake specializes in Mortal Kombat lore and collabs loads of times with another channel I’ve mentioned before: TrueUnderDawgGaming. And since Mortal Kombat 1 has been out for about a month at this point, both of them are set to capitalize on the new lore brought about by this latest installment of Mortal Kombat.

Rooster Teeth On the Ropes

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It really hurts to see.

I close off this weekend threefold dive on a depressing note about a company that I have an interesting relationship with. Not interesting in a negative way, more like in the sense that I found out about the company by proxy, but didn’t dedicate myself to watching it regularly until I discovered a series that really grabbed me. Notably, this one:

To elaborate further, I recall in early 2013 hearing about Dead Space 3 and at the time, I used to binge watch the YouTube channel TheRadBrad as my one and only source of gameplay on that specific game. Later in the year, I came back to play catch-ups on my way into the 10th grade and at the time, ads on YouTube weren’t as problematic as they are today. One of those ads was about a bunch of geeks from a channel called Achievement Hunter dressing one of their kids up in a suit full of screens and monitors to mimic the Internet.

This ad ran for quite some time, but I remember furiously mashing the mouse on the Skip Ad button because I needed, needed to watch more footage of this Dead Space 3 gameplay. I hadn’t thought about that ad ever since and I think when I tried looking for it on the Rooster Teeth website, I couldn’t find anything on it, but over the years, I’d be further exposed to Rooster Teeth by proxy, from old Achievement Hunter guides and references to what was then the game with the Guinness World Record for Most F-bombs Dropped.

Developer: 2K Czech, Publisher: 2K, Channel: Rooster Teeth

It lost this record to Grand Theft Auto V by a mountainous margin, by the way. By 2018, I was in community college and a subscriber of WatchMojo.com, one of their videos being published during the New Year being that of a video about online animated shows that were worth a watch, the runner-up as I recall being the anime-style series RWBY spearheaded by the late Monty Oum.

In my research years ago, I’d learned that the martial artist and cinematographer had credits in machinima (not that one) after choreographing a video known as Haloid, a blend of elements from Halo and elements from Metroid including their star characters, Master Chief and Samus respectively.

He sneak-peeked the last series he would ever work on on Rooster Teeth’s main channel in November 2012, debuted its first episode in Fall of 2013 and continued to work on the series until sadly losing his life due to an allergic reaction during a standard medical procedure in February 2015, after which RT vowed to pick up the slack and keep the show going. In the beginning, the CGI used to make the show was imperfect but the fighting choreography was stellar and spectacular. I remember hearing from a different WatchMojo.com video that when Bruce Lee was on camera, the studios had to slow it down to capture his moves, and I remember rewatching scenes like that whenever I came across Monty Oum’s work on either RWBY or Rooster Teeth’s other flagship series, Red vs Blue.

Following Oum’s death, RWBY’s animation started to look crisper, but at the cost of the plot. When I tried looking for evidence of trouble under the hood for RWBY, I couldn’t find a lot of information that was still available after all this time. The controversies around just RWBY are enough for their own blog post that I may make in the future, but from what I remember and have read in forums, creatives at RWBY or just in Rooster Teeth would pitch ideas only for others to steal and discredit them later on. The accusations are serious and outside of Twitlongers and written descriptions of the associated actions, there’s not a lot of physical evidence that is guaranteed to stay up with a history of slamming legitimate critics and trolls indiscriminately, but that’s getting ahead of the game. Still, it sets the tone for what’s going to be covered in this post. I’ve covered how I discovered and eventually subscribed to Rooster Teeth; here comes the part where I unearth the parts that drove me away from them, and for many watching, the story may sound somewhat familiar.

Long time fans of RT may recall when Levar Burton’s daughter Mica Burton joined the Achievement Hunter boys for a short time and appeared so far in about two episodes, a Minecraft Let’s Play and an Off Topic Podcast episode.

During the podcast appearance, I believe she brought forth a criticism leveraged against her, but in a display of the Streisand effect, further criticism and harassment followed. In April 2018, she moved back to LA to continue a career in acting, for a long time, it was speculated that fan backlash caused her to leave, but both Mica and her father pointed the finger at RT for failing to defend her during this time.

Sometime later in December 2018, Machinima’s (yes, that one) old assets and Rooster Teeth merged into Otter Media which was then bought out by Warner Bros. When companies merge, often that means that multiple people in similar roles at different companies are now in those same roles at one company and so the summer of 2019 brought layoffs to Rooster Teeth Productions with some of the Achievement Hunter crew on the chopping block as well. About 50 people were axed by September of that year and the following month, after riding the waves of success with Rooster Teeth original shorts and skits earlier that year, the company came down and hard.

One of the original founders, Burnie Burns, announced that he and his then-fiancé, Ashley, were off to start anew in Australia, technically making him the second figure to be absent from RT content except for RVB, the other being a man I always referred to as the Ghost of RT with how little he showed up, Jason Saldaña.

Then again, r/roosterteeth explained that Jason’s not the kind of guy to get in front of the camera like that, being present in only two skits to date, while the rest of his work is either voiced or far away from RT. And fair enough, founding a company doesn’t mean being its face, and I think Jason is one of the only few free of any RT-related controversies, unless this is his testimony:

Channel: Rooster Teeth

The controversies, however, would further mount. I said yesterday that 2020 would be forgotten due to all that went wrong that year though that was in the context of a manga that debuted that year. In this context, a lot went wrong for Rooster Teeth and then some. During the summer BLM protests, the company and much of the entertainment industry as a whole in the West vowed to make changes and have conversations about racism after witnessing then-Minneapolis cop Derek Chauvin kneel on George Floyd’s neck after nearly nine minutes, Rooster Teeth being one of them.

After this, the company seemed to be on a right track, quickly amending this injustice after heeding comments made by the Burtons before and former member Fiona Nova at the time, but trouble was still brewing behind the scenes. Rooster Teeth hasn’t had the best approach to handling criticism before or since. During one Off Topic Podcast episode in June 2020, they used to go by the internet-wide mantra of “don’t feed the trolls,” only to go back on this and fight them hard which some believe led to the adverse effect of two of their members being exposed for unsavory behavior, Ryan Haywood of Achievement Hunter and Adam Kovic of Funhaus, another RT production.

This was exposed in October 2020 when Kovic was fired for what I think was trespassing, though his transgressions were lumped in with Ryan Haywood’s behavior which was even worse. Over the years, it had been found out through doxing on 4chan that he was grooming several AH fans, some of whom were under the age of consent. Many of them came out and recounted being threatened into silence and in late October 2020, AH’s Jack Pattillo and Michael Jones issued a statement that Ryan was gone from the company for good. Any and all instances of his history at the company were scrubbed, save for archives from the last decade, his Twitch channel was axed in January of 2021 and that was seemingly the end of that save for a brief return to the Internet the first week of January.

That being said, scrubbing the company of unscrupulous personalities while keeping good people in seemed to be especially hard in the years since. Not exactly limited to RT as a whole (as attested by r/Army among others), but of all the places to have nepotism and favoritism, a production company with as of yet incomplete series is one of the worst places to have it. Away from the behind the scenes controversies that are causing people to leave, some shows are tanking or were ruined by executive meddling. Their show, gen:LOCK hit the ground running in the first season, but the second season makes Seven Deadly Sins season 3 look like a Spielberg production.

Channel: Mrcheese

And wouldn’t you know it, behind the scenes drama had an adverse effect on the production of this series while others either went on silent hiatus or were canned without our knowledge. RWBY still has no news behind, the series Recorded by Arizal has been silent since January 2021 (which was one series I was really looking forward to), and Nomad of Nowhere from a few years before that only has one season, but was set up for a few more to follow.

Now, most studios behind a lot of our favorite series and movies have had behind the scenes setbacks before, and only a few of the productions have been muddled or ruined by bad decisions from on high. But RT’s acquisition and shifting of hands and responsibilities seems to be a case of ruinous overstretching, and axing many decent series only to see a good series start strong and end badly.

So the problems that have kept me from any such RT-related content comes from:

  • the failure of the staff to take care of their members
  • behind the scenes controversies
  • firing or letting the wrong people go (see: Vic Mignogna)
  • putting the wrong people in positions of power; and
  • letting the wrong people head delicate projects (see: Gray Haddock)

They did get a success boost during the pandemic focusing on their several podcasts, some of which I listened to at the time, but it seems that those may be the last few reliable sources of income with recent videos failing to garner the same views as they had in the early-to-mid 2010s while the ones that do are trounced with an abysmal like-to-dislike ratio visible only to those who use the addons.

Several YouTubers have made videos on RT’s decline and possible downfall which seems more and more likely now that they’ve been moving their popular series onto their website, citing ad revenue issues. I read one comment under a Clownfish TV video that claimed that much of what’s been going on with Rooster Teeth has also happened to Machinima about a decade ago.

If that is the case, then it serves as a lesson for what the people can do to avoid this next time if RT goes under. It just crossed the 20-year mark since its founding and while I was there mainly for RWBY and Achievement Hunter, I wouldn’t have minded the changes made if they were consistent and kept up with the tempo of the company based on what I’d seen since. New personalities with their own comedic takes and such can keep things new and fresh and even produce their own talents within or without the talent, as seen with the Red Web podcast or the game show Chump. So it’s not like RT can’t attract talent; rather the people they have to answer to above them appear to be chasing short-term trends hoping for long-term benefits and it’s anyone’s guess really as to whether that means good or bad things for a project.

As for the future of RT, that’s up in the air. The personalities that left in the years prior have found their success in other ventures, and I believe the ones still there will be able to stay afloat wherever they end up. They’ve got repertoires of content that would make for a better revival of G4TV for example instead of what we got last year, but it’ll be a hard day for much of the long-time personalities and the diehard fans and the shows they love. It’ll take a hell of a miracle to bring them back up to speed if it still can. If you want a channel that covers Rooster Teeth more concisely, I personally recommend this channel: TheSneezingMonkey for more details.

https://www.youtube.com/@TheSneezingMonkey/about