Comment by Capricorn2481

> Respectfully, you are taking him far too seriously. He is playing the character of a drunk, grumpy Scottish guy complaining about things

That is a very tired thing to say. You don't need to look that hard to see how untrue this is. Take a brief glance at his twitter or his communities and you'll see how much of a "character" it is. They barely even talk about media anymore. They post the same gender war slop shit that bots are posting all over Reddit right now. Critical Drinker takes a bit of a "boiling the frog" approach to his content and his true character isn't obvious on a few listens.

> I am not a fan of him and don't like the culture war stuff

You are likely underestimating how much he does it now. It's night and day different from his earlier work. He was a ghost writer for James Patterson. He knows how to follow the money. He's essentially a parody of himself now.

> and he has much valid criticism of films/games where he highlights how badly written many of them are

I don't think such a vague and easy to defend criticism is worth handwaving the substance of the channel. People have been pointing and laughing at video game writing for 30 years. That's an uncontroversial vague post. And that is the best you're going to get from him, because he rarely talks about games or films in a specific way, he usually just copy pastes the same beat for beat plot complaints that better critics have, and putting an anti woke slant on it. Sometimes he reviews shit he hasn't even seen or played because he wants to get in on the discussion.

> He has a huge fan base on YouTube. You don't get that by being dull or not having any valid criticisms. You are way off base

Huh? Sure you do, if it has morphed from entertainment to outrage bait. That is dull, and profitable in the algorithm age. Are you under the impression cynical, lazy pop posting cannot survive on Youtube?

> I would imagine he has a more diverse audience than you would expect

I don't recall saying his audience wasn't diverse, I said his fans often don't play video games. So it's annoying to see people that don't play video games weigh in on the problems with the industry. It's nakedly obvious to the people that have grown up loving games when they are talking to a person who has just engaged with outrage content over the medium and not actually held a controller.

> A lot of people like watching people shit on popular media. Cinemasins was doing the exact same thing a decade ago

Ooph. That's exactly my point, though. Cinemasins is the kind of low brow film criticism that people who enjoy film will despise. It's pop entertainment, which is harmless, but there are 1,000 more interesting channels that can talk about film and are still entertaining. So when someone comes into a film space and you can tell they are just regurgitating Cinemasins videos, it's pretty clear they are not film watchers.

The difference is Critical Drinker has leaned heavily into the culture war stuff and has convinced a legion of fans that the reason everything is bad is down to a bunch of easily violated wokeness rules. I don't necessarily like the movies he dislikes, but the conclusions he comes to and the audience he caters to moronically shove the same 4 woke buttons into any media discussion, ad infinitum. It's extremely reactionary content. Every woman lead is a diversity hire, but every male lead in a bad movie is just an "unfortunate miss." Everything "woke" is going to fail, except whoops, for all of those things that were wildly successful, those are actually not woke anymore. It's just a channel that actively diverts discussion away from actual criticism, and makes it about algorithmically pleasing political content.

One of the funniest things I see is when Critical Drinker fans want us to return to non-woke franchises like...Metal Gear Solid. Maybe the gayest franchise of all time. A game where woke writers weren't trying to humiliate men! Except you're actually disarmed and ass kicked by your surrogate mother like 40 times.