Posted in: Games, Video Games, YouTube | Tagged: Gizmodo, pewdiepie
PewDiePie Is Trolling The Media, And Neither Him Nor Us Have Learned Anything
You'd think after the fallout from all of the Disney and YouTube Red stuff, PewDiePie (Felix Kjellberg) might want to take a break for like, a couple moments. Regather, refocus, and plan out where to take his channel moving forward. If he has, his new direction is an interesting one: Trolling his fans and the media with more Hitler/Nazi jokes.
The video above is Felix playing Conan: Exiles, with the twist that he's gone back in time to show Hitler as an angry man with a tiny dick. It's the kind of antagonizing clickbait video that's so obvious, you can see the friggin' hook. You can tell he's messing around in a game that already has a ton of issues going for it, while at the same time making content specifically geared toward driving the press insane. And it worked as Gizmodo were the first to jump on this one earlier today, denouncing it as a "failed attempt to be 'edgy'" and calling the YouTube star a "petulant doofus." Unfortunately, that includes the writer at Gizmodo who opted to turn it into an article today rather than just moving on and letting the video die as it is: dumb childish humor made to get people in media to write about it and prove his point.
Say what you want about PewDiePie, but the guy didn't just become a success screaming at games. There were many just like him when he started, but the reason he took off was because he knew what kind of videos to make and how to target an audience. It stands to reason that if he wants to target members of the press for another "see what I'm talking about" type of video, he's got the means to do so. You can't fault Gizmodo for biting the hook, but you can give them grief for not seeing it coming. And they won't be the only ones to jump back on the "look at this racist/look at this moron" bandwagon, give it 24 hours and watch the stories pile up as members of the press line up to rehash this story from a month ago for a new set of clicks.
What they don't realize is that we're all being trolled and we'll soon be in another video about how the press is out to get him. As for us, we're not out to get him, we're just here to point out how stupid this all is. It would be really nice if Pewds went back to playing TTT with other gamers and if Gizmodo went back to doing all their stories on technology… But hey, I can dream.