#i love minecraft so much ive played it for so long and watching ryan play it for the first time is so fun

[trashworldblog]

is episode was made FOR ME

[monarchisms]

30, 33, 40, 49 for AH Ask Meme ☆

this is gonna a pain in the ass to type on mobile lol

30. Thoughts on Ryan?

lovely nerd dad. i enjoy his twitch streams whenever i can watch them live. technical difficulties is an absolute banger of a series. it's a highlight of my monday mornings.

33. Thoughts on Jeremy?

absolute delight. jeremy is so fucking talented, and i love the energy he brings to every video he's in. i am soooo happy AH hired him; it was such a good decision.

40. Favorite in the support room?

that's a tough question, since they're all lovely. right now, it's a tie between alec and larry for me.

49. Has AH ever helped you through a hard time in your life?

absolutely. multiple hard times, to be honest. there's been a lot of ups and downs since before i started watching AH in 2014. i rarely talk about my personal life here, but i don't mind doing it for this question.

you see, i haven't had the best time growing up. i've grown to dislike my siblings, and i've been distant with my parents, especially my dad, ever since they divorced. i've had a few great friends in school, but other than that, i've been alone pretty much my entire life. i just isolated myself. it's still like that to this day.

for as long as i can remember, i resorted to youtube (and tumblr, when i was old enough) for some escapism. i enjoyed lots of web cartoons and fan animations of my favorite media. when i was getting more into let's plays, i only knew a few like game grumps and (before i knew how shitty he was) cryaotic. i wanted to follow more people.

the stars aligned when i saw rage quit videos on my dashboard one day. i thought michael was really funny, and wanted to check out more of his stuff. i watched more episodes of rage quit on the rt channel, thanks to that and the AH logo showing up at the beginning of those vids. i watched them in a random order, and had a damn good time.

having some knowledge of rt at that point, i binged the popular AH series like minecraft, versus, and gta iv and v. cloudberry kingdom, mari0, and the rage quit episodes with gavin will forever hold a special place in my heart.

i was a casual fan at that point, but i wanted to do more. i think i was 13 or 14 when i wanted to make fan content. other people's fanstuff on tumblr inspired me to make my own! i got a drawing tablet that i still use to this day. pretty much all of it is in my tumblr archive. gifmaking is a more recent hobby of mine, since mid 2018. without those skills, plus some sheer luck, i never would have met the people that i considered my friends, including you. i am forever grateful.

as depressing as it may sound, rt/ah are one of the few consistently good things in my life. all the fan stuff i make and share is my way of saying "thanks" to them, you know? i hope to keep it up for as long as i can. 💚🖤

[ah ask game!]

[interactivodular]

I just wanted to vent my own feelings about the whole #haywoodgate thing, because AH has been near and dear to my heart for a very long time.

I first starting watching Achievement Hunter regularly in 2013. I had seen a few random videos prior to that (Rage Quit mostly), but I didn’t really “get into“ the channel proper until ‘13. Their Minecraft videos immediately drew me in, and as a fan of the Grand Theft Auto games, their GTA IV videos also got me hooked.

Achievement Hunter has always been a source of escapism for me. Whenever I had a shitty day at work, or just a bad day in general, I knew I could come home and pop on a 30-50 minute video, whether it was a new upload or an older “classic,” and the crew would always make me laugh. As I started working more hours at my job and eventually officially became full-time, my interest in my other hobbies waned significantly. I often felt (and still do feel, actually), so tired when I got home, that I always felt I had to choose between my hobbies, and since popping on a video is less effort than trying to knit or draw or play a video game myself, I would just go on the RT site and watch Achievement Hunter for a bit before I had to eventually get ready to go to bed and do the same shit routine all over again.

As my soul-sucking retail job continues to, well, suck, my source of escapism over the years has become a literal crutch, almost entirely holding the foundation of my happiness together. I watch Achievement Hunter every day, because they make me laugh. They make me happy in a world that is increasingly less happy all-around. They made me smile on days when all I wanted to do was quit my job and crawl into bed and stay there for the next twelve years. I’ve idly wondered over the years what I would do if/when the channel inevitably fell apart, but I tried not to think on it. AH was doing so well, and it didn’t seem like an issue.

All that being said, I should now add this: Ryan was my favorite.

The personas and characters he made and cultivated in Minecraft and GTA Let’s Plays were definitely my faves, and on the rare occasion that Ryan wasn’t in a video, I definitely felt the quality was less. In counterpart to the chaotic nature of his in-game persona, I always felt that, in real life, Ryan seemed to be a very sweet guy. A theater nerd with a knack for gadgets and who loved his wife and kids.

Finding out how wrong we all were about him is like having the rug ripped out from underneath. He cheated on his wife and used his fame to solicit his fans for sexual content. He is an actual, literal scumbag, and because of this, Achievement Hunter is no longer a happy source of escapism from my own life. Ryan was a HUGE part of AH for so many years. He is in so many videos, and he was one of the main reasons I enjoyed so many of their vids. He’s literally taken the last near-decade of content and made it unwatchable to me, and to others like me, who feel too sick about his true colors to ever watch a video with him in it ever again.

I know that we, as fans, can’t possibly feel anywhere near as shocked and betrayed as his family, and his friends and co-workers. But I don’t think we’re any less entitled to our own feelings. We’ve watched this guy for years. We trusted him. Knowing that I’ll never again view years and years worth of videos--ones that I have loved and watched and laughed at so much, that I’ve watched them again and again and again--makes me so very sad, and so very upset.

I know some people are still okay with watching content with him in it, and that’s fine. Your mileage may very, and we’re all entitled to our own thoughts and feelings. Mostly I’m just left wondering... what next? I know the rest of Achievement Hunter (to our knowledge, obviously), are innocent. But fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice? Well. We all know how that goes.

I still want to watch them, but I’m hesitant and just... not comfortable, right now.