#okay i lied the flood was actually beneficial in one way to me specifically.

[vampiremourning]

anyway as soon as i pry myself off this couch im gonna share some screenshots of bg3 protags on my sideblog. just gotta like. reach the desk first.

[eeveelutionsforequality]

Am I the only one who honestly don't care what an idol says? There's far more pressing things to worry about, like the hurricane, the politics, etc. than WORDS. I'm sorry for venting, but tumblr oughta stop focusing on one specific subject and focus on doing what actually does matter. My family was in the path of the freaking hurricane and what do I see on my dash? An internet war over a stupid word that's only relevant because they want it to be relevant.

Yeah, I avoided the PewDiePie controversy until we got this ask, and then I decided to quickly brush up on it so that I didn't say something stupid.

From what I can gather, a character/player was shooting at him, so he called them the worst word that came to his mind, then immediately said "sorry" and corrected it to "asshole". Then everybody lost their collective shit.

I personally have never said "nigger" as an insult, in fact I don't use the word myself at all, not because I think people shouldn't, I just see no use for it for me - I don't think it's a good insult choice because being someone who says "nigger" is considered one of the worst things you can be, so being someone who says it is worse of an insult than it is, and I don't say it casually because there are plenty of other words that serve that purpose, I don't need to use a controversial one when I have "bro", "fam", "homies" etc. I also, on a moral level, don't like it used as an insult - I wouldn't say it's inherently racist, like, it doesn't mean the same thing in people's brains any more and I get that, like it seems to mean "really really really bad word" now instead of "I hate black people" to a lot of the people who say it like that, so I wouldn't say that saying it inherently means the person has racist thoughts/bias/etc; but the word is given that weight and strength because of what it used to mean and how it used to be used (and how it still is used by racists), it's got a lot of connotations and bad vibes.

You gotta remember that PewDiePie is living in England and a lot of the people talking about it are American - it's much rarer to hear the word over here (in Britain), from what I gather, and in my experience it isn't viewed with quite the same weight and the same intent isn't applied as heavily to it, it's just "edgy bad word" and not really associated with black people in their heads. I'm not saying that's the right way to think about the word - I think those people should be more aware that, while they don't see the connotations, other people will still read them into what they say - but there are a lot of people applying intent to what Pewds said and ignoring the fact that he's specified it was just the worst word he could think of at the time. PewDiePie was using it in the "I'm really fucking angry, what's the worst word I can think of to say" way, and not in the "I'm a racist" way - again, I'm not saying he should have used it, I don't think he should've but I also don't think it's fair to start attributing intent where there was none.

There are also a lot of people who are saying that you don't blart out things unless you say them in your daily life, but that's just not true - it's likely he sees and hears it relatively often, maybe every few days, because he's a gamer and because it is discussed a lot in a political context, so it's going to be embedded in his brain as "really bad word, don't say this" and sometimes you get angry enough that the "don't say this" part snaps. Honestly, if he's only snapped and said it now, once,after so many years of being a gamer, he definitely doesn't say it casually off YouTube because he would have slipped up and said it a lot more. You really can't tell how often someone says a word by whether or not it slips out one time, but generally if you've reserved a word for "literally the angriest I can possibly be", chances are you don't just casually say it every five minutes because it'd lose its punch real fast - and he even said in his video that he doesn't like the word, that he thinks it's dumb to say it. I think that's probably the most egregious claim people are making against him, because it's pure theorizing and armchair psychology, and not actually founded in the situation or evidence.

Another reason I see a lot of people bring it up is they're concerned about Adpocalypse 2.0, but as Philly D explained, Adpocalypse 1.0 wasn't caused just by the "Pewds is a Nazi" lies and misrepresentations, it was also caused by videos of people literally dying. It had been brewing for a while and there really isn't much YouTube can do to make it worse for creators atm anyway, so people need to chill out and look at this more rationally - chances are this will only hurt Pewds and maybe other gamers (games filing copyright shit against him is setting a bad precedent that, despite generally agreeing that lets plays are beneficial and good publicity and therefore okay, game devs can now punish and potentially destroy the livelihood of lets players over the gamer breaking some unknown rule about bad words - it's like "Oh yeah sure, you can do this, it's cool" *person does it* "Wait, did you say a word I didn't like? I changed my mind. You can't do it.") But at the moment, it's just his channel put at risk.

I think that's why it's getting more attention than the serious issues, like 1) people want to fight against racism, and they see this as racism and read all sorts of things between the lines that just aren't there or aren't certain, and 2) they're worried about the impact this could potentially have on their livelihoods. What Pewds did was, in my opinion, wrong, but it really didn't warrant this reaction, just a "Dude, that's not cool, just say 'cunt'." kind of reaction, not a "HE'S LITERALLY HITLER... AGAIN" kind of reaction. At the end of the day, you're right, it's just some gamer saying some word, there are giant storms and terrorism and political turmoil and more important things to deal with than one guy saying a bad word once.

But this is the internet and we all wanna vent our opinions and share our thoughts, and I don't think I know enough about hurricanes or flooding to be of much use in that regard.

~ Vape