Mildred, better known under the alias Thought Slime and Mil-Dread (formerly Scaredy Matt), is a Canadian non-binary Leftist YouTube personality.
Thought Slime openly identifies as an Anarcho-Communist, a left-wing anarchist philosophy that believes in abolishing corporate-capitalism in-favor of a socialized economy that does away with unjust hierarchies that cause poverty and prejudice based on class, race, gender and sexuality.
He is best known for his three YouTube Channels:
- Thought Slime
, a YouTube channel where he discusses his own political beliefs, socio-political topics and other political talking heads. - Scaredy Cats, a channel where he talks about mainstream and fringe horror films.
- Mega Slime Entertainment Zone, a Let's Play channel where he plays games.
Thought Slime provides examples of:
- Bad Santa: In "WE MUST DESTROY SANTA CLAUS", Thought Slime describes Santa Claus in a manner that an Anarcho-Communist would (for comedy, anyway); as a union-busting, animal-abusing slave-driver that shackle his elf-workers in a system that exploits them, encourages entitlement in privileged children, violates the right-to-privacy of every person on Earth and promotes the crony-capitalist system that relies on it all.
- Beware the Silly Ones: Bobby Duke from Scaredy Cats was originally made just to be a Joke Character, having literally been an idea Mildred thought up while high on marijuana edibles. When doing Western Month however, Bobby becomes genuinely offended when Mildread doesn't put in any effort into the theme and even gives him a diatribe about how unhelpful his Political Overcorrectness can really be. Not only does he quit the show soon after, but he buys the show and uses his newfound authority to make Mildread do things against their will.
- Casual Kink: A Running Gag with him is how he mentions women sitting on birthday cakes as a sexual thought, itself a memetic joke-fetish.
- Content Warnings: The description of Scaredy Cats states: "We'll warn you if an animal dies in the movie."
- Distracted by the Sexy: In "Regrettably, we must discuss the Superman Gay Panic", Mildred mocks the bad-faith objection that unambiguously stating that a character is gay or queer is injecting sexuality into comics when it was never, ever there before.Mildred: Why are you sexualizing these rock-hard bodies in skin-tight spandex and leather...grappling one another and spreading their limbs in all sorts of dynamic poses...It's not about sexuality! It's about punishing evil-doers. I want the She-Hulk to punish evil-doers with her big strong arms. They've...they've been naughty and she should punish them. Nothing sexual about it. Maybe she could sit on their birthday cakes. That'd teach them a lesson. (Beat.) Where was I going with this?
- Eldritch Abomination: In the Eyeball Zone segments, Matt/Mildred refers to a being called "the Great Lord Occulon" who supposedly rules the Eyeball Zone.
- Eldritch Location: Descriptions of the Eyeball Zone are vague and all over the place, the only real constants in it are that it's a terrifying place, there are eyeballs and small leftist projects in it and an Eldritch Abomination called "The Great Lord Occulon" rules over it and many of the other inconceivable horrors that dwell within.
- Everyone Has Standards: In "Regrettably, we must discuss the Superman Gay Panic.", they admitted that they waited a few months before discussing the "controversy" that Clark Kent's son Jon Kent is bisexual specifically because he found the "controversy" so inane and pointless that they considered it not worth their time. Even though the video does go into what he thinks of the Right-Wing reaction into it and deconstructs their fallacious reasons for being against it, it's mostly just Thought Slime complaining about how staged the entire discourse feels.Matt/Mildred: People pretended, briefly, that this was a controversy a couple of months ago. Because everything has to be all of the time, forever!
- Fictional Video Game: In "Capitalism, my official review", Thought Slime describes capitalism as though it were a video game.
- Forgetful Jones: Naturally discussed in "Oops! I have ADHD!", as difficulty with recall is one of the symptoms. Mildred admits that "if you asked me to name the ten provinces of Canada, I'm not sure if pressed that I could do it" — and goes on to add that they tried, after writing that in the script, and got nine... because they forgot the one they live in.
- Grey Goo: In "Infinite Growth (it is bad)", Thought Slime compares crony-capitalism to the hypothetical Gray goo scenario proposed by K. Eric Drexler, big business being this thing that autonomously consumes and takes as much as it can from the world around it with no end-goal in sight.
- Homage:
- The background he uses in Thought Slime content was directly inspired by the ooze from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987), the original art done in pixel-art because he grew up on the Super Nintendo.
- His "Eyeball Zone" segments in his Thought Slime videos were inspired by The Zone, a YTV Canadian programming block that he watched when he was younger.
- The Horseshoe Effect: Deconstructed in his "Conservative Comedy Sucks Too" video, where he dissects Ryan Long's "When Wokes and Racists Agree on Everything" video (itself used as a straight example on the trope's page). Thought Slime points out that many of the "woke" person's words are blatant misrepresentations of actual antiracist beliefs that have been carefully reworded to either make the "woke" character seem the same as his racist counterpart, or ignore the actual conclusions antiracists come to based on their beliefs. He points out how this is used to create a false equivalence in order to prevent fence sitters from taking meaningful action against racism of any kind.
- Hypocritical Humor: Mildred will frequently call right-wing content creators out whenever they do stuff like engaging in shameless hawking of their merchandise and begging for their fans to promote them on social media, especially if they do so under the pretense that it is not about lining their own pockets, but rather to promote their ideology or a cause. Mildred then usually follow these segments up by reminding his audience of the existence of his mascot, Grumbletum, a cute, friendly, little woodland creature, who survives by eating the likes, comments and subscriptions he gets from his videos, as well as the money he gets through Patreon, and then reminding the audience that they should contribute to both, but absolutely in no way whatsoever because it improves his own financial standing, but because it prevents Grumbletum from dying a slow, painful death from starvation.
- Hypocrisy Nod: In "Peach mom did nothing wrong", Mildred points out that when Flame Wars of that kind that the "peach mom" comics caused pop up, her Twitter circle is normally filled with people who just point out that the problem is a problem, "and then we act like that solved the problem and everybody owes us thanks and praise". Since the video itself up to this point could reasonably be described as the same kind of reaction, it then comes to an awkward halt for a few seconds while a caption reading "fleeting moment of self awareness" floats onto the screen.
- Literal Metaphor: In "My third job in a retail heck-scape", Mildred briefly mentions that, on top of figuratively "dealing with shit" from customers, he occasionally found himself having to deal with literal feces from people crapping in returned products and on the floor of the store.
- New Job as the Plot Demands: In Scaredy Cats, Bobby Dukenote gets a new, wacky job used to shoehorn in a sponsor of some kind, including a Private Detective, mattress salesmen, Shōnen protagonist in a Tournament Arc, etc. At one point, Mildred even chastises him to racking up job after job without even putting in any effort into the jobs he already had, having been Mildread's agent at the time.Bobby Duke: Hey guess what? You remember when you said that "the Bobby Duke Detective Agency would never get off the ground?"
Scaredy Matt/Mildread: No. What I said was that "you have a lot of jobs already, maybe you should focus on the jobs you already have." - O.O.C. Is Serious Business:
- While Bobby Duke from Scaredy Cats was created as a Joke Character for Mildread to look calm and rational by comparison, in the Dead Birds review he stops Mildread mid-rant on the inherent racism of The Western genre to talk about how his tendency to nitpick and take the magic out of "problematic" things makes him a wet blanket that does more harm than good. In the From Dusk Till Dawn review, he takes Mildread's lack of effort in a costume and stretching the definition of "Western" to conform to the movie he wanted to talk about as a sign that he isn't taking any of it seriously and leaves, making Mildread feel bad for hurting his feelings.
- By his own admission, he tackled The Turner Diaries under the belief that he could be the one to undermine the book's power to influence and radicalize its readers. However, by the end of the episode, he realizes that this is beyond his capabilities; the book doesn't expect to persuade through facts and logic, but taps into a deeply rooted emotional part of the psyche. It is unlikely to appeal to anyone who's not already sympathetic to its views and is too far along that journey to simply be reasoned out of it. Mildred ends by making a passionate speech instead to the viewer to not fall under the book's beliefs and directs people to some helplines to help the viewer with any issues relating to radicalization.
- Quirky Ukulele: In his Scaredy Cats review "Phantasm 3 Ukulele Jam!", Mildred is introduced practicing a Ukelele. At the end of the video, he goes back to pretending he knows how to play it, strumming it in various absurd and incorrect ways.
- A Rare Sentence: In "Fake Economies in Minecraft" Mildred takes a brief pause after uttering the phrase "viewing capitalism through the lens of Minecraft" to reflect on the fact that that's a statement he decided to say, and how incredibly silly the whole episode is to need it.
- Running Gag:
- In his review series of the Phantasm series, he starts and ends every video trying to justify his tropical backdrop by insisting that the Phantasm films are all "summer movies", fumbling over his own words in doing so.
- Most of his videos will at some point reference eyeballs, which will then segue into his "eyeball zone" segment where he promotes a smaller left-wing youtuber's video. The most consistent exceptions are his videos which directly target Fascists/Neo-Nazis, so as to not subject them to an Internet Counterattack.
- He uses "Dracula" as a noun in place of "vampire."
- Self-Deprecation:
- In the description of Thought Slime, he refers to himself as a "smug anarchist poseur".
- In "I was wrong about Landlords", a response to a different Youtuber also named Matt, he distinguishes the two by referring to the other one as just "Matt" and himself as "Stink-Matt".
- Early in "A video about one, weird, horny tweet", they admit that it is "perhaps the most pointless video that I — or maybe anyone — will ever make, and that's saying something, especially for me", flashing the thumbnails of "Fast Food Mascot Political Alignment Chart", "(PATHETIC) 3AM STUDYING WORST YOUTUBER CHALLENGE // LEARNING FROM A BAD YOUTUBER AT 3AM (GONE WRONG)", and "Fake Economies in Minecraft" on the screen to remind the viewer of just how stiff the competition actually is.
- Space Whale Aesop: In "Destiny and the Liberal Mind Prison", he points out that one can come up with a lot of criticisms of a hypothetical anarchist society - but one can also point to the fact that contemporary liberal societies have a lot of the exact same problems, if not worse ones. Moreover, since we don't actually live in the anarchist society and don't know for sure what would happen, a bad-faith actor could make up all kinds of possible problems, like "It's full of vampires!" and "What if people's legs fall off?"
- Superman Substitute: At the beginning of "Who are THE SUPER STRAIGHTS?", Mildred mocks the Super Straight Movement by opening the video like an old Superman cartoon.Mildred: The planet Straight-Krypton was dying. The only survivors, sent to space as infants in space-ships to Earth and adopted by kindly, albeit transphobic farmers in the American midwest. The heterosexual sun of Earth gave them extraordinary powers; the ability to affirm a binary understanding of sex and gender with the strength of a locomotive, faster than a speeding bigot, able to leap to conclusions in a single bound. Look! Down in the comments section, it's a Troll, it's a CHUD, no! It's the Super-Straights! [Poorly a cappellas the John Williams Superman theme]
- Straw Vegetarian: He is a vegan and has repeatedly joked about him being every killjoy stereotype people apply to veganism.
- What Were They Selling Again?: In "GarfieldEats, a normal website in normal capitalism", Mildred points out that the ad that led him to discover GarfieldEats doesn't actually say anything about the product — it's just Garfield and the creator of the app having a conversation about pizza.
