Trivia / Star

• Approval of God: Ron Ben-Israel enjoyed the Basically - Sweet Genius episode, saying that it brought back memories. Sweet memories.
  • As did one of the chefs from the episode.
• Colbert Bump: STAR_'s involvement with Jerma985 is what really put the latter on the map in the first place. For perspective, in 2013 STAR_'s channel was sitting around 210,000 subscribers while Jerma's was barely at 80,000. Jerma was seen as STAR_'s quirky Butt-Monkey friend for many years, but nowadays Jerma has gone on to have an even larger online following than STAR_ ever did.
• Creator Backlash:
  • A year after releasing "Starmod", STAR_ called it: "one of the worst ideas I've ever had."
  STAR_: It was fun, but for a one person project from somebody who barely knew what he was doing while juggling everything else in my life — it was just stressful and time consuming from beginning to end. I remember describing starmod as 'the easiest way people have ever had to complain to me'.
  • He also unlisted "The Grinch Talks Smissmas" after it had negative effects. Being disappointed by Valve in Smissmas 2014 and somewhat tired with TF2 in general, it caused some de-subscriptions and resulted in fans viewing his following video "Live Panic Attack" in an overly-negative light.
  • Since late 2014, this trope is more or less his attitude towards TF2. After years of focusing on the game, he burned out and wanted to move on to other things. The backlash partially stemmed from his fanbase demanding him to continue playing TF2 even though he no longer wanted to.
  • STAR_'s first video now contains the annotation: "Wow this video is trash why'd you come back in time to watch it".
  • He's also not fond of his "Worst Loadout Challenge", as back then he wasn't very good at rocket jumping.
  • He deleted "The Diable 3 Incident" while Jerma was streaming himself watching it partly because of this, and partly to annoy Jerma.
• Creator Breakdown: In 2020, Ster finally came clean in this video where he explained the negative effects of YouTube culture and the TF2 community in general on his mental health over the past several years. He claimed he was often completely exhausted, both physically and emotionally, by the constant nagging and hate from certain parts of his fandom for not playing TF2 enough, pidgeonholing him into making only specific kinds of videos that he no longer wanted to make. During that period he often didn't react well to the haters by lashing back at them, which only made him seem even more like the bad guy. He's moving past this to focus on himself and his own projects, and it's good to hear him finally address it and point out the toxicity of his so-called "fans."
• Enforced Method Acting: The skit where he talks to Jerma in "Contracts for Ms. Pauling" was preceded by Star_ just telling Jerma that there is a problem and getting into Teamspeak so Jerma's bewilderment would be genuine. Jerma doesn't realize it's a joke for a video until halfway through the bit.
• Troubled Production: Apparently the making of "What Really Happened?" was an absolute slog, as both STAR_ and Jerma had no idea what they were doing and had no motivation to make any jokes. Fortunately, it was saved in the edit and ended up one of STAR_'s most interesting TF2 videos to date.
• Why Fandom Can't Have Nice Things: The vocal part of STAR_'s fandom that constantly nagged him to return to TF2 were a large reason why STAR_ stopped making YouTube videos throughout the mid-2010s in the first place.