Jacob Geller is an American YouTuber/video essayist who critically discusses a wide range of social and pop culture topics, primarily from a leftist standpoint.
Jacob Geller's videos provide and discuss examples of:
- Awesome, but Impractical: His video on Orbital Lasers
goes in depth on how the Kill Sat trope is this, not just in practice but in fundamental concept. Geller argues that while such a thing would be cool, it'd be really hard to aim, really hard to hit just one target, and not worth the time and effort it would take to build such a thing in the first place. - Boom, Headshot!: The theme of Rationalizing Brutality: The Cultural Legacy of the Headshot.
- Breather Episode: Jacob's videos can touch on very dark concepts and grim subject matter, so the occasional episode where Jacob discusses the satisfaction of doing something perfectly can feel like this to watchers.
- Creepy Cave: Discussed in depth in the video "Fear of Depths'', starting with the Real Life example of Floyd Collins, an American spelunker whose death after becoming trapped in a narrow passage of Mammoth Cave became a media sensation in 1925, igniting a public fervor for macabre caving stories.
- Death of the Author: Discussed in "Art for No One", where Jacob discusses the uncomfortableness of private works being made public, whether it's cutting open the hidden pages of ''Plexus, or more literal examples, such as restoring, naming, and publishing Francisco de Goya's unreleased paintings and breaking into the media vault of Prince after their deaths.
- "Groundhog Day" Loop: Discussed, alongside Time Loop Fatigue, in "Time Loop Nihilism". The video examines time travel loops and how the characters in them tend to respond to it, such as developing the idea that nothing ultimately matters because it's all going to reset anyways. He also talks about a short story called "Through the Flash" by author Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, in which a 14-year-old girl becomes Ax-Crazy and forces a child to cook and eat part of himself to save his mother's life, but then decides to stop being a killer one day because she ultimately wants her actions to mean something after all.
- Jewish and Nerdy: Geller is Jewish and a fan of a wide range of video games. One story of his involves him successfully arguing to his parents soon after his bar mitzvah that, since he was now a man, he was therefore mature enough to play Resident Evil 4.
- Murder Simulators: Discussed and ultimately turned on its head in "Designed for Violence" where goes into not just how games are made into scapegoats in school shootings, but how schools themselves start to become more and more designed with violence as an inevitability in mind, often, ironically, following many of the design cues of games and eventually prisons.
- Recycled Soundtrack: A number of his videos use the track "Der Mond" from Wolfenstein: The New Order.
- Self-Deprecation: Geller often pokes fun at his role as a video essayist, like comparing himself to others who have "real" jobs.
- Snow Means Death: Discussed in length in "Fear of Cold". The entire video is an essay as to how very cold spaces are used for horror settings because of how most people have never really experienced biting cold, and yet it "does not forgive mistakes" if one attempts to confront it. Geller starts the video by talking about a short horror story called "To Build a Fire", in which the only human character slowly freezes to death.
- So Bad, It's Good: Wanted: Dead: Geller thinks that the story makes no sense, the combat is frustrating, and the cutscenes are full of Mood Whiplash and Non Sequiturs ... which combine to make the game far more memorable than something more polished would have been.
