- Actor Shipping:
- Natalie and Abigail from Philosophy Tube became a popular one, due to a small confession on one of Natalie's transition streams. Both Abigail and Natalie are well aware of it and have played from time to time. Abigail referencing Natalie's "mouthfeel" bit in a video when talking about sex with trans women is a prime example of such. This died down after Abigail's transition announcement when Natalie clarified in a stream that they "weren't in each other's lives anymore".
- There are plenty who crack-ship Natalie with The Golden One (a goofy Swedish bodybuilder and Far-Right blogger who resembles a bargain-basement Thor) and proposing sexy fanfic of such.
- Alternative Character Interpretation: There's a moment in Tiffany Tumbles where Jackie Jackson shows a clip of Adria saying "Have you ever considered that transphobia... is racist?". It's unclear whether Adria was unreasonably connecting two separate things or if Jackie put the clip out of context and she had a good argument.
- Awesome Music: Natalie's cover of "The Sound of Silence" at the end
of The Darkness.note - Broken Base: The way Natalie presents major hot button issues by arguing both sides, even if she disagrees with them. To some, it's a great way to foster empathy by appealing to the kind of mindset that latches onto reactionary beliefs and humanizes them to an extent even as she deconstructs their beliefs. Others see it as soft-balling harmful ideologies and approaching them in such a way that grants a legitimacy that can be dangerous. Essentially, the argument has boiled down to whether her approach uses Both Sides Have a Point to further underscore her solid anti-reactionary stance or if she promotes the same unintentional Golden Mean Fallacy that she criticizes.
- Natalie herself acknowledged in "The Witch Trials of JK Rowling" that she doesn't do this anymore, as anyone "reformed" by this strategy was still a "Recently reformed Nazi in the same spaces as vulnerable minorities". It's also previously hinted at in universe, with Justine's attempts to treat the far-right with good faith resulting in Tabby eventually cutting her off in disgust, and Justine throwing her kindness back in her face.
- Crosses the Line Twice: This magnificent line in Gender Critical:"When Shania Twain sang 'Man, I Feel Like a Woman', she wasn't talking about having a coat hanger abortion in a bathroom of a Greyhound station in Chattanooga."
- Ensemble Dark Horse:
- Abigail Cockbane, one of Contra's first recurring characters, became a fan favourite pretty early on. In contrast, the other characters that were introduced in the same episode haven't been seen since.
- Also Tabby, who fans quickly took to for her unashamedly leftist ideology and willingness to fight for what she believes in.
- Baltimore Maryland became another fan favorite, with many fan art tributes on the Contrapoints subreddit, almost immediately after Transtrenders was posted.
- Friendly Fandoms:
- With Lindsay Ellis, as both make politically left video essays, have collaborated, and are friends in real life.
- With Philosophy Tube. Both are trans women who make left-wing political video essays and have collaborated. This shared fanbase has remained despite Abagail and Natalie having a falling out.
- Harsher in Hindsight:
- While Tabby's over-the-top militancy was played for laughs in earlier episodes, the dialogue episode the Aesthetic shows that a lot of it comes from a place of personal pain. She's a masculine(-ish) trans woman who's frustrated and upset with being expected to appear more feminine and less political to appease a trans-skeptical public.
- In Incels, Abigail Thorn reads out comments from incels who are filled with self-hatred and have given up all hope. A month later, Abigail confessed that she herself had attempted suicide earlier on in the year. She also later reads comments about trans women being told they'd never pass as women and that they should repress their desire to transitionnote , at a time before she herself came out as trans.
- A few comments on Transtrenders note this in relation to Justine, specifically of how ashamed she was of being gay and how it was almost a prelude to Shame.
- In "Cancelling", she mentions that Lindsay Ellis suffered from the same cancel mob for not immediately disowning her. In 2021, Lindsay herself would be the victim of a cancel mob so vicious that it drove her to retire from content creation, and her own response video "Mask Off" was considered a Spiritual Successor to "Cancelling".
- The video Opulence begins with a humorous Framing Device—Natalie evading execution at the hands of a revolutionary mob, with the video essay delaying it. Opulence just so happened to be the video that resulted in months of harassment.
- Justine's falling to drug addiction after the stresses of online political content was based on Natalie's own, but around the same time as the video was released, fellow Leftist YouTuber Clara "Keffals" Sorrenti developed a cocaine addiction for which she'd go to rehab in early 2023.
- Heartwarming Moments: The episode on Incels. It mocks them, sure, but it also empathizes with them and draws on Natalie's personal experience living as a man to do so. It even includes advice and resources to help people get out.
- Hilarious in Hindsight:
- The humor in the TERFs episode takes an extra layer of irony in light of The Rubin Report's (the real life show The Freedom Report is based on) disastrous episode featuring Blaire White, a right-leaning transgender YouTuber and Candace Owens, another right-wing online personality. The battle between Blaire and Candace makes the battle between Tiffany and Abigail look tame.
- In Why White Nationalism is Wrong, Natalie, pre-coming out, claimed "My Nordic masculinity has grown as firm and robust as the hammer of Thor." Lampshaded when the video was flagged and reuploaded as Why the Alt-Right is Wrong, and by then Natalie had come out and was beginning her transition, and immediately after that clip was played, cut to current Natalie asking "Really? Has it?"
- Any time in her early videos (before she came out as a trans woman) where she speaks of herself as a "white male" or even....at one point....states she isn't trans.
- In Canceling, Natalie jokes about how using pliers to open a liquor bottle in the absence of a man to help her is "the lesbian solution". Her next video, Shame, sees her returning to discuss her coming to terms with her realization that she is a lesbian.
- Natalie spent the entire bath segment of the JK Rowling video with her phone hovering dangerously close to the water line to her audience's increasing anxiety... then she claimed the day after in a tweet that she'd just actually dropped her phone in the bath for the first time ever, and blamed Twitter for jinxing it.
- A one-off joke referring to landscaping businesses in the Voting video becomes downright hilarious after the trainwreck that was the Trump press conference in the Four Seasons Total Landscaping following Joe Biden's victory.
- Jerkass Woobie: Tiffany Tumbles is nasty and rude to trans women who don't "pass", and craves validation from transphobes by throwing other trans people under the bus. But behind closed doors, this is driven by dire self-loathing and insecurity.
- Launcher of a Thousand Ships: Natalie is shipped with so many other YouTubers by her audience, including Abigail from Philosophy Tube, Jim Sterling, Theryn Myers, Destiny and others.
- Love to Hate: Tiffany Tumbles. She's presented as a Hypocrite, in that she's a trans woman who tears down other trans women to try and make herself feel better and to appeal to transphobes, while Moving the Goalposts as to what "counts" as being trans or passing. At the same time, Tiffany is shown having a vast amount of self-loathing over being a right-wing trans woman, and thus being a part of a group that is actively trying to hurt her. This all ends up making Tiffany a Jerkass who is Her Own Worst Enemy and thus fun to root against.
- Memetic Mutation:
- The "mouthfeel" from her "Tiffany Tumbles" video, in which she describes the transfeminine penis as having a different taste and texture than a masculine one.Natalie: If I die tomorrow, my legacy will be that I applied wine tasting terminology to fellatio.
- The use of skulls to justify various forms of bigotry, starting with Lady Foppington's presentation of phrenology to contrast modern bigotry, but taken to feverish levels in Incels when that belief is also justified through an obsession with skull shape.
- "AS A TRANS WOMAN" explanation
- Dost thou bleed? explanation
- BURGEONINGExplanation
- "I look inside myself and I ask, 'Do I feel like a man or a woman?' And the answer is that I feel like shit." explanation
- $400,000 A MONTH note
- Breadtube's Divorced Mothers.note
- The "mouthfeel" from her "Tiffany Tumbles" video, in which she describes the transfeminine penis as having a different taste and texture than a masculine one.
- Misaimed Hatedom: A lot of viewers assumed that Justine (the character talking to Tabby) is voicing Natalie's own views, when Justine is just as much a caricature of an overly cautious liberal as Tabby is of an overly gung-ho leftist. This, unfortunately, led to some Twitter stans hating her assuming that Justine was supposed to be completely right.
- Offending the Creator's Own: While Natalie's post-2017 output has generally been well-received by the online leftist community, her content has proven very divisive among queer and trans/non-binary people, with many suggesting that her videos play to negative transgender stereotypes for cheap laughs or that she rationalizes or legitimizes bigotry.note The Are Traps Gay? video proved extremely polarizing for its heavy use of transphobic slurs, while The Aesthetic was criticized for dialogue that prioritized gender performativism over identity (see Overshadowed by Controversy). Natalie has often attempted to address critiques on Twitter, to mixed results.
- Overshadowed by Controversy:
- The Aesthetic is a dialectic on gender performativism. And while it isn't an easy-to-watch video due to its darker tone, most of the audience saw past the actual topic and criticized Natalie for playing into transphobes' hands with the arguments presented in the video - some even accusing her of having "betrayed" her trans followers.
- Among the trans community, Opulence is most frequently associated with the massive backlash following a short voice clip of Buck Angel, an older generation trans man who's claimed to be frequently tweeting transmedicalistnote , transmisogynist and anti non-binary views. Natalie's actions in around the time of its release note did little to sway her detractors, and the follow up video Cancelling would include a more in-depth response to the controversy.
- Strawman Has a Point: The view of many fans on Tabby. Contra portrays her as a less of a satire and more of a disagreeing party in her video on problems with capitalism. Though Tabby still has problems articulating a concrete set of solutions other than "Revolution!"
- Tear Jerker:
- Tiffany Tumbles' drunken, self-loathing breakdown toward the end of the episode of the same name.
- In "Voting," there's a moment during her description of the difference of suicidal action and suicidal ideation, where a hypothetical therapist suggests medication. Where a typical Contrapoints performance leans into exaggeration and humor, here she just sounds... dead and defeated.
- "The Hunger" features Justine in a self-destructive spiral - not just her own feelings of having been defeated in a debate on The Freedom Report, but also in that Tabby has blocked her on social media and Tiffany Tumbles is laughing at her, when both of them have been the subject of Justine's prior affections and rejected her. All of this leaves her open to Lucy's offers of escaping the pain with Void.
- Win Back the Crowd:
- "Shame" was positively received by the internet and not subject to much discourse, in contrast to the videos that directly preceded it.
- "J. K. Rowling" was also incredibly well-received, and regarded as a high point for Natalie's content.
http://tvtropes.org/YMMV/ContraPoints
FollowingYMMV / ContraPoints
Go To
