Characters / Checkmate, Lincolnites!

Johnny Reb

^{Click here to see his appearance in the first episode} 

"Welcome back to Checkmate, Lincolnites!, the show where we reject academic historical consensus in favor of TRUE history!"
Played by: Andrew "Atun-Shei Films" Rakich

A Confederate Soldier in the American Civil War (and self-admitted "cartoon character") who also serves as a stand-in for modern adherents to the myth of the Lost Cause. He argues with Billy Yank (a stand-in for Atun-Shei himself) in the Checkmate, Lincolnites! series.

---

• Ad Hominem: So fond of this that Billy Yank at one point makes it a drinking game - every time Johnny Reb tries to deflect a criticism of the Confederacy by pointing to something bad the Union supposedly did Billy Yank takes a drink. He admits Johnny Reb has a point the one time the Confederate apologist turns it back on him.
• Affably Evil: He may be a Confederate apologist, but he has plenty of friendlier banter with Billy Yank.
• The Alcoholic: In most videos, he and Billy are putting away lots of strong alcohol as they discuss the topics of the episode. In "Were There Really BLACK CONFEDERATES???!!!", Johnny Reb spikes his coffee with half a bottle of whiskey. He claims it's to purify the excrement from the coffee, then downs the whole cup in one gulp, so he can be drunk enough to read off a particularly unintelligible comment.
• Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!: On at least two occasions he either fell asleep or got sidetracked by a phone conversation while Billy Yank was talking about economics.
• Character Catchphrase: As one could guess from the show's title, he really loves to say "Checkmate, Lincolnites!"
  Johnny Reb: Checkmate, Lincolnites!... That's the name of the program.
• Characterization Marches On: Initially his arguments consisted almost entirely of the hate-comments left by Lost Cause adherents on Atun-Shei's other videos on the Civil War, whose arguments are generally easily debunked and often poorly worded to boot ("South really complex!"). In later videos, he's moved away from this, and his arguments are more nuanced and sophisticated, though still ultimately based on flawed premises and incorrect assumptions.
• Demonic Possession: In "Was it REALLY the WAR of NORTHERN AGGRESSION?!?!?!", he gets possessed by the Klaus the Nazi, only the have that ghost exorcised by the Witchfinder-General.
• Depending on the Writer:
  • Most of his dialogue consists of comments left on Atun-Shei's videos by jilted Confederate sympathizers, which have a lot of variance in their viewpoints (for instance, one comment openly admits the Confederate upper class fought to preserve slavery and opines that they "should have been hanged," defending only lower-class conscripts).
  • He also sometimes quotes actual Confederate or post-Confederate southerners, such as Lee's surrender address or the literal essay called "The Lost Cause," meaning his general level of eloquence also fluctuates wildly.
  • Whether or not he was an actual Confederate Soldier that somehow survived into modern times (and given Atun-Shei's character line-up, it's certainly possible) or just another Lost Causer deep in character differs episode to episode.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: In the first episode of Checkmate, Lincolnites!, he appears dressed as a Confederate cavalry officer rather than a Confederate soldier as in later episodes; openly supports slavery (even mocking Billy Yank/Atun-Shei for thinking slavery is bad) whereas in later episodes Johnny Reb tried to argue that the war was about other issues and at one point even states that not even he believes that slaves were happy and treated well ("I am a cartoon character, not an idiot!"); and at the end of the first episode he was actually shot by Atun-Shei and presumed dead (given that he bleeds profusely afterwards), but appears alive and well in later episodes. Billy Yank lampshades the last point in the second episode by asking if he didn't shoot him in the previous one, and while Johnny Reb denies it, Billy Yank points out that there's a bloodstained Confederate cavalry officer uniform at his feet, with makes Johnny Reb visibly nervous and change the subject.
• Everyone Has Standards: He's a stand-in for modern day Lost Cause sympathizers, not real 1860's Confederates, so this is inevitable when he's confronted with what the latter actually believed:
  • Even Johnny Reb isn't so detached from reality as to seriously claim that all slaves were happy and treated well.
    Johnny Reb: I am a cartoon character, not an idiot!
  • While the Witchfinder-General clearly scares him shitless, he tries to stand up to him and argue for religious tolerance as a cornerstone value of the republic.
  • While discussing Nathan Bedford Forrest's post-war political career, he's actually taken aback by the venom with which some other Confederate veterans attacked him for taking a conciliatory tone and giving a speech at a Negro social meeting, one even suggesting with evident disgust that Forrest was trying to seduce a black woman at the meeting who gave him a kiss on the cheek, and admits it's "really quite vile."
  • His justification of his support of the Confederacy comes largely from his belief in states' rights and a vague association between the term and libertarian political ideas of individual freedom. He's increasingly disturbed by the ever more reactionary sentiments of southern leaders over the course of the early 19th century and their willingness to hypocritically enforce their values on the North through legal means, and he's utterly disgusted by the outright authoritarian and anti-republican turns a lot of its leaders took over the course of the war.
  • While reading racist quotes from Confederate soldiers, he gets overtly disturbed and uncomfortable whenever soldiers mention the preservation of slavery and the possibility of having to treat black people as equals as a casus belli for the rebellion. When their quotes starts including the n-word, he is unwilling to repeat it, merely saying "that's a bad word" or replacing it with "nope".
• Friendly Enemy: In later videos, he and Billy Yank have a less-toxic relationship, sharing drinks, admitting when the other has a point, and even getting each other fairly thoughtful Christmas presents. In episode 8 the tone has shifted entirely to two friends having a chat, which makes the end of episode 9, where he goes back to shouting insults rather than give up his Lost Cause beliefs all the more tragic.
• The Gadfly: He occasionally shows absolute glee in bringing up uncomfortable subjects that force Billy to admit to Northern misdeeds. At the beginning of "Wasn't it KINDA About State's Rights?" he asks the title question and then just smirks until Billy can't resist agreeing for the obligatory "right to own slaves" joke.
• Heel Realization: He has a minor one after Billy explains to him that applying the term "Scalawag" to James Longstreet is essentially condemning him as a traitor to the South for supporting integration and reconstruction:
  Johnny: So when I call Longstreet a Scalawag, I'm basically saying he didn't...completely hate black people?
  Billy: Basically. A Carpetbagger is essentially a Northerner who doesn't completely hate black people, and a Scalawag is a Southerner who doesn't completely hate black people.
• Hidden Depths: "Billy and Johnny at the Movies" reveals he's actually the father of a 16-year-old boy, whom Billy is flabbergasted that he didn't know/Johnny didn't tell him about for almost the entire series' run.
• Hypocritical Humor: Johnny Reb accuses Grant of being a drunk, in a series where he and his jousting partner regularly put away entire bottles of alcohol, while Billy is pouring them both drinks.
• Large Ham: Johnny Reb is the passionate one who throws around patriotic declarations and believes in hyperbole, a sharp-contrast to his Straight Man Foil Billy Yank. His opening lines in the first episode (assuming him and the unnamed Confederate cavalry officer are the same person) sum it up pretty well.
  Confederate cavalry officer: Hello, good evening, and welcome to Checkmate, Lincolnites! The program where we destroy the pernicious lies of Republicans, carpetbaggers, Yankees, scallywags, and … delineators of the sable character (uh uh!) using facts and logic My guest, today, is the man who runs the lyin', thievin', Freedmen's Bureau-loving YouTube channel Atun-Shei Films. Here it is, the dollar-store Jamie Lannister himself.
• The Mentally Disturbed: Discreetly implied when, after Johnny briefly experiences a terrifying hallucination of Billy reading out Grant's "unconditional surrender" dispatch when Billy mentions his name, Billy gets him out of it and asks if he often hallucinates. Johnny lamely says he does not... but it would explain the weird fantastical asides that often dot the series.
• Noble Confederate Soldier: Subverted. While he likes to portray himself and Confederate soldiers in general as this, he often comes across as a fool. But at the same time, Johnny Reb is just as likely to play the role of the (potentially willfully) ignorant Lost Causer who is repeating lies or misinformation as he is to be a representative of a Confederate veteran. Completely averted by the version in the pilot episode, where he's a Card-Carrying Villain white supremacist who openly and gleefully supports slavery.
• "Not Making This Up" Disclaimer: Whenever he makes a particularly belligerent argument, next to him will be an image of a YouTube comment Atun-Shei is quoting so we know he's not just setting up a strawman and putting words in his mouth.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: Naturally, since his purpose is to defend the Confederates. He never reaches the extremes of the Witchfinder-General or Klaus, though. See also Everyone Has Standards, above.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: The red to Billy Yank's blue. Frequently starts episodes with an intense grin on his face, and often turns nearly-purple with rage over the course of them.
• Saying Sound Effects Out Loud: Near the end of one video, he literally shouts the words "Rebel Yell!" Justified because that's how the YouTube comment he's quoting was worded.
• Shell-Shocked Veteran: It's implied the war left him with some mental scarring, as shown by the nightmarish hallucinations he has when Billy mentions Ulysses S. Grant's name.
• Speaking Like Totally Teen: Parodied in "Billy and Johnny at the Movies". Johnny apparently thinks that the Zoomers, who are a generation generally considered to have been born from the early 2000s to the mid-2010s, use flower-power Sixties terms like "groovily trippin' out" to refer to psychedelic drug use. This is made more baffling when he reveals that he himself is the father of a 16-year-old, so he should really be more aware of modern slang.
• Southern-Fried Private: Johnny speaks with a heavy "vuh-genia" drawl^note Appropriate for a Confederate talking point mouthpiece, as Richmond, Virginia was the capital of the Confederacy and "Virginia!" was a Confederate battle cry and is an absent-minded, easily-distracted, potentially mentally ill infantryman who clings to Lost Cause mythology like it's a religion. It's clear at certain points that he's brighter than he seems, but he outright refuses to learn from anything Billy Yank tells him.
• Strawman Has a Point: invoked On occasion he acts as a rare in-universe example. While he openly admits to being a "cartoon character", he does have arguments that Billy Yank either agrees with or is unable to refute.
  • When he points out how some Lost Cause opponents go too far and stereotype all Southerners as white supremacists and Fat Idiots, Billy Yank wholeheartedly agrees with him that only an "unbelievable asshole" could fail to distinguish between people who literally owned slaves and modern rural Southerners, then joins him in glaring at the camera.
  • While Billy Yank argues that it's likely there were more pragmatic reasons behind their actions, he concedes Johnny's claims about Confederate Pet the Dog moments could possibly have a grain of truth in some cases. In the case of Andrew Chandler and his slave Silas being friends, Billy does admit the photo of them being more buddy-buddy then the typical master/slave photo is interesting. He also admits it is possible Nathan Bedford Forrest did genuinely become The Atoner in his later years as many of Forrest's former comrades believed he did (and were quite upset with him for it).
  • In the episode "Wasn't it KINDA about STATES RIGHTS?!," he first points out that the northern states engaged in gradual emancipation, with a substantial slave population at the time many of them were sparring with the south over the Missouri Compromise, and later sarcastically asks Billy whether or not Massachusetts was named after somewhere in England when the subject turns to the Indian Removal Act. In both cases, Billy makes no effort to defend the hypocrisy of the situation, not even the "what-about-ism drinking game," but nonetheless maintains that, hypocritical though they might be, the north's sentiments were sincere.
• Strawman Political: He basically acts as a mouthpiece for Lost Cause proponents, literally quoting YouTube comments (and later more diverse sources) that either try to discredit the idea that the Civil War was fought over slavery, accuse the North of being villains and/or the Confederacy as victim while Billy Yank is the voice of reason that discredits him. It's been directly acknowledged by Johnny himself that he's a cartoon character.
• This Is Gonna Suck: Once he fully grasps the difference between "citizens" (white men, whose personal liberties were inviolate) and "subjects" (everyone else, who did not enjoy the same rights and to whom the government could do whatever it wished for the benefit of "citizens") in the minds of "southern rights" advocates, he outright says, "This episode is officially bumming me out!" The worst is still to come too; the episode has not yet turned to the increasingly insane reactionary turn Confederate political factions started to take during the war.
• Took a Level in Kindness: In the pilot episode, he's portrayed as more of a jerkass that believes in white supremacy. Later episodes portray him as more willfully ignorant, making up excuses to justify the Civil War as being for reasons other than slavery, and will even be disgusted when Southern politicians or Confederate soldiers at the time will make openly racist or religiously-intolerant statements.
• Unexplained Recovery: Assuming that Johnny Reb is the same character as the unnamed Confederate cavalry officer from the first episode, he was shot by Atun-Shei at the end of the first episode, bleeding messily, but was no worse for wear in the next one, a bloodstained Confederate cavalry officer uniform notwithstanding.
• Villainous Breakdown: Has one in the fourth episode of the series after Billy Yank reads several first-hand accounts by low-ranking Confederate soldiers who expressed whole-hearted support for slavery. And in the episode on black Confederates and the question of whether or not they existed (they didn't), he finally sighs and concedes the argument with a sad "Well, shit."
  Billy Yank: We're not talking about President Lincoln. We're talking about your great-grandpappy; the average Confederate soldier.
• Villain Has a Point: Though a lot of his claims are dispelled in short order, Billy Yank will occasionally agree with something Johnny Reb says. One example being Johnny Reb's claim that the Morrill Tariff was corrupt and overwhelmingly favored the North (even if it was actually passed after the secession and not before as Johnny Reb claimed), and another was criticizing the burning of Columbia as reprehensible. And Billy Yank outright agrees with many of his criticisms of some of the Union's generals during the episode on the same, especially George McClellan.
• Word-Salad Humor: He is occasionally shown to use random dogwhistles and buzzwords in the manner of online Neo-Confederates, such as when he claimed that "Marxist, Maoist mainstream historians have made it their nonbinary mission to shove a plant-based Civil War narrative down our collective throats" in the vein of the "You Millennial Leftists" meme.

Billy Yank

"If this show is remembered, I would guess it would be as a small footnote of Civil War history's intersection with 21st-century internet culture. If we're fortunate enough to have any legacy at all, I fully expect Checkmate, Lincolnites! to be an imperfect product of its time, like all written and filmed history. I hope we're remembered as a nail in the coffin of the Lost Cause, but who knows? Only time will tell."
Played by: Andrew "Atun-Shei Films" Rakich

A Union Soldier in the American Civil War who also serves as a stand-in for modern opponents of the myth of the Lost Cause. He argues with Johnny Reb (a stand-in for Lost Causers) in the Checkmate Lincolnites! series.

---

• Author Avatar: Initially, he was just Atun-Shei without a costume. He's grown into more of a character now, but still serves as a mouthpiece for Atun-Shei rather than a representation of Union supporters as a whole.
• Beware the Nice Ones: While Billy Yank is usually the level-headed one when it comes to debates, in "Was GENERAL SHERMAN a WAR CRIMINAL?!?!?!?!" he uncharacteristically pulls a gun and points it in-between Johnny's eyes and demands he repeats himself after he accused General Sherman of being a coward who avoided a decisive battle with the Confederate army and was only good at burning down old women's houses. After giving Johnny a good scare, he immediately holsters his gun and calmly debunks it without incident, the Mood Whiplash plain in Johnny's frightened expression.
• Characterization Marches On: Initially far more violent and confrontational (in the first episode of Checkmate, Lincolnites! he, or rather Atun-Shei in plainclothes, actually shoots the Confederate cavalry officer that may or may not be Johnny Reb with a road agent's spin) but later becomes a Friendly Enemy to Johnny Reb.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: He appears sans costume in his first appearance, is described as "Atun-Shei" (which would last for a few more episodes, and actually winds up shooting Johnny Reb at the end.
• Everyone Has Standards: In the video on whether or not the Confederacy had better generals than the Union, he not only refuses to defend George McClellan's "timid and uncertain" generalship, but says unprompted that if he'd beaten Lincoln in the 1864 presidential election, the South would've probably gotten its wish for independence.
  Johnny Reb: How's that humble pie taste, Billy?
  Billy Yank: (tucking into a slice of pie) It's a little dry.
• Friendly Enemy: Grows to become one to Johnny Reb.
• Mangled Catchphrase: After getting in a good one-liner of his own at the start of an episode^note "If [the Confederate military Johnny Reb was praising] were so good, why didn't they win?", he tries to follow up with "Checkmate, Davis... ites." Johnny mocks that it doesn't sound as catchy as his own.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Downplayed, but has this reaction after he finishes regurgitating insulting comments against southerners.
• Not So Above It All: In Was GENERAL SHERMAN a WAR CRIMINAL?!?!?!?! he suddenly gets very aggressive at Johnny Reb and begins to insult modern southerners by reading off angry comments of his own. He comes to shortly afterwards.
• Only Sane Man: Compared to Johnny Reb, the Witchfinder-General, and Klaus. His demeanor is generally calm and even, even if he's being comical, his views are normal to a modern audience, and he cites his sources.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: Blue to Johnny Reb's Red. Often calm and collected, while debunking Johnny Reb's claims with cited sources.
• Take That, Audience!: After his comment-fueled outburst, he and Johnny Reb turn towards the fourth wall with a message.
  Billy Yank: What kind of unbelievable asshole can't distinguish between slave-owning Confederates and modern day rural southerners?
  (double Aside Glance)
• This Is Gonna Suck: He audibly winces when Johnny Reb asks where the name "Massachusetts" came from, before hestiantly admitting that it's named after the Massachusetts people... who lived in what's now the Commonwealth of Massachusetts for thousands of years before the English arrived... and that the English took all their good farmland and forced them to convert to Christianity and Anglicize to survive... Then that the settlers got paranoid they'd turn on them during King Philip's War, rounded them up and forced them onto a "shitty little island" in Boston Harbor with no supplies... in the middle of winter.
• Touché: When accused of being an armchair general more than a century after the fact his only answer is that his chair doesn't have arms.

---