Dethroning Moment / Cracked

Or, "Utterly Baffling Moments from Cracked History (That Shouldn't Exist)".

Keep in mind:

• Sign your entries
• One moment per work to a troper, if multiple entries are signed to the same troper the more recent one will be cut.
• Moments only, no "just everything he said," or "This entire work," entries.
• No contesting entries. This is subjective, the entry is their opinion.
• No natter. As above, anything contesting an entry will be cut, and anything that's just contributing more can be made its own entry.
• Explain why it's a Dethroning Moment of Suck.
• No ALLCAPS, no bold, and no italics unless it's the title of a work. We are not yelling the DMoSs out loud.

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• Belfagor: 6 Reasons North Korea is the Funniest Evil Dictatorship Ever. One would think it wants to be a funny parody of the USA-DPRK relationship, but no. All we have is the most annoying distillation of Eagle Land smugness and Dirty Communist-like tropes played painfully straight, all with cheap imperialistic propaganda and, to top that, thinly veiled insults toward an organization that wishes for peace between the two Koreas. You know, exactly what we need in this period. Cracked generally goes bad when talking about foreign politics. This time, it reached its worst.
  • Sen: Considering they've already done funny parodies of North Korea, the above seems inexplicable.
• A Black Raptor: Their 'Science Vs Marvel' article. I've been annoyed at articles before (I contemplated using the Terrible Superhusbands article due to its massive levels of taking OOC moments at face value and blaming the characters for it as if they're always like it), but this article was just plain awful. Yes, super hero origins are a little silly and don't hold up well in real life, but the amount of poor research that the writer used makes them look like they just hated Stan Lee and/or Marvel Comics. Being bitten by a radioactive spider = super powers is obviously silly, but the spider bite causing radiation poisoning? Because the spider's venom would become radioactive and as such be inside him? Ok, that's a little cynical. Mr. Fantastic not being allowed to use his own home made rocket or take his untrained family with him into space does have a point. The use of Evolution as an explanation for super powers is a little flimsy, except that later writers would introduce the concept of an 'X Gene' which causes random super powers, which the writer just ignores. The Hulk explanation of being hit by a gamma bomb is stupid, but the 'second problem' suggested was just not thinking straight. Because, as you know, the US regularly test bombs near their own civilization, and as such, every city 'for miles' would be effected by Gamma bomb energy. Those got more and more cynical, but the absolute worst is Punisher. For one, it has nothing to do with science. Secondly, the 'reason' it wouldn't work is because the police would stop him the second he went out to kill someone. Because, everyone knows the police have a near spotless record for catching murderers. This got even more glaring if you actually read anything about his relationship with the police (in that they all feel sorry for him and turn the other way). This all makes it look incredibly hate-filled, especially when you realize that they specifically target Marvel and only Marvel, when DC and Darkhorse Comics are just as bad at origins. Again, there's been plenty of articles that have pissed me off, but this one article shows that the writers will not bother to check their facts when they decide to write that it calls any article into question.
• HeavyMetalSnail: 5 Prejudices That Video Games Can't Seem to Get Over is the worst Cracked.com article I have ever read. The writer (J.F. Sargent) tries to make a point about sexism and racism in video games in what could've been a provocative yet interesting article if the writer did any research. Most of the time, Sargent is reading way too much into video game mechanics to find racism, most infamously saying that Redguards taking an intelligence penalty meant they couldn't use magic ("The in-game equivalent to technology") that was racist while failing to mention that the predominately white Nords take a similar penalty and that one could still use magic despite an intelligence penalty. At other times, he's outright lying about content in the game (like saying that most Asari in Mass Effect work as strippers) as well as taking quotes from characters in the game out of context and blowing the reasoning behind them completely out of proportion. The worst moment though comes from when he complains about how there's no same sex relationships for men in video games despite the fact that the header shows a picture of Zevran from Dragon Age: Origins who's bisexual and has a developed romance subplot for men as well as women. The article was just a series of half-baked, misinformed statements only made possible by outright ignoring information presented in the game. Definitely deserves its place as one of the worst articles on the site.
  • Vexer: Sargent got even worse in his YouTube video "Cracked is Anti-Gamer" where he spends 19 minutes rambling and coming up with bullshit excuses for his nonsensical opinions on games, most notably the notion that most popular games are violent, which is absolute nonsense.
• Moonstone Spider: While not as blatantly offensive and despicable as many of the examples below, I found 5 Ways You Don't Realize Movies are Controlling Your Brain staggeringly poorly researched and ignorant. The entire article rests on the assertion that human beings can only think in terms of stories. Fair enough, but then, the author asserts that all stories must have The Hero and villain clearly defined and a Three-Act Structure. Given that the vast majority of stories don't have those elements, this is an incredibly poorly-thought-out piece of writing. Perhaps the writer has simply never read the likes of "The Lady or the Tiger" where both of those elements are completely missing, but how did said author manage to get through High School or at least College English without reading many of the most influential short stories of all time? Even if he somehow missed that, the sheer number of entries on the No Antagonist trope page should be a clue, or going even more basic, one might note that of the four classic story types (Man Against Man, Man Against Nature, Man Against Society, and Man Against Himself), only Man Against Man has a clear-cut villain, and Man Against Society is the very type of story the author asserts humans are inherently incapable of understanding.
• madamecaroline: Cracked has had bad moments with transphobia before, but their 'If Everything in Life Listed the Side Effects' photoplasty in particular sticks out in my mind. One of the pictures is of a girl in short shorts with high heels, with the caption "This product's contents may not contain an actual female. Potential users should check in advance before use. No refunds". This picture is grossly offensive and transphobic, both for implying that trans-women are not actually women, and for stereotyping trans-women as prostitutes.
• fluffything: For me, I find their How 7 Iconic Movie Characters Would Fare In Slasher Movies article to be their DMOS. It starts off OK with them rating how well characters like Willy Wonka and Optimus Prime would do if they were in a slasher film. Seems straightforward enough, but, then the DMOS kicks in when they add Freddy Krueger into the list. First off, Freddy Krueger is already a character in a slasher movie series (IE: He's the main villain). Second, and more importantly, the only reason he's added was just so that we could have another round of Cracked having a terribly-done Take That! at the character. And what are their reasons Freddy wouldn't survive in a horror film? They claim that, outside the dream world, he is little more than a "hipster with knives" (and their only so-called logic behind that claim is because Freddy wears a fedora). OK, yes, Freddy is mortal in the real world. But, here's the thing: He's still a notorious serial killer. The guy isn't exactly helpless as a mortal, he can still stab you with his glove. Plus, they claim that people would instantly recognize him and would immediately just push him into a fire and burn him to death (again). Two things wrong with that. One, Freddy Krueger was able to go toe-to-toe against Jason Voorhees (who is physically larger and stronger than Freddy) by using his cunning to his advantage. I'm fairly certain Freddy could hold his own against a bunch of teenagers. Two, I'm fairly certain most people wouldn't look at a horribly burnt man with a razor-glove and go "I should fight him". In fact, I'm fairly certain they would run screaming in the other direction. The whole inclusion of Freddy on the list is little more than a poor attempt to bash the character by providing the weakest reason to do so I've ever seen. Look, if they're not fans of Freddy, fine. But this is just painfully stupid to read.
• Guest1001: "The 5 Most Ridiculously Sexist Superhero Costumes" was bad enough, ending a perfectly good list with a whiny, hypocritical Author Tract aimed at the argument that men are drawn just as unrealistically as women. But what really drove me away was the follow-up: "The 8 Stupidest Defenses Against Accusations Of Sexism", where he cherry-picked the worst comments (or single sentences from otherwise fine comments) and, instead of coming up with intelligent counter-arguments, instead he has decided to call the readers virgins for disagreeing with him. He even went so far as to say that anyone who complained about misandry was "the biggest asshole on the planet" and automatically misogynistic. Somehow, you can't imagine anyone saying that when someone criticizes a misogynistic work, can you? It was a huge combination of completely missing the point and Critical Research Failure.
• Animeking1108 6 Pathetic Attempts by Corporations to Create a Superhero was going good until the number 1 entry was Tiger & Bunny. It seems that they haven't actually watched an episode and automatically assumed that it's nothing but product placement. This is why Cracked needs writers who actually watch anime. It seems that most of their articles relating to anime are a complete Critical Research Failure.
• Math Wizard Boy: "6 Reasons it is Impossible to Quit World of Warcraft" was a good article up until reason #1. Keep in mind, up until this point, the format is a question questioning something about the game that outsiders might look at and think WTF. i.e., "How can you play the same game for eight years without getting tired of it?", and the author explains that the developers are constantly adding new stuff to the game. So for #1, the question is "[the expansion pack Mists of Pandaria] looks incredibly retarded. Does playing it mean you are retarded?" The author's short answer is yes. The long answer involves criticizing the WoW community (because the panda was the most requested idea from the players), calling the idea "buttfuck stupid", and saying that "Anyone who buys the game so that they can pretend to be [Po from] Kung Fu Panda isn't old enough to play video games in the first place". Really? This is an article about why it's impossible to quit WoW, and the "number one" reason why is because an expansion looks retarded and anyone who plays it is too?.
• InTheGallbladder: I used to be a devout fan of the website. Now, you couldn't get me to surf it at gunpoint. Why, you ask? 7 Promotional Stunts By Musicians That Backfired Hilariously. I can ignore the fact that nearly half the list is composed of white rappers, which, given Cracked's reputation, raises questions in and of itself. I will not ignore the fact that #2 features a photo of an IRA carbombing captioned with the phrase "Also, it's about ethics in video game journalism.". Personal opinions be damned, nobody has any business putting three decades of domestic terrorism on the same level as perhaps a year's worth of "someone is wrong on the internet."
• Dr Zulu 2010: 6 reasons Resident Evil movies are better than the games. Oh boy, where do I begin? Well, it's written by Luke McKinney (who has a few other articles of his up here as well) and the arguments he throws as to why are more alike to the cliched "Gamers will go apeshit when their precious little stories are tampered by those Hollywood phonies" crap we used to know as well as weak reasons; especially the argument that the games waste your time and have worse plots than the movies. First of all, it's a survival horror. It focuses more on exploration than fighting. Many games have done that before and after RE cames (IE: Sweet Home (1989), Alone in the Dark (1992), Corpse Party, Silent Hill, etc). Second, while I admit that the plots of the games are not groundbreaking, they are told more straight than the movies in many cases. And third, he critizises the games for its large cast of characters instead of one character. That you like the movies, fine (I even enjoyed the first RE movie and liked some part of the second one), but if you want to show why you think they are better than the games a lot of people grew up with, throw some damn good arguments to back it up.
  • Reviewgamesh: McKinney doesn't seem to have a grasp on the fact that the games are quite aware of their Camp factor whereas the movies play all of their tropes completely straight. His opinions on the characters- Leon, unlikable, really?- also make it look like he's just looking for something to bitch about. The game characters grab the Idiot Ball and run with it sometimes, but that absolutely pales to what happens anytime Alice steps within 10 feet of a character from the games in one of the films.
• RA2: Kristi Harrison's "5 Life Lessons from a Former Mean Girl." I recognize that it's easy to hate someone who was a bully in elementary school, let alone one who doesn't seem apologetic. And I recognize that it's foolhardy to judge someone real harshly based on their actions from that age. But Harrison goes so far out of her way to portray herself as a saint and wise sage, to the point that she doesn't just come across as remorseless, but delusional too. She acts like she became a better person, not based on anything she did, but because some teachers "saw the good in her", and her classmates and present day coworkers like her. Seriously, all she had under the section "people change" were the responses when she asked her coworkers "what do you think of me?" and lo and behold, they were all positive. But what really takes the cake is her wholehearted defending of Chris Brown, of all people! Apparently, the man is "sick in the head" therefore off-limits for teasing on Twitter, and anyone who did insult him is a cyberbully (you can see in her cherrypicked screenshot that the "cyberbully" gets several obscene replies and death threats in response). I have no idea how she segues between her own experiences picking on people and deeming Chris Brown an unacceptable target, but it's the final nail in the coffin. Somehow, she thinks she's the authority about what people can and can't say on Twitter just because she's a former "mean girl". Here's an actual quote from the article:
  Making fun of Chris Brown is like making fun of a quadriplegic blind man who's also retarded in the retarded sense of the word "retarded."

If she's going to give tips about comedy, she should exhibit a little aptitude of it herself.

• Floweramon: 4 Insane Pieces of 'My Little Pony' Fan Art. This article is basically nothing but uninformed opinions and obvious bias. Three of the things listed aren't fanart, they're fanfiction, and one of them is Fallout: Equestria. It says the story contains graphic rape (it doesn't) and doesn't really analyze why it deserves to be on the list aside from "It's My Little Pony with death, sex, and a nuclear apocalypse and it's horrible!" The other things are porn (oh gee, like no other fandom has fan porn), specific fetish fanfiction (again, not MLP specific), and a gorey fanfic. Honestly, the entire thing feels like they didn't fully look into/for actual insane fanart/fiction and just wanted to rag on MLP.
• tgsnum5: 5 popular jokes that only make people want to punch you should win a award for "Worst understanding of reader base of all time". Whatever you think of Cheese, this is just pretentious, even for his standards. To sum the article up, he bashes people for making bad jokes (which is obviously extremely subjective, although he acts like his word is the final word) while showing off Twitter posts that have him making said bad jokes. But it's when the readers respond to it that things just get out of control. Cheese and Wong go on a banning spree to anyone even remotely bashing the article, all while Cheese is posting tweets bashing the comments section, up and to the point of saying, I shit you not:
  "The only reason we still even have a comments section is because it keeps them rounded up in a nice neat place where they can jack off to each other and leave the normal people to their adult lives. It's like having a play room for the kids at Thanksgiving so the adults can hang out and watch football without being annoyed every two minutes from some stupid, meaningless, dumb kid shit."

No comment.
In the end, a lot of people who read the site from the beginning wound up perma-IP-banned, and neither Cheese nor Wong have apologized for what they said. And while Cheese was a Base Breaker from the start, looking through the comments now, almost no one is standing up for him, and point out that for all the bashing he gets, John never talks about the ones thanking him for his inspirational and thought provoking articles. It was pretty much the all time low for the comments section on the site, and really stands as a monument to selective hearing and categorizing (he claims to never read the comments) without evidence on the Internet.

• Mister Nobody: It goes even further as, apparently, David Wong is actively campaigning for the total removal of the comments section. He has referred to the comment section as "a cancer on the site" and time will tell if the site's owners agree with his opinion.

• Purple Shirt: The 7 Commandments That All Video Games should obey. First off, it starts off with "All games should have multiplayer if they're on consoles"... and cites games made specifically for single player, like Shadowrun. Probably not a good idea to get your point. His point about Grand Theft Auto makes a lot more sense - seeing as the game advertises multiplayer but you have to be within arms length if you're playing with each other. However, the biggest one is when they say to hire some decent voice actors and brings up an example from Final Fantasy X. This example? The laughing scene. This is illustrated with a YouTube clip taken entirely out of context. When you take things out of context, it makes you look silly, yes, and Rule of Funny is in effect... but for those in the know-how, it just makes you look like an uneducated moron. That's the kind of shit X-Play, Zero Punctuation, and The Irate Gamer pull. I don't even like Final Fantasy X, and I can cite better examples of "poor voice acting" in the game (Rikku's Lip Lock, Seymour sounding like he's high on drugs). He also says the game took $32 million to make and "Give some of that to the story writing department". Uhm... when you're talking about actors and are now saying that the writers need more money... then you're just going the other way. The point may have been "Hire some decent actors to deliver those lines" but when you blame the writers on what you perceive to be poor acting, you just come off as incredibly indecisive.
• Midna: The hateboner Cracked has been on as of August 2016 for people who don't like Ghostbusters (2016) is incredibly annoying in general, especially if you're someone with no strong feelings on the movie who is sick of hearing about it from both sides, and almost certainly politically motivated. Since I have to be specific, though, I'll single out "My Dad was a Jailed Insane Revolutionary Psychologist". Right at the beginning, we're dick-slapped with "[Wilhelm Reich] had a much rougher childhood than the one that got ruined by the Ghostbusters reboot, is all we're saying." Completely out of context, completely irrelevant to the content of the article, and even the way it's written sounds forced. It was literally only shoehorned in so the writer/editor could say "Man, people who hate the new Ghostbusters suck, right?" We get it already, guys.
• Blue Guy: Now, it should be pretty obvious that the folks at Cracked don't like bronies. I can live with that. However, "Why 'My Little Pony' Is About to Get Even Creepier" steps way over the line. The article implies that there are only three types of fans of the show: little girls, "bronies," (by which XJ Selman makes it clear he means obnoxious, self-important manchildren) and Furry fetishists. It also implies that all adult fans (even the more casual ones) cosplay in public by default. Long story short, the article is nothing but bias and assumptions about bronies.
• darkrage6: For me, it was Ricardo Rivera's "5 Hilarious Actor Meltdowns Behind Famous Movies" (which really weren't hilarious, if you ask me). First off, including Lindsay Lohan's antics on the set of The Canyons when there were much better choices for the list that didn't get included (like Martin Sheen's breakdown while filming Apocalypse Now) but the worst part was the one picture of Lindsay's mughots with a caption that calls her a "ridiculous fucking mess of a human." OK, I'm used to seeing jokes about Lindsay on the site and I know she's made plenty of mistakes and people have valid reasons for not liking her, but that caption truly crossed the line as it wasn't a joke, it was just a cruel and despicable statement (and unfortunately, most of the people in the comments section are making equally disgusting statements about her) that made Ricardo sound like a total dickhead; considering that former child star Mara Wilson's article mentioned how insulting celebrities doesn't make you a better person (or something like that), you'd think that Rivera would've been more respectful.
  Also, there's some Critical Research Failure when the article says that The Canyons was rejected from every film festival (actually, only two, and the execs at one of them got in trouble for making unprofessional comments about the film) when in fact, the film was accepted for a showing at the Venice Film Festival in August (the news had been out for a few weeks so there's no excuse for him not mentioning it). That just proves that Ricardo is a lazy and incredibly shitty writer who doesn't belong on Cracked. Cheese and Wong, for all the dickish things they've said, have at least written good articles, something I definitely cannot say about Rivera.
  • Doctor Sleep: For me, it was 4 Signs DC Comics Has No Clue How To Make Superhero Movies for pretty much the same reason. The article wasn't funny or educational. It was just another angry blogger who believes his opinion is uncontestable fact.
• The Funny Brony: I absolutely love Cracked, but my DMoS has to be the article on furries due to the author going by every negative stereotype about the fandom, such as furries being people who love to dress up in animal suits and have wild sex parties and so on. Personally, as a lover of furry things, it seems they lacked any real research on the fandom and went by pure bias. I love Cracked, but that lost a lot of respect of them for me.
• Man Called True: "Six WTF Video Game Endings". No research at all. The second Monkey Island game is listed with no discussion whatsoever about why the ending turned out that way (and no acknowledgement of the sequel's resolution for it), and Drakengard is dismissed as a generic hack-n-slash fantasy (when it's notorious for being one of the darkest Deconstruction Game creations ever). Worse, when called on it by several commentators, the author grew angry and defensive, refusing to admit when he was wrong. Cracked isn't known for its veracity, but this is just childish and spiteful.
• Thetundraterror: "5 Basic Things You Won't Believe Science Can't Explain"? Yeah, try 5 things the author couldn't be arsed to Google. Aside from the fact that 'science' isn't a person but a method, this list goes above and beyond with how ignorant the author is. The author starts off by saying "no one knows why ice expands and floats". Yes, we do. If you took 10 seconds to just Google "why does ice expand", you'll know why. It also acts that because pi is an irrational number, it's some sort of "code of the universe". If it's because it's an irrational number, then the root of 2 should also count. Things like the universe having 11 dimensions which is just a hypothesis at best. Really, this whole article could be summed up with Fuckin' magnets, how do they work?!
• Creamstripe: I'm generally not a fan of Cracked's articles although I do enjoy some, but The 7 Most Preposterous Sex Positions People Claim to Use was awful. Not only are the positions listed considered to be normal by most people, but for most of the entries, it just boils down to "I don't think I would enjoy having sex in this position, therefore anyone who does enjoy doing so is wrong!" It wasn't that funny, either.
• Erin582: "Six Harsh Truths That Will Make You A Better Person" gets my vote. While in theory, it makes sense and says, on one hand, that life is not fair and realize that you can be better than what you are and not have to settle for less. On the other hand, however, I took away from it as coming off as preachy and pointed advice that teaches a rather warped and self-loathing lesson of never putting yourself first, realize that you will never be good enough in society's eyes and that you should be obsessed with what other people think of you to the point of insecurity. This is not surprising that this article came from David Wong, who seems to be obsessed with accentuating the negative and looking at this world for being forever cynical and less-than-stellar. One of the absolute worst parts of the article? He actually have the nerve to say that he wished someone told him these "important lessons" earlier in life.
  • Baeraad555: That's the one that has made me deeply reluctant to click on a Cracked link ever since. It's just one long string of elitism poorly disguised as tough love. First of all, most of us believe there is such a thing as inherent human worth - and if you don't believe that such a thing exists, I'd like to know what you propose to do with people who have debilitating handicaps or are otherwise unable to pull their own weight. Secondly, yes, if you are completely and utterly useless in every way, it doesn't matter how good your intentions are - brilliant insight, we sure needed someone to come along and tell us that! Thing is, though, if you are an entirely selfish douchebag, it also won't matter how much you could offer to the world if you wanted to, because you won't want to - and since most people are neither completely useless or completely selfish, using either one as a basis for an argument is a ridiculous strawman. And while this is only my personal observation, it seems to me that the world does not lack for productivity, but there is a severe shortage of kindness. Case in point, this article...
  • Rage24: That article pissed me off. It's the kind of crap that feeds on our deep fears and insecurities about life and tries to confirm the worst as "harsh truths". The worst part is that he creates a mental trap by painting anyone who rejects these so called truths as being who the article was aimed at. If you take issue with the article, it's just your pride being unwilling to accept it. It's the same kind of mind games Christian fundamentalists pull to keep people in line. It's a shame because I read Wong's other articles and thought they were brilliant, but this depressing piece of shit becomes his most popular article.
  • BenMitchell90: This article is the reason I avoid any Cracked article that isn't historical/pop culture trivia or stuff like "5 Weird Animals that Totally Exist". The basic message ("Do something with your life") is fine, great even. It's just too bad that message is delivered in this smug, antagonistic manner that seems determined to make you feel worthless, by someone who watched the Blake scene in Glengarry Glen Ross, which was intended to show how screwed up Corporate America and capitalism is, and found that level of douchebaggery inspiring enough to change his life and something to strive for.
    • Impudent Infidel: That part is especially odd since he directly links to the blog post he got the interpretation from... and his interpretation is completely different (the blog thought the character was completely full of shit and being deliberately annoying to motivate the salesmen).
    • Morenohijazo: One could even argue whether he's just doing exactly the same thing, putting in his article tons of shit just to motivate readers... but then, he should have read the blog that talked about the scene and realized the reactions to the article would be the same that the film scene had. Anyway, the core idea is okay, that we can't expect good things to happen if we don't work for them - the tone and the conclusions are what ruin it. I can't add myself much else to what other entries here or these blogs said, so I'll just say some things, all related to Wong's ability to take things out of context so that they seem to have a different meaning (as Rage24 points out, the article is pretty much based on manipulation and mind games to work).
    • First, Wong said the aforementioned blog post he linked to was a critique of hipsters and how they lacked motivation to find a job. Well, actually, the blog post isn't like that: it talks about how hipsters aren't to blame (at least, not entirely) because they fell into the Hard Work Fallacy that going through college would assure them a job in the related area, and criticizes people who sold them that notion - probably the blog author would precisely think of Wong's article as perpetuating said notion, because of his "work harder and you'll become a successful person, no matter what" message and praising college students as the most productive people.
    • Second, Wong quotes the Bible (Matthew 7:19–20) as a proof of his point, saying "Hey, even Jesus agrees with me". Again, he's taking it out of context: Read the whole thing, Jesus was talking about "false prophets". The whole thing is more about good people and bad people than about being productive, which again, goes against Wong's point.
    • Finally, regarding the "Glengarry Glen Ross" scene, Wong conveniently forgets to tell how the film ends. You would think that awesome motivating speech that Wong said "would program his alarm clock to play it for him every morning if he knew how" allowed the salesmen to become an incredibly good salesmen, right? Well, actually, it failed spectacularly: the film ends up with them getting arrested, because being pressured to do something they couldn't do made them start to do stupid things. See, sometimes, people don't improve, not because they lack the motivation, but because they genuinely don't know how to improve or they lack the means. If that's the case, merely telling them to get better without telling them how to do it or giving them the means won't help.
  • Valiona: I'll second this as the worst Cracked moment for me, although the remarks about an autistic child winning "Miss Personality" come in a close second. The tone is remarkably condescending and cynical, basically saying that any trait you have that doesn't help you get a job has no real value. It also misunderstands the point of the "Glengarry Glen Ross" scene, as mentioned above, although, as you can see in the comments section of that clip and the article, Wong is not alone. The fact that he seems to pre-empt criticism by saying that disagreement with the article's message is proof that you need its help makes him come off as a hypocrite.
• Mightymoose 101: "Six Sexist Video Game Problems Worse than the Breasts", combining Cracked's new obsession with soap-boxing with their complete ignorance towards the video game industry, and what you get is a truly awful read. From blatantly ignoring basic facts (complaining about how "It took more computing power to render boobs than NASA took to land the moon" when the processor on your average iPhone is space-aged technology compared to what they were using in 1969), to just twisting scenes so that they can fit in the author's purview of sexism (such as stating that Ellie breaking down into tears after just barely escaping being possibly raped and eaten, and having to brutally kill a man with a machete, is sexist because the game dared to have Joel try to comfort her for essentially going through hell). The whole article is just clickbait at its most vile and unashamed, and nobody comes off well for reading it: It makes feminism look bad, it makes Cracked look bad, and the fact that nobody in the Cracked Staff will fess up to having wrote it clearly shows that they don't exactly hold it in high regard, either.
• T448Eight: The list on "The Top 8 Everything of 2012", specifically the video game entries. Two of those games weren't even released in 2012, and most of the games are just tablets. The staff doesn't even (aside from maybe Robert Brockway and David Wong) play video games...
  • Knight9910: Definitely. This one was such a terrible moment that it made me change my DMoS for Cracked.^note  Previously, it was 5 Unexpected Downsides of High Intelligence. on the grounds of it being the first point when I noticed the site's trend toward anti-intellectualism. The list as a whole was an obvious (and desperate) attempt to recapture some of the popularity of an earlier article, The Top 5 Everything Of The Decade (For Better Or Worse). But the video games section in and of itself was rife with bad ideas:
    • Most of the writers totally admit right off that they don't play video games. Soren Bowie even goes so far as to name 2009's Words With Friends as the best game of 2012, just because it's the only game he knows anything about.
    • Kristi Harrison named Draw Something with the specific reasoning that the title is lazy and therefore, according to her, totally indicative of everything video games are.
    • Robert Brockway starts to make a good point about DayZ being popular despite being a mod for another game, but then loses it when he says that no one is ever allowed to complain about indie developers being underappreciated ever again, all because one indie game made it big. He then goes on to say the following: "Modding [...] just 10 years ago aspired to, at most, replace the faces of some enemy models with crudely pixelated butts." Not only has no mod (to my knowledge) ever done that, but the modding "scene" has boasted numerous extremely advanced mods throughout the history of video games. Hell, do the names Team Fortress or Counter-Strike mean anything to you, Robert?
    • But it's not just about these things either, it's all of these things, and what they say about the site now. Specifically, as Dan O'Brien himself pointed out in the number 4 entry, he hasn't played video games in so long he doesn't even know how to hold an Xbox controller, yet he's forced to write about video games or he'll lose his job despite being one of the founding staff members of Cracked.com. You see, this is what Cracked is now. It's no longer a bunch of people enjoying themselves while writing hilarious articles about the things that they love. It's a business staffed by people who hate themselves and everything around them, whose sole purpose is to rake in as much filthy lucre as is physically possible. This is the reason for absolutely everything wrong with the site - the retardedly misinformed articles, the ego-driven mass perma-bannings of readers, even the anti-intellectual BS articles. It's all about the Benjamins now.
• ading: While there have been quite a few Cracked articles over the years that were not quite up to standards, 6 Ad Campaigns That Prove Humanity Is Doomed is, overall, not one of them. However, there is one moment in it that was just plain wrong: They complain about an ad which shows a little girl flirting with someone so he'll give her ice cream. That in itself isn't problematic, but the DMOS comes when the writer calls the ad "Child Whore" in order to attract Google traffic.
• Ding Jun: This troper found number 3 on this article about children being forced to partake in beauty contests to be quite infuriating. Therein, the author makes fun of a contest jury's decision to make an autistic child "Miss Personality". Not only is this a very crude joke at the expense of autists in general, the author is also absolutely unwilling to acknowledge that anything might be wrong with such charming lines as "Of all the kids in the pageant, you picked the autistic one for a personality prize? Was that a bizarre joke?" or "Her daughter apparently just has a half loaf of shit for personality". Such distasteful jokes are cruel, immature, and reflect a general misconception of autism as something that turns people into unfeeling non-humans. It goes to show once again just how far many of Cracked's editors are willing to go to get a chuckle out of people, even if this means displaying a level of ugly contempt usually reserved for half-literate YouTube-commenters.
• Lopiny: It's generally known that Cracked has a bit of a Right Hand Versus Left Hand problem when it comes to titling articles, including one article about unknown truths about drone warfare being titled "6 myths about drone warfare you won't believe". That one isn't the DMOS in question. The DMOS in question would be the initial title for Six Signs of the Time Way Older than your Grandpa: Six forms of modern depravity way older than your grandpa. Considering gay marriage is part of the list, it was, at the very least, a major goof.
• Angelslayer: This J.F. Sargent article about the Men's Rights Movement starts out by comparing the MRM to neo-Nazis and placing blame on them for the Rodgers killings, and it just keeps going downhill from there, generalizing the entire men's right movement as a bunch of whiny, self-entitled, misogynistic babies. The article seems to think Reddit is a good source, and that's in the very first point... it's really quite a tip-off about the quality of the article. The whole thing reads like the sort of garbage you'd see on a radical feminist blog on Tumblr, not on a humor site. This just goes to show how far Cracked has fallen in recent years.
• ergies: This article about out of place artifacts. One point was about how a "researcher" discovered a striking similarity between the Zuni tribe and Japanese because of how the words sound like each other... using words that aren't even close to Japanese. The DMoS is the sheer gullibility of the writer and the comments who insist on defending the claim using the excuse that the Japanese she was referencing was an ancient one. Even if you don't understand Japanese and use a dictionary, this is all contradicted by the fact that her only point of reference is Modern Japanese.
• Eegah-Taki: My DMOS has to be this 18 Ridiculously Sexist Modern Ad Campaigns. It had some good points here and there, but it seemed Cracked doesn't understand what parody or satire is; with some of their examples, like 18, their response was "Because everything is about your cock and chicks are totally lying to you, amirite?" (no Cracked, you're not, it's supposed to be a dick. The same type your website uses commonly), or like with 6, complaining that some companies go for a more feminine advertisement method for their ear plugs, where the other company advertised their earplugs with a more masculine skull and bones (forgetting the fact that different companies can advertise their product however they want ("Sleepinpink.com" and "hearos.com" are 2 different companies); there is nothing that actually indicated the genders of the products, just that one was pink and the other has a skull on it). But what really got me was 2, complaining that Burger King's "I AM A MAN" was not satire (even though it was) and complaining a burger joint would want you to eat burgers over tofu (yes, Cracked, Burger King wants you to eat their product, that's not sexism, that's advertising), and the reason I post this, they claim to that "I will eat till my innie turns into an outie" is the company wants you to eat your man (uh, Cracked, they mean bellybuttons when they say that, not genitals). Does anyone else remember when Cracked actually complaint about legitimate stuff?
• Kenya Starflight: I find I have to eliminate my last entry here (griping about a cooking-related article because the author intentionally botched the recipes so he could complain about them) because as annoying as it was, it didn't end my readership of Cracked. No, it was the 9 Lame Hobbies White People Like (For Some Reason) article. Cracked has done articles like this before that mock certain activities and claim there's no way people legitimately enjoy them, but this article is somehow ten times worse. Not just because of the implied racism in the title (racism against white people is still racism, Cracked), but because it has such a snobbish, uptight, self-righteous tone to it. The "upcycling" bashing in particular is annoying, as the article claims that "upcycling" — taking old items like furniture and refurbishing them into something new and useful — is wasteful because it deprives poor people of cheap goods. Aren't there enough old and used items around to ensure that both "upcyclers" and people without a lot of cash can use them? Cracked has annoyed me in the past, yet I kept reading because I found it funny and weirdly informative; this article, however, struck so much of a nerve that I abandoned the site entirely and find I don't miss it.
• Ansem Paul: 5 Ways Society Is Sexist Against Men (and How We Can Fix It) makes light out of violence and death against men and assumes any men who want violence against them to be taboo is actually looking for an excuse to hit women. It has a ridiculous, warped, twisted version of feminism that would make any feminist actually interested in social change sick to their stomach. I mean, you don't think the Suffragettes had this way of thinking, do you? The solution to being violently attacked by a woman is to go bulk up at the gym? Are you fucking kidding me? Any feminist who actually agrees with the article should question what they are really fighting for. Whatever these shadowy MRA folks people keep going on about and using to justify such things, I doubt they're worse than this. Even the writers knew their article was sick and horrible and wouldn't put their names to it, distributing blame through the Cracked staff. I can't bring myself to browse Cracked without the ad blocker on, if at all; I mean, the thought someone is getting sponsorship money for this is awful. Maybe it's time to have a word with the sponsors and see if they are OK with it? Is there anything on Cracked that isn't click-bait? Is there any hope they will ever be able to discuss gender issues with even a shred of mature thought?
  • Bibs Dibs: I couldn't get past the first 2 entries. To give you an idea of how warped their/his/her view of feminism is in this article, one of the arguments it uses to justify the "shouldn't hit a woman" rule is that society relays on generalizations which can be used be to justify any Double Standard or gender role ever. The idea that gender roles are okay because most people relay on stereotypes, that's not feminist, that's anti-feminist (or at the very least, hypocritical).
  • Fan 01: The whole article feels more like a giant Take That! to all the MRAs that picked apart all of the biased views in J.F. Sargent's article about them and their movement with clear reasoning and logic, than an actual article. The MRA bashing in this article feels like a way to get back at them for proving them [Cracked] wrong, but they took things too far by being incredibly vile to the point of nauseating. The biggest atrocity Cracked said in the article was when they said the best way to deal with domestic abuse is to have 1000 men die so "numbers even out" in regards to women shelters. How in the world could they ever say that? Saying that a thousand men should DIE? WTF, Cracked? Seriously? Cracked has hit a new low and their sponsors should be notified to see if they wish to continue funding such hateful and petty people who can't take criticism or be funny anymore.
  • WRM 5: Even by the standards of Cracked's recent articles, this is the worst yet. It's basically the same kind of "Waah, the fans made me cry!" article as Luke McKinney's "The 8 Stupidest Defenses Against Accusations Of Sexism" except even worse. No longer content to simply attack their fans, Cracked is now lashing out wildly against the entire male gender. It's not surprising that whoever wrote it didn't want to sign their work, instead just leaving it as "by the Cracked Staff." If I didn't have a DMOS for Cracked before, then I do now.
  • phylos: I used to follow Cracked a few years ago but I came back less and less the more they left comedy/information aside to push agendas. About a year ago, a friend linked me an article and I got somewhat hooked again... then this gem happened and it made me wonder what had gone so wrong in the world for something such as this article to even exist. It's not satire, it's not analysis, it's not informational; it's only unadulterated and distilled hatred and it's worrying because, for better or for worse, the site has many readers who might buy into the idea of trivializing abuse against men. I never came back and I don't intend to.
• falcon2484: The 10 Dumbest Things on TV So Far This Season is a two-page rant by the author, "Christina H," on why she hates the show Revolution and thinks it's stupid. Really, I understand that everyone was not a fan of the show; it wasn't the smartest, least-contrived, cliché-barren series. And I understand that "Christina H" is a brilliant writer who is responsible for several groundbreaking, award-winning TV series, and knows what goes into the making of good TV. But why would you mislead Cracked readers with your article's title into thinking that it's going to be a critique leveled against all of TV, instead of just a single series you happen not to like? Why wouldn't you name your article "The 10 Dumbest Things on Revolution So Far This Season" or "Why I Hate the Stupid Show Revolution"?^note Because then, you would not get to trick fans of the show into clicking on your article, annoy and offend them by calling the show stupid and essentially call all of them stupid for enjoying it. Cracked should have recognized this article for what it was (trolling) and, at the very, least refused to publish it under its misleading title, and request that the author change it for clarity.
• Donny KD: 5 Ignorant Jokes from the Last Comedians You'd Expect by Jason Iannone. For an article slamming comedians for poor research (Comedians make jokes by exaggerating the subject matter? You don't say.), the article itself is poorly written. One instance including the fact that he claims Christopher Columbus never uttered the word "indian" (except he did). It's also pretty hypocritical too, since he shames Louis C.K. for describing vaginas as pretty and like flowers (as if he's the only person who made the comparison. Looking at you, Georgia O'Keeffe.) and calling them something other than vaginas, and then he goes and suggests we call them "the iron box". As one commenter put it, "I don't think I've ever seen such a unanimous, united comments section. Seriously, if you've just got here, scroll down and be amazed: people from all sides of the political and cultural spectrum are in complete accord for the first time."
• Dash Spendar: 3 Controversial Words We've Drained Of All Meaning. Number 1: SJW. Getting past the misplaced social rants (remember when Cracked used to be about, you know, humor?), we've got this doozy of a quote: "You can pretty much guarantee that anyone who calls you a SJW is not only a racist or sexist but a fairly nasty one." That sort of sweeping generalization perfectly embodies what's wrong with the social justice movement. It generalizes to an insulting degree, and worst of all, not only creates sides but further turns it into a "with us or against us" situation. I'm all for equality. I can, have, and will fight for it. I'll also be the first to admit there are times and places for that to go on, and it can be taken too far. But apparently, that makes me a misogynist and racist. Which are two more words we've apparently drained of all meaning.
• Rothul: A 90 Second Guide to Determine if Your Internet Cause is BS: I couldn't care less about the specific issues the article derides. But the idea that a cause is BS because it A. Requires a conspiracy (as opposed to the dozens of conspiracy articles the site has ran, and the literal fact that only two people are needed for a conspiracy), B. Hasn't given you Real-Life consequences (which ends up being a back-handed argument for not concerning yourself with any cause that doesn't affect you directly), C. That a whole lot of white men are Academy Award voters, or D. There are people you don't like who might agree with you, just left a bad taste in my mouth. All of it seems to boil down to Hitler Ate Sugar and a weak attempt to take a stand on something without actually taking a stand.
• Johnnytherock: Not so much the content of the article, but recently, a lot of thought-provoking articles (or failing that, articles written with the intent of provoking thought) have been posted on Cracked. One of these articles was about Double Standard Rape: Female on Male, the other was on a more controversial issue. The issue is not with the content of the articles themselves (an argument can be made that these are issues that need to be raised, so good on the site for doing so), so much as the inability to comment on these articles. Maybe they don't trust their readers to discuss these issues reasonably, but it raises the question of why they even have a comment section in the first place, if they don't trust their readers to discuss serious issues. If this is how they mean to do this, perhaps they'd be better off disabling comments completely (as any post without comments inevitably gets commented on in another article anyway).
• gunslingerofgilead: This video critiquing Macklemore's "Same Love" song is simply a joke. The video makes a point of saying that Macklemore is actually homophobic because he keeps mentioning he's straight while at the same time supporting gay rights, an argument which makes no sense since it seems to rely on the logic that people who are not part of a minority group cannot really support rights for minorities because they're just too clouded by their own... majority-ness?. So to recap, two heterosexual writers (Cody Johnston and Abe Epperson) claim that a song, which has overwhelmingly been cherished by the LGBT community and become a gay anthem, is homophobic because it was written from the point of view of a heterosexual. This quickly becomes a case of Hypocritical Humor nonetheless, since Cracked has a track record of acting like "privileged" majorities are in no position to speak about minority rights, despite the fact that Cracked's writing and editorial staff is almost entirely comprised of straight white men.
• Donny KD: 6 Insane Beliefs of the World's Major Religons. Now, the content of the article itself is not bad, and the current title is not too click-bait-y. No, the problem lies with the original title: "6 Stories That Prove Every Major Religion Is Insane". Really, Cracked? The way they name their articles was bad before, but now, it's just plain reaching for attention and controversy. Also, there are 5 entries, not 6.
• The Mighty Heptagon: Their "Quick Fix" article "How Marvel Tricked You Into Seeing 'Guardians of the Galaxy'". Not only is the title probably one of the most needlessly inflammatory titles that they've ever used, the four points in its list don't even try to back up its central claim. What are those points, you ask? In order: They used their studio's bankable name to sell tickets (because obviously, no studio has ever done that before), they include popular retro music and references to classic movies (how dare they?!), the ending to the movie is vaguely similar to the ending of The Avengers (apparently, everyone in America already knew that before they even bought a ticket), and it's only tangentially connected to the rest of the MCU's continuity (clearly, that's enough to convince about 70 million people to not see it). The conclusion? Apparently, the movie's success had absolutely nothing to do with clever writing, likable characters or a kick-ass soundtrack, and you're a gullible, brainwashed victim of marketing if you saw the trailer and thought it looked like a fun movie.
• Bravo 104: One list did a run down of the decades between 1910 and 2010 in order from best to worst. Which decade won? The 1940's. That's right, the decade with World War II, the Holocaust, the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe and the Birth of the Arab-Israeli conflict is the best decade- not to mention that Britain and America weren't exactly saints themselves; racism, homophobia or sexism aren't even brought up as massive problems with this decade. The author's reasoning for this decade's greatness? World War II, because America had an evil enemy to fight, that they would feel no guilt over killing. Yep, the article basically says World War II was good, not because it founded the UN (although the collapse of the League of Nations rendered this a bit dampened), but because Americans had fun shooting people. It's at best ignorant and at worst downright offensive; saying that the millions of innocent people killed was worth it because the Allies didn't have to feel sad when they ended somebody's life while in a miserable trench surrounded by poverty, death, and despair. This genuinely angered me that somebody would say war is fun, especially when it's clearly been written by somebody who never actually lived in the decade. The holocaust is a pretty good contender for "worst thing that's ever happened", and yet the decade it's in gets a first place slapped on it.
  • Duke Nukem4ever: The entire list is just a middle finger to millions of people who died during World War II. But it even more offensive to people of former USSR (mostly Russians), the nation that arguably suffered the most during World War II (or at least during Eastern Front activities). In many Eastern regions, World War II is considered a tragedy. As a Russian myself, I found the Cracked's decision to label 40's "the best decade" solely because of World War II incredibly infuriating. If the World War II survivors would read this article, they would have sued the entire website for such a selfish and twisted interpretation of war. Whoever wrote this godawful list got off pretty easily to say the least.
• CJ Croen 1393: I've been straying away from Cracked ever since they let political correctness go mad, but I finally found one of these from them after finding a tiny but glaring sentence in their "4 signs that Jurassic World is going to be a comedy" article. Now, I can't guarantee that the movie's going to be as good as we all think it will be. For all I know, it'll completely dash our expectations and suck big time. And I can completely agree with their number 2 slot (that the people running the park are really stupid). But as a paleonut, what I can't forgive about this article is what they say about the Mosasaurus: "After welcoming us with the most cartoonish-looking gate in Jurassic Park history, the first big dino-huzzah the Jurassic World trailer tosses us is a sequence wherein a great white shark is dangled over a Sea World-style arena to feed a ridiculous monster that comes exploding out of the water with all of the convincingly realistic computer effects of a direct-to-DVD Lake Placid sequel. The entire shot looks like one of those photographs you can take at the Natural History Museum that inserts a fake dinosaur background behind you and your stupid friends." Cracked, do you even know what a Mosasaurus is? If you had even a grade school education about dinosaurs, you probably would! Heck, if the writer had any grade school kids, then all s/he would need to do is watch the trailer with said kids and ask "What dinosaur is that?" and the kid would probably answer them correctly. And maybe even point out that Mosasaurus wasn't even a dinosaur. Or, heck, maybe looked at the dang website. The worst part? Cracked has shown their research with prehistory before. What happened to satirical but well researched articles like "7 (Thankfully) Extinct Giant Versions of Modern Animals"? This part of this article sounds more like "We don't know what this animal is and are too lazy to do research so we'll just assume it's a fake monster made up for the movie".
• Swim To The Moon: "5 Historically Bad Movie Franchises We Keep Forgiving" is the first time I've only ever really been pissed off by a Cracked article. I've been forgiving of Cracked's previous failures but this takes the cake for several reasons. The first being that 3 of the films on the list don't have sequels and are franchises-to-be, proceeding to complain about why they hate the first film and not much else other than personal biases. That's bad enough, which brings me to the second reason: Zoolander is just a big, long content-free example. Third, it calls the Alien franchise bad based on two movies, then proceeding to call the first "a haunted house movie on a spaceship" and the second "a generic action film with aliens replacing drug dealers", both missing the point of each film. Fourth, the writer doesn't make any attempt to hide his disdain for older actors reprising their roles and doesn't give a reason for either.
• Tommy R 01 D: "4 Universally Hated Things That Are Somehow Still Popular" lists Axe (or Lynx) body spray. The article doesn't really discuss Axe itself so much as the people who use it and the marketing behind it. Specifically, Cracked reckons that the commercial only worked because it was marketed at teenage boys, who are "non-complex"... and "naive" and don't bathe regularly. Those are the kindest descriptions the article gives. The entire final paragraph -plus about a third of the text before it- of this section is just a list of insults levelled at every male between the ages of 13 and 20, ranging from mildly irritating to downright horrible. Teens have already been treated as targets of derision by Cracked ^note Often to the point where they can't be mentioned without an automatic stream of mockery, but this is taking it up to eleven.
• Fauxlosophe: I've followed Cracked on and off for some time; while like many, I've seen recent articles as being a good bit more hit and miss, I kept sporadically checking in on articles since the odd ones were interesting and even insightful. In particular, when they started pulling in actual experts and interviewing them about conditions of odd work places. They mucked that up by having three different but very similar articles on the conditions one could expect as a prostitute within about 2-3 months. What hit me as particularly bad however was when they published an article on how the "atheist community was hurting itself". I ended up only reading the first page before realizing it was clickbait not worth commenting on. The two points I can recall well are as follows; a few specific atheists being unpleasant and atheism itself, just like, comes off as arrogant. The first of these pointed to Dawkins and the Amazing Atheist having, individually, done some bad things and committed themselves to some questionable views. The fact that outspoken members of a group can occasionally be assholes is simply a universal; it's akin to criticizing Christians for the Westboro Baptist Church. There are very few groups without a media spokesperson who the media is drawn to for doing up controversy. Similarly, the second is a stereotype which the author admitted to view as inherent in atheism and something that's far from universal. I'm aware atheism has its drawbacks but rather than actually trying to look at the variety of atheists out there and the real problems of the community, this article was drafted up of the top of the head of someone who has, at best, been marginally involved with atheists at large. It's essentially writing an article called "The Problem with Christians" and talking about the Westboro Baptist Church, which frankly wouldn't be out-of-character for them. I can handle clickbait-y titles if there is substance behind them; instead, Cracked is willing to run same-y article focused on sex, games and comic books where they often repeat themselves with little fresh insight, do incredibly minimal research and pretend that they're a comedy website (as opposed to some sort of watered down pop-culture blogging community where comedy is continually getting sparser) in order to avoid serious criticism of the former points.
• Platinum Glitch Mint: 5 Ways Atheists Argue Their Cause (That Aren't Helping). The biggest problem I have with the article mostly comes from how weirdly unfocused to the topic it seems to be. The article, when it is not blaming the outspoken "leaders" of atheism as mean people who are destroying the movement in the eyes of everyone else, it is oddly enough constantly bringing up the outspoken criticisms of modern feminism by the likes of Richard Dawkins and The Amazing Atheist. The writer cites some of The Amazing Atheist's videos claiming them to be wrong without addressing what he finds wrong with them, as well as criticizing TJ Kirk's intentional jerk-like approach to his videos without addressing why it's bad that he does it. The fact that The Amazing Atheist also doesn't talk much about atheism anymore is also criticized ^note though the writer seems to be more critical of the fact that TJ focuses on criticizing social issues mostly, never mind the fact that TJ himself has addressed that he regrets the name of his YouTube channel because he always wanted to discuss more that just atheism. The article also outright calls Richard Dawkins insane simply because he made a statement using the fallacy of relative privation during the "ElevatorGate" debacle with Rebecca Watson, and that he tweeted one time about seeing two dogs engaging in a 69. The rest of the article isn't much different, as it continues to conflate popular atheism on the internet with evil woman-hating anti-feminism, claiming that "atheism has become as bad at talking to girls as the boys at a junior high dance". The defensiveness of some internet atheists is also mocked by the writer, being conflated with simple religion-hating and Islamophobia. Atheists have always been a very unfairly hated and subjugated group throughout history and around the world, and the writer ignorantly assumes that simply being outspoken and loud about one's own atheistic views because of this hatred makes you a loudmouthed jerk. Buzzfeed, of all sites, is even cited as a source multiple times throughout the article, the same BuzzFeed that published a clickbait article about why atheists are annoying neck-bearded assholes who hate religious people and constantly complain on the Internet about their atheism. Atheism criticisms aside, this article exemplifies how modern Cracked.com seems to think that any criticisms of modern feminism (or frankly anything social justice related that they agree with), no matter how rational or well natured the intentions are, automatically makes you a woman-hating monster who is simply ignorant of how feminism actually works.
• Steven: "6 Things You Learn Getting Paid to Troll People Online" is an attempt to be witty and ironic and failing massively at it while also being a massively poorly disguised Take That, Audience!. The author goes on to say how he and his friends grew up being dicks to each other and how the town he grew up in were filled with dickheads as if it excuses him for acting like a dick. He then starts bragging about how he gets paid to piss people off (by writing Cracked articles that piss people off) and makes money from all the clickbait he lures people with to fund his "$400" jeans while also bragging that he doesn't give a shit if you don't give him attention because 20 other people will. The author then spends the last 3 bullet points going off on some random tangent to emphasize how great he is and how he won't stop writing troll articles. The author is basically calling attention to himself just to get people riled up and has no idea what trolling actually means while coming off as a pretentious douchebag trying to look smart. Even the comments section, which is always a Broken Base over whatever the article is, has nearly everyone agreeing that the author is just acting like a massive tool and is hiding behind the "you didn't get the joke" excuse. Many others are also speculating that the author is trying to get back at everyone who didn't like his last article, which also failed at being ironic. I think the writer is trying to create some fake persona that some writers adopt and all it did was make me and everyone wonder if the guy is an adult trying to be "hip" with all the cool kids when it comes to trolling.
• friscokid182: "5 Famous People We Didn't Hate Enough in 2014". Okay, just the concept behind that article is disgusting by itself. A clickbait humor site thinks it has the right to tell us which famous people we have a duty to hate? Hell, even if you agree with all five of their choices (and there's a good chance you won't), there is nothing remotely humorous about commanding your audience to channel their hatred at famous people who've never personally hurt them. And their five choices are quibbles at best, and flagrant bandwagon hatred at worst. No, Cracked, I don't have an obligation to hate Jennifer Lawrence because she made some insensitive comments about OCD once, called herself "dykey" in passing one time, and once expressed some insecurity about her weight. ^note  Seriously, their final point in that entry basically boils down to "An attractive movie star called herself overweight? How dare she?!" No, Cracked, you're not the first people to criticize U2 for distributing a free album to people who didn't ask for it. But the low point of that article has to be the writer criticizing Iggy Azalea's (arguably) racially insensitive public persona by calling her home country "Racist Island"—and semi-seriously suggesting it as a new nickname for Australia. Whatever your feelings about Iggy may be, it's possible to criticize her without insulting an entire continent. If the comments section is any indication, Cracked's Australian readers were not amused.
• Bluetooth Mc Gee: "7 Reasons 'Assassin's Creed' Is the Least Playable Game Ever". Luke McKinney is on point for most of the article regarding Assassin's Creed: Unity's controversies (obviously YMMV), but point number 2 ("It Is Yet Another Sexist Screw-Up") reeks of SJW rhetoric. While the game's creative director's explanation of why you couldn't play as a female Assassin is admittedly poor and indiscreet, you can't deny that he does have a point. The level of customization options for Arno (the game's protagonist) will take time replicating on a female character, time that they didn't have as they already set a release date. In addition (this has since been explained by the devs themselves on numerous occasions, though I wish that they went with this explanation the first time around), from a gameplay standpoint, all players in co-op are the respective players' version of Arno, like Aiden Pearce in Watch_Dogs. In-universe, the game is essentially a simulation within a Matrix-like device called a Helix/Animus, so while historical plot-wise, it's unrealistic to have four versions of the protagonist, modern plot-wise it makes sense as the Assassins are hacking into the Helix and exploring the protagonist's memories simultaneously, not a set of four different Assassins' memories. So having a gender customization option that nobody else will see is, to the developers, not worth the extra few months of retooling the game, not to mention rewriting the story to accommodate the gender choice. Mr. McKinney (like most of the writers on Cracked) is either inept at using search engines, or is conveniently forgetting this information in an effort to get brownie points from the SJW community, as evidenced in the article's comments section.
• Ax Machina: The 6 Problems With Third Person Shooters That Just Got Solved felt less like an actual article and more like an advertisement for Splatoon, with Luke McKinney praising the game and comparing it to Call of Duty (which is a first person shooter, mind you.) He says that one of the main reasons he bought the game was because it lacked voice chat, and therefore, it was better than every other multiplayer game out there (you realize mute buttons exist, right?). But what really takes the cake is the first reason, where he says Splatoon is single-handedly saving the industry. Why? The only "reasons" he talked about was the fact that you could customize your character and you could play with children. Gee, that should obviously make it so that every single other game must have customization and be able to be child-friendly. Not every multiplayer game needs customization, and not every game needs to be kid-friendly. This article has made me not want to even look at the game. Great work, Luke.
• Ghidra 15: Aforementioned JF Sargent's How Casual Racism Ruined 'Free Speech' Forever. Of all of Cracked's adolescent agitprop/clickbait masquerading as "Social Consciousness" articles/tirades, this one might take the cake. The article is, ostensibly, about reactions to the Charleston Church Shooting of June 2015, and the subsequent debate about the Confederate Flag being flown over the State Capitol. This is an important, complex, and controversial subject. Surely our boy Sargent is going to treat this with the subtlety and depth it deserves, right? His "argument" falls apart completely in the second paragraph, and only goes downhill from there. His entire contention is that Apple was justified in removing a Civil War-themed game from their App Store, because nine people died in Charleston. We could argue about the ethics of a flag that was once flown directly against the United States being flown above a State Capitol of that very nation all day, the fact remains that said flag did not kill those people. His entire argument rests upon a faulty foundation, but it doesn't stop him. He can never form a cogent argument to save his life, but with this one, it's like he gave up and began mashing the keys, trusting that something would come out of it. The counter-argument that Apple was "rewriting history" by removing the game is dismissed out of hand, with the reasoning that fiction plays fast-and-loose with history all the time, and that this is no different. Anyone that passed Speech in Middle School would recognize this as a derailing tactic, if not a subject-change. Sargent doesn't comprehend that Apple pulling a game for perceived "offensive" content that actually happened is not the same thing as fudging historical facts in a work of fiction. They are, in fact, two entirely different things. The possibility that Apple is guilty of censorship is likewise dismissed, as "Apple isn't the government. It's just a company, so it can't technically "censor" you". Definition of censorship from Wikipedia: "Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication or other information which may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, politically incorrect or inconvenient as determined by governments, media outlets, authorities or other groups or institutions." Ergo, Apple's actions COULD be correctly deemed censorship, but that's inconvenient and as such, dismissed. His final contention deserves to be quoted in full: "I'm kinda cheating here, because "either everything is OK, or nothing is" is a paraphrase from an old episode of South Park where they argue that they should be allowed to make fun of Mohammed or, ya know, "the terrorists win." Except terrorism kills eight times as many Muslims as non-Muslims, so Trey Parker and Matt Stone were really just defending their right to say things that were going to piss off, hurt, and kill other people, far away, that they were never going to have to see or deal with or care about. And they were making themselves seem like heroes for being so brave." Here is another example of his inability to argue himself out of a wet paper bag. Is he saying that Islamists, unable to punish Matt Stone & Trey Parker for daring to show Muhammad, will turn on their own countrymen? That seems like a dubious prospect, at best. How does the author know that that's going to happen? Does he know something we don't? Or is he just angrily attacking fellow comedians for disagreeing with him? Is he saying that Muslims are incapable of controlling themselves when they see something "offensive" to their religion? Would he say the same thing about Charlie Hebdo? The fact that that infamous tragedy of the same year is not discussed may imply that Sargent would in fact side against the publication. For a supposed Liberal/Progressive, he sure is opposed to free speech and freedom of expression. Finally, after having proven no points, advancing no debates, or using any logic, Sargent comes to the point of his attack: "And now we're moving toward removing the Confederate Flag, among other things, from polite company. If you don't like that, you're not a defender of free speech, you're just racist. You only think this is a free speech issue because you haven't the faintest clue what that would actually look like. You're just racist." As an argument, that's about as deep as saying that anyone that disagrees with you is a stupid doodoo-head. It reads like a Strawman Argument from his opponents, a parody of left-wing criticisms of racism. Yet he is 100% serious. If Thomas Paine is the Greatest Writer of Political Treatises, I think it's safe to say JF Sargent is the worst.
• Firelink: Sorry to disappoint the poster above, here comes JF Sargent again and the article that caused me to abandon the site permanently: Six Ways Critics of Political Correctness Have It Backwards. More slacktivist clickbait, poorly researched and with questionable logic. One item that stands out is his claim that the majority of video game players are female and that the industry should cater more for them. That's a fair sentiment and women are likely underrepresented in mainstream games. However, it didn't go into any detail on who was buying what (console gaming, mobile gaming etc) and quickly devolved into a rant about mainstream games. He even fits in more whining about the confederate flag. Personally, I don't agree with what that flag represents, but I'd always fight for your right to display it and disagree with me. Sargent comes across as a parody of hyper-sensitive slacktivist students, and this for me was the site's dethroning moment of suck.
  • Otaku X: If the majority of gamers are women, wouldn't it stand to reason the industry is already catering to them? Otherwise there wouldn't be many.
• Mew Lettuce Rush I have long not read Cracked anywhere near as much due to their trivialization of serious issues under the guise of poorly researched "articles" but my Dethroning Moment had to be the article “How a Pop Band Tricked Nine Million Americans into Becoming Nazis”. The title alone is pure clickbait as is the pure reaching of all the examples (someone in a video having a star bracelet does not mean they are promoting Nazism! It didn’t even look like the Star of David!) Yes, Ace of Base’s founder was part of a Nazi band and Sweden is known for being rather anti-Semitic, but those examples had so little proof, it was hard to take seriously. The kicker is they literally compared a potential Donald Trump presidency to Nazi fucking Germany. What the fuck?! Although Donald Trump is a complete asshole, he is nowhere near the level of a complete genocidal monster who murdered eleven million people! It makes you wonder how anyone takes Cracked seriously anymore!
  • gunslingerofgilead: To top it off, both the Ace of Base and Donald Trump articles were written by Adam "Unpopular Opinion" Tod Brown, probably the biggest Scrappy on Cracked's writing team. I'm amazed Cracked still publishes his reviled garbage.
  • Impudent Infidel: Point of clarification: Adam Tod Brown is the editor who controls the column section. His stuff gets posted regardless of quality because he's the one who decides what gets posted.
• Skapokon: This one has become so infamous, I'm surprised nobody mentioned it yet: their "5 Worst Game Remakes Farted Out By Beloved Franchises" article. The DMOS is the number 3 on that list, Punch Out Wii. The reason it's on the list is only because the developers changed Mike Tyson by Donkey Kong as the final boss, and that's racist because they replaced a black person with a gorilla. Only because of that, the game was listed worse than the infamous Sonic 06. Seriously, Cracked? That nitpick makes the game bad overall? Mike Tyson wasn't even replaced by Donkey Kong, he was replaced by Mr. Sandman, a boxer who has appeared in every Punch Out game, isn't stereotypical at all and was the final boss of the original arcade machine. DK is just a secret boss added just for fun. I just can't believe how they could trash talk a remake (which isn't even a remake) that tries to be faithful to the original game just because of that small complaint.
• [e-mail]: If there's one skill J.F. Sargent can objectively be said to possess as a writer, it's his gift for unifying commenters of all political and social persuasions under the banner of total disgust and revulsion for the garbage he writes, as demonstrated in the piece "Four Things Everyone Gets Wrong About Free Speech and College". Atop his usual smug, condescending message of how you're wrong and he's right because he says so, Sargent argues that banning a work from being shown wasn't censorship on the grounds that it was replaced by a work deemed more acceptable; one can presume his understanding of the term "irony" is just as tenuous. He then goes on to equate violent protesters who destroy property, bully innocent students, and eject members of the press by threats of force to the Civil Rights demonstrations held by Martin Luther King. Sargent is evidently stuffed too far up his own ass to notice how grossly insulting the comparison is to both Dr. King and his legacy of enacting real change through peaceful means. The bright side to this is that, just like what happens after any major disaster, the article brought out the best in Cracked's long-suffering readership; it's both Awesome and Heartwarming to see a comments section that's positively brimming with thoughtful, well-reasoned rebuttals to Sargent's endorsement of mob rule and strong-arm tactics under the false pretense of defending "free speech," which he seems to have little regard for when he doesn't agree with it.
• MorphinBrony: Our old friend JF Sargent strikes again with "The 5 Most Insulting Defenses of Nerd Racism." This time, he's giving us a whiny Author Tract about the backlash against the Race Lift of Johnny Storm in Fantastic Four (2015). It seems Sargent has a very loose idea about the definition of racism. Not to mention quips like "We might as well make remake Roots with an all-white cast!" aren't very tasteful.
• Flaminghello Not nearly as egregious and offensive as the other pieces on this list, but this article referring to James Spader in Stargate as "The pre-Ultron, and therefore pre-badass James Spader" was just plain incorrect, disrespectful, stupid, and desperately pandering to the fake nerd crowd. Highly probable that whoever wrote that article has never seen James Spader in anything except Ultron, and probably didn't know the man's name up until that movie came out.
• Tribaldragon1: As of April 20, 2016, their Dethroning Moment of Suck for me is their article about a Ghostbusters extra for the reboot, which is actually more or less another instance of them talking down the reader, saying that it's, I'm directly quoting here, "controversial-because-boobs". Not that it's a classic franchise that had a cast composed of great comedians and it attempted to replace them with Melissa McCarthy and various other stereotypes, not that it's a blatant cash grab with likely very little thought or passion behind it, it's that all its detractors are secretly giant sexists. Obviously. Oh, and it was also written by the same guy who wrote the "Ignorant Jokes" article that's been given the DMoS crown by so many other Tropers.
• Melancholy Utopia: 5 Awful Lessons Disney Teaches You About Relationships certainly deserves a huge spot on this list. First of all, the subject matter has been done to death. For crying out loud, there's a reason the phrase "Real life ain't no Disney movie" gets thrown around a lot. But more to the specific problems of the article: 1) It flat-out lies about information explicitly given in the movies proper. It claims for instance that all women over 30 years old are evil (Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella, two of the first films in the Disney animated canon, say otherwise), that Ursula in The Little Mermaid is jealous of Ariel's looks (she isn't), that Jasmine in Aladdin doesn't flinch when finding out Aladdin is poor (when she gets clearly mad at him, but only for lying to her), that a whirlwind romance fixes all past traumas, giving examples like The Lion King and Frozen (completely missing the point that both movies' main plot is resolving the conflict of the kingdoms' current environmental state, and both heirs took responsibility to fix it. Neither movie claimed they were completely healed from their trauma because of any romance, but that they were in the PROCESS of healing when both decided to move on and not run away from any responsibility. Simba's romance with Nala was a bonus, not what drove him to change. In addition, the author missed the point of the moral of Frozen, which was about putting value on love between siblings. Elsa, who wasn't romantically active at all, has the most trauma of her and her sister, who WAS romantically active). The allegations the author makes about this falls so flat on its face it's breaking bones. 2) The Beauty and the Beast example deserves its own point here, since it annoyed me the most. The article says the movie encourages Stockholm Syndrome. Yeah, like we haven't heard that one before. But at least, when others say it, they're joking. This article, on the other hand, is dead serious. Critical Research Failure doesn't begin to cover anything of this. All of these facts are, I assure you, explicitly shown in the movie: Beast scares Belle when she meddled with things that weren't hers, and she tries to run away because he scared her. When she's out in the woods getting attacked by wolves, she gets saved just barely by Beast. Realizing he has potential to be a good person because of his rescue, she tends to his wounds and scolds him, saying that he should start to behave if he would wish for others to like and respect him without fear involved. Which he does, and it's when he gets nicer and better behaved that she starts to fall for him. Then, realizing he loves her, lets her go to see her sick father. It wasn't subtext, it was direct. Stockholm Syndrome is when the victim has positive feelings towards the kidnapper's abusive/controllable nature, which Belle did not have. It's also when the victim has negative feelings towards family members, which Belle neither had as she seeked out her father when she found out he was sick. And also, the most damning evidence: "Inability to engage in behaviors that may assist in their release or detachment" is also a symptom, which Belle doesn't have either, as she leaves when told she can. Sorry about the rant, but this part upset me so much I just couldn't have the author speak of Stockholm Syndrome like she knows what it is, especially when it's obvious she doesn't. 3) Several commentators below claim that when they watched the movies as kids, all they saw was an evil antagonist and the good protagonist defeating him/her and living happily ever after with their one true love. Kids aren't stupid. They know what they see is a fairytale and shouldn't be taken too much at face value, and if they do, the parents will assure them otherwise. When the latter kids grow up, they will be more experienced and aware of how the world works, and in the process, realize that those fairytales are just that: fairytales. No one is going to try to imitate what happens in those movies when they're adults. This article is so ignorant of how the human mind works, both of kids as of that of adults. 4) The author makes such a big deal out of the female protagonists marrying young, ignoring the fact that during the times the movies are set, it was customary to marry young. Aurora, Ariel and Esmeralda, all 16, live in what looks like the medieval times to the 19th century when they marry. So does Snow White, who's 14. Most of the other protagonists we either don't get a clear confirmation they marry too young (Mulan, Jasmine and Pocahontas) or they're past the age of legal marriage (Tiana, Rapunzel, Cinderella, Belle, Anna, Jane and Meg.) These are just a few examples. Also, there are countries in the world that still legalize underage marriage, so the statement is also completely ignorant. Thoroughly study the subject at hand before confidently making predications that are false, thank you very much. This whole article boils down to, not only a complete mess, but also outright lying about content and missing the points of all respective movies in their entirety. To some, this may be a mosquite bite. To others, like me, it was annoying and offensive seeing the utterly poor research the lazy author has clearly executed.
• Flash Rebel: For a long time, this troper loved Cracked for two things: it was funny and their writers checked facts instead of spreading bullshit. And then came 6 Politicians Who Abused Their Power Like Bratty Toddlers. #3 is about the staged arrest of kidnappers in Mexico in 2006, with Cracked's version being that everyone arrested was definitely a kidnapper, but because one, Florence Cassez, happened to be French, she got the right to go back to France scot-free because her human rights had been violated. The truth is that Cassez was never part of the kidnapping gang and was wrongly accused the whole time by Mexico's notoriously xenophobic officials, and that her accusation didn't make any fucking sense to begin with. But for the sake of gratuitous French-bashing, Cracked writers prefered to distort the facts. Seriously, for an event that got so much coverage, not old enough to be history and not recent enough to lack details, this is impossible to get it wrong by accident or lazines; this has to be intentional.
• 8BrickMario: 5 Much Better Alternatives to Famous Board Games is seriously flawed. First of all, the article fails to do its job, as the alternatives suggested are more sophisticated strategy games with absolutely no relation to the games listed. And the final entry, bashing Cards Against Humanity and painting all players as actually horrible people, when shock humor is the point of the game. Even worse, the entry contains a Holocaust joke when said humor is being criticized.
• PugBuddies: I've found Cracked's political articles to be as biased as Fox News (though in the opposite direction), but for a while, that bias was simply annoying. However, the article on Why Republicans Really Say Hillary is a Witch was just too much. You want to crow about how the DNC is inherently better than the RNC, or lampoon Republican politics in a way that would be called childish if it were a Republican mocking Democrats, or whine about their support of the Second Amendment? Fine, whatever. But you cannot take an admittedly stupid quote from Ben Carson, apply it to every Republican, and make the Republicans out to be a bunch of Salem-style witch hunters and still expect me to take you seriously. From this point onward, I'm going to ignore every political article Cracked publishes. Their pop culture articles are better anyway.
• Sakubara: Much like Bronies, Cracked has shown a dislike towards anime fans. While I officially stopped reading at the one where they insulted the then-recently deceased Robin Williams for being a fan of stuff like Neon Genesis Evangelion (they said that even those with body pillows consider it "an anime for losers" and that's only on the first page of the article), I have instead decided to give an entire article that insults anime fans and honestly comes across as kind of racist for its unfunny stereotypes about Japan as perverts that love sex and violence. I give you 9 Beloved Characters Made Horrifying by Japan, aka All Anime Is Naughty Tentacles: the Article. I tried to deconstruct it one by one, but honestly it was too physically painful to read. The main problem with the article is that while yes, anime can be pervy at times, the author comes across as a prude that stands on a soapbox to continue the trend of focusing more on being social justice warriors rather than being actually funny. Examples range from understandable like the one with world leaders like Adolf Hitler made into a Cast Full of Pretty Boys, to "why is this considered horrifying?" like with Mutant Turtles: Superman Legend and the Hulk manga, to Critical Research Failure like with Hellsing, to straight up "fuck you!" territory with the one about Miyuki-chan in Wonderland focusing more on the scantily clad versions of the Gender Flipped characters rather than the Double Standard: Rape, Female on Female where the page's quote is taken from, and implying that all cases of Sexy Santa Dress are what Japanese people think Santa Claus is like (because we totally have nothing like that in America). It doesn't help that when they use Haruhi Suzumiya as an example, they accuse it of being porn without watching a single episode. Overall, the entire article is Type-2 Eagleland smugness that not only insult anime fans, but Japan in general.
• GKG: Bayers Purchased Monsanto And We Are All Screwed, a scientifically illiterate, fearmongering pile of easily debunked crap that can be more or less summed up as "Monsanto is evil because I say so". The comments have rightfully taken the Cracked staff to task.
• Larkmarn: An article about being a prostitute in Vietnam was... problematic. At best, it's incredibly inaccurate, at worst, it's glorifying Sex Tourism. The article sounds like it was written by a tourism board and talked about how basically being a prostitute was nothing but rosy acceptance and improved the girl's life financially and enriched it culturally and presented this as the norm. This is genuinely distressing for an article about a region where the sex trade is a legitimate concern. But the true moment there is when the article mentioned that the girl began at 15. Glorifying prostituting a 15 year old girl is not cool (even if they had Values Dissonance on their side... which despite what the article says, they do not), and genuinely made later interview articles tough to take seriously. Even if this article was a 100% accurate account of the girl's experience, the fact is that the sex trade is a problem there and presenting it as being so rosy is downright harmful.
• Dinogeek: Robert Evans has finally broken this website for me. How, you ask? Well, I'm developmentally disabled, which for those of you who remember your World War 2 history is shorthand for "someone the Nazis would gas without a second thought". The title of Mr. Evans' most recent article is (I kid you not even a little bit) "4 Signs President Trump Is Headed For A Hitler-Like Reign". Now, ignoring the fact that Hitler isn't called a dictator for no reason and the U.S. Constitution is in place specifically to prevent the president from being able to do shit without the approval of both Congress and the Supreme Court, what I want to know is where exactly in the depths of hell does Robert Evans think he gets off with comparing an unlikable New York businessman with Adolf Hitler? Hitler, the man who would have had me and several of my close friends crowded into a little room and suffocated slowly and painfully. Hitler, the man who had tens of thousands of disabled infants injected with poison because they were born disabled. Hitler, who murdered twelve million innocent people for the unforgivable crime of being alive, and started a war that resulted in upwards of 100 million deaths. Hitler, who ripped a continent in half. And Robert Evans has the unmitigated gall to compare Donald Trump's presidency (a thing that, bear in mind, hasn't even started as of the article's publication date, November 16, 2016) to "a Hitler-like reign". Sorry to all of the good writers who are at or might come to Cracked in the future, but you're not going to be getting my views.
• Impudent Infidel: Another J. F. Sargent example; the video 5 Things Gamers Need to Admit. He conflates the loudest and most annoying segments of the gamer population with the entirety of the (now utterly mainstream) hobby, and then takes things they say in comments sections as meaningful indicators of what "gamers" are like. The entire premise of the video is that these comment section trolls saying different things than people who value games as an art form invalidates everything the latter say. He also seems completely unaware that games that aren't shooters even exist; he explicitly says the only two he can think of are The Sims and Minecraft. He also dismisses everything not on the best-seller list out of hand, and then criticizes games for their lack of variety in the next breath. The specific examples he uses suggest he's getting all of his information third hand since he gets them wrong in very confusing ways; for instance, he cites the fan backlash against Mass Effect 3's ending as evidence that nobody really cares about the writing in games.
• Baeraad555: This article makes me remember why I promised I'd never click on a Cracked link again. Most of it is just par for the course in its phony hand-wringing about how superhero movies are shock full of Unfortunate Implications - annoying, but not unexpected. What actually made me see red was the ending, where David Wong launches a pre-emptive Take That, Critics!: "But ask yourself: Why is there that knee-jerk rejection of any effort to 'overthink' pop culture? Why would you ever be afraid that looking too hard at something will ruin it?" Oh, for crying out loud. It's called Willing Suspension of Disbelief, Wong! We know that superhero movies are stupid! We know that nothing in them would work in real life! But in order to relax and have fun, you need to shut off your brain a bit. The reason why people get mad at you isn't because you've "struck a nerve" or whatever it is you're telling yourself, it's because you're pissing all over people's harmless escapism and accusing them of secretly believing awful things because they want to sit back and pretend for a few hours that the world is big and simple and that there is such a thing as good guys and bad guys and in the end the former will beat the latter - before they have to go back out into the real world, which is grimy and complicated and frequently depressing. And I'm honestly not sure whether you're too stupid to understand that, or if you do understand it and just keep pretending not to so you can keep pumping out clickbait articles.
• Princess Togezo: The 6 Most Baffling Video Game Spinoffs shows why you need to do research on the things you write about. For one thing, the article claims that, in Pokémon Channel, literally the only thing you do in the game is watch TV with Pikachu, completely ignoring the other things you can do in the game (exploring different areas, collecting trading cards, decorating your room, playing mini-games, etc.); however, I can somewhat forgive this on the grounds that Channel is a rather obscure spinoff of its parent franchise. What I can't forgive is the utter lack of research displayed when they talk about various Sonic the Hedgehog games. For one thing, of the three games discussed, only Sonic and the Black Knight and Shadow the Hedgehog could really be considered spin-offs; the third game, Sonic Unleashed, is typically counted as a main-series game. Second, the article claims that Black Knight was released first, followed by Unleashed, and lastly Shadow, when the actual order of the games' release is the other way around (Shadow was released in 2005, Unleashed in 2008, and Black Knight in 2009). But what really shows that the author didn't do the research is this sentence: "[...]Sega decided to give their struggling mascot guns and a motorcycle and changed his name to that of a cool badass[...]" In other words, the author thought that Shadow and Sonic were one and the same, instead of two separate characters. Where do I begin...? For one thing, this game wasn't even Shadow's first appearance; he had prominent roles in two prior main-series games, specifically Sonic Adventure 2 and Sonic Heroes. Also, and perhaps more importantly, all three games also featured Sonic himself as a character (non-playable in the case of Shadow, but he was still there), and they all took great pains to establish that, despite their similarities, Sonic and Shadow are most definitely not the same entity. Any Sonic fan with even the slightest interest in the "Dreamcast and beyond" days could have at least pointed out the "Shadow is a revamped Sonic" error; in fact, the author somehow seemed to have completely ignored the existence of Sonic Adventure 2, where the Hero plot is kicked off by the government and news media mistaking Shadow for Sonic, and where most, if not all, of the box art for the game's various releases has Sonic standing alongside his alleged revamp. To make a long story short, if you're going to write an article complaining about something, make sure you do your research on whatever you're complaining about, because if you get crucial details wrong, people won't take you seriously.
• Captain Tedium: My Dethroning Moment is the article "6 Secret Fuck Yous Lurking in Famous Pop Culture". The first entry on the list talked of how Tom DeFalco disliked Fantastic Four: The Animated Series and made a potshot toward it by having Ant-Man insult the cartoon while watching it. My problem with the entry is that it talked of the Fantastic Four cartoon as if it was universally despised and said things like how the show would only appeal to three-year-olds. I can understand if whoever wrote this article wasn't a fan of the 1994 cartoon, but that still doesn't change how reprehensible and obnoxious it is to state your opinion on a show like it is an undisputed fact that everyone agrees with while making obtuse and biased assumptions on the people who don't share that viewpoint. The last time I checked, there were actually a lot of people who liked the 1994 cartoon, and insinuating that they're immature idiots for liking it comes off as beyond the pale.
• Izzy Uneasy: "Raising your mentally retarded child", which its only point is "lawl offensive".
• Danny Beans: The paywalling of the upvote/downvote ability in the comments sections. The comments were often insightful and funny - sometimes moreso than the articles themselves, with good comments redeeming bad articles - and the voting system ensured that the best rose to the top. Instead of getting more people to subscribe to premium memberships, monetizing the system just meant there were fewer votes to filter out the bad posts, making it much harder to find the quality comments, and thus removing half (or more) of the fun. (I realize this has since been done away with, but the weakness of the site's content in general has done little to win me back on the rare occasions it occurs to me to give it another chance.)
• Levitator: Worst Case Wario Scenarios IRL. This article is just Wario being badly photoshoped into random movies, games, show, political campaigns...and a fleshlight?! Cracked doesn't usually go for this "lolrandom" humor, but here we are. The article was published just as the corona virus was heating up, and we really needed something nice and funny. Instead, we got this shit. I always thought people complaining about the death of Cracked were being petty, but this is really scraping the bottom of the barrel.
• Infinity League: David Wong's late 2016 article "How Half of America Lost its F**king Mind" is an attempt at explaining to the mainstream why rural, working-class voters were so staunchly supporting Donald Trump, and while he made some good points about the horrific living conditions faced by impoverished Americans, the article overall came across as a wangsty Propaganda Piece validating the right-wing persecution complex. He starts off by claiming that rural American voters feel disenfranchised, explaining this by showing the infamous electoral map of counties that vote for either Republicans or Democrats and talking about how unfair it is that the "blue" areas' votes count more than red areas do. What he fails to mention is that those "blue islands in a sea of red" have vastly higher populations than the surrounding red areas. Land doesn't vote; people do. Furthermore, he claims that rural Americans are underrepresented in media and only used as punchlines, which is also untrue; not only are straight, white, Christian men vastly overrepresented in pop culture (usually as a means to appeal to rural viewers) but American news media has always framed white rural America as being more "real" than their urban and multiracial counterparts. From there, Wong spends the rest of the article adamantly denying that there is any racism, religious fundamentalism, or problematic beliefs at all among working-class Trump supporters, claiming that they're all blameless angels who were forced to line up behind Trump out of economic desperation; the problem with that claim is, despite Trump's populist talking points, he hadn't actually offered to do anything to improve the lives of the lower classes, instead siding with the same corporate establishment that caused that mass wealth inequality in the first place (which is why a solid majority of Trump supporters were actually upper middle class or higher.) To say that they only reluctantly went along with Trump's toxic messages is to ignore the decades of history showing rural whites enthusiastically voting for candidates with bigoted rhetoric and oppressive policies. While Wong mentions that these people were led astray by right-wing propaganda telling them to respond to social progress with anger and fear, at no point does he think to blame the fear mongers spreading that propaganda. No, according to him, it's all the liberals' fault. Throughout the rest of the article, he closed-mindedly characterizes left-wingers as pampered "elitists" who condescend to the working class by... pointing out when they're wrong about things and having sympathy for the people who are hurt by the policies they overwhelmingly support. No joke; to hear him tell it, every liberal's immediate response to a rural voter complaining about abject poverty is to sneeringly and baselessly accuse him of racism before going out of their way to screw those voters over. This is blatantly false for two reasons: first, genuine leftists overwhelmingly support socialist economic policies that would improve the lives of working class voters; second, accusations of bigotry don't just fall out of the sky. It's not like rural voters have done nothing to dispel the reputation they've built up over the last 50+ years before the article came out. Wong describes the struggles of the white working class at length while glossing over (or outright ignoring) the suffering other groups face (largely because of, again, policies that rural voters supported,) and he comes dangerously close to saying that working-class whites are justified in taking their problems out on minorities because they get more sympathy from "those liberal elitists." After repeating "liberal elitists bad" over and over again for the rest of the article, Wong finishes things off by bizarrely claiming that people who hate Trump because they think he's a bad person are hypocrites for being fans of Iron Man and Breaking Bad and late night talk shows. Setting aside how inherently fallacious it is to insinuate that the other side being guilty of a double standard suddenly absolves your side of all wrongdoing, there are numerous problems with his assertions. One, despite the Expospeak Gag he makes where he sounds like he's describing Trump but turns out to have actually been describing Tony Stark all along, Stark and Trump have nothing in common aside from being billionaires; Stark is the opposite of Trump in basically every other way that counts (and Wong accuses Stark of being a womanizer, seemingly not realizing that there's a world of difference between that and what Trump has been accused of.) Second, ignoring the Misaimed Fandom, fans of Walter White do not see him as the hero; they know he's the villain here, and while his actions are interesting as a character study and dramatic story, none of the viewers condone his actions and they certainly don't think he'd make a good President. Third, with regards to late-night comedians, he points out that one of them (who had retired by the time this article was written) was accused of sexual misconduct as if that somehow means all late night hosts are comparable to Trump because they make off-color jokes. Here's the difference: late-night hosts' jokes are reserved for authority figures who they hold as corrupt, incompetent, and malicious. They're punching up; they're challenging authority; they're speaking truth to power. Throughout his 2016 campaign, Trump was the opposite: punching down against people who were already oppressed and marginalized (not to mention that the things Trump got in trouble for saying were his policies and rhetoric that affect real people, while late-night hosts' jokes were just that: jokes.) He defends rural support of Trump as nothing more than harmless protest against the establishment, a "brick through the window," but he fails to even consider what would happen when Trump actually won. Oops. In closing, David Wong comes across as exactly the type of "elitist" he complains about, being condescending, unempathetic, and quick to resort to sweeping generalizations.
• Darksteel: For me it would have to be Mark Hill's 2021 article "Why Is Everyone Angry About Six Days in Fallujah?" which unlike most of Hill's articles, seems to have no real clear point beyond "gamers are whiny manchildren and these game devs are EEEEEEEEEEEEEEVIL for making a game about a real life event in the Iraq war!", it's just a long rambling asinine article that suffers big time from "word vomit" (writing a lot without actually saying much of anything at all) and just regurgitates a bunch of bullshit stereotypes about gamers (the headline alone is clickbaity bullshit, as having problems with bad criticisms of video games that aren't even out yet is not remotely the same thing as "complaining about people taking them seriously"). Like how the same people that spoke out against the false notion that violent video games cause real life violence are the same people complaining about people criticizing the idea of the game, which is not remotely true and an overly broad generalization. Hill also spends a ridiculous amount of time cherry-picking the worst quotes from people back in 2009 and on Twitter and conveniently ignoring the many rational comments about the game in order to further his own narrative that gamers are morons. This article also suffers from Critical Research Failure, with Mark falsely claiming that Call of Duty attempted to "rewrite" the Iranian hostage crisis and the "Highway of death" which is blatantly untrue, the franchise didn't try to do either of those things, the latter mission in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019) just happened to share a name with the real-life event, there's no real hard evidence that it was meant to be a rewrite of the incident as the actual mission has almost nothing in common with the real-life incident. Mark also acts like Roger Ebert throughout as he almost seems to have an outright disdain for gaming as a whole, even outright claiming games "deserved to get the short end of the stick" and outright lied about Modern Warfare not being remotely anti-war (guess he forgot about the nuke sequence) and he claims that Six Days in Fallujah is going to be "nothing but propaganda" and is "disrespectful" failing to mention that actual soldiers that were in Fallujah worked on the game and that the devs said that you will spend a portion of the game playing as a civilian trying to help his family escape from the violence. Worst of all he assumes EVERY single person that's interested in this game is an alt-right troll who does not actually care about the content of the game itself and are only talking about it to piss certain people off, while that might be true for some people championing the game there are far more people that are legitimately interested in this game who were upset by Konami cancelling it due to them being complete and utter cowards and are excited to see it finally getting a second-chance after so long having been cancelled. Mark also does not even consider the fact that the devs are not serious when they say their game is "not political" when they obviously don't mean that, they are clearly saying that for two reasons-because company employees will get death threats if they get even the faintest whiff of a game being "political" (most notably alt-right trolls accused Ubisoft of being "racist against whites" when Far Cry 5 had all white villains) and because being too political is precisely what got the game cancelled back in 2009 so they are no doubt keen to avoid that happening again. All this is not to say there aren't legitimate criticisms of this game to be had, but this article does a piss-poor job of getting any of them across, coming off more as badly worded and researched flame-bait that sounds like it was written by Jack Thompson himself for how much contempt it seems to have for gamers as a whole (or at least anyone who dares to not agree with Mark's own asinine opinions). I was hoping with J.F. Sargent finally getting fired that Cracked's anti-gamer nonsense would stop, but from this article it sounds like Hill is every bit as ignorant about gaming as a whole.
• Mister Toodleoo: I would like to point out "4 'Geek Humor' Books by Authors Who Understand Neither", which I found a link to on one of this wiki's own SBIH pages. The section about the "computer jokes" book has the most over-the-top Lame Pun Reaction I have ever seen: "If you have any sense of humor at all, that joke should appear as a pile of rats devouring the person you love best." The insults towards the book's authors only prove to me that this line is the epitome of a Caustic Critic culture that some people have taken to heart. Ignoring political articles isn't good enough for me when I have this "joke" to make me weary of looking at certain non-political articles!

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