YMMV / Philosophy Tube

Beware of untagged spoilers.

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• Alas, Poor Scrappy: Tom Gently is a reactionary dick, but he didn't quite deserve to have his family killed by the arsonist.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: A lot of it has to do with the Arsonist. His appearances in Abortion & Ben Shapiro and Charles Darwin Vs Karl Marx especially lead to many questions to his family life.
• Anvilicious:
  • At first, Sir Nigel Piss hamming "The Chinese never had a secular enlightenment!" was pretty entertaining. But then he comes back to say it again. And again. And again.
  • The Adeleide segment in Violence & Protest is very over the top with its skewering of British Media, particularly with discussing the in-universe actions of Baroness Plantation Warrcrimes.
• Awesome Music:
  • Abigail frequently commissions the extremely talented Nina Richards to provide this for her videos. The sinister synth music from Abortion & Ben Shapiro, the cover of "Why Do We Build The Wall" for Steve Bannon, and The Hoosiers parody "Goodbye Doctor P" for Jordan Peterson & the Meaning of Life are all examples of this.
  • The Megalovania/Goosebumps theme mashup for the end of The Trouble with the Video Game Industry by Jerryterry.
  • Queer has a great cover of The Raconteurs' "Steady as She Goes".
    • Really, the entire episode has excellent covers. There's "My Type" with its Sexophone, a song that more people should've used as a bi/pan anthem. "The Devil You Know" really takes the cake though, it's so theatrical and Broadway-esque.
• Breakthrough Hit: Downplayed. Abi was already popular online, but her Identity video massively widened her brand. Her patreon increased by more than a thousand patrons, her sub count increased by around 100k and shortly after she got her role in Ladhood, her first tv role.
• Cult Classic: Data has a low view count for its age (most later vids outstrip it) but it's one of the most critically acclaimed and remembered among the fanbase.
• Friendly Fandoms: With Contrapoints. Both are trans women who make left-wing political video essays and have collaborated. This shared fanbase has remained despite Abagail and Natalie having a falling out.
• Genius Bonus: Abigail slips into her videos references to philosophy and media that might not be directly discussed in the video itself, but often have some tangential relevance to the topic being discussed. For example, in "Climate Grief", Abigail's character is named "Odradek", a reference to the Franz Kafka short story "The Cares of a Family Man". The story is about a man trying to understand and live with a bizarre object/entity called Odradek, described as a wooden star-shaped spool wound with tangled threads, and having no discernible purpose or function. Writers and philosophers have variously interpreted the story as being about existential dread, a critique of capitalism, and the difficulty of understanding something that is an abstract component of a larger whole, all of which are topics touched on in the Climate Grief video.
  • In "Jordan Peterson's Ideology", Abigail says that she will illustrate the process of "subjectification" with a quote from Louis Althusser. Cut to a picture of the surface of the moon, with two chickens clucking. This makes sense if you know that Althusser (who had serious mental health problems) strangled his wife to death in mysterious circumstances, and spent three years in a mental hospital. However, Abigail's own ensuing analysis of subjectification is definitely informed by Althusser's work, so it doesn't come across just as a cheap joke.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Before her coming out(s), Abigail worked hard to present herself as a cis (and earlier straight) male ally who still would never understand what it means to be discriminated against. In YouTube: Art or Reality? she had a character tell her how privileged she was for supposedly not being queer or trans. But now she's out as a lesbian trans woman, which needless to say puts a wrench in her previous performance.
  • In her coming out video, Abigail references Contra's "Do I feel like a man or a woman?" quote and refers to her as a dear friend. Both Abigail and Natalie have since indirectly mentioned in interviews that their friendship has completely fallen apart, and they are no longer in contact in any way.
• Heartwarming Moments: In her coming out video, she starts repeating Natalie Wynn’s quote "Do I feel like a man or a woman? The answer is that I feel like shit." But Abi has a different take on it. "Do I feel like a man or a woman? The answer… is that I feel happy."
• Heartwarming in Hindsight: The "crossdressing" in Antisemitism: An Analysis was really just Abi embracing herself for half a video, and she was absolutely glowing as Mademoiselle Y.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Thorn's impersonation of Ben Shapiro in Abortion & Ben Shapiro comes off as this when she came out as transgender and now shares a name with Shapiro's real-life sister Abigail.
  • "Queer✨" was Abigail's coming-out-as-bisexual video while she still presented as male, but she spends some time in the video dressed as a woman, in what was meant to be perceived as drag at the time. Some viewers also felt that the video advocated a surprising amount for trans people in a video primarily about Abi's bisexuality. These aspects feel different after Abigail came out as a trans woman.
  • On a re-watch, the year or so of videos before Abigail actually came out becomes progressively funnier and/or more heartwarming as she slowly becomes more obviously feminine while giving a token effort to present as a man, to the point of Paper-Thin Disguise by the "Jobs" video. Naturally when she came out, a lot of trans viewers tweeted that they'd figured it out already and were just waiting politely for her to come out on her own terms.
  • In the episode The Trouble with the Video Game Industry she spends a lot of it cosplaying as James Stephanie Sterling. Just over a year later they both came out as transgender at about the same time, so the Multilayer Façade adds a whole new level to it.
  • In her "Transphobia: An Analysis" video from 2018, Abigail makes a point of clarifying that she is cisgender and so is not an expert on trans issues. Needless to say, fans had a lot of fun making jokes about that line after she came out as trans in 2021.
• Love to Hate: The Arsonist. Even though he's a fascist and a serial killer, not even Abigail's primarily hardline antifascist fanbase can resist his charm.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • The Better Abi ^Explanation After Abigail came out as trans, some fans have jokingly said she's the better Abigail compared to Abigail Shapiro, Ben Shapiro's sister who has tried, and arguably failed, to make a name for herself in the YouTube sphere, after a massive amount of paid ads for her channel on YouTube caused even apolitical youtubers to decry how annoying and pushy her attempt to rise to prominence were. Not to mention the preference many fans hold for Abigail Thorn's political leanings compared to Abigail Shapiro's conservative views.
    • Variations include: "Philosophically Abi," and comparisons to Abigail Shrier, author of very transphobic book Irreversible Damage.
  • TERF Island^Explanation A term Abi coined to describe the UK that has since become a popular epithet for Britain. TERF, short for "trans-exclusionary radical feminist", refers to a type of feminist who refuses to see transgender women as anything other than men Disguised in Drag to infiltrate women's spaces. American feminists may wonder why such a subset of feminism exists, holds such influence in British feminist circles, or could even be considered feminism to begin with; in the United States, transphobia tends to coincide with misogynistic viewpoints because it's largely driven by religious conservatives, meaning TERFs are a minority in American feminist circles and tend to be considered useful idiots for the patriarchy, and the American left-of-centre in general tends to reject transphobia as it does other bigotry. However, that sort of hyperreligious fruitcake doesn't hold nearly as much influence over the British right wing, meaning transphobia isn't associated with misogyny or limited to one side of the political spectrum like it is across the pond. Because of this and other factors, transgender acceptance has unfortunately not been mainstreamed on the UK left, meaning TERFs have far greater influence in British feminist circles. This hasn't gone unnoticed by foreign feminists, who tend to be baffled that so many British feminists are hostile to transgender people and blind to the seemingly obvious overlap between transphobia and misogyny.
  • Abi is the new Doctor ^Explanation Abi keeps on tweeting about the biggest acting gig she's ever been offered, but she can't disclose anything other than she'll be in a wildly popular tv show. Her followers keep joking she'll be Doctor Who.
  • "I should say up front that I am cisgender. For those who might be new to this sort of terminology, that means that my gender matches the one I was assigned at birth." ^Explanation  Before Abigail came out, she explained in a video about transphobia that she was cisgender, which considering she came out as transgender in 2021, has become way funnier in hindsight.
• She Really Can Act: Abigail's talent is especially apparent as Tom Gently in Abortion and Ben Shapiro. Abigail has to speak a different accent, she has to pretend to be tied up and fearing for her life, but she pulls both off exceptionally.
  • Also her acting friend Rhys Tees in her coming out video, who plays pre-transition Abi so flawlessly in her coming out video that some less familiar viewers wondered if she'd recorded the part herself way in advance until they saw the credits.
• Squick: The Arsonist and his sister making out at the end of ''Jordan Peterson's Ideology. 'Nuff said.
  • Although, it does hilariously communicate the incestuous relationship between the British press and British fascism.

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