TVTropes Now available in the app store!
Open

Follow TV Tropes

Atun-Shei Films

Go To

  • Hilarious in Hindsight: "Ancient Aryans" concludes with a gag about Klaus the Nazi, who'd previously found he didn't have it in him to shoot himself as the Russian army stormed Berlin, immediately putting a gun in his mouth and pulling the trigger when Joe Rogan starts trying to talk about thoughts he’s had while high. Within the next few years, Rakich himself would begin experimenting with powerful psychedelic compounds, eventually resulting in another video, "The Stoner Apocalypticism of Terence McKenna," where he expresses frustration with those who aren't interested in listening to or willing to consider the validity of ideas produced under the influence of psychotropic drugs. (Although in-between, he took a few shots at Graham Hancock for trying to substantiate his wild claims about an ancient, super-advanced civilization that inspired myths about floods and Atlantis by doing powerful hallucinogens to gain visions of that bygone past.)
  • I Am Not Shazam: A confusing example. Rakich's production company is named Atun-Shei Films after a character from his first movie Alien, Baby!, but because the company's official YouTube channel is also called Atun-Shei Films and Rakich largely is the only one who appears on it, fans will sometimes call him "Atun-Shei Films" or "Atun-Shei" when this is technically incorrectnote .
  • Nightmare Fuel: Has its own page.
  • Tear Jerker:
    • The sad tale of Julie, the octoroon (a mostly white woman with distant black ancestry) mistress of Père Antoine Alley who died of a Tragic Dream and supposedly still haunts the place (from "Julie the Naked Ghost: A New Orleans Folktale").
    • Atun-Shei's criticism of Gettysburg for its Bloodless Carnage.
      Atun-Shei: "When some pimply 17 year old from North Carolina got his guts torn out by shrapnel, and felt the world go dark as he stared at a patch of grass and shat himself, he did not hear Randy Edelman's rousing score in the background. He just. Fucking. Died."
    • Atun-Shei remembers being part of a Pickett's Charge reenactment, seeing just how far away the Union line was, and crying as he imagined what it must've been like for a real soldier to make that long walk to their death. He eventually made it to the Union line and saw a Union reenactor who was also teared up. They shook hands and the other man said "I'm glad you're here."
    • His video on the Upstairs Lounge, a gay bar in Louisiana that burned down in The '70s due to a Homophobic Hate Crime with dozens of people inside who were mocked after their deaths by the public. The way he goes into detail about how pedestrians could see the bar's patrons desperately trying to squeeze their way through the iron bars guarding the windows while their friends burned to death around them is just... so awful.
    • Johnny Reb's devastated reaction when Billy Yank is killed by the mummy of Jefferson Davis, and the ending of that episode where he fully rejects the Lost Cause.
  • Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Rakich's stated aim in his video on Terence McKenna is to be fair to him and take his ideas seriously, rather than dismiss or ridicule them out of principle because of McKenna's heavy drug use. Nonetheless, it's extremely easy to come away from the video with the belief that McKenna's critics were basically right; that McKenna was a drug-addled crank whose work outside of botany basically is a bunch of slipshod and half-baked nonsense based on barely- or non-existent evidence fatally undermined by McKenna's heavy bias and transparently motivated reasoning, and that McKenna's defenders (even Rakich himself, to a point) just like doing psychadelics and appreciate McKenna for trying to mainstream and legitimize them in America rather than because his work has actual merit.

Top