Reviews WebVideo / Mau Ler

Wow, I can't believe you think you're qualified to give an opinion on this guy when you haven't even watched the fifteen hour review he did of a toothpaste commercial. Unsubbed.

...

It feels hypocritical at first to criticize Mauler for the agonizing length of his videos because I like plenty of video essayists whose work is regularly more than an hour, or in multiple parts, or sometimes both. But when his review of the Black Widow movie is twice as long as the actual Black Widow movie then... I mean, I don't think that even he genuinely believes that he has four hours of good material there. If it's taking you that long to make a point then maybe you're just really bad at making points.

Every Mauler video I've been encouraged to watch feels like watching a Cinema Sins video with someone who pauses it every two seconds to explain the point in more detail for at least ten minutes. And Cinema Sins is already so pedantic and nitpicky that I don't want to watch it, so I sure don't want to watch the worse version of it either.

I completely agree that there's little reason to watch a review of a movie that's longer than the movie itself. This is part of the reason why I very rarely watch review/analysis videos that are more than an hour long; I don't have patience for people who can't concisely make their points, especially when a video is harder to skim over than a blog post or other written piece.

You realise that the length is why so many people love his reviews right? At nearly 7 million views and 144K Likes, you would be hard-pressed to prove to me that his Rise of Skywalker review (as an example) is in any way harmed by the length. Not to mention the thousands of viewers he pulls for his 10 hour EFAP streams. To be frank about this, your review lacks objectivity. It appears to be based solely on your distaste for long form reviews. You have also failed to explain why nitpicking as you call it is an inherently bad thing despite this forming a substantial bulk of your criticism.

And with respect, the opening of this review makes no sense to me. You claim that you do not like him, yet you also claim to have watched so much of his content that you ended up feeling compelled to make this review. Surely if you don't like him then you would have just stopped watching long before this point?

First, \"objectivity\" is a shitty snarl word used by insecure and pretentious assholes. If it makes a value-judgement, then it is by definition not \"objective\" and any attempt to say otherwise is trying to weasel out of hard-tack facts. You can call an argument poorly-argued or insufficiently analyzed or even badly thought out, but \"not objective\" is just a fancy way of saying \"I don\'t agree with your particular bias.\"

Second, he himself discusses during the review proper that he wanted to give the reviewer the benefit of the doubt, and didn\'t want insufficient familiarity with the source material to be used as a stick to beat him with.

Unfortunately, as another reviewer on this very website once lamented while trying to discuss DOTA 2, what he didn\'t realize is that this is in fact an ingenious defense to make certain that the sacred cow is never butchered. If you don\'t like it and stop watching, well, you clearly didn\'t watch it long enough, or you just don\'t have the attention span to appreciate long-form content. If you do watch a great deal of it, then clearly you must\'ve liked it and you\'re just lying, or have some kind of ulterior motive.

Third, \"nit picking\" or grinding up a film looking for plot holes, or whatever, has been dismissed as legitimate or interesting criticism for years. Yes, there are genres of films where it hurts more than others, such as mystery films where the puzzle is part of the appeal and gaps in the logic by which the puzzle can be solved compromise the fun, but if you\'re actually asking how Batman got back to Gotham after being dumped in an ambiguously-foreign prison, then the question is immaterial. You didn\'t like the movie, and so you\'re thinking about things that really don\'t matter because you aren\'t engaged by it, but him having to get back to Gotham isn\'t the problem. This is why \"nitpicking\" isn\'t usually very good as critique.

Finally, let me be clear: I\'ve never heard of this guy or watched a single one of his videos, and I actually like long-form discussions. I work a drudge job; I like having a lengthy podcast discussion or video essay to lighten the load of my labor through my headphones while I do something else. I\'m not jumping on you because I\'m part of some conspiracy or a hate-bandwagon for a guy I\'ve never heard of and do not care about either way; I\'m jumping on you because you made a bunch of bad arguments and questioned his candor in making them on flimsy and specious grounds I\'ve heard before and were bad then.

I have no intention of starting a flame war so this will be my last post before moving on: I disagree.

Ya know, that\'s fair.

I don't want to start a flame war either but the 'objectivity' thing has kind of thrown me a little. It's certainly true that Mauler has a lot of fans and his videos get a lot of likes, so... that somehow means that if you genuinely don't enjoy that his videos are four hours long, then you're not being 'objective'? You could apply that to anything the Mauler dislikes. Rise of the Skywalker made a bajillion dollars and I'm sure at least a few million people like it, so I guess that means it must objectively be good then.

His full response to H Bomberguy's video on Dark Souls 2 is nine hours long. It's possible to enjoy long form reviews but still think that there's a limit on how long they can be, just like it's possible to enjoy pizza, but I wouldn't want to eat fifteen of them in a row.

He reviewed Black Widow? Thanks for letting me know so I can watch it later.

I can't possibly fathom finding a piece of fictional media so bad that I would feel the need to make a fucking 4-hour long video on it, let alone some Marvel movie that by most accounts is fine. The man is truly draining to listen to and seems like a massive dick on top of that.

@Elmo 3000: It is a common problem that people these days fetishise concepts like objectivity, rationality and evidence based reasoning, but fail to understand how to apply these things in discussion. They think it is good enough to insist they are objective whilst they share highly subjective and poorly substantiated opinions. Mauler is one of these, and I suspect he is very appealing to people with a similar level of conceit.

\"In one such rant he repeatedly calls actor Kelly Marie Tran \"Shrek\", for having the audacity of not being hot enough for him.\"

Wait, he really said that? I don\'t follow this guy much, but did he actually said that she\'s not \"hot enough\"?

For me, the amount of time I'm willing to spend listening to someone else's review depends on the topic and whether I like the reviewer. The conciseness also matters, especially the ratio of how long the work in question is and how long the review is.

For example, let's take The Grand Line Review, a One Piece channel on You Tube. I'm willing to spend 20 minutes listening to him discussing how Robin has gone Out Of Focus, which is a niche topic, but one that interests me, since I agree with his point- it's unfortunate that Robin's faded away since Enies Lobby. I was also willing to watch a one-hour documentary on Dressrosa, a highly divisive arc that lasts over 100 episodes, and thus dozens of hours, since the topic was interesting and it wasn't just Liam's opinion- he surveyed his viewers and included video of their responses. On the other hand, I'm not willing to watch 10-12 minute chapter reviews, especially since I can read the chapter in less than half the time.

Now for Black Widow. Since I already watched the film when I saw this review, I don't feel the need to watch any reviews to inform my opinion as to whether to see the film, and I doubt Mauler's review serves that purpose. Since I liked Black Widow, I also doubt I'd enjoy watching a long video about someone who disliked the movie, especially when I don't have any reason to respect Mauler's opinions.

In short, I think that a few hundred words should be enough to write a review on whether to buy a certain work of fiction, and critical analysis pieces should be at most, a few thousand words. If your reviews/analysis essays go past that length(or the length of time necessary to read them out loud), then maybe you should reconsider whether you can make your point concisely and/or with fewer extraneous parts.

In case you're curious, everything above this paragraph is 310 words long and takes one minute and 10 seconds to read(37 additional seconds to read out loud) according to Wordcounter.

Valiona, that sounds like you have a problem with all youtubers who make hours long videos discussing/analyzing something, not just Mauler specifically or even the Caustic Critic youtuber in general. You mentioned a 1-hour long video you liked specifically, but anything longer than that seems to bug you.

All I can really say about that is if youtube essays had no place on the platform or as a concept, none of the people who make them would have an audience or fandom. Not just the harsh-toned tubers, but guys like Noah Caldwell Gervais and H Bomberguy. People don't watch videos like theirs to know if they want to buy something, but rather they want to hear a more detailed analysis of something they are familiar with already. This is especially true in cases like Mauler, where the appeal is in how he tears apart whatever body of work the video is about. You don't need to like the way he does it, none of the people in this topic do, but clearly many love it or (again) he wouldn't have an actual fandom or this tropes page.

@Valiona; I prefer reviews to be on the short side, and it`s why I like tvtropes strict word count limits. That said, there are plenty of times I`ve happily sat through someone`s two hour critique of a series I`ve not even watched, and that`s a testament to the entertainment value of the critic. And whilst it is nice when a critic validates your opinions by sharing similar likes and dislikes about movies, it is easy to also enjoy a witty and insightful critic who contradicts you.

To enjoy Mauler, you have to share his tastes and also have a desperate need for validation from someone with an authoritative tone of voice. That's why his fans tend to be very devoted, whereas for everyone else it is torturous to watching him slowly tear a movie to tiny shreds.

The desperate need for validation part seems a tad inflammatory. Like, is the idea that people can just like his content without having personal issues of their own too unreasonable to believe?

Not trying to split hairs but I think there is a fundamental difference between the length of videos from Lindsay Ellis or Folding Ideas or Harold J Bomberguy Esquire, and the length of videos from Mauler, and that is the proportionate length of the video in relation to the subject matter. There's no objective point at which something is too short or too long, but Lindsay Ellis' two videos on the fall of Game of Thrones total around two hours. Harris B's video on the entire series of RWBY is around two and a half, because at the time it was eight seasons long and he covered its conception and evolution and the worldbuilding and unfortunate themes and so on.

Mauler's response videos to Harman Bomberbatch's Dark Souls 2 video total more than nine hours in length. That's more than an entire season of Game of Thrones. That's seven times longer than the original Dark Souls 2 video that he is responding to. That's... if I wanted to watch his response - to just one video - from start to finish, I would have to call in sick to work, start watching it at 9am and finish around 6pm. That's ridiculous.

And while nothing else he's done has been quite so bloated, it's still pretty bad. More than four hours for Black Widow? Two and a half hours on one episode of Game of Thrones? It just bugs me when he and his fans sarcastically disregard criticism of the obscene length of his videos with 'long man bad' when it's a completely genuine criticism; if it takes him four hours to tell me why he thinks a movie is bad, my first impression is going to be "Wow, this guy sucks at explaining why he thinks movies are bad." Good for him that he enjoys making those videos and lots of people enjoy them, but that's still my honest impression, and I'm hardly alone in thinking that.

It's starting to make me feel annoyed and I'm not sure why, it's definitely not anything that anyone has said here. It might just be who Mauler hangs out with and the aforementioned calling Kelly Marie Tran 'Shrek', but... I don't know, to summarize my issues with the guy, there is something very wrong with a critic who can complain about a single video made about a game he likes/doesn't like for NINE HOURS, and yet disregards any criticism made towards him as unfair or unfounded when it's pointed out how off-putting its obscene length is.

Oh, just remembered the time someone tweeted about the four hour Black Widow review with 'Get a fucking life' and the Mauler subreddit (basically like twenty guys making the same 'Long man bad!' joke ad infinitum) found it and called the poster a whiny mentally defective shithead c**t until they deleted the tweet.

Again, it's okay to make a four hour long video criticizing a film you didn't like, but if anyone criticizes you for the unnecessarily excessive length of your videos, then hey, that's just them being whiny and unreasonable, and they just need to shut up or go away.

Does Mauler act like the worst parts of his fandom? If not, I don\'t see the point in bringing them up at all.

I tend to feel hesitant about bringing up issues outside a creator\'s actual content, because it often overcomplicates the discussion and distracts from original points.

For example, no one answered my question.

Mauler\'s called Rose Tico \"Shrek\" once to my knowledge yes, but he\'s never done so to insult Kelly Tran in anyway.

Thank you. Wait, who\'s Rose Tico? (I regret this joke already :P)

No hate to Kelly Marie Tran; she seems like a great actress. Shame she got a raw deal.

This feels in line with the negative review channels trend that poped up a few years ago. The same points seems to apply: Reviews seem needlessly long; the reviewer critisizes points in the present moment and not highsight, ignoring the explanation the film gives later on; treating every nitpick as a narrative breaking plothole or unforgigable crime.

Sometimes a reviewer that does 8 to 13 minutes video or 15 to 20 could upload one that's 50 mitunes to over an hour (something like once every two years), however you do get the feeling that they broke their norm because they had so much to say to confine it to such a short time frame. I personaly don't believe that reviews that "consistently" go for half the movie's runtime or worse, longer than the movie itself (seriously, 4 hours?) can be geniune.

"Mauler called Rose Tico 'Shrek', but he's never done so to insult Kelly Tran in anyway." I mean... really? I mean, sure, he never called Kelly Marie Tran an ugly ogre, he just called the character who she plays in Star Wars an ugly ogre. That's totally different!

I agree that you usually can't place the blame on a creator for their fandom, to an extent at least, but I think it's relevant to compare Mauler again to other long-form video makers. Does the Lindsay Ellis subreddit post screenshots of people critical of her work and call them mentally defective c**ts? Does the Folding Ideas fandom have their own version of 'Long man bad'? Or do those content-makers feel confident enough in their own work that they don't feel the need to make memes about how people presenting genuine criticisms of their work are all idiot sheeple whose opinions don't matter?

I took a look at Mauler\'s The Last Jedi video where he calls Rose Tico Shrek, and it honestly just looks like a silly joke to me.

Also, ugly? How dare you. Shrek is a thicc boy.

Where's the joke? Is it that she's ugly, or fat, or looks like an ogre? Either way, for someone who was pretty notoriously being harassed with racist and sexist comments at the time, it's a really shitty thing to say.

Random nicknames are funny? Frankly, if Mauler had randomly nicknamed any other new character after an oddly attractive and memetic ogre, I\'d have laughed then too.

And yeah, the real-life context really sucks, but it\'s not always easy to make certain connections between that and fiction. Mauler\'s video only came out a few days after The Last Jedi released, so maybe he didn\'t yet know about it, or how bad it was.

Or maybe he did. I just commented because I wanted to clarify a certain claim.

Elmo, I get you don\'t like Mauler\'s fans by now. I don\'t even care that you dislike Mauler BECAUSE of his fans, I\'m just saying not everyone will share that viewpoint of yours and thus it will fail to be a convincing argument.

Melon (Should I call you 'Melon' or 'Very'? Or 'VeryMelon'? Do you have a preference? Sorry for rambling,) my opinion on Mauler isn't influenced by his fans, the crux of my argument that I'm really hung up on is that Mauler will make a four hour video criticizing a movie that he doesn't like, but if you criticize him for making a video that's an off-putting length, then his response will be 'Oh, lOnG mAn BaD? Not a valid argument, idiot. What a stupid thing to say.' And for someone who can spend four hours criticizing a film, the fact that he can't take on board one single bit of criticism is remarkably shallow.

I don't really get the 'not everyone will share your viewpoint so it won't be a convincing argument' because you could apply the same to literally any argument made in favour of - or against - any topic of discussion, ever.

Ninja, I just have a really hard time accepting that there was this actress who was being horribly harassed - before the film even came out - with comments related to her weight and ethnicity, and Mauler calls her 'Shrek', and you sincerely believe that a reasonable explanation for this is that maybe he was just calling her a completely random and unrelated name with no deeper meaning attached whatsoever, and it was funny because it was random and that's that.

Melon\'s fine.

I assumed you were using Mauler\'s fandom as a reason to criticize him, since you kept bringing up your experiences with them in this conversation while placing those experiences right next to your Mauler criticisms. That\'s why I meant; some people do hold a work or creators Fan Dumb against them, some don\'t, so it\'s not guaranteed to be a persuasive argument in your favor. If you weren\'t using his Fan Dumb in that context, then the comment I made in will be retracted, but you should still keep in mind not everyone will care if you run into some bad fans in a debate.

I can\'t speak to disliking how he responds to people that dislike the length of his videos because it\'s not possible to get the full context of why it even happens all the time. Like, unless you\'re going to list a conversation you actually had with Mauler it isn\'t something anyone can reasonably take a stance on.

@Elmo 3000 Well, it\'s true. Don\'t know what else to say.

Thanks Melon, that clears up a lot of stuff and I see your point.

Ninja, I'll drop it since I don't want to just reiterate the same points in a back-and-forth, but I still don't believe for a second that you can't put the pieces together when an actress is famously and publicly bullied for their weight, and one of their critics - who must be aware of this if they had done any research on the film, which you would expect if they made a two hour video on the subject - decides to call them 'Shrek'.

"an actress is famously and publicly bullied for their weight, and one of their critics - who must be aware of this if they had done any research on the film, which you would expect if they made a two hour video on the subject - decides to call them 'Shrek'."

Actually, that could change my answer. I wasn't taking into account the amount of research that would be expected for a two hour review, which would probably be a good amount. Or Kelly Marie Tran being famously and publicly bullied for her weight even before the movie's release apparently.

However, the video I was referring to was his "An Unbridled Rage" video, which is only 35 minutes. And it released just 5 days after the movie's release, which limits the amount of time for research (you can't just make a video out of nothing, you have to write a script, record audio, gather assets, edit, etc.).

I also can't find any news articles about Kellie Marie Tran being bullied for her weight that were published before the The Last Jedi released, at least not on Wikipedia. There is a Dec. 19 Newsweek article about a racist Wookiepedia edit, but that's it. It is possible that Mauler simply missed the articles in question. Maybe he didn't research at all, and just went purely off his reaction to the movie itself.

Finally, I feel like Shrek is a very famous and memetic character that means all sorts of things to different people. Sure, he's pretty big in-universe (and in fairness, I did call him "thicc" as a stupid joke), but he's hardly the first character I'd associate with weight insults.

I just want to treat Mauler as innocent till proven guilty; there's so many what-ifs on the Internet. I'd be happy to be proven wrong though.

You\'re going way out of your way to give Mauler the benefit of the doubt. Is it really that important to you to prove some stranger on the internet didn\'t say something sexist? That guy who unironically throws around terms like \"forced diversity\" whenever women appear in a script?

The claim that he mocked a woman for \"not being hot enough\" struck me as very serious.

No one suggested he was just joking. They were suggesting that, as someone with fairly reactionary politics from a very cursory examination of his trope page, he attacked a woman for not being conventionally attractive as part of a fandom backlash heavily associated with reactionary politics.

After some reflection, I think I'll stand by most of what I said, but I also think I acted facetious and dismissive of the opposing perspective. Particularly with the "thicc" comment. That was foolish, sorry.

I can't say much with certitude about "reactionary politics," so I'll let that point be.

He called Rose \"Shrek\" because of how out of place she is in the story. He hates the character but it has nothing to do with the actress or the way she looks.

Sorry to necro but I was revisiting this review and I am in complete awe at the argument "Yes, he repeatedly addressed this character as 'Shrek', but he wasn't making fun of the way that she looks, honest, (even though at the time she was famously the victim of a harassment campaign over her looks and weight,) but because he... um... he thought that she was "out of place" in the story. So he just randomly decided to call her the name of a fat ugly ogre. You know; as is super-common to do, when describing someone as out of place. Call them a fat ugly ogre. I do it all the time. No other possible interpretation or meaning behind his words.

...

Because, I mean... he said so! And it's impossible that he could just be lying. And the only alternative is that at worst, he was actively supporting a harassment campaign steeped in racism and misogyny, or at best, he was being a snide and sexist jerk. And obviously neither of those things can be true, because..."

If the first few minutes of his M.O.M. review are indicative of his comprehension skills then Mauler's brain is way too smooth for him to be as smug as he is. For example:

"If Defender Strange is stealing said power....(a min. later) Then consider the time it takes to sap the power from America. Like with how long this takes you should definitely opt for a much-more straight-forward killing."

So within the span of about a minute he forgot that Def. Strange was not trying to outright kill her but to take her ability (which may have killed her) to travel the multiverse. Mauler, the bestest film critic, can't seem to grasp this simple concept. This is just one of many questionable nitpicks in the opening of a 5-HOUR rant! I'm not my biggest fan but even I don't hate myself enough to subject my soul to that level of nonsense.

Part of me feels like, you know, he doesn't even have a page here any more, so we shouldn't bother... but it's also legitimately so fascinating how he and his crew have so little media literacy, and yet it's paired with such confrontational confidence. Like, they all hate people who say "Hey, that's just my opinion!" because they see it as a weakness because they believe that everything can be judged as either objectively good or bad (and coincidentally, this objective judgement always coincides with whatever their opinion would have been,) instead of seeing as it as just being comfortable and secure enough with your own thoughts that you can acknowledge that how you feel about a work might not necessarily be how everyone else should feel.

And also, the sheer hypocrisy and lack of self-awareness on display still staggers me when these guys can make a six hour video or an eleven hour podcast focussing on the most basic, banal and repetitive criticism you could imagine... but if someone says "imo this is a bit long tbh and it's kind of off-putting" then suddenly "UM, NO? This is invalid criticism. It is objectively wrong. I'm going to make a running joke about how the people who think my videos are too long are idiots who don't know what they're talking about."

Critics who can't take criticism.

I fully agree with what\'s said here: Mauler is... not a good reviewer. At all. His reviews are nitpicky, take far too much time talking about trivial details instead of things that really matter (Who cares if Dr. Strange sliced a bus in a way that\'s not completely realistic? Do you need to talk about it for five minutes?), and mean-spirited. Padding is absolutely rampant: not only do entire chunks of the EFAP podcasts are lifted whole without editing, but Mauler is clearly working offscript the whole time; and it shows. Overall, I think most of the long reviews could be truncated by around 60%. And then of course, Mauler not only thinks that his Reviews Are the Gospel but fully expects you to think so too, because he\'s \"objective\" you see.

Too bad I still needed to watch two 5-hours reviews as a podcast to understand I was watching |=Cinema Sins=]: Extended Cut.

I was also content to let the bones lie, but a friend who\'s kind of right-wing and sometimes angry and confrontational about it keeps trying to force me to watch that however-long documentary about how The Force Awakens, a movie I liked, Sucked Actually, so clearly the same courtesy isn\'t being paid to me in kind!