Reviews WebVideo / The Spoony Experiment

And I'm going to apologize in advance for bringing up the Scarlett thing, but it really does seem like it plays a big part in his behavior. I'm not going to judge him for it, though, because I know what it feels like and it's not my place to criticize him for emotional pain. I just thought I'd bring it up as a possible (legitimate?) explanation for some of his behavior.

You have managed to sum up EXACTLY how I feel about him. His videos are usually entertaining, and often hilarious, but I really draw a line between critiquing or even mocking a work, and insulting the people who enjoy it. He crosses that line.

Wow http://thatguywiththeglasses.com/videolinks/spoonyone/reviews/34651-counter-monkey--getting-started-with-roleplaying I see what you mean. It's weird seeing him just be a person and he actually seems pretty nice too.

Creating a bad personna's a bit of a trap really. It gets laughs but it's surprising how much it can convince the audience that there's something real behind it. Didn't the guy who made Your Webcomic is Bad and You Should Feel Bad say that he really regretted making such an aggressive character for that whole thing

I'm of the opinion that reviewers in general tend to be more fun to watch when they're being themselves, or at least let their true personalities shine through their personas, and it's part of the reason why I prefer people like James Rolfe or Brad Jones over Doug Walker when he's the Nostalgia Critic; all of them are playing an exaggerated character, but in the case of Rolfe and Jones I get the impression that it's an exaggeration of their own personalities (in fact, if I'm not entirely mistaken, Lewis Lovhaug described his own show in a similar way) or at least that their characters are very tongue-in-cheek. With that in mind, I don't really see how Spoony is that different when in-character as opposed to when he's not. I'm not saying that I find him rude, I just get the impression that he genuinely does think of the things he reviews as really bad, and that his anger is amplified instead of faked.

As far as his more elitist comments (such as asking his fans to murder Final Fantasy X supporters) go, I don't know enough about him to say whether he really means them, but he has said that "you are not an idiot for finding friends and feeling like you have somewhere you belong", so I don't think he's a Fan Hater as much as he's, well, an internet comedian. I make fun of fans of things I don't like constantly, but I never actually mean anything elitist about them that I say, and I fully expect others to do the same. There's a difference between being ironic and being cynical, and from what I can tell, Spoony's mostly ironic. Nevertheless, I do heavily agree with you that insulting fans of something just because of their opinion, regardless of what this "someting" is, is indeed going too far.

I in the comment you're referring to, he also says that the cases of him making fun of uberfans is supposed to be Hypocritical Humor since he's prone to being just as overzealous about things he likes.

Ah, here it is: "For every Star Wars slam I make, I expose an irrational worship of the old sci-fi show Sliders. Every time I issue an Internet bitchslap against people arguing who the best Doctor is, I’m embroiled in another argument about whether Deckard was a Replicant, and getting in my trillionth argument about AD&D alignments in another forum thread."

The problem is I don't think we see that side of him enough for what he's getting at to really work.

(And also I don't see why insulting fans of something is okay if they do it back. It's perpetuating a cycle.)

I didn't mean that it's okay to insult someone because of their opinion, because it isn't. What you think of something has nothing to do with being wrong or unintelligent, and it's hypocritical to say that it is. What I meant was that whenever I call someone stupid or pretentious for liking something, I'm joking. I have absolutely no problem with people holding different views than me, as long as they've actually thought about why they have these particular views, and if someone were to take offense at me jokingly calling him/her stupid because of his/her opinions, I'd apologise and stop doing it. Whether Spoony thinks the same or he really does think that fans of certain media are stupid/wrong I don't know, but judging from his aforementioned comments, it seems to me that he doesn't really think lesser of them because of what they like, regardless of whether he comes off that way in his videos (I'm fully aware that I might be completely wrong, however). Like I said, he's a comedian, and comedians definitely won't always pull punches, even though I agree it would be an improvement to see him on his friendlier side more often.

Original Poster Guy here. I'm going to start by saying, "holy crap, we're having a mature, civilized discussion on the internet." This always makes me happy.

I'lll elaborate later, but I think that Spoony is serious when he insults fans sometimes, but I also think that he's joking at other times. The problem is that it's hard to distinguish between the two. His self-righteousness, coupled with how thin-skinned he seems to be, has really started to make me appreciate his new work less: I should enjoy it, but I just can't separate his comments on Twitter and other sites from his videos.

Speaking of self-righteousness, watch his Transformers: Dark of the Moon discussion with Brad Jones. In it, he states (out of character) that while he watched the movie he felt like the smartest person in the room. I mean, yeah, that movie was bad, but come on.