This just shows how infamous these Channel Awesome people really are. That may seem odd since in hindsight, these are just 20 to 30 somethings making fun of bad entertainment. Yet, when I first discovered the Nostalgia Critic in 2010, I dove deep into the fandom and ended up watching nearly all of the people on the site. By 2011 I dropped out of that fandom ASAP. Why? Because I felt I was diving deep into a fandom that promotes the false illusion of success.
I think the internet is a place where you can easily convince people you can be successful, when rarely any of that success transcends over to the real world (yeah I know stuff about Fred and Annoying Oranges, but those are super rare cases). Many of the contributors have HUGE egos about themselves and believe they are better than anyone else. That at first seemed charming, but later on when you see the type of content they produced, it was either mediocre or just plain bad. I hated how these reviews would just become huge fan service pieces with Mary Sue elements where the reviewers were these saviors of the universe, or poorly implemented stories into critical pieces (The Dark Nella Saga, for starters).
Then there was the mentality of avoiding criticism from fans. And I don't mean stuff like "Oh my god, the movie was great, you suck and you should die!!!!!", I mean actual criticism of how they delivered the content, the movie they reviewed, facts they got wrong etc. Doug Walker had this character that was basically a straw man argument character called Douchy McNitpick. He is a parody of the anal fanboy that gets excited over nothing, criticizes everything and does nothing but whine. On paper, it sounds legit as every fandom has a fan that tends to over analyze everything to the point it loses meaning. But what I noticed is that people seemed to take him as a point to never criticize anyone on the site, cause they will get mocked and ridiculed.
It got bad to the point where fans would often say "I hate to be a Douchy McNitpick, but..." before correcting the reviewers. This is why many people tend to hate the reviewers at Channel Awesome: because for all the criticism they dish out, they can't handle any of it themselves. And I don't mean small points of criticism, I mean BIG stuff like forgetting someone's name, incorrect facts about the production, mistakes in the video editing process, so on and so forth.
These are people that claim to be professional, to have gone to film school, to have all these degrees in literature, language and sociology, to have theater experience and more. Yet, someone points out a fact to them and it's OUR problem? The third "mistakes" video he did had some HUGE mistakes that should have been corrected. Yeah, people claim that he "acknowledged" the existence of his mistakes, but it was done at the expense of the fans that made him famous in the first place.
In addition, there was a passive/aggressive condescension not just on Doug but on many of the reviewers on the site.. When Doug did his infamous Let's Play, he made a commentary that at first apologizes for the video... but then does a 180 and says that people took the video too seriously to begin with. First, it further illustrates just how these people can't seem to accept any criticism from the fans, and when they address it, it is always in a passive/aggressive manner. Second, he criticizes fans for taking the video to seriously when many people on the site tend to take things WAY too seriously to the point of real anger and frustration (Angry Joe, I am looking at you...).
To further elaborate on how these people seem to avoid criticism, our own TonyWDA did a video response to MarzGurl's review of Atlantis:
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="
http://www.youtube.com/embed/epflAX4O13U" frameborder="0"></iframe>
A lot of people came out and said that her review was indeed a flawed one, and came out as one big whine fest rather than an actual piece of film criticism. So much so that people posted the video on her Facebook page, and decided to completely ignore the video and not respond to Tony or address any of the claims he made. So again, for people that claim to be experts of criticism they don't want to experience any of it themselves, fueling the growing hatred of this community.
And it seems that the site may be beginning to rot from the inside out due to tons of drama between the reviewers, leading many of them to either quit or be fired. From example, The Distressed Watcher (aka the Amazing Atheist on YouTube) quit because he felt that they were taking sides with the reviewers (the guy wasn't that popular to begin with, though). Then recently, they fired Spoony from the site after he sexually harassed one of the female reviewers on Twitter, and he was one of the biggest reviewers there. He seems to have been on a steady decline ever since he was diagnosed with heart failure, his girlfriend dumped him, and now the firing which has affected the quality of his work greatly.
All of this may seem odd to mention since this IS about the Nostalgia Critic. But I am mainly illustrating why people like ValentineBros are happy that he is ending the show now: after all the drama and bullcrap they seemed to harness, it seems that it is the beginning of the end of the site, which leads to a personal victory in the eyes of many.
