Let’s talk about Mekkah’s video about Mangs and Chaz

[RLR_FYE]

Damn Mekkah really dropped a hammer on us just when we thought it was all over.

That last bit about him refusing to work with anyone who works with Mangs is definitely making a statement.

Not going to lie I’m a little heartbroken this dynamic duo won’t be collaborating anytime soon. Those Mangs and Mekkah let’s plays are fantastic.

 

Edited February 12, 2022 by RLR_FYE

[Armchair General]

His video comes off kind of petty, in an way.

[RLR_FYE]

21 minutes ago, Armchair General said:

His video comes off kind of petty, in an way.

I’m curious what you mean by that?

[Shanty Pete's 1st Mate]

To keep it brief: As a frequent Mekkah watcher, I appreciated this video. Obviously, this is something he's had on his mind for a while, but I can respect it taking him a while to formulate and express it. It's always difficult to discover that a colleague and friend of yours has done something seriously wrong. As a YouTuber, it's Mekkah's choice whom he collaborates with, so if he's elected to set a hard line (i.e. no one still collaborating with Mangs), then that's within his rights to do so. I used to watch Mangs, but he let me and many others down.

As for the Chaz allegations... there's been a ton of discourse about that, both on the comments of the video and on Reddit. Even where people are broadly skeptical of his accuser, Indie, there's also a lot of backlash to how Chaz, and others in his circle, responded to the allegations. To be honest, I haven't reviewed enough of the information to make a personal judgement: neither to the plausibility of Indie's allegations, nor to the suitability of Chaz and others' (i.e. Goosaphone, Lucky Crit) responses to them. It may seem callous or lazy, but I'm just tired of that whole thing.

[Florete]

I don't want to get into the Mangs/Goose stuff. My stance is a little complicated, and I'd like to leave it at that.

However, I do want to say that I have absolutely no sympathy for the Project Ember "devs" in all this. Mekkah in this video goes into a spiel about how, "Mangs wasn't willing to respect their wishes." This is completely laughable. Project Ember is, in the community's own terms, a hack (not sure why we haven't started calling them 'mods,' but it is what it is). And I'm willing to bet most or all of these hackers never even purchased a legitimate copy of the base game. Did they respect the devs? Did they get permission from IS/Nintendo to hack the game for use primarily with illegal copies? Somehow I doubt it.

If you're going to release something publicly, you have to accept that people you don't like are going to be consumers, and some of them may share it with others. The companies who own the IP have trouble controlling this and get lambasted when they do, yet these hackers think they deserve more respect? What a joke.

And yet Mangs even decided to meet halfway and donate the ad revenue to charity. Mekkah tries to downplay this by saying Mangs still benefits regardless - which is true - but the money was still donated to charity. You can't take that away.

If the PE hackers had made a statement like, "We're aware Mangs is playing Project Ember on his channel. We won't stop him, but we don't support him and will not allow discussion of his Let's Play on our Discord server," I'd respect that. But to act like it's within their rights to prevent him from using it for content is ridiculous.

[Eltosian Kadath]

I remember the time Mangs apologized for his behavior before the sexual assault of Goosaphone came out. Fool that I was, I believed his apology, thought he had turned over a new leaf. As the saying goes, fool me once shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. Anyone that believes he isn't a predator either hasn't heard about his history, or is a fool. I didn't need this video, but some people probably do.

I never knew much about Chaz, or was particularly interested in him, or much of his content, so I feel just as much an outsider on the topic as Makkah does.

[Zapp Branniglenn]

When this stuff was going down in 2020 I read the twitlongers and was pretty grossed out. Granted, a lot of it paled in comparison to the several years of allegations in the Smash community that were still going down by the time the pandemmy hit. Mangs really was "the big channel" for a blossoming youtube community though, so it caused a huge rift. People took sides. One side wanted to prove Chaz was guilty of something, which would somehow in their diseased minds exonerate Mangs of any wrong doing. It's not a contest, it's about accountability. And Chaz's video on the situation was exhaustive - in the right ways. Never digressing into unrelated topics, always treating people involved with agency, and always having evidence where it's due. Mangs' apology was the total opposite, so I unsubbed and haven't looked back. 

However, I admit my biases. I think Chaz is hilarious and a brilliant engineer of video and audio. I still watch his streams to this day. And by the same token I also thought Mangs was pretty annoying even when I did follow him, only ever watching stuff with other people in it. So unsubbing from Mangs didn't come at any real cost to me. I did however see Mangs' little Q&As in the 2010s, which gave rare glimpses into his own personal politics. He's very socially conservative and has specifically named the MeToo movement as a load of bullshit. There's a distinct lack of humanity in the way he regards women that I'm not surprised to hear that younger viewers don't pick up on. He points to that behavior as him "playing a character" but when that same character comes out in the format of that sort of video, you can believe it. You can find out a lot from a vlogger from what they don't edit out. 

As for Mekkah's video, it's similarly exhaustive, and certainly very personal while remaining as analytical as possible, but I can see why a lot of people are asking "why make this now?". I assume that most of those comments are Mangs stans just poking and prodding at any weakness they can find in the video. But at the same time, that was my first thought too. Why was Mekkah so silent for these years? It's obviously had an impact on his channel. He does offer the Project Ember situation as an example for why Mangs' behavior hasn't improved. I absolutely believe that Mangs has not improved, but it's small potatoes compared to groping a passed out co-star. Mekkah himself acknowledges this as he brings it up, but it's not much of a smoking gun to incite this belated response video. I'd rather he'd have made this same video a year ago with the intention of answering "this is why I'm not working with Mangs. And I'd like to move past it. Unsub if you disagree with that choice".

Edited February 12, 2022 by Zapp Branniglenn

[ping]

Dondon151 has made a comment on Mekkah's video that I think is worth taking into account - I believe Mekkah focused too much on Chaz's apology video itself and didn't really address his and his friends' behaviour before that.

Spoiler

Quote

I know you read your video comments pretty religiously, so I hope you can pin this as it contains information new and relevant to the content of this video.

On Mangs: The issue that I took regarding July 2020 and subsequent developments was always about accountability. Mangs dodged accountability because he knew that there was no one to hold him to account. He knew he could get away with what he did, he knew he could weather all of the allegations, and he knew he could bury the evidence of his transgressions and emerge with his channel in a better spot than previous. Even before I decided to openly take a stance condemning him, I knew that it would be up to the audience to try to hold him to account for his actions, but inwardly I expected exactly the outcome that we see today: that he would go away for awhile, sweep everything under the carpet, gaslight the audience into thinking that it wasn't so bad after all, and continue on as if nothing happened. I expected also that there would be general vitriol directed at content creators such as you and me, who do not have as large of an audience.

 

To be absolutely frank, the response of the community at large - that it wasn't their responsibility to try to hold Mangs to account, or that it couldn't even behoove them to take the very basic action of not consuming his content DESPITE knowing that what he did was wrong - was totally expected, but it still hurt me, much in the same way that it hurts me to see a petty theft go unpunished, or some other rather inconsequential miscarriage of justice. Of course the average viewer wouldn't give enough of a **** to let this information influence their actions.

 

We Need to Talk, when it was published, made me physically ill. I don't know if it was the revision of events, the nonapologies, the appeals to utilitarianism to justify a return to content creation, the lean towards vacuous conspiracy, the very obvious display that Mangs learned NOTHING at all and wanted to make sure that we, the audience, also learned NOTHING at all - or some loathsome stew of all of the above - but it, and the subsequent deletion / privatization of all July 2020 videos on Mangs's channel, drove in me a deep desire to do something, ANYTHING, to call him out on the bullshit and ensure that people would never forget what he did. To be clear, I don't have a problem with offering redemption in principle - but there was no redemption that was deserved through the veil of untruths and crocodile tears.

 

I decided not to make a video for 3 reasons. 1) I figured that most of the community was over July 2020 and that making such a video would seem petty of me, 2) I would be asking for trouble in trying to take on someone with 10x my subscriber count, and 3) that my community post summarizing the events of July 2020 would be sufficient. But I'm glad that you made this video. Not only because I don't want the community to forget the specific wrongs and hypocrisies, but also because I don't want them to believe in Mangs's alternate history of events - that the Fire Emblem community was all honky-dory until some disgruntled content creators decided to spring sexual assault allegations to cancel their largest content creator and drive wedges everywhere. That's not our doing. That's MANGS's doing. He was due for his just deserts, and because he chose to eschew accepting accountability for his past misdeeds, that's why the community is where it's at today.

 

On Chaz: I know that you are overall less informed and involved with the specifics involving Chaz's allegations, but I think that portion of the video was honestly quite out of place and took away from the message of the content on the whole. Let me explain to you why.

 

1) You half-justified Chaz's dismissal of Indie's allegations with the context that Indie had previously raised her allegations in a separate context, only to be rejected. There are 2 problems with this. The first is that it should be immediately obvious that tweeting "believe all women" and, IN THE SAME DAY, telling an audience not to believe a lying ***** greatly damages the sentiment behind the former message. The second is that Indie's initial allegation had been rejected only by Goose's immediate circle of content creators, clearly colored with their own biases, and deserved a serious consideration when brought up to the community at large, not Chaz's flippant dismissal that ultimately obfuscated the seriousness of Mangs's misconduct.

 

2) Let's not forget about Rybean. Throughout the concurrent drama involving Mangs and Chaz, Rybean worked covertly and overtly with Chaz's content creator sympathizers to present allegations against Mangs and to interfere with allegations against Chaz. He did this all while posing as an objective source, using the burner Twitter account @fe_truth. Chaz claims that he was completely unaware of everything that Rybean did. That's an awfully convenient excuse. The irony of all of this is that out of the debacle of July 2020, Rybean was really the only person who sustained any long-term consequence.

 

3) You brought up at a couple of points that Indie never published a response to Absolutely Everything. Do you want to know WHY that is? It is because of me. Yes, ME.

 

After Absolutely Everything, Indie approached me on Discord and asked me about what she should do. I told her that there was nothing that she could do, and to drop the matter altogether. I felt extremely bad in doing so, but I truly thought that there was nothing positive that could come of furthering the matter, as Chaz had a YouTube following of >30,000 subscribers and Indie had a social media following of approximately 0. It sucks that Chaz had the last word, but obviously he could get away with shaping the narrative however he wanted to. And of course there was no response to Absolutely Everything, because in doing so, Indie had nothing to gain and absolutely everything to lose. You haven't heard any more from her side of the story because I told her that there was no point. And you know what? There still isn't a point, because no one's going to believe anything that she has to say (especially now), and it would only revisit trauma that I expect she wants to be done and over with.

 

To be clear, this doesn't indicate at all whether I believed Indie's allegations to be true. My best impression was that she and Chaz had an emotionally tumultuous relationship, and that perceived hurt may have arose out of that. Regardless, I had always considered the allegations themselves to be less relevant than the hypocrisy and treachery of the behavior in July 2020, and I was growing more and more skeptical about their veracity until...

 

4) It came to my attention that there was another, separate occasion with a different person involving Chaz and potential sexual misconduct. Through some internet detective work, I figured out whom this person was, reached out to her, and got some details of the event. Out of respect for her privacy, I will only tell you here that she felt coerced by Chaz into performing some sexual acts that she wasn't comfortable with, and that she was upset by how parts of the community were treating Indie's allegations. Whilst I had previously considered Indie's account to be probably embellished, this new information caused me to reconsider whether I, an outside observer, was being manipulated by a different version of the truth. I just didn't quite know what to believe any more, and I'll leave it at that.

 

5) While I think that Chaz does a better job verbalizing his fault in Absolutely Everything, let me point out that he has since rebranded his channel name to Choops, Absolutely Everything is unlisted (better than private, I suppose), and every other reference to July 2020, whether it be in videos or in his community tab, has been meticulously scrubbed. So much for accountability. Additionally:

 

6) I've noticed that whenever July 2020 is brought up to Chaz on Twitter, he links to Absolutely Everything and says that it exonerates him. Yes, this totally-not-biased source, crafted by the accused party, apparently exculpates him. Do you not see the problem here. Chaz preemptively biases the observer by stating that his video definitively exonerates him before they even get a chance to see it, in the absence of the opposing viewpoint. If I had any concerns about nefarious motives, or about whether Chaz has learned from the experience, this observation only rationalizes my concerns.

 

In summary, I don't think that Chaz's misdeeds are nearly on the same level as Mangs's, nor do I have a strong opinion on the veracity of Indie's account of events. It's a shame that the concurrent dramas obfuscated the important details. But, bearing in mind that actions speak louder than words, I don't give Chaz a pass. His apology video is immeasurably the superior one, and I do buy that he at least believes most of what he says, but I can't help but to stay skeptical. It's really not that difficult to say, "sorry that I was a hypocrite and carelessly mishandled these allegations," instead of producing a 2 hour video that tries to rationalize every little action, while putting one's foot in their mouth several times along the way (referring to Chaz's multiple nonapologies prior to the release of Absolutely Everything).

 

I did not watch Mangs's ""apology"" video when he posted it, because his action of just continuing as a youtuber after, what, hardly a month would have invalidated practically everything he could've said. Hearing the snippets Mekkah put into his video, and then reading the transcript, did not surprise me, but it still made me feel livid. The sheer amount of half-truths, misleading framing, lying through omission, and just straight-up lying is just sickening. "I did an oopsie, but Cancel Culture Bad, also THEY are bad people". "I'm not going to explicitly assert that I'm only returning because I'm soooo altruistic and my fans love me, but hey, take a look how much my fans love me". Manipulative bastard.

[Jotari]

I really don't watch Fire Emblem youtubers (like I'm so uninvolved that "News which you couldn't possibly not know if you were in the Fire Embelm community in said year" with a screenshot of Serenes itself was something I had no knowledge of), but I got into Aether recently because he decided to play my fan game. And it seems all this drama has chased him off of youtube permanently (with only two chapters of my game played 😕 ). So, that sort of sucks. For me at least. And all those people that like short form over edited content covering various fangames.

Edited February 12, 2022 by Jotari

[Armchair General]

13 hours ago, RLR_FYE said:

I’m curious what you mean by that?

Basically, he's saying that we, the FE community have an responsibility to hold Mangs accountable for his actions; along with the Project Ember fallout that Florete already mentioned.

 

Sure, it doesn't help that Mangs is prone to posting shit like this.

But I really don't care much about them, at the end of the day; although it's kind of weird how Mekkah is talking about something old, at this point.

Edited February 12, 2022 by Armchair General

[Etrurian emperor]

10 hours ago, Zapp Branniglenn said:

I did however see Mangs' little Q&As in the 2010s, which gave rare glimpses into his own personal politics. He's very socially conservative and has specifically named the MeToo movement as a load of bullshit. There's a distinct lack of humanity in the way he regards women that I'm not surprised to hear that younger viewers don't pick up on. He points to that behavior as him "playing a character" but when that same character comes out in the format of that sort of video, you can believe it. You can find out a lot from a vlogger from what they don't edit out. 

I can't claim to be an expert on Mangs but from what I know I'd even say the term ''alt right'' might be applicable. From what I heard he promoted the ''black pigeon speaks'' channel which has a well deserved reputation as a ''little fascist bird'' in some circles. I think I also heard him sharing the whole ''hard men create good times, good times create soft men and soft men create bad times'' 

Despite me having little respect for anyone who thinks like that I would not consider such leanings to inherently be a deal breaker. Contend creators have a right to their opinions even if those opinions are just horrid. As long as they don't let their content intrude on their work people can believe whatever gibberish they like. And to Mangs credit his channel doesn't seem openly promoting his politics. His politics wasn't something I knew until the controversy brought them to light. Curiously Mekkah seems to be a supporter of the Dutch Socialist party and he's got plenty of bad things to say about the Dutch far right so I guess their partnership is a nice example of politics not necessarily being a barrier to got relations. 

That said it has become problematic in the sense that his politics might have influenced his behavior. The alt right has a very.....peculiar attitude towards woman, and Mangs behavior towards woman and his seeming disgust towards cancel culture do seem very influence by alt right thinking.  

As for their partnership. I think its mostly reasonable if you refuse to work with someone who crossed multiple ethical lines and who might motivate others into following in those murky footsteps. 

[eclipse]

As this is YouTube, this is going into cross-site drama.  Please talk about that elsewhere.