i guess with even more horrendous shit from rt/ah coming to light with no signs of stopping, especially with this insightful thread from caleb, it just clicked to me how deep the whole "friendly ribbing and bullying" shit on camera was with the company, AH in particular, and how at its worst, it was just regular bullying with us as a general audience not knowing any better.
i've really only ever said in the past that the "bullying" AH did to matt made me mildly uncomfortable because i think he's a cool dude, and him getting dunked on could get old and sad if done excessively, and that's something i still believe. however, that turned out to not even the worst of it, upon some reflection i did over this weekend.
i learned of the existence of rt, and eventually became a big fan of AH, sometime in early 2014, so i must have been 13 years old at the time. yikes, i know lol. this was back when ray and kerry and caleb and such were in the gameplay videos more often at the time. i, the impressionable fucker i was, and lowkey still am, latched onto the... jokes? callbacks? bits??? whatever the hell they're called of caleb being the cheating screen-looker who is absolutely obsessed with frisbees and shit. i repeated back what i heard the guys said like a parrot to myself because they found it fun to do, so i eventually did, as well.
i find the jokes pretty funny on their own back then and now, but what i never acknowledged back then was how constant that all was, to a concerning degree, even to the point where caleb was getting harassed and was sent death threats from other "fans". fucking mind-boggling! i never went that far because i wasn't that fucking stupid, but i currently feel a bit of shame, for lack of a better word, because of how much that hurt someone i liked watching on screen.
it's the same deal with gavin. bird noises. british humor. jokes about his way of explaining smart ideas poorly. all of that. dude was constantly egged on for years. it's calmed down since then, but that, and the physical stuff (one i remember semi-clearly was geoff pushing gav in i think a minecraft let's play to prevent him from winning some competition in the game) was insane, looking back on it. but since i was just a kid, i just laughed along.
#stopthebullying, #startthebullying, the brazing of newer hires like joe, god knows how much “friendly” ribbing towards kerry and jack. god, i’m not a fan of watching much older rt/ah videos because i’m guaranteed to hear a slur of two, but the comments from other fans who have been here longer than me about how jack got shit on in early AH stuff and the rt podcast/drunk tank episodes he appeared in can be its own separate fucking post, the poor guy.
i don’t know how to end this post, really. most of it was written at 4 am, and it shows. my brain has been a mess this past weekend, and so has rt since its inception. bye.
