more than enough time has passed that i can articulate my thoughts and feelings better. it’s kinda been nagging at me and has never really gone away since totalbiscuit passed.
there’s something uniquely upsetting learning that there’s a fair and valid share of people that think the world is better off without him now. there’s no true remedy for the kind of unsettling feeling that you’re not supposed to mourn the death of someone who’s been there and helped you get through multiple difficult life periods. i idolized him, ever since i was in 6th grade. i even went as him for halloween 2011. his channel was another place of comfort for me throughout the years. so the days following his death, it was such an extraordinarily depressing blow to just see how many people openly celebrate it. there’s no feeling like it that i’ve ever experienced.
TB never came off to me as deserving of it all. it felt like, at least to me, almost everything people found wrong with him was something that he could have learned to reverse if he just had a better line of communication with the people he needed to listen to and more time. that he was problematic and had his low points but wasn't irredeemable, wasn’t malicious. following him, it seemed to me that he was very open-minded and receptive to criticism. it’s much more a fault on me for giving him the benefit of the doubt learning about the things he’s said after the fact. the transphobic comments, the close association with more directly malevolent figures, the one cancer jeer that’s so horribly ironic in retrospect. and yet i so readily dropped p*wd*ep*e and rightfully pushed him as far away as i could without looking back, and i still do the same on an infrequent basis.
it wasn’t like monty or etika. there were no big and emotional tributes, nor the feeling that communities were setting aside any differences to come together and preserve a person’s memory. just more arguments and debates, this time about whether or not it was even something you were allowed to be sad about.
i think that’s what makes his passing still sting, after all this time, why i still haven’t felt the sense of closure that eventually comes following such tragedy and why i don’t expect to; it’s being told by the internet that it was a good thing that john bain is no longer with us, that his death was some kind of retribution, and if you openly mourned for him, you are (and i quote) a “cockroach coming out of the woodworks”.
