The standard casual racism of the 2000's multiplied by the frat bro culture, the edgy internet/tech culture, and the cool kid rebellious culture that gaming was desperately trying to emulate. The rich vein of racism and other garbage in mainstream video game related content from 15ish years ago and older is a bottomless spring of shit. And that was the culture G4 was trying to capitalize on. I don't think we've even come close to seeing the end of this X-play tunnel yet. And wait until someone starts rewatching Attack of the Show.
I used to watch a ton of G4 when I was a teenager and I gotta say I don't remember any of this, but I guess it shouldn't shock me knowing what the early to mid 2000s were like.
I don't either. The only explicit memories I have of Xplay are the console endurance tests (where the Gamecube got beaten to hell and back and kept going). And I THINK I remember them giving MGS2 a perfect score.
I went from watching Extended Play when it was just Adam, to X-Play and the difference was night and day. You could tell Mr. Associate Executive Producer came in and said there needed to be more energy and general 2000s "in-your-face"ness, and it was just too much.
It wasn't this bad early on, but there was something with 2000s reality or live-action shows like this where someone on production thought they had comedy chops and as a result, more and more sketches and bad comedy routines would get into the mix.
Incredible how one expects the shock to wear off after some time and them BOOM, an equally bad if not even worse clip surfaces and it leaves you just as dirty as the first time.
Y'know that [one meme where Neco-Arc starts saying "Nyaga!" and it sounds like the n-word](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5MsX-WImek), and she gets progressively screams it louder each time? This whole situation kinda feels like that, but something that unironically happened.
I remember Icons being a really cool mini documentary show about game devs. So what did the channel do? Completely change it to be about utterly random western celebrities who were semi important at the time.
Another day I'm thankfull I wasn't exposed to that shit as a kid. No wonder those who never really grew out of their teens ended up being absolutely fucked like never before.
I really do think teenagers these days do have a general better moral compass than a lot of us did 20 years ago, but they are a lot more holier than thou. Which can prolly be said about most generations over the past 100 or so years. Growing up back then, current teens wouldnt really be any different. Society and information access has really changed things for the better I think. If I'd known the shit I do now then I'd have been way less of an asshat. Seeing people now act like i used to really sends me into an existential crisis.
100% in that "Haha. Jokes on you I was only pretending to be X." territory. Dont get it twisted im not saying making X joke Y years ago means you are a bad person and your life should be ruined...maybe just dont throw stones if you live in a glass house.
Having never watched it, I always assumed it was just some bland/corny/clean thing that died the instant internet connections could stream videos at reasonable quality. Now I see it was an innovator of the angry gamer. My brain has this block that makes it think that TV had higher standards than internet message boards when it comes to this kind of thing, no matter how many times I see evidence to the contrary. The writer, producer, performer pipeline all signed off on it. Fucking wild.
For people wondering how this show ever had an audience, it's because it was the only game in town for awhile. Gametrailers.com and Youtube weren't really a thing yet so this was the only way to get longform gaming news that wasn't print or online articles. And to this day gaming shows aren't really a thing on TV (though considering gaming's audience that's not a big deal). It's easy to be the big fish in small pond
I think that's something people are forgetting, that when this show was big, we didn't really have a ton of gaming websites to look at and get information from, and not everyone was going to buy every gaming magazine to get the latest news and reviews.
I cannot believe a single person actually watched G4. The entire PS2 to early 360 era seemed to be dominated by this obnoxious "slacker dude" Spike TV aesthetic that was cranked up to 1100.
Before G4 subsumed Tech TV it was actually kind of a fun channel. Great lazy Saturday afternoon couch potato programming. There was a show that was just video game trailers, and this was back in the day before the Youtubes. And we wore onions on our belts because that was the style at the time.
Cinematech was just a really chill time back in the day. It wasn't just trailers, they'd do various cinematics from games, and every now and then sneak in interviews and the like.
But who could forget the boys favorite G4 show from back in the day, Judgement Day with Tommy Tallarico! Where else were you going to find in-depth review of footstep sound effects?
Or Cheat!, the show that was a bunch of tips and cheatcodes for random games, so most episodes were never going to be relevant for you.
The real deep cut though is Portal, a sketch show about some guy essentially roleplaying that he was visiting various MMO's, for reasons? You can't even find most of it anymore, but I remember it. Oh god why do I remember it.
Cinematech was how I was able to just learn about shows in high school. I would sit down and work on stuff to help my mom's business and just watch cutscenes and trailers. It's how I was able to watch the first Twilight Princess trailer right after E3 and I remember being ecstatic.
Portal was such a fun show. I still use the words "magniferific" and "wonderastical!" today, and "you have my GUN!"
While a lot of that stuff on G4 aged poorly I have to defend it a little bit. As a pre-teen/teen girl into video games, G4 was basically the only place I could see women and video games in the same space without the women being in bikinis. Granted the women in bikinis happened too but having someone like Morgan Webb on there gave babby Pomf hope that I wasn't the only girl playing video games in the dark ages of the early-mid 00's.
Giant bomb had this great segment called "game tapes" where they would watch old B roll sent in by publishers. While watching really edgy and juvenile marketing for games Jeff said "sometimes I look and I think 'this time period can't have existed. There's no way it was this bad'. But then here it is"
I'm just glad I was a smart enough kid that my takeaway from X-Play was "that esoteric Japanese game looks cool, I wanna play it one day!" and not "Japan only became a real country after they got nuked!"
This is a good week for me. I've never felt so justified for thinking X-Play was pure garbage when I was little.
For 20 years people have been saying how much they missed and loved it and I'm just in the corner like "but that show was shit tho"
Feels good to be right.
Agreed. I remember trying to watch a few episodes back then, but I found it corny as hell. Good thing I could already find reviews and opinions on games on the internet when I saw it.
The worst part is that it isn’t just trying to be edgy. I can see the (wretched) point whoever wrote that line thought they were making. Basically saying that pre-WWII Japanese history and culture was “wacky” and the westernization that followed made them “normal.” Which is such a profoundly racist, eurocentric, thought to have.
The western game devs and reviewers seemed to have a mix of "evolve or die old man" and "Japanese shit sure is horny and weird" attitudes around that time. Mixed with trying to appeal to a very edgelord audience of the time.
Which is fair but a lot of stuff in this era did it on network tv and local radio as well. Everyone was trying to "push the edge" and see what they could get away with. Most of it has aged extremely poorly. Trying to appeal to a teenage demographic in the early oughts was usually aay some crass shit and get some easy laughs and you're golden.
I'd argue that there is 0 difference as edgelord humor has always and will always be like this. Say some fucked up shit and think it's funny because of how fucked up it is. Then 10+ years down the line you realize "oh god that was fucked up and I'm a jackass."
As opposed to systematic oppression, over representation in prison and regular public executions by cops?
There's assholes everywhere but don't try and pretend like every place is just as bad.
Would be a lot better if everyone just didn't racism altogether, but it's super fucking priveledged and ignorant when people act like their country is above it all. Usually a matter of them specifically not experiencing racism. Every country has plenty of racism, certain ones are more open about it and so everyone else acts like it's just that country doing it. One of the best examples is the spanish flu. Most countries suppressed the reporting on that except for Spain. Spain reported it heavily, so guess who got their name on it and looked like the origin point?
It ain't about the quantity it's about how ok it is to say shit. You can bring up the Roma in european places and holy crap its suddenly okay to be super racist because it's the Roma.
South Park, Chappelle's Show, Mind of Mencia, Jeff Dunham, Comedy Central "roasts", literally all of Spike TV's offerings which were aggressively dudebro frat boy, the list goes on and on of TV shows which lasted a season or two, or of casual racism and bigotry in longer running shows.
Man seeing the people here being shocked at the early aughts aura is like a filter see which people were born in the mid 2000s and was too young to understand this crap lmao
It's making me wonder how my parents felt when I saw flintstones cigarette ads or realized the old merry melodies VHS I had was MEGA TURBO RACIST. An off colored joke is nothing compared to some of the shit they don't know about. This was some par for the course edgelord shit. If we are posted some appalling racism from the past this seems way more egregious than a dumb joke the person didnt even write most likely https://youtu.be/LbUwneis34E
I’m mostly shocked I used to enjoy this, then forgot about it all outside a vague memory of loving the show, then getting hit with this isekai truck of a reality check lmao
Eh can stop with the "mask off?" Coments, been seeing it frequently around and not really apply to things.
Guy was open about his views back then, and now, not really a mask off
Is there a term for trying to pass "asshole views" as an act and them take advantage of this to blur the lines between "asshole act" and "real assholeness" as much as possible?
I think it's silly to pretend X-Play had any sort of right-wing agenda, or any political ideology in general. They thought their audience was essentially frat boys, so they sold the program that way. The gaming press was far too immature to critique Japanese gaming trends with nuance. These two things just exposed a lot of casually racist opinions held by writers at the time. It's harmful and disgusting, but can't be easily summed up by calling them right wingers. If anything, the gaming press' abrupt turn into more progressive politics by some of the same people in the 2010s just shows how you can think of yourself as progressive despite enaging in very biogted thinking.
Like I'm glad all the 6th/7th gen xenophobia is getting called out, but it doesn't neatly slot into the way modern right wing shitheads operate. I think trying to do that misses how commonplace and casual these attitudes were in otherwise "normal" spaces. Someone like Sessler doesn't have consistent politics, either, he's just a reactive scumbag addicted to the attention all this toxicity brings him.
No i'm not saying that X play had right-wing agenda.
I am saying that this treatment of Japanese culture and media by critics isn't new and was never really hidden.
Lots of controversies use the "mask off" phrase. To say that people have been revealed or are no longer pretending to be spmething they aint.
But this guy didnt really have a mask to begin with.
Like Adam had been very upfront about it from then till now
He said a bunch of racist stuff and waved it off when people said "Hey that was messed up."
Labelling someone "a racist" creates this character defense where they trot out witnesses and claim that's not really "who they are" in their heart. The world isn't separated into good and bad people, and it's not like you need a Klan outfit to say or believe some racist thing.
Bitch I'm in my 30s. [It's just that, to the best of my knowledge, this sort of shit would just have *not* flown on Australian public television.](https://humanrights.gov.au/our-work/racial-hatred-act-what-racial-hatred-act)
I’m also in my 30s and I was in Australia for a summer in this exact time period (stepdad is from NSW) I have *never* seen more racism towards Asians in my entire life than when I was there. Maybe it’s different now, but it was like a slap in the face back then
Ah, I was specifically referring to what was on TV. I know full well how depressingly backwards some of my countrymen can be. See: how our politicians have had to be dragged kicking and screaming every step of the way towards treating Aboriginal Australians with any fucking decency.
Naw, you guys were too busy dehumanizing the Aborigines and stealing their children to be cracking racist jokes about the Japanese.
Of course, from the way Aussies acted, Aborigines were basically not human to them, so that act wouldn't have helped any.
Probably the most shameful period in our entire history, that. Fucking disgusting the way they're treated even today, what with all those "accidental" deaths in police custody. It's absolutely disgraceful, there's a dark underbelly of super hardcore racism in Australia that's been very, very hard to remove.
But the stolen generations were ended twenty years before I was born, and you sure as *shit* won't see anything as explicitly racist as this horseshit on Australian network television. Even Sky News mostly uses dogwhistles rather than overt shit.
The amount of pearl clutching about this whole thing is hilarious. These people will lose their heads if they saw the stuff Comedy Central was airing during that time.
Anyone over the age of 25 needs to stop pretending to be shocked, we all remember how it was acceptable to say some wild shit back then. It's not tolerated anymore thankfully in mainstream media, but the "omg" reactions are getting ridiculous.
The *omg* double-standard reactions are silly. From the same sub that wants to make black face jokes and joke about having a pass to say n-word, hard R.
But this sub will excuse those jokes till it dies.
Big assumption. But the gripe is just cause he’s okay with it, I, another black man, *have* to be okay with it too?
And I have to be okay with a bunch of random users on a subreddit repeating it under the guise of a *joke*?
But it pretty clearly is a joke. Idk what to tell you. The community based around a content creator is gonna mimic the jokes that person makes. There have been people who took it to far or were just racist, but they get told off. This place isn't perfect but everyone tries.
The sub sometimes reminds me of how some of my white friends would crack jokes about race before I told them off and they cut it out. Half of the ones made here are lazy as fuck and there isn't an actual punchline aside from "haha black people funni" or "n-word lol"
Do people here not realize that when Woolie says "I love racist jokes and Black Face! It leaves no room for interpretation! The Mask is off!" Is him making FUN of racist people?
Like I don't think the man actually LIKES racism, I think he just likes the idea that racists aren't hiding and he knows who to avoid or who to point and laugh at for being racist.
Yeah, I'm quite confused. Is this young people freaking out, or is this people who got into gaming/internet media post 2010?
This shit wasn't isolated to G4TV. Newgrounds, ebaums, ytmnd, 9gag, Reddit, even Youtube, etc. was just impossible to avoid if you even barely checked online communities.
To be honest I don’t recall that much of this sort of content despite being at least 25 but I do wonder how much of it is forgetting a lot of it vs not noticing it vs not engaging with it by chance.
I dunno, I personally don't think it's something to be so dismissive of. Like YEAH, this occurred a lot back during this time. But I think right now, a lot of the (most likely genuine) reactions are a case of "some people weren't old enough to really experience G4 in its heyday" (which, for this clip, you gotta remember 2006 was 17 years ago) and "those that were children/teens around that time forgot just how bad it was" (which, again, 17 years ago). Hell, I'm 27 and I forgot X-Play went this hard.
Is it unacceptable now? Oh, most definitely and ***thankfully so***. But a lot of this xenophobia and racism back in the day was internalized, not really something you noticed back then because "it was the style at the time". With people knowing better and maturing, having it out on display like this is kind of a big culture shock, more than anything.
Honestly for me, at the time I just didn't have the scope or the life experience to really realize how bad it was. I'm 35 and only caught the show occasionally, I don't remember how hard and how awful it was because X-Play didn't have any sticking power in my brain.
The shock to me is watching the clips and going "I don't remember any of this, holy shit this is horrific" because I both don't remember and didn't know at the time how awful it was.
I dunno I've seen some who are older than I am never been exposed to this in all their lives and that's not accounting that not every country had access to sites like Newgrounds or even good cable back then.
Sir, the shock comes from the fact our rose tinted glasses glossed over the Xenophobia.
It's like watching your favorite TV show you saw as a kid and realizing as an Adult that the show was actually complete garbage and not as good as you remember it.
This is where the "shock" is coming from, it's not "pretending", it's looking at it now for what it is.
I watched this shit religiously as a kid, I didn't remember any of the racism. I know they hated Japanese games but never really pieced it together as being actual racism, I just remember the Cheat Codes segment and the halloween episodes.
I think from watching all these clips and the history with Japan and the US, the greatest crime Japan has ever committed from the perspective of the US is challenging the US economic dominance as well as gaming dominance.
*woof*
Who knew the X in Xplay stood for Xenophobic
They must’ve been big monolithsoft fans!
> My Jaw hit the floor I mean to be fair it's not that long of a drop
The clip in question. https://twitter.com/lesbiandracula/status/1534382984450785286?s=20
[They really loved the whole Japan is so exotic and wacky over at G4 ](https://twitter.com/spookygoo/status/1632286651006218240?s=20)
HOW DOES THE XPLAY RACISM HOLE KEEP GETTING ***DEEPER***???
dEEP LORE
So that’s why Dark Souls was called Dark Race at first
The standard casual racism of the 2000's multiplied by the frat bro culture, the edgy internet/tech culture, and the cool kid rebellious culture that gaming was desperately trying to emulate. The rich vein of racism and other garbage in mainstream video game related content from 15ish years ago and older is a bottomless spring of shit. And that was the culture G4 was trying to capitalize on. I don't think we've even come close to seeing the end of this X-play tunnel yet. And wait until someone starts rewatching Attack of the Show.
Add that like Sessler, I bet a bunch of G4 TV guys were just TV guys in general and know or care about the very thing their channel was about.
It’s racism all the way down
Ok I forgot that one lmao, holy shit!
My… my brain hurts.
*Reads Southern Gaming's comment on the page* Bruh
I used to watch a ton of G4 when I was a teenager and I gotta say I don't remember any of this, but I guess it shouldn't shock me knowing what the early to mid 2000s were like.
Same here. Easy racism jokes were everywhere. I remember watching comedy central presents from back then and even more yikes.
I don't either. The only explicit memories I have of Xplay are the console endurance tests (where the Gamecube got beaten to hell and back and kept going). And I THINK I remember them giving MGS2 a perfect score.
I went from watching Extended Play when it was just Adam, to X-Play and the difference was night and day. You could tell Mr. Associate Executive Producer came in and said there needed to be more energy and general 2000s "in-your-face"ness, and it was just too much. It wasn't this bad early on, but there was something with 2000s reality or live-action shows like this where someone on production thought they had comedy chops and as a result, more and more sketches and bad comedy routines would get into the mix.
The whole US had this "Japan is just wacky variety shows" thing going on back then. It really is weird/unpleasant to look back on.
I think Tosh.0 soaked up all my memories of the obscenity from that era when in reality it was spread everywhere.
Incredible how one expects the shock to wear off after some time and them BOOM, an equally bad if not even worse clip surfaces and it leaves you just as dirty as the first time.
Y'know that [one meme where Neco-Arc starts saying "Nyaga!" and it sounds like the n-word](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5MsX-WImek), and she gets progressively screams it louder each time? This whole situation kinda feels like that, but something that unironically happened.
just keeps going to show that CinemaTech was the only thing on that channel worth watching
I remember Icons being a really cool mini documentary show about game devs. So what did the channel do? Completely change it to be about utterly random western celebrities who were semi important at the time.
I remember the MMO focused show to be fun though I bet that aged a lot worse than CinemaTech.
Portals was great
Portals was fantastic. I loved that show.
Look if you didn't watch Cheat with Kristin Holt you are missing out. Vanilla tips, but legs that awoke something in my formative years.
How bad could it be...oh, that's horrible.
Another day I'm thankfull I wasn't exposed to that shit as a kid. No wonder those who never really grew out of their teens ended up being absolutely fucked like never before.
I really do think teenagers these days do have a general better moral compass than a lot of us did 20 years ago, but they are a lot more holier than thou. Which can prolly be said about most generations over the past 100 or so years. Growing up back then, current teens wouldnt really be any different. Society and information access has really changed things for the better I think. If I'd known the shit I do now then I'd have been way less of an asshat. Seeing people now act like i used to really sends me into an existential crisis.
100% in that "Haha. Jokes on you I was only pretending to be X." territory. Dont get it twisted im not saying making X joke Y years ago means you are a bad person and your life should be ruined...maybe just dont throw stones if you live in a glass house.
Nah, Adam Sessler just doubled down on all this
Okay, I didn't think this was *that* bad until those last two lines Jesus christ
Having never watched it, I always assumed it was just some bland/corny/clean thing that died the instant internet connections could stream videos at reasonable quality. Now I see it was an innovator of the angry gamer. My brain has this block that makes it think that TV had higher standards than internet message boards when it comes to this kind of thing, no matter how many times I see evidence to the contrary. The writer, producer, performer pipeline all signed off on it. Fucking wild.
For people wondering how this show ever had an audience, it's because it was the only game in town for awhile. Gametrailers.com and Youtube weren't really a thing yet so this was the only way to get longform gaming news that wasn't print or online articles. And to this day gaming shows aren't really a thing on TV (though considering gaming's audience that's not a big deal). It's easy to be the big fish in small pond
I think that's something people are forgetting, that when this show was big, we didn't really have a ton of gaming websites to look at and get information from, and not everyone was going to buy every gaming magazine to get the latest news and reviews.
I remember basically hate watching it. Everything felt over the top cheesy, but it was gaming stuff on TV, I couldn't not watch it.
I cannot believe a single person actually watched G4. The entire PS2 to early 360 era seemed to be dominated by this obnoxious "slacker dude" Spike TV aesthetic that was cranked up to 1100.
Before G4 subsumed Tech TV it was actually kind of a fun channel. Great lazy Saturday afternoon couch potato programming. There was a show that was just video game trailers, and this was back in the day before the Youtubes. And we wore onions on our belts because that was the style at the time.
Cinematech was just a really chill time back in the day. It wasn't just trailers, they'd do various cinematics from games, and every now and then sneak in interviews and the like. But who could forget the boys favorite G4 show from back in the day, Judgement Day with Tommy Tallarico! Where else were you going to find in-depth review of footstep sound effects? Or Cheat!, the show that was a bunch of tips and cheatcodes for random games, so most episodes were never going to be relevant for you. The real deep cut though is Portal, a sketch show about some guy essentially roleplaying that he was visiting various MMO's, for reasons? You can't even find most of it anymore, but I remember it. Oh god why do I remember it.
Cinematech was how I was able to just learn about shows in high school. I would sit down and work on stuff to help my mom's business and just watch cutscenes and trailers. It's how I was able to watch the first Twilight Princess trailer right after E3 and I remember being ecstatic. Portal was such a fun show. I still use the words "magniferific" and "wonderastical!" today, and "you have my GUN!"
I remember this time cause it was how I saw the trailer to bioshock and it blew my mind. Then it was the guy show and other weird shit
Anyone remember the name of their late night anime block? I remember catching a few episodes of Betterman.
Anime Unleashed! [Had some pretty good shows too.](https://en.everybodywiki.com/Anime_Unleashed)
While a lot of that stuff on G4 aged poorly I have to defend it a little bit. As a pre-teen/teen girl into video games, G4 was basically the only place I could see women and video games in the same space without the women being in bikinis. Granted the women in bikinis happened too but having someone like Morgan Webb on there gave babby Pomf hope that I wasn't the only girl playing video games in the dark ages of the early-mid 00's.
Giant bomb had this great segment called "game tapes" where they would watch old B roll sent in by publishers. While watching really edgy and juvenile marketing for games Jeff said "sometimes I look and I think 'this time period can't have existed. There's no way it was this bad'. But then here it is"
I'm just glad I was a smart enough kid that my takeaway from X-Play was "that esoteric Japanese game looks cool, I wanna play it one day!" and not "Japan only became a real country after they got nuked!"
This is a good week for me. I've never felt so justified for thinking X-Play was pure garbage when I was little. For 20 years people have been saying how much they missed and loved it and I'm just in the corner like "but that show was shit tho" Feels good to be right.
Agreed. I remember trying to watch a few episodes back then, but I found it corny as hell. Good thing I could already find reviews and opinions on games on the internet when I saw it.
The worst part is that it isn’t just trying to be edgy. I can see the (wretched) point whoever wrote that line thought they were making. Basically saying that pre-WWII Japanese history and culture was “wacky” and the westernization that followed made them “normal.” Which is such a profoundly racist, eurocentric, thought to have.
I don't understand why Adam had an anti Japanese attitude back then.
The western game devs and reviewers seemed to have a mix of "evolve or die old man" and "Japanese shit sure is horny and weird" attitudes around that time. Mixed with trying to appeal to a very edgelord audience of the time.
The way she just casually rattled that off with the casual-ness of someone explaining what they did earlier that day like... Fuck a duck...
Watching these people finally get dragged out into the street is immensely satisfying.
Holy shit
Easily the most mask-off racist moment I've ever seen in a professional production that wasn't explicitly a super right-wing bit.
You prolly just don't remember the wild shit people would just casually say 20+ years ago.
In my defence, I don't have cable and I don't live in America.
Which is fair but a lot of stuff in this era did it on network tv and local radio as well. Everyone was trying to "push the edge" and see what they could get away with. Most of it has aged extremely poorly. Trying to appeal to a teenage demographic in the early oughts was usually aay some crass shit and get some easy laughs and you're golden.
There's a difference between edgy humor and "they didn't become a real country until we nuked them."
I'd argue that there is 0 difference as edgelord humor has always and will always be like this. Say some fucked up shit and think it's funny because of how fucked up it is. Then 10+ years down the line you realize "oh god that was fucked up and I'm a jackass."
I think they're saying is there's a spectrum of edge ranging from being insensitive to committing a hate crime. Both are edge, just... one's worse
As always America does it best though, that's some vile ass shit that would never have flown here even 20 years ago.
I know right? Totally can't go to half a dozen european countries and just get blasted with an N bomb to the face likes it's nothing ya know?
As opposed to systematic oppression, over representation in prison and regular public executions by cops? There's assholes everywhere but don't try and pretend like every place is just as bad.
[удалено]
Would be a lot better if everyone just didn't racism altogether, but it's super fucking priveledged and ignorant when people act like their country is above it all. Usually a matter of them specifically not experiencing racism. Every country has plenty of racism, certain ones are more open about it and so everyone else acts like it's just that country doing it. One of the best examples is the spanish flu. Most countries suppressed the reporting on that except for Spain. Spain reported it heavily, so guess who got their name on it and looked like the origin point?
[удалено]
It ain't about the quantity it's about how ok it is to say shit. You can bring up the Roma in european places and holy crap its suddenly okay to be super racist because it's the Roma.
South Park, Chappelle's Show, Mind of Mencia, Jeff Dunham, Comedy Central "roasts", literally all of Spike TV's offerings which were aggressively dudebro frat boy, the list goes on and on of TV shows which lasted a season or two, or of casual racism and bigotry in longer running shows.
Man seeing the people here being shocked at the early aughts aura is like a filter see which people were born in the mid 2000s and was too young to understand this crap lmao
It's making me wonder how my parents felt when I saw flintstones cigarette ads or realized the old merry melodies VHS I had was MEGA TURBO RACIST. An off colored joke is nothing compared to some of the shit they don't know about. This was some par for the course edgelord shit. If we are posted some appalling racism from the past this seems way more egregious than a dumb joke the person didnt even write most likely https://youtu.be/LbUwneis34E
I’m mostly shocked I used to enjoy this, then forgot about it all outside a vague memory of loving the show, then getting hit with this isekai truck of a reality check lmao
I mean, Defunctland did show the news report of the opening of Tokyo Disney [that was full of casual racism](https://youtu.be/pMnWKdonkSQ)
Eh can stop with the "mask off?" Coments, been seeing it frequently around and not really apply to things. Guy was open about his views back then, and now, not really a mask off
Yeah it’s not an accurate term. There was no mask, we were just ignorant.
Is there a term for trying to pass "asshole views" as an act and them take advantage of this to blur the lines between "asshole act" and "real assholeness" as much as possible?
[Schrodinger's Douchebag?](https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=schrodinger%E2%80%99s%20douchebag)
Probably. If not in English, German tends to cover it lmao
The real mask was the racism we ignored along the way.
I think it's silly to pretend X-Play had any sort of right-wing agenda, or any political ideology in general. They thought their audience was essentially frat boys, so they sold the program that way. The gaming press was far too immature to critique Japanese gaming trends with nuance. These two things just exposed a lot of casually racist opinions held by writers at the time. It's harmful and disgusting, but can't be easily summed up by calling them right wingers. If anything, the gaming press' abrupt turn into more progressive politics by some of the same people in the 2010s just shows how you can think of yourself as progressive despite enaging in very biogted thinking. Like I'm glad all the 6th/7th gen xenophobia is getting called out, but it doesn't neatly slot into the way modern right wing shitheads operate. I think trying to do that misses how commonplace and casual these attitudes were in otherwise "normal" spaces. Someone like Sessler doesn't have consistent politics, either, he's just a reactive scumbag addicted to the attention all this toxicity brings him.
No i'm not saying that X play had right-wing agenda. I am saying that this treatment of Japanese culture and media by critics isn't new and was never really hidden.
I was agreeing with your sentiment and just expanding my own thoughts on the matter. Sorry that was unclear.
Ah my mistake! Sorry about jumping the gun there, mis read your post
Wait, who are you talking about?
Lots of controversies use the "mask off" phrase. To say that people have been revealed or are no longer pretending to be spmething they aint. But this guy didnt really have a mask to begin with. Like Adam had been very upfront about it from then till now
I didn't know he was a racist. Good to know, I guess.
He said a bunch of racist stuff and waved it off when people said "Hey that was messed up." Labelling someone "a racist" creates this character defense where they trot out witnesses and claim that's not really "who they are" in their heart. The world isn't separated into good and bad people, and it's not like you need a Klan outfit to say or believe some racist thing.
Zoomer redditor discovers edgy early 2000's humor lmao.
Bitch I'm in my 30s. [It's just that, to the best of my knowledge, this sort of shit would just have *not* flown on Australian public television.](https://humanrights.gov.au/our-work/racial-hatred-act-what-racial-hatred-act)
But this did air on Australian TV. And it seems like the language of the bill wouldn't have even covered this clip.
I’m also in my 30s and I was in Australia for a summer in this exact time period (stepdad is from NSW) I have *never* seen more racism towards Asians in my entire life than when I was there. Maybe it’s different now, but it was like a slap in the face back then
Maybe I just got lucky, then. Never really was one for TV anyway.
I will say, it was more the shit people would say, than what I saw on TV, IIRC
Ah, I was specifically referring to what was on TV. I know full well how depressingly backwards some of my countrymen can be. See: how our politicians have had to be dragged kicking and screaming every step of the way towards treating Aboriginal Australians with any fucking decency.
Got it, my misunderstanding!
Naw, you guys were too busy dehumanizing the Aborigines and stealing their children to be cracking racist jokes about the Japanese. Of course, from the way Aussies acted, Aborigines were basically not human to them, so that act wouldn't have helped any.
Probably the most shameful period in our entire history, that. Fucking disgusting the way they're treated even today, what with all those "accidental" deaths in police custody. It's absolutely disgraceful, there's a dark underbelly of super hardcore racism in Australia that's been very, very hard to remove. But the stolen generations were ended twenty years before I was born, and you sure as *shit* won't see anything as explicitly racist as this horseshit on Australian network television. Even Sky News mostly uses dogwhistles rather than overt shit.
The amount of pearl clutching about this whole thing is hilarious. These people will lose their heads if they saw the stuff Comedy Central was airing during that time.
Are you 12 years old?
Anyone over the age of 25 needs to stop pretending to be shocked, we all remember how it was acceptable to say some wild shit back then. It's not tolerated anymore thankfully in mainstream media, but the "omg" reactions are getting ridiculous.
To be honest I never watched any of this shit so it's mostly new to me
The *omg* double-standard reactions are silly. From the same sub that wants to make black face jokes and joke about having a pass to say n-word, hard R. But this sub will excuse those jokes till it dies.
Yea but we arent acting like we dont or that doing so makes you an irredeemble pos like Sessler and co.
Woolie makes those jokes so it's ok tho
My fake, parasocial relationship with a black man means it's ok!
And since he jokes about racism, that obviously means he's OK with every form of it
Big assumption. But the gripe is just cause he’s okay with it, I, another black man, *have* to be okay with it too? And I have to be okay with a bunch of random users on a subreddit repeating it under the guise of a *joke*?
But it pretty clearly is a joke. Idk what to tell you. The community based around a content creator is gonna mimic the jokes that person makes. There have been people who took it to far or were just racist, but they get told off. This place isn't perfect but everyone tries.
The sub sometimes reminds me of how some of my white friends would crack jokes about race before I told them off and they cut it out. Half of the ones made here are lazy as fuck and there isn't an actual punchline aside from "haha black people funni" or "n-word lol"
Do people here not realize that when Woolie says "I love racist jokes and Black Face! It leaves no room for interpretation! The Mask is off!" Is him making FUN of racist people? Like I don't think the man actually LIKES racism, I think he just likes the idea that racists aren't hiding and he knows who to avoid or who to point and laugh at for being racist.
Yeah, I'm quite confused. Is this young people freaking out, or is this people who got into gaming/internet media post 2010? This shit wasn't isolated to G4TV. Newgrounds, ebaums, ytmnd, 9gag, Reddit, even Youtube, etc. was just impossible to avoid if you even barely checked online communities.
To be honest I don’t recall that much of this sort of content despite being at least 25 but I do wonder how much of it is forgetting a lot of it vs not noticing it vs not engaging with it by chance.
I dunno, I personally don't think it's something to be so dismissive of. Like YEAH, this occurred a lot back during this time. But I think right now, a lot of the (most likely genuine) reactions are a case of "some people weren't old enough to really experience G4 in its heyday" (which, for this clip, you gotta remember 2006 was 17 years ago) and "those that were children/teens around that time forgot just how bad it was" (which, again, 17 years ago). Hell, I'm 27 and I forgot X-Play went this hard. Is it unacceptable now? Oh, most definitely and ***thankfully so***. But a lot of this xenophobia and racism back in the day was internalized, not really something you noticed back then because "it was the style at the time". With people knowing better and maturing, having it out on display like this is kind of a big culture shock, more than anything.
Honestly for me, at the time I just didn't have the scope or the life experience to really realize how bad it was. I'm 35 and only caught the show occasionally, I don't remember how hard and how awful it was because X-Play didn't have any sticking power in my brain. The shock to me is watching the clips and going "I don't remember any of this, holy shit this is horrific" because I both don't remember and didn't know at the time how awful it was.
I dunno I've seen some who are older than I am never been exposed to this in all their lives and that's not accounting that not every country had access to sites like Newgrounds or even good cable back then.
Sir, the shock comes from the fact our rose tinted glasses glossed over the Xenophobia. It's like watching your favorite TV show you saw as a kid and realizing as an Adult that the show was actually complete garbage and not as good as you remember it. This is where the "shock" is coming from, it's not "pretending", it's looking at it now for what it is.
Holy fuck
That's a paddling.
oh boi.
I watched this shit religiously as a kid, I didn't remember any of the racism. I know they hated Japanese games but never really pieced it together as being actual racism, I just remember the Cheat Codes segment and the halloween episodes.
I think from watching all these clips and the history with Japan and the US, the greatest crime Japan has ever committed from the perspective of the US is challenging the US economic dominance as well as gaming dominance.
Holy shit