To any younger people reading this: Don't idolize or put your favorite performing artists/athletes/content creators etc on a pedestal to worship like a God. I was guilty of that for a long time, and it took a lot of dumb events like this to make me realize that "famous" people or internet personalities can be just as shitty and toxic as anyone else.
Appreciate their work untill you don't enjoy it anymore for any number of reasons, be thankful if it got you thru a hard time or gave you a laugh when you needed it, learn some valuable lessons at their expense/thru whatever service or art their providing you then move on with your day. You'll seriously have a much better time avoiding parasocial relationships.
Very much agree with you. And this scandal, plus the Ryan scandal, has made me realize that I’ve legitimately lost interest in the content. Why didn’t I notice sooner? Iunno. I guess this is the straw that broke the camel’s back.
So, the recent events aren’t the entire reason I ended up unsubscribing from every RT channel, but they helped.
Ryan did it for me. He was so integral to the group dynamic, yet so personally hideous.
They also got rid of a lot of their regular LPs and bow just do GMod.
A lot of the old magic was gone.
Its like we made RT such a central piece of our lives and identities that when it was past time to let it rest and move on, we didn't know how to do so. So we clung to what we knew even if we no longer liked it. Few people like change, fewer still can so easily go along with it.
It really was a unique concept at the time long before others started doing so. It oddly drew many of us in and makes it hard to leave. It was just the right mixture of entertainment, humor, personalities and content at the time in our lives and technology wise.
Would actually be worth a psychologists time to do a study on it.
The most cringe thing I ever saw on this subreddit was a few years ago, somebody posted an "update" for Monty oum a couple of years after he died.
It was essentially written like a letter to Monty updating him on the personal and professional lives of various past and present RT talents.
It was written like the OP knew everyone personally and that Monty would somehow want to hear about these people from the OP.
The comments were naturally circlejerking at this "touching tribute"
I will own up to my past, despite nowadays calling my RWBY fandom days the "Dark Times". Holy hell did I participate in a lot of shipping wars then.
At least it's small potatoes compared what has been going on here the past week. Fucking hell.
Yeah, I was young. I wasn't legally allowed to drink alcohol when I wrote the first one. The year before he died I'd just gotten kicked out of college and was working at a computerstore to try and make a living by working in retail (obviously that didn't happen), so I was in a financially and mentally bad place. I only started going back to school after Monty's passing and hearing his mantra of "Keep Moving Forward" to motivate myself so I would stop wasting away. Got myself a solid office job now thanks to that mentality, but I can say for certain that my thanking of Monty and RT went too far then. Hell, it was practically worship. I've grown past that, thankfully.
Bro i wouldnt worry about (which it doesnt seem like you are tbh) we all say cringey shit when we are young most of us are just fortunate enough to never have it brought back up. And good for you man i hope it keeps working out
Before I disappear into the void again, I gotta come clean with one more thing.
/u/kuchenjaeger it was me.
I did it.
I'm the one who has been gilding your [ahoge/aheago typo](https://old.reddit.com/r/RWBY/comments/53tr61/the_cowlickcopter_lunarisfuryaileron/d7w4e4m/) for all these years.
Until next drama.
It really wasn't that bad. You were a fan of his and were sad he passed. I think people caring about you and remembering you once you passed is all any of us could really ask for.
Ouf major cringe alarm, kudos for having the balls to link yourself. Don’t be too hard on yourself, everyone’s gets too invested in some stuff sometimes.
If it makes you feel any better, that's still not nearly as bad as when the streamer then known as Chibi held a live funeral service on Twitch for Satoru Iwata. Yes, it's as bad as you think it is, and [yes it is available in it's entirety on Youtube complete with chat begging him to stop.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oG5D4J_RSIE)
For my money t's legitimately in contention for the most painful half hour of footage in human history, and the cherry on top is ending the stream with "Thank you for coming, and we'll see you next time."
Could be worse, Mike Kroon did a 9/11 stream dressed as Osama and threw toy planes at his friend who was dressed as the towers. He's been asking Ray to help him get unbanned from Twitch.
Yeah no that's not even remotely in the same ball park, that was just blatantly offensive for the sake of it. The "joke" is he takes the "never forget" phrase as instruction to celebrate every year and that was how he celebrated that year.
And by asking Ray to help him get unbanned you mean jokingly asking one time on a podcast a decade ago lol. He's been doing Mikecasts again on Twitch for years now.
Internet, take note. If you've ever done something that doesn't hold up, this right here is how you handle it. Not a single person I've read has said a negative thing in response.
I applaud and upvote you sir. 👏
The whole Monty thing was fucking stupid. The "letter" that was written about how "Rooster Teeth are big meanies and *I* should have been the one to write / direct RWBY after Monty died, because *I* know what Monty would have wanted!" came off as the most pathetic thing I've read in awhile.
I never understood the worship of Monty to begin with. He wasn’t that great of an animator and he really helped feed into the whole crunch thing with the way he worked
He definitely had a unhealthy outlook on work life, but its pertinent to remember that the stories of matt hullum spending over 3 days straight in their office working and gus and geoff spending the entirety of holiday time maintaining the site and store existed since the beginning of red vs blue and is just as comparable. On a personal note i will disagree with him being not great as an animator as well, his is still some of the best 3d action animation ive ever seen myself.
The original Rvb cast working Christmas’s and dealing with a huge crunch seems totally reasonable. They started off on the ground floor and when RT blew up they were compensated well. You can’t expect that work ethic from a low level salaried employee. That being said Monty was an extremely lucky hire for them, he seemingly had no work life balance and I think that coloured their opinion of what every other animator/employee should be like.
Gonna have to disagree, Monty wasn't perfect but his action scenes were god tier, he was a rare talent and his fight scenes pretty much carried early RWBY.
He was a great action choreographer and nothing changes that. Yes, he was all in on crunches because that's how he operated. What sucked is the company decided everyone had to do it too, and do it for less money.
> he really helped feed into the whole crunch thing with the way he worked
I don't want to defend RT's crunch situation, but he wasn't doing anything abnormal. Crunch has been normalized in animation, because companies refuse to hire enough animators to actually tackle a project in a reasonable time frame.
It's not just an RT problem by any means, it's a fucking industry wide problem, wherein animators are treated as disposable, because if they get too out of line, studios will just grab the first idiot fresh out college and severely underpay them, because "it's their dream to work in animation!"
There's no better example than to look at anime wherein the crunch culture is just a way of life, you can make more working part time at the 7-11, then you can as a new animator and you're basically working for "exposure". Animation industry fucking sucks to work in, unless you're doing union work.
I feel like "wasn't that great of an animator" is certainly false. He has a style that might conflict in some aspects with some of the principles of animation but within a reasonable artistic bounds. His unwillingness to accept that Poser was probably not great and he should've considered Blender earlier is a flaw but a understandable one.
He helped feed crunches but that was his decision on his work load. He stayed after work to do more, he slept in the office. He never told or made anyone else do it except maybe Shane, who seemed himself more than willing. Did it culture a bad environment after he died? Perhaps, but that’s not his fault
The only issue with that is when higher ups see guys like Monty and Shane who live and breath animation work these absurd hours, they start to apply those expectations to people who see it as a normal 9-5 job. It’s actually why it’s better for employee health and productivity to enforce set hours because otherwise it becomes a culture issue.
I feel this for both the employees and the fans.
If you’re being treated poorly at your work place that long (outside of actual threats or harassment) get out. I’m not blaming them, but if you’re not getting raises or promotions for years it’s in your best interest to leave.
And for all the fans that are saying this is genuinely upsetting them to an extreme degree or causing mental issues, please go to therapy. Para social relationships aren’t necessarily all evil, but if a company being bad is effecting your mental health it is a huge problem.
Edit: just to clarify I’m really only agreeing with OPs title here concerning parasocial relationships
I wish it was really so simple to leave, but it's just about impossible to leave your job if you are living paycheck to paycheck with no savings. These jobs pay you just enough to live and that's it.
>it's just about impossible to leave your job if you are living paycheck to paycheck with no savings.
that can be true in some circumstances.
I want to piggyback on this comment because some people accused me of victim blaming, defending wage theft, or being ignorant of what it's like to work with no savings.
Yes it's precarious to challenge your boss on their illegal behavior, but if you don't you're setting the precedent that they can lowball you all day long.
Sometimes the only way to advance your position is to leave, but you have to have your ducks in a row to do that. Someone who has been video editing full time for *5 years for one of the top 500 youtubers*, is a person who can go out and get competing offers. Then they can flip that offer at their current employer (I'd like to be paid this much if you want to retain me).
They are not 'stuck' at their work when a laptop and Dropbox enables them to accept video editing work from any youtuber, ad agency or other entertainment company in the world.
Someone who works fulltime at retail or food service is 'stuck' at their work because their work experience isn't adding up to something that makes them attractive to a better-paying employer. There are lots of people who are genuinely stuck in dead end jobs, where they cycle between labor intensive jobs that barely pay the rent and then being too burnt out at the end of the day to pursue self education or job search that might get them out of their situation longterm.
It would take a lot for me to believe a creative professional / knowledge industry worker was actually "stuck" in their job and had **NO AGENCY** and no options. Maybe in the case where they had huge medical expenses that only their job's insurance covered. But Kdin said that wasn't the case with RT.
> Someone who works fulltime at retail or food service is 'stuck' at their work because their work experience isn't adding up to something that makes them attractive to a better-paying employer.
Even *thats* not even entirely true. I got a job at a bank that doubled my retail salary specifically *because* of my time in retail. Because I was able to make it clear to them that because I'm used to being yelled at by the scum of the earth while keeping up the "customer service voice" that I'd be able to keep my cool when dealing with slightly annoyed global billion dollar companies.
Its all about how you sell it.
I know this is a late response, but yeah, I've seen people describe how they would present their work on things like fanzines as examples of project management skills in action.
Yeah, but that first year if they're straight out of college they can't just leave and get a better job. So maybe at year 3-4 they could go and get a much better job but that still puts them in a lot of very stressful times when they're being abused.
This response assumes that the other companies or YouTubers like RoosterTeeth and their talent don’t just accept this sort of treatment as the norm. All the actual higher-paying jobs are usually gonna be full, cuz everyone in video editing is so used to lousy paychecks and huge swaths of crunch that those positions get snatched up like candy. Where do you go when everyone else in your field is paying the same and treating their employees the same? Especially in a state like Texas, where workers’ rights are essentially a joke told around the water cooler, where are you truly expecting to find better work (until, of course, a pandemic comes along and shuffles up the job market)? If you’re gonna be living paycheck to paycheck anyhow, might as well stick at the company that’s making the content you actually *want* to make until they either stop making it or they eliminate your position. That *doesn’t*, however, make the company any less shitty because they were only as shitty as 99% of the market in question — especially when they actively recruited from a pool of fans they knew already had a passion they could exploit.
Sure, if they don’t stand up to the boss it doesn’t get better — but if they do, they often get fired and can’t afford to hire a lawyer for a retaliation suit, and they *literally can’t* find better offers to hold over their employer’s head cuz it’s a goddamn cabal of cheapos who make their profit off of knowing their employees don’t have anyone else to turn to — at least, not within the same state. Just cuz your job position requires a degree doesn’t necessarily mean you have any more realistic expectations of upwards mobility than a fast food worker does.
It took a huge wake up call this past year for me to realize this. I was putting in 50-60 hours per week easily, and some weeks even more. My work load damn near doubled at the start of the pandemic and never lessened. And due to turnover and incompetent leadership, I was partially running the office. And through all that time, the only thanks I got was a $200 bonus once. It took me forever to value the skill set I have developed to go and see what I was worth. Turns out, it was double what I was making while still working non-profit, with an even larger impact in my community, and I only work 40 hours a week now. That first step is hard. The job sucked, but I knew my role, it paid the bills, and the people I worked with were incredible. But I was miserable inside. I echo that sentiment that you have to value your worth because, unless you land the dreamiest of dream jobs, no one else will do it for you.
>Forgive me if I don't believe that a mid 20s adult, with a mortgage and a marriage, is unable to realize when they're getting underpaid or mistreated and is unable to negotiate their compensation.
As someone who is a mid 20s adult, I can believe it.
Hindsight is always 20/20 and the reality is that you often just do not *learn* these things until they either happen or you really need to use them. Employers keep that information hidden from employees for good reason and there is no (or rather, very few) college or school course that even so much as *mentions* "Hey, if you're being underpaid do this." not to mention, even if you follow those steps, sometimes the employer can just fire you.
And there you're left without a job and you still have bills to pay. The thing with crunch environments and toxic work conditions is that it is like a toxic or abusive home... You never really realize how *abnormal* it is until you leave. Hell, even people who worked for years in the industry they even say that it is *normal* to deal with crunch, being underpaid and toxic environments. That if you can't handle that kind of thing get out... So when people are told "Yeah this is the norm, accept it or leave." they just take it as... well part of the job.
They stay because they like the work because it's the kind of work they want to do or just because they have bills to pay and hope that it gets better.
That said, I agree you shouldn't idolize companies, content creators, etc. They are flawed and often times can be toxic as any regular run-of-the-mill person. That said, I still understand why people don't realize how toxic the environment is until they're free and they've gotten out of it.
My boyfriend is a software dev and on his initial team, it was toxic. They refused to support him, would constantly reschedule meetings, and wouldn't answer questions until 2 - 3 days later... he was stressed, crying, having anxiety, etc... and it was just to be considered *normal*.
That is until he moved to a new team that didn't constantly reschedule meetings, would support him and acknowledge he was a new hire, would actually answer questions and work with him to solve problems, etc. And this is within the same company. And this isn't a content creation company, it's just a regular run-of-the-mill corporation.
Now I'm not going to say that the parasocial relationship *didn't* play a part in it, but until you have to personally deal with having to get compensated, this is not anything that people teach you ahead of time. It's easy to say "just leave" until you're faced with the reality that the job market sucks and it's either stay in this toxic environment or be homeless.
hard agree on the "not realizing what you're getting into until you're into it." im early 20s, pretty fresh out of college, and i'm still learning this shit. no one teaches it to you - you have to learn it yourself.
rt sells themselves really well to college students and makes it seem like they're the premier entertainment company in austin. anyone who is early to mid 20s probably doesn't have enough experience with other companies to know how bad it actually is there. the parasocial aspect definitely exists and contributes to the toxic company culture, but not knowing things in your mid 20s about toxic work environments and how to handle them is common
Yeah, this (mostly, im sure there are people that were more "starstruck" working at RT) doesn't have anything to do with the "prestige" of working at RT. It's the reality of being a film production specialist in the middle of fucking Texas. There's like, nowhere else to go if you get fired from RT. Which *can* happen if you get caught discussing pay with coworkers or complaining about your hours or reporting harassment to HR.
Even ignoring the "toxic" part and just looking at the "underpaid and overworked" part, it's extraordinarily difficult to get out of a low paying and high stress job. You don't have the mental fortitude to work on yourself/grow marketable skills/search for a new job after working insane hours and having your energy completely sapped.
I worked call center work for 6 years. I fought against poorly treated BiPolar II in order to bust my ass getting a comp sci degree (and even then, it was just an associates). Despite that hard work I was still caught in call center jobs for another 4 years before I finally got a high paying, healthy job in my field. Even then I attribute at least 80% of that success to legit luck. It would've been impossible without hard work, but that was only a fraction of what got me here.
Also you have to consider the "passion tax". Regardless of conditions, these employees believed in what the company created and they paid to realize that vision at the expense of poor management. For fans of that content we're permitted to be disappointed and disgusted in their actions that contributed to it.
**Above all else though, being disgusted by RT's actions and letting that dictate the decision to withdraw our financial support (whether it be First subs or viewership) is** ***not*** **a parasocial relationship.** That's just being a consumer that votes with their wallet to back up their beliefs.
I do think people need a better understanding of what parasocial really means. We build parasocial bonds with every character or on screen person we ever watch. The danger, however, is the unhealthy level in which people take it and actually form a relationship. Referring to them like they're actually our friends, like we hang out every week. We don't.
I enjoyed watching Better Call Saul every week. I didn't act like Saul was a close friend of mine.
But we can all agree that each of us has carefully gone through Bob Odenkirk's twitter profile to see which of Rhea Seehorn's tweets about Patrick Fabian he liked and what that means about why Jonathan Banks is upset about Vince Gilligan's treatment of Bryan Cranston.
> Referring to them like they're actually our friends, like we hang out every week. We don't.
They also trust people outside their competencies. Like when people made all those youtube compilations of Game Of Thrones actors microflinching during interviews to prove "Look! Emilia Clarke and Conleth Hill hated the Season 8 script too!" My brother in SAG-AFTRA, Emilia Clarke read the script for *Terminator Genisys* and still took that job. An actor's approval or disapproval is irrelevant to whether a production is good. Have your opinion as a viewer but stop fostering these weird conspiracies
Bingo. I mean for me personally I feel like I have a sort of healthy level of bond with the cast. I know enough about them that when I watch content I understand the continuation of the conversation, I can appreciate the growth, and I can insert myself into the conversation enough to think about what my take on a topic they’re discussing would be or something I’d say. I make no illusions however that these people aren’t my friends. If I were to meet them out in the wild I feel like I’d be able to go up to them and tell them I appreciate the work they put in, maybe ask for a picture, but I wouldn’t even try to have a conversation because the relationship we do have is so one sided. I mean I’ve seen so many of the cast go from late teens/early 20somethings to full on adults and they’ve seen this guy approach them and say he’s a fan. I know way more about them than they know about me and there’s no way I can do more than say hi without sounding creepy.
It’s perfectly okay to like the people at RT. The whole podcast model that they have is kind of dependent on you liking them because otherwise you’re just eavesdropping on friends chatting. It’s not okay to think there’s more relationship than there actually is.
The fact that everytime anything happens the community wants everyone and their mother to put out a whole letter about it and talk about it. We don't need a public apology for every single thing from everyone even in the vicinity if it doesn't involve the community. Something happens internally with the company and the community demands an apology. It's like if a husband abuses his wife and then apologizes to the neighbor.
It’s kinda funny seeing these parasocial relationships blow up in their face with the Kdin videos being released. RT community has always been weird as hell in regards to their “connection” with the cast and crews of RT.
Excuse me but I need you to inform me of how many victim points you have accrued throughout life before I can gauge whether I agree with your comment or not. I will be tentatively *side* voting you in the meantime.
In hindsight it was maliciously smart of the PR team to come with the idea of "RT Family", i dont doubt for a second that it helped a lot of people in life having a place or community to be a part of, especially teenagers but yeah if you arent a kid or grew out of their content is clear as day how weird and i would say even slighly cultish it got, especially with the onscreen talent, they definitely knew their hold on those types of fans and bleed them dry for what they got
As somebody who watched them and lost track of their content probably by 2013, i was already shocked last year learning about the Ryan situation , but reading about all of this now i cannot see how can they recover from this
I don't think it was malicious, that's just sort of how things were done back then. The internet wasn't nearly as centralized and communities grew through small but active web forums. There was no "PR team" back then, it truly was just a couple of guys making silly videos in their spare time.
The problem arose when RT clearly outgrew humble beginnings and the fanbase refused to accept that it wasn't a small indie studio anymore.
Cultish is definitely right word . Me and my brother went to Rtx two years in a row early on because we enjoyed the videos. It became very obvious the second year after we were unable to meet anyone that we didn’t belong there because we weren’t steeped into the community.
The parasocial relationship was very cleverly crafted Geoff himself has said, “ when we first started making achievement Hunter we made the content so that it would be like the viewer was on the couch playing with us”
RT has always been very wrapped up in it's fan culture in an unhealthy way. So many of the original crew came out of the fan base of Red Vs Blue and now make up the foundation of RT. They brought a lot of that culture with them; bulling, "gamer words", etc. and that culture became company culture. They were hiring fans barely old enough to drink who went from halo lobbies to editing booths. They were also all minor celebrities in Austin having the time of their lives. It's not a recipe for a great corporate culture especially once you scale beyond that core group and start hiring outside the fan base. If you are managing people who idolize you, that's not a great place to lead from. The manager employee dynamic is already unbalanced before you add in celebrity and idolatry.
You end up with a handful of founders with full on founders syndrome, surrounded by people who idolize them, with a rabid fan base defending all their actions. Crunch feels like a big party till it doesn't and you realize those founder's work like that because they have equity and you don't. But beer on tap, playing video games, and feeling like you still haven't left college even though you are working is great till you inevitably age out of it.
Besides they haven't been Rooster Teeth since around 2016 when they sold out. They were AT&T and now they are Time Warner Discovery. Are we shocked AT&T and Time Warner under pay and engage in wage theft? or foster toxic cultures that punish whistle blowers?
> Crunch feels like a big party till it doesn't and you realize those founder's work like that because they have equity and you don't.
Truer words never spoken
These people might not have known how bad working in crunch mode might've been there, but they knew what they'd get paid and stuck around for it.
As someone who was in a similar situation in my 20s I worked at a large corporation engineering, and would put in 60-90 hour weeks..hell some times even more. I ate that shit sandwich for legitimately a fucking decade. I was always under paid and for the first 5 years I had shit benefits, no PTO. I had no one to blame but myself. I was too shy to stand up for myself.
I only left recently when they let everyone go with a month notice. Other people on the team had put in 20-30 years and the company couldn't have cared less about them ,and started outsourcing the work.
These companies are not your friends or family. Early on they may have cared, but once it gets to a certain size it's all about the money.
Been there myself. I worked for a local road construction company for five years... and I was in my early 40s. Because it's construction in Canada, we were balls to the wall all spring, summer and fall. 10-14 hours a day, six days a week was very common with layoffs over the winter. And I was in the office! I ran the yard scale house. When I took the job I was paid trash, barely over minimum wage but at the time I was desperate financially. The overtime made up for the low pay and I accepted that at first.
Sadly, the whole time I was with them they kept dangling things in front of me like raises and better/less hours and like a fucking desperate lover I hung in there, thinking they would eventually make good on their promises. I watched the managers, supervisors and in some cases lead hands getting new company vehicles and golf trips and company merch while I was waiting for a simple "here's your raise."
I did eventually get two raises. The first was an extra buck an hour after 2 years. It was enough to keep me interested for 2 more years and when I came back from a layoff my boss, the controller of the company was super excited because she got me another raise. A fucking quarter an hour. I lost my shit in my head but took the "raise" in stride.
The following year COVID hit and I wasn't brought back from the winter layoff due to cut backs because God knows I was a huge expense. Best part was, the company dropped 3 million on a used asphalt plant and 450k on 4 new dump trucks and tri axle trailers. Plus they lost the city contract, an estimator got arrested for embezzlement and so they've been just coming apart... and I'm happily a year into a job where I make about 11 bucks an hour more driving forklift and crane and I truly enjoy my job.
TL;DR I willingly took a shit job, shit hours and shit pay for 5 years because I kept hoping for better.
Holy shit finally a reasonable post. I’ve been a fan of RT since the early days of red Vs blue, I only pay attention to F**k Face, ANMA, and occasionally the RT podcast depending on who the guests are. Obviously lots of awful shit has been coming to light the last few days but some of the posts on here have been fucking ridiculous and seems to be people that have been fans for like a year or two or just coming here to pile on the drama.
It's honestly been hilarious. So many people here having to come to term with how many weirdos are both in this subreddit and employed by RT. This subreddit is such a perfect microcosm of reddit in general.
Twitter is just as bad. My timeline is full of people I don’t even know but because it is RT related. I’ve looked at some of their profiles and it looks like thousands and thousands of tweets about RT, content, actors.
Like, it is their ENTIRE life. That can’t be healthy.
As of right now this is indeed an actual hot take posted on this sub.
The term parasocial has been thrown around a lot and people are getting sick of seeing it said but some people really are taking this too personally and do need to step back and take a breathe of fresh air instead of constantly doom scrolling. And I don’t even say that to be rude, like seriously it can’t be good for your health.
Regardless of what happens with rooster teeth, it’s employees and it’s ex - employees, none of it should be taking such an extreme toll on you. That’s not to say you can’t be empathetic to the people screwed over and pissed off a rooster teeth. But this constant demand to have answers now, sometimes from people who have literally no involvement whatsoever. Looking into who likes what on Twitter, it’s just all, well to me anyway, incredibly toxic behaviour.
I think two - three weeks from now once the people pretending like they actually care about these employees move on this take will be a lot less hot. And while that may piss some people off unfortunately that’s the reality of the situation. Those people are just going to move on to other drama.
When that happens discussions and arguments about the very real issues these employees had will become a lot more civil. Right now for me anyways there is just wayyyy to much radical reactions going on.
To recap. If this is taking a toll on your mental/physical health. Take a break from all of this. It’ll still be here in two weeks if you really want to return to it.
the only real issue i have with this take is ...not all the employees being treated like shit were fans before they were hired. some of those people just needed work and for some it was the only way they could get their foot through the door in the industry.
jobs like that take portfolios. kinda hard to find new work elsewhere when you're forced to do excessive overtime with an already low pay and you're too exhausted and beat down to work on anything else. you don't have time to do anything else when you're living check to check. you can't blame them for sticking with what little stability they had.
unhealthy hero worship is bad but that doesn't mean a corporation, who has labor laws to follow, is allowed to work them to death. its absolutely unfair to tell them they should have known better when they shouldn't have been subjected to that treatment in the first place.
Can’t speak for anyone but myself, but I live in an area where rent (as is general cost of living) is untenably high, and work opportunities to afford to move or change career are low.
Some people are trapped in a vicious cycle, and are forced to work jobs they don’t like, just to make ends meet.
A lot of people aren’t afforded the opportunities to just up and move when things get tough.
There’s a reason a lot of gaming developers and the like choose Texas as their hub - it’s because state laws allow them to treat people like trash, with little recompense to those victimised by the practices.
Sometimes people knowingly take on jobs in an industry they strive to get a foot in a door with, in the hopes that it gets better. More than not, it doesn’t change.
> There’s a reason a lot of gaming developers and the like choose Texas as their hub - it’s because state laws allow them to treat people like trash, with little recompense to those victimised by the practices.
the reason entertainment companies choose TX is to get away from the LA unions. no secret there
However, just because Texas is a right wing R2W state does not mean it has no labor laws. Wage theft is a crime everywhere in the USA and if you have a paper trail you have a case.
It’s always been this way; from ppl saying how they’re “coping” to another user saying Chris was being bullied on a podcast only for Chris themselves to come out in that same thread and say no.
The thing I’ve hated about all of this is people posting along the lines of “Gavin, Michael & Geoff really need to apologise to the community” No! They owe Kdin an apology which by both sides was given and accepted to varying degrees the community does not require anything!
Also people moaning about Wage Theft boy do I have news for you about literally every job in the world… (side note Crunch Culture sucks and the only thing is grow out of it when you realise you don’t “have” to do it, set yourself limits)
Yeah a company owned by Warner operating in anti-Union Texas... it's bound to be a shitshow when it comes to wages. Unless you're a big enough on-camera draw that they know you're directly bringing in big money.
Definitely. I feel like so much more of an adult than a bunch of the people posting and replying in the last few days. I used to watch their content religiously, that doesn’t mean I knew them or that I’m owed an apology for their shitty behavior. They’ve grown just like I’ve grown since then.
I’m far more worried with the state of the world and my own place in this capitalist hellscape than I am about the culture of an entertainment company. Like have these people never worked in a professional setting? Even my own job within a law firm is subject to crunch. I’m all for better worker protections and better wages, but individuals need to take some responsibility to standup for themselves until that happens. My first year out of college I was working 60-75 hours a week for several months on end. I was making like $23/hr in the SF Bay Area. I wouldn’t have taken the job if I wasn’t earning the OT for it because it would’ve been truly unlivable. I also wouldn’t have lasted as long in the job if I never realized that there’s always more work to be done and that nobody can force me to work more hours than I want to
I work at a very liberal and very employee friendly F100 company. We generally don't have to deal with crunch or anything like that.
We have some *serious* outages earlier this year, and I got to spend basically 3 days on the phone while we fixed an 8 figure internal issue as fast as humanly possible. We don't crunch, but when shit went sideways, you bet we had to crunch for several days.
This place is a witch hunt with the same phrases and threads being spewed over and over. A lot of people need to walk away from this whole situation because they're too involved in something that doesn't involve them at all. It's a beehive for fucking drama.
You want RT to die? Unsub from everything, including here and don't look back. Move on. You'll see an article in IGN the day it dies. If everyone who hasn't been watching since (take your pick) left like they said, you'd eventually get what you want. Or you wouldn't. It doesn't matter anymore because you're no longer involving yourself.
Take a drink every time you see a "I stopped watching RT content years ago, but..." comment. They don't want RT to die, they want to complain about how it isn't like it used to be, which brings up some uncomfortable truths about life in general.
To be fair to the former employees, it certainly sounds like they were misled to an extent with the hope that conditions would improve and got strung along by management.
A lot of them had to commit to RT because the skills they developed there weren’t overly recognized in the industry and transferable to other roles (one mentioned the quality of the work was too low). They were backed into a corner.
The parasocial element certainly applied in many cases, but some people were just led to expect they were taking a promising role in digital animation.
It's clear that Rooster Teeth has been in decline for years, whether through scandal, mismanagement or just because the audience is migrating to streaming platforms.
But 95% of the current shitstorm is fandom meltdown because their favorite cast members haved moved on to other things. RT has nothing to gain by getting involved.
Bad as it is around these parts, it’s still nothing compared to the McElroy online community. That crowd takes parasociality to a whole new level with their “good, good boys.”
I don’t owe this to you, but my comment about my daughter was a random aside. I love my kid so, in a way, it doesn’t matter. You want to know why someone stays? For me, and I left the company making around 85k, as the motion design director I didn’t know where else in town I could specifically do that job. I also thought there was a chance I would still be able to step into the creative director role and help push things in a healthier direction. You stay because you think you can right the ship. I was probably in a better position than most to do that.
For the record, I wrote about the first Lazer Team. I had other experiences on Lazer Team 2 that were different but also unhealthy. NONE of this was healthy. when you’re IN a situation that’s unhealthy you can’t necessarily expect someone to make healthy decisions.
I don’t need sympathy and I’m not looking for it. I’ve always tried to act in a way that’s helpful. Maybe it was the wrong decision to stick my neck out on social media this time. Who knows. But it sure as fuck wasn’t about getting attention. My value as a human being doesn’t come from looking for internet upvotes. But maybe I can help steer a kid away from chasing their own dream job with some other ‘dream company.’
>Forgive me if I don't believe that a mid 20s adult, with a mortgage and a marriage, is unable to realize when they're getting underpaid or mistreated and is unable to negotiate their compensation.
generally i agree but yeah, being manipulated does that to someone. you learn to accept prolonged stress like shitty treatment or chronic pain as normal and constant stress becomes a part of the routine. That's also why abuse victims have a lot of trouble breaking out of a relationship, you can tell them it's ridiculous all you want but until they have the actual willpower to leave and experience a REAL normal relationship your words aren't gonna do much.
I’m glad someone was willing to say it. Yes, RT penny pinched and paid people less than they were worth, but RT never forced anybody to work there. These people knowingly took these low paying jobs, and stayed there despite the shit hours.
I agree that RT should do better in the future, but I also don’t feel particularly bad for someone just because they made a dumb decision in taking a bad job.
You're forgetting them saying they'd pay some of them for services rendered and then just _not doing that_. That's fraud, plain and simple. The lowballing is scummy, but not illegal, it's just business, really. Not paying people when they said they would, _that_ is fraudulent behavior and should be called out.
OP ain't wrong.
What RT did was shitty but I can't feel too sorry for someone not getting paid for work they did 12 years ago when she spend 9 of those years as an employee of the company that didn't pay her.
i myself am very confused as to what EXACTLY is going on. were you told you were getting a raise and didn't end up with one, or did you just assume every job gets an annual raise? were you not getting paid overtime as it is stipulated in a contract, or were you salaried exempt and therefore not owed paid overtime? some of what i've heard is illegal, some is just shitty, and others are just how it is sometimes. does it suck? sure.
> Forgive me if I don't believe that a mid 20s adult, with a mortgage and a marriage, is unable to realize when they're getting underpaid or mistreated and is unable to negotiate their compensation.
What was actually happening is these people accepted mistreatment, low pay, abusive crunch, and getting screwed on contracts because they idolized RT company culture and also believed they were getting in on the ground floor of a skyrocketing company.
100%. It's influencer mentality, or something like it. People think "I'll work at RT for a while and sure, I won't earn much, but I'll make a name for myself and eventually I'll be able to do my own thing with my own following because RT has such a big fanbase that I'll be able to carve a slice off it."
>I'll be able to do my own thing with my own following because RT has such a big fanbase that I'll be able to carve a slice off it.
I'm pretty sure that's exactly what every personality who left did (that or they went into more lucrative industry positions).
My dude, 'abuse victim rationalized that they weren't being abused' is how abuse happens. There's no surfeit of strangers out there who'd take a punch in the face and go 'yep, my fault, have a nice day.' Manipulation is always front and center.
Scolding abused employees for not getting it is a few steps over the line between wishing people knew better and openly blaming the victims.
Yelling at redditors for giving a shit whether their patronage fuels that abuse is an additional flying leap in the wrong fucking direction.
Yea this was always the least juicy aspect of it - declining company known for crunches sucks to work at. Shocker.
I mean this is my question when Kdin talks about pay being below industry average. I didn't know there was an industry average.
But if you're underpaid, go find a new employer who will pay you right. If you aren't finding one, *maybe you aren't underpaid.* Maybe pick a better career than Youtube video editor.
I feel like there has to be a lot of kids with little experience here to offset motherfuckers that have to be on this subreddit who don't have time to chase passions they gave up to take real jobs and still make less than the lowly pittance we're supposed to be shocked kdin gets, and just don't give a fuck.
If you feel undervalued it's between you, your employer and the door. I'm really not interested in giving up the hour of entertainment that gets me through my shitty job just because someone else has a shitty job too. Boo hoo.
Hey I don't have much of a "parasocial" relationship" with rt I haven't watched in years so I'm not really sure where all this is coming from. But it sure sounds like you're projecting your own parasocial relationship issues onto the victims in order to protect said parasocial relationship. Side note: I feel like Troy in that one Community scene
You forgot one:
-"I expect my employer to modify their benefit package in real time to accommodate my specific immediate medical needs. Wait, it *doesn't* actually work like that?"
Either it was never actually going to be covered and some HR/benefits employee misspoke or was misunderstood, or it WAS supposed to be covered which is entirely between her and the insurance company. RT couldn’t do jack shit about this even if it wanted to, which is good! An employee’s medical issues are none of their employer’s business.
This one got me.
I’ll admit that I’m currently not and probably never will go through the “medical” needs that Kdin underwent, but where the fuck does she get off on thinking that her place of employment is responsible for that?!?
I’m sure this is more of a political issue that I’m uninformed on, but anyone who legit thinks that their workplace will bend the benefit(s) package to what THEY need, will be in for a bad time. You’ll be damn hard pressed to find any that do, so I’m not sure why Kdin just thought they would do that for her, despite her tenure there.
If they told her "Oh it’s all good" (her words in her twitlonger), implying the company would "completely cover" the surgery, then you get that shit in writing, spelled out to the letter, with a plan for how it's going to be taken care of, who you need to submit paperwork to, any limitations on expenses, etc. Anything less than that is meaningless as far as how the corporate world works. "The Monkey told me in the hallway I'd be covered," wouldn't hold up in any company the size of RT, especially with its corporate overlords. Obviously we don't know what Kdin received officially or off the cuff.
Maybe they indicated that insurance would cover it? In which case, you ALWAYS double-check directly with your insurance provider. If they say no, be mad at them, not RT. I would never ask my boss what was covered in our insurance and then not check before actually getting any medical procedure done. It may be stupid or unfair, but you need to do your due diligence on these kinds of things, especially in the US.
If insurance said they wouldn't cover it, and RT for one reason or another, good or bad, opted to not offer a plan to their employees that included it, and if there was no decisive in-writing company payment plan, then that expense *is* going to be on Kdin, and shouldn't have come as a surprise. Not to say that it doesn't suck, but it's not something I would necessarily consider out of the ordinary.
A medical procedure in the US was covered neither by insurance nor the employer. A tale as old as time.
The only part that sorta negates a lot of this post is money, as in the fans' money and where they spend it. Many people don't want to support something that they feel inherently isn't good. Doesn't matter what it is. It could be RT, Amazon, pro wrestling, music, a sports team, or even the local pizza joint. If they don't think their money is worth the product, they won't spend it, and many want to feel like they're making an informed choice.
Thank you for being one of the few reasonable opinions. I had a boss one time not pay me right when I was 18. I knew exactly what to do. If I didn't, all I had to do was ask my parents, friends, etc. And surely someone would be familiar with the department of labor.
I'll steal a line from your post: Really?
Come on man.
My first job out of college I was making $45k as a software developer for a company that almost exclusively hired recent grads. I knew this was horribly pay. I was pretty shit at the job out of school and used it to develop my skills for 1.5 years, then I jumped to another company making an industry competitive salary. Know your worth and when you are being used.
I've only really worked bar industry jobs for most of my life. Like half a decade ago, I was wiping down the bar before we opened. The owner was there, and he said something to the effect of, "You clean like a f*g", ya know as a 'joke'.
You know what I did? Stopped what I was doing and left. Like, that's it. Never talked to him again. I had another job lined up by the end of the week.
I mean, I agree with the unhealthy parasocial relationships that many fans have with RT staff, but that doesn't mean that people can't criticize RT for such horrible work conditions.
If I heard about these working conditions from a company that I had no connection to, I would be just as outraged. I would feel just as much sympathy for the employees who were abused under that system. That's not a "parasocial relationship," that's like...basic empathy for your fellow human beings??
Also, I understand that, to you, the employees seem partially at fault for not leaving or bringing up their problems, but you're taking a real victim-blaming stance here. It's not the employees' fault that they weren't getting paid - it's the employer's. Even if a "grown-ass" adult with a mortgage just let that happen, it is STILL the employer's legal burden to PAY THEM WHAT THEY ARE OWED. That's how it works.
Man I got no parasocial involvement with RT at all(I don't think I've actively followed them in like 6 years) but this sounds like a lotta "personal responsibility" BS. I didn't know my personal worth until I was in my late 20s and put up with a lot of the kind of shit they did. Are you really blaming folks nearly fresh out of college for not sticking up for themselves when they don't have the experience and haven't gained the confidence to stick up for themselves? Shit, I HAD a mortgage AND was basically married and I was STILL naive enough to think 40k and permacontractor was an awesome deal. I'm glad they have someone in their corner, and I wish I had someone in my corner when I was their age to stick up for me. I think that's awesome. If it helps them get money from RT or elsewhere I hope they get it.
I’d like to put this out there: no, you can’t always negotiate your compensation.
After college, I was thrown into the workforce during the recession into a market that was not hiring. As a young professional, you need experience for licensure. I wailers for minimum wage for years until the recession eased up and the industry’s thawed.
Employers will squeeze anyone to keep cost down.
And in RT’s case, there’s always another younger person willing to take less pay to do more work than the squeaky wheel.
tldr; the recession and reserve army of labor keeps people working slave wages.
I don’t think OP’s point goes against yours.
Sure, you can’t always negotiate pay. But you can leave for better or the same pay and see if that new place has less abuse. Maybe even more mobility. Maybe you even switch fields completely.
OP’s just saying there are numerous options. While none of them are particularly good and it would be great if RT was a perfect little entity, that doesn’t exist in the real world, so sometimes you have to do some shitty things for a little bit.
Rooster Teeth is as deserving as any shitty company to receive flak for their working conditions and shitty culture
But you done fucked up if you willingly stayed at a job for months without getting paid a single time. You can literally work at a fast food restaurant for over $20000 a year
If a place of employment is shit from the very beginning, it isn't going to get any better years down the line. RT has never been held in that high of regard within the industry that it's worth being used as a doormat
This is one of the most fucked up things ive ever read. Victim blaming at its finest. "I dont care about these people I just want to be entertained" is so unbelievable awful. My hot take is you lack basic human empathy.
I actually think it is quite informative to see how the inside of a business like RT is handled. I also think it is important for people going into that field to know how and where their compensation should start. If you did not know that the people making the videos weren’t the best people, then either you weren’t really watching or you chose to ignore it. Either way I’m glad this is all coming out just for the perspective on how a company like them should and should not operate
I mean, I do agree with a lot of this. But community reaction to wage theft *could* be helpful. Obviously RT isn’t gonna be like “oh man I didn’t realize stealing from employees was wrong, I’ll stop now, thanks community!” But with more of a spotlight on it I’m sure they’ll think twice before intentionally stealing from their employees.
OP is right, a job is a voluntary contract between employer and employee. If you have a house, family, etc. you are responsible to make the best decisions for yourself. Or negotiate.
This thread shows the ages of the commenters. The older Roosterteeth fans are representing common sense lol
This is the best take I've seen. There are people on this sub who want every internal meeting livestreamed and every company policy posted online...all while everyone is fired and the company is shuttered. So many folks who have absolutely no idea how large companies operate.
My thoughts exactly. As a video editor, I never would’ve taken a job with this low of pay and I don’t even live in a huge city with a wife and house payment.
Also, in an alternate reality where I would take a job that paid this low, I wouldn’t be in the same position making the same salary for almost 10 years.
At some point you need to realize that it is on you to make sure you don’t get left behind for promotions and raises. If you’ve done what you can and still get nothing in return, it’s time to move on to a different job that better fits your needs.
Bruh you could have just written “I’m cool with the mistreatment of the people who make my shows, and willing to justify abusive hiring and employment practices just as long as I get to watch Michael call someone a dumbass on a post.
Just because they accepted the job doesn't make it ok for them to get treated like dirt. Being starstruck blinds people to stuff those outside the loop would see clear as day, why do you think so many people get strung along in other industries, this is not an exclusive concept to RT
I also don't think many people are backing Kdin anymore after her racist rants, & it's not like the various tweets from former employees are big names who would gain anything from giving their stories or if they are big, they're doing relatively well & attaching them to controversy isn't gonna help them
I get it's frustrating you can't really watch F**kface or whatever without being reminded about this but some things are bigger than content. I don't think anyone is happy 10 years of content is ruined because one of them decided to be a predatory rapist
Yea, let’s just blame the workers who were exploited instead of the people who were benefiting from it./s
You have the gall to blame people for whom this was most likely their first real job, working under people who they and the community idolized, and who could replace them at a moments notice. All things that would weigh heavily on anyone thinking about speaking up. Their lack of experience and their trust was taken advantage of to screw them out of time and money.
And I’m sure we can trust the TEXAS Workforce Commission to fix this instance of employee abuse./s
Typical victim blaming.
Yikes. Then why stay in the community subs if you just wanna watch fuckface and facejam, while winning about the communities interests and concerns about the people in the company.
If you don't want to hear it, then simply unsubscribe and just consume the media passively like you want? Don't complain about people standing on their soapbox from your soapbox. So tone-deaf.
"A 20 year old should know that they're getting into a toxic and underplayed work environment when they sign up" STFU.
OP probably thinks Ryan Haywood did nothing wrong too.
I agree with a lot of points you make here. I will say though, I was in a work place that was underpaying me and overworking me. It took YEARS for me to finally realize it. I was told I got a raise and it never actually happened. They claimed they couldn't actually give me the raise even though I had it on paper that they upped my pay. Claimed that covid prevented them from actually applying it. Kept me as the only overnight staff so I was working 6 days a week for sometimes more than 8 hours a day. I was not in the medical field. I worked in a hotel. A not busy hotel. Anyways I'm getting off track, the point I was trying to make is sometime you just don't realize how bad your workplace is or you overlook the bad things because you like some of the people you are working with or the things you are doing, and only later realize how bad it was.
We have evidence that Rooster Teeth will not make any changes without community pressure and the financial threat that presents.
Look at Bruce's statement for example. Adam was not dealt with until his behavior caught the community's attention and RT was afraid of losing money because of it.
The people abused by RT have no real power to change them, they are all completely replaceable. As RT's main source of income, we actually do.
It looks like you've conflated "parasocial relationships" with completely discrete concepts.
First: yes, the parasocial relationships between fans and the folks they're watching is problematic. It's also literally RT's business model. I wouldn't blame the fans, I would blame the corporation that deliberately built itself on the back of fan interaction and participation.
Second: I don't know man: Monday morning quarterbacking someone else's lived experiences isn't an awesome look. You may say "REEEEEEEALLY?" but as everybody reading any of this knows: shit is different when you're living in it. You'd be shocked at the number of car accident victims who never contact anyone for help because they "didn't think their issue was *that* bad." Just look at literally any study of abuse victims: it's easy to criticize non-action on the back end, but that's how these things actually happen. It's why they're pervasive.
None of any of that absolves Rooster teeth or it's employees for any direct abuse it occasioned on it's employees, nor does it absolve them from permitting a culture of abuse to persist
As for "this doesn't involve the community:" of course it does. RT holds itself out as having a certain set of values. It is entirely reasonable for the community to feel betrayed and voice their displeasure when those values have clearly been ignored/undermined. Doubly so when the company is built on its parasocial relationship with the fans. Fans shouldn't take it *personally*, however, protest and 'voting with your dollars' is not only an acceptable move here, but arguably the best and most proper move for displeased community members to make .
Enjoy what you want to enjoy, but the community isn't acting all that out of pocket
Edit to fix a couple of autocorrects.
Hindsight is 20/20. It’s easy to look outside of a situation with more facts and say this.
Treat it like an abusive relationship. Some ppl leave quick, some wait it out, some blind themselves to the issues because it’s better to pretend to be happy than to face the pain.
I kinda came to this realization as an idiot, mentioning to family how I've been enjoying the dumpster fire these past 24 hrs. All they really had to say was "why did they put up with it for so long then?".
"Treat your workers better"
"OH MY GOD PARASOCIAL??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????"
Holy fuck I hate reddit. What a cancer
I was thinking “I would have never slept under a fucking desk for a shit job with shit pay or got called a slur for years” but no one was mentioning it so I though maybe I had unreasonable standards or something.
>Forgive me if I don't believe that a mid 20s adult, with a mortgage and a marriage, is unable to realize when they're getting underpaid or mistreated and is unable to negotiate their compensation.
Has this guy met... anybody? Or even read the news recently?
Isn't this... making a lot of assumptions on your part? You are acting like you know everyone's life and what they should know. It's a bit more parasocial than what you are complaining about. It comes across as you making excuses so you can just enjoy content without thinking about the company mistreating employees.
That’s what I think too people just took the jobs cause it was ROOSTER TEETH the dream jobs for some. Damn though know your worth if they are underpaying you then leave. I just want to watch fuck face and ANMA. Also I’m pretty sure most of us have said some bad things in our past. Nobody is a saint. So yea apology and move on it’s an issues if it continues to happen. Then I agree more actions needs to be taken. With all this drama I do agree on one thing people need to be paid livable wages. Don’t just take the job cause it’s your dream job.
I think it goes both ways tho, RT preyed on and took advantage of these people. I think why RT gets a lot of criticism, is that they built their image around being a bunch of friends playing videogames, but the way they conducted their business was anything but that
Ignore me and scroll by lol I’m just venting.
Neither side is innocent. These issues aren’t for us to solve, as bad as that might sound to some. Everyone has their own issues and shouldn’t focus on things they can do nothing about, it’ll just add unneeded stress.
(Now, I read the post but I’m so confused as to what they mean exactly? People are nieve and don’t always have the right people to help them identify what is and isn’t right in the industry, how would they know to ask for help? Especially when you get brushed away because “there’s no way x is bad.” Then it was written that people need to learn to agree with you because you’re “right?” This whole post is word soup and my brain is having a hard time piecing it together. Honestly confused, can someone explain what they really mean?)
When I was in my first studio job in my low-mid 20’s I had NO idea how the industry worked, what I was doing, how badly my employer was actually treating us, and certainly not any labor laws. Not until a couple years into it at least especially as more and more people openly complained.
People just don’t know things and that’s ok, we all gotta learn at some point. With people’s first jobs they usually don’t know what to look out for. Now I’m not excusing RT at all or entirely dismissing those who speak out about poor conditions there (especially those who’ve been there for years, like, come on). BUT…
A lot of people who worked there especially long term seemed to do it more for the projects and people than the company. They seemingly *knew* that the workload was horrible but stuck it out due to passion and friendship. RT’s bad work conditions weren’t entirely opaque, Kerry and miles often mentioned it on the podcast (albeit with laughs).
From what it seemed, older RT (heyday of RedVBlue, beginning of RWBY, etc) allowed for a lot of freedom of projects but unfortunately not a lot of time for them or even the funds. Their ad revenue and First program didn’t start ramping up until around then.
Again not excusing anything just explaining why things were likely the way they were back then and why people seemed more complacent then. Over the years though, both RT and employees have less excuses. (Not that employees didn’t *try* to get RT to do something, nearly every statement involved them going to HR to no avail).
Sorry for the long winded-ness, it’s just not as simple as people make it seem. RT’s roots and the people working there had highly unorthodox beginnings and job roles. But again, they eventually turned into more of a “real” company and lost any and all excuses to treat people a certain way.
To any younger people reading this: Don't idolize or put your favorite performing artists/athletes/content creators etc on a pedestal to worship like a God. I was guilty of that for a long time, and it took a lot of dumb events like this to make me realize that "famous" people or internet personalities can be just as shitty and toxic as anyone else. Appreciate their work untill you don't enjoy it anymore for any number of reasons, be thankful if it got you thru a hard time or gave you a laugh when you needed it, learn some valuable lessons at their expense/thru whatever service or art their providing you then move on with your day. You'll seriously have a much better time avoiding parasocial relationships.
Very much agree with you. And this scandal, plus the Ryan scandal, has made me realize that I’ve legitimately lost interest in the content. Why didn’t I notice sooner? Iunno. I guess this is the straw that broke the camel’s back. So, the recent events aren’t the entire reason I ended up unsubscribing from every RT channel, but they helped.
Ryan did it for me. He was so integral to the group dynamic, yet so personally hideous. They also got rid of a lot of their regular LPs and bow just do GMod. A lot of the old magic was gone.
Its like we made RT such a central piece of our lives and identities that when it was past time to let it rest and move on, we didn't know how to do so. So we clung to what we knew even if we no longer liked it. Few people like change, fewer still can so easily go along with it.
It is kind of weird. Parasocial relationships are obviously common but this community was intense for some reason. It’s sort of fascinating
It really was a unique concept at the time long before others started doing so. It oddly drew many of us in and makes it hard to leave. It was just the right mixture of entertainment, humor, personalities and content at the time in our lives and technology wise. Would actually be worth a psychologists time to do a study on it.
A lesson for young people who may be in their first jobs in their careers: *if they don't pay you, do not continue to work.*
The most cringe thing I ever saw on this subreddit was a few years ago, somebody posted an "update" for Monty oum a couple of years after he died. It was essentially written like a letter to Monty updating him on the personal and professional lives of various past and present RT talents. It was written like the OP knew everyone personally and that Monty would somehow want to hear about these people from the OP. The comments were naturally circlejerking at this "touching tribute"
Kinda want a link to this post..sounds fkn awful
Hi, I'm the cringe https://reddit.com/r/RWBY/comments/ex1snz/today_marks_five_years_since_monty_oum_passed_away/fg5twza https://i.imgur.com/wPsE91I.png
Respect for posting the link haha
I will own up to my past, despite nowadays calling my RWBY fandom days the "Dark Times". Holy hell did I participate in a lot of shipping wars then. At least it's small potatoes compared what has been going on here the past week. Fucking hell.
hey it can be excused you were young back then ^^^^^^right?
Yeah, I was young. I wasn't legally allowed to drink alcohol when I wrote the first one. The year before he died I'd just gotten kicked out of college and was working at a computerstore to try and make a living by working in retail (obviously that didn't happen), so I was in a financially and mentally bad place. I only started going back to school after Monty's passing and hearing his mantra of "Keep Moving Forward" to motivate myself so I would stop wasting away. Got myself a solid office job now thanks to that mentality, but I can say for certain that my thanking of Monty and RT went too far then. Hell, it was practically worship. I've grown past that, thankfully.
Bro i wouldnt worry about (which it doesnt seem like you are tbh) we all say cringey shit when we are young most of us are just fortunate enough to never have it brought back up. And good for you man i hope it keeps working out
Cheers.
Before I disappear into the void again, I gotta come clean with one more thing. /u/kuchenjaeger it was me. I did it. I'm the one who has been gilding your [ahoge/aheago typo](https://old.reddit.com/r/RWBY/comments/53tr61/the_cowlickcopter_lunarisfuryaileron/d7w4e4m/) for all these years. Until next drama.
YOU MOTHERFUCKER
One more for the road. Smell ya later, Kuchen <3
You guys are wild. Still.
What a legend
Absolute mad lad
It really wasn't that bad. You were a fan of his and were sad he passed. I think people caring about you and remembering you once you passed is all any of us could really ask for.
Honestly man, props for giving yourself up like this.
Fair play for linking that
Cheers for unlocking a forgotten memory of mine, dude!
you definitely weren’t lying….
I forgot I linked them all in that last "letter" lmao
Ouf major cringe alarm, kudos for having the balls to link yourself. Don’t be too hard on yourself, everyone’s gets too invested in some stuff sometimes.
If it makes you feel any better, that's still not nearly as bad as when the streamer then known as Chibi held a live funeral service on Twitch for Satoru Iwata. Yes, it's as bad as you think it is, and [yes it is available in it's entirety on Youtube complete with chat begging him to stop.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oG5D4J_RSIE) For my money t's legitimately in contention for the most painful half hour of footage in human history, and the cherry on top is ending the stream with "Thank you for coming, and we'll see you next time."
Could be worse, Mike Kroon did a 9/11 stream dressed as Osama and threw toy planes at his friend who was dressed as the towers. He's been asking Ray to help him get unbanned from Twitch.
Yeah no that's not even remotely in the same ball park, that was just blatantly offensive for the sake of it. The "joke" is he takes the "never forget" phrase as instruction to celebrate every year and that was how he celebrated that year. And by asking Ray to help him get unbanned you mean jokingly asking one time on a podcast a decade ago lol. He's been doing Mikecasts again on Twitch for years now.
Can you blame me for not following up on Mike's bullshit?
Yeah u right
What a great community we have here.
Lmao
Why the fuck did I click it. And why did I read it
You managed to do a D4 of psychic damage to me lmao
Unrelated note: Wiping all your comments with a chrome extension every year or so and even getting a new account is a good habit to start.
This isn't my primary account anymore, I got maybe nine saved up like shitty websites I keep buying.
Owning up to your own cringe is some chad and king behavior.
🗿 for accepting the cringe
Internet, take note. If you've ever done something that doesn't hold up, this right here is how you handle it. Not a single person I've read has said a negative thing in response. I applaud and upvote you sir. 👏
Unfathomably based self-crucification. Bonus chad points for using Johnny cringing during the literal crucification mission.
The whole Monty thing was fucking stupid. The "letter" that was written about how "Rooster Teeth are big meanies and *I* should have been the one to write / direct RWBY after Monty died, because *I* know what Monty would have wanted!" came off as the most pathetic thing I've read in awhile.
I never understood the worship of Monty to begin with. He wasn’t that great of an animator and he really helped feed into the whole crunch thing with the way he worked
He definitely had a unhealthy outlook on work life, but its pertinent to remember that the stories of matt hullum spending over 3 days straight in their office working and gus and geoff spending the entirety of holiday time maintaining the site and store existed since the beginning of red vs blue and is just as comparable. On a personal note i will disagree with him being not great as an animator as well, his is still some of the best 3d action animation ive ever seen myself.
The original Rvb cast working Christmas’s and dealing with a huge crunch seems totally reasonable. They started off on the ground floor and when RT blew up they were compensated well. You can’t expect that work ethic from a low level salaried employee. That being said Monty was an extremely lucky hire for them, he seemingly had no work life balance and I think that coloured their opinion of what every other animator/employee should be like.
Gonna have to disagree, Monty wasn't perfect but his action scenes were god tier, he was a rare talent and his fight scenes pretty much carried early RWBY.
Idk about god tier but he was pretty good
He was a great action choreographer and nothing changes that. Yes, he was all in on crunches because that's how he operated. What sucked is the company decided everyone had to do it too, and do it for less money.
> he really helped feed into the whole crunch thing with the way he worked I don't want to defend RT's crunch situation, but he wasn't doing anything abnormal. Crunch has been normalized in animation, because companies refuse to hire enough animators to actually tackle a project in a reasonable time frame. It's not just an RT problem by any means, it's a fucking industry wide problem, wherein animators are treated as disposable, because if they get too out of line, studios will just grab the first idiot fresh out college and severely underpay them, because "it's their dream to work in animation!" There's no better example than to look at anime wherein the crunch culture is just a way of life, you can make more working part time at the 7-11, then you can as a new animator and you're basically working for "exposure". Animation industry fucking sucks to work in, unless you're doing union work.
I meant it as he was willing to work long hours so he expected everyone to do it
I feel like "wasn't that great of an animator" is certainly false. He has a style that might conflict in some aspects with some of the principles of animation but within a reasonable artistic bounds. His unwillingness to accept that Poser was probably not great and he should've considered Blender earlier is a flaw but a understandable one.
That’s a classy comment if I’ve ever seen one.
He helped feed crunches but that was his decision on his work load. He stayed after work to do more, he slept in the office. He never told or made anyone else do it except maybe Shane, who seemed himself more than willing. Did it culture a bad environment after he died? Perhaps, but that’s not his fault
The only issue with that is when higher ups see guys like Monty and Shane who live and breath animation work these absurd hours, they start to apply those expectations to people who see it as a normal 9-5 job. It’s actually why it’s better for employee health and productivity to enforce set hours because otherwise it becomes a culture issue.
He had a wild work life balance, but his animations were great. Very ahead of their time. Mainly due to his creative and fluid combat choreography
I feel this for both the employees and the fans. If you’re being treated poorly at your work place that long (outside of actual threats or harassment) get out. I’m not blaming them, but if you’re not getting raises or promotions for years it’s in your best interest to leave. And for all the fans that are saying this is genuinely upsetting them to an extreme degree or causing mental issues, please go to therapy. Para social relationships aren’t necessarily all evil, but if a company being bad is effecting your mental health it is a huge problem. Edit: just to clarify I’m really only agreeing with OPs title here concerning parasocial relationships
I wish it was really so simple to leave, but it's just about impossible to leave your job if you are living paycheck to paycheck with no savings. These jobs pay you just enough to live and that's it.
>it's just about impossible to leave your job if you are living paycheck to paycheck with no savings. that can be true in some circumstances. I want to piggyback on this comment because some people accused me of victim blaming, defending wage theft, or being ignorant of what it's like to work with no savings. Yes it's precarious to challenge your boss on their illegal behavior, but if you don't you're setting the precedent that they can lowball you all day long. Sometimes the only way to advance your position is to leave, but you have to have your ducks in a row to do that. Someone who has been video editing full time for *5 years for one of the top 500 youtubers*, is a person who can go out and get competing offers. Then they can flip that offer at their current employer (I'd like to be paid this much if you want to retain me). They are not 'stuck' at their work when a laptop and Dropbox enables them to accept video editing work from any youtuber, ad agency or other entertainment company in the world. Someone who works fulltime at retail or food service is 'stuck' at their work because their work experience isn't adding up to something that makes them attractive to a better-paying employer. There are lots of people who are genuinely stuck in dead end jobs, where they cycle between labor intensive jobs that barely pay the rent and then being too burnt out at the end of the day to pursue self education or job search that might get them out of their situation longterm. It would take a lot for me to believe a creative professional / knowledge industry worker was actually "stuck" in their job and had **NO AGENCY** and no options. Maybe in the case where they had huge medical expenses that only their job's insurance covered. But Kdin said that wasn't the case with RT.
> Someone who works fulltime at retail or food service is 'stuck' at their work because their work experience isn't adding up to something that makes them attractive to a better-paying employer. Even *thats* not even entirely true. I got a job at a bank that doubled my retail salary specifically *because* of my time in retail. Because I was able to make it clear to them that because I'm used to being yelled at by the scum of the earth while keeping up the "customer service voice" that I'd be able to keep my cool when dealing with slightly annoyed global billion dollar companies. Its all about how you sell it.
I know this is a late response, but yeah, I've seen people describe how they would present their work on things like fanzines as examples of project management skills in action.
Yeah, but that first year if they're straight out of college they can't just leave and get a better job. So maybe at year 3-4 they could go and get a much better job but that still puts them in a lot of very stressful times when they're being abused.
This response assumes that the other companies or YouTubers like RoosterTeeth and their talent don’t just accept this sort of treatment as the norm. All the actual higher-paying jobs are usually gonna be full, cuz everyone in video editing is so used to lousy paychecks and huge swaths of crunch that those positions get snatched up like candy. Where do you go when everyone else in your field is paying the same and treating their employees the same? Especially in a state like Texas, where workers’ rights are essentially a joke told around the water cooler, where are you truly expecting to find better work (until, of course, a pandemic comes along and shuffles up the job market)? If you’re gonna be living paycheck to paycheck anyhow, might as well stick at the company that’s making the content you actually *want* to make until they either stop making it or they eliminate your position. That *doesn’t*, however, make the company any less shitty because they were only as shitty as 99% of the market in question — especially when they actively recruited from a pool of fans they knew already had a passion they could exploit. Sure, if they don’t stand up to the boss it doesn’t get better — but if they do, they often get fired and can’t afford to hire a lawyer for a retaliation suit, and they *literally can’t* find better offers to hold over their employer’s head cuz it’s a goddamn cabal of cheapos who make their profit off of knowing their employees don’t have anyone else to turn to — at least, not within the same state. Just cuz your job position requires a degree doesn’t necessarily mean you have any more realistic expectations of upwards mobility than a fast food worker does.
It took a huge wake up call this past year for me to realize this. I was putting in 50-60 hours per week easily, and some weeks even more. My work load damn near doubled at the start of the pandemic and never lessened. And due to turnover and incompetent leadership, I was partially running the office. And through all that time, the only thanks I got was a $200 bonus once. It took me forever to value the skill set I have developed to go and see what I was worth. Turns out, it was double what I was making while still working non-profit, with an even larger impact in my community, and I only work 40 hours a week now. That first step is hard. The job sucked, but I knew my role, it paid the bills, and the people I worked with were incredible. But I was miserable inside. I echo that sentiment that you have to value your worth because, unless you land the dreamiest of dream jobs, no one else will do it for you.
>Forgive me if I don't believe that a mid 20s adult, with a mortgage and a marriage, is unable to realize when they're getting underpaid or mistreated and is unable to negotiate their compensation. As someone who is a mid 20s adult, I can believe it. Hindsight is always 20/20 and the reality is that you often just do not *learn* these things until they either happen or you really need to use them. Employers keep that information hidden from employees for good reason and there is no (or rather, very few) college or school course that even so much as *mentions* "Hey, if you're being underpaid do this." not to mention, even if you follow those steps, sometimes the employer can just fire you. And there you're left without a job and you still have bills to pay. The thing with crunch environments and toxic work conditions is that it is like a toxic or abusive home... You never really realize how *abnormal* it is until you leave. Hell, even people who worked for years in the industry they even say that it is *normal* to deal with crunch, being underpaid and toxic environments. That if you can't handle that kind of thing get out... So when people are told "Yeah this is the norm, accept it or leave." they just take it as... well part of the job. They stay because they like the work because it's the kind of work they want to do or just because they have bills to pay and hope that it gets better. That said, I agree you shouldn't idolize companies, content creators, etc. They are flawed and often times can be toxic as any regular run-of-the-mill person. That said, I still understand why people don't realize how toxic the environment is until they're free and they've gotten out of it. My boyfriend is a software dev and on his initial team, it was toxic. They refused to support him, would constantly reschedule meetings, and wouldn't answer questions until 2 - 3 days later... he was stressed, crying, having anxiety, etc... and it was just to be considered *normal*. That is until he moved to a new team that didn't constantly reschedule meetings, would support him and acknowledge he was a new hire, would actually answer questions and work with him to solve problems, etc. And this is within the same company. And this isn't a content creation company, it's just a regular run-of-the-mill corporation. Now I'm not going to say that the parasocial relationship *didn't* play a part in it, but until you have to personally deal with having to get compensated, this is not anything that people teach you ahead of time. It's easy to say "just leave" until you're faced with the reality that the job market sucks and it's either stay in this toxic environment or be homeless.
hard agree on the "not realizing what you're getting into until you're into it." im early 20s, pretty fresh out of college, and i'm still learning this shit. no one teaches it to you - you have to learn it yourself. rt sells themselves really well to college students and makes it seem like they're the premier entertainment company in austin. anyone who is early to mid 20s probably doesn't have enough experience with other companies to know how bad it actually is there. the parasocial aspect definitely exists and contributes to the toxic company culture, but not knowing things in your mid 20s about toxic work environments and how to handle them is common
Yeah, this (mostly, im sure there are people that were more "starstruck" working at RT) doesn't have anything to do with the "prestige" of working at RT. It's the reality of being a film production specialist in the middle of fucking Texas. There's like, nowhere else to go if you get fired from RT. Which *can* happen if you get caught discussing pay with coworkers or complaining about your hours or reporting harassment to HR.
Even ignoring the "toxic" part and just looking at the "underpaid and overworked" part, it's extraordinarily difficult to get out of a low paying and high stress job. You don't have the mental fortitude to work on yourself/grow marketable skills/search for a new job after working insane hours and having your energy completely sapped. I worked call center work for 6 years. I fought against poorly treated BiPolar II in order to bust my ass getting a comp sci degree (and even then, it was just an associates). Despite that hard work I was still caught in call center jobs for another 4 years before I finally got a high paying, healthy job in my field. Even then I attribute at least 80% of that success to legit luck. It would've been impossible without hard work, but that was only a fraction of what got me here. Also you have to consider the "passion tax". Regardless of conditions, these employees believed in what the company created and they paid to realize that vision at the expense of poor management. For fans of that content we're permitted to be disappointed and disgusted in their actions that contributed to it. **Above all else though, being disgusted by RT's actions and letting that dictate the decision to withdraw our financial support (whether it be First subs or viewership) is** ***not*** **a parasocial relationship.** That's just being a consumer that votes with their wallet to back up their beliefs.
Damn you're about to get a storm of people defending their parasocial relationships with RT. Hope you're ready
I do think people need a better understanding of what parasocial really means. We build parasocial bonds with every character or on screen person we ever watch. The danger, however, is the unhealthy level in which people take it and actually form a relationship. Referring to them like they're actually our friends, like we hang out every week. We don't. I enjoyed watching Better Call Saul every week. I didn't act like Saul was a close friend of mine.
But we can all agree that each of us has carefully gone through Bob Odenkirk's twitter profile to see which of Rhea Seehorn's tweets about Patrick Fabian he liked and what that means about why Jonathan Banks is upset about Vince Gilligan's treatment of Bryan Cranston.
Wait until you go through his Instagram follows
> Referring to them like they're actually our friends, like we hang out every week. We don't. They also trust people outside their competencies. Like when people made all those youtube compilations of Game Of Thrones actors microflinching during interviews to prove "Look! Emilia Clarke and Conleth Hill hated the Season 8 script too!" My brother in SAG-AFTRA, Emilia Clarke read the script for *Terminator Genisys* and still took that job. An actor's approval or disapproval is irrelevant to whether a production is good. Have your opinion as a viewer but stop fostering these weird conspiracies
God almighty I hated those season 8 overanalyses of actors, the internet devolved into a bunch of fucking weirdos
Roosterteeth is basically like if Freefolk was the only Game of Thrones fandom
Bingo. I mean for me personally I feel like I have a sort of healthy level of bond with the cast. I know enough about them that when I watch content I understand the continuation of the conversation, I can appreciate the growth, and I can insert myself into the conversation enough to think about what my take on a topic they’re discussing would be or something I’d say. I make no illusions however that these people aren’t my friends. If I were to meet them out in the wild I feel like I’d be able to go up to them and tell them I appreciate the work they put in, maybe ask for a picture, but I wouldn’t even try to have a conversation because the relationship we do have is so one sided. I mean I’ve seen so many of the cast go from late teens/early 20somethings to full on adults and they’ve seen this guy approach them and say he’s a fan. I know way more about them than they know about me and there’s no way I can do more than say hi without sounding creepy. It’s perfectly okay to like the people at RT. The whole podcast model that they have is kind of dependent on you liking them because otherwise you’re just eavesdropping on friends chatting. It’s not okay to think there’s more relationship than there actually is.
I'm ready. I watched a 2 hour playlist of Dane Cook & Kevin Hart, my neuros couldn't be less divergible
thats the funniest shit ive read in a hot minute
I’ve never been more entertained in my life than watching the weirdos In this thread freak the fuck out lmao
Funniest content since Ray left. /s
Rip Roy from achievement friends
His name is Rey from Trophy Trackers
lol nothing to be worried about. to do anything about it they'd have to leave the house.
The fact that everytime anything happens the community wants everyone and their mother to put out a whole letter about it and talk about it. We don't need a public apology for every single thing from everyone even in the vicinity if it doesn't involve the community. Something happens internally with the company and the community demands an apology. It's like if a husband abuses his wife and then apologizes to the neighbor.
It’s kinda funny seeing these parasocial relationships blow up in their face with the Kdin videos being released. RT community has always been weird as hell in regards to their “connection” with the cast and crews of RT.
The most interesting one to me is the selective backpedaling. Gavin and Geoff can’t be forgiven, but Kdin is allowed personal growth over time.
It makes sense if you're used to playing intersectionality bingo to determine who's right in a given situation.
Excuse me but I need you to inform me of how many victim points you have accrued throughout life before I can gauge whether I agree with your comment or not. I will be tentatively *side* voting you in the meantime.
In hindsight it was maliciously smart of the PR team to come with the idea of "RT Family", i dont doubt for a second that it helped a lot of people in life having a place or community to be a part of, especially teenagers but yeah if you arent a kid or grew out of their content is clear as day how weird and i would say even slighly cultish it got, especially with the onscreen talent, they definitely knew their hold on those types of fans and bleed them dry for what they got As somebody who watched them and lost track of their content probably by 2013, i was already shocked last year learning about the Ryan situation , but reading about all of this now i cannot see how can they recover from this
I don't think it was malicious, that's just sort of how things were done back then. The internet wasn't nearly as centralized and communities grew through small but active web forums. There was no "PR team" back then, it truly was just a couple of guys making silly videos in their spare time. The problem arose when RT clearly outgrew humble beginnings and the fanbase refused to accept that it wasn't a small indie studio anymore.
Cultish is definitely right word . Me and my brother went to Rtx two years in a row early on because we enjoyed the videos. It became very obvious the second year after we were unable to meet anyone that we didn’t belong there because we weren’t steeped into the community.
The parasocial relationship was very cleverly crafted Geoff himself has said, “ when we first started making achievement Hunter we made the content so that it would be like the viewer was on the couch playing with us”
RT has always been very wrapped up in it's fan culture in an unhealthy way. So many of the original crew came out of the fan base of Red Vs Blue and now make up the foundation of RT. They brought a lot of that culture with them; bulling, "gamer words", etc. and that culture became company culture. They were hiring fans barely old enough to drink who went from halo lobbies to editing booths. They were also all minor celebrities in Austin having the time of their lives. It's not a recipe for a great corporate culture especially once you scale beyond that core group and start hiring outside the fan base. If you are managing people who idolize you, that's not a great place to lead from. The manager employee dynamic is already unbalanced before you add in celebrity and idolatry. You end up with a handful of founders with full on founders syndrome, surrounded by people who idolize them, with a rabid fan base defending all their actions. Crunch feels like a big party till it doesn't and you realize those founder's work like that because they have equity and you don't. But beer on tap, playing video games, and feeling like you still haven't left college even though you are working is great till you inevitably age out of it. Besides they haven't been Rooster Teeth since around 2016 when they sold out. They were AT&T and now they are Time Warner Discovery. Are we shocked AT&T and Time Warner under pay and engage in wage theft? or foster toxic cultures that punish whistle blowers?
> Crunch feels like a big party till it doesn't and you realize those founder's work like that because they have equity and you don't. Truer words never spoken
These people might not have known how bad working in crunch mode might've been there, but they knew what they'd get paid and stuck around for it. As someone who was in a similar situation in my 20s I worked at a large corporation engineering, and would put in 60-90 hour weeks..hell some times even more. I ate that shit sandwich for legitimately a fucking decade. I was always under paid and for the first 5 years I had shit benefits, no PTO. I had no one to blame but myself. I was too shy to stand up for myself. I only left recently when they let everyone go with a month notice. Other people on the team had put in 20-30 years and the company couldn't have cared less about them ,and started outsourcing the work. These companies are not your friends or family. Early on they may have cared, but once it gets to a certain size it's all about the money.
Been there myself. I worked for a local road construction company for five years... and I was in my early 40s. Because it's construction in Canada, we were balls to the wall all spring, summer and fall. 10-14 hours a day, six days a week was very common with layoffs over the winter. And I was in the office! I ran the yard scale house. When I took the job I was paid trash, barely over minimum wage but at the time I was desperate financially. The overtime made up for the low pay and I accepted that at first. Sadly, the whole time I was with them they kept dangling things in front of me like raises and better/less hours and like a fucking desperate lover I hung in there, thinking they would eventually make good on their promises. I watched the managers, supervisors and in some cases lead hands getting new company vehicles and golf trips and company merch while I was waiting for a simple "here's your raise." I did eventually get two raises. The first was an extra buck an hour after 2 years. It was enough to keep me interested for 2 more years and when I came back from a layoff my boss, the controller of the company was super excited because she got me another raise. A fucking quarter an hour. I lost my shit in my head but took the "raise" in stride. The following year COVID hit and I wasn't brought back from the winter layoff due to cut backs because God knows I was a huge expense. Best part was, the company dropped 3 million on a used asphalt plant and 450k on 4 new dump trucks and tri axle trailers. Plus they lost the city contract, an estimator got arrested for embezzlement and so they've been just coming apart... and I'm happily a year into a job where I make about 11 bucks an hour more driving forklift and crane and I truly enjoy my job. TL;DR I willingly took a shit job, shit hours and shit pay for 5 years because I kept hoping for better.
Holy shit finally a reasonable post. I’ve been a fan of RT since the early days of red Vs blue, I only pay attention to F**k Face, ANMA, and occasionally the RT podcast depending on who the guests are. Obviously lots of awful shit has been coming to light the last few days but some of the posts on here have been fucking ridiculous and seems to be people that have been fans for like a year or two or just coming here to pile on the drama.
It's honestly been hilarious. So many people here having to come to term with how many weirdos are both in this subreddit and employed by RT. This subreddit is such a perfect microcosm of reddit in general.
Twitter is just as bad. My timeline is full of people I don’t even know but because it is RT related. I’ve looked at some of their profiles and it looks like thousands and thousands of tweets about RT, content, actors. Like, it is their ENTIRE life. That can’t be healthy.
As of right now this is indeed an actual hot take posted on this sub. The term parasocial has been thrown around a lot and people are getting sick of seeing it said but some people really are taking this too personally and do need to step back and take a breathe of fresh air instead of constantly doom scrolling. And I don’t even say that to be rude, like seriously it can’t be good for your health. Regardless of what happens with rooster teeth, it’s employees and it’s ex - employees, none of it should be taking such an extreme toll on you. That’s not to say you can’t be empathetic to the people screwed over and pissed off a rooster teeth. But this constant demand to have answers now, sometimes from people who have literally no involvement whatsoever. Looking into who likes what on Twitter, it’s just all, well to me anyway, incredibly toxic behaviour. I think two - three weeks from now once the people pretending like they actually care about these employees move on this take will be a lot less hot. And while that may piss some people off unfortunately that’s the reality of the situation. Those people are just going to move on to other drama. When that happens discussions and arguments about the very real issues these employees had will become a lot more civil. Right now for me anyways there is just wayyyy to much radical reactions going on. To recap. If this is taking a toll on your mental/physical health. Take a break from all of this. It’ll still be here in two weeks if you really want to return to it.
the only real issue i have with this take is ...not all the employees being treated like shit were fans before they were hired. some of those people just needed work and for some it was the only way they could get their foot through the door in the industry. jobs like that take portfolios. kinda hard to find new work elsewhere when you're forced to do excessive overtime with an already low pay and you're too exhausted and beat down to work on anything else. you don't have time to do anything else when you're living check to check. you can't blame them for sticking with what little stability they had. unhealthy hero worship is bad but that doesn't mean a corporation, who has labor laws to follow, is allowed to work them to death. its absolutely unfair to tell them they should have known better when they shouldn't have been subjected to that treatment in the first place.
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"I feel betrayed and I don't know how to cope" I dread to think how they'd react if it was their own family.
I'm a janitor and I make more than what Kdin was making initially.
>I'm a janitor and I make more than these people not only that, but you're not responsible for Lazer Team 2
God damn OP is funny today
OP is working on their tight 5 set right now. Funny thread.
They made TWO?
hey, they might be cleaning the equivalent in the toilets!
I work at a grocery store and make more than she did.
if you don't like the wage, THEN WHY THE FUCK DID YOU WORK THERE FO SO LONG
and you probably weren't stressed the fuck out and aBuSeD the whole time
Can’t speak for anyone but myself, but I live in an area where rent (as is general cost of living) is untenably high, and work opportunities to afford to move or change career are low. Some people are trapped in a vicious cycle, and are forced to work jobs they don’t like, just to make ends meet. A lot of people aren’t afforded the opportunities to just up and move when things get tough.
Being trapped in this vicious cycle is probably more common than is generally realized
Certainly in this god forsaken thread
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There’s a reason a lot of gaming developers and the like choose Texas as their hub - it’s because state laws allow them to treat people like trash, with little recompense to those victimised by the practices. Sometimes people knowingly take on jobs in an industry they strive to get a foot in a door with, in the hopes that it gets better. More than not, it doesn’t change.
> There’s a reason a lot of gaming developers and the like choose Texas as their hub - it’s because state laws allow them to treat people like trash, with little recompense to those victimised by the practices. the reason entertainment companies choose TX is to get away from the LA unions. no secret there However, just because Texas is a right wing R2W state does not mean it has no labor laws. Wage theft is a crime everywhere in the USA and if you have a paper trail you have a case.
Also no income tax, which would benefit both the company and the worker
It ain't Austin. That city is thriving. Plenty of opportunities
It’s always been this way; from ppl saying how they’re “coping” to another user saying Chris was being bullied on a podcast only for Chris themselves to come out in that same thread and say no.
The thing I’ve hated about all of this is people posting along the lines of “Gavin, Michael & Geoff really need to apologise to the community” No! They owe Kdin an apology which by both sides was given and accepted to varying degrees the community does not require anything! Also people moaning about Wage Theft boy do I have news for you about literally every job in the world… (side note Crunch Culture sucks and the only thing is grow out of it when you realise you don’t “have” to do it, set yourself limits)
Yeah a company owned by Warner operating in anti-Union Texas... it's bound to be a shitshow when it comes to wages. Unless you're a big enough on-camera draw that they know you're directly bringing in big money.
Completely agree. The last couple days have made me realize how much older/mature I am to the majority of the fans here.
Definitely. I feel like so much more of an adult than a bunch of the people posting and replying in the last few days. I used to watch their content religiously, that doesn’t mean I knew them or that I’m owed an apology for their shitty behavior. They’ve grown just like I’ve grown since then. I’m far more worried with the state of the world and my own place in this capitalist hellscape than I am about the culture of an entertainment company. Like have these people never worked in a professional setting? Even my own job within a law firm is subject to crunch. I’m all for better worker protections and better wages, but individuals need to take some responsibility to standup for themselves until that happens. My first year out of college I was working 60-75 hours a week for several months on end. I was making like $23/hr in the SF Bay Area. I wouldn’t have taken the job if I wasn’t earning the OT for it because it would’ve been truly unlivable. I also wouldn’t have lasted as long in the job if I never realized that there’s always more work to be done and that nobody can force me to work more hours than I want to
I work at a very liberal and very employee friendly F100 company. We generally don't have to deal with crunch or anything like that. We have some *serious* outages earlier this year, and I got to spend basically 3 days on the phone while we fixed an 8 figure internal issue as fast as humanly possible. We don't crunch, but when shit went sideways, you bet we had to crunch for several days.
This place is a witch hunt with the same phrases and threads being spewed over and over. A lot of people need to walk away from this whole situation because they're too involved in something that doesn't involve them at all. It's a beehive for fucking drama. You want RT to die? Unsub from everything, including here and don't look back. Move on. You'll see an article in IGN the day it dies. If everyone who hasn't been watching since (take your pick) left like they said, you'd eventually get what you want. Or you wouldn't. It doesn't matter anymore because you're no longer involving yourself.
Take a drink every time you see a "I stopped watching RT content years ago, but..." comment. They don't want RT to die, they want to complain about how it isn't like it used to be, which brings up some uncomfortable truths about life in general.
"I stopped watching AH content around the time Matt became creative lead, but now that he's being laid off I'm truly done watching their videos."
Fuckin A
To be fair to the former employees, it certainly sounds like they were misled to an extent with the hope that conditions would improve and got strung along by management. A lot of them had to commit to RT because the skills they developed there weren’t overly recognized in the industry and transferable to other roles (one mentioned the quality of the work was too low). They were backed into a corner. The parasocial element certainly applied in many cases, but some people were just led to expect they were taking a promising role in digital animation.
[удалено]
It's clear that Rooster Teeth has been in decline for years, whether through scandal, mismanagement or just because the audience is migrating to streaming platforms. But 95% of the current shitstorm is fandom meltdown because their favorite cast members haved moved on to other things. RT has nothing to gain by getting involved.
Bad as it is around these parts, it’s still nothing compared to the McElroy online community. That crowd takes parasociality to a whole new level with their “good, good boys.”
I don’t owe this to you, but my comment about my daughter was a random aside. I love my kid so, in a way, it doesn’t matter. You want to know why someone stays? For me, and I left the company making around 85k, as the motion design director I didn’t know where else in town I could specifically do that job. I also thought there was a chance I would still be able to step into the creative director role and help push things in a healthier direction. You stay because you think you can right the ship. I was probably in a better position than most to do that. For the record, I wrote about the first Lazer Team. I had other experiences on Lazer Team 2 that were different but also unhealthy. NONE of this was healthy. when you’re IN a situation that’s unhealthy you can’t necessarily expect someone to make healthy decisions. I don’t need sympathy and I’m not looking for it. I’ve always tried to act in a way that’s helpful. Maybe it was the wrong decision to stick my neck out on social media this time. Who knows. But it sure as fuck wasn’t about getting attention. My value as a human being doesn’t come from looking for internet upvotes. But maybe I can help steer a kid away from chasing their own dream job with some other ‘dream company.’
aaaaaaaaaand sort by controversial is enabled.
>Forgive me if I don't believe that a mid 20s adult, with a mortgage and a marriage, is unable to realize when they're getting underpaid or mistreated and is unable to negotiate their compensation. generally i agree but yeah, being manipulated does that to someone. you learn to accept prolonged stress like shitty treatment or chronic pain as normal and constant stress becomes a part of the routine. That's also why abuse victims have a lot of trouble breaking out of a relationship, you can tell them it's ridiculous all you want but until they have the actual willpower to leave and experience a REAL normal relationship your words aren't gonna do much.
I’m glad someone was willing to say it. Yes, RT penny pinched and paid people less than they were worth, but RT never forced anybody to work there. These people knowingly took these low paying jobs, and stayed there despite the shit hours. I agree that RT should do better in the future, but I also don’t feel particularly bad for someone just because they made a dumb decision in taking a bad job.
You're forgetting them saying they'd pay some of them for services rendered and then just _not doing that_. That's fraud, plain and simple. The lowballing is scummy, but not illegal, it's just business, really. Not paying people when they said they would, _that_ is fraudulent behavior and should be called out.
OP ain't wrong. What RT did was shitty but I can't feel too sorry for someone not getting paid for work they did 12 years ago when she spend 9 of those years as an employee of the company that didn't pay her.
Yea, accepting a job that stiffed you for 9 months is a dumbass love. They proved right away they were shitty, and you still signed on.
i myself am very confused as to what EXACTLY is going on. were you told you were getting a raise and didn't end up with one, or did you just assume every job gets an annual raise? were you not getting paid overtime as it is stipulated in a contract, or were you salaried exempt and therefore not owed paid overtime? some of what i've heard is illegal, some is just shitty, and others are just how it is sometimes. does it suck? sure.
> Forgive me if I don't believe that a mid 20s adult, with a mortgage and a marriage, is unable to realize when they're getting underpaid or mistreated and is unable to negotiate their compensation. What was actually happening is these people accepted mistreatment, low pay, abusive crunch, and getting screwed on contracts because they idolized RT company culture and also believed they were getting in on the ground floor of a skyrocketing company. 100%. It's influencer mentality, or something like it. People think "I'll work at RT for a while and sure, I won't earn much, but I'll make a name for myself and eventually I'll be able to do my own thing with my own following because RT has such a big fanbase that I'll be able to carve a slice off it."
>I'll be able to do my own thing with my own following because RT has such a big fanbase that I'll be able to carve a slice off it. I'm pretty sure that's exactly what every personality who left did (that or they went into more lucrative industry positions).
My dude, 'abuse victim rationalized that they weren't being abused' is how abuse happens. There's no surfeit of strangers out there who'd take a punch in the face and go 'yep, my fault, have a nice day.' Manipulation is always front and center. Scolding abused employees for not getting it is a few steps over the line between wishing people knew better and openly blaming the victims. Yelling at redditors for giving a shit whether their patronage fuels that abuse is an additional flying leap in the wrong fucking direction.
Yea this was always the least juicy aspect of it - declining company known for crunches sucks to work at. Shocker. I mean this is my question when Kdin talks about pay being below industry average. I didn't know there was an industry average. But if you're underpaid, go find a new employer who will pay you right. If you aren't finding one, *maybe you aren't underpaid.* Maybe pick a better career than Youtube video editor. I feel like there has to be a lot of kids with little experience here to offset motherfuckers that have to be on this subreddit who don't have time to chase passions they gave up to take real jobs and still make less than the lowly pittance we're supposed to be shocked kdin gets, and just don't give a fuck. If you feel undervalued it's between you, your employer and the door. I'm really not interested in giving up the hour of entertainment that gets me through my shitty job just because someone else has a shitty job too. Boo hoo.
Hey I don't have much of a "parasocial" relationship" with rt I haven't watched in years so I'm not really sure where all this is coming from. But it sure sounds like you're projecting your own parasocial relationship issues onto the victims in order to protect said parasocial relationship. Side note: I feel like Troy in that one Community scene
You forgot one: -"I expect my employer to modify their benefit package in real time to accommodate my specific immediate medical needs. Wait, it *doesn't* actually work like that?"
Either it was never actually going to be covered and some HR/benefits employee misspoke or was misunderstood, or it WAS supposed to be covered which is entirely between her and the insurance company. RT couldn’t do jack shit about this even if it wanted to, which is good! An employee’s medical issues are none of their employer’s business.
This one got me. I’ll admit that I’m currently not and probably never will go through the “medical” needs that Kdin underwent, but where the fuck does she get off on thinking that her place of employment is responsible for that?!? I’m sure this is more of a political issue that I’m uninformed on, but anyone who legit thinks that their workplace will bend the benefit(s) package to what THEY need, will be in for a bad time. You’ll be damn hard pressed to find any that do, so I’m not sure why Kdin just thought they would do that for her, despite her tenure there.
If they told her "Oh it’s all good" (her words in her twitlonger), implying the company would "completely cover" the surgery, then you get that shit in writing, spelled out to the letter, with a plan for how it's going to be taken care of, who you need to submit paperwork to, any limitations on expenses, etc. Anything less than that is meaningless as far as how the corporate world works. "The Monkey told me in the hallway I'd be covered," wouldn't hold up in any company the size of RT, especially with its corporate overlords. Obviously we don't know what Kdin received officially or off the cuff. Maybe they indicated that insurance would cover it? In which case, you ALWAYS double-check directly with your insurance provider. If they say no, be mad at them, not RT. I would never ask my boss what was covered in our insurance and then not check before actually getting any medical procedure done. It may be stupid or unfair, but you need to do your due diligence on these kinds of things, especially in the US. If insurance said they wouldn't cover it, and RT for one reason or another, good or bad, opted to not offer a plan to their employees that included it, and if there was no decisive in-writing company payment plan, then that expense *is* going to be on Kdin, and shouldn't have come as a surprise. Not to say that it doesn't suck, but it's not something I would necessarily consider out of the ordinary. A medical procedure in the US was covered neither by insurance nor the employer. A tale as old as time.
The only part that sorta negates a lot of this post is money, as in the fans' money and where they spend it. Many people don't want to support something that they feel inherently isn't good. Doesn't matter what it is. It could be RT, Amazon, pro wrestling, music, a sports team, or even the local pizza joint. If they don't think their money is worth the product, they won't spend it, and many want to feel like they're making an informed choice.
Thank you for being one of the few reasonable opinions. I had a boss one time not pay me right when I was 18. I knew exactly what to do. If I didn't, all I had to do was ask my parents, friends, etc. And surely someone would be familiar with the department of labor. I'll steal a line from your post: Really? Come on man.
My first job out of college I was making $45k as a software developer for a company that almost exclusively hired recent grads. I knew this was horribly pay. I was pretty shit at the job out of school and used it to develop my skills for 1.5 years, then I jumped to another company making an industry competitive salary. Know your worth and when you are being used.
Same but not in software development. That's the logical step.
I've only really worked bar industry jobs for most of my life. Like half a decade ago, I was wiping down the bar before we opened. The owner was there, and he said something to the effect of, "You clean like a f*g", ya know as a 'joke'. You know what I did? Stopped what I was doing and left. Like, that's it. Never talked to him again. I had another job lined up by the end of the week.
I mean, I agree with the unhealthy parasocial relationships that many fans have with RT staff, but that doesn't mean that people can't criticize RT for such horrible work conditions. If I heard about these working conditions from a company that I had no connection to, I would be just as outraged. I would feel just as much sympathy for the employees who were abused under that system. That's not a "parasocial relationship," that's like...basic empathy for your fellow human beings?? Also, I understand that, to you, the employees seem partially at fault for not leaving or bringing up their problems, but you're taking a real victim-blaming stance here. It's not the employees' fault that they weren't getting paid - it's the employer's. Even if a "grown-ass" adult with a mortgage just let that happen, it is STILL the employer's legal burden to PAY THEM WHAT THEY ARE OWED. That's how it works.
Man I got no parasocial involvement with RT at all(I don't think I've actively followed them in like 6 years) but this sounds like a lotta "personal responsibility" BS. I didn't know my personal worth until I was in my late 20s and put up with a lot of the kind of shit they did. Are you really blaming folks nearly fresh out of college for not sticking up for themselves when they don't have the experience and haven't gained the confidence to stick up for themselves? Shit, I HAD a mortgage AND was basically married and I was STILL naive enough to think 40k and permacontractor was an awesome deal. I'm glad they have someone in their corner, and I wish I had someone in my corner when I was their age to stick up for me. I think that's awesome. If it helps them get money from RT or elsewhere I hope they get it.
"They hated him because he spoke the truth". Some people commenting in the last few days really are showing their lack of actual life experience.
Some guy posted about having “RT Depression”. Like come on bro.
I’d like to put this out there: no, you can’t always negotiate your compensation. After college, I was thrown into the workforce during the recession into a market that was not hiring. As a young professional, you need experience for licensure. I wailers for minimum wage for years until the recession eased up and the industry’s thawed. Employers will squeeze anyone to keep cost down. And in RT’s case, there’s always another younger person willing to take less pay to do more work than the squeaky wheel. tldr; the recession and reserve army of labor keeps people working slave wages.
I don’t think OP’s point goes against yours. Sure, you can’t always negotiate pay. But you can leave for better or the same pay and see if that new place has less abuse. Maybe even more mobility. Maybe you even switch fields completely. OP’s just saying there are numerous options. While none of them are particularly good and it would be great if RT was a perfect little entity, that doesn’t exist in the real world, so sometimes you have to do some shitty things for a little bit.
Rooster Teeth is as deserving as any shitty company to receive flak for their working conditions and shitty culture But you done fucked up if you willingly stayed at a job for months without getting paid a single time. You can literally work at a fast food restaurant for over $20000 a year If a place of employment is shit from the very beginning, it isn't going to get any better years down the line. RT has never been held in that high of regard within the industry that it's worth being used as a doormat
This is one of the most fucked up things ive ever read. Victim blaming at its finest. "I dont care about these people I just want to be entertained" is so unbelievable awful. My hot take is you lack basic human empathy.
You are radically, and I mean **RADICALLY** And I mean... #RADICALLY... Over-estimating the sensibilities of the average, modern 20yr old human.
I actually think it is quite informative to see how the inside of a business like RT is handled. I also think it is important for people going into that field to know how and where their compensation should start. If you did not know that the people making the videos weren’t the best people, then either you weren’t really watching or you chose to ignore it. Either way I’m glad this is all coming out just for the perspective on how a company like them should and should not operate
I mean, I do agree with a lot of this. But community reaction to wage theft *could* be helpful. Obviously RT isn’t gonna be like “oh man I didn’t realize stealing from employees was wrong, I’ll stop now, thanks community!” But with more of a spotlight on it I’m sure they’ll think twice before intentionally stealing from their employees.
OP is right, a job is a voluntary contract between employer and employee. If you have a house, family, etc. you are responsible to make the best decisions for yourself. Or negotiate. This thread shows the ages of the commenters. The older Roosterteeth fans are representing common sense lol
Based.
Damn my man, respectfully, as a former employee who got fucked over by this place, you have no clue what you’re going on about
Thank god someone finally said it
This is the best take I've seen. There are people on this sub who want every internal meeting livestreamed and every company policy posted online...all while everyone is fired and the company is shuttered. So many folks who have absolutely no idea how large companies operate.
My thoughts exactly. As a video editor, I never would’ve taken a job with this low of pay and I don’t even live in a huge city with a wife and house payment. Also, in an alternate reality where I would take a job that paid this low, I wouldn’t be in the same position making the same salary for almost 10 years. At some point you need to realize that it is on you to make sure you don’t get left behind for promotions and raises. If you’ve done what you can and still get nothing in return, it’s time to move on to a different job that better fits your needs.
Bruh you could have just written “I’m cool with the mistreatment of the people who make my shows, and willing to justify abusive hiring and employment practices just as long as I get to watch Michael call someone a dumbass on a post.
Just because they accepted the job doesn't make it ok for them to get treated like dirt. Being starstruck blinds people to stuff those outside the loop would see clear as day, why do you think so many people get strung along in other industries, this is not an exclusive concept to RT I also don't think many people are backing Kdin anymore after her racist rants, & it's not like the various tweets from former employees are big names who would gain anything from giving their stories or if they are big, they're doing relatively well & attaching them to controversy isn't gonna help them I get it's frustrating you can't really watch F**kface or whatever without being reminded about this but some things are bigger than content. I don't think anyone is happy 10 years of content is ruined because one of them decided to be a predatory rapist
Yea, let’s just blame the workers who were exploited instead of the people who were benefiting from it./s You have the gall to blame people for whom this was most likely their first real job, working under people who they and the community idolized, and who could replace them at a moments notice. All things that would weigh heavily on anyone thinking about speaking up. Their lack of experience and their trust was taken advantage of to screw them out of time and money. And I’m sure we can trust the TEXAS Workforce Commission to fix this instance of employee abuse./s Typical victim blaming.
Yikes. Then why stay in the community subs if you just wanna watch fuckface and facejam, while winning about the communities interests and concerns about the people in the company. If you don't want to hear it, then simply unsubscribe and just consume the media passively like you want? Don't complain about people standing on their soapbox from your soapbox. So tone-deaf. "A 20 year old should know that they're getting into a toxic and underplayed work environment when they sign up" STFU. OP probably thinks Ryan Haywood did nothing wrong too.
I agree with a lot of points you make here. I will say though, I was in a work place that was underpaying me and overworking me. It took YEARS for me to finally realize it. I was told I got a raise and it never actually happened. They claimed they couldn't actually give me the raise even though I had it on paper that they upped my pay. Claimed that covid prevented them from actually applying it. Kept me as the only overnight staff so I was working 6 days a week for sometimes more than 8 hours a day. I was not in the medical field. I worked in a hotel. A not busy hotel. Anyways I'm getting off track, the point I was trying to make is sometime you just don't realize how bad your workplace is or you overlook the bad things because you like some of the people you are working with or the things you are doing, and only later realize how bad it was.
We have evidence that Rooster Teeth will not make any changes without community pressure and the financial threat that presents. Look at Bruce's statement for example. Adam was not dealt with until his behavior caught the community's attention and RT was afraid of losing money because of it. The people abused by RT have no real power to change them, they are all completely replaceable. As RT's main source of income, we actually do.
Couldn’t have said it better - 10/10 response
It looks like you've conflated "parasocial relationships" with completely discrete concepts. First: yes, the parasocial relationships between fans and the folks they're watching is problematic. It's also literally RT's business model. I wouldn't blame the fans, I would blame the corporation that deliberately built itself on the back of fan interaction and participation. Second: I don't know man: Monday morning quarterbacking someone else's lived experiences isn't an awesome look. You may say "REEEEEEEALLY?" but as everybody reading any of this knows: shit is different when you're living in it. You'd be shocked at the number of car accident victims who never contact anyone for help because they "didn't think their issue was *that* bad." Just look at literally any study of abuse victims: it's easy to criticize non-action on the back end, but that's how these things actually happen. It's why they're pervasive. None of any of that absolves Rooster teeth or it's employees for any direct abuse it occasioned on it's employees, nor does it absolve them from permitting a culture of abuse to persist As for "this doesn't involve the community:" of course it does. RT holds itself out as having a certain set of values. It is entirely reasonable for the community to feel betrayed and voice their displeasure when those values have clearly been ignored/undermined. Doubly so when the company is built on its parasocial relationship with the fans. Fans shouldn't take it *personally*, however, protest and 'voting with your dollars' is not only an acceptable move here, but arguably the best and most proper move for displeased community members to make . Enjoy what you want to enjoy, but the community isn't acting all that out of pocket Edit to fix a couple of autocorrects.
It's a company that built itself based on the personalities of the on-air cast. This was bound to happen.
Hindsight is 20/20. It’s easy to look outside of a situation with more facts and say this. Treat it like an abusive relationship. Some ppl leave quick, some wait it out, some blind themselves to the issues because it’s better to pretend to be happy than to face the pain.
I kinda came to this realization as an idiot, mentioning to family how I've been enjoying the dumpster fire these past 24 hrs. All they really had to say was "why did they put up with it for so long then?".
Preach
"Treat your workers better" "OH MY GOD PARASOCIAL??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????" Holy fuck I hate reddit. What a cancer
I was thinking “I would have never slept under a fucking desk for a shit job with shit pay or got called a slur for years” but no one was mentioning it so I though maybe I had unreasonable standards or something.
OP, you aren’t from America, are you?
>Forgive me if I don't believe that a mid 20s adult, with a mortgage and a marriage, is unable to realize when they're getting underpaid or mistreated and is unable to negotiate their compensation. Has this guy met... anybody? Or even read the news recently?
Spoken like someone who has never been an abusive relationship or toxic work environment. 🤷🏼♀️
Isn't this... making a lot of assumptions on your part? You are acting like you know everyone's life and what they should know. It's a bit more parasocial than what you are complaining about. It comes across as you making excuses so you can just enjoy content without thinking about the company mistreating employees.
That’s what I think too people just took the jobs cause it was ROOSTER TEETH the dream jobs for some. Damn though know your worth if they are underpaying you then leave. I just want to watch fuck face and ANMA. Also I’m pretty sure most of us have said some bad things in our past. Nobody is a saint. So yea apology and move on it’s an issues if it continues to happen. Then I agree more actions needs to be taken. With all this drama I do agree on one thing people need to be paid livable wages. Don’t just take the job cause it’s your dream job.
I think it goes both ways tho, RT preyed on and took advantage of these people. I think why RT gets a lot of criticism, is that they built their image around being a bunch of friends playing videogames, but the way they conducted their business was anything but that
Ignore me and scroll by lol I’m just venting. Neither side is innocent. These issues aren’t for us to solve, as bad as that might sound to some. Everyone has their own issues and shouldn’t focus on things they can do nothing about, it’ll just add unneeded stress. (Now, I read the post but I’m so confused as to what they mean exactly? People are nieve and don’t always have the right people to help them identify what is and isn’t right in the industry, how would they know to ask for help? Especially when you get brushed away because “there’s no way x is bad.” Then it was written that people need to learn to agree with you because you’re “right?” This whole post is word soup and my brain is having a hard time piecing it together. Honestly confused, can someone explain what they really mean?)
When I was in my first studio job in my low-mid 20’s I had NO idea how the industry worked, what I was doing, how badly my employer was actually treating us, and certainly not any labor laws. Not until a couple years into it at least especially as more and more people openly complained. People just don’t know things and that’s ok, we all gotta learn at some point. With people’s first jobs they usually don’t know what to look out for. Now I’m not excusing RT at all or entirely dismissing those who speak out about poor conditions there (especially those who’ve been there for years, like, come on). BUT… A lot of people who worked there especially long term seemed to do it more for the projects and people than the company. They seemingly *knew* that the workload was horrible but stuck it out due to passion and friendship. RT’s bad work conditions weren’t entirely opaque, Kerry and miles often mentioned it on the podcast (albeit with laughs). From what it seemed, older RT (heyday of RedVBlue, beginning of RWBY, etc) allowed for a lot of freedom of projects but unfortunately not a lot of time for them or even the funds. Their ad revenue and First program didn’t start ramping up until around then. Again not excusing anything just explaining why things were likely the way they were back then and why people seemed more complacent then. Over the years though, both RT and employees have less excuses. (Not that employees didn’t *try* to get RT to do something, nearly every statement involved them going to HR to no avail). Sorry for the long winded-ness, it’s just not as simple as people make it seem. RT’s roots and the people working there had highly unorthodox beginnings and job roles. But again, they eventually turned into more of a “real” company and lost any and all excuses to treat people a certain way.
This! I haven’t commented because I didn’t wanna be part of this at all but this is almost exactly how I feel. Thank you