PewDiePie is Not a Victim, He Is Embarassed to be Losing - The UpStream

PewDiePie is Not a Victim, He Is Embarassed to be Losing

posted Saturday Feb 18, 2017 by Scott Ertz

PewDiePie is Not a Victim, He Is Embarassed to be Losing

If you don't know who PewDiePie is, that is alright. Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg is a YouTube star, whose channel has the largest subscriber count at 53 million subscribers and generated him an estimated $15 million in 2016. He has managed to accomplish this by consistently being surprising. He started off as a gaming channel and later began to fancy himself a comedian, and the content began to change.

One of his go-to concepts is shock value. The thing he seems to find both shocking and funny is anti-Semitic content. While these types of "jokes" have been accepted for other content creators, such as South Park, Kjellberg's latest video did not. The difference was in what the actual content was. He paid someone to hold up a sign that read, "DEATH TO ALL JEWS." The world did not respond to it as he had hoped, and he blames everyone else for that "problem."

Rather than saying he was sorry for creating something that offended a lot of people, he blamed the media for reporting on the negative response the video received. Of course it could not possibly be the fault of the person who created the concept, filmed the video and then published it to the world - the reason it didn't go well is because someone else noticed that it was offensive content.

I truly believe these articles slamming people like me for these topics, they're doing more harm than good. They're doing more harm than I'm doing by saying them. I think being the political correctness police is essentially just going to fuck us all over, and this year, 2017 I decided I'm taking a stance back, I'm going to be true to myself. I want to do the sense of humor that I enjoy, and this is the price for it, I'm fine with that.

While I do agree that the "PC Police" are creating an environment in which everyone is encouraged to be offended by something, there are still some things that are actually offensive, such as calling for the extermination of a people who have faced that exact fate more than once in their history, and are facing a new version of it today. Some things simply are not funny, and this is one of them. In 2016, he took a different stand on content, however, saying,

I still make kinda stupid jokes that I shouldn't make. But I feel like back then I didn't understand. I was so immature and I just thought things were funny just because they were offensive. So I would say a lot of stupid shit. I'm not proud of it. I'm really not. But I'm also glad that I've grown past it.

It makes you wonder what has changed, and why he feels that being offensive is his true self in 2017. The price he is mentioning in the first quote, however, is incredibly high. The PewDiePie channel has had two major partnerships which led to his financial windfall in 2016: YouTube itself, which is owned by Google, and MakerStudio, which is owned by Disney. Both of those partnerships came to an end this week after the video was published. MakerStudio released a statement about the termination, saying,

Although Felix has created a following by being provocative and irreverent, he clearly went too far in this case. The resulting videos are inappropriate.

YouTube issued a statement about canceling Felix's YouTube Red series, which is produced by The Walking Dead's Robert Kirkman, saying,

We've decided to cancel the release of Scare PewDiePie season 2 and we're removing the PewDiePie channel from Google Preferred.

All 3 of these changes are going to take PewDiePie from being a YouTube star to being an internet unknown. Removal from Preferred will mean new people will be less likely to encounter new content, and cancelation of his promoted content will end his financial successes. However, no matter what he says, this is his fault, not yours or the media's. He created controversial content, knew it was controversial and now must pay the price for the reaction. No one is responsible for paying for your mistakes but you, a lesson that is going to be incredibly expensive for Felix.

Advertisement

Login to CommentWhat You're Saying

Be the first to comment!

We're live now - Join us!
PLUGHITZ Keyz

Email

Password

Forgot password? Recover here.
Not a member? Register now.
Blog Meets Brand Stats