@Pewdiepie is the Most Successful Celebrity Ever. Forever Ever.
Skrattar Du!
I’m not a raging millennial so I didn’t grow up glued to YouTube. But more seriously, the platform became well known in my later college years and I was too busy trying lock down a wifey to care much about people talking at webcams. Even until recently, I don’t use it much other than to replay my favorite clips of Jim Gaffigan.
But for some reason or other, likely due to my heightened daily stress level in a third-life crisis, I’m finding myself surf’n the web again and check’n out what all the cool kids are following. I started to discover rich content creators like the game reviews of ACG and daily news reports of De Franco. Naturally, I got to finally learn who and what Pewdiepie is.
Currently and likely forever the most followed account on YouTube (64 mil subscribers!), Felix Kjellberg is the longest standing celebrity born out of social-media. His channel seems almost nonsensical, filled with daily uploads themed with “Pew News” and “You Laugh You Lose.” It’s a long string of satire sprinkled with some real-world talk and social commentary. I always assumed, partially due to his popularity and in part due to the way he is covered in the media, that his appeal was mostly for teens. Some think he’s a clown, some a troll, and some just an incomprehensible mad man locked away in some basement.
But me? I think the man is a genius on fire.
I don’t think Felix is particularly funny or witty or scathing or really entertaining in any specific way. In fact, the more I watch, the more I’m convinced that he’s just a normal “kid” who has grown into his body over the course of his YouTube career more than anything else. What does impress me however, is his capacity to keep rolling. Rolling forever.
He is the ultimate troll and anti-troll at the same time. Big-time celebrities, on and off YouTube, often run in backbreaking moments in their careers that are difficult to come back from. Especially when you consider that PdP started on YouTube in his early 20s when the vast majority of young creators run into some career-ending faux pas. This is the major risk in being a social-media figure that is open to daily scrutiny and attack. Pewdiepie is no exception, having been repeatedly accused of “misogyny” and “mobbing” and even last year, being a “Nazi sympathizer.” The attacks come from all ends of the spectrum including negligible blogs run by sociopathic liberal arts students to even institutions like the New York Times. The now 28-year-old seems to just snicker at everything, only rarely speaking seriously into the camera and defending himself. He seems to have found an antidote to the mobbing culture of the 21st-century online generation that has destroyed many video stars much earlier in their careers - rolling with the punches and never surrendering.
Got ‘Em
And when PdP trolls, he does it in the most subtle and brilliant way that never conveys a sense of violence but utter ridicule wrapped up in chuckles. Take Ali-A for example, a popular YouTuber who consistently racks up millions of views per daily video for his now predominantly Fortnite streams. Felix did an initial post covering how these ‘content creators’ basically exploit children with overdramatized but ultimately unoriginal content, designed solely to stack advertisements into 30-minute streams. The “giveaways” are likely fake and everything from the thumbnails to the structure of the videos is cookie-cutter.
So Felix made this beauty.
Aaaaand he kept going.
Now the meme-d intro shows up every so often in random videos and it’s brilliance.
Felix never takes the moral high ground, which I believe to be the Achilles heel of any public celebrity whose head gets a bit too big. Everything is just amusing and he does his best to only poke fun at a world of ridiculousness. His entire persona is light commentary on everything and he and his editing team do a masterful job leaving threads together and nurturing long-standing inside jokes for PdP’s fanbase.
Packed with Micro-accusations
But don’t take my word for it as a gloating fanboy. Give a watch at the last few videos in a row (be sure to pick ones that were made in the same span) and enjoy how he runs with everything, including a brief period where he quoted Carlos Matos’ Bitconnect speech through several videos.
Maybe I’m just killing the meme of Pewdiepie by explaining him like this but nevertheless, I encourage you to check out the way he makes and how continues to grow his special brand of social commentary. I’ll stop fanboying here. Let me know what you think!
Hahaha... Most fun I had in weeks reading and watching contents in Steemit. I wonder how he will meme Steemians.