Pride Month Youtuber Attention

Hey, you like YOUTUBE CONTENT? Do you like hearing people TALK ABOUT MEDIA? Do you like PAYING ATTENTION TO QUEER CREATORS’ PERSPECTIVES?

Well, sheeiiit, check this out.

First up, we have the work of Jacqueline Meritt:

A Dive into the Heart of Kingdom Hearts I

This video made me buy a copy of Kingdom Hearts to try and discover the game that Jacqueline was talking about. I never found it – but that’s okay, not every game is going to work for everyone. Part of what games let us do is practice emotional states, and then we can share the results of that practice.

I don’t like Kingdom Hearts.

I like Jacqueline liking Kingdom Hearts.

This is very long form media, it’s in that specific genre of ‘step by step through an example play through, with discussion of themes and concepts along the way’ that I find interesting to watch. It’s like a sort of curated, theme-based version of a Lets Play, where instead of showing you the whole experience one instance at a time, you skip a lot of the metaphorical travel time and focus instead on what the story is about. It’s neat!

And then when you’ve passed that gate, you can check out the four hour runthrough of Kingdom Hearts 2.

Next up: Joyce Stick:

I Loved Persona 5, And I Hate Persona 5 Royal | joyce-stick

It is comical how much unlike my tastes Joyce’s passions are. Just looking at her videos you’ll see praise for Death Note, Madoka and Night in the Woods, three works that I have at best no real interest in, and two of which I actively hate. The important thing isn’t whether or not I agree with her – it’s whether or not what she says is interesting in and of itself.

Joyce particularly likes to work from the front of [here is thing] and then [here is some other concept I will explain, by explaining thing]. That’s the core of what she’s doing – the distinctions and delineations around the edges aren’t important unless you’re looking to emulate her model.

Also, if you like what I do, she does a lot of similar things. And she can get access to actual anime footage in ways I can’t, so, uhhh, she gets to make them look pretty and does cool editing tricks and whatnot. I’m jealous of her picrew avatar, because I’d totally use that kind of thing in my videos, if it wasn’t so tangibly difficult for me to do or get one of my own that reasonably represents me.

Third and finally, we have Lady Knight The Brave:

Haunted Metaphors - A Russian Doll Season 1 Video Essay

These are some rock-solid, long-form thoughtful media analysis videos from a perspective I don’t actually see much of at all in the media space. Ironically, two of her videos are on stuff I was planning on delving into this year, from very different perspectives.

Anyway, the videos are well edited, use the visual medium to convey points and are also very pleasantly thorough while also actively avoiding the pitfall of ‘x is good, actually’ or ‘here’s why you’re wrong about thing’ argumentation platform. It’s much more ‘here’s problems I see, here’s what I find interesting about them, here’s how to solve them.’

Also we don’t have as many openly asexual creators in the media criticism space, which is a bit of a shame, because as a non-asexual creator, I feel like I have to keep my sexuality hidden from the conversation entirely, so it’s nice seeing someone who can forward opinions and insights within that space about how a very horny media landscape looks when horny isn’t your interest or problem.


I like the content these people make. Youtube algorithm snake oil means that there’s a lot of things we do that ‘make the algorithm happy’ but there is, at least at the moment, a pretty clear positive correlation between three basic forms of engagement: Subscribing to the channel, liking a video, and commenting on a video, even if you don’t have anything to say beyond ‘this was cool.’

I request to you, then, for your sake (to see more interesting content, if you agree with my tastes), or for my sake (to encourage these people making content I want to see) or for their sake (because number go up serotonin go brr), to do that for these people. Head to a video, watch it, see what you think, and then put in that small effort to Hail The Algorithm.

Bonus, these three don’t actually put out work very quickly so it’s not going to clog your feed. Rad, eh?