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Tuira Kayapó brandished her machete in the face of a government official who was trying to convince indigenous leaders to accept a mega-dam project in the Amazon, 1989

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This seems to be what I've learned.

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cup game

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o r a n g e

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What are u reading?

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Hi Skyen,

Saw a recent repost about MatPat, which as a lappsed fan I feel in my soul, but was wondering if you could expand on calling him a Sophist?

As I understand it, Sophistry is only having confidence in your own thoughts and perceptions, and not those of others (who as far as you know might just be "philosophical zombies") and I'm not quite sure I get how that applies to MatPat/the Theorist Channels. Can you elaborate please?

Regards.

Not quite. A "sophist" was just a kind of teacher in Ancient Greece, usually teaching various subjects to the upper classes. They were often itinerant, wandering from place to place to offer their services, and the most successful of them could command very high prices for their teaching.

For various socio-political and cultural reasons, this created some friction in Ancient Greek society, where "the sophist" was known and understood as a Type Of Guy, and sometimes considered a very annoying Type Of Guy. Aristophanes wrote satirical plays casting sophists as annoying, hair-splitting pedants, for example, but their most famous hater was probably Plato, who derided them as know-nothing blowhards whose only real skill is to argue and persuade with flashy rhetoric, but who have no access to real truth.

It is from Plato that we get the derogatory meaning and negative connotation of the word "sophistry," which is usually defined something along the lines of "incorrect/insincere arguments which only sound plausible through rhetoric."

I call Theory™ videos sophistry because, in my opinion, they are largely much more concerned with constructing a reading of media which is pleasing to an audience than they are concerned with deeply engaging with the media they examine. It's more about the cool-sounding Mind Blowing Conclusion than it is about earnestly engaging with what a piece of media is saying.

And there are good reasons for this, of course! It's fucking YouTube - pleasing the audience is the only way to grow or maintain income on that damned webbed site. I have to do it too, I am not exempt from the criticism I am making here! Doing things in this way is the reason the Theory™ empire grew to such an astonishing size, and it's the reason MatPat has managed to be successful as a consultant helping other channels grow their business. The guy has done extremely well for himself by working extremely hard, and I don't really begrudge him his success, he played the system very efficiently.

What I take issue with isn't specifically either MatPat or the Theory™ channels, I see them as part of a continuum with CinemaSins and some of Red Letter Media's output and literally thousands of other channels and creators who adopt a similar approach to art and media. I take issue with the way they have influenced their audiences to engage with media, and the way that they have become part of the very bones of online media criticism. Even people who have never watched a Theory™ or CinemaSins video adopt these approaches, simply through the cultural osmosis of existing within their spheres of influence.

idk that I have the energy right now to try and chart out the whole thing, but I think there is a deep core of a peculiar form of anti-intellectualism embedded in culture, which infects almost everything, and which finds one way of expression through these channels. It's this idea of art not as a thrumming, shifting spectrum of human expression, but as a series of puzzle-boxes whose purpose is to be solved, and whose solutions had better be satisfying to a certain model of Facts And Logic™ or else they have failed in their task as art.

There's a Film Theory video which I come back to a lot here, it's this one, about Moana.

In the video, MatPat goes through a bunch of genuinely very interesting Polynesian mythology and comes agonizingly close to actually approaching an interesting reading of the movie:

Moana, through her actions and her calling, becomes a demigod / culture hero just like Maui, and achieves that status through love of community and acts of service to it, whereas Maui's selfishness in stealing the Heart of the Ocean is the very thing which disempowers and reduces him from hero to charlatan. He recovers his status at the end only by sacrificing something important to himself as an act of service to another. The movie is trying to say something about what makes a Hero, and it is trying to engage with modes of storytelling indigenous to Polynesian cultures and with their ideas of what a hero or demigod is (how good of a job the movie does at that task, I leave for people in that culture to decide, but I quite liked it).

MatPat approaches that reading... only to swerve DESPERATELY at the last second and declare that wait a minute, the fact that Moana CLEARLY has SUPERPOWERS means she MUST be the SECRET CHILD of MAUI HIMSELF!!!! Puzzle box solved! Mind-Blowing Conclusion™ achieved!!!!

You see what I mean?

The movie at no point raises the idea that people inherit demigod superpowers through biological descent, the movie at no point raises questions about or problematizes Moana's ancestry (in fact, a deep and secure connection to her ancestry is a key point of her fucking character), but in order to achieve a Mind-Blowing Conclusion™, MatPat has to invent this punnet square bullshit as a framework and impose it on the movie. All of his research and reading into Polynesian mythology is not deployed out of an earnest desire to engage with the culture that the movie is about, it's undertaken for the sole purpose of finding rhetorical ammunition to use as covering fire for his Mind-Blowing Conclusion™.

The Mystery Of Moana's Powers are a puzzle box that needs to be solved, and it needs to be solved in a way which is pleasing to the audience. What's pleasing to the audience? "Luke, I am your father!" dramatic twists are pleasing to the audience. Superhero comic logic is pleasing to the audience. So that's the framework he chooses to force the movie into, these are the Facts and Logic™ his approach will allow to be relevant.

Theory™ videos at their best are good, harmless fun. They are a guy playing around with media, squashing and twisting it to arrange it into pleasing and funny shapes, and there's nothing wrong with that.

The trouble begins when you market that playful entertainment with taglines like "The Smartest Show In Gaming!" and adopt a presentation style and rhetoric not of "ha ha, I am playing around and having fun" but "we are uncovering the REAL SECRETS hidden in your FAVOURITE MEDIA using FACTS AND SCIENCE AND RESEARCH to discover the HIDDEN TRUTH."

Because when you do that and you do that with polished rhetoric and production values, draped in the aesthetic of science and research... then that's

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Rejects Joel drumming animation!!!

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Never a dull moment with our three heroes

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Smaugust 2025 / Anomaly

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ALRIGHT, LET'S GIVE THIS ANOTHER SHOT! 💥💥💥💥💥

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big words from a man who hasnt stood up in 1500 years

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hmmm

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kris seeing through their hand in the shadow crystal. all the "severed hand"/"guy who wakes up without a hand" references in the new chapters. berdly having his entire arm paralyzed in the hospital if you didn't spare him in chapter 2. toby fox talking about his chronic wrist pain often preventing him from coding and playing. learning to navigate his disability and how working in a team makes developing games possible for him, even if they don't perfectly represent his vision. the piano as THEE representation of kris' freedom and individuality outside of their role as The Cage. the option to tell susie that Kris will keep playing if she learns to play piano too...

if kris loses their hand and deltarune ends with a 3-hand concert where susie plays alongside them i am going to walk straight into the ocean

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Susie's idea

[ID: a Deltarune comic. Susie and Kris stare at the locked shelter, with Susie sighing. Then a light bulb lights up over her head.Susie exclaims: "Kris, I got an idea!" while the "Susie's idea" act box pops up over Kris's head. Susie rummages through her pocket, and pulls out the Joker card. She sticks out her tongue in concentration, sliding it through the crack in the bunker doors, and Kris thinks: "shit." Cartoon fighting noises, dust clouds, and lighting bolts emerge from the locked shelter, as Susie cheers: "Fuck 'em up, Jevil!" Jevil is shouting "Chaos, chaos!" "I can do anything!" and "bye-bye!" Meanwhile, Kris has a cartoonishly large frown on their face as they get a phone call, with the caller shouting: "Kris who the hell is this." End ID.]

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Medical mystery 🦝🥤

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Hair to dye for