Speaking of YouTube - I almost checked out that MauLer guy, after seeing someone on another forum I visit link to a funny back and forth on his twitter and going “oh yeah, he’s a youtuber, the Original Trilogy guys seemed to vouch for him.” So I followed the link and looked at his profile and… He basically just stalks some other YouTuber called “MovieBob” and a critic named Patrick H. Willems. That seems to be the last two straight weeks of his twitter feed, at least. I scrolled down for awhile and he’s just making fun of “MovieBob’s” weight and Willems’ intelligence and screencapping tweets by a YouTuber named Jenny Nicholson, who I guess has already blocked him. I know I got called out earlier for “judging a book by its cover” but it really seems like he’s a pretty toxic media personality, to me. Nothing but personal attacks on other people and angry tweets about people not liking things the way he wants people to like them.
Yeah, MauLer makes some good points but his personality is really grating. Half of the stuff he does is just hating on other YouTubers for having different opinions than him. The first part of his TFA review was entirely devoted to picking apart the opinions of YouTubers who liked the movie. His movie criticism videos are entertaining but I really don’t like the way he acts online.
Well the TFA intro was a response to all the people who had ripped into him for daring suggest that some things are subjective and other things are objective. I get that not everyone likes his personality, but this was about being very clear on what he was criticising and why. He was understandably sick of people responding to ‘this is a plot hole’ with ‘it’s a movie about space wizards, man’. I don’t always agree with Mauler, but I still maintain he is so much more level-headed than someone like Willems who descends into tripe like “you’re just not watching movies correctly” as a defence against cogent points of disagreement.
I can’t attest to Mauler’s Twitter feed because I don’t follow it. While his EFAP podcasts come across like a circle jerk a lot of the time, I usually find (on the rare occasions I listen to it) that Mauler is the one that cuts through the personal stuff and tries to get to the heart of the actual conversation. They (he and co-host Rags) have even had some of their most vehement critics on the show, and Mauler seems to go out of his way to be polite and stay away from the bitchy stuff and just get down to the minutiae of the discussion.