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Notes -
Mr Beast’s Trans Debacle
Mr Beast is the Gen Z entertainment celebrity of note. Calling Mr Beast the PewDiePie of Gen Z would be underselling him. His 25-minute Squid Game YouTube video received 400 million views, which to put in perspective is 5x the total viewership of the Seinfeld Finale. His Tik Tok has 80 million followers, his most popular “YouTube short” has 650 million views, etc. He is more popular than what the average millennial or older would think (I fall into this cohort). When he visited a mall in my state to sell his burgers (one of his successful business offshoots), the line extended miles and made the news. Mr Beast has a childhood friend group with whom he makes videos. The rapport between the friends of the group, what might be called the “vibe”, is a crucial ingredient to Mr Beast’s success. They were, like many friend groups containing boys in America[*], all male; the pure boyishness was a major draw for his success.
This year, one of the “cast” members of the Mr Beast enterprise transitioned into a woman. (For brevity, I will just call the member she and a woman.) Chris, who had a child and went through a divorce, has transitioned in full. She is wearing dresses on video and taking HRT. If you were to plug Chris and Mr Beast into Google News, you would have no idea how the viewers have responded to this change. But plugging it into Tik Tok (the premiere Zoomer app) gives a different story.
The response among Gen Z has been overwhelmingly negative. When I checked last night, 8 of the 10 most watched videos for the search “Mr Beast” were a negative reaction to Chris’s transition, the total view count of which was more than 80 million. The comments overwhelmingly negative. A typical comment section looked like this, sometimes with more than 25k comments. The commenters chant “Mr Beast 6000 coming out”, referencing Mr Beast’s oldest YouTube channel known for political incorrect humor. The consensus among the fans is that the transition has ruined the group’s rapport and that Chris has got to go, but that hands are tied because she is transgender. On the latest (secondary channel) video for Mr Beast, the comment section is censored and moderated so that the issue can’t explicitly come up. The commenters instead spam “we want to see more Chandler and Nolan”, cleverly emphasizing their disinterest with Chris by omission. The fans on Tik Tok are trying to find any clip they can to get Chris cancelled, with one finding a video of him saying the N word and another digging up an anti-Islam tweet from 2017.
There are a few things to explore here.
Tik Tok is the last remaining “Wild West” internet platform. Low censorship, low “authority-boosts”, and high anonymity allow for majority discourse like in the old days. It would be hard to gauge the fan reaction without looking at Tik Tok, which (conveniently) is the app that most of his fans use for socializing and discussion. This illuminates how manipulated platforms like YouTube and Twitter are, both because of censorship and because of cancellation fears.
The younger generation appears to be immunized against the transgender movement. The boys do not buy it. Mr Beast is a litmus test because he has a large, diverse fan base in Gen Z, the majority of whom use Tik Tok and have Mr Beast content algorithmically fed to them. These Tik Toks are as close as we will get to a “youth vote” on the transgender issue. They not only don’t buy it, but they think it is immoral and noxious.
Mr Beast is in a pickle. He became popular, partially, because of the authenticity and joy of his friend group. The discomfort involving the transition is palpable in the latest video. Body language, rapport, banter, and general “vibes” have ruined what led children to watch his content. He is the most data driven creator and knows this. He has previously mentioned that he edits out sneezes and coughs because it loses retention, and I believe once mentioned that adding a girl to reaction videos negatively reduces engagement. Alas, he can’t come out and fire the transitioned member without losing corporate sponsorship and reputation. He is stuck between losing popularity among his fans, or losing support among the progressive power structure. He is also losing support from parents who don’t want their 8-year-old watching a transgender. There’s also the moral issue of supporting a friend post-divorce.
"Immunized" is taking it much too far given how the percentage of teenagers who identify as trans/non-binary/etc. has exploded. And I would guess that, by most measures, their net positions on trans issues are more pro-trans as well. Rather I would say that they are much more polarized due to the increased salience of transgenderism and transgender ideology.
If your contact with the concept of transgenderism is learning that the T in LGBT refers to crossdressers and once hearing a joke about thai ladyboys, you are likely to be tolerant and not care about weirdos doing weirdo things. If instead it is seeing a whole friend group at school trying to convince a member that he's trans/non-binary because he has long hair and isn't masculine enough, or seeing an attention-seeking person go trans and police "misgendering", or encountering the trans part of the online SJW community, or seeing public figures like Cosmo/Narcissa and Jim Sterling blow up their lives, or at least hearing about it in the media with the constant drumbeat of pro-trans rhetoric and with news stories like MTFs competing in women's sports, you are going to approach the issue in a different way.
Good god, what did that toxic narcissist do now? I've never seen someone take being a shitbag "ironically" so far for so long with nearly nobody calling them out on it.
I haven't followed him closely, I mostly just heard about how he has lost so many viewers and subscribers that he did a "Under 800k Subscriber Special" (and previously did a "Under 900k" one) in which he apparently blames transphobia and claims Youtube suppresses LGBT content. I also heard that his wife left him. (Supposedly he has said that she decided to leave him for another guy. I know they were already in an open relationship before the trans stuff but I don't know what role either that or the trans stuff might have played.) A quick search finds this thread discussing the channel decline. Hurting his Youtuber career and losing his wife isn't as bad as Cosmo/Narcissa's degeneration and he still makes good money on Patreon, so maybe saying "blow up" was going too far. But I remember when he was a big mainstream gaming personality who was incidentally a SJW, and now I get the impression that it has consumed his whole self-conception and narrative of his life while leading him to do self-destructive things.
Yeah, I guess that's kinda it for Sterling's career unless she does some radical changes.
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It's Stephanie Sterling now.
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