I should preface this by saying I've always had a pretty bad superiority complex about my supposed intelligence, and in general, the kind of upper/middle class white American lib brain that looks down on people for eating McDonald's and shopping at Walmart as some sort of failing on their part. I've done my best to try to unlearn a lot of it/think of it in material rather than moral terms (people eat McDonald's cause it's full of fat and salt and other things to be addictive and tasty, and because if they're working 2 jobs in a shitty town it's much more accessible than buying and cooking fresh food from the supermarket, not because they're somehow morally inferior or stupid. That sort of thing). So please let me know if my post is just mostly shitty opinions like that at heart, and if I'm the asshole in this scenario, cause it absolutely could be the case.

Anyway, I recently got back in touch with a sort-of friend from school, long story short I come over to smoke weed and watch movies and YouTube videos with them sometimes, and while the videos I suggest are typically either ""breadtube"" stuff like Thought Slime or video game stuff like vinesauce (god I sound basic and I know it), yesterday they introduced me to a genre of video I sort of knew existed, but had never personally experienced before: what I can only describe as the true crime equivalent of those algorithmically generated Elsa Spiderman Baby Surgery Playtime style kids videos.

Specifically, they're "animated horror stories" that are put out several times a week by one channel (though while looking for different one, we found there are tons of other channels with the exact same formula and animation software [which might legitimately be GoAnimate]). Here's an example to give you an idea of what I'm talking about, as well as the metrics on these kinds of videos.

https://youtu.be/snprJEnO-Pg

I actually had a blast watching a few of them, and if you watch a bit of the above video, you'll see why: these are HILARIOUSLY bad. The stories themselves are somehow both tasteless and completely uninteresting; every single video is very vaguely themed around a social media network or a retail store or something else that they can put in the title, they're all within 30 seconds of being exactly half an hour long, and the production quality on these is... Well, I'll get into that in a bit. But in every case I watched, the stories aren't actually interesting at all. There are no fun authored twists or interesting conceits. They all play like a rather dry episode of a true crime podcast, except about a crime that never actually happened.

Anyway, I did get some enjoyment out of trying to think of how something this slop-like gets made. They're narrated competently by speakers with American accents and implicitly take place in America, but the weird grammar and word choices clued me in that it was not written by native speakers, and a quick Google search for this specific channel led me to the LinkedIn of what seems to be a (if not the only) writer for the channel who is, in fact, a literature student from India. She has the channel listed as her place of work, so my initial assumption that every part of this was Fiverr-made was wrong. We didn't watch more than one video from any specific channel, so I'm not sure if each uses the same narrator for each video either, but considering they put out several videos a week, each with 3-4 short stories each, suddenly a lot of other things start making sense.

The animation is barely that; it's (ugly as shit) generic 2D models animated cutout-style in what I would describe as "the laziest ways possible", but I don't think laziness is the reason they look like shit. McDonald's doesn't taste bad because it's "lazy" (and, to be honest, I don't actually think it DOES taste bad; it's fucking designed not to, and I don't think anyone is immune to hot salty crisp fries at all times no matter, how much they might pretend otherwise), it's because it's cheap and quickly made, and you're not paying for a delicious gourmet meal, you're paying for speed, convenience, and most of all, cause it's cheap. It's not a perfect analogy for YouTube videos because they're all technically free, but several hours of content a week vs 20-30 minutes from something like TS or Scott the Woz is my comparison here.

This was my first time watching a video of this type, and I was pausing every couple of seconds to point out more incredible, obvious shortcomings: They constantly reuse character models even within the same scene, there are like two or three angles, which means everything is presented either from the side or directly overhead, and any shot with a car or a house has some truly mind bending perspective going on. When characters move you can literally see the gaps between their body and their arms/legs sometimes, and even when the narrator is quoting a big hammy emotional manifesto, they're all always making the DreamWorks face.

No attention is paid to any continuity within the narration or the story itself, and it's clear they literally do not do a second draft of anything here; in the third story in the above video, the narrator describes someone as having "steel eyes", in context meaning "steely" probably, but the animator literally gave the guy have fucking metal cyborg eyes when he shows up for absolutely no reason; later on when the "steel eyes" line dropped, it fell into place for me and I laughed for a good minute. They show the character driving up to a 3 story house that literally a sentence later is described as a 1-story. In another one, where they have Walmart employees with name tags on their vests, they don't bother fixing the text when they mirror the rest of the character model, so when they're facing left, their name and the "Walmart" on their vest is just mirrored too.

And my point with all this is, somehow, my friend was enjoying these on a completely surface level. They weren't laughing at how horribly the videos were made, they told me they were genuinely interested in the substance of these stories and the "animation", but they have literally no substance! As I mentioned, they are not narratively interesting in any way. Literally every single one is "I went on a website and then a creepy guy happened, and then the creepy guy got arrested or maybe not". None of them have any fun twists or framing devices or anything; you can tell they're basically produced by a machine, except as with many "automated" tasks in modern capitalism, that "machine" is Just A Guy (from a country with looser labor laws and lower wages).

There's also a ton of Ideology in these that goes unremarked upon by both the story and the audience, which isn't surprising, but more than a bit frustrating since, bless their heart, I don't think my friend who enjoys this literal slop is even picking up on, never mind critiquing. Like I said, most stories end with the cops getting the guy, who did creepy evil shit just cause they were creepy and evil (and portrayed as literally ghoul-like in the animation). One gave the excuse that a fucking mass shooter (I'll get to this in the next paragraph) did it cause of experimenting with LSD in the 80s which was. Wow. But in every other case it's just "evil people exist because they're evil. They're not created through any material conditions, they just straight up spawn in the dark fully formed like Minecraft mobs. Thankfully the police usually show up quickly and arrest them though."

Speaking of the mass shooter thing: the fucking Content content (like, Violent Content, Sexual Content, etc) of these is like an absurdist reduction of American content standards. They describe and show (through extremely crude animation) horrific violent scenarios, such as drugging and kidnapping underage girls for sex trafficking, mass shootings, etc, but in a video on OnlyFans themed horror stories, the sex content was pg-13 at absolute most. They had fucking high schoolers talk about "her erotic photographs set my heart alight", and I think even in Britain and India, high schoolers talking about porn would be saying things more akin to "bro she's got such nice tits". I haven't actually read the article, but the headline "everyone is beautiful and nobody is horny" came to mind; these algorithm-made pg-13 rated stories aimed at kids are the primal id of exactly how much of everything they can put in a video without age restriction or ad revenue loss, and the answer is: tons of "realistic" violence, but no actual sexuality, and literally a single f bomb per video, just like a pg-13 movie.

When people talk about "guilty pleasures", I assume they mean things like McDonald's: things that are cheaply and cynically made to scratch a very primal urge for fat and salt, or gore and tits in the case of horror movies. But this content is literally nothing. It's not fun, it's not interesting, it's not subversive, it's not anything except a way to fill time and maximize ad space. All the channels that pump out literal 10-hour videos of cheaply animated and narrated Reddit stories are like some grass growing under a leaky outdoor faucet; fascinating that they managed to eke out a living from basically an algorithmic error, but I never imagined anyone would actually be finding this random grass and thinking it was worth their time and energy to eat it, instead of the actual garden that the hose is watering, this analogy kind of sucks sorry.

Idk what exactly my point here is, and I'll probably be editing this post later to expand upon and revise it, but just. God damn. It's one thing for toddlers to be put in front of a 2 hour Spiderman Lucina Unlicensed Dental Practice Songs For Kids video and not know any better than to change it, but for a fucking adult human to find a similar equivalent genuinely entertaining on its own merits is so foreign to me as to prompt an hour of writing about it on my phone at 6 am.

#girl