Ethan betrayed his friend Felix - I don't think this was a full on top 10 anime betrayal, but I do think the way Ethan discussed the scandal was handled poorly. DISCLAIMER - I THINK ETHAN HAS EVERY RIGHT TO SAY HE IS DISAPPOINTED WITH FELIX. However, did he really need to dedicate half the podcast to the topic? I would have understood if he only took like 10 minutes to talk about it, but he even went out of his way to arrange a black guy to call in just to make the most out of Pewdiepie's fuck up and this just felt very opportunistic to me. I'm sure there are plenty of other goofs and funny videos they could have talked about and so making such a big deal about it (like "jokingly" comparing it to Hiroshima) and even putting Pewdiepie in the title felt really cheap. How is he better than all the smaller youtubers who made videos about this fiasco just to attract views?
I don't see it as a "betrayal". He said he didn't think PDP is racist and that his apology was good and that the DMCA thing was bullshit. He probably felt under pressure to comment because he's talked about PDP a fair bit in the past, so it's not necessarily "just to get views" or whatever. The black guy was because they thought it wasn't cool to have a discussion about the n-word that only included white people, when black people are the ones most affected by it. The black guy said basically the same thing, that he didn't think he was racist and liked the apology. There was no harsh condemnation of PDP as a person. Calling it a "betrayal" implies that YTers should only defend their friends and not criticize them, which is a harmful standard to promote IMO. PDP himself reportedly didn't even have a problem with it and didn't understand all the upset.
I did think having an entire podcast about it was a bit much and kinda lame, though.
Ethan claims he did the hard thing by publicly saying he was disappointed by what Pewdiepie said, but was it really hard? All the mainstream media condemned him so how exactly was that a hard thing to do?
Just look at the response it got and the vote ratios and compare that to videos on YT that are purely defending PDP. "Anti-SJW" / "Anti-PC" views are very popular on youtube and things construed as "SJ" or SJ-esque often get brigaded with downvotes. Take Destiny's debate with Jontron, for example, since you mentioned it. It has more downs than ups, most of the videos about it are bashing Destiny (including some extreme hit pieces), etc. The MSM is generally the opposite in that they tend to take a more "pro-PC" slant (with some exceptions like foxnews, breitbart, etc). So I do think it's fair to say doing it was harder than not doing it would have been TBH.
he didn't say anything at all when Jontron deliberately said actually racist stuff
True, I guess.
Keemstar - I found the whole rant about Keemstar just unnecessary. I don't watch Keemstar, but I did watch this video Ethan ranted about. He just REPORTED the outrage, he didn't cause it.
Yeah, I think that part was bullshit and it's the one area where I think some "outrage" (I hate to use that word cuz it sounds so extreme, but for lack of a better one...) is justified.