The Wooden Handed

Knowing that luke will no longer be posting on the channel, I think there's a lot to say about how smg4 as a channel changed over the years, and its really fascinating how it changed from shitposting mario committing food play fetishism with a plate of spaghetti, to doing just that but with a loads of arcs and lore intertwining; fascinating in a way that it kinda showed the corporatization of smg4.

It's no big of a deal saying that smg4 lost some of its core audience when they began adding ocs and arcs. luke and kevin weren't exactly the best storytellers- not that id ever wanna hold that against them, i believe they made the right choice for themselves to expand their reach and writing as content creators- but that's beside the point. I think the main reason why people stopped liking modern smg4 was because it stopped pandering to the og fans and started reaching to a wider audience.

I mean seriously smg4 began with luke as a 12 year old making edgy machinimas, cementing the channel's unique sense of humor that many like myself grew up with and as much as I wish the humor stayed that way, realistically there's only so much you can do making that kind of content, especially when the internet expanded the way it did, and knowing that luke wanted to grow as a content creator and try different kinds of stories and attract a larger demographic, of course the core edgy humor that built the channel in its golden age would be lost.

With that being said, I couldn't shake off the feeling that a huge reason why it fell off was with the creation of Glitch Production. Don't get me wrong, I believe md and tadc are great shows, but with smg4, corporatization should have been the last thing that happened to it, smg4 should have been a sole project, even after Glitch's formation, and could have retained the humor it once had with sm64 graphics and gmod ragdoll physics, but alas it was not meant to be. I am tucked between being frustrated that smg4 turned out the way it did, and also acceptance with the fact that luke always wanted to change as a creator, so letting go of that old humor was technically inevitable.

And yes I wish they did better stories, I wish they had a proper foundation for the new kind of content, and I wish they were more concise with the scripts, but I guess we got what we got. I wouldn't go as far as to say the introduction of meggy or any of the other ocs were the downfall of the channel, and naturally I wouldn't know the main reason why luke quit in the first place, because I believe they could have still made good shitposts with ocs (since many people seem to forget that smg4 the character was a self-insert straight man), and blaming the audience seems like a cop-out for the most part.

the reason why iroh saw more in zuko than in azula wasn't because he was narrow-minded, it was because zuko was a normal kid, shape into a hot-headed mess, due to the physical abuse he suffered in the hands of his own father; someone who had to grow up very quickly because he was given the impossible task of capturing the fucking avatar, someone who's been missing for a 100 years, who people didn't even think was still alive at that point.

Sure he's fucked up many times in his journey to become the avatar (burning katara's hand for example, and a few other stuff), but he's a fucking kid, of course he's gonna be erratic as shit, and suffer the consequences of it. I've yet to see people, except for a few posts here and there, actually acknowledge that aspect of his character.

Did y'all just forget how he radicalized a Fire Nation school into resisting? or the fact that he is, by design, literally Sun Wukong coded: the orange and yellow coded costume, his flying ability, courtesy of his airbending, or the fact that he's a monk-holy kind of character (which I'll admit is a bit of a stretch, but wukong achieving Buddhahood in the end of jttw sort of fits). So the fanon treating him instead like he's some nice guy archetype, just because some fucking zutara shipper wannabes justifying their shallow excuse of a ship is some absolute fucking bullshit.