GAME GRUMPS: 10-YEAR ANNIVERSARY

Let me describe to you my daily after-school ritual in 2012 when I was a fifteen-year-old ninth grader. Despite my poor memory, I remember this well. I would sit next to my friend Tiffany on the school bus ride home, leave together at our stop in Hellam, walk Tiffany to her house, and then head to my Dad’s apartment nearby.

First thing I would do is turn on my dad’s computer, which was in his bedroom. I wasn’t allowed to be in his bedroom or on the computer before dad got home, but I did anyway. I had important things to watch on YouTube! The bedroom window faced the parking lot, so I’d keep a very close eye on the parking lot through the window blinds to make sure Dad wouldn’t catch me breaking the rules.

While the computer was booting up, I’d go into the kitchen and make a very specific sandwich. It was a sandwich made of sweet bologna, pepper jack cheese, thousand island dressing, and wheat bread, then microwaved for thirty seconds. It was microwaved just enough that the bread wouldn't become soggy, but still heated up the sandwich enough that it changed the “feel” of the sandwich when eating it. I’d put it on a plate because my dad complained about me leaving crumbs on the floor and desk.

Once the computer and sandwich were ready, I’d open YouTube and watch Game Grumps, a new let’s play show featuring @Egoraptor and JonTron. It was the funniest shit in the world to me and made a long, arduous day at school feel more bearable. Their comedy was unlike anything I had heard before. I could “sense” their friendship more than any other YouTube duo I knew. I remember being amazed when they finally showed Barry’s face. I remember listening to Waterflame’s Poppy Bros. remix a thousand times. I bought their shirts. No matter how awful the day I had at school or at home, there was one thing I knew I could count on: new episodes of Game Grumps every day.

Of course, I was shocked when Jon announced his sudden immediate departure from the show the following year. I could sense that episodes were generally getting staler and the loud, goofy energy just wasn’t there as often as before. Looking back as an adult, this change was fine. Things change and I think it’s better to look back fondly on what we had instead of demanding things return to the way they were—especially when it’s something as ultimately unimportant as a let’s play show. It took me a while to get used to the new replacement co-host Danny. I was still salty about Jon leaving. But like countless other fans, the classic “Mayor Luigi” bit was what softened me up enough to accept him. I enjoyed Arin and Danny’s time on Grumps much the same, but I always missed Arin and Jon.

It saddens me that in 2017 Jon was revealed to have white nationalist political views. It soured a lot of the race comedy from early Game Grumps; it changed my perception of those jokes from “These are just jokes! They don’t mean them seriously” to “Was this the beginning of white nationalism creeping out earlier in his life?” Perhaps at the time the race jokes were indeed just jokes and that lack of restraint later led him to being indoctrinated by online far right personalities. He never did properly apologize, he now makes pro-leftwing jokes in JonTron, and he has stopped publicly talking about politics almost entirely, so it’s hard to say for sure if he has changed his mind.

I had intended to make an anniversary cartoon and release it on this day because of the strong nostalgia I have for not only early Grumps but where I was in life in 2012. But I didn’t necessarily want to honor Jon with an anniversary animation because of what I explained earlier. I’m sentimental for the show and co-hosts that helped shape my sense of comedy, made me feel better on bad days, and inspired my own work on YouTube.

It dawns on me that I’ve been mostly making cartoons of let’s players on and off for ten years. I’d like to stop doing let’s player cartoons one day because I feel like everything I have to say artistically with these cartoons has already been said, both by myself and by the myriad of other great let’s player animators out there. Animation is a medium capable of much more than just Game Grumps and SuperMega and Oney Plays over and over, and I want to explore that. I feel limited to doing just these kinds of cartoons. It’s what I’m best known for and so it’s what is expected of me, though. To do something else risks alienating the audience I’ve been building for ten years. My attempts at other kinds of animation and art have always been failures in terms of views, despite having fun making those things. Whether that is a problem with the algorithm, me not playing the algorithm to my advantage, or if the non-let’s player cartoons just don’t connect with people, moving on from let’s player cartoons is something I want to do in the future.

— Alyxandr