Rage baiting and how to avoid it

Hi guys, I thought I'd follow up on what I discussed on my one year anniversary post when it comes to rage bait considering how I briefly glossed over that in favour of how far I had come from being a toxic shithead on the internet since I launched this site of mine.

So, what is rage bait exactly? Basically, it's when a content creator puts out content that's meant to offend those who are consuming it, preferably otherwise sound minded individuals who normally wouldn't expend their outrage consuming media, but it also works for the terminally online given their refusal to touch grass from time to time. I brought up the main offenders for this trend on my previous post but felt I should go into more detail in what they collectively do so that anyone reading this can look for them in other media that's put out in the world.

We'll start with Velma as that show is the epitome of rage bait, the show is basically a bunch of rants from its star Mindy Kaling strung together to form a plot that vaguely resembles that of a traditional Scooby Doo plotline. The issue of course is that we're listening to a woman in her mid-forties rant about how much she hates men, Christianity, white people and wealthy people despite having two kids (although as far as I can tell, she's never been married) is known to be attracted to white men specifically and is of course a multi-millionaire (her hatred of Christianity makes sense given the recent backlash it's received and that she's a Hindu.) This is all obviously an attempt to rage bait right wing audiences, however it also manages to offend the left wing as well due to its offensive depictions of LGBT characters (not helped by Mindy being straight and thus engaging in queer baiting) non white characters (Velma is an offensive Indian stereotype, Norville an offensive African American stereotype and Daphne and offensive east Asian stereotype) and if I'm being honest, women as the show goes off on tangents about feminism that I doubt even the most devoted fourth wave feminist will find appealing. At least the animation is decent, in fact it's one of the few animated shows/movies to have this luxury which is more than I can say for what Disney has to offer.

When it comes to movies, there's plenty to choose from when it comes to clear rage bait, however I've decided to highlight Wish in this regard because I refuse to believe this is anything other than a middle finger to the legacy of Walt Disney. First off, the animation is garbage, I refuse to believe anyone looked at the final product and felt it was appealing in any regard. Apparently the animators knew what they were working on was complete crap but were too afraid to speak up against it due to the arrogance of the film's director who clearly only got the job due to politics I'd rather not get into on this site (look up the term DEI for more information) resulting in a bizarre hybrid of 2d and 3d animation that doesn't mesh well together like other movies that successfully pull off this technique such as the Spider verse films and the more recent offerings from DreamWorks. Compared to Disney's other recent films, Wish is rather A-political for the most part as there's no forced diversity whether it be racial or with LGBT characters, instead it focuses on the other big problem with the studio which is that the writing is exceptionally poor especially when it comes to characterisation. Asha is completely forgettable and has a bland personality purely so that she can spout off the terrible fourth grade humour that the writers of the film has, the villain is even worse as by all accounts, he's not really a villain as his descent into madness is believable due to how the other characters in the film treat him. If anything, the lack of diversity in this film just goes to expose how weak the writing in their other films really is as they can't gaslight us into believing we're just racists/sexists/anti LGBT etc for not liking the film like they do for their other projects as no such character exists here, instead we're left with the incoherent plot, childish humour even toddler's won't find funny and of course, the terrible music.

Now the music is what I should really talk about on this site given that's my area of expertise, it isn't just Wish that has a terrible soundtrack (in fact it might be one of the better soundtracks in recent memory from Disney) as the company has done away with hiring composers for Broadway/West end musicals in favour of trendy pop stars and of course Lin Manuel Miranda. The pop stars sort of make sense given how they tend to have the biggest reach to younger audiences, however the films run the risk of becoming extremely dated as a result which admittedly has been a problem for many decades at this point (we'll have to wait and see if people still remember Billie Eilish by the end of the decade.) Lin Manuel Miranda on the other hand, boy howdy is this guy a hack as he combines traditional Broadway melodies with the most dated trends of the 2010's resulting in songs that even now in 2024 are beyond cringe. Now obviously he didn't write the songs for Wish (hence why I don't think it's among the worst soundtracks in recent years) however he did write the likes of "The scuttlebutt" from the Little mermaid remake, the soundtrack for Encanto (which includes the intolerable "We don't talk about Bruno") and a whole bunch of other songs that I doubt anyone reading this will find appealing outside of a so bad it's good tone. It's especially egregious when these terrible songs are paired with terrible renditions of songs from older movies that we grew up loving, specifically those from the likes of the Disney renaissance which have all been butchered by the casts of their respective remakes with terrible autotune and a lack of personality from their casts. There are exceptions of course, any song sung by Halle Bailey from the Little mermaid are all decent due to her being a good singer, however it seems Disney goes out of their way to hire the worst vocalists out there from Emma Watson to Mena Massoud as Belle and Aladdin respectively. This is another example of rage bait in my opinion as Disney is renowned for having excellent music in their movies that were usually composed by well established artists of their day, instead we now have bad rehashes of these excellent songs paired with instantly dated original tracks from mediocre to talentless composers.

Now I've stated at several points in this site that the music industry has long since moved on from spouting out divisive political topics, yes you have the occasional outlier such as when Meghan Trainor briefly resurfaced in 2022 or when Jason Aldean made that racist country track that resulted in him becoming a lol cow in the music industry. Apart from these outliers, there hasn't been anything nearly as egregious in the music scene as what we've seen in Disney in recent years. Instead, it's whatever Tik Tok decides to make a viral sensation which is a site I'm convinced is little more than a constant breeding ground for rage bait which most hit singles these days have the misfortune of soundtracking. I'll swing back to Tik Tok in a bit, but I will say that the methods of what makes a song a hit more than qualifies for rage bait as we have tons of songs that never would've even touched the charts a decade ago finding massive success due to people on the social media site making a mockery of the song in question. What's worse is that music labels have gotten in on the formula and have convinced their artists to play into this trend, resulting in songs such as "WAP" by Cardi B and Megan thee stallion, "Unholy" by Sam Smith and Kim Petras and a whole bunch of others that have instantly fallen into obscurity as their reason for existing was to piss off the right demographic (usually the idiots from the Daily Wire) with their tasteless provocation in a way that "Old town road" from Lil Nas X did accidentally in 2019.

The good news is that like other harmful trends I've covered on this site, the music industry was the first to combat it as there's been fewer of these types of songs making it big in recent months. The downside is that there's been nothing to replace it with as no artist other than Taylor Swift seems to have any presence in the music scene these days, even then, it appears the public's patience with her is finally starting to run out given how insufferable her fanbase is as well everyone realising she's a bit of a one trick pony both musically and lyrically if the reception to her latest album is anything to go by (something I've been saying for fifteen years at this point, but I digress.) Even so, I'll take the fiftieth rehash of "I knew you were trouble" from her any day over her dire attempts at being political such as on "You need to calm down" or her attempts at rage bait such as "Look what you made me do," any day of the week. Basically as much as I don't care for her music, I'll always respect the fact that Taylor Swift is making music she believes makes the world a better place (barring those two outliers I brought up) this is more than I can say for the likes of Meghan Trainor or Halsey who were two of the worst artists of the 2010's with their pathetic attempts at social commentary during the height of the music industries venture into "woke" culture. I stand by that this culture died out in 2018 as everyone from both sides of the political isle were able to see through the facade these artists put up in their music, not helped by the fact that the songs in question were usually poorly performed and produced in addition to spreading toxic messages about how being unlikable is the way to get ahead in life among many other things. The pendulum appears to have swung the other way in America if the existence of "Try that in a small town" and "Rich men north of Richmond" is anything to go by, although thankfully those songs are little more than lol cow anthems throughout the rest of the world, so I wouldn't worry about "anti-woke" songs climbing up the ARIA, NZ or British charts anytime soon.

When it comes to gaming, there's not much to say really as the rage bait there is more from practices implemented into AAA games rather than through artistic merit (or the lack thereof.) Sure these companies will hire consultancy agencies to make a game that much more insufferable with identity politics, cringe urban Californian dialogue and otherwise completely unlikable characters even the far left would despise, however I've found this is a mere distraction from the real issue at hand which is that these games are plagued with microtransactions meant to bypass the intolerable grinding gameplay that these games have to offer. The best example of this is Suicide squad kill the justice league, everyone initially bashed the game for its terrible dialogue and obvious disrespect for the DC universe (not helped by it coming from the mindset of a company that endorses extortion in the name of "political correctness) however I like many others can ignore these aspects of a game if said game was any fun to begin with. This is where the true failure of this game comes into play as it's one thing for Harley Quinn to give a lecture to the Batman for what makes a person good or bad, it's something else entirely if this comes right after a bland boss fight that feels like it was ripped from Borderlands which itself comes after multiple levels of "fight off multiple waves of enemies" that feels ripped from Warframe (made worse that Warframe is a FREE game that's been out for a decade at this point.) The game developers knew that this was a weak premise for a game, so they decided to include battle passes which is clearly meant to incentivise gamers to replay the bland campaign in order to unlock in game rewards, said rewards being worthless and a cheap cash grab in the case for the DLC expansions. The best part of all of this is that when gamers made the connection that many of these games used the same consultancy agency, a curator group was created to expose this agency (even though it should be noted that they're not entirely to blame for why all these games suck) which resulted in said agency freaking out and unintentionally starting gamer gate 2 as a bunch of other agencies were exposed as a result of their freak out. This goes to show that even these agencies know that what they're working on is garbage, although they'll do whatever it takes to hide the fact these games are terrible.

This of course leads me into perhaps the biggest form of rage bait outside of Tik Tok, that being journalism as I of course can't bring up gamer gate 2 without talking about how journalists have reacted to it. Thankfully this appears to only affect online journalism as televised bulletins more have an issue with concealing news rather than twisting it to piss people off. I could summarise this part by simply mentioning Kotaku given how they're infamous for writing inflammatory articles that only serve to make progressives look that much more insufferable, however it isn't just them as we've had article after article from the likes of Rolling stone, Buzzfeed and Pitchfork about how everything is offensive except for the offensive media they actively promote on their sites. When it comes to Kotaku, rolling stone and Pitchfork, they're just bad hit pieces against anything that itself isn't rage bait to allow the likes of Velma, Suicide squad or Hasley to seem tolerable by comparison. Buzzfeed is where I believe journalistic integrity went to die as from the very beginning, that site has only existed to promote awful articles about how everyone's a bigot and how they can change their daily lives to not be the case. The problem of course is that these articles are written by some of the most entitled people on the planet who are themselves bigots as they promote harmful stereotypes for certain demographics whilst shaming others for things, they can't do anything to change (such as their skin colour, sexuality etc.) It doesn't help that the overall quality of these articles on a technical level is rather poor, from bad sentence structures to the authors clearly not knowing what certain words mean. Then there's the bad research these authors do for their articles, particularly from that deranged woman from Kotaku who straight up lied about what happened in gamer gate 2 and then pulled the race card when people tried to correct her on it (despite this being a white woman mind you, although she does seem like the type of person who is genuinely confused on what determines one's race if those crazy screenshots of her is anything to go by.) It's fairly obvious why these articles exist, which is why I recommend using AdBlock when viewing them for yourself as to not give them any financial engagement.

OK time for me to talk about the BIGGEST form of rage bait, that of course being Tik Tok as everything up till this point at least has the benefit of being made by professionals (supposedly.) Tik Tok is a social media app that has done nothing but made the world that much worse than it already was as its designed specifically for its users to engager with it due to the nature of its short form content. This alone is egregious as it’s been scientifically proven to damage one's attention span, however if it were simply kids dancing around like brain dead idiots to the latest hit single from Sam Smith like the media insists it does, that would be one thing. While that certainly does happen, that's only one of the many trends on the site and it's by far the most innocuous as we have other more worrying trends from the fat acceptance movement to the promotion of neopronouns to straight up unhinged rants about different ethnicities and religions that make the ones from Velma seem tame by comparison. At least Mindy Kaling has the excuse of suffering from a midlife crisis during her rants on the show (as well as the possibility of workplace harassment as I very much doubt, she willingly allowed these rants to be animated for the purpose of a mean-spirited spin off of a beloved kids show.) These individuals on the other hand are ranting about stuff that doesn't matter or is at best a minor inconvenience for them like they've been persecuted in a third world country, only to then blame their conundrums on normies as if anyone else is responsible for their poor decision making skills and delusions for being something they're clearly not. I won't even go into the legal issues with the site when it comes to one's privacy as I'm not exactly well educated in how that works on an international scale, but that too is something to consider if you're to continue engaging with the site.

To go into detail on why Tik Tok is a bad website, I'll bring up the three points I mentioned on my anniversary post, which being the fat acceptance movement, that moron who promotes neopronouns and the creep who makes content specifically for kids. I'll start with the fat acceptance as that's the easiest to tackle, these are a bunch of morbidly obese women who let's face it, are far too lazy to live their lives and have somehow convinced themselves that society is somehow to blame for it. The biggest culprit here is Tess Holliday who is a plus sized model who actively promotes unhealthy eating in her content which has led to an increase in mortality rates when it comes to obesity, at least Lizzo only encouraged her fans to not feel bad about their weight (which makes her fall from grace all the more ironic.) That stupid idiot claiming that you can identify as anything from a dog to a table is a different beast altogether, people say that they have good intentions as they admittedly do a plausible job in creating hypothetical scenarios where a conversation would take place that would involve explaining these pronouns. The issue of course is that pronouns isn't restricted to humans as in certain languages, even inanimate objects have male and female pronouns. Heck German is one of the few languages (that I'm aware of at least) that even has nonbinary pronouns by default (der/die/das=him/her/they) good luck explaining this concept for French or Spanish speaking individuals where that's not the case. Of course, the real issue here is that it's clear this person doesn't understand the concept of non-binary or why certain people identify as such, meaning that it's really strange for them to expand this concept for an audience likely looking to them for further explanation. Finally, there's Jeffrey Marsh who is that creep who likes to make content for kids, honestly just Google the guy, look at the results in the images section and tell me if he has ANY business being around kids from his face alone. This is especially not helped by how CREEPY his speaking voice is, yes, I know it's a falsetto but everything about him just screams child predator to me from his voice to his bad makeup to his overall demeanour. It's because of him specifically that the LGBT movement has received a ton of backlash in recent years as many people (usually idiots from the Daily wire) like to use him as the image of the community when I can assure you that most of us are NOTHING like this guy.

I'll end this off with going over rage bait on YouTube as that's honestly where most people get the wrong idea of what is actually is, many content creators like the Critical drinker and his many associates are incorrectly labelled as rage bait simply for pointing out topics I've brought up in this site in an admittedly harsher way than what I've done. Blair White is another creator that's often described as rage bait as is her associates even though if you watch her content, she's actually debunking many misconceptions people have of LGBT individuals, albeit again in a way harsher tone than I'm giving in this essay of mine. I think the only rage baiter people have correctly identified as such are members of the Daily wire as they often misrepresent media in order to fuel their agenda when it comes to right wing politics, this is very evident with the likes of Matt Walsh and Ben Shapiro who both clearly have little knowledge of what they're talking about at any given moment. Believe it or not, most of the rage baiters on YouTube come from the far left as they're the ones spouting off nonsense in media no sound individual would take seriously even for a second. What's worse is that people act shocked when they're involved with scandals of their own, usually child grooming or internet scams which honestly makes the Daily wire seem like saints by comparison. It's almost as if they've joined the far left specifically to cover up for their misdeeds, much like how companies hire consultancy agencies to write "woke" garbage for their games in order to cover up their own multiple scandals.

I could write a separate essay about terrible YouTubers, however no one wants to read about that, so I'll instead give a short list of these creators to avoid like the plague. They include ACTUALLY HAPPENED, Butch Hartman, ImJayStation, Lily Orchard, Morgz, Nicole Arbour, SSSniperWolf and WatchMojo. I know all of these are fairly old but believe me, I begun avoiding these types of channels like the plague a long time ago at this point and as such, I haven't bothered to memorise the names of channels that have pissed me off in more recent years. Besides, all of these channels are fairly well known even in more recent times, so they're a perfect sample of the types of channels I'm talking about regardless.

Well, that's about all I have to say about rage baiting, from the divisive political takes to bad faith criticism of media both current and from the past, we've looked at some truly vile examples of content that only exists to make the world a worse place. Hopefully one day, all of it will be lost media and that those responsible either find their inner peace from whatever mindset caused them to make this vile garbage or are at the very least blacklisted from the entertainment industry (I obviously prefer the former to happen.) I also hope the companies that have pushed this vile content onto the world get exposed for whatever crimes this is clearly meant to be distracting us all from as believe me, there's no other explanation for why Velma is allowed in HBO or why Disney and these gaming companies keep hiring a bunch of no talent consultancy firms to "diversify" their products for a "wider audience." Speaking of, I also hope these agencies go out of business as they're clearly taking work and money away from those who deserve it given how they clearly don't care about the end product that their services go towards. Most of all, I hope that we as a society can find a way to stop making this practice so lucrative as many of the worst online content creators are driven by the low-risk high reward nature it offers. Until we do, vote with your wallets and your engagement (or lack thereof) by not giving these individuals a second or your time or by buying their garbage products.