It was always gonna go downhill once Wolf left. He was a PoS in plenty of his own ways, but he was angry and autistic enough to call everyone, even his friends, on their shit. Its no surprise once he was off, Rags was able to run his mouth wantonly and every "debate" became a lot of dogpiling each other until you agreed with him.
And now that all of them are "established" they don't want to rock the boat too much and risk their shekels, unlike how they came up.
I still love the moment of fear Mauler had after E;R threatened to debate him on ATLA after Rags had called it trash and gotten the rest of EFAP to back him on that.
Rags had never seen it beyond a handful of Youtube clips but did his normal "extreme hyperbole, everything I remotely don't like is literally objectively bad" (see also him missing crucial mechanics in REmake 2 and deciding it was garbage because of it).
So Mauler had to go "watch" it on his own with a completely unrelated guy, and decided (totally free of bias because he'd never take a position to protect his own guy) Rags was 100% right and it was terrible and that literally everyone was wrong.
Of course once they tried to buddy buddy with E;R, a basically untouchable name to most of their audience, that would make trouble.
Mauler, Rags, Drinker, etc. just aren't politics guys. They are media critics who dabble in culture war subjects, usually on the grounds that culture war is leading to shitty media politics, not even out of concern for public policy. They were never going to go anywhere politically useful. It's why the system doesn't care if they pile up millions of subscribers and views.
It was always gonna go downhill once Wolf left. He was a PoS in plenty of his own ways, but he was angry and autistic enough to call everyone, even his friends, on their shit. Its no surprise once he was off, Rags was able to run his mouth wantonly and every "debate" became a lot of dogpiling each other until you agreed with him.
And now that all of them are "established" they don't want to rock the boat too much and risk their shekels, unlike how they came up.
I still love the moment of fear Mauler had after E;R threatened to debate him on ATLA after Rags had called it trash and gotten the rest of EFAP to back him on that.
Its even worse than that.
Rags had never seen it beyond a handful of Youtube clips but did his normal "extreme hyperbole, everything I remotely don't like is literally objectively bad" (see also him missing crucial mechanics in REmake 2 and deciding it was garbage because of it).
So Mauler had to go "watch" it on his own with a completely unrelated guy, and decided (totally free of bias because he'd never take a position to protect his own guy) Rags was 100% right and it was terrible and that literally everyone was wrong.
Of course once they tried to buddy buddy with E;R, a basically untouchable name to most of their audience, that would make trouble.
E;R is untouchable period, like the ubermensch of video essayists. Nobody even dares to challenge him
Mauler, Rags, Drinker, etc. just aren't politics guys. They are media critics who dabble in culture war subjects, usually on the grounds that culture war is leading to shitty media politics, not even out of concern for public policy. They were never going to go anywhere politically useful. It's why the system doesn't care if they pile up millions of subscribers and views.