The Right Opinion: The Brothers Who Faked Their Death For Subscribers - XtremeGamez | TRO

Intro

I know that was a bit of an abrupt segue, but there is a morbid fascination we have with celebrities who didn’t necessarily bow out in the most graceful fashion. When someone with such great potential, and such apparent success, is victim to the tragedy of a premature demise, particularly those of artificial sorts. We’re left thinking about what might have been for that individual, and we’re also encouraged to reflect on the industry that may have manufactured such an outcome.

Now make no mistake, some of these individuals were incredibly prolific regardless of their life, and you don’t want to overstate it as if it was to take away from their artistic contribution, but when someone passes away that contribution is often frozen in that moment, and we are drawn to the attention of what that has taken away from us as individuals. A really great example of that was Stefán Karl Stefánsson, the guy who played Robbie Rotten, and provided me, and many others with the numerous memes that yielded from the We Are Number One meme, his diagnosis, recovery, relapse was an emotional rollercoaster that many people were on all the way, but the final outcome also reflected something else.

Because we were there throughout the situation, we had the time to provide our support to someone we loved. Popular individuals leaving this world prematurely is not the most common event, and often what is even rarer is being able to foresee the possibility of that, and therefore the journey to that destination is often a fight we want to be there for. There’s an emotional battle that gives us purpose, to know that we might make a difference in that battle.

Therefore, it was natural when people found out that today’s subjects were facing, they wanted to show their support, who are those subjects? Well, they are a pair of YouTubers by the name of XtremeGamez, the Australian brothers of Thomas and Jonathan, who do what you want to see, have fun, play games, and chill. They describe their content as family friendly, and kid friendly, and in their five years on YouTube, they’ve built up the fairly sturdy subscriber count of 4.24 million, and over 314 million views, pretty impressive. Where did those views come from?

Well, who remembers ProGamerJay? No-one? Well, a couple years back he was the punching bag for many commentators who found his content a bit, well, laughable, he was notorious for rather misleading, albeit amusing clickbait, his most well known was a video that was titled “If you see red then you are colourblind” or words to that effect, as he has changed it since then, the cheeky bugger. However, although many people picked on him, maybe due to his delivery. He was part of a greater trend, that was represented by multiple creators, even to this day, that rated the power of leading your audience to believe that they were doing something higher stake than what actually happened within the video. Now with that said, a lot of these channels specialised in various areas of clickbait, there was obviously a significant amount of overlap but they all occupied various corners. Honestly, these videos should have died out much faster than they did, but some have in fact persisted. They either moved into the creative maestros such as MrBeast who actually follow through on their clickbait, or a level of uninspired irony that I, and other audiences, appear to still be attempting to understand, such as Morgz.