Asmongold TV - Rotten Tomatoes Situation | Asmongold

Episode Date: July 11, 2025

Rotten Tomatoes Situation Subscribe to Asmongold TV on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@AsmonTV Disclaimer: This podcast is an independent project created by a viewer using content from the YouTube channel Asmongold TV. The purpose is to make his content more accessible to those who prefer audio formats, helping more people engage with the ideas presented in his videos. This podcast is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or officially associated with Asmongold. All rights to the original content remain with Asmongold TV. If there are any concerns or requests regarding this podcast, please reach out. ------------ Keywords: gaming content creator, gaming news, gaming hot takes, streamer content, reaction videos, asmongold Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rotten Tomatoes censorship backfires. There was something funny that happened over on Rotten Tomatoes yesterday. I don't think this is a coincidence. We're going to go over what happened. Now, I want to point out right away that whatever this was that we're going to talk about appears to be fixed. And that's the audience score ratings for TV shows. Not movies, just TV shows.

Specifically, Star Wars-related shows, but we'll get into that. Let's go with where it started. So the Accolade is a very popular show right now, and for all the wrong reasons. Everyone's. Yeah, everybody's talking about the show, but nobody's talking about they like it. Y'all say there's an echo.

Let me see how I fix that. I actually need to fix this for a bit. It should be better. Reporting on it and watching it like a hawk because it's a disaster. It's a train wreck, right? And everybody loves looking at a train wreck. It's hard to look away. So what happened was, and of course, you know,

since everyone's watching everything Ackleite related very closely, if something happens, everyone's going to jump on it. And over- People are watching everything about the Acolyte except for the actual show. Tomatoes, the audience score disappeared. Now, here's a screenshot from that. This is fixed, so it won't look like this anymore. I'm going to look at it right now.

But this is the front page. Yeah, it sounds like it. They fix it. For the Acolyte. You search Rotten Tomatoes, Star Wars, the Acolyte. This is what's going to pop up. And at the bottom of it, there's a season. Hey, I'm surprised it's all the way up at 14%.

A. So Season 1, Star Wars, the Akelet. It looks like this over on the page. So here is the page. Now, this is fixed. Right. So you see 83%. percent from critics,

14% average audience score. Very low. That was missing. If you wanted to see that, you had to scroll down and then click on season one, and then you could go to season one and you would see 14%. It's kind of weird because I don't think this is going to get a second season.

It's just going to get the first season. Yeah, this is it. So what they did was they made it so if you looked it up, You wouldn't just see it. You had to do a little bit more work and scroll down to the season one. Now, at first, this was like one of the only shows that had it done. People were starting to point out real quick, oh, it's other shows too. We're seeing it with other shows now, mostly Star Wars related as Master of the TDS points out here.

See, I'm not, I'm not crazy that this was really happening. This appears to only be happening to Star Wars related shows. How odd. Certainly no funny business. TV shows in general. So it happened on the Acoi, but what about the other ones besides that? And then the website, you could tell they were tinkering with it because the loading for the site was slower than usual. I don't know how to better describe that.

Okay. I have super good Wi-Fi here. So, you know, I have fast internet. very good internet here and it was taking a little longer than normal maybe that's just you know maybe that's just nonsense but it really did feel like they were tinkering with the site you're gonna have to just you're just gonna have to take my word with it or take it with a green of salt or whatever i think that we just learned this right with like remember that uh fucking de i detected website where like i really thought that they had been censoring it but it turned out it was actually

actually just the fucking, uh, some like DDoS protection, which still didn't really make sense to me, but like that seems like that's what it was. I feel like, I feel like that was a, that's a big learning experience. And I think that we should think about that a lot when we go and we start shooting first without really being sure. Like, let's, I mean, did they never said anything about this? There's no receipts for this. It's, it's about being skeptical, right? But like, and that's the thing. You need to be skeptical of it, especially as something you want to believe.

Yeah, exactly. Sometimes Google bots can't go through DDoS protection without being lightlisted. Yeah, yeah. And like, I didn't know that. It didn't make sense to me. And so like, yeah, right? And so, like, I scrutinizing websites every time they update is a recipe for paranoia. Yeah, exactly, right?

Now, is there a chance that they floated this and then they got a lot of negative reception? And then they decided to backpedal on it? Yeah, for sure, that's possible, right? Like, it's also possible that a raccoon got in the building. and the raccoon did this. But, you know, I wouldn't expect that to be the reason why. It's a low possibility. That's what it felt like to me.

And then other teams... Somebody says they just restructured the site to hide the audience score on the front page. But if you say that, but if I click on it, it says audience... It says audience score right there. Like, I mean, that's not... That didn't happen, right? because like i can just look at it and and you can see immediately that didn't happen they disabled the value 14% that's a value front page was it like this before or not so you're saying beforehand

it showed the audience ranking and also the critic ranking yeah that's stupid it should show both i'm gonna be honest i think it should only show the audience ranking who cares what a critic says yeah like what like i'm sorry but like This is my opinion about movie critics, is that a critic is supposed to be used as a tool and a reviewer is supposed to be used as a tool that the public uses to gauge whether they should see content or not. I think that if there is this large of a disparity

between the average audience ranking and the average critic ranking, the critics are always wrong because the critics exist to serve the audience. that's the way it works there's no chicken in the egg the fucking the audience is the reason why the critics exist the critics aren't the reason why the audience exists

in general started to look like this not just Star Wars everything some still had it but for the most part every TV show was a loose somebody says it's not an authentic review of the content

though this is review bombing what how do you so review bombing what do you mean by that people saying that they don't want to see the show what does that mean a review bomb you're being a little bit hypocritical you just said that you don't trust other people's gaming reviews why do you trust movie reviews it's not that i trust the reviews it's that i trust the critics reviews less than i trust the audience or sorry then then yeah i trust them less than I trust the audience reviews. I'm not going to look at a negative audience review and think, oh, wow, I hate this movie now. No, it's, those are what I'm saying at all.

What I'm saying, though, is that, yeah, I wouldn't take a lot of reviews seriously, but a lot of people do. That's like people have the reviews, naturally, right? That's why they exist. Like, if that was actually true, and I didn't care at all about reviews, and I didn't think they served any purpose, I would never read them or talk about them. but I am because they clearly show a purpose and they have a reason. It's just it's an apples and oranges thing.

Gotcha Andy, that probably should be a permabend. That was a gotcha Andy. But what I'm saying is that a critic reviews, for how much I distrust audience reviews, I distrust critic reviews 10 times more. And I don't think that the audience being compromised by review bombing is accurate because I think critics can also be compromised. For example, if you are giving a negative view to this game,

I bet it could look bad professionally because this, not game, this show, this show is getting a lot of, like, criticism that people professionally are saying is racism. So people could avoid giving it negative criticism because they don't want to be painted with the same brush that the toxic fan base is being painted by. So when you tell me that the game, sorry, that the show is being review bombed, I say by who? Because you're saying it's by the audience. I'm saying it's also by the critics.

Dean, it's audience score. You had to go down to click the link or whatever. And now it's apparently all fixed. So over on the website now, if you go to Best TV shows of 2024, all of them now have their audience scores. Damn, so there it is. So, okay. established, except Sun, some of them, like Sunny here.

Sunny, you can't see it. They're not all fixed. They're not all fixed. Sausage Party, look at that. They still have no reviews there. Isn't that funny? Why is everybody so afraid of Seth Rogen? That's a legitimate question.

Why is everybody so afraid of Seth Rogen? They won't even let audience scores for sausage party pop up. Or nobody watched it and reviewed it. Maybe that's a thing, too. But there's still no critic scores. I find that funny. So they fixed this. They fixed it.

And put them back in. So what's the problem? And you would think that would be the end of the story, right? Right. But it's not. It's not the end of the story. Because now we're getting articles like this. Professional acolyte haters fall for fake rotten tomatoes controversy.

So now there's hit pieces. It feels like this might have been done to discredit people. Well, of course he's going to do. do this because he's one of the people that does reviews. You should expect people to defend themselves. Every time you attack somebody, you should always expect people to defend themselves.

Of course he's going to say it's bad because he's one of the people that's doing it. You're literally shitting on him. Of course he's going to say this. It feels like to me. Now, it's stupid. By the way, he's wrong. But you should expect this. See? See? Yeah. They'll fall

for anything. There's receipts out there of this. A lot of people got screenshots of this. These aren't doctored. I'm not the only one that posted shit like this. I saw a lot of people covering it. So if you want to find screenshots of what this looks like, it's not hard. And Nererotic has one up. I'm sure maybe the geeks and gamers people. Some of them probably for sure have screenshots. It was going around. This happened. Now, Paul is trying to argue that it was a technical glitch. Well, how are they supposed to know it's a technical glitch?

I mean, like, the audience, you can't expect the audience to know that. Because if the audience sees the website this way, they're going to assume that's the way the website is. I mean, it's not really falling for anything, right? I mean, that's just looking, observing, and making a conclusion based off of that, right? I mean, that's not crazy. Just Star Wars? And then it's like, oh, we better cover our tracks and then take them down from everything.

they're restored. It almost feels like they got caught real fast. They were trying to pull a fast one because it started to look like censorship because they would love... We don't... What's the fucking evidence of that? Like, I'm not going to do this shoot first,

ask questions later bullshit again. Like, I just looked like a fucking idiot for this like two days ago. Like, what's the evidence of this? Like, was there any other points on the line here? Like, maybe, look, and here's the truth. maybe they were going to do it and then there was a bunch of negative feedback and they're like,

oh my God, they're making the YouTube video, shut it down. Maybe that happened. But I don't think it did. And I don't think there's evidence for it to happen. So maybe it was just a mistake. Yeah. To get rid of this audience score. And I guarantee you they eventually will get rid of it.

A crunchy roll. agree with him. That's all right. Now we're getting to a conversation. I think that a lot of these people in the movie industry absolutely fucking hate the fact that fan reviews play so much of a role in the success of their shows. And I think that they are going to try to push to get rid of fan reviews. Absolutely. Because like you think about it from their perspective. The fan reviews are bad for them because it causes them to lose money. So if the fan reviews didn't exist, then they would lose less money. So I think this probably will happen.

It's the same, oh, by the way, oh, this won't happen. Well, where's the dislike bar on YouTube? Think about that. Has taken down audience scores, basically. You can't comment on things over there anymore. I'm going to talk about that later. Yeah. But you know, damn well, critics would love to get rid of this audience score. Businesses.

I think that they would, too. I think he's right about this. I would love to get rid of this audience score too. Yep, I think he's right. The only time they like the audience score is when it's high and the critics are low because then they can go with, okay, well, the audience likes it. Screw those critics. That's why I think that's honestly the only...

If Rotten Tomatoes gets rid of audience scoring, people are just going to make a new website and go there instead. Because, and the reason why is that these people who are effectively filters for feedback, Like these people don't actually, nobody cares what Rotten Tomatoes thinks about anything. Rotten Tomatoes is just simply a place for people to put their reviews. So if you can't put your reviews there, they're just going to go somewhere else. And do you have this happen all the time when you have these people who are professional critics who think that they're doing some sort of service to the public by telling people that a movie is good or a movie is bad?

I'm sorry, you're really not. Also, if you're not acting in a way that's congruent with what the audience feels, then you should expect to lose your job and you're not doing your job the right way. That's all there is to it. So it's a service, though. Yes, that's a service. Well, what I'm saying is that, like, people don't care. Like, for example, you don't want your ISP to tell you what websites you can and you can't go to, right?

Outside of, like, the viruses and shit. you don't want to have your computer tell you what programs you can and can't install you want to make those decisions for yourself and what i'm saying is that rotten tomatoes is the same thing rotten tomatoes is a tool people and if the tool does not work in the way that it is useful for then people will find a new tool and they'll go to another website i know i would if there's a website that i don't want to read critic reviews i think critics are fucking stupid so why the fuck do i want to hear what they think. I think they're all paid off. I think that they all have the same cookie cutter opinions. I think that there's a ton of topics they refuse to talk about or play any credibility to because it's not professionally convenient. And I don't trust anything that they say. So if I'm going on a website and the only thing that I'm getting is things that I think are a lie, well, then why the

fuck would I go to the website? If you want to know what people really think about something, read a post on 4chan. That's what people really think. The reason why I think When there's real anonymity There's no updutes to be gained You don't have your internet footprint Attached to this You just get to talk shit

And say what you really think Give a man a mask And I'll tell you who he really is That's what I think And the moment that you take that option away There's no reason to go on the website It's because once in a while It works to their benefit

But to wrap all this up as some kind of technical glitch like he suggests here. I think is as a joke. No, it's not a joke. It's not a joke. There's no justification. There's no evidence that it wasn't.

Like, no, it's, it's not. Like, I feel like people get an opinion about something and they get so attached to that opinion that they're willing to, like, it's like a captain, you know, a captain will go down with the ship. You don't have to be,

you don't like you you can't always know why things happen like you don't know why this happened he doesn't Paul Tessie doesn't know why it happened either none of us know why it happened but like if you say this is the reason that's different than saying you don't know what the reason is and on and it's it's not a coincidence to me that it was all Star Wars shows at first and then other TV shows got theirs removed. And it wasn't even every TV show. There was a couple that still had it.

Surprise. Then I don't believe it because I'm not, I've see it. Where's it? Where's the picture? Because I'm seeing the Ackle. I don't see anything else. Surprise. They had high audience scores. I said you're going to have to take that with a grain of salt because I can't show you because they fixed it right away. I was going to go over it today and then when I got on a lo and behold, all the audience scores were fixed.

To me, you know what? and thinking with a tinfoil hat, right? Because I can't prove it, but just speculating, I feel like Rotten Tomatoes was going to do a solid for Lucasfilm there. And it backfired because they think no one's watching this shit, but everyone's watching it. And the moment they did it, it exploded on Twitter. Everybody was talking about it.

I mean, you had an article go up, almost 30 minutes after it happened. So everyone was starting to talk about it. And it backfired on them. And they quickly, see, here's another shot. It was gone. Right here. So it backfired on. How do you know that?

Like, how do we know that? Like, what are we doing? Like, no, it is a mistake. Is a mistake? Now, he could be right. And, hey, here's the thing. He could be right. But there's no.

evidence of this shit. I'm pretty damn quick, and they fixed it. It's like, okay, we'll just remove all the audience scores. And I bet you that didn't go very well with some people in the industry, and they had to change it. Because not everybody is like Lucasfilm and wants to cover up what the audience thinks. I think most people are, actually. So now you've got these people who can run in and try to discredit people for covering this, which is bullshit, because it absolutely did happen. and I don't believe this cope that it was a technical glitch.

Why? Coincidence that the technical glitch was going after Star Wars related properties. I'm sorry, but like I really don't think that's enough. That's like an A, B, F, J. You're skipping a bunch of letters there. I don't know. It was interesting. It was almost like damage control. Yeah, this is one dot, bro.

Like, find me 10 more examples of this happening. Like I was saying about, like with Google censoring ship, then maybe I'll start to see the line. But this isn't, what the fuck? Time for the series. And then they got found out real fast, panicked, and then restored it to how it was. That's good.

But I do think eventually that audience score vanishes from everything, not just TV shows, from movies too. I have no doubt that one day that's going to, that's going to vanish off of rotten tomatoes. I think he's right, by the way, about this. I think that a lot of the studios and the people in the industry tremendously resent the amount of power that the audience has because they don't think that the audience views things authentically.

Now, they're stupid, but that's still what they have every right to be stupid, right? They hate us. I think that a lot of them do genuinely hate the unwashed masses, right? Yeah, they do. Not hate, resent. At a critic, all of the websites that have anything that covers how audiences and thus do you feel about the product. They have a fact, brother. This is not beneficial for them to have people that can tell the truth.

At least in some ways, like critics can be controlled. You can cut them off. Critics are controlled. Threaten them losing access, all that stuff, and they'll fold real fast. Yes, critics. They are controlled. So interesting stuff. I just, I was kind of shocked to see it.

And when I woke up this morning, it was back. And then I saw articles like this. It's like, okay, well, they're going to capitalize this now. And try to discredit people. Because, of course, when that happened, people made videos on it. It was breaking news. And like, here's the video. I was like, oh, ho, gotcha.

No. I think that people on YouTube really like to value the opinion of people on YouTube. You really think this is like, there's like this fucking big company and they're like, oh, you see this video? It got 7,000 views in an hour.

Oh my God. Get the investors on the line. We've got to figure this out. What the fuck out of here? They don't care. Like, it's not a big deal. Like, obviously they probably are like, ah, shit, right?

But they're not going to make big corporate decisions based off of a handful of YouTube videos that get made over a few hours that's not what's that's not what's happening right I mean it's just not

happen that really happened and it's probably because of this video and other videos and people that covered it that they restored the audience score to its proper place anyway

that's pretty much it. Let me know your guys' thoughts on all of this. I'd like to hear from you. Also, if you would, please like and subscribe, share the video. Make sure you're still subscribed. Hit that notification bell. I'll see you on the next one.

Peace. I'm going to give my opinion about this shit, right? I think that this guy does himself a really big disservice by jumping to such a big conclusion. I think that it's what he wants to believe. I think that he thinks that this is what's happening because he wants it to be what's happening because it reaffirms what he believes.

And I think that people like him have a really important position in the industry right now because the industry is so controlled with people that aren't allowed to think like he does. And I think that he damages that position and he damages the integrity of the side that I would say he is on

and I am also pretty much on. by jumping to conclusions without a lot of evidence, just based off of what he thinks happened. I think that people will stop taking it seriously, and we cease being the side of people that are reasonable, and we are seen as unreasonable. I think that in general, any time that you become unreasonable, you become wrong. And I understand that maybe you think this is true. But to draw as many conclusions as this video did, I think serves a disservice to his message and to his viewpoint. Because a reasonable, logical person critically thinking about this would see that he has skipped a number of steps and he's drawn a number of conclusions that are based off of biases.

And I'm not saying that those conclusions are inaccurate. I'm saying that there's not enough evidence for them to be accurate and to say that there is is ridiculous. And for something that's so small, to immediately jump to that, I think it is a unreasonable conclusion. That's what my belief is. So, do you think there is a Star Wars fan base is split? Everyone in their 30s hates the newer stuff. Meanwhile, the younger generations like it. Well, I don't know about that.

Who says the younger generations like it? I don't know. There's a video. Gicks and Gamerer said a video with more proof. No, I'm sure that it happened, right? And I think that, like, I get where he's coming from. I do, but I just think that he needs to, like, just dial it the fuck back. Like, people on YouTube put too much of an emphasis of the value of a YouTube video.

A YouTube video is not going to sink Star Wars. It's not going to happen. They're not going to make industry-wide decisions based off of a handful of YouTube videos. It's just not what's going to happen. Says you? Of course, says me. I've made a lot of YouTube videos about things that didn't change. I know it better than anybody, right?

So, no, but Disney will. Disney's not going to change what happens based off of YouTube videos. They're going to change what happens based off of audiences. Right? if people stop watching the content, then they'll stop making it. So, you know, if there's nothing, but you didn't like the video? Yeah, I mean, I could see why people didn't like the video. I think, like, obviously, you know, everybody's going to have whatever opinion they want to have,

but I just don't think it's fair to go to this much of a conclusion. Yeah, I made a lot of videos, Blizzard didn't change. Yep, there it is. And I know it all too well.