Asmongold TV - We've gone backwards.. | Asmongold TV

Episode Date: July 14, 2025

We've gone backwards.. Asmongold show for all of his stream highlights, competitions, reactions & more. -------------- Keywords: streamer reactions, esports commentary, gaming drama, gaming content creator Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Some of the best modern films and shows explore identity. If you're anything like me, you'll have probably noticed a trend of films and streaming shows that are progressive and identity projection, but oddly morally empty. Think Amelia Perez, The Acolyte, Iron Heart. These works weirdly center on characters who behave shittily, and yet are showcased and marketed, bafflingly, as heroes. The reason why is because the people that write them are shitty, awful, people. You used to watch movies and play video games to get away from annoying people like that in real life,

but now those annoying people in real life have put themselves into video games and there's no escape. He's not a line, but he's right. Well, no. All we ever care about is good storytelling, and we don't like second-rate slot. So somebody said it's millennials? It is absolutely millennials. My generation is responsible for, I think, 90% of this. Entertainment written by identity junkies. The difference is storytelling integrity. Does the film earn its insights or just shovel them in? I'm disappointed in your species.

At root, these stories often reflect a morally relativist worldview, born from resentment, filtered through postmodern narrative structures, and decorated with progressive identity politics. A culture that wants to affirm identity, but has lost faith in shared ethics. This is fine. This is a really good video already. This is, bro, he's cooking. Like, yeah, I think he's totally right about this. This is why also a lot of these movies and stories immediately fall off

and they don't have any sort of like long-term relatability. Like, nobody's going to go back in 10 years and watch any of these stories or watch any of these shows. Because they're just not, they're just like, it's like McDonald's content. I'm okay with the events that are unfolding currently. In Ironheart, Riri Williams, who has an organization. expenses paid scholarship to MIT somehow squanders all her opportunities, breaks the ethical code by selling academic work to other students, and then joins a criminal gang to make money for her own

self-aggrandizement and prestige. And this is the good guy? And making an Iron Man suit. In Amelia Perez, the former cartel leader undergoes gender reassignment and reinvents herself. But the moral trajectory is confused. The Redemption Arc overlaps uncomfortably with the legacy of violence, and there's little appetite for genuine accountability. In the Acolyte, a coven of lesbian space witches try to live their lives only for one of their ambiguously fertilized and birthed young twins to be separated by morally dubious Jedi, and then for one of the grown-up kids to fall in love with a psychopathic stranger who had earlier killed her friends, and then go stone-faced and force-choke her mental or to death.

This is being written by mentally ill millennials that are fucking addicted to SSRIs. And the reason why they write characters like this is because this is how they are in real life.

They're putting themselves into the stories. But the problem is that when Tolkien put himself into a story, he was a soldier in World War I and he was a professor at Oxford. But when these people, These people put themselves into stories. They are community college dropouts and their former Starbucks baristas.

So I wonder who's going to tell a better story of heroism. Ah, geez, I really wonder. Oh, and they're furries, too. Underpinning is what we might call the trauma theory of identity, that systemic oppression and marginalization don't just condition life outcomes. They shape inner morality. In this framing, characters like Riri Williams or Amelia Perez's ethical violations are reframed as understandable, even sympathetic. Wrong.

Look at Fight Club. Fight Club has that exact same mentality, and people loved it. The problem isn't the idea of theoretical morality inside of a society where you feel oppressed. It's about the characters being unlikable and obnoxious. And I think that you can find a lot of examples, like even Batman is kind of a good example of this as a baseline, that like you're kind of creating your own morality because the world around you won't do it. Subvert these norms doesn't therefore have to be bad. There is a horrible moral displacement. In this logic, who you are matters more than what you do.

If your identity is marked as historically marginalized, then the narrative arc doesn't need to prove virtue through. action. I think that this is also reinforced by journalism, is that I think journalists and people that are critics, like professional critics, there's like almost a toxic positivity to this where a lot of them don't want to give negative criticism or negative feedback to shows that showcase like this type of identity politics

because they feel like it's against their worldview. They're captured? Yeah, they've been completely captured. How come unpopular ideas find their ways into shows that represent pop culture in the first place. The reason why is because those unpopular ideas are very strongly motivated. In a lot of the, like historically, a lot of revolutions are not actually done by the majority of people. There's a very small minority of people that are incredibly weaponized and militant and aggressive,

and those people are the ones that actually cause things to happen. So it's because these people go out of their way to seek these power positions. That's the way, and that's the reason. why it happens. ...doesn't need to use her genius ethically to be good. Her genius exists in spite of the system. That fact alone could be treated as morally redemptive, slapping back, even if she teams up with a bunch of criminals.

This, of course, is a gross and weak abandoning of the idea of a moral compass, of innate values, and a refusal to let your circumstances dictate your behavior or skew your intent. And I think this is another big component, too, that, like, he's bringing up is that whenever you have these like subjective moral systems that are based off of like any sort of like oh well this is okay because of like my upbringing the problem also is that it limits the audience of a show like that to one specific culture like for example a movie like lord

the rings or a show like you know the lion king or i i don't know like any any old like gladiator right Like this is something that can be enjoyed by like almost every like Dragon Ball Z is another good example of this. All of these things can be enjoyed by generations of people worldwide. But whenever you create your identity and you create your struggle system around contemporary cultural identity politics, you limit the amount of audience that that show can ever even appeal to in the first place. Pretty. It really puts perspective on things, doesn't it? Not too much.

There's too much fucking perspective now. There's also an aesthetic layer, a kind of fashionable grimness. And these newer identity-driven narratives, moral ambiguity, isn't used to interrogate the self. It's used to accessorize the self. It's a vibe. These characters are often written to be cool, edgy, or unapologetic. There may also be a deeper... That's because the people that are...

writing them think that they are cool, edgy, and unapologetic. That's the reason why. It's because that's what they, that's what they, I was going to say that's what they are. That's not true. That's what they think they are. A narcissistic investment in identity itself as a form of prestige or moral high ground. In this reading, a character's identitarian life becomes a kind of Permanent rebuttal to the surrounding world. Therefore, their choices need not be judged by conventional standards. Identity becomes its own moral currency. To transgress is not to sin, but to reject an imposed morality.

Bro, like, is that Concord? Let me see. Next, we don't need more of these. Bro, they knew. Imposed morality. Yep. was never yours to begin with. If the system is rigged and irredeemable, if it isn't a level playing field, then morality itself becomes suspect. So do some dodgy shit or whatever.

I've been internalising a really complicated situation in my head. This, of course, is also a garbage outlook, because wild temptation and wrestling and the threat of resentment brimming and spelling over is a real proposition for too many people. There are multiple better ways to contest the system. through public service, creative expression and music, and on the screen, and in the John Lewis formulation of getting into good trouble. So let's look at some contrasts and how identity can be explored on screen. Get Out is not simply a horror film with racial...

It's insane the kind of problems that these people have, bro. Like, it's so, so annoying. Like, I see this with all the times with video games, too. And, like, if you just look at these people, like, if you want to find out if a game's going to be good or, not with like the story, just go find the Twitter accounts of like a few of the people that are the writers of the game. And just like, you know, if they're like posting like, yeah, I'm writing on this game, okay, well go look and see what the kind of stuff they say is. And if it's the kind

of stuff that you all know what it is, the game's going to suck. It's going to be garbage. The themes, but a savvy indictment of liberal hypocrisy disguised in civility. It builds its commentary of race relations in America into the architecture of the plot, where the polite, progressive white family are not malevolent in the avert backwards racist sense, but are exploitative in a way that is far more insidious. They admire blackness, even as they appropriate and hollow it out. Jordan Peel marries genre elements of body horror, thriller, and surrealism to thematic depth, Everything from the use of silence to the claustrophobic camera work supports the central anxiety. Being seen not as a person, but as a body, as a vessel for someone else's narrative.

Get Out doesn't shout its ideas at you. It lures you in like the armadages do, with charm and familiar. This seems like, yeah, it's about right. And then reveals the deeper rot. The whole movie is just white equals bad. I think that, like, I mean, again, a lot of things like that, I think you can explore topics like that that are mature and not necessarily have it be narrowed down to that.

I like this seems like the kind of like from like the way he's explaining it this seems like the kind of passive weird racism where it's like you know, you know there's a white family and like the black kid gets in the car and they turn on the hip hop song for him

like that kind they're like oh this one's for you right that's kind of what this seems like to me It's a decent movie, yeah. So it's like there's a degree of like patronizing bigotry of low expectations racism that's prevalent with a lot of liberal and conservative people but they think that it makes them good people

because they're trying to like help what they consider to be like a lesser class of person. Like tokenism? Yeah. It's a rare example of a mainstream success that manages to be politically biting, dramatically compelling, and wholly original. Or you could just watch Ironheart, a show containing plot armor, sociocultural armor, and literal armor, and a toe-curling trifecta, which relies on hand-by-down iconography.

Characters are archetypes of messaging, not people. Identity is a checkbox exercise. Riri Williams makes a succession of morally shitty decisions, and the show, supposed to be an affirming, stylish identity-driven exercise, ends up as a ratings calamity and moral cesspool, and its failure must really be. down to review bombing or reactionaries. What I find to be really funny about this is that there's like all of these stories about how

you have like these characters that do all this bad stuff. I think that this is like such a toxic form of representation. Meanwhile, you have guys like that one black guy that's running a red lobster now. And apparently, bro, they're cooking. So how is it that you're doing a worse job telling a story than just real life? life. Like that's the, like literally, yeah. Like, he's turning it around. Exactly. Like, that should be, like, he's 25 of these, like 35, something like that, right? And so, yeah, it's just, it's so weird that they have these problems because even in real life, you can have examples that tell a thousand times better racial stories and cultural stories. And I wouldn't even say a story's necessarily racial, right? Like, if you want to add that element into it, you have so many other great example of this in real life. And why? you doing it like this? It's so obnoxious.

Being ahead of its time or whatever. Anyway, you're to blame somehow. Or you could watch Melma, a sweet old IP desecrating and shitterly discombobulating identity farce used not for empathy or insight, but as a cynical shield for lazy writing and mean-spirited commentary,

and which drowns in its own self-referential, retarded disdain, uses identity policy. This, by the way, is 100% written by millennials. This is a millennial show right here. There it is. Politics has cudgel and gimmick

with a meta approach that comes off as snaring and self-loathing, failing both the source material and its new themes by being performatively edgy without any emotional anchor. Moonlight is a work of stunning emotional precision, a film that speaks in glances and silences.

as much as dialogue. What sets it apart as a treatment of identity is its quiet refusal to reduce its protagonist, Chiron, to a symbol. Black, poor, and gay, Chiron isn't a case study and intersectionality. He is a living, breathing character, shaped by circumstance, but not defined solely by it. The film's triptych structure, showing Chiron as a child, a teenager, and then a hardened adult allows Jenkins to explore the tension between internal identity and external performance. What does it mean to grow up in a world that punishes softness in black men? How do you protect your sense of self in such a world? Jenkins answers these questions, not with...

And you can see how kind of the difference with this is, is that, like, these are ideas and themes that transcend an individual identity group, and they transcend a generation. Like, people will be able to watch them. movie like this in like 50 years and be like, oh yeah, I can get it, right? It's more genuine, right? It's genuine. It's direct. Lisa statements, but what the gentle sway of the camera, the bath of blue light, the

halting cadences of conversation. Moonlight doesn't posture. It listens. And in doing so, like a good video game comparison is like comparing the story of like Expedition 33 versus like Assassin's Creed Shadows. or Dragon Age the Vail Guard. Not so good. His dignity to a type of experience

that cinema has really been willing to observe with such tenderness. Or you could just watch the Society of Magical Negroes which follows a young black man who was inducted into a secret organization of black people whose job is to use charm de-escalation and self-effacement to make white people feel comfortable. This is the reason, like, how, like, you set yourself up to lose.

Like, how do you expect a white person to go up to the box office and be like, yeah, can I get two for the magical story of the successful you know, like, I mean, it can't say it. Really? Thereby maintaining social harmony. The film frames this as a satirical critique

of racial dynamics, but its satire sucks, neither sharp enough to provoke thought nor funny enough to entertain, leaving it stranded in an uncanny zone of smug irony offers no meaningful alternative to the stereotype it critiques. I think that's also another really good point that he's bringing up to is that a lot of these

really bad stories hide their messaging through irony because they're afraid of being genuine. And I feel like it's kind of like you can never have a moment of like serious like storytelling without like a quip or a moment of just quick, ha ha, you know, funny, stupid little joke. It's basically like, and it makes sense for like a movie like Thor, Ragnarok. It's a fucking superhero movie, okay?

Like it's, it's supposed to be a comedy. It's a funny fucking action movie. But like whenever you're not doing that and you're still using that same formula, it just doesn't work. Replacing nuance with quirk and moral clarity for self-conscious detachment and appeals to no one. Too glib for those seeking depth. too self-congratulatory for those craving subversion and too soft for audiences who expect satire to bite and just coming across as modern bollocks with no cultural impact and somehow no balls the substance offers an extreme and confrontation and that's another part of it too a lot of the people that are writing these stories don't really understand how to write men's experiences in a way that is

like it resonates with men basically. I think this is a huge problem. And like I've noticed this a lot with stories. An identity that is thematically rich. Blending body horror, social satire, and feminist allegory. The film centers on a middle-aged actress who undergoes a grotesque cosmetic transformation. Uh-oh. Through an experimental procedure, a literal shedding of her physical self.

What sets the substance of part? heart is its willingness to plunge deep into the horror of feminine self-errasia. It doesn't just acknowledge the pressures placed on women to conform to ideals of youth, desirability and public image. It embodies them, graphically and viscerally. The horror elements aren't just stylistic flourishes. They're the natural extension of a system that devours female autonomy in the name of empowerment. It uses genre as a scalpel to dissect societal obsession with the body. The film is bold, enraged, and at times even camp. But beneath its blood so...

There's a lot of women that have this problem, like, I mean, about the idea of, like, you get older and then people treat you differently, et cetera, because, like, you're not attractive to them in the same way anymore. Like, it's actually really bad. Like, I've seen it happen. Like, I'm now, you know, I'm an old man now. And so, like, I've seen this happen to, like, multiple women over the years. And it is really sad to see.

Yeah, no, it's sad to see. What about dudes? Well, this is something that happens. primarily to women. Like, obviously, things like this happen to men and women, but this is definitely something where it's like 95, 98% of like this type of dynamic is experienced by women. Men age better? Well, men's value isn't necessarily only, like, I would say, like, if you're thinking about,

like, what, what, if you're, if you're trying to compliment a man, I think that attractiveness or appearance might be. in your top three. If you're trying to compliment a woman, attracting this appearance is probably your top three. That's just how it is. So that's the difference. Like, yeah, I mean, you just did a big save that I, I don't even know what I said. But anyway, yeah, biological value to create human offspring. Exactly. Like, that's a lot of women's, like, women have like an intrinsic innate value because they can have kids. And so whenever they're older and they're not able to have kids or for whatever reason, that's not really as viable,

then their biological value goes down in the eyes of a lot of guys. That's it. Yeah, but you use their wholesaling point? Yeah, exactly, right? To visuals are clear and disturbing questions. Or fuck it chuck-on she-hulk, attorney at law, shallow empowerment by committee,

its gender politics and tick-top deep and it dodges dramatic engagement in favor of snarky fourth-wall winks, smug-south awareness, and straw-man villains. Identity is treated like a meme template, ready to post, shallowly drawn, and gone the next day. And remember, don't lecture her about controlling her anger because she does it infinitely more than you. And if the show's tanking, just do some clumsy fuck you to the haters at the end. Trolling the trolls, get it?

It's cool because it's... Yeah, but it doesn't work because the show still goes out, out of business, and that's it. Shekel market value for women is looking good. Old equals looking less good. Yeah, it's the same reason why a lot of the people that make comments about liking older women never actually post the photos of the women that they're pretending to like. That's the reason why. And I think, again, like, just, you know, that's just the way it is.

It's biology, right? It's biology. It's just the truth. Yes, when they say older women, they're talking about 27, okay? It's reacting to your legitimate disdain. While Dallas Bias Club is nominally about the libertarian hustle, of Ron Woodroof, a straight rodeo-riding electrician

given a death sentence by an AIDS diagnosis. Its emotional core resides in the character of Rayon, a trans woman living with HIV, whose presence gradually cracks Woodruff's macho bluster and exposes the deeper moral terrain of the story. Rayon is not framed as a political statement

or sociological lesson. She's funny, tragic, wounded, and resilient. And crucially, she is allowed to be fully human Her femininity isn't exaggerated into parody, nor is her trans- I think that's also another thing is that with a lot of the characters and like these stories that are written to be basically an identity group and not a person, that's exactly what they are. They don't have any personality and they don't have anything really that they do themselves

that makes them interesting. And to the extent that they do, it's very one-dimensional and they don't have any weaknesses. Like I've noticed this a lot with like video games where like you can have certain characters and like whenever there are characters that are part of certain identity groups, you can almost guarantee that this character will be the morally good, you know, competent, correct character in most circumstances. And like, have you guys noticed that? Yeah, Mary Suze, basically, yeah, it's quite common.

Reduced to a single note source of trauma or inspiration. The film finds extraordinary pathos in the small gestures the way Rayon dresses for dignity. Her moments of maternal care towards Ron, the unbearable pain in her eyes during a visit with her disapproving father. The character is drawn with enough specificity to avoid tokenism, and her relationship with Ron transcends the predictable arc of big it, learns. And here's another reason why, too. This is another big factor. It's because the actors in this movie did a really good job doing the movie. And this is another factor that, like, isn't taken in consideration enough. is that a lot of these really shitty movies have shitty directors and shitty actors.

They suck. So, of course, the movie's going to suck. That's it. Hard carried by actors? Yeah, exactly. Well, I mean, what movie isn't, right? In almost all movies, they're hard carried by actors. Tolerance.

It becomes something messier and more truthful, a reluctant alliance, grounded and shared vulnerability. Dallas Biers Club succeeds in giving identity-based storytelling emotional head. because it doesn't isolate Rayon as other. It allows her interior life to unfold within the same moral frame as every other character. That's what makes her fate all the more devastating and meaningful. But Amelia Perez is also supposed to be about trans stuff, automatically elevating it to some kind of profound elevated status, automatically lending it some kind of gravitous and sense of meeting the moment, right?

Never mind that it's a tonal grab bag of gender, politics garbage, crime opera, and pop musical, a confused and garish visual and audio nightmare, where identity themes are rendered as surreal spectacle rather than human drama and the penis. It's so weird, isn't it? Like, it's so weird. The message of the movie is more important than a well-developed character. Yeah, I think so too. And then I think also, it's that a lot of these stories are afraid to tell compelling characters

that are in, like, negative positions. Like, they're afraid to tell compelling villain characters in a lot of different ways because they're worried that, like, people might identify with the villain, right? To Vagina song will haunt our collective memories and be a worse imposition upon our collective musical sensibility

since that time you too shoved their dreary new album onto everyone's playlist without asking. Yeah. And now that stupid fucking dog shit song is rattling around my head, and I need to go off and listen to literally anything else, heard it from my psyche.

Oh my god. By the way, just before I go, you can now find me over on Substack, where, in addition to my spluttering ramblings on popular culture, you can also find a plethora of articles on politics, society, and the wider world. But don't worry, my signature tone of disagreeable comagionly cynicism, with occasional bright spots of misguided optimism, perhaps because I was born foolish, abides there as well. If you think you'd like to sign up for a free subscription, it would really have to be. out a lot. The link is in the description.

I actually think this was a really good video. I've never seen one of his videos before. I really, I really like this. I think that he was, this was very insightful. Yeah, this is a great video. I'm going to go with my sub and give it a like. Here, I'll link it to you guys. Yeah, there you go. And optimistic fool, well, I do think that shows like this and things like this, they do burn out and they remove the, what do you call it, they remove themselves, from the market over time. I don't think it's something that happens immediately.

It doesn't happen, you know, overnight. But it's something that, you know, in like 20 years, we're probably going to see way less stories like this. And, yeah, I did really like this video. It was great. He's British. We can't trust him. Well, you know, how it is.

And, you know, like the last of us? Well, I don't know about the last of us. I'm just saying, like, in general, like progressive shows, actually villains and the writers want us to sympathize with them. Yeah, I think it's actually. just like weird, weird storytelling by weird people writing these stories. And I think that's really what the big problem is more than anything else. Is it that you have a bunch of writers and the people doing this stuff that are just fucking

weirdos. They're unlikable. They're obnoxious. They're patronizing. They're rude. They're weird. And guess what? It doesn't really go over very well with people.

That's what happens, man. Damage of food memory. Yeah. Where are the good writers? Where are the good writers? I think that there are a lot of different, there are a lot of places where there are good writers. And I think that stories do exist that have good writing. But I think that you have to find it outside of like the mainstream places.

Because I think what happens is that if you're a good writer, so think about it like this. If you're a good writer, do you actually want to go and be one of these like really big, you know, be part of like one of these really big areas? like these big production studios, or would you rather go out and do your own thing at a much smaller scale and then maybe actually be able to have some creative control over it? Like a good example of this is Expedition 33. The reason why you have good stories like that,

and this is also a big component, is because those stories aren't being told by committee. But with a lot of times nowadays, they are. And so you have these stories that, yeah, of course this isn't going to go very well because you have 17 different head writers. Literally every interview in the writers is, I didn't, I didn't see people like me in films and shows growing up.

So yeah, bro, exactly. Literally every interview with the writers is, I didn't see people like me in films and shows growing up. So I submitted my Tumblr fan fiction writings in a portfolio, and here I am. Yeah, that's the problem, isn't it? They didn't see mentally ill people? Yeah, because nobody wanted to deal with them, man.