I think part of what makes the McElroys so lovable for millennials and gen z is that they’re a REAL underdog success story. All the ones about Bill Gates and Steve Jobs starting Apple and Microsoft from sheds and Jeff Bezos starting Amazon from a shed are wrong. They all came from well-off backgrounds with upper-class privilege coming out their goddamn ears, but the brothers didn’t.
They really were just three ordinary boys from West Virginia, and if you listen to Griffin’s Florida State lecture (the whole thing’s on youtube) he talks about how rough things were for them when they started their podcast. He mentions how they were in mourning over their mother, fighting all the time, and ready to separate forever, but held on and decided not to abandon each other in the thick of it. And things were still rough, because their father had to work stupid hours at the radio station to support himself, and the brothers were trying to make it in game journalism.
And then they started MBMBaM, a goofy bad advice podcast full of improvised bits and comedy segments, and it blew up. They started TAZ, a fun D&D podcast where they played with their dad, and were able to bond together and let him retire comfortably on the revenue it generated, and now Clint oversees the TAZ graphic novel series that’s still releasing issues and spends boatloads of quality time with his three sons. Monster Factory is just a funny game stream where Justin and Griffin try to destroy character creators as much as possible, but it’s one of their biggest IPs. Their TV show was short-lived but explosively popular among their fanbase.
They sell out entire stadiums and Lin-Manuel Miranda plays them We Didn’t Start the Fire parodies as they walk on and people lose their collective minds. Tom Holland fanboys over them at SDCC. People come from all over the place to hear them perform, and that performance never got less authentic. It’s just three brothers and their dad being goofy together and trying to make each other laugh. And the laughter and love they carried for each other was so contagious that it made an entire world of people love them, too.
Maybe they’re a bit weird, and their jokes don’t always land, but they’re not always supposed to, because it really is just a tight-knit family living in the moment. And in this world where our two generations may be close to each other but horribly disadvantaged socio-economically, the idea that these three boys carved out a way for themselves through the sheer force of their own happiness out of such a dark place is more hopeful than any “millennials are killing the mayo industry” article ever written.
Joe Biden was the goddamned Vice President of the United States of America. He literally owns more than one home. His son was working as the attorney general in Delaware. And even they came to a point where they were struggling to figure out how they would be able to pay for all this without bankrupting themselves in the process. His son couldn’t even quit his job even though he had fucking brain cancer because his family needed the money, even though his illness was starting to affect his ability to work in the first place.
And Joe Biden is the same stupid fucker who thinks universal health care is a pie in the sky fever dream that most Americans don’t deserve because protecting the assets of health insurance companies is far more important for him and the Democratic establishment than anything else.
If the state of the American healthcare system is such that even a person with a reasonably well-paying job, with better health insurance than most other people are privy to, can’t afford to quit their job, even though their illness makes it increasingly difficult for them to work, because they wouldn’t be able to afford their treatment without having to get their parents to take out a second mortgage on their second house, what does this say about the state of things for literally everyone else in the country???
the grasshopper mouse of the southwestern United States looks like a standard house mouse but is almost entirely carnivorous and is known to kill and consume everything from less homicidal mice to goddamn rattlesnakes, which they kill by jumping onto the snake’s back and gnawing through its spine
those people making memes and gifs and shit of doomguy killing and beating up isabelle or whatever is just the evolved version of kids making ms paint videos of bart simpson shooting barney and elmo with a machine gun
Posts that make you realize how good you are at curating your online experience
Pokemon: *makes every Pokemon not only analogous to real world animals, but also features no real-world animals at all, realizes way too late that this creates a lot of terrible implications for how Pokemon live and people eat, and then walks a thin line between “people eat Pokemon all the time” and “no one knows where meat comes from” without fully committing to either idea*
