Well, well, well. Take a look at this sorry tale of hubris and nonsense. The summary: Logan Paul is a popular YouTube star who went to the quite famous Aokigahara forest in Japan, a.k.a. the ‘suicide forest’, to make a video. You can tell how seriously and respectfully he took this venture by the fact that he wore a shitty Toy Story hat while doing it. He found a suicide victim’s body and filmed it and put it up on YouTube.
If, at this point, you’re not leaning back from the screen in disgust, then there is definitely something wrong with you.
I had never heard of him before today, but apparently his fan base consists mostly of kids and teenagers.
Let’s not get into how immensely hurtful it is to the family of the victim, that their loved one was used in a fucking YouTube video by this asshole to get views. And he did it to get views, make no mistake about it. Someone with a functional moral compass would have deleted the footage. He decided to display it to the world in the worst form of voyeurism imaginable. There is so much to be said about this fact alone, but I’d like to focus on another: that he decided to ‘push boundaries’ (because that is his thing, by all accounts) by walking into a place of suffering and death and treating it with the worst kind of disrespect.
It was gonna be a joke. This was all a joke. Why did it become so real?
He said that after he found the body, and I swear this makes me want to punch his stupid face in. Because this is where it becomes serious to him. Because, up to this point, he was walking through a forest where people routinely go to kill themselves, where it’s enough of a public crisis today that the authorities have put up signs and volunteers try to talk them out of it, and he treated it like a joke.
If no one can tell the difference between you being ‘edgy’ and ‘pushing boundaries’, and you simply being a vile shit-stain with the morals of a week-dead skunk, then you are an abject failure (and also a vile shit-stain etc).
Those who create media and narrative may not be obliged to make the world a better place, but by all the gods, you’ve got a responsibility to not make it any worse. This kind of edgy bullshit makes it worse. He cannot be allowed any excuse; he made the choice at every step to put his ridiculous edginess, if you can call it that, over the humanity and dignity of other people, without their consent. He treated people as disposable props in his own narrative.
I’ve never heard of him before, and now I will never forget him. May the Internet fall on his head for his crimes, and may this ‘edgy’ nonsense someday stop.