askchapo

I also really like how grounded they are.

There’s that video where they go visit a turbo right wing American private ranch dude gun influencer (?) and I really liked how the video slowly built up.

At the start it’s like hey guns are pretty fun and we’re not as obsessed with them and making them our identity like these crazy Americans. But we can have fun with them. They all talk and hang out and literally shoot the shit. We are all capable of being friendly with people with radically different politics if they don’t think we’re subhuman, for a little bit at least.

And then the guy pulls out this gun that was used all over the Yugoslav wars. And Aleksa is immediately brought back to reality. This device was made to kill people. This device is why his family fled to Australia because it was either that or likely death or misery or something. “Hey you’re from that area huh! Pretty cool right check this out”. As he thinks about the civilian massacres his parents did everything to have him not die in.

And these guys are dancing around with it like it’s a toy. They think it’s a fun toy to look at for him, like an American looking at a nascar toy car. Fuck!

Much more impactful than libby “guns are bad mmkay”, much more cognizant of how the disconnect between firearms-as-toys-as-identity and firearms fucking kill you is an unbelievably strange cultural phenomenon.

The video discusses much more than just that, but this is a world away from didactic video essays. I enjoy some of those but they are far too disconnected from what they talk about. Aleksa and Alex don’t need to try to present themselves as perfect or firefight their image when that illusion breaks, they’re just dudes. You can show their videos to normal ass politically uninvolved people and they’d get something out of it. You don’t need to be Perfect Theory Vanguard Man to understand that reactionary bullshit is killing us.

I’m glad the video essay boom has subsided, I want to see more people doing things like Boy Boy. I know I would be interested in doing something like that if I felt safe being open about my politics in my part of the world, also as someone who fell into a line of work that has me traveling to countries that would not appreciate my political views, countries where I have family that can also be threatened by me being too loud politically. Idk