Pop Culture

Dan Gheesling is a Big Brother winner, a former Detroit Lions football coach, and a Twitch streamer, but he is most famously known as the longtime friend and collaborator of beloved Canadian internet figure Ryan “Northernlion” Letourneau. Unfortunately for Northernlion, Gheesling decided to take the U.S. Army up on a sponsorship deal recently, which saw him participating in a boot camp-style game show for his all-ages audience on Twitch, a decision Letourneau had some serious issues with.

Gheesling’s three-day-long, live-streamed stint with the U.S. Army, which began on September 16, led to him being immediately condemned by essentially every corner of Twitch. However, Northernlion was understandably silent about the matter on Twitch.

As Northernlion explained in a stream on Twitch today, however, his delayed decision to address the sponsorship was due in part to his 14-year-long friendship with Gheesling, but he also wanted to let Gheesling address the situation himself before talking about it on stream.

“You can probably tell…I’m upset,” stated Northernlion. “And I think I will be more upset as we talk about it, which I don’t mind[…]I think what it comes down to is that…the stream that he did with the U.S. Army is just unacceptable. It would be unacceptable if it was just sponsored by the Army, but steeped, head to toe, in the imagery, and making it look so awesome—It’s so far beyond the bounds of what is acceptable to me.”

As Northernlion explained, Gheesling did eventually address the fallout from his U.S. Army–sponsored Twitch streams. Unfortunately, Gheesling wasn’t particularly apologetic about promoting the idea of joining the army to the children in his Twitch chat. Gheesling did state that it was “never [his] intention to upset anyone,” but also said that he “had a job to do,” and “couldn’t breach the contract.”

Gheesling’s half-baked apology was not received well by both Twitch viewers in general and, seemingly, Northernlion himself.

“You probably didn’t have to read between the lines to know how I feel about the U.S. Army,” Northernlion continued during his stream. “Of course I hate the U.S. Army; they’re threatening to take over my country! They’re actively at war overseas, and with their own citizens.”

Likewise, Northernlion directly addressed how bizarre it is for the U.S. Army to advertise via Twitch: “We work in this insane industry. I feel like I’m on Curb Your Enthusiasm, where the first domino is ‘I’m gonna play some [The Binding of Isaac],’ and then the big domino is like…I’m denouncing the United States Army? But I have to remember that I didn’t put myself in this position—and it’s a joke. The whole thing is absurd. But also it’s serious—it’s very real. And you know it’s real, because this is where they’re doing the marketing.”

Northernlion seemed uncharacteristically shaken while addressing Gheesling’s actions, which likely prompted him to explain that the fallout from the cancelled Northernlion Supercruise in April, which Northernlion organized with Gheesling, had negatively affected his own mental health: “Taking that kind of heat fucked me up for a while. It took me a while to digest it—to return to a baseline… a different version of myself, to be honest…And I came out of it realizing that the community is made of real people, and I don’t wanna do any sort of sponsorship that’s even a few percent over the line[…]That made [the community] feel like they’re in a place that’s masquerading as a safe space, but actually is taking advantage of you.”

“Even if [Dan] thinks it’s over for him, I still think there’s a place to do the right thing,” Northernlion concluded. “I hope that he can understand that he’s an adult and he can make his own decisions…I really think, for some people, it would make a difference.”