Andrew Rakich, the creator and host of the production company Atun-Shei Films, is an independent filmmaker, semi-amateur historian and YouTuber who has created and hosts several recurring series on his channel, as well as making numerous documentaries on New Orleans and New England, King Philip's War, and assorted folklore. He also sometimes creates video essays on historical films such as Braveheart.

While Rakich had been educated at the UNC School of the Arts and aspired to be a filmmaker long before he had a YouTube channel, his earliest videos were entirely for recreational purposes about topics he liked. It first began with Atun-Shei applying his background in film and history reviewing historical films and giving his opinion on how to "fix" them (and sometimes not even historical films; one video had him pleading "Please Don't Screw Up Legally Blonde 3"). Then, he decided to focus on his background as a tour guide in historical reenactments to tell anecdotes ranging from local New Orleans to Civil War-era and Old West stories in the style of a history tour guide.

However, his Breakthrough Hit came during the debate surrounding Confederate monuments that was revived in light of the racial protests in the U.S. in 2020 that the channel began to take the form it would become known for, when Atun-Shei took inspiration from ContraPoints and created "Were the Confederate Monuments of New Orleans Racist?" The extreme, vitriolic backlash he received from Confederate apologists after the release of that video led him to create the first episode of what would later become Checkmate, Lincolnites!, arguably his most famous series to this day.

In 2023, Rakich completed production on his first widely-released film, The Sudbury Devil, which premiered at the Satanic Temple World Headquarters in Salem, Massachusetts in early September of that year and was later released independently to stream on his website on December 21st, 2023.

In 2024, he announced that Atun-Shei Films had begun a new initiative to help promote smaller independent film projects by other creators which would be available for purchase on the official website, kicking things off with Magpie.

Click here for the official Atun-Shei Films YouTube channel, and click here for the official website.

Films Rakich has made:

• Alien, Baby!
• In The Wildwood
• The Sudbury Devil
• THE CORNERSTONE OF JOHNNY REB^note Technically this is the Grand Finale of Checkmate, Lincolnites!, but it's also a Big Damn Movie and one of Rakich's larger projects, so he considers it a narrative film on par with something like The Sudbury Devil
• The Vampires Of New Orleans

Works associated with the Atun-Shei Films YouTube channel

• The Abolitionists^note A documentary series about prominent activists and freedom fighters throughout history
• The Birth of an American Town^note An extensive chronicle of the history of the Massachusetts hamlet of Sudbury
• Checkmate, Lincolnites!
• DAEMONOLOGIE^note An adaptation of The Demonology of King James
• Frozen '50s Man
• The Witchfinder-General

Other

Literature

• Devils Dead And Other Stories
• The Fall Of Alla Xul

Web Videos

• Sergeant Pickle

Tropes common to Rakich and also found in his miscellaneous work:

• Accidental Misnaming: Of the apathetic bordering on malicious type. The first victim of John Brown's raid was, ironically, a free black man named Heywood Shepherd, and in 1931 the Daughters of the Confederacy put up a monument to him as an example of "good" black people who resisted the allure of abolition and equal rights to stay true to their enslavers. Rakich notes the audacity of them using his death to put words in his mouth is perfectly symbolized by the fact that not only did they incorrectly state that his death was in a principled stand against John Brown's raid (he actually thought they were common robbers and was killed by accident when both parties couldn't see each other), but they incorrectly named him as Heyward Shepherd on what was supposedly a memorial to him.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: invoked Rakich counters the often-cited claim that the famously pro-animal rights Benjamin Lay, a man who refused to even kill the bees that made his honey later in life, drank milk (there are uncontemporary claims that Lay kept domesticated animals, but Rakich says this is unlikely taking Lay's personality into consideration) by coming up with a theory bordering on Epileptic Trees describing how Lay may have been an early American drinker of plant-based nut milk and those who knew him at the time simply mistook it for animal milk. Of course, he is quick to add the disclaimer that he has no sources for this claim at all, that it's mostly based on vibes and he even throws some Self-Deprecation in there by playing a clip of Giorgio A. Tsoukalos saying "Is such a thing even possible? Yes it is" in relation to the claim.
• Anachronism Stew: In "The Forgotten Confederate Monuments of New Orleans" when going down a rabbit hole of Albert Pike conspiracy theories, he points out that text on a website claimed to be sourced from a letter Pike wrote in the 1870s uses 1920s terms like "Nazism" and "Fascism" and 1950s terms like "International Communism". The page then tries to resolve this by claiming that the already existing Illuminati invented all these movements.
  Rakich: Oh. Well, that's awfully fucking convenient.
• Ambiguously Bi: He's made references to himself having a girlfriend, and later still a fiancee and wife, but he's also deliberately inserted Homoerotic Subtext of himself and Brandon Fisichella, a fellow history YouTuber, into videos concerning him.
  Rakich: Obviously I'm not referring to you, Brandon, I mean, you have a lot of personality, I'm sure any one of your subscribers could tell you that. I mean, you've got your, like, twinky smile, and the really sharp way you dress, and that really sexy Transatlantic accent... um... guess what I'm trying to say here is, uh... (mimes the "Call Me" gesture)
• Arbitrary Skepticism: King James' 1597 treatise Daemonologie goes into detail about poltergeists, fairies, succubi, incubi, among other kinds of spirits and supernatural beings...but werewolves? Ridiculous old wives' tales!
• Argentina Is Nazi-Land: A passing mention is made in "My N@zi Roommate" that Klaus the Nazi came from Argentina to answer Atun-Shei's ad for a roommate.
• Army of Thieves and Whores: His video "America's First Conspiracy" examines the conscription practices of New England towns during King Philip's War, finding that whenever possible, social undesirables such as criminals, drunkards, vagabonds, and others were pressed into service while the sons of well-to-do, respectable families stayed home (unless they volunteered, in which case they usually became officers).
• Artifact Title: The channel's name is taken from the character "Atun-Shei the hoemaker" from Rakich's first movie, Alien, Baby!. Although the film showcases elements of many of his personal passions (The Mummy Trilogy, Nazi history, weird science fiction, classic private detective/G-men types, cannibalism), it's not incredibly relevant to his channel in general.
• Artist Disillusionment: As time has gone on, Rakich has grown increasingly more hostile to the moderate-to-right "military history nerd" section of his audience that he ended up cultivating back when he was primarily making videos about the Civil War and when Checkmate, Lincolnites! was actively releasing. In a Q&A, he describes how back when he was making things like his original Gods and Generals review, he believed that uncontroversial statements like "slavery is bad" and "Nazis are bad" were things that literally everyone watching his videos could agree on and that this would therefore be his opening to persuading them to listen to his arguments, only to be proven wrong in the comments sections of videos like that when they started to attract the attention of neo-Nazis and neo-Confederates arguing that these things were actually good. This hasn't so far turned into full-on Creator Backlash for Checkmate, Lincolnites! (in which the entire Central Theme is that people can be convinced to stop believing in incorrect ideas if they are presented with enough evidence) or any such thing, but it has caused a noticeable slant in his work where trying to argue with people who hold bad-faith ideals is presented as a meaningless waste of time that continues a Vicious Cycle at best and plays into their hands at worst.
• Artistic License – History:
  • The concept is discussed in several videos of his; in general, he's more forgiving of this than most of the YouTube history crowd, and he particularly defends Braveheart as a masterpiece of filmmaking despite its myriad inaccuracies in the details. He even made a video literally titled "No, Historical Inaccuracy in Movies DOESN'T Matter" in response to Brandon F's review of The Patriot (2000), arguing that the minutiae (weapon styles, clothing styles, etc.) usually focused on by history nerds just isn't that important in the grand scheme of things — furthermore, most people know (and don't care) that blockbuster movies aren't a great source of historical education. That said, he's less forgiving if the movie has substantial or obvious implications for modern society, such as Gods and Generals' whitewashed portrayal of American slavery, which he argues gives ammunition to modern racists and the Lost Cause movement.
  • He later came to disagree with his own assessment, feeling it was too defensive of films like Braveheart and pointing out that he himself, with limited means, was able to create a fairly accurate film about witch hunters and so big Hollywood productions really have no excuse. He also pointed out that his rebuttal of Brandon's arguments was smattered with anti-intellectualism and "let people enjoy things" sentiment without really engaging with Brandon's point that inaccurate movies and other media severely contort the general public's idea of what history was like in ways that are difficult to undo, which he actually agreed with from the beginning, especially regarding the pro-American, pro-war propagandized version of The American Revolution that The Patriot (2000) offers to its audience.
• Associated Composer: Whether on his YouTube channel or one of his larger films projects, most of Rakich's work has been scored by Dillon M. DeRosa, who can do anything from brooding and eerie horror music for The Sudbury Devil to the Frozen '50s Man theme.
• Author Appeal:
  • If his deep love for Ravenous weren't a dead giveaway, he's helpfully got a whole video about cannibalism stories in the old West. And the cheery coroner in the first episode of Frozen '50s Man can be seen enjoying a taste from a dismembered limb during an autopsy. Also, his "Were the Confederate Monuments of New Orleans Racist?" video has this gem:
    "There's no ethical consumption under cannibalism — shit!"
  • In addition to American (and Nazi) history, he has a passion for the history of film as an art and a medium, and many of his videos examine both.
  • invokedHe's a big defender of Mel Gibson as a filmmaker, arguing that his films in general, and Braveheart in particular, are landmark moments in cinematic history and deserve to be recognized as more than mindless mass entertainment, mocked and nitpicked for their Artistic License – History, or tainted by Mel Gibson's political and religious views.^noteKeep in mind that the channel's early "Fixing" videos featured a character named "Doctor von Murderall", basically a prototype of the later Klaus the Nazi character, whose dialogue consisted almost entirely of things Gibson said during his infamous diatribe during his DUI arrest. This was the basis for his impetus in his response video to Brandon F after Brandon criticized the historical inaccuracies in Gibson's films.
  • invokedHe's clearly a fan of A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones, peppering references to them throughout his videos, although like most of the fanbase he clearly doesn't hold Season 8 in very high regard.
  • He's done an extensive series of videos on King Philip's War, which he likes to remind the audience is the bloodiest war per-capita in American history despite being mostly forgotten today, and even self-published a strategy boardgame called "Flintlock and Tomahawk" about it.
  • Rakich originally hails from Wayland, Massachusetts, and most videos involving New England find an excuse to include Massachusetts in some capacity; the full title of his self-admitted favorite character, the Witchfinder-General, is "The Witchfinder-General for the Colony of Massachusetts Bay."^noteHelps that Massachusetts was home of the early Puritans, of which the Witchfinder-General is a sendoff. That being said, he's no stranger to making Hollywood New England or "Masshole" jokes purely because they're funny. In the other direction, he's clearly got a deep fascination with the unique cultural and racial background of his adopted home of New Orleans, as he used to be a tour guide in the city, knows a ton of local legends and has made countless videos breaking down various aspects of the city's history (and perhaps most obviously, it's a huge source of Creator Provincialism for The Vampires Of New Orleans).
  • He's admitted beginning to experiment with various psychedelic drugs partway through his channel's history and that they played a role in inspiring the imagery in some of his videos like "In Defense of Puritanism" and the video essay on The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect, plus The Sudbury Devil. This eventually resulted in a full video about Terence McKenna, the ethnobotanist and psychedelia advocate who brought the psilocybin mushroom to America, during which Rakich extensively discloses a timeline of his own psychedelic use and the experiences he's had while tripping.
  • An odd case of something being constantly present in a work because the creator rejects it; in various videos, such as "Why Gods and Generals Is Neo-Confederate Propaganda (And Also Sucks)", Atun-Shei explained that the reason his Civil War-related videos are dedicated to debunk the Lost Cause of the Confederacy negationist ideology is because he once actually believed in it for a while, for which he expresses deep regret.^note He would later clarify that he was never anything resembling Johnny Reb or otherwise a die-hard Lost Causer, but merely casually believed some of the historiography it presented, out of, in his words, "a healthy distrust of the government". He would also explain that he was making this clarification due to some claiming that Checkmate, Lincolnites! was created from "the fervor of the converted being the strongest", which was not his intent.
  • Rakich is a diehard environmentalist and hardcore radical vegan who wholeheartedly believes that large-scale technological upheaval will be required to stop humans from destroying the earth—and by extension themselves—before it's too late, and directly equates the consumption of factory-farmed animal flesh with eugenics and mass murder. As such, this viewpoint tends to show up in his critical analysis of media (and hence why he tends to regard movies that have a vegan or Green Aesop very fondly), and in his own works you can bet that if a character outright expresses enjoyment for eating meat they're going to be pure evil, rock-stupid or both. Interestingly, this also means that he's a huge fan and champion of the Avatar movies, believing that they have a wildly political "Earth First" message for big-budget Hollywood blockbusters and that the Mighty Whitey accusations levied at the films are missing their greater point entirely.
• Author Tract: In this Q&A, he discusses how while he views the Atun-Shei Films brand as a platform with a wide variety of content for people to choose from and doesn't want it to necessarily become subsumed by his own views, he believes that he reserves the right to make more heavily politicized content when he feels like it given that it's his own channel. This is especially apparent in videos that deal with the topic of Veganism, as he's clearly extremely passionate about animal rights and the dismantling of things like factory-farming and animal agriculture (though he also says that he still tries to present these beliefs through a provisional, informative lens).
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • While experimenting with various Union firearms (some of them authentic originals) in "Guns That Killed Racists," Andrew repeatedly encounters this trope.
    • The Gallagher Carbine is incredibly well-sealed, preventing gas leakage issues, and it had a novel idea for reusable cartridges to minimize the resupply necessary to keep soldiers armed. Unfortunately, it was too well-sealed, and as a result extracting and retaining the cartridge after firing was ridiculously difficult without specialized tools, let alone in the midst of a fight, even with a clean gun not yet covered in sticky black powder residue.
    • He expects to really like the modern 1860 Henry Repeating Rifle, with its strong reputation as an ahead-of-its-time firearm and the precursor to the famous lever-action Winchester Repeating Rifle. But he's left horribly disappointed to discover that the Henry's giant magazine size and advanced self-cocking is greatly held back by a number of very questionable design decisions, and its mechanical usage lacks a lot of quality-of-life features the Winchester would add, like a breech-loading closed magazine, a smoother lever action, or a wooden grip on the heavy single-piece milled-steel barrel so just firing it wouldn't burn his hands. Andrew ends up much more impressed by the Spencer Repeating Rifle, which, despite having half the magazine size of the Henry, proved a much more reliable repeater while firing a much larger cartridge, even if the lever action doesn't cock the hammer automatically as the Henry's does and the stock magazine follower had its own issues.
    • This is also why the U.S. Army strongly resisted equipping its entire force with repeaters before, during, and after the American Civil War; they were greatly concerned about soldiers carelessly blowing through all their ammunition, possibly out of genuine recklessness and possibly out of battle panic, and being left with severe supply issues. For better or worse, single-shot guns limited how many shots a soldier could waste.
  • invoked In "Guns That killed Redcoats", Andy deconstructs the popular myth that sharpshooters with rifled muskets attacking from cover at a great distance contributed heavily to the American victory in their War of Independence. He points out that despite looking silly to modern eyes, line infantry warfare was ultimately still a much more effective manner of combat engagement with the technology at the time than the highly specialized Long Range Fighters like Joseph Graham's famous sharpshooters, and there's even a contemporary source given of Graham himself saying that his company would basically be sitting ducks without infantry and artillery to back them up and give them a line of retreat.
• Ax-Crazy: His description of Col. Vincent "The Clawhammer" A. Witcher fits this. In the title he calls Witcher "The Civil War's Biggest Weirdo", begins the video by saying this man was renowned for his barbarity, and describes a variety of violent acts he committed both before and during the Civil War which horrified even his fellow Confederates. Of note are cases of him bashing the skulls of his enemies against rocks, which he did with hideous regularity. And for no reason anyone could discern, he did it all in a fancy "clawhammer" jacket.
• Based on a Great Big Lie: Invoked. Rakich makes a point in most of his videos covering New Orleans "ghost stories" and other folklore that almost all of them either have only a tiny kernel of truth to them or were completely made up and retold countless times by tour guides over the years. That doesn't stop him from spinning a good yarn with them, though, which is the true appeal of such ghost stories to begin with.
• Became Their Own Antithesis: Martin Delany, after a life of radical struggle for the abolition of slavery and the liberation of Black Americans, went on to eventually, in an extraordinarily shortsighted attempt at bipartisanship, endorse ex-Confederate and former slave owner Wade Hampton in the latter's bid for governor of South Carolina. His Republican allies promptly abandoned him, and Hampton immediately stabbed him in the back.
  Andrew: Because of course he did!
• Bestiality Is Depraved: In "Did Ancient Egyptians Circumnavigate Africa?", he questions what the motivations of Hanno the Navigator and his men were when attempting to capture the female gorilai (usually identified with gorillas, but possibly also chimpanzees or bonobos) from the island they had camped on. Especially since Hanno's records imply they thought of these creatures as simply hairy, ugly humans.
• Black Magic: The subject of King James' 1597 work Daemonologie, which Andrew turned into a film adaptation. The treatise was the major textual basis of the work of witchfinders in Britain and later, by extension, England's American colonies in the 17th century.
• Bling-Bling-BANG!: Indigenous Weapons and Tactics of King Philip's War showcases the decorations indigenous warriors put on their weapons during King Philip's War, including wampum inlay, accessories hanging off flintlocks, and engraving or carving warclubs. Since they were intended for combat, they were less flashy than most examples of this trope, sticking to unobtrusive decorations that would demonstrate status without sacrificing utility.
• Bloodless Carnage: One of his (many, many) criticisms of Gods and Generals. During the scene of the battle at what's most likely Miller's Cornfield (famous as the site of the bloodiest fighting at the Battle of Antietam/Sharpsburg, itself the bloodiest day of fighting in the entire war), he mocks the fact that the most obvious damage is done not to any of the men fighting, but to a soldier's water canteen ("He might get seriously dehydrated!"). He views this as irresponsible whitewashing of the scale of the violence involved in the Civil War, and in his opinion, you can't do the conflict justice without showing "rivers of blood."
• Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick: In Ancient Aryans: The History of Crackpot N@zi Archeology he lists the achievements of ancient societies (which the Nazis tried to claim as being invented by an ancient Aryan Master Race) as "writing, pyramids, aqueducts, and man-boy-love."
  Klaus the Nazi: <This is utter nonsense! Man-boy love is entirely a Greek invention!>
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: According to his "Abolitionists" series, most freedom fighters throughout history have been "huge weirdos," even setting aside questionable opinions on topics other than their personal cause celebre, since you've got to be at least a little weird to put aside the conventional wisdom of your day and espouse progressive opinions outside the Overton window. He points out one of them literally lived in a cave preaching to everyone who came by.
• Cash-Cow Franchise: invoked Defied and discussed. Rakich has stated that outside of Checkmate, Lincolnites!' ten-episode run, the only reason he would go back to debunking the Lost Cause or create hypothetical spinoffs to the show (offering up a Checkmate, Wehrmacht! adressing the myth of the clean Wehrmacht as an example) after its conclusion is if he really needed the money, since the concept is his most profitable one by far, at least on YouTube. He's also mentioned that if he could go back and do the series again, he would have stretched the series out to twenty or so episodes (the same amount of content, just in shorter videos) purely so he could have generated an even bigger nest egg to use for other projects.
• Caustic Critic:
  • Generally averted in his historical movie video essays, where he'll go out of his way to point out things that the film does well or service the film by way of better storytelling. In fact, a large aspect of "Fixing Braveheart" is rebelling against this exact type of nitpicky "This film is SO historically inaccurate!" discourse which has dominated discussion surrounding the film and propping up its myriad qualities, such as its great battle scenes and its simple but relatable story of a rural hero becoming a Rebel Leader which fundamentally works well even if it has little basis in reality and runs on Black-and-White Morality.
  • The one notable exception to this is Gods and Generals, which he goes out of his way to trash on a historical, political, directorial and artistic level because it is just that bad. Not only does Rakich despise the transparent Lost Cause apologia and revisionism rampant throughout the film, but that he believes it's also mind-numbingly dull and overwrought despite its constant attempts at melodrama. All 45 minutes of his review on it have nothing positive to say whatsoever.
• Cheap Gold Coins: Parodied in the sketch "Historically 'inspired' Fantasy Settings" when not-Geralt is told he will receive a bounty of "50 gold dragons" for killing the local ghoul. He starts confusedly picking that sum apart, saying that if it's based on real-world currencies then he's being extremely overcharged (running the number through a currency converter estimates that it would be equivalent to $30,000) just for killing a single monster.
• Celebrity Resemblance: Invoked. He (self-deprecatorially) has Johnny Reb introduce him in "Confederate DESTROYS Yankee with FACTS and LOGIC" as "the dollar-store Jaime Lannister", referencing how he bears a passing facial similarity to Nikolaj Coster-Waldau.
• Colbert Bump:
  • invokedRakich has acknowledged that his channel experienced significant growth after The Cynical Historian featured a clip from Checkmate, Lincolnites! in a video he made about the Lost Cause myth, causing his channel to rapidly start growing at a time when he really needed it to.
  • In terms of things he himself has bumped, Ravenous (1999), while not a completely unknown film, experienced a surge in popularity after his videos hailing it as a masterpiece came out.
• Could Say It, But...: While recounting his experiences with psychedelic drugs in "The Stoner Apocalypticism of Terence McKenna", he prefaces it by saying that he has never done anything illegal or done any illegal substances, but if he had, this is what would have happened to him.
• Creator Backlash: invokedHe's more or less repudiated his old Caustic Critic persona from the days when he did YouTube primarily as a hobby to a tiny audience, which shows up in his older film reviews (pre-2020, thereabouts). After making his own widely-released film and having to deal with the occasional trashing of it despite its general good reception (as well as his claim that he has good evidence that an unnamed director of one of the films he reviewed saw his review of it and wasn't happy), he's mostly moved away from doing movie reviews altogether, and when he does they're very in-depth critical analyses or very careful to avoid being too complainy (like with his review of The Northman, which he did not care for). He has now pinned a disclaimer under his Gods and Generals review saying that the video was made when his channel had a different tone and much smaller audience, linking to more up-to-date and better-articulated versions of the points he makes.
• Creator's Favorite: invokedAtun-Shei admitted in "So You Want to be a YouTuber (feat. Everyone)" that the Witchfinder-General is his favorite character/series, considering him to be the most unique character his channel has.
• Creator's Oddball: invoked Acknowledged in the introduction to his video on The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect, which discusses a work of science fiction rather than history.
• Creator Provincialism: He gives a lot of special attention to the history of New England (where he grew up) and Louisiana (where he currently lives).
• Crossover:
  • In How New England Yankees Conquered the World, Brandon F made an appearance to talk about the Revolutionary War. Later on Brandon's channel, Atun-Shei made an appearance impersonating him in "Reconsidering the Historical Films of Mr Mel Gibson".
  • Has done at least two crossover episodes with In Range TV showing the longarms used in the American Civil War and Revolution.
• Dated History: He's done this to himself on occasion when he messes things up, particularly his video correcting a number of mistakes in his first King Philip's War video.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance:
  • One of his major goals is trying to get people to understand how differently people thought and perceived the world in the past — for example, poor white Southerners who owned no slaves themselves still putting their lives on the line to defend the institution because of how vital they thought it was to a functioning society, or people afraid of witchcraft because, from their perspective, the reality of supernatural powers and events influencing the world was as obvious as the sun in the sky. This isn't done to justify or excuse said views or behavior, but instead to educate people why such things were accepted. He puts it succinctly in "The Top 10 Most Immersive Historical Movies of All Time" when discussing Barry Lyndon, a film which in his opinion is one of the best showcases of characters with the regressive cultural attitudes of their time who are still relatable:
  Rakich: The fact is, almost every person watching this video would never in a million years be able to honestly befriend anybody born before the Industrial Revolution. Harp on all you want about "The Good Old Days" and how life was "so much simpler then", and how much you'd love to fight in The American Revolution or whatever. If you could go back in time and meet your six-times-great-grandfather, he'd think that you're lazy, effeminate, and insufferable.
  • He also makes clear that The Abolitionists, while broadly positive about the figures featured on the program, will not gloss over that these people were still products of their time, and that being progressive in one area hardly makes them right about everything. The very first episode about Martin Delany delves into his problematic near-black supremacism justified by racist pseudo-science, his deeply ahistorical attempts to appropriate the culture of ancient Egypt as West African, and the fact that he was a bleeder and leecher by trade, while always seeking to put these beliefs in the context of their day, namely a white society whose own biology, anthropology, and ethnography was "a Heinrich Himmler fever dream" of white-supremacist nonsense actively trying to erase all African culture.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: In "The Sexual Politics of Frankenstein", he talks about how one of the more overlooked aspects of Frankenstein is that Victor's relationship with the creature is allegorical for neglectful and/or abusive parenting. Victor's initial creation of the monster is written uncomfortably like a rape scene, and so thus the creature's conception is a result of Victor raping nature itself as part of his desire for dominance over it. Then he literally flees taking responsibility for his "child" at every turn, which results in the deaths of multiple people as the creature gradually becomes embittered towards society and convinced that he will never be able to fit in as a human, resenting Victor for even creating him. Rakich also points out that Shelley is drawing on her own experiences with the trauma of childbirth to make the horror of the creature's existence hit harder (her mother died shortly after giving birth to her, and her own first daughter was born prematurely and died a week later, which was a massive emotional blow to her).
• Early-Installment Weirdness: It's very easy to tell which videos Rakich made at or near the start of his YouTube career, as they often cover a much broader range of topics than he's typically known for, the production value is very low and may just consist of him talking with a handful of visual aids and worst of all, he doesn't typically cite any sources, as was the case with "King Philip's War: The Most Important American War You've Never Heard Of", which he has stated he created almost entirely from memory as opposed to while actively consulting his research and sources.
• Even Evil Has Standards: The QAnon members in Episode 2 of Frozen 50s Man may be horribly prejudiced people who believe in insane conspiracy theories but even they hate Nazis. Learning their leader works for Klaus causes them to have a Heel–Face Turn and leave to go rethink their lives.
• Evilutionary Biologist: "This hotel has a dark secret" discusses the real-life example of Joseph DeJarnette, a Neo-Confederate Social Darwinist who used his insane asylum, the Western State Hospital (which was later converted into the hotel featured in the video), for sterilizing thousands of mentally ill or mentally disabled patients. Andrew also notes that, unlike common fictional depictions, DeJarnette maintained a warm, comforting bedside manner and was generally kind and gentle to his patients and sincerely believed that sterilizing them was the best way to release them into the general population, something which he thinks is even scarier than a cackling madman, since it meant he was more easily able to manipulate the people under his care and their loved ones into accepting what he was doing to them.
• Excrement Statement: In "That Time the Ladies of New Orleans Peed on Union Soldiers", the rich white women of New Orleans would make a point of harassing the occupying Union Soldiers - in particular emptying chamberpots onto the heads of Union Soldiers passing below. Since it was taboo for men to criticize high society women, even when they had valid reason to, the soldiers just accepted it. When General Benjamin Butler ignored this taboo by giving orders to treat ladies who disrespected Union Soldiers as prostitutes, it caused global outrage and cost Butler his post. The local response to the rich white ladies of New Orleans was to print Butler's face on the bottom of chamber pots. Atun-Shei reveals that the Confederate Memorial Hall still sells such chamber pots, and strongly implies he himself peed in it.
• Fashion-Victim Villain: invoked He says that Vincent "Clawhammer" Witcher got his nickname from the two-tailed coat he always wore, which made him look like the back of a clawhammer. This was a coat usually reserved for formal occasions, which meant Witcher was wearing the equivalent of a tuxedo every day.
• Franchise Original Sin: invoked His review of Gods and Generals points out that some of the film's qualities that get criticized by him were also present in its predecessor, Gettysburg, but only became serious issues for him in the follow-up.
  • He takes Gods and Generals to task for claiming that the Confederates weren't fighting for slavery, but as he acknowledges, this was also the case in Gettysburg. It was more forgivable in Gettysburg because Confederate motivations were only brought up very briefly (and could just be brushed off as the opinions of individual characters), and because the movie is devoted almost entirely to the military side of things rather than the underlying social and political factors that helped drive the war. Gods and Generals, by contrast, is full of speeches where the Confederates go out of their way to paint their cause as righteous and justified. Moreover, while Gettysburg could legitimately claim to present the events from a neutral, unbiased point of view, Gods and Generals is very clearly biased in favor of the Confederacy despite director Ron Maxwell's attempts to pretend otherwise.
  • The somewhat clumsy use of non-traditional story structure in Gods and Generals was also an issue in Gettysburg, but it wasn't as big of a problem there because there were plenty of likeable and engaging characters to get attached to. This is not the case for Gods and Generals; as the review notes, Stonewall Jackson (the closest thing the movie has to a protagonist) is a Static Character who lacks introspection, while most of the other characters are boring, underdeveloped or both.
• Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse: In his review of The Outlaw Josey Wales, he says that while he understands the bitterness many Confederate veterans felt after the war, his empathy doesn't blind him to the fact that nothing can justify the atrocities of the Ku Klux Klan and similar groups.
• Good Capitalism, Evil Capitalism: invoked He makes a distinction in "The REAL Cause of the Revolutionary War" between how the foundations of liberalism and capitalism that came about through the 1600s were an unimaginably progressive leap forward for the time and were the death knell for the objectively worse, more repressive and decrepit systems of feudalism and absolutist monarchy, the primary goal of the advancement of these systems was so that the wealthy merchant class that primarily benefitted from them could make even more money unimpeded, paving the way for economies based on destructive colonialism as well as concentrating power in the hands of an elite capital class which effectively ruled the roost, even in the areas that most closely resembled democracies like New England.
• Greater-Scope Villain: In "Freedom or Death: The Louisiana Slave Revolt of 1811", Atun-Shei describes a revolt of Louisiana slaves led by Charles Deslondes against the white planters led by Manuel Andry. Though the rebels were defeated and killed to a man, Governor Clayborne was the real victor. He used this to accelerate Louisiana's statehood and entrench the American planters as the political power in the state.
• Gun Porn: He's done a few collabs with Karl from InRangeTV examining various different firearms from various different historical wars and talking about the historical context behind them:
  • "Guns That Killed Racists" is about standard-issue (and some experimental) weaponry used by the Union Army during The American Civil War.
  • "Guns That Killed Redcoats" is about the commonplace muskets used by the colonial militias (and later the professional Continental Army) during The American Revolution.
• Gushing About Shows You Like: Ravenous (1999) is his favorite film by his own self-admission, and the two videos he's made on it so far are basically a cumulative hour and forty minutes of this, along with a heaping helping of Everyone Is Jesus in Purgatory and What Do You Mean, It's Not Political?, which he also admits he's doing to "indulge the turtleneck-wearing, NPR-listening English major who lives in [his] head with a bloated, long-winded, high-handed, eggheaded, grandiose, snooty, ostentatious, needlessly orated video essay in which [he uses] words like 'dialectic', and quote[s] from books with titles like 'The Sexual Politics of Meat'".
• He Also Did: Long before Rakich achieved internet microcelebrity fame with what is now his main channel, he had a much older channel called 12CenturyFoxProductions, which features far less serious/professional and more bizarre and shitpost-y videos like the Sergeant Pickle series and "MUST SEE - MAN POURS MILK ON HIS OWN HEAD".
• Higher Understanding Through Drugs: In "The Stoner Apocalypticism of Terence McKenna", he talks at length about McKenna's transcendentalist beliefs and how they related to the consumption of magic mushrooms, most famously a multi-week excursion to South America he went on with his brother where he swore he came this close to unlocking the secrets of the universe, and the "Stoned Ape Theory", in which he purported that human spirituality and therefore civilization was "unlocked" by early hominids tripping balls. Andy himself approaches the subject from a rationalist point of view, but also acknowledges that he's had similar experiences on his own Mushroom Sambas and to constantly belittle McKenna's wild claims in a video on him would be both obnoxious and counterproductive.
  Andy: I've absolutely no patience at all for stubborn, snobby, sober normies who roll their eyes at Terence and write him off as a drug-addled New Age guru without bothering to engage with his ideas and the revelations of entheogenic plants and fungi more generally. As far as I'm concerned, this is really disrespectful to people who have discerned profound spiritual meaning on psychedelics; this is not gonna come off like a video essay by a reddit Atheist, constantly scoffing at every idea that doesn't strictly adhere to rationalistic materialism. That would kinda be like telling the story of Moses and constantly adding insulting addendums like "He musta set that bush on fire when he was drunk!"
• Hillbilly Horrors: Andy portrays Maine as an entire state of both this and Lovecraft Country in "Did Vikings Explore New England?"
  Andy: You cross the Piscataquog River and you just get this...horrible wave of dread. It's bad enough on the I-95 corridor, but at least there you know you can escape back to Massachusetts. Go north of Bangor and it's like a fucking Cormac McCarthy novel. There's not even electricity up there. People live in houses made from human bones and mate with cave trolls in the starless dark of howling winter night—I'm not exaggerating. There are literally only 163 Dunkin' Donuts locations in the entire state.
• Historical Villain Upgrade: His documentary "In Defense of Puritanism" is an examination of how the popular image of the Puritans as backwards, austere, intolerant fanatics is a gross oversimplification that erases their more positive aspects and achievements. While there is some truth to the stereotypes, Puritanism's nature as a decentralized and non-hierarchical movement resulted in multiple schools of thought emerging under the umbrella, meaning it wasn't a monolith that can be painted with a broad brush. The prejudices many Puritans held can't be justified, but they become understandable when viewed in context and it's debatable as to whether they were actually particularly bad in practice by the standards of the era. Finally, they were pioneers of ideas like freedom of speech and equality before the law, which have become widely cherished American values, and were directly invoked by men like John Adams who themselves embraced their progressive ideals while disowning their problematic ones.
• Holiday Episode: Every year since 2019, he's released a video on Leif Erikson Day discussing the history of Erikson's expedition and the settlement of Vinland, or othrwise Viking-related content.
• Hormone-Addled Teenager: invokedThe Birth of an American Town examines how the settlers' children who reached adolescence in Sudbury, while we have no reason to doubt their religious piety, likely engaged in a lot of illicit sex due to a combination of hormones, the surprisingly sex-positive rhetoric of the Puritans (Even if they strongly condemned fornication, homosexuality and masturbation) and the fact that Sudbury's communal governance meant frequent town assemblies often left homesteads conveniently devoid of parents. Of course, this type of behavior came with the heavy risk of children born out of wedlock due to the absence of birth control, which carried severe punishment and shame with it as it branded the mother with undeniable evidence of her guilt.
• Horny Vikings:
  • Subverted in "Who was Leif Erikson?", which starts with a man claiming to be Leif Erikson arriving in armor and roaring that he came to America to pillage in the name of Odin. Once he leaves, the real Leif Erikson arrives in the normal clothes of a well-to-do Norseman, denounces the first man as an imposter, and reveals that he (the real Erikson) is a Christian Momma's Boy. The rest of the video is Atun-Shei talking about how Leif Erikson was unusually kind and harmless for an explorer.
  • This is one of his largest criticisms of The Northman; despite the fact that he's very confident that Robert Eggers is aware that Norse society was far more complex and cosmopolitan than the Victorian revival-era portrayals of angry shouting pagans leaving carnage in the wake of their longships (which drew from the writings of the people whose lands they pillaged) would have you believe, he finds it puzzling then that the film leans so hard into that ahistorical cultural stereotype despite doing so well at maintaining accuracy in all other departments.
• I'm a Humanitarian: His "Cannibals of the American West" talks about three examples of non-survival cannibalism that occurred in the American West.

  Atun-Shei Films: "What is it about the American west that makes people want to eat each other? Because it happened a lot; like, a weird amount."

• In Harmony with Nature: Heavily discussed and deconstructed in "Did Native Americans Really Live in Balance with Nature?", in which Rakich examines not only what it even means to various cultures to be "in harmony with nature", not just in the context of indigenous Americans but also Western cultures and the influence of both anthropocentrism and biocentrism on both. Does to be "in harmony with nature" mean to avoid overly damaging agricultural practices while still hunting animals and clearing land? The Algonquin tribes of New England believed so. Does it mean to turn to extreme substinence hunting as a means of survival against an onslaught of ethnic cleansing and cultural eradication? That's what the 19th-century Sioux of the Great Plains believed (and where the misunderstood habit of them using "every part of the buffalo" comes from). Overall, Rakich doesn't take a concrete stance on the very broad concept of environmentalism, only pointing out hypocrisy and fundamentally opposing schools of thought on the matter where he sees them as well as explaining the intersectionality between the issues of environmentalism and indigenous struggles for cultural preservation.
• Inspiration for the Work: invoked
  • In a Q and A, he admits that A Field in England inspired the bizarre, psychedelic visuals of In Defense of Puritanism. Well, that and tripping on actual psychedelic drugs.
  • At the end of his video on King James VI and I's Daemonologie, Atun-Shei admits to having taken inspiration from the BBC's adaptations of Shakespeare with minimalist settings for the video.
• I Surrender, Suckers!: The "road agent spin," a draw specifically designed to look like you're offering your pistol to someone, only to suddenly whirl it around and fire, as featured in The Outlaw Josey Wales. He taught himself to do it, and one of his videos is a tutorial on it.
• "It" Is Dehumanizing: In his video the validity of the portrayal of Native American cultures as being more In Harmony with Nature, while discussing the Animistic beliefs of various tribes, he points out that the Potawatomi language refers to animals as "who" opposed to "what" and with gendered pronouns as opposed to "it", reflecting their culture's recognition of animal sentience and belief that they were related as blood to humans in certain aspects. He then points out that Google Docs attempted to correct his use of "his" in reference to CRC-175 (the whale killed during the Makah whaling controversy) in the video's script to "its", reflecting English's own foundational cultural belief of human exceptionalism.
• Karma Houdini: The story of the Portuguese slave ship Arrogante and its vicious, depraved, utterly sadistic crew in "The Cannibal Slave Ship" does not have a happy ending. Despite literal hundreds of available firsthand witnesses and accounts from the Africans who had been interred as cargo on the ship of the atrocities they had suffered, the Arrogante's crew were given very preferential treatment and ultimately bailed out by a racist Kangaroo Court in Jamaica and never convicted of anything, flying in the face of the popular notion of the British Navy in this period of history as crusading abolitionists hunting down evildoers. The only one among them that seemed to suffer any consequence was the ship itself—but not before being rechristened as the Iberia and carrying out another entire transatlantic slave delivery to completion, after which she was wrecked off the coast of Cuba.
• Lampshade Hanging: "In Defense of Puritanism" points out that the iconic buckled hat was a later invention that started as a joke and is no more historically accurate than a horned viking helmet. The Witchfinder General costume still features it.
• Large Ham: several characters in the various series on the channel.
  • The Witchfinder General is more of a Cold Ham, but still chews the scenery frequently. Look no further than the Signing-Off Catchphrase he gives at the end of each video ("Thou art a wretched sinner, utterly undeserving o' God's love...")
  • Klaus the Nazi, almost constantly.
• Long List: In "How New England Yankees Conquered the World", Atun-Shei reads a list of men from the town of Gloucester, Massachusetts who died at sea. It takes him over five minutes. At the end he reveals that the list only involves men who died in 1879, and that even then, most of those men died in a single freak storm.
• Magnum Opus Dissonance: invokedDespite the fact that Rakich has stated he believes that The Witchfinder-General is his most unique and noteworthy contribution to YouTube, the numbers on his channel suggest his audience is far fonder of Checkmate, Lincolnites!, and his most viewed video of all time is ironically enough "My N@zi Roommate", a silly six-minute sketch which was almost guaranteed to be demonetized instantly due to its subject matter.
• Meaningful Release Date: He dedicated a lot of his more educational videos in 2025 to discussing The American Revolution, due to the year being the 250th anniversary of Lexington and Concord and the fateful "Shot Heard 'Round the World".
• Misaimed Fandom: Discussed in the "The Sexual Politics of ..." duology in regards to two of the most famous pieces of 19th century Gothic Horror literature, Bram Stoker's Dracula and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and the legacy they and their adaptations have left in the popular conciousness, including the many cases of Common Knowledge surrounding them.
  • invoked In "The Sexual Politics of Dracula", Rakich points out that Dracula has been co-opted in large part by the exact opposite crowd that it was meant to entertain, as the popular perception of the book as an erotic thriller which paved that way for the Vampires Are Sex Gods trope largely ignores how there is a large degree of subtext in the original book about Eastern European deviants diluting the Anglo-Saxon blood of the English by stealing their women, and that Dracula is a remoreselessly evil Hate Sink who is ultimately spared by Christian mercy.
  • invoked "The Sexual Politics of Frankenstein" makes a compelling case for how Frankenstein has gone through so much Lost in Imitation Adaptation Decay that most people now only regard it as a reactionary story about how Science Is Bad that warns against humans "playing god" and messing with the natural order. Rakich argues that the original text^note the 1818 draft of the story, as he clarifies, not the 1831 George Lucas Altered Version, despite being very seminal Sci-Fi Horror, is not really specifically about science or "natural orders" at all—it is instead a book about personal responsibility, human hierarchy, sexual liberation and the corruptive influences of society, and that most people ignore both the cultural context that the book was originally written in as well as the radical Bohemian lifestyle that Mary Shelley was living at the time.
• Mushroom Samba: In "The Stoner Apocalypticism of Terence McKenna", he describes the influence that tripping on psychedelic drugs has had on his work as well as several particularly memorable and influential trips he had, including one where he felt like he was being possessed by an Eldritch Abomination.
• The Natives Are Restless: Deconstructed by The Birth of an American Town, which goes to great lengths to describe the political, cultural and economic impeti behind the decision of the Wampanoag and Nipmuc nations to go to war with the English settlers of Massachussets Bay and Plymouth, including decades worth of getting screwed over in deals with encroaching colonists, anti-colonial leaders rising to prominence within various bands of natives and settler attempts at diplomacy generally coming up short in terms of earnestness. This gradual buildup of resentment by the Algonquin nations kicked off the bloodiest war per capita in American history, and would ultimately lead to their own near-eradication and assimilation into colonial culture.
• Nightmare Fetishist: In "Fixing The Mummy (2017)", he jokingly describes a bizarre fantasy of his where Ahmanet and Imhotep get it on while half-regenerated with scarabs crawling out of them.
• Noble Confederate Soldier: Discussed in his video on The Outlaw Josey Wales, which he believes does this trope much better than Gods and Generals. Josey's not fighting for the South or "states' rights", nor is he interested in justifying either. His beef with the Union lies solely against the Redlegs (pro-Union paramilitaries) who massacred his family and killed his surrendering men.
• Noble Savage:
  • Mostly defied in his videos on Native Americans, especially King Philip's War. While their culture is somewhat different from the white settlers', the Natives are still canny, politically-minded, and driven by most of the same things as their rivals. He's also up front and candid about the severity of the violence they often inflicted on white civilians. Rakich is vocally critical of what he sees as The New World invoking this trope through its theme of "humanity decoupling from nature," pointing out that not only were the English themselves pretty close to nature as a pre-industrial agrarian society, but that the Native peoples were every bit as much the unquestioned masters of their environment as the Europeans were of theirs.
  Rakich: Now, in fairness to the movie, if I was caught in a time warp to 17th-century Virginia, I would much rather live with the Algonquin than the English. I mean, I'd eat better, I'd have more personal freedom and I wouldn't have to constantly witness women being treated like absolute dogshit. But it would still suck, I mean, it'd be a life of backbreaking hard work, y'know, and it wouldn't mean I wouldn't have social problems either! I mean, my brother-in-law might be an asshole, or my son might be an ungrateful brat who's unfit to hold my titles, uh, the Sachem might have a grudge against me and might be trying to make my life difficult!... Just because Algonquin life was tribal doesn't mean it wasn't complex!
  • "Did Native Americans Really Live in Balance with Nature?" is a feature-length examination and discussion of this trope, particularly in regards to Native Americans being In Harmony with Nature and therefore leading a better and more sustainable life than the Evil Colonialists who nearly wiped them out. Long story short: it's hella complicated, as not only were Native Americans not a monolithic society in the slightest, but they were also humans just like white settlers--they were just as likely to initiate unsustainable practices which were bad for the environment and just as likely to put their own self-serving interests over the natural world.
• Nobody Poops: Discussed in his video essay on Terrence Malick's The New World (2005), where he criticizes the film for its highly romanticized depiction of the Powhatan people, and the idea that they "lived at peace with nature". He notes that the film avoids acknowledging some of the less glamorous aspects of "living at peace with nature"...like having to poop in a hand-dug latrine.^note  Atun-Shei notes in a few videos that he's an avid hiker who's been on several multi-day hiking excursions—meaning that he knows this experience very well.
• Obligatory Swearing: invoked The sketch "Historically 'Inspired' Fantasy Settings" examines why Low Fantasy settings often have an overuse of modern-day swear words like "fuck" when medieval people didn't really swear all that much. This is because the alternative is to use a Curse of The Ancients like "By God's Blood" (blasphemy was considered "bad language" back then far more than sexual or scatological words), which would likely sound silly to modern ears.
• One for the Money; One for the Art: invoked Rakich describes in "how i make money from "youtuber movies" that while he's not disappointed by or spiteful toward Checkmate, Lincolnites! (in fact he seems quite proud of how it turned out), he has seen it for some time as the Atun-Shei Films "piggy bank" in that it is by far his most profitable money-making venture, and that he has used it in the past as a way of funding his more "artsy weirdo" stuff with a much narrower and less profitable audience.
• Overly Narrow Superlative: In "Did Vikings Explore New England?", Rakich declares that Tales Of A Wayside Inn is "The second sexiest piece of media set in the town of Sudbury", implicitly saying that the sexiest is his own film, The Sudbury Devil, which he then immediately plays a clip from.
• Permanent Placeholder: "Atun-Shei Films" was originally just a placeholder name for his production company taken from a character in Alien, Baby! (the company's first project), but after the company's YouTube channel became famous under that name thanks to his videos, Rakich acknowledges that he's "stuck with it", in his words^note Although people have pointed out to him that it sounds nearly phonetically identical to "Horse Cock" in Turkish ("atın şeyi"), which he finds hilarious.
• Playing Up the Stereotype: In his videos on New England history, a lot of jokes about stereotypical "Massholes" (people from Massachusetts as being loud-mouthed Jerkasses who speak with Hollywood New England accents and subsist on a diet consisting entirely of Dunkin' Donuts) tend to show up in greater quantities, since Rakich himself is from the state.
• Politically Correct History: Rakich normally takes heavy umbrage with historical works that give their characters modern-day attitudes to make them more palatable for modern audiences (he disses John Smith in The New World (2005) as an "anachronistically-woke white guy"), since he feels it takes away from the authenticity of the setting and part of his main objective as a filmmaker is to make complex, interesting and relatable characters with the prejudices of their time. That being said, he is more than eager to point out the amazing exceptions to this general problem where real-life historical figures espoused ideas centuries ahead of their time, such as in the fourth episode of The Abolitionists which focuses on the radically anti-racist vegan dwarf Quaker Benjamin Lay, who was advocating for complete equal rights for all races in 1738.
• Politically Incorrect Hero: The Witchfinder-General qualifies in the unproduced script where he fights Dracula, for a forgiving definition of "hero."
• Politically Incorrect Villain:
  • Klaus the Nazi, for obvious reasons.
  • In his "Were the Confederate Monuments of New Orleans Racist?" video, Atun-Shei uses a meter to show how racist said monuments were - the lowest rating was "Innocent" (which none of the monuments were rated as) and the highest was "Hitler!". He gave the monument to the Battle of Liberty Place, which was built to commemorate the White League's violent attack on city hall, a rating of Hitler.
    Monument Inscription: "United States troops took over the state government and reinstated the usurpers but the national election november 1876 recognized white supremacy in the south and gave us our state."
• The Production Curse: invoked "The Movie that was Cursed by the Norse Gods" has Rakich retell the story of the heavily Troubled Production of Beowulf & Grendel, and how it supposedly was ascribed to the film's composer (who was also the Ásatrú high priest of Iceland at the time) accidentally laying a curse instead of a blessing on the production of the film.
• Production Foreshadowing: He talked about (in his words) the "elevator pitch" of The Vampires Of New Orleans (or at least the aspects of it that are wholly fictitious, namely his idea of a white vampire plantation owner who hunts black people in New Orleans) in a December 2022 Q&A video long before it went into actual production.
• Production Posse:invoked Atun-Shei Films is also the name of his independent film production company, and both he and it regularly collaborate with a number of the same actors, including Benton Guinness, Kendra Unique, Linnea Gregg, Randy Walker, Trent Davis, Philip Yiannopolous, Matthew Ridgon and Matthew Taylor-Raetz.
• Real Men Wear Pink:
  • When discussing "The Dark Deeds of Freydis Eriksdottir", the strict Norse ideals of masculinity are central to the saga, as Thorvald was compelled to murder Helgi and Finnbogi to affirm his manliness even though they were innocent of any wrongdoing. Atun-Shei closes the video by encouraging men to drink Cosmopolitans and practice Seiðr magic (a very feminine pursuit in Viking culture).
  Atun-Shei: What, Seiðr magic's too girly for you? Tell that to fucking Odin! Skál! *downs his own Cosmo*
  • Despite his film pedigree and obvious Author Appeal subjects being things like cannibalism, Two-Fisted Tales, Nazis unearthing ancient evil artifacts and extremely bloody and violent wars, Rakich isn't afraid to admit when he still gets teary-eyed at schmaltzy, emotional all-ages films, such as the endings of Paddington and Babe.
• Relax-o-Vision: In "The Most Fµçкed-Up Scene in Movie History", after describing and showing the scene in question from The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc where an English soldier rapes Joan's sister's corpse right outside the closet where Joan is hiding, a montage of cute dachshund pictures with uplifting music plays.
  Rakich: Whoo, I needed that.
• The Revolution Will Not Be Civilized: Subverted in "Freedom or Death: The Louisiana Slave Revolt of 1811". After the German Coast Uprising was suppressed and the rebels massacred, they were painted by the triumphant planters as bloodthirsty savages. Yet in truth the rebels only killed two people and were remarkably organized and meticulously planned in advance. Atun-shei also stated that Deslondes' two right-hand men in the revolt, Kook and Quamana, were veterans from the Akan Kingdom and were likely trained in military tactics.
• Rule of Cool: Andy criticizes The Northman for being what he feels is so spectacular that it winds up lacking in any real Emotional Torque, and that "style over substance" can't carry an entire film on its back in the way he believes was attempted here.
  Andy: Of course, the obvious answer to that "Why?" question, which you're probably muttering under your breath right now, is "Because it's fucking awesome, that's why!" But—I'm sorry, call me old-fashioned—but nothing is more awesome than being emotionally invested in a story! Spectacle without emotion is just showing off. Story should always come first!
• Run for the Border: Parodied in his video on Vincent Witcher. After his Gods and Generals review started getting brigaded by Neo-Confederates leaving nasty comments, he apparently fled to the northern Alaskan wilderness (as far north in the U.S. as possible)^note Obviously Alaska only became a part of the U.S. almost a decade after the Civil War concluded and was never a Union state during it, but Rule of Funny is meant to apply here to wait until things cooled down.
• Seasonal Rot:invoked Discussed. This is Rakich's impetus behind limiting Checkmate, Lincolnites! to just ten episodes. He points out that the scope of the series (namely debunking myths about The American Civil War) is very limited, and that if he tried to extend the series just because it's extremely popular with his audience, then he would not only run out of material very quickly but the overall quality of the series would swiftly plummet.
  Andrew: You're getting ten episodes, total. I want Checkmate, Lincolnites! to be something we can look back on fondly. I want it to end strong, like Breaking Bad, and not die a slow death, like Friends.
• Second American Civil War: "I'm Not Worried About the Second Civil War" deconstructs this trope, with Andy explaining why it's unlikely that the contemporary U.S. is going to experience another conflict along these lines using historical precedent. He explains that The American Civil War (and to a lesser extent The American Revolution before it) came about in highly specific political climates that involved competing economic systems and the primary instigators of the conflict mobilizing regional militias in ways that are completely alien to the political makeup of modern America, where the sectional divide is primarily along isolated class lines. Then it's subverted, since the video is titled "I'm Not Worried About the Second Civil War" because he's actually worried about the global violence and suffering that anthropogenic climate change will inevitably cause to the entire world as humanity speeds ever forward towards the ecocide of its own planet unless it collectively decides to radically alter almost every aspect of its current lifestyle, and the video ends on a very intentionally depressing and nihilistic note.
• The Secret of Long Pork Pies: Played for Horror because it was so thinly-veiled. In "The Cannibal Slave Ship", as one of the many countless abuses that the white slavers heaped upon the "cargo" of Arrogante that Andy describes, the primary one that the video earns its title from is when they took an African man on deck and slaughtered him. Not long after, strange meat served on rice was distributed out to the slaves, who were forced to eat it...Rakich doesn't have any source for this, but he can only imagine one of those slaves huddled in the dark forcing themselves to eat this Mystery Meat before realizing with horror that they could hear oinking and squealing up on deck, meaning that the ship's pig (and only source of normal meat) was still alive.
• Self-Deprecation:
  • In "Fixing Gettysburg: The First Day", when making an offhand comment about "the pulpy D-movies you find during deep dives on streaming services", the accompanying visual aid is an image of Alien, Baby!'s Amazon Prime listing.
  • In his review of The Northman, he claims that he's garnered a bit of a reputation as being the "dollar-store version" of Robert Eggers.
  • In "The Civil War Was A Slave Revolt", an episode of The Abolitionists examining often-overlooked aspects of African-American contributions to The American Civil War, he points out that a lot of "Union vs. Confederacy" talk about the Civil War is predominantly done by white people and that Checkmate, Lincolnites! is indeed, "some white people shit".
• Shameless Self-Promotion: Rakich has made it clear that he has absolutely no reservations about using videos aimed at his larger audience to promote his smaller or less well-known projects, such as featuring clips from Alien, Baby! in his video essays, making community posts about Frozen '50s Man and even creating a minisode of his most popular series Checkmate, Lincolnites! just to promote the wide release of The Sudbury Devil.
• Shout-Out:
  • "Ancient Aryans: The History of Crackpot N@zi Archaeology" introduces Atun-Shei recreating almost verbatim the beginning of the scene of Indiana Jones teaching a class in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Both are even dressed similarly.
  Andrew: Archeology is the search for fact, not truth. If it's truth you're interested in, there are plenty of youtube channels that teach philosophy.
  • The video footage in the first part of "In Defense of Puritanism" is a shout-out to A Field in England, which is set during the English Civil War and features similar unsettling, Deliberately Monochrome shots of an open field, characters tripping on psychedelic mushrooms, and a black circle engulfing the screen. He acknowledges the film as an inspiration in the "Ain't Nothin Cheap About These Laughs" Q&A — it, and Andrew himself indulging on psychedelic drugs.
  • Several of his videos use the Ravenous (1999) soundtrack as background music, and in the bridge segments of "Cannibals of the American West" he dresses up like and acts remarkably similar to Colonel Ives.
• Shown Their Work:
  • As any good student of history would do, he cites his sources to back up his points and claims in his videos. For example, in his Checkmate, Lincolnites! videos, he'll provide letters or diary entries written by important figures at the time to either prove his claims or disprove a point made by Johnny Reb.
  • He has also come around on this point in regards to historical accuracy in filmmaking. As Rakich sees it, directors of a film have to on some level micro-manage every tiny niggling detail about their film, including production design, and once he himself had had to contend with his own constant struggles for historical accuracy and immersion with a minimal budget while filming The Sudbury Devil, he came to the conclusion that big-budget historical movies really ought to just do the history justice if they already have the money.
• Slavery Is a Special Kind of Evil:
  • Andrew Rakich doesn't hide his disgust for the practice, and he goes further into depth on the subject in his video The Mundane Horror of American Slavery.
  Andrew: Imagine for a second a situation in your own life where you don't have that much personal agency. This might be an easier mental exercise for some of us than others, but it could be at work, or at school, just anywhere where you don't have that much control. Your boss wants you to do your job a certain way; your teacher wants that assignment in by Wednesday, and oh, by the way, it has to be double-spaced. The good news is that in our lives, at least here in the developed world, when your shift ends, when the bell rings, you're back in control; free to go to the bar and vent to your friends about your idiot boss and all the crap you had to go through at work. Even in the most benevolent of circumstances, American slaves never had that. Take that feeling, that feeling of a lack of agency of control, and imagine that you have it every moment of every day; that you were born with it, that you will die with it. Then you'll have some tiny inkling of what it might have been like to be an American slave.
  • "The Cannibal Slave Ship" goes into some of the worst, most disgusting crimes against humanity brought about by the Transatlantic Slave Trade, up to and including the titular (albeit rare) forced cannibalism that happened upon the ship Arrogante. Apparently, Rakich had a moment on his honeymoon in the Caribbean where he was suddenly filled with horror realizing that the ocean he was traveling upon was an unmarked mass grave, filled with the souls of countless slaves who had been thrown—or even thrown themselves—into its waters.
• Soapbox Sadie: The Abolitionists episode 4 deals with the radical Quaker Benjamin Lay, who became famous for his intrusive and firebrand oratorial tactics and public stunt protests. Lay was infamous even among the rather forward thinking for the eighteenth century Quakers for loudly and violently accusing them of hypocrisy because they owned slaves despite advancing women's rights, which Rakich compares to someone going into a Unitarian church in the modern day and tearing into the congregation for all driving gas-powered cars. In one infamous incident, Lay declared his refusal to eat with a slaveowner after being served by one of his slaves at dinner, got up from his seat and simply left.
  Rakich: Let's just pause to fully appreciate how drastic and frankly antisocial this principled behavior is. This is like if you went out to lunch with a vegan friend and ordered a ham sandwich, and they said "I don't associate with animal abusers", walked out, and never spoke to you again.
• Spiritual Successor: invoked The thesis of "Jurassic Park is Basically Just Frankenstein" is that Jurassic Park (1993) is a much more modern and culturally relevant film adaptation of Frankenstein than any of Frankenstein's actual film adaptations. Beyond the obvious comparisons (A scientist creates unnatural synthetic life which goes on to be uncontrollable in a testament to the unethicality and unpredictability of experimenting with nature), it and its first sequel have very similar core themes toFrankenstein's messaging about the chaos of the natural world and the folly of humankind in attempting to bring power and order to it just because they can rather than making an effort to coexist with it. Victor Frankenstein creates a monster, and it kills everyone he loves because of his inability to care for his creation. John Hammond brings dinosaurs back from the dead to serve as theme park attractions, and they prove themselves to be uncontrollable animals with a right to live.
• Succubi and Incubi: Succubi and incubi were among the most feared demons in the early modern Anglosphere, and Daemonologie goes into detail about them, albeit mostly to debunk what King James sees as ridiculous superstitions that have grown up around them.
• Switch to English: In "My N@zi Roommate", Klaus begins discussing his plans with Adolf Hitler in German, before Adolf stops him, telling him that they should practice their English if they want to blend into the modern world, and they continue the conversation in English, although they exchange some brief German phrases again after encountering Klaus's roommate.
• Symbol Swearing:
  • A video analyzing a scene from The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc is titled "The Most Fµçкed-Up Scene in Movie History."
  • Not a swear word, but the intention is the same. Due to YouTube's crackdown on Nazi content, videos on the subject (usually involving Klaus the Nazi) has "Nazi" written as "N@zi", such as "My N@zi Roommate" or "Ancient Aryans: The History of Crackpot N@zi Archaeology."
• Sympathetic Slave Owner: The Mundane Horror of American Slavery deconstructs this archetype:
  Andrew: American masters did not treat their slaves with respect and even love. They certainly thought they did, but you didn't have to be John Brown to realize that it was all a delusion. It came from this twisted sense of paternalistic responsibility that was entirely self-serving.
• A Tankard of Moose Urine: "Did Vikings Explore New England?" portrays Truly flavored vodka as this, with Andy visibly struggling to drink even a little of it and praying that his viewers at home have something better to drink for Leif Erikson Day. He still winds up drinking most of the bottle over the course of the video and is clearly already plastered when it starts.
• Take That!:
  • In several videos, such as "Why Gods and Generals Is Neo-Confederate Propaganda (And Also Sucks)" and "When Movies Were Magic", he uses Paul Blart: Mall Cop as an example of the nadir of filmmaking.
  • "Ancient Aryans: The History of Crackpot N@zi Archaeology" ends with Klaus the Nazi appearing on Joe Rogan's podcast. When Rogan starts rambling about thoughts he had while on drugs, Klaus shoots himself.
• Technician Versus Performer: In his opinion, something that scientists and historians will have to get good at in order to better combat pseudoscience and pseudohistory is being entertaining to the average viewer and embracing populism. He cites that the reason pseudohistorical ideas are spread around so well is because they're very often repeated by people who are not academics with credentials but entertainers on news podcasts or in media, and that the best way to combat that is to play them at their own game and provide facts in an interesting way while avoiding coming off as stuffy ivory-tower intellectuals, which he sees as having the opposite effect in regards to changing people's minds no matter how correct they may be. An example he gives is of senator Rand Paul riling up CDC head Dr. Anthony Fauci at a committee hearing during the COVID-19 Pandemic; no matter how justified he was to be upset at Paul's obviously personal attacks at his credentials, Fauci ended up coming across as mostly just saying "How dare you, I'm a virologist!" as opposed to answering Paul's (admittedly bad-faith) questions, and he became a lot more untrustworthy in the uninformed public eye as a result, which undermined the American scientific community's legitimate attempts to combat the virus in the US. Rakich himself has used his own channel several times to deliver what he sees as fun and educational history videos that debunk historical myths or shine light on overlooked parts of the historical record.
• That Came Out Wrong: Played for Laughs in "Fixing The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor", when defending why he thinks Nazis would be a perfect fit for the third film in The Mummy Trilogy due to its overall aesthetic and time period:
  Rakich: So I know what you're thinking. "Really, Nazis? We're doing Nazis?" Well, yeah! Nazis are frickin' awesome!
  [Beat as a graphic of the quote "'Nazis are frickin' awesome.' —Atun-Shei Films, 2018" appears on screen]
  Rakich: —BAD GUYS! They're awesome bad guys! Jesus!
• The Thing That Would Not Leave: In his video describing the tale of Julie the Naked Ghost, he briefly digresses to describe an anecdote he heard while at Mount Vernon about a man who once stayed with George and Martha Washington for six months simply because back then it was considered unspeakably rude to ask someone to leave your home even when they were clearly taking advantage of you. Rakich concludes the anecdote (complete with a "Not Making This Up" Disclaimer) by mentioning that George Washington wrote just three words in his diary when the man departed at last after six months; "He finally left".
• Uncertain Audience: invokedHe's admitted that his dream project probably doesn't have enough commercial potential given its budget to ever get made. That dream project? A Work Com about the construction of the Bent Pyramid in Ancient Egypt, where the hapless Loser Protagonist architect realizes from very early on (since pyramids need to be calculated out in advance to be constructed properly) that critical and catastrophic flaws in the pyramid's design are going to leave it looking like crap by the time it's complete. The rest of the show is him trying to hide the defects long enough to embezzle enough money to flee to another country before he's executed for his failures, blissfully unaware that he's just as likely to have been executed for his successes if it had worked out properly. Rakich has also gushed over a theoretical special episode where the Pharaoh comes to visit the worksite personally, and quickly proves to be the most Royally Screwed Up asshole imaginable, inbred to the point of near-deformity, constantly demanding to sleep with everyone's wives and having people executed for very petty reasons, with an emphasis on demonstrating how, having grown up in an extremely toxic environment where divinely ordained despotism, a god complex and the idea that the things he does are always right by virtue of he, the Pharaoh, being the one doing them have been imprinted onto his mind from a very young age, of course he's going to be just the absolute worst.
• Values Resonance: invokedDiscussed in "In Defense of Puritanism", which attempts to recontextualize the Puritan movement, not just as intolerant religious fanatics (although it also makes no bones about their flaws, nor does it attempt to excuse them), but as important thinkers in the foundations of modern liberal democracy, pushing such principles as equality before the law, democratic government by consent of the governed, universal literacy and education, and, while they often failed to properly see the humanity in other peoples, human brotherhood and human rights.
• Vikings In America: invokedEvery year on Leif Erikson day, he makes a video discussing the history of the Viking settlement of Vinland, which according to historians was probably somewhere in Newfoundland. However, in "Did Vikings Explore New England?", he explores the evidence that Vikings explored as far south as Maine and traded with the local Native Americans^note To be clear, a lot of this evidence is bogus and was essentially made up by amateur historians from New England who wanted to claim their home as having been once populated by Vikings. While most of it doesn't hold water, he points out the existence of an 11th-century coin from Norway which found its way onto a beach in Maine and had been perforated, presumably to be used as a necklace. Historians explained this away as having been the result of a Chain of Deals which migrated the coin much further south amongst the contemporary Natives, but (a very drunk) Andy declares that they don't want Vikings to have explored Maine because they hate fun, and America. He then proposes the alternate explanation that Vinland was actually in New Brunswick and the Vinlanders were basically right next door to Maine, so they could have totally explored it all the time.
• Villainous Valour:
  • The cruel slaver Manuel Andry is described as acting in this manner. His slaves tried to kill him in his bed armed with axes and knives, and despite being unarmed himself he fought his way past them and escaped his plantation. Then, despite being injured, he mustered a militia of 80 other planters and ambushed Charles Deslondes' army of 500 rebelling slaves. (A later video reexamining the revolt questions this sequence of events, noting that the only witness was Andry himself and that the physical layout of the plantation leaves more than a few questions.)
  • The "Abolitionists" episode on John Brown's raid describes the bravery of one of the marines involved in suppressing the uprising who climbed into the Harper's Ferry armoury full of armed abolitionists waiting to kill him, charged at John Brown, slashed his throat and stabbed him hard enough that his sword blade bent in two before making his escape.
• Visual Pun: While quoting at length from Albert Pike's Letters to the People of the Northern States to illustrate the deluded paternalistic racism prominent Southerners used to justify the institution of slavery (and in part to contrast Pike's eloquent, refined writing with the blunt, fevered rantings about taking over the world attributed to him by a Conspiracy Theorist later in the episode), Rakich plays footage of his dog walking around behind the quotes he's reading from. This is partly because Pike uses the metaphor of human ownership of dogs to demonstrate how in his mind the institution of slavery, although a sadly necessary evil, was tempered by human nature: the natural sympathy slavemasters felt towards their chattel, as an owner to a dog, and the unconditional affection their slaves felt back. The footage also shows Rakich's dog taking a dump and Rakich having to clean it up, to show what he thinks of this argument.
• Weak, but Skilled: In "Guns that Killed Redcoats", Karl points out that early modern firearms were still just about neck-and-neck mechanically with bows and arrows and could be outpaced by them or even hand weapons by the time of the American Revolution. For this reason, it was expected that these firearms would be used by well-trained colonial militias who could provide fire support for each other, thereby potentially winning an altercation even with a handicap of an extremely slow reload and not-so-great range. He then points out that skilled militia training is still relevant and makes a difference even today in the age of automatic and semi-automatic weapons.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Political?:
  • Invoked in "Overanalyzing Ravenous (1999)", where he makes cases for the film being anti-American, anti-capitalist, vegan propaganda, queer liberation, and feminist. Some readings were intended by the filmmakers, some are just interpretation, and some contradict the other readings to make their point.
  • invoked Rakich takes care in his review of The Northman to point out that while he has a lot of issues with the film, he does not see it as secret Nazi propaganda like some in the greater public seems to think and even points out Robert Eggers' comments describing how he tried to deliberately detach the film from the heavily mythologized "teutonic" bullshit about the Norse peoples that the Nazis misappropriated. However, he does pointed out that Misaimed Fandoms don't make themselves and a large part of the film's misunderstood nature likely comes from it indulging in Do Not Do This Cool Thing, something Rakich himself tries to avoid at all costs when portraying historical characters with Deliberate Values Dissonance.
• Wrong Insult Offence: Rakich claims that when people accuse The Sudbury Devil of ripping off Robert Eggers' work (likely referring to The Witch for also being about witchery in 17th-century New England with an emphasis on historical accuracy), he has to patiently explain to them that no, he ripped off Antonia Bird, thank you very much.^note This is also evident while watching The Sudbury Devil, as Eggers is not typically known for Splatter Horror with extremely graphic and shocking content.
• You Bastard!: Played for Laughs in "Plymouth v. Jamestown: Where is America's Homeland", in which the Witchfinder-General comes on after Atun-Shei has finished making his point to berate the audience for not donating money to the channel.