- Broken Base:
- Rakich's growing eco-pessimist slant in the latter half of the 2020s has divided his audience; while coming to focus more on ecological activism is arguably a logical extension of his preexisting admiration for figures like Benjamin Lay and Antonia Bird, his vegan lifestyle, and his work as an animal rights activist, he's come to adopt an increasingly angry-but-defeatist attitude and a tendency to pull it into other videos. His "I'm Not Worried About the Second Civil War" video in particular attracted a lot of attention, both because it was a seemingly intentional Bait-and-Switch to pull in the significant section of his audience that're only interested in "Checkmate Lincolnites!" and don't watch his other content, who were not expecting this sort of thing, and because he got into a couple angry fights in the video's comments. This was particularly notable in the Sexual Politics of Frankenstein video, where his digression about his own vasectomy made several arguments that verged on (or even crossed the line into) outright anti-natalism; about as unpopular and niche a philosophical position as still technically has enough of a small community willing to embrace its bleak, utter pessimism to bother giving it a name. Fans were divided as to whether this position is meant to be taken at face value, or if it's just a hypothetical being discussed in a very dark video (something Rakich himself at least suggested to be the case in a follow-up Q and A video), including whether or not it does represent a coherent thematic connection to Frankenstein by Rakich's own reading that the novel is fundamentally about the importance of personal responsibility rather than the evils of scientific hubris.
- Rakich's use of outrageous Vulgar Humor has been divisive with his "normie" audience versus the audience he has more actively pursued. While it is Rakich's signature style, in his earlier work it's mostly limited to crude verbal jokes rather than the gross-out visual gags he would become fond of (e.g. Alexis defeating Mr. Dracula with potted plant cum in episode 4 of Frozen '50s Man), and was therefore more accessible to a wider range of people. As such, the people in his audience that enjoy the campier and more vulgar sides of his work and find it to tie into his micro-budget filmmaking style nicely are usually at odds with the people that think he relies on it too heavily and that his skills at political and/or historical satire are overall more entertaining.
- Hilarious in Hindsight: "Ancient Aryans" concludes with a gag about Klaus the Nazi, who'd previously found he didn't have it in him to shoot himself as the Russian army stormed Berlin, immediately putting a gun in his mouth and pulling the trigger when Joe Rogan starts trying to talk about thoughts he’s had while high. Within the next few years, Rakich himself would begin experimenting with powerful psychedelic compounds, eventually resulting in another video, "The Stoner Apocalypticism of Terence McKenna," where he expresses frustration with those who aren't interested in listening to or willing to consider the validity of ideas produced under the influence of psychotropic drugs. (Although in-between, he took a few shots at Graham Hancock for trying to substantiate his wild claims about an ancient, super-advanced civilization that inspired myths about floods and Atlantis by doing powerful hallucinogens to gain visions of a bygone past.)
- I Am Not Shazam: A confusing example. Rakich's production company is named Atun-Shei Films after a character from his first movie Alien, Baby!, but because the company's official YouTube channel is also called Atun-Shei Films and Rakich largely is the only one who appears on it, fans will sometimes call him "Atun-Shei Films" or "Atun-Shei" when this is technically incorrectnote .
- Nightmare Fuel: Has its own page.
- Tear Jerker:
- The sad tale of Julie, the octoroon (a mostly white woman with distant black ancestry) mistress of Père Antoine Alley who died of a Tragic Dream and supposedly still haunts the place (from "Julie the Naked Ghost: A New Orleans Folktale").
- Atun-Shei's criticism of Gettysburg for its Bloodless Carnage.Atun-Shei: "When some pimply 17 year old from North Carolina got his guts torn out by shrapnel, and felt the world go dark as he stared at a patch of grass and shat himself, he did not hear Randy Edelman's rousing score in the background. He just. Fucking. Died."
- Atun-Shei remembers being part of a Pickett's Charge reenactment, seeing just how far away the Union line was, and crying as he imagined what it must've been like for a real soldier to make that long walk to their death. He eventually made it to the Union line and saw a Union reenactor who was also teared up. They shook hands and the other man said "I'm glad you're here."
- His video on the Upstairs Lounge, a gay bar in Louisiana that burned down in The '70s due to a Homophobic Hate Crime with dozens of people inside who were mocked after their deaths by the public. The way he goes into detail about how pedestrians could see the bar's patrons desperately trying to squeeze their way through the iron bars guarding the windows while their friends burned to death around them is just... so awful.
- Johnny Reb's devastated reaction when Billy Yank is killed by the mummy of Jefferson Davis, and the ending of that episode where he fully rejects the Lost Cause.
- Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Rakich's stated aim in his video on Terence McKenna is to be fair to him and take his ideas seriously, rather than dismiss or ridicule them on principle because of McKenna's heavy drug use. Nonetheless, it's extremely easy to come away from the video with the belief that McKenna's critics were basically right; that McKenna was a drug-addled crank whose writings outside of botany basically are a bunch of slipshod and half-baked nonsense based on barely- or non-existent evidence fatally undermined by McKenna's heavy bias and transparently motivated reasoning, and that McKenna's defenders (even Rakich himself, to a point) just like doing psychedelics and appreciate McKenna for trying to mainstream and legitimize them in America rather than because his work has actual merit.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/YMMV/AtunSheiFilms
Go To