I hope you'll consider subscribing to 'premium' diabolical

A hell of a lot more evil straight to your inbox.

Well, here we are. This newsletter, I hope, has been a fun, interesting, entertaining place for all of you wonderfully diabolical readers. A place to think and discuss things from a slightly different perspective than what I think many people are used to in this day and age of shrieking outrage, tribalism and the like. So I’ve finally turned on the “premium” option, and I hope you’ll consider subscribing and helping support my work.

This isn’t exactly a political newsletter, but it’s not not political either. And I suppose I have to admit that it will likely remain a place to talk about politics within the larger context of our culture and society and media and entertainment, though I’ll also be posting my movie and TV reviews here as well, and who knows what else. Eventually the diabolical podcast.

I don’t ever want to simply discuss that thing that some politician or another said or did—this isn’t a gossip rag—I want to talk about why all of it matters. About fandom and censorship and morality and history and all the rest. I don’t plan on writing deep analysis of the stimulus bill or whatever or housing policy. But I do want to talk about things like:

• The outrage mob that descended on Hogwarts Legacy developer Troy Leavitt for old videos he made in which he mildly critiqued feminists and said that GamerGate was about ethics in game journalism. This has led to him leaving his job at a AAA studio—and now his detractors, far from being satisfied by the blood they’ve spilled, are accusing him of being a “grifter” who plans to nefariously turn his misfortune into a YouTube career with a Patreon attached. Mmmmkay. Stay classy, game journalists!

• WandaVision star Elizabeth Olsen has been critiqued for using the word “gypsy” to describe her character Wanda Maximoff and her character’s wardrobe. In this piece, I talk about why context matters and how in America the word “gypsy” is a compliment—often describing hippie-like free-spirited people—not a slur.

• The decision by Dr. Seuss’s publisher to no longer publish six books with racist imagery and how it’s not actually an example of cancel culture—but it still can result in whitewashing our past.

• In a similar piece I question whether painting over a Rudyard Kipling poem and replacing it with a Maya Angelou poem actually does any good whatsoever in terms of social justice, or if we’re just (once again) whitewashing the troubling parts of our collective past. This is actually part of a larger discussion about whether or not we should remove Donald Trump from Home Alone 2, and why it’s troubling on so many levels when our first instinct is to erase the things we dislike instead of engaging with them.

• My latest piece is about the controversial video game Six Days In Fallujah and the angry, coordinated effort to have it banned.

• You get the idea. Some stuff might be a bit controversial, too, though I promise to try my best to come at every issue with as much fact and compassion as possible, even if fact and compassion are not so very prized these days.

I’d also like to post a couple of comments from readers that really struck a nerve with me and let me know that I’m hopefully on the right track with this stuff.

Here’s the first:

“I’m a liberal who’s embarrassed about woke liberalism, so your newsletter is cathartic for me. I like that you’re approaching the culture war from a level-headed position. Cancel culture and social justice grievances are ruining interactions on social media and in the workplace. Hartley Sawyer even got fired from The Flash over deleted tweets. It also sucks that the woke left is fairly dominant in mainstream video game coverage. It leads to controversies you wouldn’t imagine people caring about, like The Witcher and Kingdom Come: Deliverance not having any brown people, Giant Bomb refusing to cover KC:D because they don’t like Daniel Vavra, problematizing black characters being voiced by white actors, or the idea that masked tribesmen in Little Devil Inside are a racist stereotype. It’s annoying that Eurogamer’s review of Dead or Alive 6 is frontloaded with complaints about the overt sexuality, and that outlets stump for Anita Sarkeesian instead of critically engaging with her views. If you want pushback against this strain of liberalism, you quickly find lots of bad-faith conservative reactionaries and anti-feminists. I felt pretty discouraged until I stumbled across writers like Jesse Singal, Kat Rosenfeld, and you, Erik Kain. I hope your commentary can help promote rational discourse for everyone.”

Another:

“To tell the truth, the Hogwarts Legacy post was an unbelievable breath of fresh air. There are (no exaggeration) literally zero other people writing critically and thoughtfully about the mobbing and groupthink that goes on in video game culture - articles like your Hogwarts Legacy piece simply never happen, in part because the video game press lacks independent voices, and because anyone who steps out of line gets stomped out of existence before they can speak up.

“Seeing what was happening to the Hogwarts Legacy dude felt truly wrong to me, on a gut level - so I can't describe how cathartic it was to see your post articulating those thoughts better than I ever could.

“These days, if you want political perspective on video game culture, you have exactly two options: the hyperpartisan games press, who are perpetually engaged in competition with each other to be the wokest website of all time, OR... the histrionic, neckbeardy YouTubers like TheQuartering who gleefully spend every minute of every day complaining about the boogeyman of feminism every 4 hours.

“I think the game industry desperately needs someone like you - an independent voice who can write intelligently about these moments that we all know are unfair, but that the traditional games press is far too paralyzed to speak up about. Games writing badly needs its equivalent of a Glenn Greenwald or Bari Weiss figure: someone unafraid calmly and intelligently speak the truth about these cultural things we all see but are too afraid to speak up about.

“I think you might be that person, Erik. :)”

These—and the rest of the comments on this post—really give me hope that there’s an audience for thoughtful, conversational material and not just hyper-partisan nonsense where we try to “pwn the libs” or wax outraged about what some moderately conservative actor said on Twitter.

Other readers have had great suggestions, such as deep-dives into “the J.J. Abrams/Damon Lindelof-ization of movie-making. By that I mean the way all these movies are way over played, far to self-referential, plot heavy to the point of incomprehensibility. It's really hurt the joy of watching a movie.” And this is exactly the kind of thing I want to discuss in more entertainment/pop-culture focused pieces.

Or the hyper-sexualization of media that seems to bizarrely correlate with the dwindling sexuality of young people. Even as everyone in films and TV gets more swole, thin and sexy, the movies and TV shows we watch get more and more sexless and sanitized. Fake plastic trees in every yard. Hot people with no chemistry in every frame. Every house a McMansion that nobody’s ever lived in.

This is the kind of material you can expect to see more of here at diabolical when you subscribe. So far, all of this has been free, gratis, and I’ve earned exactly . . . zero dollars on it. A labor of love, sure, but labors of love do not put bread on the table. So I’m moving to a hybrid premium model starting now. I’ve opened up a paid subscription option where you can subscribe for $5 a month or $50 a year to read every single post here at diabolical straight to your inbox. I’ll toss in some fun perks as this newsletter evolves, including AMAs, private discussions for subscribers where we can just shoot the shit, and maybe, uh, NFTs or something. NFTs are the new thing, right? We’ll do NFTs. Burn the world down for our NFTs. (We won’t do NFTs).

Much of the content here will still be completely free, of course, but the honest to god truth is that things have not been great financially. After ten years at Forbes, a paywall and a huge collapse in SEO has devastated my traffic and my income. And it’s sort of made me realize that I should be writing more meaningful, provocative, interesting content anyways. I’ve been coasting. It’s not healthy.

Other gigs are an option, but the media landscape is looking pretty grim and most of my favorite writers are all here on Substack—I am in good company with folks like Freddie deBoer, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi and Jesse Singal (even if we don’t always agree on everything). I’ll probably write a lot more about things like Game of Thrones or video games than these guys, of course. That’s not a bad thing in my book.

I could probably go get a real job in marketing or comms or something but then, no time for writing and I’d very much like to keep writing the most engaging, interesting, hopefully entertaining stuff I’ve ever written. For you, my droogies. And for me.

So far, diabolical has been my favorite place to write since I started in this crazy business. Maybe that’s because I’m my own boss. Maybe it’s because I can say what I really mean without fear of reprisal from anyone other than the outrage mob. Maybe it’s just this super slick, clean format that Substack offers.

The point is, I’m hopeful that some of you will help support my writing so that I can focus as much as possible on creating new content here first and foremost. But know that even if you can’t afford to or just don’t care to or whatever, I understand and that’s okay. I get it. Things are tight. There are so many things to pay for and subscribe to these days.

Sure, most of them aren’t as gloriously evil as a (hopefully) nuanced newsletter where we actually discuss important issues without resorting to shouting matches and naked tribalism, but when you’re already paying for a bunch of streaming services and less exciting bills, it’s tough. I get it. I still love you.

If you want to subscribe to diabolical for a free or premium subscription, that’s awesome and I really truly do appreciate each and every one of you. Except that one guy. Screw that guy.