Cuphead, Outrage, Shaun and Jen, and I, Hypocrite

What’s this? This isn’t the content usually on this blog! Why the sudden shift?

...No real reason. Just felt like doing it. I felt an urge, a need, to dive into the muddy waters of  

Response articles. We’re gonna be looking at a response video to a response video on a controversy

that shouldn’t have existed.

Source

Yeah, OK I’ll back up. Originally, this chain of events started with an outrage over people “slandering” 

the hot new video game, Cuphead, with accusations of racism, ableism and the likes. This got many 

Gamers whipped up into anger, and you may have heard of this outrage bubble a while back. Later, 

noted skull enthusiast Shaun and Jen did a video on this, and concluded that this outrage was born of 

very little, and was most likely a fabrication in order for people to keep the outrage going. A rather good

video, worth a watch.

This is where a channel titled “I, Hypocrite” comes in. A lovely chap who’s made videos such as:

Clearly, nothing wrong here. Anyway, he made a video responding to Shaun’s previously mentioned 

video, titled "Debunking Shaun's Manufactured Manufactured Cuphead Outrage". And in order to 

complete this mad cycle of responses, I figured, why not have a go at it?

Before we get into it, a few disclaimers. I have not personally played Cuphead, although at this point 

the game itself is hardly relevant to the discussion around it. I will not be covering every single point I, 

Hypocrite makes in his video. Several times it devolves into insults, movie clips, and unrelated 

tangents, so for the sake of time I will be sticking to his main arguments. Finally, I’d highly recommend 

you watch Shaun’s video, again, for the sake of clarity here. I’d also recommend you watch I, 

Hypocrite’s video, if you want to see his full argument and assurance that I’m not taking him out of 

context.

So, to begin, he first tackles Shaun’s overview of an AlphaOmegaSin video. Shaun makes the point 

that AOS is making a big fuss over people calling Cuphead “Racist and Ableist”, however, no single 

person is ever cited as saying it. It’s always “these people” who are saying it, at least, in the Alpha 

video. This is a setup to the point of the whole video, and Shaun uses it as a launching off point to 

discuss the strange lack of anyone specific claiming these things.

In order to refute this point, I, Hypocrite, makes a point of going through Twitter and finding people 

who are actually calling Cuphead racist. He pulls up a couple of tweets and threads, and claims that 

this shows that there are actually people calling Cuphead racist. He says, and I quote: “If only there

were websites known for this kind of behaviour, that we could maybe go to, and run a little search...

I guess it would behoove us to do 5 f***ing minutes of research, wouldn't it, Shaun?"

Now this is, honestly, a rather silly point to make, and it’s indicative of the larger issue Mr. Hypocrite 

will keep encountering: he keeps flat out missing the point. He hears Shaun say “Who is calling 
Cuphead racist?” finds some people using the word racist in relation to Cuphead, throws them up, 
and laughs, thinking he’s defeated Shaun already. Thing is… he’s missing the larger point.

When Shaun says “AOS is whipping his audience up over nothing”, well, that’s what he’s saying. The 

point is that Alpha (and later Ian Miles Cheong and CheekiScrump) never provide a good and proper 

source for their opposition. Alpha never points out any specific tweets or anything, and *that* is the 

point. Thing is, if you look hard enough, you can find people saying bloody well anything on Twitter. I 

could find people making a serious case for the earth being totally hollow, but a few disparate people 

on Twitter does not an opposition make. What Shaun is asking of these people is “where are the 

legitimate, well thought out arguments?”, "Who are you mad at?", and so on and so forth.

The other, larger point I want to bring up is: how would the viewers of the Alpha video know? How 

would the people who read the Scrump article know? None of these folks ever cite a specific person. 

This is the second area in which I, Hypocrite misses the point: the video is overall about these figures 

making people angry at nobody. Watch to the very end of Shaun’s video, and you’ll see that the overall 

point is this “outrage at nothing”, and that very much applies even if there are some people doing it on 

Twitter. How would the audiences know? No people were ever cited as saying it. Hypocrite is missing 

the point, and trying to play “gotcha” without thinking of the video as a whole.

So then, onto his next major point, where he moves to people calling Cuphead ableist. Hypocrite takes 

the same general tactic from last time and applies it to this point, finding people calling Cuphead 

ableist… on… Shaun’s video?

I do hope you see the issue here. It’s rather unfair to take Shaun to task over things people have said, 

y’know, after he posts his video. Because that’s when Youtube comments are posted. You can’t make 

a comment before a video exists. Just, find better sources for your “gotcha” attempts, at least, please. 

He proves nothing by only citing comments in the future. Perhaps he was attempting to make the point 

that the sentiment was out there? Even that stretch falls flat, as the comments he cites are quite 

reasonable, levelheaded expressions of disappointment with the lack of accessibility in the game. Not

much "outrage" going on here.

OK, next up: Hypocrite tackles the “game journalists are bad at games” point. He starts of by saying 

“We know game’s journalists are biased against difficulty because of this tweet from one journalist 

saying he’d stay away from Cuphead”, and then he goes through like, a few examples of people

working in games criticism who were bad at other games?

To get that 2nd point out of the way: no, a couple of games writers being bad at a couple of other 

games proves nothing, and has nothing to do with Cuphead. You’re gonna need to cite people being 

bad at Cuphead to make this point, which, of course, he never does.

Ryan Bloom's tweet is pictured here from Hypocrite's video.

Right, so, about that tweet he cited earlier. He cites one Ryan Bloom, the chief editor at a website titled

"Gaming Illustrated." What's funny about this is that I went through the site itself, and only found a
couple of articles that talked about Cuphead. What's in Your Box: Cheer to Greg is an article that says
Cuphead "lives up to every single bit of hype it built" and "Cuphead is a must have". Another article, 
Cuphead E3 Preview: Disneyesque Death Trap, gives it a "best of E3 award" and the author claims
they "can't wait to play it". This doesn't seem to be a site biased against Cuphead, in fact, it's 
praised it quite highly. Not a brilliant example of "biased journalists".

Alright, so, finally, the final point of this video, and if you could see me typing this out, you’d see me 

giggling in anticipation. I, Hypocrite makes a, how shall we say, very silly mistake here, one that reveals 

to us that he has barely looked into this issue at all.

His point here comes directly from the argument before, that games journalists are bad at games. He 

then takes an offhand comment from Shaun about “beating the game fairly easily”, and extrapolates 

from this that the real outrage from Gamers is that journalists are making a somewhat easy game 

sound much harder, and lowering the bar for the medium as a whole. And I quote: “It's not good enough
to say 'well, this game's really f***ing hard but that's OK, we like it anyway' if the game isn't actually
that difficult."

If you know anything about Cuphead, you are probably giggling just like me at this. He has 

fundamentally misunderstood this entire debacle. This whole outrage was about “Games Journalists 

are bad at games, Cuphead is hard, how will they be fair to it?” Cuphead, is, pretty universally, known 

as a hard game. That little comment Shaun made? That was a joke leading into his next statement, 

where he sarcastically talks about how it qualifies him to talk about it. You want more concrete proof 

that capital G Gamers think it’s hard? Here’s CheekiScrump referring to the game as difficult:

Obviously he's a bit off the mark here.

And I hope this speaks for itself in the end. This counterargument that I, Hypocrite has made fails to

look at the full issue, and is based of extreme amounts of extrapolating to shape the issue into

something he can use better, in his head. He misunderstands Shaun's points. He provides barely 

relevant evidence to his own points. And overall, he has crafted a very scattered, pointless video, that

proves nothing and is a great case study in how not to refute an argument. 

Thanks for reading, everyone. If you liked this stuff, I may be doing more, so look forward to that. 
Anyway, I hope you have a lovely day, and take care.