post #4: choosing a favorite: informing matrices behind saying who's the best minecraft youtuber

   I want to begin with a note about audiences. I spend a lot of time thinking about things. Often I'm thinking about things while doing things -- e.g., watching a YouTube video, playing a game, listening to music etc. Frequently my thoughts relate to the thing i'm engaging with. . One potential hurdle to sharing my thoughts, is that the demographic or community im thinking about-- there's no guarantee they would hear the what I have to say about what I've been thinking about. . So far, between 2024 and 2025, I've put out three fnaf videos. I spent a lot of time thinking about what I said in those., but my sense is is that the communities im talking about probably wouldnt / didn't see my video. Put another way, the audience for my video would be more so composed of people , for example, who are my friends irl. Some of my friends are into fnaf, but the majority are not. In this post I want to work through some of my thoughts about categorizations of what constitutes my favorite minecrafter or who I consider to be the best minecrafter / minecraft youtuber. hitherto, i've seen at least a handful of videos taking up this point of discussion slash consideration (litigating who's the best Minecrafter). I see people debate about it or talk about people debating about it often enough for it to be a perceived (by me) trend. Generally, I've had a hard time engaging with communities online that I don't know already in person. I have pretty extreme social anxiety and putting myself out there into spaces I perceive as unknown-- that's generally been a step too far for me. An effect of this is that the people and spaces I engage with (parasocially, I suppose)-- my thoughts on these matters stay mostly with myself, even if ostensibly I try to articulate or share them. I spend a lot of time thinking about things and I like sharing my thoughts with people if I can. With all of this being said, I'll try to henceforth navigate the fact that my majority audience is unfamiliar with what i'm talking about (most of the time).

[^^ drawing of etho get surprised by creeper ^^]

     I think that's most of what I wanted to say in the preface. Anyways, this post comes as an offshoot of a video essay script I'm working on right now, which has the current working title of "being trans and divining GOD'S TRUE NAME." I presently envision this video to be a colage or kaleidoscope of thoughts on matters about truth using a bunch of different micro-scale case studies to hopefully end up saying something, via induction or whatever it takes. In one of the sections I have sketched out, I talk about a minecraft video essay about who's the best minecraft player. . Although I cite that specific video, my interest in bringing it up in the script is more related to thoughts circulating through the comment I left underneath it -- the video was a nice shorthand for some of the ideas that crystallized for me while watching it (but which I had been working through for some time prior). Anyways, in this post, I want to consider what I feel goes into someone or something being the best (with respect to a field and an orator declaring that statement). In this case, I will be saying I think EthosLab is the best Minecrafter / Minecraft YouTuber.

[^^ drawing of etho waving to camera in front of smelting array ^^]

     On its own, this declaration doesn't convey a lot of information.

     In this post I want to try and deconstruct what I mean when I say Etho is the best minecrafter and what I imagine other people say when they make similar claims. I want to start by tracing some of the frameworks for litigation Frostbyte Freeman offers in his videos on the matter (the video essay I talk about in my video is the second in his series discussing the matter). As for the field of Minecraft -- who's the best Minecrafter? -- Freeman works through several categories that he and others have proposed for to chart people across so as to gauge who's the best. This type of framework is an objective-esque methodology. Freeman says common categories people use for evaluation are such things as building skills, pvp, and redstone. Freeman proposes to add the category of "impact" as he feels the previous categories otherwise fail to screen for the likes of such figures as BdoubleO100 aka bdubs. While Freeman starts his series outlining an objective methodology, he reveals early on that he's not actually that interested in going through the process of litigating fully what it would mean to evaluate every single potential candidate along these criteria. Instead, both of his videos on the matter evolve to offer modified frameworks for how someone could consider someone else to be the best Minecrafter. I appreciate the complications Freeman brings to the initial objective categorizations. Pvp, for example, is generally evaluated as whichever player can kill the other player in pvp, that's the better player. The best pvper is thus whoever has the best mechanics, game knowledge, and ability to execute upon all of that (to be clear, these ableist criteria). Taking bdubs as an example, though, Freeman pushes back against this as the sole legitimate mode of evaluating pvp goodness. Even though bdubs mechanically sucks at pvp, Freeman views him as nevertheless a talented player in the category of pvp. In his very being bad at pvp, Freeman says that bdubs ends up accentuating the soft peculiarities that hum underneath Minecraft's various gameplay systems. When you watch bdubs pvp, every creeper and zombie becomes reimbued with threat -- the game remains a revolving cavalcade of danger and excitement. Bdubs defies the framework of mastery and relishes in timid and independent mediocrity (according to Freeman). In other words, bdubs is a pvp master because he takes what could possibly be perceived as shortcomings and time and again reconstitutes them into points to take in stride and flourish with. I appreciate this gesture greatly.

[^^ drawing of etho, yippee!! ^^]

     As much as I appreciate the insights Freeman brings to the conversation, I think he probably doesn't go far enough. To say another way: I think there's still a number of important and relevant criteria that contribute indelibly to one's choice of best minecrafter (whether they know it or not) which have yet to be mentioned in terms I've heard. I believe, and narrate to myself, that Etho is the best Minecrafter. Let me trace some things that might have happened to let me say this. I mean something specific when I say Etho is the best. Specific here does not mean one-dimensional. I sense what I mean is complex, but anchored. But what led up to this? What happened in history that let the world be like this today? (and tomorrow and yesterday?)

[^^ my drawing of dogboy etho and a sandy city llama ^^]

     Well, to jump to the quick of it, one thing I don't see discussed that often in 'who's the best Minecrafter' debates is the matter of privilege. For rekrap aka Parker to be able to spend a month building tunnels every day on the Lifesteal SMP (or for him to be on this type of SMP), for Mud Flaps to be able to spend 30 days of in real time catching tropical fish, or, most recently, for Etho to be able to spend a week building tunnels and collection systems between a dozen different trial chambers hundreds to thousands of blocks away from each other-- well, not everyone can do this. That's not a statement of physical or mental or ... ability, but of unequal access to time. If the criterion for best Minecrafter is simply that some [X person] can afford to spend [y amount of time] doing [z thing], then that's inherently classist / restrictive. By and large, most big Minecraft YouTubers are white guys with decent enough class access. (There are big non-white ∨ [logical Or operator] non-male creators too, don't get me wrong, but they are in the vast minority). While these white guys with big, successful channels-- while I'm not trying to say that they aren't skilled or that skill doesn't exist, I think it would nevertheless be rash to write out something like (class) privilege as something that informs who the greatest Minecrafter / Minecraft YouTuber is. There's no way to invent an objective categorization of skill that isn't impacted by the way Minecraft content creation has since its inception been tied to race and class and privilege. I feel like it's still fine to declare whoever you think is the best, but it might be helpful to do so while also acknowledging the circumstances that led them to where they are and that led you to where you are. For a while now, Minecraft YouTube content has been a line of work for many people. I've been watching Etho for close to a decade, if not more. For someone to be spending that much time on Minecraft and Minecraft content so continuously over so many weeks and months and years-- not everyone can do that. And yet I still think he's the best. Certainly, I place him higher than what I would colloquially categorize as clickbait content creators (I won't list any times because I sense the taxonomy would break down upon any kind of inspection). And I'm thankful that Etho has been privileged in this journey. In the sense that since he's been at it so long, he's more or less secured himself a niche (a privileged position) and thus he has much more lee way and affordance to experiment with content and form and many other things. I find his output incredibly inventive and inspiring and so many other things.

     But of course, his privilege is not invisible and sometimes I find myself having to look away so I don't have to confront the full reality of what led things to be the way that they are. I think the stereotype of Minecraft YouTubers being creeps or weirdos or otherwise getting canceled-- I think there's probably something to that. While Etho hasn't yet been publicly, loudly canceled, he still says and does things now and again that I cringe at. The biggest most recent example is in the QOTD segment from one of his Lets Play episodes from a couple months ago, Episode 588 where he talks in this video about how (paraphrasing), "oh, i'm sorry guys, i've been dealing with my family's property for a little bit recently, so I haven't had time to post or play much minecraft -- I had to deal with a homeless encampment that got set up on our grounds, and those guys were just nasty, but thankfully we called the cops, and we got them off our territory." I don't think it's super productive to list out everything problematic he or others have done, but it's important to keep them in mind. I can't personally hold Etho accountable in any kind of way, and I doubt there's much I can do to change his POV so I keep my thoughts to myself in this regard, making mental notes every now and again. Because the fact is that Etho and his videos hold an important place in my life. While surely I could find self-soothing in other places, I've developed a kind of parasocial relationship with him where watching his stuff and seeing him cameo in other people's videos fulfills an intense regulatory / soothing function for me. I find Etho (his body of work and his persona) a certainty not dissimilar to steel. That's what I write into it and that's what I need to get out of it. It's a survival mechanism. If things get dire and he does something I truly can't forgive him for, that would be painful in many ways. Painful because I've grown around him and integrated him (again, parasocially) into the rhythms of vitality that I require to maintain a functioning human body.

     The YouTuber lotodots recently made a video talking about his experience growing up watching Minecraft FNAF roleplay videos. Even though they were slop content and follow little logic, he describes how they fulfilled a vital role in anchoring his life, offering a certainty to come home to when he gets back from the stresses and compressions of school. Sometimes, for the viewer, quality is less important than impact (though impact is surely derived from quality in some kind of way). This is not, I don't think impact in the sense that Frostbite Freeman offers the term, but I think it's an important iteration to consider. When someone says someone else is the best Minecrafter, the orator is a person, and thus it's impossible for their personhood to not inform their statement. I say Etho is the best not because he's shaped content creation in any kind of way, or because TommyInnit fangirled over him when they were in an MCC together, but because of the impact he's had and continues to have on me. Of all the minecrafters out there, he's the best to do that.


     Etho is my little guy, also. I don't interact with fandom that much -- ive sometimes scrolled through Etho fan blogs on tumblr or interacted with fan edits on youtube... but my sense is that I have a kind of Fandom relation with Etho. he's my little guy. so silly. just doin his own thing (in a world where he has the privilege to do so).

[^^ drawing of etho as doggie yippee guy ^^]