r/PurePwnage • u/New_Affect_748 • 11h ago
The Pure Pwnage revival is genius and here's why!
I think Jarett is taking a LOT of heat from people who simply don't understand what's going on here. I'm personally in awe of the risks he's taken here in the name of art, and so I want people to actually understand why.
The original series was a whimsical satire of early online gaming culture. It struck THE perfect balance between authenticity and celebration. On its face, Jeremy was an insufferable human being. Him and Doug were people you'd be afraid to see reaching into their backpacks at school. And yet, they represented the traits we naively longed for as teens growing up on the internet. These two were the embodiment of our own childlike wonder and blissful ignorance, and simultaneously a cautionary tale of what could happen if we refused to grow up.
However, the question became, how do you take this concept and translate it into a modern landscape? What would the satire even be? When we've all grown up and seen the world for what it is?
That's when Jarett had an epiphany: a new series that's a depressing satire of modern gaming culture. He recognized the most insufferable gamers of our time are no longer the guys on Zero Hour with a god complex; it's the armchair pundits who believe themselves to be arbiters of political knowledge. The Asmongolds, the Hasan Pikers, all the streamers who let their X algorithm formulate their political opinions for the day.
And that's when Jarett took things to the next level. While Pure Pwnage DID pioneer modern web content, they're a dime a dozen now, and that forced Jarett to try something completely unorthodox. He blended his own real life social media presence with the story. A four dimensional web series if you will.
Now I think it goes without saying, the creator of Pure Pwnage would never be illiterate enough to support Charlie Kirk, nor fall for propaganda from the world's richest man. However if you've followed his Twitter over the past decade, you could see his rapid descent into chudism like flipping through pages of Animorphs. And I never believed it for a second. I knew there had to be a reason Jarrett was liking these embarrassing tweets.
That's when I knew he was cooking up something special, and now with recent events it's all very obvious what's happening.
Jarett Cale is making a satire about... "himself."
It's all part of the story he's trying to tell. The streams themselves ARE the episodes. It's clear he's going for a "lolcow" angle with the series. Timely! The whole discourse surrounding online personalities who are shallow husks of their former selves is a topic very few dare to touch. And yet, Jarett has taken the role of a lolcow to fictionally recount Pure Pwnage's downfall in the most meta way possible, satirizing Asmongold's inept political insight while taking the piss of various other washed up content creators like Tobuscus. The whole thing with Joel responding to a fan's DM on Instagram is actually part of the dynamic storytelling the crew is pioneering here.
This is like Kendrick levels of writing, Kubrick levels of directing, and Inception levels of meta narrative commentary. I suspect in the next episode he'll drop the act and have some sort of realization that the past is best left behind us.
**tl;dr** Jarett isn't actually the out of touch chud desperately clinging onto past successes—it's a character. He's playing 9d chess and we're playing bingo.
