Although grounding videos are the main reason why the GoAnimate community became popular to this day, the bulk of flaws that they have are the reason why they're also a curse on the community, ranging from repetitive content, plagiarism, cyberbullying, excuses and criticism dismissals, and lack of creativity (compared to videos before the era of grounding). The overused jokes and toilet humor aren't exactly your best motive when it comes to entertaining a community mostly composed of kids, is it?
| Type: | An opinionated video explaining why Vyond's blessing and a curse isn't that bad |
|---|---|
| Length: | 3:37 (3 minutes and 37 seconds) |
| Created: | 12th July 2023 |
| Creator: | African Vulture |
| Status: | Unlisted |
The Truth About Grounded Videos (Why they're not that bad) is a video made by African Vulture on 12th July, 2023. It depicts Boris, the GoAnimate community's grounding god, explaining why these videos aren't really bad. However, there are flaws with the reasons/logic provided.
This page will go over the reasons documented in the video first, followed by the flaws.
1. Grounded videos, especially the "Caillou gets grounded" videos, are keeping the GA community alive.
Even though this may be true, the majority of the community isn't very creative with their ideas, and not to mention that some people end up going way too far. Examples include adding punishment days, especially those containing NSFW content.
2. They help the GoAnimate community to grow bigger and more successful for over the past 11 years.
Although the community would've been basically invisible if grounding videos didn't exist, "more successful" isn't really the right approach to take, as it caused stupid video plots to exist, such as "[character] (un)grounds [another character] and gets (un)grounded", where the plot is plagiarised every time and this can be used against or towards users (effectively cyberbullying them, regardless if they're criminals or not).
3. They help us to grow our channels, allowing them to become more popular and successful in our career with more subscribers.
The thing is, popularity doesn't always equal being the best GoAnimator out there. There are people in the community who plagiarise and copy grounding videos ad nauseam and gain tens of thousands of subscribers with zero effort put in. Weatherstar4000video and SouthParkComedian are prime examples of "quantity over quality" people who have more subscribers than they deserve because Vyonders plagiarised their content. The use of grounding videos may fall under the YouTube algorithm that people exploit to squeeze every last subscriber out of their videos. Plus, using only popular GoAnimators clearly taken from Mega Comedy World 2.0 for this example doesn't help because there are obscure GoAnimators out there that may make better grounding videos than them. Not only that, but the Vyonders are also relatively unpopular as compared to popular YouTubers we know of as the average number of subscribers for a Vyonder ranges from hundreds to thousands of subscribers and chances that they'll reach a billion subscribers is highly unlikely
4. If it weren't for grounded videos, the community would be dead and there would be no GoAnimators left.
Not exactly. Before grounding videos existed, the community was only just starting; there were GoAnimators back then but it's almost impossible to talk to anyone who had been in the community before these videos became a thing. Many people back then also barely used Comedy World, instead using themes such as the Anime Peepz theme for animations, sometimes fairly complex. If the Grounded videos didn’t exist, chances are these fairly decent videos would take their place. Back onto the main topic, the point is like saying that if the legacy video maker was unarchivable, the community would simply move on from GoAnimate for good, when in reality, a good chunk of people may continue to use Vyond Studio until they announce that they're leaving the community, and even then, others would take their place.
5. Just because they're popular with thousands or millions of views doesn't mean that they're destroying the community or its reputation.
That depends on the person that this logic is being directed to. This would be false for people like Weatherstar, Alex Kimble and Brendan Barney, because they have done certain actions that have caused the rest of the community to copy off their actions. The latter two people had filled the community with people who make GoAnimate-styled rants, all the while attempting to silence criticism completely.
6. People in the community are actually enjoying watching grounded videos.
That's basically the same as reasons 1 and 2.
7. They're funny and are for comedy and entertainment purposes.
They could be funny, but their funniness may be worn down by the repetitive trend of reusing the same script and plot repeatedly, along with taking the same actions as everyone else because of this "algorithm". Examples include: - Using the parents grounding the troublemaker for an extremely long amount of time while repeating the word "grounded"
- Using Classic Caillou (a clone of Caillou with a gray shirt) instead of the original one
- Making a Childish Dad video, along the other childish family members
- The troublemaker performing generic actions that have been done a million times before with little to no creativity (such as stealing an item from a store)
- Grounded videos with toilet humour, such as characters pooping on adults and farting in class
- Using Vyond logic to excuse the laziness of the videos
8. Some grounded videos have jokes in them.
Although they do have jokes and it's true that Samster does include jokes in his videos, it doesn't change the fact that some jokes may not be very good, especially for the community's standards.
9. The characters in the videos like Caillou, Dora, Little Bill and more are fictional cartoon characters. They're not even real and aren't meant to be taken seriously.
Unfortunately, people will end up making grounding videos of real life people online for any known reason, even if said reason is biased, unfair, or just plain wrong. For example, way too many people make grounding (and rant) videos on Roku Kun, PaperLuigi99 and Abiuth Flores and Harry Strack, instead of simply reporting the possibly disturbing videos that could be against YouTube's guidelines, and moving on. An avatar of a user is depicted as them, and there's a chance that someone could go send hate to the channel that is linked to the avatar shown, especially when they don't mean to cyberbully or do drama, in which drama is classed as cyberbullying. Plus, they make grounded videos out of various characters from little kids shows to express blind and undying hatred of because they're too old for them
10. Grounded videos are meant for disciplining the troublemakers so they would be taught a lesson for their wrongdoings.
This reason's kinda lackluster. This is because this is literally the point of grounding videos in general. It's confirmed that GoAnimators have been grounded in real life before, sometimes before joining GoAnimate in the first place. Not only that, but the troublemaker often does bad things for no reason other than for the sake of him/her getting grounded, just to learn a lesson
It got positive reviews, people in the comments say only videos with violence and gore are bad.