For those of you who aren’t caught up on all the drama, I’m about to take you back to 2016—I know, it seems like centuries ago… One of the Paul brothers, Logan, had uploaded a video entitled “THESE GLASSES CURED MY COLOR BLINDNESS” (his capitalization, not mine).
In the video, Logan tells his audience how he can’t see certain colors and that he bought a pair of glasses that will fix it. Obviously, many critics made responses to this video and it turned out Logan faked being color blind. However, he never suffered repercussions for it since the video got to 23 million views, two million likes, and he ended up gaining a lot more subscribers from it.
In one of the response videos to Logan created by a channel known as h3h3Productions, the critic Ethan Klein points out Logan didn’t need his glasses to see the different shades of his colored light lamp he had bought two months before he made the video about being “color blind.”
This was the first big thing put out by the oldest of the Paul brothers. It was made very clear as time went on that Logan was not, in fact, color blind and only made the video to gain subscribers. The person who popularized this trend was Ethan Zachery Scott, who uploaded his own video back in 2015, and he was actually color blind.
Even when you scroll through the comments on Logan’s video, you can see the small amount of outrage this video incited from people who really do suffer from being color blind. This was the very first example of Logan’s complete disregard for a real condition that affects more than 3 million people every year, according to Google statistics.
After this whole debacle, the Paul brothers weren’t mentioned again until the summer of 2017 when the second brother, Jake, started blowing up. And not for the most popular reasons. The former Disney Channel star was featured in the news and around social media for being a public nuisance and disrupting the peace of his entire neighborhood.
Though most YouTubers and other celebrities like to keep their addresses private, Jake and his fellow housemates decided to publicly post their home address on Google so their fans could stand outside their house every day of the week.
A KTLA reporterdid a story on how Jake and his Team 10 members, who were renting a house in the area, would be facing a class action public nuisance lawsuit depending on the results of a meeting between the neighbors, public officials, and police. Eventually, Jake and the rest of the Team 10 members were banned from filming near or around their home and had to move.
Many YouTubers online were outraged and frustrated with Jake and YouTube. Here was this popular, young YouTuber making ridiculously reckless videos and promoting those kinds of behaviors to his young audience and, despite complaints and threats of lawsuits, nothing was done. YouTube didn’t even want to touch Jake Paul, most likely in large part due to his popularity.
YouTubers like Jenna Marbles and Julien Solomita on their podcast, and h3h3Productions and others demanded YouTube do something to reign the crazy adult in. And, yes, I say adult because Jake Paul was twenty while these events were taking place, and he also lives on his own with seemingly no parental supervision whatsoever.
The boy should be old enough to know the difference between right and wrong and to know how to take responsibilities for his actions. At some point, even Disney Channel cut ties with Jake, though when announcing the news, Jake claimed he “moved on” from his show.
YouTuber Philip DeFranco speculated that even though the statements from both Disney Channel and Jake were polite, the decision to take Jake out of the Disney show was in large part due to the negativity he and Team 10 were facing.
Though Jake Paul continued to make a fool of himself through response videos and doing just really stupid stuff, both he and Logan sort of faded away as memes for a while. Then, sh*t hit the fan really hard for Logan at the beginning of 2018. Great way to start off the year, guy…
While on a trip to Japan, Logan and his friends went to the Aokigahara forest located on the outskirts of Mount Fuji. Now, something to note about this place is that one of its nicknames is, unfortunately, the Suicide Forest because, while the suicide rates in Japan are extremely high, many people go into the forest to kill themselves.
Another important thing to keep in mind is Logan and his friends went into a restricted area in the forest where they eventually found a dead body hanging from a tree. If Logan Paul’s intentions were to make a PSA about suicide and how it’s never an option or the answer, he could’ve stopped filming then and recorded himself back in his hotel room reflecting on the experience.
Instead, what he does is film the body, approach it, zoom in on it, and make jokes about it. The guy and his friends are seen making total assholes of themselves and have absolutely zero respect for the victim as a person. Logan pretty much just sees the man hanging from a tree as a prop to his vlog to make it more interesting.
The most disgusting things that arose from this situation was the dead body was featured in the thumbnail, the video reached 6 million views, and was featured as number ten on the trending page on YouTube. And YouTube wasn’t even the one to remove the video; Logan did.
Obviously, Logan faced a lot of backlash from this on social media but he received no criticism from his fans. After all, the video got 6 million views before he deleted it and he never lost a single subscriber. For me, that has to be the most disturbing part of this whole situation.
After getting a lot of criticism from his fellow YouTubers and news outlets, Logan issued an apology on Twitter, though not many people were very pleased with that, and he recorded another apology that he uploaded on his channel. However, some online creators thought Logan’s video apology was far less sincere and wanted YouTube to do something.
Though they were no doubt getting tweets and messages about the situation, it took YouTube a full week before they finally issued their punishment to Logan Paul which included taking him off Google Preferred—which means he’ll be making far less money in terms of ad revenue—and his projects on YouTube Red have been put on hold.
Despite YouTube’s punishment for Logan, many creators were still very upset. For the longest time, it seemed like YouTube didn’t want to punish Logan. Some compared Logan’s situation to that of Pewdiepie’s, more commonly known as Felix Kjellberg, who received a lot harsher punishment a lot faster for seemingly a lot less.
If you’re not familiar with his situation, I’d suggest going to Philip DeFranco’s channel and not Googling it considering the backlash had a lot to do with the unnecessarily negative articles written by the Wall Street Journal. In short, Felix made a bad joke and YouTube and Disney Channel ended up cutting all ties with him and holding his show “Scare Pewdiepie.” He is very much still suffering from all that and he had made a few videos on Logan’s situation, calling out YouTube for picking favorites, which they very much are.
Pretty much everything that can be said about Logan’s situation has already been said a thousand times over. But what I really want to touch on is how the fans of the Paul brothers’ are affected by all this. As mentioned before, Logan got no backlash whatsoever from his audience. He even gained subscribers either in spite of or due to all the criticism he was getting.
And even though he deleted the video from the Suicide Forest, he left up the other three videos he took while he was in Tokyo which depict him making a complete ass of himself and showing him and his friends disrespecting Japan despite him saying, “I just gotta be careful to not, like, disrespect the culture, cause Logang, Japan is all about the respect.”
After that statement, he’s seen running around with his friends in kimonos, throwing coins into a well in a temple while making a vulgar remark (wishing for “hella bitches”), throwing Poké Balls at random strangers while wearing Pokemon onesies, and buying fish, running around with them like a child, and then discarding them on a taxicab in the middle of a street.
Just from these three videos alone, we can see just how completely disrespectful and ignorant Logan was being even before he entered the Suicide Forest.
Most of the people who watch the Paul brothers are young, impressionable kids and young adults. One of the catchphrases in Logan’s videos is to “be a Maverick” which is the name of his bird and he’s seen in most of his videos running around acting like a child and, overall, being a jerk.
To Logan Paul, being “a Maverick” is simply being an asshole. And these behaviors have been indoctrinated so heavily into these kids’ minds that while Logan’s video was circulating and he was getting criticism from other people, his followers defended him. It just goes to show how much impact the Paul brothers have and how negative their influence really is.
They’ve basically brainwashed their followers into thinking these kinds of behaviors are acceptable when, in reality, no one wants to be around an obnoxious, annoying, disrespectful idiot unless they get paid to. It’s truly terrifying to think so many young people who watch Logan and Jake Paul’s videos mimic those actions in real life because they do it.
And God help anyone who says anything bad about them or else the Logang and the Jake Paulers are gonna come for you!
Ever since he uploaded the apology to YouTube two weeks ago, Logan has yet to make another video. Honestly, at this point, I think he needs to apologize to his younger fans. He needs to get back in front of the camera and apologize to his audience and say it is not okay to act like this!
Something a lot of YouTubers have talked about in the past is how they put on a sort of facade when making videos, or they pump up their energy to make the videos more enjoyable. If Logan and Jake are indeed putting on their own facades when creating content, they need to be upfront about it and say it really isn’t acceptable or cute to behave perpetually like a child.
Jake, who is twenty-one, and Logan, who is twenty-two, are adults and yet they act like children who haven’t had the parental guidance around to tell them not to behave in such an idiotic manner. And honestly, they probably haven’t had any parental guidance at all because even their father is depicted as an overgrown child in some of the videos he’s been featured in on Jake’s channel.
If Logan Paul really wants to start out fresh and try to put all this negativity behind him, he needs to start acting like a grownup and he needs to let his audience know acting so obnoxious and disrespectful isn’t funny.
During one of their Podcasts, Jenna Marbles and Julien Solomita made a good point: As a creator, you can only be responsible for so much of what your audience does. I agree with that statement a hundred percent. When you have over a million subscribers, you can’t possibly be accountable for what every single one of your fans do.
However, if you create content promoting the idea that being obnoxious, childish, and disrespectful will get people to like you, you are telling your younger audience it’s okay to be irresponsible. And since neither Logan nor Jake are telling anyone this, I’ll go ahead and say it: Acting like they do is not going to get you anywhere in life.
Just look at where it’s gotten both of them. Jake Paul was forced to move out of his home because of the uproar and danger he brought upon the neighborhood and because his neighbors got fed up with it. Logan Paul made a fool of himself in another country, was reprimanded by police, and was punished by YouTube for making a video depicting and disrespecting a suicide victim.
Nothing about what either of these boys are doing is okay, and it’s time they stop normalizing it.
