First YouTuber to receive this treatment? Preston.
Preston is an American YouTuber and he's 25 years old (though he looks about 16!). As of 2nd Feb 2020 has 4.08m subscribers on his "PrestonPlayz" channel and 754,220,348 views. (He has various other channels, such as TBNRFrags, which has 5.26m subscribers and 1,093,825,401 views, and Preston, which has 11.4m subscribers and 3,684,422,514 views.) Basically, he's a very successful guy. He was recommended to me as someone who was a Christian and didn't swear. And he doesn't. Which is good.
His PrestonPlayz channel is Minecraft, TBNRFrags has videos of various games like Modern Warfare, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, Fortnite, PUBG - shooty things basically. For the purposes of this 'review', if we can call it that, I'm going to concentrate on his PrestonPlayz channel...
There's a lot of 'pranking', which is usually being mean to his wife. Clearly it's all scripted, but the relentless mean things he does to Brianna do get a little wearing. Like blowing up her houses. Or stealing her diamonds. Also she gets trapped in prison a lot, and he has to rescue her. He does things with other family members, too, and friends. Out of all his videos, I like the base build battles the most, but the scripted things are pretty annoying.
Another thing that bothers me, apart from the pranking and stealing, is the way his wife is presented. He calls her "my wife" a lot, which is a bit weird. I can't think of many occasions I refer to my husband as "my husband". Maybe this is a cultural thing..?! And some of the things she says are just, well, I find them uncomfortable. For instance, in "7 Ways to Steal My Wife's DIAMONDS in Minecraft", Brianna says, "I love clothing stores! I love dressing up pretty! Preston likes when I dress up pretty!" Plus there's the way he keeps having to rescue her. I may be reading too much into this, but I don't like the way their marriage is presented. I don't think I'm a militant feminist. But I don't like this being presented to kids as the way things should be.
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| "Preston likes when I dress up pretty" |
As more YouTubers get married and have babies, it seems that we should be mindful of the examples they're setting our kids. Is their marriage something we can look at and say, "I want my kid to have that one day"? Stampy and Sqaishey were lovely the other day when they were talking about how they discuss SpaceDen while having cups of tea (and joking that they had to start another 'Den' series because they don't have anything else to talk about!).
There are some other things I find annoying, too. He puts a lot of adverts into his videos, for things like Deluxe Floop, his clothing line Preston's Stylez, his other channels... I don't mind when people drop a thing at the end, or the beginning even, to say they've got something new to sell, but I don't like having videos constantly interrupted with mini adverts. Obviously YouTubers have to make a living, but kids are suggestible, and if a TV programme was doing that we'd have something to say about it.
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| Just dropping in another merch push |
I have to admit that even if I didn't have all these criticisms of his videos, I would find him annoying anyway. I don't like his over enthusiastic style - it irritates me. Seb, however, finds him very funny and gives him 8/10. I'm guessing that at 8 years old, Seb is pretty much his target audience.
In conclusion, I don't mind Seb watching him without me (I know there's not going to be any really bad content), but this is not a YouTuber I can watch with him. He would drive me totally insane quite quickly. I watched a couple of hours of his videos as research for this, and that was enough to last me a lifetime.
