EndymionTV And SlopTube Grifting

Before I talk about Endymion, I want to start with what got me thinking about this topic in the first place. A few days ago, Twitch streamer Asmongold posted this: “Because Ghost of Yotei has been conscripted into the ‘culture war,’ it seems people are attacking and defending it based on the ‘side’ they’re on rather than the merits of the game. Tiresome and exhausting, especially when the majority of the controversy isn’t even from the game.”

Oh, really Zack? Is the culture war lens somehow illegitimate in this particular case?

His post is emblematic of the broader collapse in online discourse. Asmongold, who has spent years commenting on out-of-game controversies and identity politics, has (in this moment at least) casually pivoted to gatekeeping the current online criticism of Ghost of Yotei.

Is this amnesia? No, this is just a popular Internet personality, focused entirely on audience capture, who now requires that audience to forget everything he has ever said for just a few moments so that he can distance himself from an unstable narrative.

The dishonesty surrounding Ghost of Yotei, from both defenders and detractors, is so pervasive and performative as to defy absurdity.

EndymionTV and Surface-Level Anti-Woke Branding

The hubbub about Ghost of Yotei has given me a grand opportunity to rehash some things about the YouTuber, EndymionTV. If you’ve ever wondered how the culture war became a content farm, you need look no further than Endymion. He’s not just a symptom, he’s a blueprint.

Ostensibly, Endymion (like Asmongold) is on my side of the culture war. He says a lot of things I agree with. He calls out woke media and uses a lot of the right words and phrases. But here’s the thing about grift: just because you know the words doesn’t mean you know what they mean. Just because you can mimic what a side says doesn’t make you an expert on what that side is about.

Endymion’s content often suggests lying is fine as long as it serves the anti-woke narrative. This is something he holds in common with SmashJT. The problem with lying is that the lies eventually catch up to you and what is intended to make your side look like it is winning turns into ammunition for your opponents. Ultimately, if you’re caught lying, you’ve given them proof that your side is unserious, sloppy, and easy to dismantle.

How do you defend someone who lies without furthering their lies? This is why I wrote an article about lying to fuel your culture war gains. Lying only works when your enemies are stupid. And granted many of them are but not all of them are. Many of our enemies are good at lying which is why I can understand it is tempting to manufacture lies in return. You won’t beat the devil at his own game. There’s always a bigger fish.

Grift isn’t just a problem because it’s dishonest. It’s a problem because it’s strategically suicidal. It turns your allies into liabilities and hands your enemies the moral high ground because they can legitimately say, “We didn’t fall for that.”

Much of what I’m about to cover here, I also covered in two videos I made about 9 months ago...

Endymion presents himself as anti-woke, using titles and thumbnails saturated with tribal buzzwords to trigger algorithmic engagement. Stuff like, “THEY ARE DYING” and “DEAD AS HELL” and “BUY THE SLOP” and “EAT THE SOP.” The last two are ironic considering the clickbait nature of these very thumbnails.

This content is optimized for search engines and low-attention-span viewers who rarely watch past the first few minutes. The early portions of his videos serve as affirmation bias loops which are designed to reinforce preexisting beliefs rather than challenge or inform.

Ad Copy Disguised as Commentary

Much of Endymion’s rhetoric mimics corporate ad copy. I talked about this in my commentary about his discussion on the upcoming Star Wars Eclipse. His praise for the game’s villain and narrative structure feels rehearsed and suspiciously promotional, possibly part of a paid or incentivized campaign. Repetition of phrases like “as I was told” and “from my sources” creates a faux-insider tone that mimics marketing tactics rather than genuine critique.

While Endymion positions himself as a fighter against wokeness and a voice for the anti-DEI crowd, one questions whether he even knows what he is fighting against. In his Starfield commentary, he praises the game for limiting options to “he,” “she,” and “they,” calling it “the logical point.” But here’s the contradiction: he accepts “they/them” as valid, even while posturing against neopronouns.

What this tells me is that Endymion knows his audience dislikes pronoun discourse, so he mimics that discomfort. It’s the same rhetorical move he made in his Star Wars Eclipse coverage: signal tribal resistance, repeat emotionally charged phrases, and avoid actual analysis. So, he doesn’t understand the discourse, he just knows how to perform opposition.

Endymion exploits NPC-like tribal behavior, feeding viewers emotionally charged mantras including “diversity”, “gender identity,” “Kathleen Kennedy,” and “Disney.” He repeats words, names, or phrases without substantive analysis, creating a feedback loop of outrage and tribal validation.

This is why I suspect Endymion is still involved in marketing these products to you, albeit from an angle of negative marketing in its most cynical form. The media being attacked is still the center of attention. The outrage keeps viewers emotionally tethered to the product. They’re angry, sure, but they’re still engaged. And then comes the contradiction: viewers are told to “vote with their wallet,” while being fed a steady stream of content that keeps them in the loop, watching trailers, dissecting leaks, and reacting to every update.

This isn’t just theory, it’s a documented tactic. As AZ (HeelVsBabyFace) pointed out about the Obi-Wan Kenobi show, Ewan McGregor was obliged to record a video from his car condemning racist messages directed at co-star Moses Ingram. In the video, McGregor said, “You’re no Star Wars fan in my mind” to those sending hate.

But here’s the trick: the video wasn’t just McGregor moralizing. It was a marketing maneuver.

The moment McGregor made that statement, the content machine spun up. YouTubers reacted. Fans debated. Outrage was monetized. And suddenly, Obi-Wan Kenobi was back in the spotlight; not because of its story or craft, but because of online tribal conflict.

What is SlopTube?

Endymion leans heavily on anonymous sources to build credibility, often repeating vague claims without verification. Let me repeat: this tactic mirrors other YouTubers like Smash JT, who uses parasocial trust and unverifiable scoops to maintain audience loyalty. The illusion of insider access is used to deliver hopium and copium, reassuring viewers that change is coming if they just keep consuming.

This is part of a broader phenomenon: SlopTube.

Creators perpetuate culture war conflict for clicks rather than resolution. They don’t adhere to any consistent axioms or standards. Instead, they’re reactive, opportunistic, and ultimately insincere. The real danger here (which is apparent everywhere) is the erosion of civil discourse, the normalization of tribalism, and the commodification of outrage.

I hate almost all mainstream content on YouTube. The entire platform thrives on algorithmically engineered content that is far from meaningfully researched or critically thought about. This is also why, even though Endymion is ostensibly on “my side” of the culture war, I feel the need to critique his content for what it is: grift. SlopTube.

Performative Content Disgusied as Insider Reporting

Another tactic EndymionTV regularly employs, like so many others in the content mill, is leveraging Steam rankings and metrics as if they’re definitive indicators of cultural victory. I’ve criticized this same superficial methodology in the work of Dr. Disaster. The issue isn’t the numbers themselves, it’s the culture war framing layered on top which is designed to make you feel like “your side” is winning. There’s no reflection on how volatile or context-dependent these figures actually are. They’re presented without nuance, as hard proof of success or failure, when in reality they’re just snapshots in a constantly shifting landscape.

For Endymion, he references conflicting data (e.g., refund rumors vs. top seller status) without investigating or verifying. For instance, he compared Indiana Jones’ reported 4 million copies sold to Steam’s estimated 36,000 units, implying that Game Pass downloads were inflating the numbers. Yet he failed to apply the same scrutiny to KCD2, treating metrics as definitive proof of success or failure.

There’s a reason the anti-woke grift relies so heavily on metrics, leaks, and sock puppet “insiders.” It’s because it refuses to subsist on moral argument alone. If these grifters actually knew, believed in, and utilized moral argument, they would win every time.

As a Christian, I see the widening disparity between men and women and I recognize how certain video games exploit that tension. Ghost of Yotei, for example, presents a scrawny Japanese woman fighting fully grown men in what’s most certainly framed as an empowerment fantasy. Beneath the revenge plot is the inversion of moral order disguised as progress.

That should be enough to critique. That should be the argument.

But for someone like, EndymionTV, this is insufficient. Like so many Grummz followers and mimickers, he needs the tea leaves (Steam charts, wishlist spikes, refund rumors) all to validate his discomfort. He needs numbers to prove his side is winning. He needs tribal metrics to make the moral unease feel like victory.

In his video on KCD2 entitled “Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 Investor EXPOSES DEI Lies + Woke Devs BAN Sexy Mods as Players Revolt” Endymion introduces a supposed insider named MarcoCorrosion and claims to have vetted him. However, the whole vetting process was laughably superficial as he simply cited MarcoCorrosion’s Twitter profile.

Oh, his X profile says “gamer.” Yeah, must be legit.

The tragedy is, this works. Endymion’s greater audience is unlikely to verify anything themselves because they’re too wrapped up in the idea that their side is winning.

Through MarcoCorrosion, Endymion also fell for a troll account named StonksAndChill whose posts he also cited in his video. StonksAndChill claimed to be an investor influencing Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2’s creative direction. The whole “vetting” process consisted of checking who the account follows (mostly Embracer Group employees) but ignoring the rest of the account’s tweets which clearly revealed it as satire or trolling. For example, posting contradictory tweets like “I’m one of the investors who told Warhorse to make the game more gay.”

Even after members of Endymion’s own audience pointed out that his source was a troll, he never issued a correction, never pinned a clarifying comment, and never took down the video talking about it. For someone with thousands of subscribers, that kind of silence should’ve been a massive credibility hit. But it hasn’t been and that should tell you everything you need to know about the state of YouTube commentary. People don’t follow grifters like Endymion for truth, they follow them for emotional validation, tribal signaling, and the illusion that their side is winning.

What’s truly bizarre about the responses about KCD2 are the inconsistencies surrounding it as compared to reactionaries in 2023 and 2024. Another telling sign that Endymion has no clue about what rhetoric to espouse and just grifts is that when KCD2 came out, he couldn’t decide what his stance was. One day he was defending it only to raise concerns the next and backpedal.

To this day, it baffles me as to why he wouldn’t have just done what he eventually did do: play the game and analyze the media in front of him. But nowadays I’m hearing all these claims of “audience capture” where commentators seemingly have no autonomy and, instead, just end up echoing the sentiments expressed by their viewers.

Noteworthy is that Endymion cited Grummz to justify his changing positions, creating a fog of plausible deniability. This is something I’ve noticed a lot of grifters do too: if they don’t know what opinion to have, they just cite Grummz and call it a day.

All this is to say that EndymionTV as a content creator who:

• Lacks journalistic rigor

• Falls for obvious trolls

• Flip-flops to maintain engagement

• Prioritizes algorithmic reach over truth

• Undermines his own credibility by refusing to correct errors

But these points can be expanded to include the broader ecosystem of reactionary content and the cultural dynamics that enable it: viewers who don’t verify, developers who overshare, and a YouTube landscape that rewards outrage over accuracy.

How Grift Operates: The EndymionTV Playbook

EndymionTV’s recent post about Ghost of Yotei is a textbook example of how grift sustains itself through tribal validation and selective framing. Let’s break it down:

Frame the Narrative Around “Winning”

• The post mocks “morons on Twitter” for claiming higher sales numbers, positioning Endymion as the voice of reason.

• He asserts that Yotei failed to match Ghost of Tsushima’s performance, despite data showing it recouped dev costs within two days.

• This creates a false binary: Yotei is a failure because it didn’t outperform its predecessor, even though it succeeded by industry standards.

Emotional Hook via Culture War Rhetoric

• The phrase “Easiest layup ruined cause they wanted Antifa lady I guess” is pure tribal bait.

• It implies that the game’s supposed failure is due to ideological choices, not market dynamics or creative direction.

• This primes the audience to associate any deviation from their preferred aesthetic with sabotage.

Misuse of Data to Reinforce Bias

• The graphic shows conflicting numbers: “1.6M+ copies sold (best estimate)” vs. “2M+ copies sold (truth)” without clarifying sources or methodology.

• The “% players also played” section is designed to imply audience overlap, but it’s meaningless without context (e.g., timeframes, platforms, sampling).

• The presence of Alinea Analytics branding adds a veneer of legitimacy, but the data is selectively framed to support Endymion’s narrative.

Grift Through Manufactured Authority

• Endymion positions himself as the arbiter of truth, dismissing others as fanboys or liars.

• He doesn’t cite sources transparently, doesn’t acknowledge counter-evidence (like the Damaged Sector post), and doesn’t engage in good-faith analysis.

• The goal isn’t to inform but to emotionally validate a specific audience and keep them engaged through outrage and tribal loyalty.

This is the grift engine in motion:

• Step 1: Find a tribal narrative.

• Step 2: Insert vague data or fake sources.

• Step 3: Repeat emotionally-charged phrases.

• Step 4: Never correct. Never clarify.

• Step 5: Monetize the outrage.

This is how SlopTube grift works: not through outright lies, but through selective framing, emotional manipulation, and the illusion of insider authority. People are led to believe their side is winning, not because it’s true, but because it feels good.

Finally, take all of this into account when you consider something like Asmongold’s lamenting that Ghost of Yotei has been “conscripted into the culture war.” Coming from someone who’s spent years farming engagement through culture war rhetoric, this reads as an expedient distancing where he can feign neutrality while still benefiting from the tribal machinery he himself continues to instigate.

And crucially, none of this should be taken as confirmation that Asmongold is even committed to the position he’s expressing. That’s the point. His vector of engagement shifts with the moment, optimized for reach. Today it’s exhaustion with tribalism; tomorrow he’ll be back to dunking on “woke” game devs. What’s clear is that his audience doesn’t really care about consistency, just momentary emotional resonance.

All in all, this just amounts to a funny kind of absurdity: a culture war ecosystem where no one holds a consistent position yet everyone insists they’re fighting for something real.

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