🐟 Fishtank Fishtank.Live General - Jet Neptune's Pisces Aquarium Internet Reality Show w/ Host Bam Margera

[Punitive Castration]

I don't have much to say about the season, I just wanna bring out two conversations in particular that stuck out to me about the latter half of the show.
At one point Tayleigh said to Jet that she was worried about not being entertaining enough, and Jet said that it's not the contestant's job to worry about being entertaining, leave that to production and be yourself. And a couple times when they talked to TJ, they mentioned that he was laying low, and that's okay, maybe just lay low don't stand out and win that way.

Letty, Vance, and Sylvia all said during the run of season one that whenever they weren't doing anything in particular they felt an enormous pressure to be interesting, and they tried to meet that pressure to make the show as good as it could be. Obviously to varying degrees of success, but you could feel they were putting in effort. When they were given open-ended challenges and tasks they'd try hard to be funny with it. Especially with TTS, they'd try to give generous answers to every message.

Feel free to tell me my observation is totally wrong but I felt the complete opposite from the four finalists this season. I think Shinji had that attitude up to a point and then when he got sick and lost his way he slipped into being like the others. I think part of it is last season most of the contestants were in the show because they had aspirations in entertainment, and had taken the camera hours as a major portion of the prize, considering the prize money was so horrifyingly low. Whereas this season I think maybe two or three at best of them, out of the entire cast, are actually going to use the camera time to some sort of career goal, and the rest would give some shit about "I'm conserving my energy for the next challenge" and shut down like an asshole and treat every incoming TTS like it was a rude interruption of this valuable sleeping time.

It's real weird. In terms of what it meant for the season itself I think it really hurt it. It felt like they had to squeeze blood from a stone to get an hour of liveliness. Last season they made all those jokes about, we're gonna bring in a homeless black guy to punish you for not being interesting, even though the cast was actually very interesting. This season they'd give the cast something dumb like, everyone pretend to be a different race, and they'd run out of ideas and start repeating themselves within three minutes. I looked forward to seeing what Letty and Vance would do with themselves after the show and I even got fairly invested in Sylvia as her streams were at least about topics I would find funny (Daniel Larson) but I think I'm going to watch maybe one Shinji stream this time and that's it, the rest didn't win an audience of any kind.

 

[Blackstar]

In addition to this, the contestants got punished for being interesting or making content, getting shut down by production, being the new target of the contestant/production dogpile, or in Tay's case getting soytaxed whenever she reacted to anything. In combination with shitty production this just led to a content drought and a shitty season. Tay managed to be the most interesting contestant and made the most content in the final weeks, but by the end even she had no motivations/reasons to do anything.

 

[Punitive Castration]

In addition to this, the contestants got punished for being interesting or making content, getting t shut down by production, being the new target of the contestant/production dogpile, or in Tay's case getting soytaxed whenever she reacted to anything. In combination with shitty production this just led to a content drought and a shitty season.

Yeah that was the other thing, I warned about it over the summer and it was still bad or worse this time. I know sometimes they were just seeing an obvious, upcoming end for a contestant and trying to set it up to look like a moment and not a shitty little walkout like Meg did. But effort-in needs to result in grace, if nobody else is putting in effort. Lest we get another fucking goddamn season of Fatty """""carrying"""" the show by lowering the bar for weeks and weeks.

They squeezed Jon of everything they could, and when he was gone they had a Hanukkah miracle and squeezed 24 days of content out of Letty all while slamming her around the tank way harder than anyone else.

I don't think Cole was long for it, he already said he was looking for the door after he found out he was going to be the butt of the joke and not a special plant like he believed he would be.
But Brian was actually constantly saying that he recognized he needed to make the show interesting, and gave a shit about it, and just got disrespectfully punted even though they were already hurting for contestants by that point and didn't really need an elimination yet.

Jimmy was never going to last, and I could feel them trying to avoid the fish preserving him to the final 3 just to spaz him out, but the idea of sending him that many production TTSes inventing hater memes, and on the night-of taking Tayleigh aside to mess with his stuff even when she was his ally, just to pile-on... it got stupid. There's a reason they had to bring him back, just to make the audience pissed off with him so it didn't look so stupid. Say what you want about Jimmy but if there's a contestant in the show who fills so much airtime and puts in so much energy that Fatty has to replace him or her when they go, serious thought needs to be given into turning that person into an actual freeloader so Fatty doesn't have to come back. Not a "bring him back to shit on him so everyone hates him and is happy he's gone" freeloader. A Trish that actually puts in work. Because I am so fucking sick of Fatty, I would take Reddit humor and cringe just because at least Jimmy could follow the plot and take orders without losing track of what is going on.

And yeah, you could tell they were just trying to knead Tay into a villain and were """"""helping"""""" her look like one by crapping on her. But considering she was the only one still kicking her fucking feet in the water at that point it was frustrating to watch.

 

[RL Steinbeck]

I was just thinking about one of the funnier production fails that kept happening throughout the show: whenever Sam or Jet were trying to say something important, but TTS was relentless, they'd yell at the camera for production to kill TTS, and it literally never happened. If it did, it would be like five minutes later. It made them look extremely incompetent, like nobody was paying attention downstairs, and it always visibly frustrated them, especially Sam. It must have happened at least half a dozen times.

 

[Sicko Hunter]

I don't think Cole was long for it, he already said he was looking for the door after he found out he was going to be the butt of the joke and not a special plant like he believed he would be.
But Brian was actually constantly saying that he recognized he needed to make the show interesting, and gave a shit about it, and just got disrespectfully punted even though they were already hurting for contestants by that point and didn't really need an elimination yet.

You totally nailed it here. Brian would have stayed to the end he was very clearly committed to the show and he cared about making content unlike other people on the cast. Getting rid of him was idiotic not to mention pointless. They didn't need to eliminate him. I don't like Brian I think he kind of sucks but he clearly cared about making the show interesting.

 

[Da R00D D00D]

If they bring him on any projects, it's confirmed that Sam is effectively running a wigger 'n frens charity jobs program. I'm not aware of anything Brian has to offer which is probably part of why he has no job to begin with.

I think they have to take what they can get. Jet and Ben are the only full time crew members that stayed from season 1 to 2. I think that's ultimately why Josie and Vance became part of the crew, the people they had from season 1 likely did not want to spend another 6 weeks sleeping on the floor in a dingy basement. Wouldn't surprise me if Josie and Vance don't show up for season 3 considering they spent 3 months total locked up in a shitty house.

 

[Charles Vincent Crumb]

But Brian was actually constantly saying that he recognized he needed to make the show interesting, and gave a shit about it, and just got disrespectfully punted even though they were already hurting for contestants by that point and didn't really need an elimination yet.

You totally nailed it here. Brian would have stayed to the end he was very clearly committed to the show and he cared about making content unlike other people on the cast. Getting rid of him was idiotic not to mention pointless. They didn't need to eliminate him. I don't like Brian I think he kind of sucks but he clearly cared about making the show interesting.

Brian was an odd one. His effeminate disposition made him very easy to dislike. He got very blatant about the need to be entertaining in all the group therapy sessions they had, but just calling attention to that over and over was even more of a reason to dislike him.
I would say that like Tay, if he wasn't eliminated, Brian was probably never going to the basement to try to leave, that's commendable. I don't think he would have left for anything.

 

[Halloween23]

You totally nailed it here. Brian would have stayed to the end he was very clearly committed to the show and he cared about making content unlike other people on the cast. Getting rid of him was idiotic not to mention pointless. They didn't need to eliminate him. I don't like Brian I think he kind of sucks but he clearly cared about making the show interesting.

Brian constantly talked about "making content" but was boring as shit still. I agree that if it was a legitimate competition he would have mopped the floor with everyone though.

 

[eatler]

Wouldn't surprise me if Josie and Vance don't show up for season 3 considering they spent 3 months total locked up in a shitty house.

Im thinking Bex and medic cowboy too after the Tay, Frank thing and if not that the chicken thing.

 

[Hector Hamsteak]

But Brian was actually constantly saying that he recognized he needed to make the show interesting, and gave a shit about it, and just got disrespectfully punted even though they were already hurting for contestants by that point and didn't really need an elimination yet.

Because Brian actually cucked content and lead to the entire house aligning on one side. He wanted to be mediator and have everyone following him and as the entire house were passive that's what happened. If he hadn't been kicked the entire show would have just been a replay of a reality TV show where the "cool guys" have the majority and just kick off the weaker players 1 by 1.

 

[sum ting wong]

While I agree Soup Kitchen Brian wouldn't have left on his own he was a content black-hole. Jimmy worshiped him, TJ was to much of a coward to go against him, Trish need validation from him, Tay maybe could have been convinced to be competition like she was against TJ/Shinji, and Brian would have unironically sucked Shinji's dick.

There would be 0 conflict with Brian in the tank. Jimmy wouldn't have come back to fight, Tay wouldn't have punched Trish, worst of all Brian probably would have won due to his desperation and he'd definitely join the wigger crew (he still might) and we'd be stuck with him for all future seasons (we still might).

 

[Punitive Castration]

Because Brian actually cucked content and lead to the entire house aligning on one side. He wanted to be mediator and have everyone following him and as the entire house were passive that's what happened. If he hadn't been kicked the entire show would have just been a replay of a reality TV show where the "cool guys" have the majority and just kick off the weaker players 1 by 1.

It's definitely true that he was ringleading that but production also demonstrated they have a lot of control over where that goes and could have put a spoke in the wheel very easily, which probably would have resulted in a more interesting end for him at least. He was so dedicated to the attic bits, all they really needed to do was give him something like "when we do a mini-cell challenge in the kitchen, we need you to eliminate yourself first and take all chips you can find and dump all the personal items in the basement." And then just let him live with the consequences of that. Or any number of more serious reputation-destroying things he would have gladly done to himself and inverted the dogpile onto himself as a result. I think the Super Pizza bit was an attempt to do that, to make Jimmy hate and fight Brian, but it wasn't really the right way to do it.

 

[Lowercase I internet]

You totally nailed it here. Brian would have stayed to the end he was very clearly committed to the show and he cared about making content unlike other people on the cast. Getting rid of him was idiotic not to mention pointless. They didn't need to eliminate him. I don't like Brian I think he kind of sucks but he clearly cared about making the show interesting.

I don’t think Brian was a content driver, but he was an especially good content passenger. What I mean is that he couldn’t generate content on his own during a boring situation like Jimmy, but put him in the ideal situation or give him another fish generating content to react to and he had some good moments. Brian wasn’t likable, but you don’t need to be likable in order to serve a purpose or keep the audience engaged.

The man was involved in gator squats where he had his soup kitchen rant, a cuckold love triangle with Trish and Cole, the leader of the poor clan during the short poors vs rich plot line, another love triangle with CK, Trish, and himself, and to top it all off he was a great punching bag for TTS and everyone in sneedchat. The soup kitchen jokes were great and had me laughing every time.

Looking back to the days leading up to Brian’s elimination he didn’t really do much, but that’s to be expected because he wasn’t a content driver. If production actually gave him a task or attempted to make him into a villain I think he would’ve been really good and would at least give the audience someone to root against. Brian would’ve made a great villain. In many ways he had the ability to be unlikable like Vance, but I think he actually would’ve gone much further with it and earned himself the title of a true Fishtank antagonist. Every time he argued with CK it made me want to see him fail all over again, and I believe that’s sign of a good antagonist.

Just another example of production throwing away a fish for no reason when the fish has lots of potential to be developed. Imagine what would’ve happened during a Brian vs Tayleigh plot line. I feel like some actual hatred and conflict would develop between the fish due to the intense desire to win shared by Tay and Brian. Make it even more interesting by putting Trish on team Tayleigh due to hating Brian for going back to CK and TJ on team Brian due to already not liking Tayleigh.

 

[Sicko Hunter]

Brian constantly talked about "making content" but was boring as shit still. I agree that if it was a legitimate competition he would have mopped the floor with everyone though.

I don't understand why production didn't just tell them "Hey we don't want you talking about making content or generating content that breaks the fourth wall stop it". I also hated Brian bringing it up all the time.

Brian even had the perfect shit eating grin to be a proper villain. Look at this.

 

[OrangeJuliusEvola]

Yeah, decent fast paced conversations and none of the eyes glazing over shit because people can't follow your train of thought no matter what subject you talk about, which is great, but ultimately suffers from being surface level time wasting shit with mostly maladjusted self obsessed normies operating at a higher level than normal. It's full of lefties pushing for censorship and codes of conducts while the right wing boomers blame the democrats for all their woes. Absolutely infested with glowies too. They keep their finger on the pulse for sure.

I didn't make any long term friends out of it. Besides the glowies, everyone else was either gay and degenerate, or wrapped up in the current year political mind virus. Disappointment at how the online conversations are conducted was commonly the first post that new joiners made, since they get these expectations that finally they're joining a club of civility and sophistication and it's just as much of a shit flinging shit show as anywhere else, just with smarter retards. It pushes the better adjusted people away, unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately).

Some cope by opting to join the higher IQ societies, thinking that it must be those retard 98%'ers that are to blame and all the truly enlightened conversations are had by the 99.9999%'ers but that's not it at all. Those guys can be just as retarded and degenerate. No amount of IQ can fix those who are spiritually and mentally unwell, and that's the biggest take away from joining Mensa.

Grad school disabused me of the notion that nominally intelligent people are any less susceptible to the general cultural zeitgeist of being a retarded easily-offended fuckwit, so I didn't go in with unrealistic expectations. I wanted to meet people IRL to do nerdy hobbies, not shitposting and dick-measuring competitions over IQ online, and that's what I got for a year. Granted, as a non-white from an ethnic group not known for being smart, I got a bit of a pass for my heterodox beliefs, particularly since I made it clear that I really wasn't there for political or social debate. YMMV.

I don't understand why production didn't just tell them "Hey we don't want you talking about making content or generating content that breaks the fourth wall stop it". I also hated Brian bringing it up all the time.

Yeah, Zoomies really don't understand how bad immersion breaking can be, nor how to be properly "meta". Of cast and production, only Sam and Tai really know how and when to break the fourth wall in a manner that's entertaining rather than disruptive or annoying, likely due to their experience with comedic timing.

Worrying about content and producing entertainment is good, don't get me wrong. They should aim for fish who innately understand that. But at the same time they need to understand that they're "on-air" 24/7 during the show and conduct themselves accordingly.

And dump Jet because he seems to have a negative understanding of this shit.

 

[curbside2]

Brian even had the perfect shit eating grin to be a proper villain. Look at this.
View attachment 5685517

I had a feeling the early season was building towards Cole Vs. Brian. Cole leaving fucked Brian.

 

[Ancient Pioneer]

At one point Tayleigh said to Jet that she was worried about not being entertaining enough, and Jet said that it's not the contestant's job to worry about being entertaining, leave that to production and be yourself.

Tayleigh was always one of the more interesting fish in the tank starting on day 1, the issue she had is that Ben would do attack therapy sessions, and even Sam would rant at them about not being interesting or entertaining when Charleston was there.

I felt the complete opposite from the four finalists this season.

They also had only four fish for way too long, eliminating Brian only for Jimmy to get kicked absolutely destroyed the balance in the show for half the season.

It felt like they had to squeeze blood from a stone to get an hour of liveliness.

This is a three part problem, one is that people don't tend to immediately want to just fuck over people they live with day to day, particularly when you know you have 40 days ahead of you living with them. Usually the first options are just ignoring or avoiding problems and only later escalating to arguing over what irritates you. This becomes even more pronounced and is visible in both seasons when one fish would lash out, they would immediately get dogpiled into oblivion. First Jon, then Letty are the two standouts from S1 and in S2 you rotated first to JC for the chip theft, Cole got isolated by the attack therapy, Jimmy for his spergouts, then Tay for being upset and crying while trying to give advice to Jimmy to restrain himself and not allow the rage outs to dominate his life when he was leaving. Since the cast was whittled down so much Tay was just the dogpile target for the rest of the show.

Since the cast got whittled down so hard and so fast nobody could play off each other and be amusing or funny any longer, and since one of the four was just the perpetual target they couldn't really play off each other. Shinji had trouble communicating because he was ESL, TJ always had problems talking since he was an autist, Trish and Tay were in a hard feud that lasted until Frank arrived which killed the feud but they never really reconciled and had a tense relationship into the ending. Tay and Trish would look out and empathize with each other such as when Frank literally threw Tay around by the neck or elbowed the shit out of Trish the "Kill a baby" challenge, or Trish telling Tay that Shinji and Oliver were about to hurl cat food on her when she was confined to the doghouse. But they never regained the ability to just sit down and have a good conversation or generate laughs for the audience.

The last part is that the production crew got up their own ass about "hell house" which polarized the cast into tense relationships with each other, only to never feed them anything beyond grits and loot crate ramen deliveries. The ramen wasn't even cooked half the time, the crew just eating the brick by breaking pieces off. They were fed nothing and acted exactly how you would expect, Sam and Ben later talked about this issue at the bar that the fish seemed far more lively and happy when they had been fed real food for a few days during the Donut on a nail challenge, and that they definitely wouldn't pull that stunt the next season. Jet and Ben were continously getting frustrated during the grits period that the fish weren't even interested in cash prizes and felt they were just going through the motions.

This season they'd give the cast something dumb like, everyone pretend to be a different race, and they'd run out of ideas and start repeating themselves within three minutes.

This is a sign that the bit being done is flawed in a severe way and shouldn't be run for 15-30mins straight, this would be a reoccurring problem with any attempt at comedy during the season, and is something Sam seems to be exposed as having a problem with via his standup attempts. Timing is everything in comedy and the challenges would just run on way too long and beat the comedy to death. A great example was the "Two Foreigners arguing with each other in two different languages" that Tai and Shinji had to do. It was funny initially but then it moved onto like round 5 or 6 and it just got extremely stale and everyone watching just wanted it to end. The grits thing is another example of a comedic bit that ran its course in a day or two but lasted weeks, the target window of this joke is the introduction that they're only going to eat grits and then the complaints the next day during meal time that day or the next.

 

[Asperchewy]

I was thinking that place Josie visited was probably the spot were they filmed the music video FUCK ANTHONY. I guess it actually was.

I never saw that (music?) video before. But that's definitely the place. The other shots with the elevator I am almost certain is a factory/warehouse in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Not even a few miles away from the Pawtucket Red Sox stadium and Hasbro toy headquarters.

Another fun fact: When TurkeyTom interviews Top J, That was also filmed around downtown Providence. (I can tell by the highway they were stuck in traffic on, And the bar parking lot of "Tommy's Place")

Video is here:

Great bar, great city. Just stop harassing the homeless people you fucking clout chasers.

 

[ProfDongs]

The scene from Louie with David Lynch is basically how the Wigger's would try to produce and try to drive content.

Just discomfort and unnatural was all they could manage.

 

[UnLimiTed-Lbs]

View attachment 5684831

Thank you Lance, very cool!