The scapegoating of the Angry Video Game Nerd

This article explores ongoing fan discourses surrounding the alleged artistic decline in quality of the influential video series Angry Video Game Nerd ( AVGN ). Since 2016 and intensifying since 2021, fans, critics and vocal antagonists of the series and its creator, James Rolfe, express salient anxieties over changes to the series and the legacy of its creator, revealing larger symbolic struggles than simply whether a 20-year-old YouTube series has declined in quality. To explore the social drama surrounding Rolfe and the motivations for the anti-fannish struggle for the soul of AVGN , the author employs Kenneth Burke’s dramatistic concepts to demonstrate how Rolfe has been symbolically constructed as a scapegoat to bear collective guilt over two anti-fandoms’ respective communal anxieties. Criticisms reveal anxieties over YouTube privileging profit and corporatization over the more symbolically pure ideal of passionate self-expression, as well as conservative–libertarian anxieties over threats to geek masculinity and gamer hegemony.