Let me tell you, YouTuber's have been in complete and utter disarray. With most of them retiring because of families or to better themselves, it almost leaves like a sour taste and all the good YouTuber's are gone leaving the terrible shitty ones. It's almost hard to believe in this day in age but for whatever reason, things aren't looking too good. Since I haven't talked about an Animation Channel since TheSoul Publishing or pretty much the latest drama of EnchantedMob I thought I would be fine to talk about another animation channel as well as being in the category for the art topic as well. For this we have Verbalase who's famous for his Cartoon Beatbox Battle series but faced backlash for a leaked animation he payed to another artist.
The Major Downfall:
50k Hazbin Hotel AMV Scam / Bankruptcy & Failure / The Animator Debacle:
I'm not going through the history on Verbalase (also known as Adym Steven Evans) because it's too long and mostly focuses on the Cartoon Beatbox Battle series. I will say that before that, he used to make comedy sketches wayback around the start of YouTube. There was minor drama way back in 2020 in regards to tracing but that got swepped under the rug.
Yes you read the minor heading. I'm not going to show the actual video on this but here's a sped up meme version of the video and you'll see what I mean by this. The whole animation is basically Verbalase as a self-insert encountering Charlie from Hazbin Hotel and it gets out of hand and goes into a seductive BDSM territory. To be fair, Verbalase didn't post the animation to his channel because his channel is supposed to be Family Friendly. Despite the rise of the animation controversy in 2024, it actually goes back into September of 2023 when the video was posted and leaked by a user named HydroHater99 (a parody name from a user named Hydroanimates). It wasn't until this year when it was explained from a twitter user named @thestartofluck who goes into details about the debacle. They also even show discord messages that go all the way back into 2021 about the Hazbin Hotel animation taking place so he was open about it in the conversation and openly admitting that he spent between $47k-$50k.
Despite the animation looking exactly like a reminiscent from the actual show (even though this by someone else), it's definitely not worth investing in for $50k. That was also another thing, Verbalase was asking for donations prior to this. Most people would suspect because of his Cartoon Beatbox Battle series falling in long hiatus times to try and get things done but after the controversy, people started to connect the puzzle pieces together as to where the money was actually going. It was also happening around the time that the Hazbin Hotel series would be shown so at this point, it was poor timing. And the song he chose is also very disturbing.
As a result, this story blew up everywhere. Many different news outlets talked about the topic including an entry on knowyourmeme.com, YouTuber's like Pyrocynical, uhyeah, sensitive soci3ty, BoyWithALife and many others made videos on the situation, there were many different reddit posts talking about it and Verbalase got so much negative attention towards his channel that his most recent video was received poorly with 3.2k likes to 16.1k dislikes. This really didn't affect his subscriber count in any way as he's been gaining subs on his main.
There's one last topic I want to discuss even though it has nothing to do with Verbalase. This is the fact that Hydroanimates (the person who got the $50k) has also been into the drama and trying to clear their name saying that they're not the person who animated it. Thestartofluck responded to a tweet on January 13, saying that Hydro didn't animate the animation and came to a conclusion that it was a studio that Verbalase ran with few other people that commission it for $50k and Hydro was just a fan. It's also strange that the people confuse one Hydro with another Hydro.
UPDATE: January 21, 2024:
So, this is actually the first update regarding Verbalase and the whole situation surrounding the animation is quite crazy. On January 19, 2024 (literally a day after this post), Verbalase posted a video on his second channel titled "Addressing Things" where he addressed the situation regarding the animation and other things. In the description of the video, he states the following:
"Hey everyone, it's a verbal Ase, and I got to tell you it's been a very challenging, emotional, and motivational week for me. I've learned so much from everything that has happened in the past few weeks.
At the end of the day, we are all human beings, and there are all different types of people out there and I can not and should not judge people for being who they truly feel they are. I mean, that's what happened with me during most of my year in school, I got bullied and picked on for not walking and acting like how everybody else thinks I should act. A lot of people have reached out to me from many different backgrounds and personal choices and religious views, and they were all stating that they are still supporting me regardless of what's being said about me on the internet and I want to express my sincere gratitude and appreciation to all of you and also apologize for my statements made on social media regarding my opinions on what's going on in the world. I did take this time to have some conversations and dialogue with many of my fans in the community about what the end goal was and I was told that everyone just wants to find their purpose and express who they truly are at heart and that is something I truly resonate with. Instead of focusing on our differences, I should be focused more on our similarities, and that's what I'm going to do from now on.
Regarding the video, I never personally released this video on any of my main YouTube channels because of the video context. I was tinkering with the idea of making a separate YouTube channel intended for a more mature audience but after The video was finished in 2022 and uploaded on a private separate Channel and marked as made not for kids, I still decided against it and took it down, but I guess while it was up so #verbalase mebody downloaded it and made it public and tagged me in it.
I believe everything happens for a reason, and this has been one incredible experience I am evolving from, and I'm 100% going to keep going. I love you all so much, and I sincerely appreciate your emails encouraging me to evolve and learn from this experience. Thank you all so much for taking the time to write me and teaching me. Much love and respect to you all! 🤓🙏🏾❤️" - Verbalase.
One thing that I also forgot to mention is that he also addressed the homophobic and transphobic statements that apparently happened in his Discord server which I'll probably add later. While his response was met with mostly positive reception, others thought that the response was generic and didn't tell the full story. The way in his response felt lackluster and kind of failed to explain anything and didn't address on the money that he spent on the animation.
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