Title: John Bain (Aka Totalbiscuit) has passed away [READ OP]
Reason: User banned (one week): attempting to continue thread derail
Nine of the top ten posts on Reddit's /r/all right now are all from various communities independently mourning John, with many more further down the page. It's a discovery even for those like myself who have followed his work for nearly a decade now, in my case primarily via StarCraft (although I first encountered his voice through WoW, when he was one of the first out of the gate to push back against the incursion of cosmetic cash microtransactions when the Celestial Steed first landed back in WotLK). As just one example, I only had the vaguest notion of what Warframe was and had no idea what an impact he had on the development of that scene. I know this is a console-centric forum (with, let's call it as it is, a sizeable and vocal progressive presence that accepts no mediation, compromise, or nuance when it comes to repudiating the more despicable reactionaries online), but I think it's quite fair to say that where the PC scene is concerned, no media figure was more important to so many and it's hard to imagine one that would be as broadly mourned. When TB covered a game or lent his support to fledgling independent titles, be it through exposure, advice, or direct contributions like the voice work he provided for Space Pirates and Zombies, he gave it his all and made you know that he was never there to be a tourist hopping on the flavour of the month. It's hard to fathom how one finds the time or energy to make this commitment and mean so much to so many games and players at once. From SC2 alone I've probably heard more of his speaking voice in the past few years than that of many of my closest friends, and yet I've only ever seen a fraction of his work. I'll be a little bolder than that, in fact, and say that John's contributions were as beloved and necessary as they were because they filled the vacuum left by the insipid log-rolling, hype culture, schoolyard clannishness, misplaced priorities, sanctimonious hectoring, and intellectual failure of the established enthusiast media at large. If that also swept along a great deal of reactionary unpleasantness in its wake, well, perhaps we can distribute blame for those externalities some other day; but know that John Bain was as beloved as he was in so many corners because he worked his arse off to provide a much-needed service and perspective to which the self-described journalists had abjectly failed to attend. It's no mistake that everyone who worked with him directly or interacted with him in person only had the kindest things to say about him, while the the sneering at his kind of work, or overblown and uncharitable accusations of complicity in a culture of entitlement and harassment, reliably came from those who were so far removed from the communities he served as to have never interacted with him productively at all. That always reflected more on them than it did on him. And once the condolences have died down, the taboo about speaking ill of the dead has subsided, and certain parties come out of the woodwork again to air their meticulously documented grievances, I won't let them forget it. You know who you are.
Link: https://www.resetera.com/posts/8317187/
Archive.is (legacy): https://archive.is/PjTsk