Hi! I worked for Sam for a short period and its super confirmed that 90%+ of any and all cast and supporting staffing (like people who built sets or made skins) were not paid at all. He had a tendency to hire fans who were happy to do it all for free to be able to say "Im friends with Sam!".
He tried to "Hire" me on to work on now unreleased roleplays for his channel but I quickly learned I wasn't going to be paid for my VA work and swiftly left.
I do wonder what the recording sessions for Tokyo Soul were like.. the actors behind the other characters must've been questioning everything when Sam would tell them the video idea
I DID drop off Sam after this season and not watch his other roleplays, so didn't know about this controversy, but damn do I miss how I felt in those days
As a kid this all made sense and I was nodding along like, 'yeah this is just part of the story.' Now I realize, nope, this definitely does not make ANY sense, but I always thought the endless void ending was super cool. Can't wait for more videos!! ⸜(。˃ ᵕ ˂ )⸝♡
the graphic realisticness of the dialog and clothes being ripped in the r@pe scene made my jaw drop.and then laughing the whole time like its funny is insane to put in front of impressionable kids,and also putting it harder on male minor victims that could be watching by enforcing the stereotype of being taken advantage of as a man to be "emasculating" and making them "less of a man".i feel so genuinely bad for grian,taurtis,and any other poor life form (especially a few very unfortunate minors im sure sam sadly got his greasy mits on)that sam has ever interacted with.
As someone who grew up with YHS, the really intense shift to Tokyo soul was really jarring and what was what turned me off of Samgladiator all together. I was like 8 or 9 then, now I’m watching this and realizing how batshit insane it was
Just adding to the bit at the start about Sam's weird behaviour, last year apparently he made false accusations against Grian saying he SAd SillyJilly, who played a semi main role in both series, at a public event, which Silly herself said on Twitter was a complete lie and I think it's really crazy he's still targeting people he doesn't like for no reason all this time nearly a decade later
my favorite personal lore about tokyo soul is that the "car crash" episode came out while i was in my school counselor's office talking about some serious difficult home issues, and i looked on my phone and saw there was a new episode in my notifications and was like OMG YAY!!!
the clips with the taurtis clones make me so uncomfortable because knowing that these are mostly unscripted it feels like taurtis is actually uncomfortable. like i could be wrong but it doesn't feel like it
Usually I despise dream theory with a passion, but I think the story actually makes a surprisingly high amount of sense if we look at it through the lense of sam's mind. By his point in the story, sam has thoroughly lost it, and has honestly never really had it. After watching 90% of the people he knows die and getting shipped off with 3 of his friends to Tokyo, everything in his world stops making sense. He becomes more self destructive and harmful to those around him and he begins to dramatize the world around him. He imagined his teachers and community as being even more destructive, perverted, and kinda racist than even his last school, though I wouldn't be surprised if there was some level of truth to that part. Not long in to their time here, taurtis finally gets sick of sam. He's beaten him, stabbed him, manipulated his memory, and killed his entire family. Now that he's in Tokyo, all he has left to stay for is grian and dom, and that's not enough, so he runs away. Sam does what he did the last time he lost taurtis and pretends like it didn't happen. He imagines not only a new taurtis, but mass produced clones of taurtis. He sees taurtis as replaceable, so he imagines that taurtis literally has a bunch of clones he can be replaced with, and later imagines that he can just be replaced by a taurtis from another timeline. Because he sees him as replaceable he, treats him however he wants, shown by how he treats the taurtises as literal slaves. Eventually, he gets bored with his life at Tokyo and searches his past for something exciting to cling on to. He decides on his experience with the Yakuza, so he recreates it frame by frame with the Italian Mafia. He has to sell drugs, ends up fucking it up due to police involvement, now he's in debt to the mob and needs to fight them. Eventually, new people come in to sam's life, and he does not care for them. They try to be friendly and enter his life, but he gives them the worst possible endings in his head. Lizzie gets kidnapped and never rescued, aphmau gets sacrificed to undo a spell, jin gets found on the li- I mean killed by the Yakuza. Eventually, jin gets bored of this too, so he imagines a world where he can have more power and excitement, where he's fighting off aliens and Eldritch beings all just to fuel his own ego. He's constantly starting plot lines and stopping them once he stops caring, bringing back the memory of familiar faces only to complete disregard them and keep focus to his main 3, himself, taurtis, and grian. In the middle of it all though, there is Cthulhu. Cthulhu is what's left of Sam's conscience. He tries to tell taurtis what Sam really what's from him and constantly warns Sam that his actions, horrible personality, and imaginary world will cause everything to end. When we reach the end of the series, even Dom has been left behind in favor of the main 3, and how Sam feels about his closest friends becomes clear. He doesn't love them as people, he loves them as ideas. That's why he clings to taurtis and constantly tries to keep them together when the real taurtis left a while ago. When Cthulhu is proven right and the world ends, he gets exactly what he wanted. All that's left in the world is himself and the memory of his 2 best buds, the only things that really matter to him in his imaginary world. He's left alone with everything he ever wanted and as he falls into the void and realizes he still isn't satisfied, he realizes the mistake he's made, but he can't go back. He's already made it to the end.
I was a big fan of SamGladiator, especially season 1 of Yandere Highschool. But this season was really weird for me even as a kid. So after this I didnt really watch him anymore but I liked his fnaf roleplay 😭