Favourite Things (SuperEyepatchWolf)
“One man, one hour, nothing but genuine enthusiasm.”
- if you think YouTube video essays are all negative deep-dives
- if you've stopped trusting recommendations
- if you want to care about things outside your lane
- if you're tired of everything being a review score
You don’t watch YouTube video essays. I know. Two-hour lectures about why a film you’ve never seen is actually a masterwork of capitalist critique, delivered by someone reading a script off a second monitor with the energy of a hostage. The thumbnail has a red arrow on it. You’ve already closed the tab.
Every December, SuperEyepatchWolf uploads a video called Favourite Things, and it is the opposite of all of that.
The format is almost insultingly simple: a list of stuff he loved that year. Games, films, manga, music, books, occasionally a piece of internet arcana nobody else would think to champion. No ranking. No scoring. No thesis about the decline of the medium. Just an Irishman sitting in front of a microphone, going through the list one by one, explaining what each thing is, why it works, and why it mattered to him — with the specific detail of someone who has actually finished the thing rather than watched a summary of it.
Here’s the rule that makes it work, and it’s the rule this whole site is built on: no cynicism allowed. He doesn’t do the ironic-detachment bit. He doesn’t hedge. If he loves a wrestling manga, he tells you exactly which panel got him, and he means it, and forty minutes in you believe him about things you have zero interest in. That’s the skill. Not enthusiasm — earned enthusiasm. He’ll walk you through the mechanics of a fighting game you’d never touch, and by the end you’re not thinking “maybe I should watch that” — you’re thinking “maybe I should play that.”
The videos run long. An hour is a short one. And the length is the point — it’s not padding, it’s the room he gives himself to actually make the case instead of compressing everything into a hook and a verdict. It’s the pace of a friend who’s had a few drinks and genuinely needs you to understand why the third act of this obscure anime restructuring broke him. You put it on while doing something else and forty minutes later you’ve stopped doing the something else.
The second-order effect is the real product: you leave with a list. Not of things that were marketed at you — of things a person with taste and skin in the game vouched for, across half a dozen mediums, most of which you’d never have found on your own. Start with the most recent one. It doesn’t matter which year. They all work.
It’s the most valuable hour of December on the entire platform.