Video here, but don't bother giving it a click. I'm going to exhaustively go though it.
Firstly he says "the OSR" and shows thumbnails for the following videos, which I can only assume is 100% of the preparation he did before producing his own shitty video about the OSR:
Dicebreaker video with pretty but flat British lady having a bad take on the OSR written for her by some dude we'll never know or see or hear about because she clearly doesn't game.
Questing Beast being the most inoffensive vanilla human being alive and begging for free product in the first line of the video description.
Dungeon Masterpiece, AKA obviously weird religious virgin tries to pretend he isn't a weird religious virgin and fulfills his quota of talking about something other than Jesus for 5 minutes out of his day.
These are not the best and brightest of the OSR or YouTube, or even the average homeless shelter.
If you pause you can actually see that the purveyor of this video has only watched about half the QB video, and none of the others. So I actually overestimated the research this video's person did in preparation for the video.
I am now 2 seconds in to the video. Yeah I feel this is going to be a long one.
Then he forgets the third term that normies associate with OSR - he goes through Renaissance and Revival, but not Revolution. I feel this was a conscious decision because he wanted to milquetoast the movement more. He also went very blaze on the OSR's reaction to the current state of D&D because we all know it's complete inoffensive homogenous woke trash and gets woker and trasher every single day. There is a planet orbiting a dying star of ultimate mediocrity, continually getting ever closer but never manages to get to the point normies completely hate it too. That's current D&D.
26 seconds in. Woof, I have MINUTES to go.
Next he says the OSR isn't one game. This is something of a lie. The OSR is explicitly TSR D&D. Full stop. There was a time when others like Call of Cthulhu and FASERIP and Rolemaster were getting OSR style clones, but they ultimately went nowhere. No community, no fanbase, nobody cared about them. TSR D&D is were it's at. The further you make the experience (not necessarily mechanics, but informed by mechanics) of your game from TSR D&D in any iteration, the less OSR it is. This will come back later in the video.
37 seconds in
He then goes on to say the OSR is a philosophy, community, and lifestyle. No, it isn't. Especially not the last one. And not the first unless you're specifically talking about a game design philosophy of taking new evolutionary paths off of TSR D&D. But it's not fucking Buddhism. You can't live your life the OSR way.
Also it's not ONE community. Many build up their own communities around them. There is interspersing between these communities but those who float around the woke trash minimalist game forums looking for random lists to not use in the games they don't play don't really intermingle with normal OSR players who would call the games the former plays "woke trash" or even idiot BrOSR weirdos who yank their crank to passages from the AD&D DMG. These three crowds don't intermingle, and there are hundreds of subcrowds. Not one overarching community.
47 seconds in, but what a terrible 10 seconds that was
"No one really knows what makes an OSR system and OSR system"
Apparently somebody didn't ask the king of the OSR. Actually it's really easy. As I said above, if you preserve the play experience from TSR D&D, you're OSR. Every other game is not OSR. Minimalist trash on itch is not OSR. ShadowShart is not OSR. Dungeon World is not OSR. Knave is not OSR. Mork Bork is not OSR. Nothing Luke Crane has written is OSR. It goes without saying that Forbidden Lands and other Free League polished turds/scam products aren't OSR.
1 min 7 seconds in.
Then we have a tirade on how all OSR players are grognards, thinly veiled behind forced sincerity with an underlying rationale that you'd only be OSR if you were playing TSR D&D when you started. This may have been the case in 2006 when I was first elected king of the OSR but nowadays just like every other game, the OSR is mostly D&D 5E defectors and thus, younger people who never played at TSR D&D tables they weren't running themselves.
The actual framing should be that DMs are naturally game designers to a greater or lesser degree, and DMs flock to the OSR because modern D&D hates them. They get excited and write an OSR because they think that's the penultimate level of being a DM - publishing your own game. Houserules are stupid but a hack is a game.
1 minute, 41 seconds in, he implies the following are OSR/hacks of TSR D&D: Mothership, Hyperborea, Cy-Borg. Well, 1/3 isn't bad. Wait, that's 33%. A failing grade. If you have to guess which of these three is OSR, you don't know the OSR.
2 minutes in.
Mis-explains retroclones, stating that Hyperborea is a 2E clone rather than a 1E clone, though the edition is closer to 2E anyone who knows Hyperborea knows it started as 1E with a coat of paint. But that almost doesn't matter because retroclones are actually close to a given edition (at least 1st generation ones are, and it was the original intent behind the "retroclone" term's creation), or an attempt to get close to a given edition of D&D, to greater or lesser success. Hyperborea explicitly isn't that. It's trying to be it's own thing. Mostly.
2 minutes, 18 seconds in.
Mischaracterizes both Labyrinth Lord showing the Advanced Labyrinth Lord cover, and mischaracterizes LotFP. Calls both edgy. At core, other than a little artwork and maybe a few spell descriptions in LotFP, neither are edgy at all. Advanced Labyrinth Lord is a shitty B/X clone (the first B/X clone) stapled to some ill-designed AD&D options. LotFP is it's own game entirely, and only an idiot would say it's exactly like B/X or houserule it to be exactly like B/X before playing it.
Mischaracterizes OSE as not merely B/X with new layout. Advanced Fantasy is complete trash, nobody cares about it or plays it.
"Hack" family isn't a thing. None have anything to do with one another, they merely adopted a similar naming schema. Most of them are fucking awful as well. Especially white and black hack.
Accurate explanation of Basic Fantasy. So a little nugget of truth there.
3 mins in. Dear sweet god..
"One pager pamphlets" AKA scams and minimalist trash on or off of itch. He talks about them somewhat lovingly like they aren't a scam to pull $2 out of as many idiots as possible.
3 mins 40 seconds in
He just mentioned multiple scam/pamphlet games in a positive light including ShadowFart, Bork Bork, and kuhnave. It bothers me these idiots don't know the difference between a scam and OSR game yet.
4 mins in
He just mentioned Zines, the absolute worst thing in the OSR that isn't minimalist trash or 5E light faux-sr shit. In a positive light. Also pointed to Arcane Library as an OSR discord server, when it's a 5E discord server duh.
The rest of this video was actually pretty good. I'll give it a 2/10 as that's the percentage of the video that I didn't want to kill myself during. Truth be told it took me well over 6 months to make it through this 5 minute video, as I kept walking away from it due to how offensively retarded the presenter was about everything OSR related.
