The Right Opinion: The Rise Of GradeAUnderA - Ascent Of An Internet Hero | TRO

Intro: I thought it’d be neat that we begin this video with a story because I love a good story like anyone else. When I was growing up, I wasn’t really the type of person who used Twitter, or any the social media sites that I used today, I remember when I was around 13, I was at school, and back then the only app that was really considered fashionable was Facebook, now this is before it was taken over by the Minion moms, but just take my word, at one point, Facebook was cool, I promise guys, please don’t reject me.

Whatever, at that time it was also cool to follow ridiculous numbers of Facebook pages, and before they were taken over by cash farmed sponsorships they had the capacity to be pretty funny, to my juvenile brain at least, however, it was one day that I clicked on one of the videos, I highly doubt I could find it now, but I remember it being this page called UniLad, and I clicked the video, and it was this guy, with this really strange accent, talking about Manly Drinks vs Girly Drinks? Basically mocking the gender stereotypes behind alcoholic beverages.


And to be honest, I didn’t really know what to think, it was alright enough, and I did agree with the sentiment, I’d personally take cocktails over beer and so on any day, though I do like penis, so I might be biased. Either way, I didn’t really think too much about it, my life had very little to do with YouTube, the man in the video was GradeAUnderA, or Grade for short, he is a commentator with a very distinct style, I’ll talk about the styles that he was inspired by in a bit, but as you can see from that clip, it bathes in its rather amateurish charm. Currently Grade sits on just shy of 3 and a half million subscribers, and is very prolific in the commentary community for both good, and not so good reasons, but I didn’t know that back then, I was just a pleb.

Fast forward a couple years and I was much more engaged with the commentary community, all this drama with Leafy was transpiring, I wasn’t really an avid viewer of him but I was thoroughly involved in the whole feud with Keemstar, and I remember really rallying behind Leafy, I think I even sent him an email in support, that was incredibly sad. Not just the sentiment of it, but the fact that I used email, I’m like Benjamin Button because I used to be a boomer, but now I’m a epic woke man.

Then iDubbbz’s Content Cop dropped and I had my perception completely 180’d, everything I thought was fact, was not, and iDubbbz did a great job at destroying Leafy, who only managed to destroy himself with his response video, proving he was well out of his depth, but maybe that’s a story for another time. Grade was dragged into all of this because he’d made videos on the situation, and jumped on the train, in fact he’d been heavily involved in the drama, until the Content Cop, in which he just dropped off the radar. What a surprise.

And after a few more months of videos, people just kinda moved on, there were a few thought pieces, asking where he had gone, how he had fallen from grace, and so on, everyone kinda knew he’d return, and at the turn of 2019, he did. How long he’ll be around for again we don’t know, honestly he might have left already, but at the same time his return did complete the arc that I felt necessary to make this video.

I always felt there was more to his story, because my two experiences with his content were radically different, covering themes that could’ve been related to a different channel, my perception going into this is that of a person who became something else than he initially set out to be, from that person on my Facebook feed, it never felt like he was setting himself up to become another channel caught up in drama, so today if you’re not familiar with the tale of GradeAUnderA, I want this to be a learning experience not just for you, but also for me, understanding his rise, his peak, his fall. But we’re not just going to be documenting how it happened, we’ll ask why it happened, and maybe provide some opinions on the whole situation, let’s just hope they’re the right ones.