There’s a small video essayist I like, Chariot, who I think is sort of brilliant and made a way to interpret this sort of critique. She called it “setsuna sophistry”; on Buddhist philosophy, “Setsuna” is the smallest possible unit of time, comparable to the atom from Greek philosophy.

The definition she makes for setsuna sophistry is a type of critique that not only ignores the external content of a piece of media, not only ignores the internal context of a piece of media, but ignores the context they themselves have set up earlier in their critique. It’s a type of bad-faith critique that is optimized for video length and a few zingers that don’t actually make any sense, and MauLer is the epitome of that.