Most reactors have this fascinating rationalisation for not doing any research about the artists, films, or TV shows they are listening to or watching before they listen to them or watch them. It is the we don’t want to spoil our experience of the song, movie, or TV show we are listening to or watching rationalisation. As a result they don’t do what many of us did back in the day when we heard or watched something we liked; we tried to find out anything we could about the artist, the movie, or the TV show and the meaning of the song, movie, or TV show we were watching.
We also read the TV Guide summaries religiously of what was coming up next week on the TV show we were watching and we watched the what was going to be on next week's episode promos of the television show we were watching.
Our YouTube reactors, however, don’t do any of this because they think it will ruin the experience of hearing an artist and watching a TV show or film. They prefer the tabula rasa approach, something that is impossible in the first place given the realities of socialisation.
Beyond not doing research a lot of YouTube reactors have difficulty grasping parody and satire. Perhaps it is because they make parody and satire meaningless by rolling both into the omnipresent but empty concept "cheese". I was reminded of this once again when I watched several reactors react to Queen’s 1978 song “Fat Bottom Girls”.
Several reactors thought the song, written by Queen guitarist Brian May, was serious. They even pondered a historical, sociological, and ethnographic question. Didn’t they like skinny girls back then, they asked? Two other reactors reacting together wondered why Queen’s vocalist Freddie Mercury, who they knew was gay (so much for tabula rasa), was singing a song, which they wrongly assumed was written by Mercury, about women. They also assumed that the song was autobiographical, which it may have been at least in part, but to grasp how it was or whether it was autobiographical they needed to do research on how it was autobiographical which they did no.
American YouTube reactors also revealed a lack of knowledge about British colloquialisms and euphemisms. None of them, for instance, knew that Fanny, the narrator’s naughty nanny (how is that for alliteration), was also a euphemism or that May was likely parodying and satirising, the English upper class, in the song.
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