Welcome!

The big question to be answered in the inaugural Unironic Watch Reviews article is whether the name of the site itself is un- or just ironic. Meaning: by naming the site Unironic Watch Reviews, does that actually mean that the reviews are meant to be layered in irony? By specifically calling out that the site consists of something explicitly unironic, one could sensibly make the connection that its use in the name is sarcastic; by calling this site Unironic Watch Reviews, one can get a chuckle out of how insincere the reviews themselves actually are. Alternatively, by explicitly saying that the site is made up of un-ironic watch reviews, the editors could be appealing to their readers a priori: these are not jokes; this is sincere. Arguably (and anything is arguable, even though not everything is debatable-with-a-straight-face), the worst situation would be an ambiguous one. As David Foster Wallace argues in his 1993 essay "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction", irony is most dangerously used as a sort of "get out of jail free card" where you can say anything you want, and then after the fact, if you're called out on it, defer to irony (see "New Sincerity" at Wikipedia for more). The far-right anti-vax troll Jack Posobiec used this strategy when he hilariously re-invented vaccines in a recent Tweet:

"What if instead of a vaccine we just were able to get exposed to a weak version of the virus that enabled us to build the antibodies we need to fight the real thing?"

When Posobiec was called out on how that's basically what vaccines are, he and his supporters claimed he was being ironic or making a joke. Though what the joke was is, I suppose, left as an exercise to the reader.

But back to Unironic Watch Reviews. Let me be clear, the U in UWR (as it shall henceforth be known), is an explicit promise to the reader that our reviews will be genuine, sincere, not paid for (but I do hope that I'll somehow become rich and famous like Ben Clymer), hopefully entertaining, and while the context will be unironic, we do hope that we will make you both smile and laugh while reading!

tl;dr: Unironic means that the articles, reviews, editorials, and whatever else might appear on this site are not meant to be ironic and are meant to be sincere. We do hope that the content will sometimes be funny, but we definitely cannot promise that. Sorry.

Stay tuned for our first review!