YouTube Digest is a look at some of the most popular new Web videos of the week. This week, we have a new YouTube subscription service that has many fans and creators up in arms, the final part of an epic music video trilogy, a strange celebrity video, a stolen sketch, and an important update on Skids the cat.

Meet YouTube Red - 590,388 views

This week, YouTube unveiled the new service YouTube Red, which promises no ads, offline playability, and background play—for a price. Yes, YouTube has finally done what has always seemed like a dark inevitability: they’ve introduced a subscription service. Meaning you can soon pay for all the premium content that YouTube serves you, from increasingly self-serving coming out videos to teens reacting to other teens trying British candy. Imagine! What a thrill.

Though, of course, there are many people who aren’t so excited about this. I won’t pretend to know the exact ins and outs of the YouTube business, but I agree with many others who are concerned that signing YouTube creators onto YouTube Red, and then making the videos of anyone who doesn’t private, could have a pretty negative effect on the free-wheelin’, all-access YouTube we know and love (right?). Strong-arming, coercing, or otherwise pressuring top content creators into becoming part of the pay service—which will cost ten dollars a month—is bad optics, and is creating rumblings of unrest among the creator class.

But some outlets, like The Verge, are saying that our fears are overblown, that a subscription service was inevitable and will prove mostly beneficial to creators. Why The Verge is carrying water for YouTube will likely remain a mystery, but just because they are defending the hooded, red-eyed ambivalent gods who run YouTube doesn’t mean they’re wrong, certainly! Maybe this whole deal is going to work out fine for everyone. It’s possible, I suppose.

Honestly, what troubles me more about this whole YouTube Red business is what it means for us, the viewers. Not, like, are we gonna be missing out on sweet paywall-protected content. I’m not all that fussed about that. What I’m worried about is that we’ve arrived at a point where YouTube (and The Verge) thinks we should be paying for YouTube videos. YouTube videos! Has YouTube seen YouTube videos? YouTube videos are, by and large, hot stinky garbage. But we watch them, because they are free garbage. And we love free things! Humans have loved free things for a long time. Probably since humans were invented. So sure, we’ll watch some screaming teen open a virtual pack of FIFA cards. We’ll peep a dweeb playing Last of Us. We’ll learn the difference between girls and guys from a massive Internet company’s video department. Because we’re not paying for any of it!

But now YouTube has evolved to a place where it has a stable of very successful stars, who have obsessive fan bases and who are becoming certified Celebrities, so they think that they should now start charging us to watch these dopes? No. Absolutely not. And I think, deep down, a lot of the creators who are upset about YouTube Red know that they’re not worth the money. Deep down. Very deep down. But it’s there, that cold, shameful knowledge. And while ten bucks a month isn’t gonna break the bank for most people, it’s the beginning of something. It’s the beginning of putting a premium on content without establishing a standard of quality. Eventually, I would hope, YouTube viewers will say no that. When you can watch prestige programming like CSI: Cyber for free (or, almost free; you still have to pay for electricity), why on Earth would you pay money to watch Davey Wavey ogle some hairless barista he just met? That YouTube thinks we would ever be willing to do such a thing means that we’ve communicated to them that we’re saps and dupes and dolts who will just chow down whatever loud gruel they feed us. So let’s tell them no. Let’s exercise our brains just once in this anesthetized pantomime we call modern living and say that we are better than that. We are too good to pay for “Draw My Life” videos. We may have forgotten that, so far from Eden have we strayed, but we are. Tell YouTube that we are better than at least that.

Troye Sivan - TALK ME DOWN (Blue Neighbourhood Part 3/3)

Squeal! It’s the final part of YouTuber turned pop musician Troye Sivan’s “Blue Neighbourhood” music video trilogy, about a boy with an abusive dad and a dreamy boyfriend, played by Troye Sivan. Part three takes place at the dad’s funeral, and everyone is sad and wearing black and looking out to the sea. Then the boy and Troye reconnect—they’d been riven apart by mean dad—and things are about to get kissy again but then a lady—mom?—shows up and is all “Nope” and so the boy has to go and then he jumps off a cliff I think? I don’t know. It’s hard to say. The narrative isn’t really the point here anyway, is it? The point is that Troye Sivan looks sad and deep and thoughtful and artsy, and that the other boy is cute and has a cute haircut and oh isn’t it all so meaningful, this relatively chaste, white-bread romance. Isn’t it all so dreamy and yet! Somehow? Accessible. Most importantly it tells us that Troye Sivan has something to say, and it’s going to be sad and serious but it’s also going to turn you on a little, just a bit, a frisson of arousal mixing with sadness, a pure distillation of the sensation of being young, that magical, aching longing. (I think we maybe call that melancholy? Isn’t there always something a little romantic or sexy about melancholy? The sensual allure of ghosts? Is that a thing?)

This is all, of course, the result of the large and complicated apparatus that’s been built around Troye Sivan—by himself and presumably by his handlers—to lend him a sense of depth, perhaps even profundity. Of course it’s all trompe l’oeil, a careful illusion. But, it seems to be working. Troye’s full-length album, called Blue Neighbourhood, will drop in December, just in time for the holidays. And it will sell well. Teens and others seem to really be responding to Sivan’s brand of gay(er) Lana Del Rey-lite. And eventually Troye Sivan will grow up and actually have something to say—or, rather, have a more nuanced and thoughtful way of saying what he’s already saying— and none of these early, sorta silly fumblings toward ecstasy will matter any more. But right now? Right now the Troye Sivan machine is dancing as fast as it can to convince us that there is something weighty at work here. This blue neighbourhood, full of sighs and sunsets and haircuts and sea. Sigh. Isn’t it all so tragically perfect. Or is it perfectly tragic?

Tom Hiddleston & Jessica Chastain Throw the Worst Party Ever | After Hours | MTV News - 163,615 videos

Actors are people too. I know that’s hard to grasp as a concept—actors? The people from film and TV? Are people??—but it’s true. They are. And like most other people, actors like to loosen up sometimes, have a little fun. Sometimes that can be really fun for us too, like when Natalie Portman rapped or the Queen wore that hoodie. But other times, like in the video above, it can be a little uncomfortable. Look, no one on this planet short of her family and other loved ones loves Jessica Chastain as much as I do. And Hiddleston could hiddle me a ton, if you know what I mean. So it’s exciting, heartening even, to see that they were up for a little make believe mischief with MTV’s Josh Horowitz. But the results of this particular goof are . . . strange. That’s all I’ll say, because I, as a dedicated Chastainiac, and as someone who hopes that Tom Hiddleston will someday read me a bedtime story, don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. It’s not a bad video! It’s just odd. And not exactly odd in the way they intended, I don’t think. So. Keep being human, actors. But I dunno. Be careful.

When A Woman Takes A Compliment - 469,912 views

Hey, do you want a funny but pointed video about how society demands that women never accept a compliment lest they be branded vain monsters? And even worse, how they are sort of expected to self-efface in reaction to a compliment? It is a widespread social ill and is definitely ripe for skewering, so a video on the topic would be good. Which is why Amy Schumer made exactly that, two and a half years ago. So go watch that, instead of this terrible, rather shameless BuzzFeed Video rip-off.

Skids update - 460,862

Here’s the update on Skids. The video’s description reads: “The dork is home, and happy.” So that’s good, that the dork is home, and also happy. The description then says that Skids—whom I believe to be the aforementioned “dork”—had a little ringworm, but that’s it. Everything else is fine. So that’s good. We can now head off into the weekend knowing that. Skids? Our phat cat who knows where it’s at? He’s gonna be just fine. As will the rest of us, someday. In the meantime, enjoy your weekends. I’ll see you on the other side.