Jason Genova

About

Jason Genova is an amateur bodybuilder and YouTube fitness personality from Delray Beach, Florida. As of March 2020, his main channel had over 51,000 subscribers and over 35 million views total, before being suspended.^[30] Having been a renown internet fitness personality since 2009, Jason has managed to develop a dedicated fanbase over the years.

History

Jason first gained notoriety in mid-2009 when his first YouTube video "My Storie Part 1," was widely discussed on online fitness forums such as bodybuilding.com's "Miscellaneous" section, 4chan's /fit/ board and musculardevelopment.com^[2].

The video features clips of Jason performing gym exercises with poorly executed form and doing poses, while heavily misspelled motivational quotes are being displayed. He also introduces himself as "Jason Giovannie", goes on long rants about his training and talks about his aspirations of becoming a professional bodybuilder.

Online Presence

Genova's content generally consists of workout videos at the gym, posing and going on rants against his haters. The unintentional humor in Jason's videos went on to become a continuous topic of discussion on online fitness boards and Facebook groups, which eventually lead to the creation of mega-threads^[1] on bodybuilding.com and musculardevelopment.com^[2] to contain the discussion.

As of late, Jason's content is mainly being discussed on the Genovaverse subreddit^[31], since the old dedicated Delray Misfits board started to shift it's focus towards off-topic political discussion.

Jason's online presence and life have also been the subject of independent documentaries^[3] and news articles,^[4] one of which even received an award from the Society of Professional Journalists.^[5]

Personal Life

Disabilities

Jason suffers from mental disabilities and has been diagnosed with severe ADD and dyslexia. Despite being on the autistic scale^[6], Jason drives a car and works at a local Publix in Delray Beach.

Personality

Jason is notorious for being a habitual liar, having an extortionist mentality^[7] and regularly expresses narcissistic behaviors.^[8] He often uses his mental disabilities to extort people for favors or to get out of trouble, something he openly admitted to numerous times. His actions are very impulsive and shortsighted, resulting in him being unable to follow a proper bodybuilding diet^[9] and mainly consuming fast food,^[10] protein shakes, disturbing amounts of caffeine and random bodybuilding supplements.

Jason has an obsession with the Star Wars prequels, giving himself the nickname "Lord Vader"^[11] and often makes Star Wars references in his videos.^[12]

Rivalries

Throughout his presence on YouTube, Jason has been generally intolerant towards criticism regarding his physique and training methods,^[13] often engaging in disputes with other popular fitness personalities like Lee Priest,^[14] Ron Harris,^[15] Ian McCarthy,^[16] Marc Lobliner^[17] and Kali Muscle^[18].

As a method of attack and/or retaliation, Jason calls for an Order 66 (a Star Wars reference), with which he orders his followers to attack someones social media and YouTube channels by flooding them with troll comments and dislikes, which often results in people setting their social media to private or apologizing to Jason.^[19]

Notable Events

Jason's behavior, as well as that of his following, have been the subject of many controversies.

Cameragate

In late 2013, Jason and his former cameraman Andrew parted ways after a dispute in which Jason threw Andrew under the bus in exchange for receiving a digital camera from his former manager Chad. This ultimately led to Andrew creating a spin-off series titled The Delray Misfits,^[33] which as of June 2022 has 79,000 subscribers and over 43 million views on YouTube. The show focuses on the other characters at the Gym. Apart from having regularly filmed collaborations,^[20] Jason is also friends with the Delray Misfits outside of YouTube. Since World Gym closed down in 2015, the original main cast has mostly disintegrated over the years and doesn't put out any new content as of late.

Physique of the Week contest

In late 2015, someone entered Jason into an online weekly-held contest titled "Physique of the Week." Since the contest was decided by the amount of Facebook Likes a certain physique receives, Jason easily won the competition by over 1000+ votes, despite having by far the worst physique out of all 5 entries.^[21] The organizers however awarded the win to the second place finisher, which triggered a huge backlash^[22] from Jason's followers who went on to shut down the contest's Facebook and Twitter accounts, as well as getting Sponsors of the contest to cut ties. As a consequence, the mega-threads on bodybuilding.com were permanently shut down due to raiding from Jason's followers. The organizers eventually declared Jason the winner.

Rich Piana Slap Box incident

In late 2015, Jason issued an Order 66 against popular Fitness YouTuber Rich Piana for not giving him a sponsorship.^[23] This led to a highly controversial incident^[24] where Rich slapped Jason at an Expo, which was caught on camera. Before the deletion of Jason's channel, the video had received 1.9 million views and was by far his most watched video.

Departure from YouTube and social media

In early 2020, some of Jason's followers started trolling Jason's uncle, a personal chef, by flodding his Google Business and Yelp pages with troll reviews. He responded by replying to Jason's followers on message boards with threats of legal action. This only further increased the trolls' efforts and let to Jason's grandma getting involved. Since she owned the condo that Jason had lived in for the past couple of years, she and the uncle confiscated Jason's computer and forced him to move back in with his mother. Jason ended up setting his YouTube channel and Instagram page to private, before both were suspended indefinitely shortly after. Since then, Jason has vanished off of social media and hasn't produced any new content, aside from a few minor cameos on other people's social media or YouTube.

Fandom

Genova's Witnesses / Pisstroopers

Over the years, Jason has managed to develop a dedicated fandom who call themselves "Genova's witnesses"^[25] or "Pisstroopers" (in reference to Jason's obsession with Star Wars). They are known to be very loyal to Jason, often display overly protective behavior and passionately troll Jason's critics. A wiki dedicated to Jason Genova and the Delray Misfits, titled Genovapedia^[34], keeps up with all the recent happenings.

Monkey Prickers

The self-labeled "Monkey Prickers" (derived after a sculpture that has a close resemblance to Jason, which he hates being compared to^[26]), are a subset of followers dedicated to organizing troll jobs on Jason for entertainment, much to Jason's annoyance.^[27] They regularly catfish Jason into sexting with imaginary girls and offering him fake business deals which he then brags about on camera, amongst many other forms of trolling.

Slang

When interacting with each other online, Jason's followers use an own language (comparable to 1337 speak), which has been derived from Jason's captions and text messages that contain many recurring spelling errors and sayings that he regularly uses. This includes ending almost every word with -ening, e.g. "sickening", "pissening" and catchphrases like "it sick, it piss, it revolting, it insulting"^[28] and "alrightpeaceoutbye", amongst many others.^[29]

Search interest

External References