User blog comment:RaijinRising/I need help for a video on Monty/@comment-4010415-20190915212959/@comment-4010415-20190916032748

Mentally speaking, his mind was heavily influenced by emotions. There was a lot of grief, anguish, depression, frustration, etc going on there, which honestly coated much of that letter in bias. In my opinion, if that letter has to be addressed, it's best to find a nice way to point out that his letter is heavily biased due to the fact that he was in a lot of pain.

One of the impressions that I got from it was actually that he hadn't fully realized and understood that a lot of the special perks that he had been blessed with prior to Volume 3 were a direct result of being Monty's right-hand man. The perks weren't really for Shane, they were for Monty because Monty was the head of the show and had a heavy influence on its animation workflow. With Monty gone, Shane found himself being treated just like all the other animators and even became upset when he wasn't notified ahead of time that the company was considering hiring a certain animator (I think it was Dillon?). That specific part of the letter is what made it dawn on me. Why would Shane expect the company to notify him of every single step they were taking in potentially hiring this other animator? There was literally no reason for them to tell him. But then I realized, if Monty had been there, the company probably would have told Monty, and Shane would have found out through him.

Also, having been self-taught, Monty's style of animation workflow was definitely not industry standard and had its own kinks and eccentricities, but he made it work. With him gone, they no longer had the one thing that made that style of workflow work, so they switched to something that more closely resembled the industry standard so that things could be more refined and work more fluidly. As the head of the show and one of the biggest animators on the team, Monty had a lot of power to make things happen even if doing so wasn't exactly the most professional way of doing things. Again, Shane enjoyed these perks that bled over to him from being Monty's right-hand man, without realizing that he did not truly hold the same power that Monty did.

In short: Most of it was that Shane was grieving and in a lot of pain, which painted how he viewed things, but there's also the fact that he appears not to have quite realized that the perks he had enjoyed were a simple overflow onto him from being Monty's right-hand man. He felt like the status and freedom that he had previously "had" were "taken away" from him, not realizing that they were never truly his to begin with, but rather, they were Monty's. This left him confused and even more frustrated and in pain. But again, that was the impression I got from reading his letter and thinking it over. If this is at all accurate, then hindsight is 20/20 and the people at Rooster Teeth should have done more to make sure Shane was okay and understood that they had nothing against him or Monty.