While a plurality of viewers seemed genuinely fascinated by the three-week-long trip, even during less-exciting moments, Dykes noticed that some expressed a morbid glee for destructive content. Dykes says that some online commenters even started to bet money on how the trio might die in the Congo Basin, perhaps at the hands of a hippopotamus or a crocodile. “I think people are lost or confused as to what is a video game and what is a movie, and then what is reality,” he says. “So it’s almost like this disconnect where people just wanted to be entertained: ‘If I’m going to the Congo, I want to see you escaping wildlife, wrestling.’” Tuyumvire saw the conflicting responses from viewers as “another kind of challenge for me to…create a story that will continuously be fed to the audience, but that will not also be overcrowded by too much exaggeration.”

Others have criticized Dykes, drawing parallels between him and other foreigners entering so-called forbidding places and, intentionally or not, reinforcing outdated tropes. Guy Dieudonne Moukandi N’Kaya, a lecturer and researcher at Marien Ngouabi University in Brazzaville, Republic of the Congo, says that Dykes’s trip through the Sangha felt honest in that it showed the “tense coexistence” between humans and wildlife in the region. Yet the way Dykes framed the expedition gave N’Kaya pause: Leading up to the trip, Dykes noted in a TikTok teaser that he would be “dropping into the heart of darkness,” a phrase culled from Joseph Conrad’s controversial, turn-of-the-20th-century novella about a Belgian trading company siphoning resources from the Congo River. N’Kaya says that descriptors such as “heart of darkness” and “unexplored,” which Dykes has also used in some of his posts, erase the presence of those who have long lived within the region: “The Sangha is not empty,” N’Kaya writes over email. “For centuries it has been traversed by people in dug-out canoes—fisherfolk, traders, and families.”