Line #14 YMMV/ExtraCredits


1	* AlternativeCharacterInterpretation: Gajah Mada is this. There's no doubt he was exceptionally talented in battle and intrigue, but was he [[MyMasterRightOrWrong totally loyal]] to Jayanagara or was he responsible for his death? While not outright stating the latter, the narrator does admit that it's in character for Mada.
2	* SugarWiki/AwesomeMusic: Most of the original compositions used in ''Extra History'', especially [[https://soundcloud.com/deankinersounds/eh-admiral-yi Admiral Yi]].
3	* BrokenBase:
4	** "Western Vs. Japanese [=RPGs=]". The episode takes it for granted that turn-based combat with menus is inherently less engaging and interesting than other systems of play, such as RealTimeWithPause or straight-up action, and the substantial anti-fanbase of [=JRPG=] non-fans were eager to agree. But even at the time, many protested that this was narrow-minded and [[BiasSteamroller doesn't dig into actual problems with the model so much as assume it doesn't work]], and [[HilariousInHindsight the renaissance of the [=JRPG=] style later in the decade]] suggested that other factors were more to blame for the drought.
5	** "God Does Not Play Dice". For some people, it fixed the "science is based on faith" point described in their "Religion In Games" videos. For others, it just made it much worse.
6	** The ''Call of Juarez: The Cartel'' and ''The Division - Problematic Meaning in Mechanics'' videos were bound to get this reaction. Are Dan and James rightfully pointing out poorly thought-out and legitimately offensive content or is it PoliticalOvercorrectness?
7	** "Mental Health in Games - How We Can Do Better". In the video they criticize games that portray mental health institutions as [[BedlamHouse evil places where patients are tortured]], arguing that this is unfair to mental health professionals who genuinely help their patients and that it discouraged people with mental illness from seeking health. Was this a genuinely good point, or does it ignore the historical abuses that occurred in mental health institutions? The comment section of the video has people making both of those arguments.
8	* CheeseStrategy: They're called "First-Order Optimal" (or [[FunWithAcronyms Foo]]) strategies in their [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EitZRLt2G3w "Balancing for Skill"]] video, with [[Franchise/StreetFighter E. Honda's Hundred-Hand Slap]] as the main example. An experienced player ''can'' defeat them (which is the difference between this trope and an outright GameBreaker), but they're good enough to get you past most AI and unskilled human players.
9	* CrossesTheLineTwice:
10	** Ibn Battuta's horrendous and fickle misfortune gets so intense it becomes funny. His "Will To Live", drawn as a balloon that flies away, makes it icing on the cake.
11	** The regicide of the Roman Emperors during the Crisis of the Third Century? Horrifying? Drawing the Praetorian Guards as smiling while preparing to kill the emperor makes it entertaining, as is Diocletian's faux-innocent smile.
12	* DontShootTheMessage: The main point of ''Stop Normalizing Nazis'', that treating Nazis as a normal faction in fun shooter and strategy video games diminishes their reputation as one of the most abhorrent political and military movements in recent human history and makes the audience more receptive to bad faith revisionism downplaying the Third Reich's history of atrocity and disgrace in favor of cooing over their cool uniforms and warmachines, is potentially sound. However the video’s incredibly poor delivery of said message made it come across as them saying that [[MurderSimulators playing as a Nazi in a video game will turn you into one in real life]]. Their [[DearNegativeReader less than genial response to criticism]] did not help.
13	* FandomRivalry: With ''WebVideo/TheMysteriousMrEnter'''s fans after he included an episode of ''Extra Credits'' in his "Animated Atrocities" series. The fact that Mr. Enter tends to have political views that are often at odds with what ''Extra Credits'' promotes doesn't help, either.
14	* FranchiseOriginalSin: For some people, their episode on ''Call of Juarez: The Cartel'' could be considered a prelude to many of Extra Credits more controversial episodes such as "Stop Normalizing Nazis" and "Evil Races are Bad Game Design". However, the episode receives nowhere near as much hate as these latter episodes do, both then and now. Much of this likely stems from many factors: For one, Dan states that he isn't against the idea of a game about Mexican Drug War on principle. On the contrary, he was a bit excited about the game's premise. Not to mention that most people agree that ''VideoGame/CallOfJuarezTheCartel'' itself is ''not'' a well-made game, even from a gameplay and technical, meaning even people who'd otherwise view the episode as PoliticalOvercorrectness, don't see it as a game worth defending.
15	* FriendlyFandoms:
16	** Fans of WebAnimation/OverlySarcasticProductions get along well with those of Extra Credits. In fact, December 3rd 2018 had both hosts of OSP and Matt do a crossover!
17	** Extra History, WebAnimation/OverSimplified, and Simple History as they all focus on historical events with cartoon images and a hint of humor.
18	* GeniusBonus:
19	** The ''D-Day'' Extra History episode showing LaResistance has a character identified as De Gaulle's main associate co-ordinating resistance groups in France. He isn't identified by name, but the character model has a trenchcoat with the initials JM, indicating that he is [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Moulin Jean Moulin]].
20	** Part 2 of "The Bronze Age Collapse" has a cartoon of a barbarian soldier mouthing "Bar--Bar--Bar". This is in fact the true origin of the word. The Athenians used the word "barbarian" as their pejorative for {{Funny Foreigner}}s whose language sounded like BlackSpeech to them.
21	* GrowingTheBeard:
22	** The first few months of the show's run on ''The Escapist'' saw an improvement in quality and a shift in primary tone from humorous to heartwarming.
23	** Early episodes of Extra History often were criticized for their focus on military history, hearkening back to old ideas about war and espionage as "the great game of mankind," and a penchant for [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory Great Man History]], where they focused on individual great people and downplayed the impact of societal forces on history. The former can be seen in episodes like Suleiman, where the entire series focuses on the multiple wars the man was involved with, but his civil accomplishments (like reforming the codes of law) are given only one quick line or glossed over entirely - yet it's mostly what the man was remembered for and why he was deemed "The Great". Since the change in writer however, the show's taken a lot of efforts to cover topic more broadly and put more emphasis on societal factors, and cover more topics that aren't directly related to wars. Example of later episodes that deal more with societal trends include the ones on Japanese Militarism, and the various black American history videos like the Cotton Gin, the History of Black America like the Burning of Black Wall Street - Tulsa, OK or the videos on Policing London. When the series on Frederick the Great ended up also mostly focusing on military history and a personalistic focus on Frederick himself, it also went out of its way to discuss the culture and environment that created him and the world around him, and outright stated the series wasn't properly covering his non-military achievements.
24	** Earlier episodes were often criticized for being a bit "Americentric," since they were mostly derived from James's experiences as a developer and teacher. While he was still there, they attempted to address this with spotlight episodes focusing on nations with less-mainstream gaming culture and development, and after his departure, many of the guest writers have come from different countries and cultural backgrounds to provide a broader perspective.
25	* HarsherInHindsight:
26	** In an episode discussing the ''Six Days in Fallujah'' controversy, they said that Konami isn't dumb and doesn't publish games on whims while displaying a cartoon of a Konami executive accepting and rejecting proposed projects without proper consideration to show how absurd it would be for Konami to operate like that. Later, it turned out that Konami's upper management did indeed think that experience and game quality were largely incidental to games' success, before, during and after an extremely ugly and public feud with Creator/HideoKojima that saw every game he was working on either cut short or cancelled, seemingly out of spite, most obviously with their willingness to farm the ''Franchise/SilentHill'' license out to developers who churned out glorified shovelware. It ended with Konami temporarily attempting to leave mainstream game development altogether in favor of focusing entirely on microtransaction-driven mobile titles and pachinko gambling machines.
27	** "Western Vs. Japanese [=RPGs=]" is extremely critical of the latter style of game, arguing that it represents a stagnant design philosophy that hasn't meaningfully evolved the way western roleplaying games have, namely by liberally stealing and borrowing from other genres. In the 2020s, as the genre was undergoing a renaissance of popularity and cultural reappraisal after years of drought, input from Japanese creators led to a reexamination of both the term "[=JRPG=]" and the Western attitudes toward the subgenre. Now it looks increasingly like studio politics, hoping to avoid backlash from western gaming culture (itself driven by a handful of influential western tastemakers and developers who disliked [=JRPGs=]) were behind the decline and fall of the style rather than the creative stagnation the episode blames. Worse, many have also felt that the western RPG style of mixed-up gameplay the episode praises eventually went too far, resulting in games that are [[FollowTheLeader all trying to incorporate all the most popular elements of whatever's in vogue into themselves]] and, paradoxically, ending up just as or even more stale and same-y than the [=JRPG=] titles the episode criticizes.
28	* HilariousInHindsight: The episode of ''Extra Credits'' on ''VideoGame/CallOfJuarezTheCartel'' has become this ever since Techland themselves decided to forgo putting it on digital storefronts once they reacquired rights for the series. Likely this is in-part due to them [[CreatorBacklash sharing the same opinion]] that ''Extra Credits'' has about the game, coupled with how poorly the game's content has aged since its initial release.
29	* HoYay:
30	** In the first episode detailing Justinian and Theodora for Extra History, Dan is shown sheepishly looking at a picture of the emperor with hearts around his head, and X's and O's on the picture.
31	** The narrator had this to say on [[SexyScandinavian Rus Norse men.]] Note that he gets [[WingDingEyes hearts in his eyes]] and starts drooling.
32	--->'''Narrator:''' Oh, that's right. Shirtless, blonde, tattooed, armed to the teeth, and physically perfect.
33	* MemeticBadass:
34	** Scott, for making hilarious but insightful PAX panel videos all by himself 3 years in a row, and destroying the entire Extra Credits staff in the 8-Player Extra Credits Staff Brawl.
35	** Robert Walpole gets this treatment in the final episode of the South Sea Bubble episode where he ends up being being behind literally everything that wraps up the crisis (and sees him cultivate more money and power), with the effect that "It was Walpole" became a RunningGag in the comments. While researching other episodes James discovered Walpole connections where he didn't expect to find them, so they decided to add a "Walpole moment" section to every "Lies" episode showing how he (or someone he was connected to at least) either impacted or was impacted by the events they are discussing, and he is now practically the "Extra History" mascot.
36	* MisBlamed: Among the many things that the "Stop Normalizing Nazis" video was criticized for, the use of the Iron Cross as a stand-in for swastika came across to many as a major case of spreading misinformation and/or lack of research. However, the use of the Iron Cross in this manner was actually discussed before in a three-minute video corresponding with their Battle of Kursk series. The reasoning being that using the actual swastika would risk their videos being banned in Germany.[[note]]Of course, an argument could be made that the "Stop Normalizing Nazis" video should have taken a moment to remind the audience about this.[[/note]]
37	* MorePopularSpinoff: The ''Extra History'' series (originally a temporary series of videos intended to bolster the gaming content by showing the history behind popular games) gradually surpassed the "main" ''Extra Credits'' series in terms of both viewership and general popularity, to the point where new viewer could easily be forgiven for assuming they subscribed to an educational channel that occasionally dabbled in gaming content rather than a an ostensibly gaming-focused channel that happened to talk about history very often. The fact that the history videos were generally well-received while the gaming videos were sometimes highly controversial (see OvershadowedByControversy below) probably contributed to this. In 2022, 49/50 of the channel's most popular videos were history-related, and history videos consistently garnered far more views, likes, and comments than gaming videos, unless said gaming videos discussed unpopular or volatile subject matter that resulted in anger-driven engagement. In early 2023, presumably because of the widening gap in popularity between ''Extra History'' and ''Extra Credits,'' the decision was finally made to split the channel into two, and the main channel was rebranded as ''Extra History'' while the ''Extra Credits'' gaming content was moved to a smaller secondary channel.
38	* OvershadowedByControversy:
39	** Extra Credits' reputation was tarnished by their defense of RevenueEnhancingDevices used by publishers at a time when backlash against the practice was at an all-time high. A different creative team would later apologize for it.
40	** "Stop Normalizing Nazis - Socially Conscious Game Design" is by far one of their worst-received videos to date with an over 90% dislike ratio. Ignoring the more extreme portions that many fans pointed out, many people found the video to have an incredibly flawed premise backed by weak arguments that seem hypocritical given Extra Credits' previous work criticizing video game censorship and desensitization.
41	** "Evil Races are Bad Game Design - Bioessentialism and Worldbuilding" tries to make a point about how designing speculative fiction worlds with designated [[AlwaysLawfulGood "good"]] and [[AlwaysChaoticEvil "bad"]] races narrows and flattens storytelling possibilities, but it is ''far'' better known for weighing in on the ongoing culture war about whether or not having "bad" races promotes real-world racism.
42	* ParanoiaFuel: "Propaganda Games- Ethical Game Design" and its discussion of games made to promote political view. You could be playing a game that shapes your views and unconsciously leads you into a particular way of thinking, and you'd probably never know..
43	* SeasonalRot: After James Portnow's departure, the ''Extra Credits'' videos became less and less cohesive, utilizing a cast of guest writers without a strong central creative or intellectual identity to anchor them or tie them together, resulting in their videos not getting much attention. The ''Extra History'' episodes became more and more popular in their place, in part because they ''do'' have a strong central creative force anchoring them (head writer Rob Rath), and are inherently more cohesive by virtue of their linked multi-episode format. Nowadays, the ''Extra Credits'' series proper is only likely to get a lot of press when a controversial and/or unpopular episode draws a lot of criticism, often on account of their guest writers using it as [[AuthorTract a soapbox]], and the idea that the series is a shadow of its former self is more common than not in the fanbase. This eventually culminated in the Extra Credits gaming analysis content eventually being sectioned off into a new channel, while the Extra History, Mythology, and Literature content took over the original entirely. (Ironically, this coincided with James's return as a creative force in the game design channel and what's often seen as an uptick in the quality and cohesiveness of its content.)
44	* SequelDisplacement: Gradually, the ''Extra History'' videos have crept above ''Extra Credits'' in terms of viewership, with ''Extra History'' episodes now receiving 2-3 times the views of the preceding ''Extra Credits'' video. This trend is only bucked when a particular ''Extra Credits'' episode handles more controversial or recent topics. It was to the point that at the end of 2022 [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgwQkLgbF1Q they announced that they would primarily focus on using the Extra Credits channel for posting history videos and migrate the gaming videos to a secondary channel]].
45	* UglyCute:
46	** Micro-Transactions Raptor: represents an arguably ugly practice of the industry but still, it's a cute little blue feathered raptor!
47	** The nascent AI from "The Singularity". A concept that terrifies many people who consider it, but it's so cute!
48	* UnintentionallySympathetic: When covering John Brown, the Extra Credits tries to challenge John Brown's violent actions during the Pottawatomie Massacre for moral complexity. But most viewers felt that the evils of slavery and the violent cruelty of those who defended it were [[PayEvilUntoEvil very much deserving of]] Brown's forceful approach.
49	* TheWoobie: In the "Lies" episode of The Seminal Tragedy mini-series, James speculates that Franz Joseph I of Austria could have been seen as this. James specifically mentions how the man had to watch his entire family die around him (his daughter died of illness, his son committed suicide, his wife and nephew were assassinated).

Context YMMV / ExtraCredits