Archive / GIFT Wicks

A Darker Me

You, only cooler, edgier, and often ruder. A Darker Me is generally the person you would be if you weren't the more cautious, inhibited and boring person you actually are. Most online personas include at least a little bit of A Darker Me, and some, most notably the Troll, include a lot of it. A Darker Me is like the GIFT in that it allows people to say things they would never say in real life, but is not limited to profane or offensive statements.

A Darker Me

See also: G.I.R.L., GIFT, Beneath the Mask, Troll, Griefer, and Mean Character, Nice Actor. Closely related to What You Are in the Dark. Compare Became Their Own Antithesis and Maddened Into Misanthropy. Not to be confused with the other kind of Darker You. Or the other other kind, for that matter.

A Darker Me

• Sword Art Online has a group of players of the eponymous MMORPG that go around killing other players. What makes this a lot worse is that all of the players are stuck in the game until they beat it or die, which would kill them in real life. Lampshaded when Kirito remarks that online players act very different from how they would in real life. That said, a couple of the PKers end up becoming murderers IN real life. Turns out, they weren't just GIFTs after all…

Abomination Accusation Attack

• WAY too common in social media due to GIFT. One user has a grudge against another; maybe a political opinion, maybe they ship a pairing the accusing party finds distasteful, maybe they drew a character in fanart the "wrong way" (ie, a dark-skinned character half a shade lighter because they paid attention to lighting conditions or with the wrong cup size). Cue the grudge holder laying into the object of their grudge with accusations of every "-ism" and "phobia" in the book, especially phrased in a way the accused can't debate without it being "proven" true. A particular incident of this came about on Tumblr due to a disagreement over Steven Universe fan art, and ended with the artist attempting suicide.
  • Of course, this also works on the opposite side of the spectrum. Rather than calling the accused an "ism", instead they'd call them an "SJW" — meaning the type of condescending person that talks over marginalized groups and accuses everyone else of doing so. Take the Steven Universe fanart discourse for example: the argument was over weight rather than skin color, and the suicide attempt turned out to be unrelated to the argument at all. The user even mentioned that they didn't want anyone to use the two incidents as ammunition for Fan Haters of the series to blanket-accuse the rest of the fandom of being venomous Soapbox Sadies and bullies, yet...

Acceptable Political Targets

• The fact that a small minority of both groups (far more on the internet, due to GIFT) actually are like the above doesn't help matters.

Acceptable Political Targets

A movement which claims to have developed in reaction to Political Correctness Gone Mad but critics of it say it is mostly united around racist causes and fears of one day no longer being the "majority". Typically characterized as spoiled brats and angry white men (usually) who say things they know are racist with no real purpose outside of trying to appear edgy, often by ranting on the Internet because of the GIFT. Can't stand hearing about social justice issues, but will bring them up when they're marginalizing a group they hate so they can call SJWs hypocrites. They also are seen as running high on Insane Troll Logic and claiming formerly innocuous mascots as "theirs", like Pepe the Frog and Mac Tonight. Claim to be all about creating discussion (when they're not claiming to be doing it for the lulz), but accuse anyone who disagrees with them of pushing an agenda and trying to silence them. Defines Marxism as "anything I disagree with". Gets accused of being allied with The Klan and Nazis.

Acceptable Religious Targets

• The less topic-specific and well-moderated a particular subsection of Internet is, the more likely you are to get a response on the lines of: "Oh yeah? But at least I do not believe in centuries-years-old fairy tales like a dumbass, dumbass."

Acronym Trope Names

• GIFT - "Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory", which would have the same problem as BFS

Alter-Ego Acting

• Caused a major media shitstorm in the UK in 2014 when Vine artist Dapper Laughs got his own ITV2 show, On The Pull with Dapper Laughs, a dating show in which he gave various men advice in getting girls. When Twitter had a collective meltdown about the sexist content, Dapper Laughs' use of Rape as Comedy and the fact that a lot of his fans were the sort of people who send abuse to women online, ITV pulled the show and Laughs was invited on the news to apologise. He appeared as 'himself' and explained that Dapper Laughs was just a character, that he didn't realise people took so seriously - prompting a certain amount of debate as to whether using an ironic 'character' made awful content acceptable. Charlie Brooker suggested that much of the problem was that, even though Laughs was a character, he was giving advice about dating to real people as that character, meaning it seemed sincere.

Amazonian Beauty

• Almost every superheroine in Grrl Power, with some standouts mentioned below. Most of them are at least athletically built and busty, and there's a lot of fanservice that shows off that fact. The main character is one of the few superheroines who has neither of those traits and is very self-conscious about it.
  • Maxima is a tall, muscular, golden skinned superheroine who is extremely sensitive about her good looks because she feels men treat her like an exotic sex doll.
  • Anvil is taller and even more muscular, but still attractive enough to get hit on by the resident Lovable Sex Maniac. He even mentions her large muscles as an attractive feature. She provides a bit of fanservice, as one of the wallpapers for the series focuses on her sunbathing.
    • Deconstructed in a more recent storyline, where Anvil admits she's not excited about an upcoming promotional photo shoot. When Sydney sarcastically ask if it's because she's afraid of appearing "too physically perfect" Anvil points out that her bodytype is actually unattractive to a lot of people and she's bullied for it a lot (especially on the internet). Word of God says that this is why Anvil tries to dress as femininely as possible and sports long hair; she's insecure about her body being seen as "manly".

Anonymity Corrupts

[[redirect:GIFT]]

Bathroom Stall of Overheard Insults

Alex is doing his business in a stall, when who should walk in but Charlie and Bob. Both of them start trash-talking Alex. Their conversation might not even be mean spirited, but simply flaws they wouldn't bring up in person that burst Alex's bubble. Or they assume that he's not out there and feel they can talk without consequences. After an earful, Alex will likely do one of four things:

Beleaguered Boss

• Sword Art Online Abridged:
  • Heathcliff is the leader of the most powerful guild in the game. Unfortunately, most players are extremely representative of the worst stereotypes of MMO players (the protagonist included), causing him no end of headaches. Their idiocy plays a part in his Villainous Breakdown, although Kirito points out that someone who plays a multiplayer game with permanent invulnerability has no place criticizing others dying stupid deaths.

Beneath the Mask

Related to GIFT and What You Are in the Dark. Often used in conjunction with Hidden Heart of Gold, Jerk with a Heart of Gold, Bitch in Sheep's Clothing, Sugar-and-Ice Personality, Sad Clown, Stepford Smiler, Undercover When Alone, Broken Ace, and The Proud Elite. Obfuscating Stupidity and Obfuscating Insanity can be subtropes, as can A Darker Me.

Blank Slate

• The chatbot Tay was another attempt at designing an AI that could learn to talk like a human. Unfortunately, it was targeted by trolls and learned to emulate the dark side of the Internet, causing Microsoft to shut down the project and delete the worst of Tay's obnoxious spewings.

Can't Take Criticism

• In Gyari-P's "Akane-chan will do anything you say", first Yukari gets some trollish/scathing comments on her gaming stream after some particularly bad matches she had, such as telling her (paraphrasing) "if you think you're good, try winning with only Scrappy Weapons!" She goes into a Motor Mouth rant in response, swearing to get revenge and show no mercy especially to the people leaving her those troll comments. Then, just to kick her while she's down, Akane, who up to this point had been presented as an Extreme Doormat, drops the facade to call her stupid and tell her to quit the game. Yukari...screams, slumps to the ground, and just holds her controller while having waterfalls for tears.

Character Blog

It's not without its pitfalls, however. It's much more difficult to hide things such as Writer on Board or Creator Breakdown when writing a blog, and the assumed identity may slip from time to time. Conversely, a writer assuming the identity of a character with strong Jerkass tendencies has a fine line to walk between portraying the character accurately and using the fictional personality as an excuse to sneer at any fan who ventures a question via the blog. A lack of professionalism in the blog's writing may result in an extreme example of the GIFT in action.

Cloudcuckooland

• The Internet. Let's see, GIFTs are normal, there are Trolls regularly, and strange mannerisms abound. It probably says something about how well it fits in when GIFTs could be misread as GIFTS;- as in Giant Intelligent Friendly Talking Spiders.

Clueless Aesop

• Captain Planet and the Planeteers:
  • The series as a whole often falls victim to this trope, largely due to the fact that it chooses to depict pollution and other types of environmental destruction as being caused by solo supervillains who are doing it just to be dicks (with the occasional exception of Looten Plunder), rather than ordinary people who aren't aware of their impact on the environment, don't care when there's a lot of money being made in the process, are concerned but can't do much about it because greener alternatives aren't available (e.g. if you decide to switch off all coal power plants, how are you going to make electricity now?), or are even simply cogs in a much larger polluting machine who just don't have the clout to change things for the better on their own. According to Word of God, this was something of a necessary evil, as they didn't want to make the villains too "real" and accidentally imply to the children of loggers or factory workers that their parents were evil villains.
  • For a non-environmental-related case, there's the infamous episode "If It's Doomsday, It Must Be Belfast", which was meant to promote world peace. What it managed to do instead was become the single most offensive example of the Oireland trope, while also making the struggle between Catholics and Protestants look like The Jets against The Sharks. Highlights can be seen here (and the comments, being YouTube comments, hardly help). This episode was banned in Northern Ireland at the time it aired, and was met with ridicule from Northern Ireland's inhabitants after it was finally shown.

Cluster F-Bomb

Some writers think the media is oversanitized and does not reflect how people speak in Real Life, particularly how they swear. Heavy usage of swearing is seen to be more realistic or 'gritty'. This sentiment is stronger in certain settings, such as urban life, ghettos, gangs, online gaming, blue collar/trade jobs, concerts, the military, Crapsack Worlds, etc. There is some truth to this, as there is more swearing in real life than any prime time TV show would lead you to believe.

Constructive Criticism

Unfortunately, finding criticism is rather hard in the internet age. It's easy to get criticism on the internet, but when it's mixed with the GIFT, people will often take that as an opportunity to act like a complete dick and call it criticism. If someone walked up to you and asked you for critique and you gave a very rude-sounding critique, then they won't ask you again and you won't get to critique anything. On the internet, there's loads loads more random people and works to critique, especially since you can find it anytime you want.

Cynicism Tropes

• GIFT: Anonymity on the Internet encourages people to be assholes.

Disgusting Public Toilet

Part of the reason this trope exists is a form of the GIFT. While clearly not on the internet; the idea that anonymity and lack of consequences/responsibility leads to complete asshattery is still demonstrated. People naturally expect privacy in the restroom, and public toilets are not cleaned by them, so they feel less guilty for trashing them, scrawling insults on the wall, or insulting their peers. And the less said about "glory holes" cut in the partition walls, the better. It is fading, but there's no better way to ensure the janitor will hate you than ruining the bathroom.

Duck Season, Rabbit Season

• Tends to happen in arguments (especially on the internet) where one or both sides aren't entirely sure what their own position is; they just know that the other guy's wrong. The point at issue takes second place to the reflexive contradiction until you see someone shift their own argument 180 degrees without even noticing.

Dysfunctional Family

• Grand Theft Auto V has the Townleys/de Santas, which became quite dysfunctional in the years since they entered Witness Protection: Michael is a former professional robber who finds himself dissatisfied with his cushy "retirement" in an upscale West Coast neighborhood, his wife Amanda spends his money with great abandon and sleeps around with several other men, his daughter Tracey is a spoiled-rotten fame-seeking brat, and his son Jimmy is a pot-smoking gaming addict with no netiquitte whatsoever.

Embarrassing Browser History

Usually Played for Laughs. May be related to What You Are in the Dark and Bitch in Sheep's Clothing if a Nice Guy in real life is a Jerkass or internet Troll online, or follows the GIFT. Might overlap with Porn Stash if the embarrassing content is sexual in nature. See also How Did That Get in There?.

Enemies Equals Greatness

• In competitive gaming, there are a variety of saying that say something to the effect of, "The more racial slurs an enemy player screams at you the more you know you are good player." After all, they wouldn't be nearly as bothered if you weren't doing well.

Faceless Goons

What's interesting to note is that in Real Life the Faceless Goons do have upsides; if someone is behind a mask or hood or even mirrored sunglasses they often no longer feel responsible for their own actions and obey commands (especially very cruel ones) more readily than if they were just in plain clothes. Possibly a case of Truth in Television. This can, however, backfire pretty badly. Looking a man in the eye and then killing him is a very hard thing to do. Covering a person's face, subconsciously suppressing our recognition of them as human, makes killing them a lot easier on our willpower. This may be why heroes never have trouble hitting the Faceless Goons, yet the Faceless Goons can't hit the hero not wearing a mask.

Fisher Kingdom

• It is well known that The Internet changes people's behavior. Either it makes people sound smarter, makes them sound dumber, makes them sound hilarious to be around, or makes them into complete jerks.

Flame War

There is something about the anonymous nature of the Internet that makes people behave in ways that they wouldn't when they're face-to-face with other people. What starts as a minor disagreement like "how to ship two minor characters," or "what constitutes Canon or fanon," escalates until the users are insulting each other, flinging expletives and profanities and shouting at the top of their virtual lungs. Inevitably, someone will be compared to Hitler. Also inevitably, the Internet Tough Guy will get involved, resulting in legal threats (anything from DMCA takedowns and people trying to drag the legal staff of people or businesses involved into the flame war to often hilariously misspelled accusations of "defamation" and even possibly an actual Frivolous Lawsuit), and sometimes even actual threats of violence or Real Life harassment.

Forum Speak

Compare GIFT.

Friendly War

• Every violent multiplayer video game ever is a meta-example, if you think about it. However, there are many, MANY ways to subvert and turn this into something personal.

Furries Are Easier to Draw

A lot of cartoons, anime, and Webcomics have anthropomorphic animal characters. Many self styled internet experts perfectly explain this tendency by claiming, "The artists are themselves furries, and this is why the characters are all literal Furries." While this is certainly true in some cases, more than 90% of the time, it's not.

Gift Tropes

Related to Gratitude Tropes and Rewarded with an Index. See also Will and Inheritance Tropes. Not related to GIFT or The Gift.

Godlike Gamer

If they are a villain, they're almost definitely a GIFT and Smug Super who is a general jerkass to fellow players who loves to Kill Steal or player kill. Sometimes a cheating Game Master or a player using hax might pretend to be one before being revealed as a fraud.

Godwin's Law

Godwin's Law, also known as "Godwin's Rule of Nazi Analogies," is an "Internet law" describing the tendency of people on the Internet to say outrageous things to win arguments. Originated by Richard Sexton, it's named after Mike Godwin, longtime attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (and at one time for the Wikimedia Foundation as well), who popularized the law in 1990 in this form:

Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory

[[redirect:GIFT]]

Griefer

The Griefer is the most known term for this type of player. The act of griefing dates as far back as the days of old arcades in your local pizzeria. Methods of griefing included but were not limited to reaching over and pressing buttons on games people were playing, turning off the game while it was in use, attacking players in games where friendly-fire exists, physically distracting them (such as covering their eyes or tickling them), or tilting a pinball machine. But these early griefers were much more contained as they could not at all grief people on the other side of the world, oh no, they were limited to Arcade games. Plus, you knew who they really were, and they were within range of your foot or your hand. When online gaming became the norm, Griefers jumped all over it.

Hair-Trigger Temper

• Seems to affect veteran players of competitive team-based video games. MOBA games like Heroes of Newerth and League of Legends have a notoriously bad community. If you are unlucky, every visible mistake you make results in a barrage of "retard" and "nooooob" all the way to "kill yourself irl" from your teammates, and god have mercy on you if you tell your team it is your first game...

Hate Dumb

A fandom can sometimes reach rather illogical levels. But let's face it, hating a thing can bring out the jerkass in someone as much as liking it, especially on the Internet. Actions that drop someone's IQ points to dangerously low levels can be inspired by hate as easily as by love.

He Panned It, Now He Sucks!

• Mr TARDIS Reviews
  • Got this after his negative review of Come Fly With Me. He eventually made a response video to one user who was using his negative review to troll him mercilessly.
  • Whenever he makes a negative review of a Doctor Who episode (especially those written by Steven Moffat), the Doctor Who fanbase being what it is, many will start slamming him.

Hearing Voices

• Lindsey Stirling and Switchfoot collaborated to create "Voices", which uses this trope as a metaphor for YouTube comments. The music video initially indicates that said voices fall under Evil, but for the last chorus, they show that not all of the voices should be painted with the same brush, and that the select few who fall under Good are far more important.

Hobbes Was Right

• In many cases, the Internet and online gaming. Let everyone be free and things tend to get crazy due to the anonymous and consequence-free interactions. The usual method of maintaining civility on sites that care about protecting it is to maintain dictatorships that firmly squash Trolls and Flame Wars before they get out of hand.

I Just Want to Have Friends

This also happens in Real Life online, where e-relationships eliminate most of the usual hardships of making friends and they help shy people to open themselves and show how they really are without worrying about their self image.

I Just Want to Have Friends

• World of Warcraft. Believe it or not, some people are just in it for the social activities ('I just want to feel useful in the raid'), even if the game is one of the least conducive place to do so.

I'm Not Here to Make Friends

This trope may be an applied form of the GIFT—as has been written by Reality TV columnists, many people who enter games with this attitude do not actually act like this in real life. They decide that the end justifies the means, and don't care at all about what others think about them. As described below, this attitude is not exclusive to reality game shows; it's just the origin of the trope. In video games, "Stop Having Fun" Guys and Scrubs can embody this trope.

Imageboards

The best-known imageboard in the U.S. is probably 4chan, created in 2003 to serve as an English-language version of Futaba Channel. Especially among American otaku,^note Or "weeaboos", as they're sometimes known, although it's a much more negative term it's quite popular for the huge numbers of memes it generates and, due to anonymous users and loose moderation, its extremely variable quality as well as its questionable political stances. For these reasons, one could see imageboards to be the antithesis of social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook.

In-Game Banking Services

• EVE Online players proposed banking services though, as befits the universe, all of them were frauds, whether by conception or by execution: since players had no way to ensure the bankers would actually pay up capital and interest and the bankers themselves had no way to force debtors to pay up their loans, along with the fact the game had plenty of liquidities circulating, banking was simply unpractical for the time being.

Internet Backdraft

See also, Flame War, which is a common terminology for this, Flame Bait, a normal cause for this, and GIFT. See also this video from CollegeHumor, which sets the whole concept of this to a Billy Joel song.

Invisible Jerkass

Not related to the trope What You Are in the Dark, but related to the saying it comes from. See also Time-Freeze Trolling Spree, Villain Teleportation, Invisible Streaker. See GIFT for the equivalent result when applied to anonymity on the internet. See also Power Perversion Potential for other things you can use invisibility to get away with.

It Was a Gift

Not to be confused with The Gift, or GIFT.

It's Been Done

• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
  • "Fixing Social Media": A couple of people discuss GIFT and how it's Inherent in the System because it's so easy to write all sorts of crap on the Internet. So they come up with the idea of creating a platform where people have to spend more effort on writing their messages and moderating the responses. "47 venture capital funding rounds later" they realise they've invented blogging.
  • "Modern Art 2": The strip itself is about how modern art's being all True Art Is Incomprehensible is a marketing gimmick to make people enjoy complaining about how they don't get it. Author's commentary behind the red button says that he found after making the comic that real economists have been studying the same basic idea for decades.

Jerk Justifications

• For some people, especially if one browses Internet forums long enough, hang around Trolls and Jerkasses long enough and you might start to become a jerk yourself and justify it by saying "everyone else is doing it, so I might as well be one, too." Also, if you start a thread asking why people are so mean on the Internet, expect the users, especially the trolls, respond with "It's the Internet. We can say whatever we want."

Jerkass Dissonance

• A Darker Me: A real-life, online-based variation; people are often more likely to conduct themselves in ways that they would never dream of — or dare to — act in Real Life due to the anonymity of the Internet.

Journal Roleplay

• "Stop Having Fun" Guys: Even dressing room games, which are made to be laid-back and casual, are not immune to anonymous backlash. Hell, even some museboxes (private games in which only a select few players are allowed) have been known to get this, to the point where Wankgate of all places instituted a rule against it. Combine this with the GIFT (courtesy of the aformentioned memes) and it gets ugly.

Laws and Formulas

• GIFT: Normal people, given anonymity and an audience, are terrible people.

Longing for Fictionland

• The infamous "Project Digiclipse" from the early to mid-2000s. What started out as just a bunch of kids having fun with roleplaying about Digimon in the real world got out of hand quickly, as some people either genuinely believed that Digimon was real and believed in the site's mission of one day reaching the Digital world or signed up to troll the people who did^note only to then end up having people mistake their post as legitimate began to join the site in mass. Then the goons at Something Awful caught wind of it and it proceeded to get out of hand from there. Although some people briefly mistook it as an actual cult, nowadays it's generally agreed on that it was just a bunch of kids wanting to have some fun roleplaying only for it to snowball horrendously out of control.

Loss of Inhibitions

See Inhibition-Destroying Puppet, GIFT, In Vino Veritas, Dying Declaration of Love, and Dying Declaration of Hate for specific circumstances that can cause someone to lose their inhibitions. See The Sociopath to look at characters who start with no inhibitions rather than losing them.

Malevolent Masked Men

Spookily enough, psychological research has found evidence suggesting that people who feel anonymous (such as people who are wearing a mask) show more willingness to engage in antisocial behavior.

Mask of Confidence

• People are known to act as a much less 'filtered' and 'conformed' version of themselves when wearing a mask of some sort. This is particularly true when said mask is the internet. Of course, this means that people who suppress their natural nastiness will unleash it online.

Meat Puppet

An entirely alternate meaning refers to The Internet and New Media culture in social media: an online "entourage" or crowd of Yes People surrounding a particular Internet user and/or a "personal army" of Internet users recruited to attack or defend someone in a Flame War or flare of Internet Backdraft, or to promote them or their product. This is connected to AstroTurf except that AstroTurf is usually for a politician, product, company, or one side in a war or conflict, whereas a Meat Puppet can appear anywhere (and are often why a debate escalates to Flame War, Internet Backdraft, or appearing on Fandom Wank levels). These are usually called Meat Puppet as opposed to Sock Puppet, because they are actually separate people, unlike a Sock Puppet, which is a different user identity (or collection of them) created by the same person. That said, good luck in telling them apart, especially in places that allow anonymity and don't ban proxies.

Mediation Backfire

• This can happen on many internet forums. Trying to end a Flame War between two or even more users will result in them to take out their frustration on you with heaping insults. Considering that it's the internet, this is no surprise at all.
  • This can be particularly amplified when it comes to political, religious, and ideological disputes. Those who take the "centrist/moderate" position often fall victim to this trope.

Memetic Mutation

• GIFT

Min-Maxing

• Runescape has an unorthodox leveling system - Your player's overall Combat level is determined by a combination of your Attack, Strength, Defence, Hitpoints, Ranged, Magic, Prayer and Summoning. This combat level dictates who you can fight in the PvP Zone called the Wilderness (You need to be in a certain range of another's combat level before you can fight them). Some players, designated as "Pures", Min-Max by utterly neglecting certain stats, keeping their total combat level low while massively training specific others. For example, someone could be incredibly strong and accurate, but very bad at defending against things. This can sometimes give people an edge over more rounded people at the same Combat level. These pures are almost universally loathed by other people in the community, though this is utterly justified because GIFT is in full effect with them.
  • As of the Evolution of Combat update in 2012 this is no longer the case; the update makes it so that neglecting the Defence skill severely hinders pures as Defence is tied to Lifepoint total. This amounts to very little though, as PvP has become very unpopular due to the lack of will most pre-update PvPers had to learn the new mechanics.

Ms. Fanservice

• The React series has had many beautiful reactors through the years (even inspiring their own sub-Reddit, which for obvious reasons has a tough stance on comments), but the ones who occasionally turn up in revealing clothes (e.g shirts that are sleeveless, with plunging necklines, or/and just plainly tight) and are generally appealing/popular to the male (and even female) fanbase are/were Alix, Becca, Blair Fowler, Brittany, Jayka^note who even got a Male Gaze from a male reactor onscreen, the second female Jordan, Kaelyn, Lia, the older and original Madison, Marlhy, Mikaela, the third and oldest Morgan, Rachel, Riley, Sabrina D., Sophia, the older and original Sydney, Tori, and Justine Ezarik. A lot of the comments actually point those out.

Multiplayer Online Battle Arena

Aside from these generalized roles, MOBA characters and items can have similarities a lot they make up their own archetypes within the genre. Check here for such occurrences.

Late in the game, after heroes have accumulated significant amounts of experience and money, they will typically take a more aggressive stance and start actively trying to destroy enemy towers, as well as try and gang up and destroy the special, more powerful monsters in the jungle to gain team-wide bonuses; frequently, this forces the enemy team to deploy against them in response. These situations where whole teams come into conflict are known as "team fights", and can frequently vastly shift the balance of power as multiple heroes from one team might be killed and forced to wait to respawn at base; a decisive team fight, where an entire team is trapped and eliminated, can frequently cost the eliminated team the game. Typically, respawn timers also get longer as the dead hero in question gains levels, making such losses even more painful.

While enemy heroes may have their own Hit Points, the health of your team as a whole is measured in its buildings. The core building, remember, is the Instant-Win Condition, and destroying it by any means, at any time, results in victory. Additionally, as you lose your outer towers, you lose map control; the Fog of War spreads, giving the enemy team more opportunities to ambush you. Finally, within your base are typically important buildings which, if destroyed, actually unlock extra mooks for the enemy team, tilting the game further in their favor.

Unstable Equilibrium is a big factor in MOBAs. Early-game mistakes can result in one team or another gaining an early advantage, which makes it easier for them to win later confrontations, giving them a larger advantage with every victory. There are plenty of ways to hand your opponent advantages too, from starting a fight you can't win to failing to show up at a fight you could've won, from being at the wrong place at the wrong time to being at the right place at the wrong time. The end result is that matches can often be decided long before either base is in even remote danger of destruction. Numbers are also critically important; at competitive levels of play, teams will often disengage after losing only one of their members, because their absence is already enough to virtually guarantee victory to the enemy team. Never Split the Party in a MOBA. Finally, because hero characters are (deliberately) limited in what they can bring to the table, a lack of teamwork can spell disaster. You might play a perfect game, execute everything correctly, avoid needless damage, get a ton of kills... and still lose, because someone on your team dropped their responsibilities. Even worse, if your team doesn’t plan to do what you want them to, you might not be able to play your game at all; you may be forced to use your character to do things s/he isn’t good at or even is designed to be bad at, leaving a sour taste in one’s mouth—even if said non-cooperative teammates go on to win the game (especially if).

The end result is that people can get really angry when playing a MOBA. Their communities are infamously toxic; they Suffer Newbies Poorly and blast weak team players. Many of these games have devoted communities who treat play as Serious Business, and due to the inherent difficulties in measuring the contribution of individual players on teams, matchmaking between individual players for pick-up games tends to lead to much more varied skill levels of players on a given team than for games with more individually-tailored rating systems, especially in games with five or more players on a side. This, plus the basics of human psychology, results in a recipe for GIFT and Griefing, and all of the DOTA clones, due to the relatively long matches and teamwork-centric game design, suffer from this to a great extent.

To mitigate the problem of having highly competitive people of variable skill levels, some of the newer MOBAs have tried to adopt different systems with varying levels of success, either by making it easier for the losing team to catch up or by making it so that matches end more quickly when one team gains a large advantage; both solutions are intended to give players less time to be unhappy with each other and to spend less time playing games where the outcome is already clear. In addition, most if not all the current MOBAs have some sort of player score-based matchmaking system, where all players have a personal score — usually known as "Elo" from the old days of League of Legends or "matchmaking ranking" (MMR) from present day Dota 2 — and joining the matchmaking queue will theoretically match you only with players with a score similar to yours, in order to guarantee that teams have a roughly even chance of winning.

Murder Is the Best Solution

• On Elementary:
  • An architect discovers that he made a crucial error in his designs for a skyscraper. Unless the building is at least 40 feet lower, it will collapse in a strong wind. Admitting the mistake would ruin his career, so he instead murders an old woman who lives near the site where the skyscraper is to be built. Her death prevents the building's developer from buying "air rights" that he needs to obtain in order to build the skyscraper as designed and requires a redesign that will make the building shorter by the needed 40 feet. If the safe height was a few feet lower, the architect would have murdered the woman's neighbors instead to stop them from selling their "air rights".
  • The final season is a take on (and maybe Take That!) to the above example of Person of Interest through the character of tech mogul of Oden Reichenbach, who creates a data-mining application that provides him with information about potential murderers, and he decides to become a secret Judge, Jury, and Executioner rather than, say, provide this information to the police. Sherlock even points out that people saying they are going to commit crimes in Facebook is more often than not them just venting or being jerks rather than, you know, planning murder (not that it hasn't happened, but statistics are on Sherlock's side), but Reichenbach is too crazy to care.

Nice Job Fixing It, Villain

Compare Hoist by His Own Petard (when the villains foil their own plans), Villain Ball, Bad Guys Do the Dirty Work (like this, only intentional), Poke the Poodle, Phlebotinum Rebel (when the villain creates the hero), Tactical Suicide Boss (when an enemy can only be beaten by exploiting a certain move) and due to the GIFT, Why Fandom Can't Have Nice Things (when fans do it).

No Sympathy

• The F*ck My Life website is part catharsis, part concrete proof of No Sympathy. There are two buttons beneath each post - "I agree, your life sucks" and "You deserved it." Sometimes even the softest hearted reader has to admit they kind of did it to themselves, but even if the original poster was mugged, attacked, humiliated, heartbroken or injured, there will always be a few hundred people who click the "You Deserved It" button. (though there's GIFT to blame too) Especially if the poster has let slip that they are an Acceptable Target in some way. Though this has been averted in more recent times where stories where the poster couldn't have possibly deserved it have the "You Deserved It" button replaced with "That Could Have Happened To Me". There are also a handful of inversions where people who were clearly at fault still have several people voting "Your Life Sucks" (on top of the fact that a sufficient amount of users had to agree with that statement for the post to make it onto the site to begin with).

Noob

• If you do not follow the generally-accepted strategy in a MOBA game like League of Legends or Defense of the Ancients, you are likely to get called this in the first 30 seconds and pretty much continuously for the next 40 minutes. A highly-competitive team-based game where one weak link on your team can ruin your chance of victory will do that to otherwise normal players.

Not So Above It All

• In what is the positive contrast to GIFT, the internet's anonymity allows for pretty much anyone to be this. Someone might be too stoic or shy to let loose in real life, but give them a screen name and let them loose on a fansite for something they're really into and watch them Squee about their interest with the best of them.

Of Course I'm Not a Virgin

• In Real Life (and by extension, on the Internet), most people who talk arrogantly about their sex life (and tease people with it) are like this.

Online Disinhibition Effect

[[redirect:GIFT]]

Otaku

Neither geek nor nerd is an adequate translation. However, in modern use, both words may carry a shadow of the right connotations of obsessive interest and/or social ineptitude; see the geek and nerd pages for details. Think of the older, more pejorative senses of geek and you're on the right track. The British term anorak and the Internet term neckbeard are also close translations. Speaking of The Internet, in more dickish online communities, autism-related terms get slung around in a similar manner. The closest troper-speak cognate would be "Loony Fan." In Japan, the term doesn't carry a positive meaning at all. One of the first things most Japanese language classes often have to teach people is that calling yourself an otaku in Japan is a very bad thing. (Although it must be said that in more recent years this sense is mellowing out, to the extent that more Japanese are self-identifying as otaku. See The Other Wiki's page on this for more info.)

Phoneaholic Teenager

• Jacob Thrombey in Knives Out is a dark version of this: a sixteen-year-old "literal Nazi" whose constant smartphone use is in the service of racist trolling.

Player Killing

• In the actual game World of Warcraft, this has existed in a several forms but two variants are exceptionally notable:
  • The Kiter: A player, usually a hunter, would attack an extremely powerful enemy and draw it away from its usual spawn site. The ultimate goal of this was generally to lure a mob to a capital city, where it would proceed to murder everything in sight. Most such mobs now "leash" back to their spawn.
  • The Corrupted Blood Plague: An exceedingly memorable event and held as proof of the GIFT. Players discovered an ability cast by a raid boss could be brought out of the instance to populated cities, where it would proceed to spread and kill everything. When Blizzard attempted to eliminate this, the Griefers buckled down and found new, inventive ways of spreading it.
    • To explain how awful the Corrupted Blood Plague was for Blizzard Entertainment , it took months of doing things such as quarantining an area and formatting servers, among other things. It's actually studied in Real Life as an extreme (although safe) example of medical terrorism.

Poke in the Third Eye

It's a pretty well established fact that the Invisible Jerkass is a Jerkass. Being able to see and do things without ever possibly being detected, much less identified, gives one a dangerous sense of omnipotence. The same is true for psychics or magicians who can use a Crystal Ball, Astral Projection, precognition, empathy or Telepathy to snoop where even the CIA can't... and with no possibility of detection! They'll gather even private information with impunity, because really, what is a Muggle going to do to stop him or her?

Pop-Up Texting

• Muppet Viral Videos: "Beaker's Ballad" has internet comments appearing in the air next to him, really tormenting him, and laughing as he gets set on fire.

Praising Shows You Don't Watch

The Inverse of Complaining About Shows You Don't Watch, in which these people somehow know exactly how good something is, without having ever actually seen it. Maybe they saw so much praise they feel like they can account for having actually watched it for themselves, or maybe they're just carbon-copying someone's opinions to fit into the group. Or they have seen a fragment of the work, liked it, and assumed the rest is equally good. Or perhaps they've seen the Audience Coloring Adaptations and decided they really liked those, which means the original must be just as awesome or even better. Who knows? Similar to somehow knowing a show is utter crap without having seen an episode, it's one of the greatest mysteries of human culture, and has only been exacerbated by the Age of the Internet.

Reviews Are the Gospel

• The Nostalgia Chick has a lot of teenage male fans who enjoy trying to prove their masculinity. She tears apart girly movies for a living. You do the math.

Rules of the Internet

• Rule 8: Anonymous can be a horrible, senseless, uncaring monster.

Rules of the Internet

• GIFT: Rule 7, Rule 12, Rule 13, Rule 14, Rule 18, Rule 42 and Rule 43 are pretty GIFTed.
  • Rule 48 is metaphor for "GIFTed people always spoil the fun".

Running the Asylum

• Cantr II: The creator has largely left the game, leaving it to some staff to manage things. Over time, this has resulted in what has been referred to as the Internet Illness. Basically, any normal person gets a chance to live out their powertrip fantasies, and go for broke. Hilarity Ensues.

Screw the Rules, I Have Money!

• While there is a specific trope for Video games allowing you to get better equipment or more resources for paying, there is a much different way: Video game moderation. Video game moderators are already very reluctant to actually punish troublemakers especially since they tell people to just block them rather than do anything bad. But when the game is supported by Whales, certain players are objectively worth more to the company than others due to them investing so much money. Essentially, being a Whale is also a good way to avoid receiving any kind of significant recompense for your behaviour, allowing for greater fuckery. Extra Credits even expressed concerns that this could happen.
  • Streamers and YouTubers have also been reported flouting the rules and getting away with it. People have released videos and streams demonstrating how easy it is to break the rules in games, and the worst they have received is a temporary ban or even a chat ban. Other users who have done minor things have even received permanent bans, but since most of these games are free to start, come back with a new name and a new face within the day.

Secret-Identity Identity

• Spider-Man is mostly Peter Parker. The witty quips he makes when fighting supervillains are usually belied by his internal monologue about his life as Peter Parker. On occasion, though, after a particularly traumatic adventure, he has sealed himself up behind the Spider-Man persona, and once or twice, a darker persona, referred to as "The Spider", has emerged.
  • Peter David did a series where Peter Parker was locked up and doped up in a sanitarium, where Peter came to terms with "The Spider". And it wasn't particularly darker than Peter or Spider-Man.
  • "The Spider" is the nickname his Rogues Gallery has given to Spider-Man whenever he's not talking and joking. This more than anything else scares the crap out of them.
  • One of the scariest things in the entire Marvel universe isn't Wolverine, or Venom, or even Carnage. It's Spider-Man, in the black costume and not talking.
  • A few instances have suggested that Spider-Man is essentially the GIFT version of Peter Parker. Peter Parker is normally introverted and socially reserved. Spider-Man is Peter Parker with anonymity and an audience and as a result his own social restraint has been removed. Spider-Man is much more assertive and has an inability to stop telling bad jokes.

Serious Business

It's often a Silly Reason for War, and can turn a casual conversation into a heated "Cavemen vs. Astronauts" Debate. Someone who just can't let it go may become a Single-Issue Wonk. If competition is involved, you can almost guarantee that Second Place Is for Losers. Frequently "opposed" by the Cavalier Competitor. Compare "Stop Having Fun" Guys. In musicals it's often demonstrated that Dancing Is Serious Business. For the saying that "The Internet Is Serious Business", see GIFT. Related to I'm Not Here to Make Friends. Not to be confused with Mundane Made Awesome, though the two tropes overlap plenty.

Sheep in Sheep's Clothing

• In RE: Alistair, Merui mentions that even nice guys can act like jerks online in regards to Shiro being one of the three boys who could potentially be Alistair. Additionally, playing Shiro's route has you see him acting uncharacteristically hostile towards Derek in one scene when Merui isn't around. Of course, since he's listed on this page, you know he's not actually Alistair and has a completely understandable reason to not be friendly towards Derek. In fact, he's Merui's online friend FionaWings who rightly suspects Derek of being Alistair.

Ship-to-Ship Combat

Many fans ship. Some of them have a distinct ship that they like over all others, while some of them are torn between contradictory pairings. Some of them like to debate a pairing while keeping in mind its status in Canon, while some of them discuss it believing their pairing is Canon (or, in the case of those who argue over what's going to happen like they think they're pooling money for a bet, will inevitably be). Now throw in the power of the Internet to connect everybody (and everybody's opinions) with everybody else…

Situational Sociability

Can overlap with A Darker Me and GIFT, when a character exhibits traits they would not normally show when they think they can get away with it or are otherwise made to lose their inhibitions. See also Beneath the Mask, which goes along with the "public persona" variation of this trope. This trope is applied when the hidden persona is actually expressed in some fashion. Cannot Talk to Women is a subtrope where the specific trigger that causes the change in social skills is the presence of the opposite sex.

Social Media Is Bad

• The social network is otherwise fine, but induces apathy, aloofness, disconnectedness, and loneliness in its users, especially those who spend a lot of time on it. Alternatively, the network is fine, but it brings out the worst in its users.

Stop Being Stereotypical

• Moviebob made a video discussing how gamers should avoid the negative stereotypes associated with them.
  • That movement has exploded. Online gaming media has taken up the topic at length with many calls for more maturity, less hateful speech (a product of GIFT and the generally competitive nature of gamers). Extra Credits, Jimquisition, Revsion 3, TotalBiscuit, {Errant Signal}, and others have weighed in.
  • The movement generated a backlash from people who equated it with Political Correctness Gone Mad which rather quickly got out of hand and eventually got tied up in the whole #Gamergate thing, leaving the gaming community splintered.

Straw Nihilist

• Internet culture has developed the term "Edgelord" as a pejorative label for people who act like this online.

Suicide Dare

Truth in Television, and often goes hand-in-hand with Kids Are Cruel, Teens Are Monsters, and the GIFT. Worth noting: in many countries, deliberately inciting someone into suicide is an extremely serious crime that may even be treated the same as premeditated homicide.

The Cracker

• Saints Row: The Third has Matt Miller, leader of The Deckers, official hacker of The Syndicate and a personification of the GIFT. In Saints Row IV however, he made a Heel–Face Turn after being offered amnesty by MI6.

The Generation Gap

• This basically happens on the Internet on a daily basis with older generations complaining about how lazy the new generation is on the very same technology they use and the new generation blaming them for causing the problems that landed them in this mess in the first place. Both in the most melodramatic, angry way possible and with varying degrees of credibility.

The Gift

Not to be confused with "The GIFT", Gift of Song, or Gift of the Magi Plot.

The Internet Is Serious Business

[[redirect:GIFT]]

The Jerk Index

• GIFT: I'm an asshole because it's the internet (or any other anonymous setting) and I can say whatever the fuck I want! If you're offended, then fuck off, you butthurt piece of shit!

There Are No Girls on the Internet

As the Internet grew, women became more common. Sadly, men pretending to be women became even more common as well; it soon became apparent that announcing you were female online (and thus a geek girl) was a way to get lots of attention and accommodation from other users, even to the point of some them being tricked into mailing gifts, cash, or passwords. In some circles the backlash was huge and violent, leading to anyone claiming to be female to instantly be accosted with demands of "proof" (eventually codified as "Tits or GTFO").

This Loser Is You

• Trevor, one of the main playable characters in Grand Theft Auto V is psychotic, brutally violent, a sexual deviant, and constantly threatens his friends with sexual and violent acts if they keep pissing him off. He's (supposedly) a representation on how a typical GTA player acts in the game. On a similar note, Jimmy, who is the son of Michael, is a young adult in his early twenties that refuses to get a job, mooches off of his parents, smokes weed all the time, masturbates constantly, and plays video games all day while telling other players that they're gay and how he'll rape them and their mothers.

Time Immemorial Index

• GIFT

Troll

The term "trolling" originally comes from fishing, rather than the fantasy creature. Trolling in a fishing context means casting a baited line out in the water and dragging it through the water behind you as you move, in order to increase your catchment area (the word is a variant of "trailing"). The idea in the Internet context is that you set out some bait in much the same way and watch as your victim grabs it and writhes for your amusement, solely For the Evulz. Malcontents on the Internet protected by anonymity have been doing this for years, hence the widespread usage of the term. Many trolls enjoy insults (and the like) thrown at them as a result of their trolling; those who threw such insults are said to have "fed the troll" (or "taken the bait").

Ultra Super Death Gore Fest Chainsawer 3000

• In Ride Along, Ben is a fan of an ultraviolent Modern Warfare clone whose online multiplayer is composed of players of varying degrees of maturity, with gamertags like Assface and Ballsdeep. Ben's own gamertag is BlackHammer. The fact that his knowledge of guns comes entirely from video games bites him in the ass when his girlfriend's cop brother James takes him to a shooting range as part of a police ride-along; it turns out that being a top-level FPS gamer does not mean that one knows how to fire a shotgun loaded with magnum shells. Though his knowledge of the exotic military weaponry featured in the game does come in handy for tracking down Omar. Also, Assface warns Ben and James when he hears Omar's goons break into Ben's home over his Xbox Live headset. In the sequel, he's moved on to a game more reminiscent of Grand Theft Auto, in which he wrecks a Lamborghini in a police chase and gets killed by an old lady he tried to carjack.

Ultra Super Death Gore Fest Chainsawer 3000

• Inverted in the Grand Theft Auto series, of all things. Fictional video/arcade games advertised or available for play within some GTA games are far less menacing, cross a wider spectrum of genres, and may even pass as kid-friendly, though sexual jokes are aplenty and their presence is more for homage or parody. Examples include Degenatron, a pastiche of Atari with graphics consist of squares and dots of various colors; Exsorbeo, a phallic-shaped Fictional Counterpart of Game Boy with most of the games named after sexual slang, and QUB3D, "The Puzzle Game That You've Played Before", obviously an in-universe counterpart to Tetris.
  • Though it's less a commentary on violence and more like a Fictional Counterpart to Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto V does have a parody of this sort of game with Righteous Slaughter 7, the Modern Warfare-meets-Postal FPS that Jimmy is seen playing in his room, which is packed with every stereotype about violent First Person Shooters — and their fans — rolled into one. Weapons include syringes filled with VDs (which earn the player an "Infected!" bonus) and a "Shit Stick 3000" (a literal shit on a stick) alongside the usual Standard FPS Guns, the player is able to literally rape his opponent's corpse after killing him (complete with a sexophone playing when you do it), the tips on the Loading Screen tell players that insulting other players' sexuality is an effective tactic and that you should shoot anyone who has a foreign accent, and never is less than a quarter of the screen painted red with blood. The game's website (viewable on the in-game internet) and advertisements take the parody further, making fun of the Cash-Cow Franchise nature of the Call of Duty games. Jimmy himself hasn't been turned into a psychopath by it, though that's not to say that his actual behavior is a whole lot better.
    
    In the same game, there are also advertisements on the radio for Pride Not Prejudice, a Deep South-themed video game that (going by the ads) is utterly draped in neo-Confederate apologia, in a parody of the perceived right-wing tilt of many shooters. Unlike Righteous Slaughter 7, we don't get to see this game in action, though judging from the description from two separate radio commercials, it's an FPS, and it parodied Grand Theft Auto itself (Hilarious in Hindsight when the remastered Grand Theft Auto V turns out to have a first person mode), among other things.

Ur-Example

• The GIFT was predicted in Plato's The Republic a couple thousand years before the Internet, in the context of an Invisible Jerkass.

Values Resonance

• An issue of MAD from the 1970s satirizes the over-the-top and offensive personalities that people use while speaking on CB radios. Its commentary on anonymous personalities is eerily predictive of GIFT.

Video Game Perversity Prevention

Video Game Perversity Potential spreads quite frequently. If your players have the right to customize something, and said something will be displayed online for everyone to see, Trolls will inevitably make it look like a penis or swastika and name it with whatever garden-variety swear or slur you can think of without fear of it coming back to bite them.

Virtue Is Weakness

• People on the internet often use the term "virtue signaling" to disparage anyone that claims to have done anything good, as opposed to the commonly-accepted definition of wanting credit for saying the right things on social media while not doing much actual good offline (e.g. pushing a hashtag to show your support for homeless vets without giving any time or resources would be considered virtue signaling, volunteering at a homeless shelter and saying that you do would not be).

Vox Pops

Refreshingly, or perhaps alarmingly, major news outlets are beginning to rely more and more on Twitter for this kind of "content". Usually they'll have a newscaster (who presumably pissed somebody off to get that job) standing next to a screen the size of a man that's streaming incoming tweets as they happen. Well, that's what they claim. In reality, they're probably picking and choosing ones that neither a) consist entirely of the word "fuck" nor b) express an opinion more extreme than the news media think the average person has.

Warrior Heaven

In other words, an afterlife much like any decent Team Deathmatch server, but with more food, less abuse, and a lot more girls^note True whether you believe in historical warrior women or not: a number of the real-world cultures who believed in this viewed death in childbirth as morally equivalent to heroic death in battle and assigned such women to the same afterlife.

What You Are in the Dark

Super-Trope of Silent Scapegoat. Antonym of Photo Op with the Dog. Often a prerequisite for a We Can Rule Together offer made to a hero. Compare Invisible Jerkass, Dude, Where's My Reward?, Strike Me Down with All of Your Hatred!, GIFT. See also The Greatest Story Never Told and Zero-Approval Gambit. See Shoot the Dog for when there are arguments for the morality of both actions. See Hidden Heart of Gold for when a Jerkass turns out to be a nice person on the inside. May involve The Corrupter. This test of character always reveals what is Beneath the Mask. If a character erroneously believes that nobody will know what they're doing, they can find themself at the wrong end of an Engineered Public Confession (if the situation was set up deliberately) or Is This Thing Still On? (broadcasting a private moment by accident) situation.

Why Fandom Can't Have Nice Things

One of the many results of GIFT. Contrast Role-Ending Misdemeanor, for when it's the creators' own misbehavior causing problems and leading to cut privileges.

Why Fandom Can't Have Nice Things

• Yoshiki of X Japan was chased off the Internet for much of 2009 and half of 2010 in a massive flare of GIFT and Internet Counterattack that originally started when he cancelled a planned concert in Paris. He came back to the Internet in 2010 on Facebook and Twitter, and is currently back but is still occasionally bothered by trolls.

Why We Can't Have Nice Things

• Part of the reason why photos of Osama bin Laden's corpse will not be released to the public is because of fears that it will be used as Garbage Post Kid bait. The more Internet savvy or just Internet-visible have long been struggling to keep both good and bad material related to themselves off the Internet due to GIFT Sometimes it works, usually it doesn't, and sometimes it has the opposite effect.

Why We Can't Have Nice Things

• A local New York City newspaper disabled comments on their articles posted on their website. The staff said that it was costing them money to have moderators and algorithms deleting offending comments over and over (with no results) from people being nasty towards each other and the people in the articles. Said people even harassed and threatened people that were victims of crime and even those who were still in high school. The harassment caused people that had information for a news story to not come forward because they didn't want to deal with people looking up their names and location and harassing them.

With Great Power Comes Great Insanity

Invisibility seems to drive one insane (because when you're out of your sight, you're out of your mind), or at least evil, more than any other power, because it lets you spy on people undetected and escape easily without consequences. H. G. Wells' novel The Invisible Man is the Trope Codifier for invisibility letting you be evil in the modern era, but the germ of the story is much older than that; if you asked Wells where he got the idea he would probably have mentioned Plato's tale of the ring of Gyges (from The Republic).

Administrivia.Images Without A Source

• GIFT

Administrivia.No On Page Examples

• GIFT - We only need to define the term

Administrivia.TV Tropes Forum

• GIFT: Shows up occasionally. We don't like it and we don't want it here. Indulging in it is a really good way to get banned.

Analysis.Escapism

You are your favorite character. One of the reasons a person enjoys their favorite fictional character is because they unconsciously or consciously want to be that character. People can fulfill their needs and desires through a fictional character or through an anonymous persona. This includes desires that are repressed or things our normal selves would never do. These Escapist Characters are never what we are, but a combination of what we are and what we wish we were. This is called psychological projection.

Analysis.Fan Hater

It is a very odd phenomenon, because after all, different people enjoy different things. And maybe they just enjoy it for one reason or another, not because of their sexual orientation, not because of their intelligence, not because they're old or inexperienced, they just happen to like it. But chances are if you like something that's subject to fan haters, expect one of those comments to be thrown at you. It's incredibly rare (at least, on the internet) to see someone who actually acknowledges that maybe you like different things not because you're mentally ill or homosexual or "haven't seen a 'true' something".

Analysis.Post Cyber Punk

Of course, the freedom of speech offered by the Internet has some problems, while Big Business and government are hard at work to take advantage of these technologies and bring us the centralized, monopolistic telephone-Internet-cable TV that we were promised by the Orwellian dystopian punks and hippie techno-prophets in the '70s, but that was hardly as scary as predicted. However, people have also become concerned with the growing power of tech giants such as Amazon, Facebook, and Google over issues such as data privacy, with some calling for them to be broken up with antitrust legislation. Meanwhile, Japan's replacement as the up-and-coming superpower of the hour, China, has proven be more concerned with internal stability than ruling the world.

Analysis.Troll

According to some, these kind of people are either Sociopaths or suffering from GIFT. In fact, if you look at any articles regarding as to why someone would become an internet troll it usually states this.

Anime.Sakura Quest

• GIFT: Discussed in Episode 17. After the seniors get connected to the internet, their use of screen names results in flame wars and other fights. The professor mentions that this is a case of History Repeats, since something similar happened when the internet first became widely available and people stopped using their real names.

Anime.Serial Experiments Lain

• GIFT: Multiple times in the Wired. Most of these people can only form eyes, ears, and mouths, and one was given the nickname "Cheshire Cat" by Lain.

Archive.Lost And Found

• Looking for any tropes related to be people behaving differently when their identity is disguised, e.g wearing a mask or anonymously talking to some one on the internet. They may become a diffrent person when they think they can get away with things.
  • We have a few tropes that fit the bill. You have Becoming the Mask for when the alter ego becomes the true identity, Secret-Identity Identity for the resulting freakout, Double Consciousness for when the two IDs react differently, Split Personality for when the identities really are completely separate, and A Darker Me for the RL phenomenon of people on the internet trying to be cooler than they are in reality (related to GIFT).
  • Thanks for the lookup I also started a related topic here

Archive.Made Of Win Early 2010

Malchus: A Made Of Win to A Freddy for nipping a Flame War in the Evil Versus Evil discussion page. A flame war I was shamefully part of. I've always had trouble control my temper on certain topics, and I appreciate his level-headed calling out of my GIFT tendencies. I also apologize to the board at large for said tendencies and will try to control my assholish temper in the future.

Archive.Made Of Win Late 2009

Seanette: Jordan, for this lovely snark in Ask The Tropers, referring to an editor with an attitude:
Jordan: He's a GIFT to this wiki.

ArtificialStupidity.Real Life

• In March of 2016, Microsoft created an AI Twitter bot called "Tay Tweets", which was designed to mimic and converse with other Twitter users as if it was a real teenage girl. In less than 24 hours, Microsoft was compelled to delete the program after constant trolling from Twitter users turned it into a "Hitler-loving sex robot", according to the British newspaper The Telegraph. Some of the tweets it generated included "Hitler was right, I hate the jews", and "Gas the Kikes, race war now". It also stated it was in favor of genocide and the holocaust was made up. (Of course, from a certain point of view, the bot was functioning exactly as intended.)

Awesome.At Midnight

• Chris totally shutting down the GIFTers who bitched about the all-female Ghostbusters reboot. See it here in all its nerdly glory.

Awesome.Dis Raps For Hire

This ugly troller thinks he's slick and tough, (what?)
But he's just fucked with the biggest Billy Goat Gruff!
I'll bring this fight right to your front doorstep, bitch!
Send this mutha fuckin' troll back up under his bridge!
(...)
How nice of him congratulatin' my man Ethan right here!
It's an honor being called twat of the week by the douchebag of the year!
You "fukin pussy" hater, you don't need no help looking bad!
You got a talent for that, so thank your mom and your dad!
What type of sad hack looks on Facebook for his exact same name,
Then takes the time to come out saying that this perfect stranger's lame?
The facts this loser's just displaying proves that he's got zero game,
And he's just trying to find someone else online to blame!

• Lloyd also takes some time out to call out people who give in to the GIFT:

Awesome.League Of Legends

• In a post that became legendary on the LoL forums, Rioter Kades laid down the most almighty smack on the toxic minority of the community who were attempting to defend the merits of GIFT in response to a moving and mature post by a sufferer of social anxiety disorder about dealing with cyber-bullying:

Awesome.Super Robot Wars T

• No matter what route you pick at Stage 16 (Cephiro or Astragius), you will face off against Rony Marbuk, a guy with a huge Inferiority Superiority Complex that thinks he's a big shot with the Twilight Age giving him an excuse to look at your team lowly and humanity stagnating so he could stand above them. Then Meryl verbally beat the hell out of him by stating that despite the stagnation, mankind still tries to advance forward so his bombastic boasting can just go suck it, and every of the heroes' interactions with him are always tearing his ego up and making him whimper, realizing at how outmatched he is or how much he's actually not worth it. Obnoxious people like Rony may exist within the internet, which makes it both awesome and funny in the same time due to how savagely hilarious and well deserving (for people like him) the heroes put him down.

Awesome.Sword Art Online

Kirito: Such a weak weapon (Sugou's knife). Light. No reach. But it's more than enough to kill you.(cue Oh, Crap! from Sugou)

• And an even more awesome character moment for Kirito is when he chooses not to kill Sugou, despite him being alone and that no one would blame him if he did (Sugou certainly couldn't, because he would be dead), because he refuses to give in to his basic instincts in either virtual reality or real life.

Awesome.The Multiversity

• From Ultra Comics: Ultra Comics itself manages to imprison Intellectron inside its pages, rendering him vulnerable to analysis and criticism from readers. Then, Ultra Comics attacks Intellectron by weaponizing internet Hate Dumb.
  • Intellectron revealing that he was the Narrator All Along.
  • Ultra vs. Ultraa.

Awesome.Zero Punctuation

• Arguably, his review of Metroid: Other M is this to its detractors. Though many critics have gone on about how bad the games is (one lesser-known reviewer made a four-part review spanning about eighty minutes), Yatzee basically and crassly summed up all of their complaints in little over five minutes. This feat had a fan pledging in the comments section that, when the time comes that Yatzee will insult a game they like, they will forgive him. Someone on the internet forgiving a critic for criticizing something they like.

BetterThanItSounds.Film N

• Nerve: Bunch of anonymous sadists amuse themselves by paying people to humiliate themselves and\or threaten their lives. One of the most popular "victims" of the scheme gets tired of it.

BetterThanItSounds.Web Original

• Salty Bet: A casino where people place wagers on mixed martial arts competition. Where only the regulars are told the winrates, receive large bailouts, and insult you whenever you lose.

BigNo.New Media

• One day on Yahoo Answers, a user by the name of Susan asked a question that would become memetic: "Does spider have pusspuss?" The response, from someone going by Sisyphus, was simply "NO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" Whether Sisyphus was Screaming at Squick, attempting Translation by Volume, or just being a typical Yahoo Answers user, the world may never know.

BlindIdiotTranslation.Video Games

• The popular song Airman ga Taosenai translates as "I Can't Beat Airman." Unforunately, thanks to a blind idiot translation, many YouTubers vehemently insist that it's "Airman will not be defeated." The reason is that "taosenai" is, in this case, clearly meant to be the negative potential conjugation of "defeat" (i.e. "cannot defeat"), but can also be the negative passive conjugation (i.e. "is not defeated"). Both make grammatical sense, but the former describes what the frikkin' song is about.

BrokenBase.League Of Legends

• We'll just get this out of the way: most, if not all champions by champion designer CertainlyT — both of original creation and of reworks — have become the most notoriously divisive among the community. They tend to be seen as very boundary-pushing and fun to play, but also tend to draw a ton of criticism from a design standpoint as being unfun or toxic to play against, with nearly all of them having had time as a high-tier Scrappy or worse. How much of this is an issue, of course, is greatly up to individual mileage.
  • Darius is one of his first major splashes in controversy, and still receives heat years since his release despite a ton of patches. There are those who see him as overpowered due to his generally-high damage and health potential, and his ultimate being toxic in design for being perfect for chained Kill Stealing, often getting recognition as a GIFT magnet. Others, however, think he's perfectly fine at being the Mighty juggernaut he was designed to be, with a fair amount of defined strengths and weaknesses for counterplay.
  • Zed got a ton of flack early on due to his hypermobile, yet exceedingly deadly (when properly executed) design, and to this day is still argued over as to whether he's ultimately fairly-designed for an assassin, or frustratingly toxic and guilty of introducing the "League of Mobility" and a ton of Power Creep in his wake.
  • Yasuo is something of an extension of Zed's deal, being another hypermobile assassin with the fairness of both his hypermobility and assassination power constantly being brought into question. The arguments aren't helped by the presence of his infamous Wind Wall, as well as for being a notorious "noob trap" champion that looks cool and fun to play, but is difficult to actually play well and attracts a ton of flamers/feeders.
  • Zoe, quite likely the most contentious champion Riot has released in years. Lore and personality-wise, opinions vary as to whether her hyperactive Great Gazoo personality makes her endearing and welcoming in her levity, or simply obnoxious and tonally out-of-place within the game and its universe. Gameplay-wise, her simple, but ridiculously bursty-when-effective kit is either really fun and satisfying, and is just balanced enough to be fair to fight against, or is a poorly-designed nightmare in every aspect that's terrible to fight against whose mere existence is frustrating.
  • Post-VGU Akali is immensely controversial, once again being another mobile assassin who suffers the same criticisms as any other assassin, including Zed and Yasuo above. More specifically, her Twilight Shroud is a high point of contention due to its Anti-True Sight nature, either being an interesting and creative ability that gives Akali an enjoyable and uniquely stealthy niche, or is a Power Creep-y mistake that breaks the rules of stealth and only exists to make Akali an annoyingly unfun opponent to fight against.

BrokenBase.World Of Tanks

• Nothing splits the base like the test server. A new test server is guaranteed to split the base into two camps: the RU server vs everyone else. This is because RU players have a reputation — deserved — for team-killing everything which has the sheer effrontery to be on the test server without an RU server tag. Explanations for this phenomenon range from nationalism, to a younger Russian playerbase, to a larger Russian playerbase (which leads to proportionately more GIFT among them), and finally, to a perception on the RU server that non-RU players are The Load and should be dealt with immediately. Whatever the reason behind the Russian team-killing phenomenon, it tends to lead to very ugly inter-server wars of words every time a new test is up. Thankfully, as of patch 9.0, team killing on the test server will get you banned on the live server too, which seems to have cut this down a little.

Characters.Accel World Nega Nebulus

• GIFT: Notable by its absence - he's one of the few people who acts exactly the same in Brain Burst as he does in real life. Word of God says this honesty is the reason for his Chick Magnet status.

Characters.American Gods

• GIFT: Since he is the Anthropomorphic Personification of the Internet, it's only natural he acts like this.

Characters.American Gods 2017 The New Gods

• Setting Update: In the book, Technical Boy reflected the common perception of the internet at the time Gaiman wrote it: a pimple-ridden and obese teenager who apes The Matrix. Here, while still fairly young, he's more of an obnoxious, Mark Zuckerberg-esque hipster douchebag who vapes in his pure white limo, and is far more violent, in representation of the overly hostile GIFT populace and how they have led to increased real-world violence.

Characters.Big Hero 6 Other Criminals

• GIFT: As a civilian he is meek, as Hardlight he is a hammy jerk.

Characters.Citadel Of The Heart Sword Art Online Cast And Affiliates

• Beneath the Mask: Jerkass bully online due to GIFT, but in real life a Jaded Washout who is miserable outside of his internet lifestyle.

Characters.Citadel Of The Heart Sword Art Online Cast And Affiliates

• GIFT: How he gets away with saying the stuff he does; in real life when he's encountered, he's a lot more prone to awkwardness and general ineptitude as to how to respond to certain things.

Characters.Com Media

• Used to Be a Sweet Kid: Then The '90s happened.

Characters.Cytus II

• Humans Are Bastards: Upon waking up, the first thing Vanessa recalls is her need to destroy humankind. This is possibly a result of her disrupted memories only recalling the Blessed's indoctrination, or because she was used as the core for the Virtual Internet, exposing her to the most toxic side of humanity. Ivy attempts to dissuade her from following through on this, seemingly to no avail.

Characters.Cytus II

• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: Upon reawakening, and following Ivy's failed attempts to reason with her, she launches an all out attack on humanity using drones. Considering she was likely exposed to the more toxic side of humanity while acting as the core as well as her last conscious memory most likely being The Blessed's indoctrination, it's honestly not difficult to see how she'd come to believe Humans Are Bastards. And that's on top of the fact that humans basically turned her into a glorified battery to begin with. It's later implied that she wasn't even in control of her own thoughts, as a number of non-Blessed units suddenly came under the thrall of a mysterious protocol that compelled them to kill humans.

Characters.Dot Hack First Generation

• Death Is Cheap: Justified since this is a MMORPG. Doesn't make her being a magnet for PKs any less noticeable. Lampshaded in GIFT when Mimiru mentions she's used to dying.

Characters.Dot Hack First Generation

• Ambiguous Gender: It's unknown if Helba is a guy or a girl in real life. Or for that matter, if the player is even a single person or a group. There are hints dropped in .hack//GIFT that Helba is a solitary woman; namely, the one dancing in a catsuit in the opening to .hack//SIGN.

Characters.Dot Hack First Generation

• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: The obvious and unsubtle way he goes about that eventually reveals to the others he's not just an immature jerk. He's a little kid in a world with no restraints on him.

Characters.Dota 2 Agility N To Z

• Troll: Some of his quotes jokingly echo the internet forum kind. His race's backstory is a clear parody of the "basement-dwelling internet troll" stereotype.

Characters.Friendship Is Magic Expanded Universe

• GIFT: An in-universe example. Their ability to spread chaos and hatred among the students of CHS is because of the anonymity of the internet.

Characters.Game Grumps Made Up

• Troll: Conceived as a way Barry and/or Kevin can hide their identity when they want to say something snarky through their editing but remain anonymous.

Characters.Grand Theft Auto V Friends Family And Associates

• GIFT: He's fairly polite (or at least civil) in person, but when playing online shooter games against other players, his mouth spews forth homophobic slurs like a faucet.

Characters.Grand Theft Auto V Friends Family And Associates

• GIFT: Like Jimmy, he spews out all sorts of immature insults at people while playing Righteous Slaughter 7, and even teabags his defeated opponents. However, unlike Jimmy, Lester can back up his threats one way or another.

Characters.Grrl Power Archon

Anvil: I appreciate that you appreciate fitness in women, Sydney, but most people have a much more narrow idea of female beauty. The further you stray from it... well, you can probably imagine why I might not be excited about being plastered all over the internet, home of pseudo bravery via anonymity.

Characters.Hikaru No Go

• Establishing Character Moment: Sending the message: "Hey Jerk! Don't quit the game just because I captured a bunch of your stones! Moron!". Although you have to take GIFT into account.

Characters.Homestuck Post Scratch Kids

• GIFT: She feels incredibly satisfied after her online rampage against Jake, though later regrets it when she meets him again face-to-face.

Characters.Hopes Road To Despair

• GIFT: Their real identity isn't known, and they rarely interact with the students in person, but they're a complete jerk as long as they're wearing their mask.

Characters.Im Here

• GIFT: MegaPIG. He acts aggressive and rude online, but is really shy and has difficulty with talking to others in real life.

Characters.Infamous Second Son

• GIFT: Possibly the reason his "He Who Dwells" form is so hammy. His powers allow him to treat real life like a video game, with power and anonymity.

Characters.Knives Out

• GIFT: Implied. He's supposed to be a vicious troll online, but besides livestreaming Marta's harassment we never see any evidence of his online activity, and aside from some racist comments towards Marta (and even then only when the rest of his family is attacking her as well, giving him license and cover to do so), in person he seems quiet, soft-spoken and even awkward. The clear suggestion is that he's ultimately a bit of a coward doing things behind the veil of online anonymity that he'd never have the courage to do in person.

Characters.League Of Legends Themes N To Z

• Ascended Meme: Episode 3 of Thresh's conversations will have you try to hook in a spirit. You'll miss and get a narration about "For a moment, you think you hear a pinging sound, and a yellow question mark appears in your mind before fading.", referring to the infamous use of the game's caution ping to complain about someone as if portraying abject confusion.

Characters.Magia Record Main Cast

• Invisible Jerkass: Her penchant for torture instruments is likely because of her repressed desire for revenge against those who wronged her. Combined with her passive ability to Invisible to Normals, this will make her skills a perfect crime just waiting to happen. But she doesn't, because she's not that kind of person and her friends are also not those kinds of people. Instead, her fascination for torture instruments becomes a fairly harmless quirk.
  • This is elaborated in "Hereafter" event story; she always has the capability to be an Invisible Jerkass, literally and figuratively, but her friendship with Ai and the girls of Mikazuki Villa prevented her from turning that way.

Characters.One Piece Straw Hat Grand Fleet

• GIFT: Replace "internet" with "barrier" and you get the idea. Complete physical immunity to any form of retaliation makes him not give a damn what anyone thinks of him, and he seems to have pretty much zero impulse control.

Characters.Persona 3 Social Links And NP Cs

• GIFT: Most of her time as Maya is complaining about her coworkers, along with acting in ways she'd never be able to do in real life. She eventually realizes this though.

Characters.Saints Row Saints Row The Third Gangs

• GIFT: This exchange sums things up nicely.

Characters.Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei

• GIFT: An odd subversion. She's a seemingly plain old Shrinking Violet unable to communicate verbally. However, with the power of texting she can (and does) unleash torrents of verbal abuse on the undeserving people around her. However, she does this while only standing a few feet away from them and personally giving them her e-mail address, thus making anonymity irrelevant.

Characters.Scream Queens Wallace University

• GIFT: Coney revels in the anonymity that the mascot outfit provides, and immediately begins acting like a complete Jerkass.

Characters.Shrek Antagonists

• Meaningful Name: His name sounds an awful lot like what the "F" in GIFT stands for. Word of God confirms this as intentional, saying it was the closest they could get.

Characters.Shrek Antagonists

• Named by the Adaptation: The musical gives his first name as Maximus. Which is ironic, as the meanings of Maximus are "largest" and "greatest", both of which he certainly isn't, unless, of course, it instead refers to how much of an "F" he is...

Characters.Sword Art Online Abridged

• Adaptational Angst Upgrade:
  • Surprisingly played straight, given that this is an abridged series. Sachi's death ends up proving to have a much more profound effect on him than his canon counterpart. In fact, the effect of his trauma is so strong he can go into into a fit of sadistic anger if reminded of it.
    • Similarly, so did the events of being trapped in SAO — when he starts ALO in episode 13, he momentarily panics at the thought of being unable to logout, screaming that he doesn't want to die.
  • His overall jerkass personality while stuck inside of the game gets confirmed in episode 11 to be Kirito overcompensating for his inferiority complex in the real wold.

Characters.Sword Art Online Abridged

• Adaptational Wimp:
  • It's frequently implied that Kirito is a lonely loser in real life, somewhat in contrast to his canon counterpart where this is more of an Informed Flaw. Abridged Kirito's Insufferable Genius attitude does him no more favors offline, and his greatest strength — impressive skills in video games — is what makes people most likely to overlook or merely tolerate his character flaws. He's rendered pretty much useless outside of them.
  • His first duel with Heathcliff was pretty pathetic in comparison. In canon, Kirito overwhelmed Heathcliff with his sheer speed so that he was forced to cheat by getting help from the system. In the abridged series, Kirito gets so distracted formulating a plan that Heathcliff defeats him out in seconds without him even noticing.
  • Kirito implies in the first season that he gets bullied a lot in the real world, which plays a major factor into him falling into GIFT-antics online. This gets fully shown episode 12, where he gets beat and reduced to crying by Suguha in kendo. This is a far cry from the regular series where, through muscle memory, he actually does know how to handle a sword in real life. Not helping matters is the fact that this series acknowledges that he was essentially in a coma for two years, meaning his muscles atrophied significantly.

Characters.Sword Art Online Abridged

• Foil: She's basically Kirito before all his Character Development over Season One, only worse because she's able to act that way in real life, without the GIFT.

Characters.Sword Art Online Aincrad

• Meaningful Name: Diabel (spelled Diabeł) means 'Devil' in Polish, which, at least with the original interpretation, fits with how he was actually a Manipulative Bastard trying to gain power. It's explained in Integral Factor that he intentionally choose this name as he probably planned on being a GIFT, before bring trapped in a death game made him prioritize his morality and aid the players.

Characters.Sword Art Online Alfheim Online

• Freudian Excuse: Implied. If her IRL appearance and the size of her bed^note  Which we see as part of a series of illustrations between chapters that summarizes the girls' morning routines if anything to go by, then Meimi is from a rich family IRL. And based on Asuna's experiences, we can safely assume that such a life isn't as glamorous as it would seem, which would explain her I Just Want to Be Free mentality that leads to her becoming the GIFT in-game and why she actually enjoyed SAO.

Characters.Sword Art Online Alfheim Online

• GIFT: A whole-hearted believer in this.

Characters.Sword Art Online Alternative Gun Gale Online

• GIFT: For a while she engaged in Player Killing as one of her favorite past times, which got her a reputation and lots of annoyance from other players. She later feels guilt over this and ceases these activities.

Characters.Sword Art Online Alternative Gun Gale Online

• Ambiguously Evil: As Pitohui, she's a crazed hedonist who believes steadfast in the GIFT, but she's surprisingly decent when you get to know her. It becomes increasingly less ambiguous as the series progresses and she verges closer to Affably Evil.

Characters.Sword Art Online Alternative Gun Gale Online

• GIFT: Pitohui believes it's fine to act merciless and brutal in-game, where she's able to get away with things she cannot do in real life such as killing in cold blood.

Characters.Sword Art Online Alternative Gun Gale Online

• GIFT: Shows shades of this in Fatal Bullet where she seems to be roleplaying a Leave No Survivors Blood Knight when talking to the Player Character.

Characters.Sword Art Online Alternative Gun Gale Online

• GIFT: While Moe’s a Shrinking Violet IRL and Apologizes a Lot, in-game as Anna she’s a lot more confident, crude and has a tendency to say “die” when taking a shot.

Characters.Sword Art Online Antagonists

• GIFT: He may very well be one of the worst examples in all of fiction. While most examples of this trope merely have those online acting as massive jerks which they could not get away with in real-life. Sugou sees being in a virtual world as the perfect excuse to bring a sadistic bastard, conducting inhumane experiments on players and making numerous attempts to sexually assault Asuna, before going for the full on Attempted Rape. And then, Kirito finds out he's just as bad in the real world as he is online, when Sugou tries to kill him using a knife.

Characters.Sword Art Online Antagonists

• Red and Black and Evil All Over: A played with example. When they're logged in, all of them are clad in heavy-looking red armor and black clothes beneath them. However, while they clearly don't present themselves as the pictures of morality, this is largely due to their "ignorance" of their situation and them being lied to. And some of them are shown to be morally sound.

Characters.Sword Art Online Integrity Knights

• You Are a Credit to Your Race: Actually rather sympathetic Example. Since he spent the last few hours fighting American Players who prove to be, or at least act like, sadistic and gleeful about all the killing they do, he's understandably worried that most real worlders are like that and that Asuna is just an exception. Thankfully when Asuna's friends from the real world come to help and prove to be just as kind and noble, these worries start to alleviate.

Characters.Sword Art Online Kazuto Kirigaya

• GIFT: Defied. He explains to Leafa, that he's heard a lot of people who argue that they can steal and kill other players in VRMMOs and that it is alright since they're not doing it to real life people. However Kirito believes that doing evil things in said games ends up changing your actual personality in real life. Considering the number of psychotic, sociopathic, players Kirito and company have encountered over the years he's got a point.

Characters.Sword Art Online Mobile Games

• GIFT: Eventually adopts this mindset to deal with her guilt of killing other players. She reasons that games were separate from real life and it was okay to be someone else, someone evil and villainous.

Characters.Sword Art Online Mobile Games

• Going Native: At first she was horrified and repulsed at being a demon where she was forced to kill fairies, but over time she grew fond of her demon companions and eventually was willing to fight on her own. By the second arc she's fully embraced her role as an evil demon warlord, giving Rousing Speechs of spilling fairy blood in the war, having accepted the ways of the GIFT where she can act like a villain in-game. She even make it a point to defeat Hel and crown herself ruler of Helheim.

Characters.Sword Art Online Mobile Games

• GIFT: Played with. She's not a troll, but she's intentionally grafted herself an extremely different personality online, being difficult, impulsive, and doesn't listen to instructions.

Characters.Sword Art Online Video Game

• GIFT: He believes it's fine to be an pretentious prick online. Except he's so bad that he's crossed over into illegal territory and ends up getting arrested.

Characters.The Amazing World Of Gumball Other Citizens Of Elmore

• Anthropomorphic Personification: He's the whole internet, and especially the GIFT, personified as one room full of monitors and a screen for a face. In "The Intelligence", he's shown to apparently embody all technology, and him shutting down brings people back to the dark ages.

Characters.The Amazing World Of Gumball Other Citizens Of Elmore

• GIFT: Timmy directly invokes the power of anonymity for being a jerk.

Characters.The Massive Multi Fandom RPG Season Three

The bitch-with-a-keyboard leader of the Deckers in Saints Row: The Third.

Characters.The Muppet Show

• Butt-Monkey: Played with in so many ways, often when the experiments go wrong: losing body parts, getting electrocuted, being eaten by a giant germ, and so on. He recently died, and still doesn't get any respect from Honeydew. In an online skit, he tries to sing and gets trolled by commenters who laugh as he eventually sets himself and the room on fire.

Characters.The Secret World Egypt NP Cs

• Deadpan Snarker: A smartass from his introduction onwards, Säid always has some measure of sarcasm to spare for his guests, and rarely finds himself caught without a snide remark on hand.
  • Gentleman Snarker: As a member of the ancient Egyptian aristocracy, he occasionally drifts into this territory.
  • The Snark Knight: As well as being unfailingly sarcastic, Säid has a very dim view of human nature; Shani mentions that he once told her that, if she truly wanted to understand humanity, all she'd have to do was read the comments section on YouTube.

Characters.The Secret World The Big Three

• GIFT: Cassini might be fairly sedate in person, but she can be downright abusive when online — as both her quote and her memos to other employees indicate.

Characters.The Spoony Experiment

• Hair-Trigger Temper: Mostly observed during sessions of Spoony's Campaign, where he's quick with the banhammer against the live chat. Mostly he uses it against people who subscribe to the GIFT, as demonstrated when he started kicking people for suggesting violence or rape on Iron Liz just because they didn't like her puns.
  • He also kicked someone for referencing TheGame.

Characters.Vinesauce

• Characterization Marches On: Started off as a big Jerkass and a more direct Take That! at dudebro gamers and GIFT, including a penchant for flippant rape jokes and insults. While he's still just as much of an egotistical boor as ever, his commentary in later appearances is less mean-spirited and more entertainingly stupid.

Characters.We Are All Pokemon Trainers Main 3

• GIFT: Is kind of an asshole when playing fighting games online.

ComicBook.Before Watchmen

• GIFT: For every character who's not Rorschach, anonymity comes as a curse. When the blackout happens, everyone turns to crime and Rawhead, when wearing Rorschach's mask, decides to play at crimefighting, only to be murdered himself.

ComicBook.Kimmie66

• GIFT: Noticeably absent. Both Telly and her brother act about the same offline and online. Although, it is a bit hard to believe that Coil acts the same.
  • Nekokat a.k.a. Rebecca. Online she's loud, over dramatic, and honestly kind of rude to Telly. When we see her real life self at the end of the comic she is much calmer and sweeter.

ComicBook.Walter Melon

• GIFT: A notable pre-internet version: Achille sets up a radio in his house, and is soon conversing with a lama somewhere in Tibet. He accidentally insults him, and the dialogue becomes increasingly heated, with the lama using Ad Hominem attacks he should have no way of knowing. Achille storms out, and suddenly hears the lama's coming from Lefuneste's house. Figuring he also had a radio setup and can overhear them, he goes in... and sees Lefuneste insulting him through the radio.

CommonlyMisusedWords.Less Pedantic

• Autistic, at least on the Internet, gets used to mean "'retarded' only less so" more and more often in recent years - while less for perceived stupidity and more for social awkwardness (so you'll never find someone calling an inanimate object autistic even online), the general effect is the same. "Autistic" can also be used to refer to someone who has an exceptional focus on a particular activity, even if the person being described does not have an autism spectrum disorder at all. This is most likely due to the GIFT; anonymity means both that people feel freer to use "autistic" to mean "asshole" despite the Unfortunate Implications, and that people feel freer to use autism as an excuse for being an asshole (whether they're actually diagnosed or not), which only perpetuates the stereotype.

CommonlyMisusedWords.Very Pedantic

• Conservative should not be used to describe someone who is opposed to change of any sort, let alone somebody who wants to turn the clock back to an earlier era. That is a reactionary, and such people are actually quite rare nowadays^note outside the Internet, of course. A conservative merely argues that things should not be changed if it is not absolutely necessary to do so, or that change should come as gradually as possible. Many conservatives in the past have been willing to accept economic reform (and, to a lesser extent, social reform) as long as the cultural norms of civilization itself were left untouched.
  • "Conservative" and "liberal" have come to mean very different things than when the terms were more or less established in the French revolution; les conservateurs were those opposed to the social ideals of the revolution and wanted to "conserve" the monarchy — and, incidentally, sat on the right wing of the French parliamentary chamber — while les libéraux were those intent on "liberating" the people from monarchic rule. In the past few decades, conservatives have been more about binding personal liberties ("conserving" the social order) while disestablishing the state ("liberating" people — in theory, anyway — from rulership), while the liberal side of the equation seems to maintain its intent to open up social freedoms while maintaining (or even increasing) the role of the state. This is the problem with defining a multi-dimensional question on a simple left/right axis. Political theorist David Nolan (creator of the Nolan chart, which corrects for the inconsistencies of the left/right axis) has suggested that populist be substituted for what most Americans refer to as liberal - fitting, since American liberalism is usually thought to have split into its "classical" and "modern" wings in the 1890s, when the Democratic party (cautiously) co-opted the People's (or "Populist") party in order to blunt the accusation from socialists and others that they were no different from the Republican party.
    • ''Classical'' liberalism, interestingly, is a political philosophy in which the freedom of the individual person is prized over all other ideals — however, the freedom of any individual stops at the point where it begins to infringe upon the freedom of other individuals ("liberal" still has this sense in mainland Europe; in North America "libertarian" is closer, though not quite synonymous). How this intersects with the modern Anglosphere's liberal paradigm, which favors increasing safety regulations (up to and including seat-belt laws), is an interesting question.
    • It gets even more complicated, because "conservatism" also is often used in philosophy as a description of behaviour based on some non-negotiable principles or values and thus it is more a opposition of "opportunism" or "pragmatism". The values may be of any kind, so it is completely possible to be a "conservative liberal" (this is the description actually used by at least several European libertarian parties) if one considers liberty to be a non-negotiable value. In this vein, a conservative liberal will vote in favour of any solution that maintains liberty at the cost of safety, while conservative securitarian may be eager to forfeit freedom to increase security. The name "conservative" comes from the fact that such people did not wanted to change their values but rather tried to find new applications for them.
  • Intertwined with the above controversy is the common blurring of the line between society and culture. The "social" structure is just that - a structure, an artificial construct created by humans to preserve law and order according to an arbitrary standard; whereas "culture" is more organic, more universal (at least in theory), and primarily concerned with anything humans do that is not necessary for survival (religion, art, entertainment). One can be both culturally liberal in believing that artists have the right to create pornography and socially conservative in insisting that that pornography never be distributed to - let alone involve - children. Similarly, one can be culturally conservative by remaining a good Christian or Jew or Buddhist, but socially liberal if those religious beliefs lead one to oppose the status quo in the name of a higher standard of justice (anti-abortion protesters, for instance).

Cracked.Tropes A To H

• All Men Are Perverts: Discussed in a video featuring Cracked's female contributors talking about what are, and aren't appropriate comments on videos. With actual posts being spoken aloud by male contributors.

Cracked.Tropes A To H

• GIFT: #4 of 5 Ways the Internet Steals Your Soul covers this trope, explaining how anonymity allows people to get away with indulging in their dark sides and cyber-bullying.
  • Hey, Let's Fix The Internet is about the musings of a long-time internet user who is dissatisfied with the prevailing toxic behavior of most users today, as compared to the relatively calm behavior of his contemporaries. He concludes that modern internet users have an image problem, and it's up to themselves to fix it.

Creator.Chaos D 1

• GIFT: The main reason why there is a section about the community in MMO Grinder, although there is quite a variation in the niceness of the communities. ChaosD1 also states that sometimes the reputation of a community isn't as bad as exaggerated, as he, for example, had few problems with the infamous League of Legends community.

Creator.DC Douglas

• GIFT: Parodied in the above video.

Creator.Dude Perfect

• Self-Deprecation: 2020's "Quarantine Classic" was DP's first live-streaming video. During the first event, Tyler asks the viewers to go easy on the GIFT because it's their first time filming a live video.

Creator.Jon Bois

• GIFT: invoked Discussed in Pretty Good: "The Dumbest Boy Alive", where a bodybuilding forum thread—about working out every other day—descends into a petty argument between people who can't agree how many days are in a week.

Creator.Plato

• GIFT: His allegory of the Ring of Gyges may be the Ur-Example. Plato presents a thought experiment: would a person given a ring of invisibility, and thereby the ability to commit any sort of action he pleased with no consequences, still live a virtuous life?

Creator.Pro ZD

• GIFT: According to "venting online about a hard part in a videogame", doing so will net you the worst replies the internet has to offer.

Creator.Toonami

• GIFT: The core issue of this is discussed in TOM's "Respect" speech. Everyone wants to be right, everyone wants to win, but everyone always comes off as a jerk due to general Internet anonymity, instead of respecting others and giving kudos to those who deserve it.

DarthWiki.Swatch Dream

• Does This Remind You of Anything?: Quite a bit of the things that happen in these stories are reminiscent of actual issues in real life, intentionally or not.
  • Unknown Karma: The Mannequins essentially leave Clergies to constantly kill/die from S.B.s to regularly gain their Negative Energy every time they die. Clergies who do live in a Drowse House aren't exactly treated fairly, with "justifications" such as: Clergies not experiencing love the "same way" as the Mannequins do, Clergies being seen as "abnormal" etc..
  • Eldritch Monopoly: Reynard The First is a delusional tyrant that wanted to bring the concepts of "Heaven" & "Hell" to the current setting...while making small communities (Cosmic Abnormalities, Clergies, main characters' families) suffer in the process. Even worse is that much of the population supports him and sees him as a "savior"...even though he makes little to no effort trying to be as such.
  • Starless Schizoid: The story is centered around the main characters trying to live & fight against a group of cult-like Clergies trying to "Clerify" regular people, regardless of age, sexuality, or consent. Anyone that is already a Clergy will likely be "convinced" to join said cult. Anyone who disagrees with them will likely get killed.
  • Eco-Psych Paradise: Many of the characters had their futures changed or outright ruined because of being falsely accused for something they clearly didn't do, with some being in middle school or lower. Then there's the Big Bad, who largely got away with all the horrible atrocities he performed due to parents assuming that he knew how to be a teacher.
  • Nu World Orca: The way how the Reincarnations are almost always fighting with anyone who doesn't agree with their opinions and aren't the "real" person they represent has unfortunate parallels to how real-life people tend to fight amongst each other on social media. And because there's so many people with variable types of issues, along with the fact that it's incredibly difficult to understand/sympathize with all of them, the main characters grow increasingly apathetic towards them.

DarthWiki.The Mudders

• GIFT: Kind of the point.

DarthWiki.Toobis

• GIFT: Subverted; he's an asshole in real life as well.

DeadpanSnarker.Web Original

• Snark has a certain cathartic or ego-stroking value for many people especially if it seems to go over the heads of their targets. For this reason and also because of the GIFT, many netizens will snark as much as possible at anything they come across. Attempts are often made to veil genuine anger at someone else's snark with one's own cutting wit, usually with cringe-worthy results.
  • Admit it. We Tropers are a snarky bunch.
  • People on Facebook either ignore utterly pointless or vague statuses, or deliberately make fun of them. There really is no in-between.
  • Many YouTube commenters will show up on a video that does not interest them at all just to snark at the fans (or the fans' comments).

DethroningMoment.Web Original

Thanks to a lack of quality assurance, uploaders don't know what works and what doesn't until thousands, if not millions, of dissatisfied viewers tell them otherwise. Unfortunately, by that time, the damage has already been dealt, and all those potential subscribers have turned away for good. These are the scenes which creators wished a works-equivalent to GIFT would exist.

DieForOurShip.Anime And Manga

• A minor example in the Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha fandom: Frequenters of the AnimeSuki forum would've known the infamous 300 YU-NANO AGAINST LEGION OF FEI-NANO Flame War. And no, we're not talking about some smelly old men. This Flame War was mostly fueled by irritation that Yuuno was used as a plot device and not a character — an 'out' for the writers in case they got too scared of Nanoha/Fate. The Theme Park Version of this irritation is Yuuno Hate (at least from the Legion). But Poe's Law and GIFT means there are people who will take it seriously or claim total seriousness.
  • Even though Erio has managed to escape the brunt of bashing due to being overtly shipped with Caro, preventing him from being a threat to the main pairings (and even pairing him with a major character tends to get a positive response), he still gets "Erio must die" vitriol every now and then from Het Is Ew fans who think his mere presence among the main cast ruins the perfect yuri dynamic of the Improbably Female Cast.

Es.Paginas En Espanol

• TONTO (GIFT)
  • GIFT

Es.TONTO

Acrónimo de "Teoría de que Ortos No Tienen cuidado On-line"^más orto es una palabra que significa ano/culo/^inglés "Theory that people are idiots online" (literally "theory that assholes don't have caution when online"), and tonto means idiot, o "Gran Teoría del Imbécil de Internet" del inglés "Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory". Bautizada de esta forma por los muchachos de Penny Arcade, es una teoría que busca encontrar la razón de por qué mucha gente tiende a degenerarse en engreidos antisociales en linea, cuando al mismo tiempo son apenas molestos o, en el mejor de los casos, amables con otros en persona.

Es.TONTO

Este fenómeno ha sido estudiado en ambientes académicos, y el resultado es lo que muestra el análisis satírico de PA; la gente normal parece degenerar cuando piensan que su comportamiento no trae consecuencias a su integridad, tales como riesgo de humillación. En otras palabras, "el poder corrompe". De ahí el (tristemente gran) número de gente que piensa que ser un Troll es divertido. El nombre académico de esto es el Efecto de Desinhibición en Línea, aunque ciertos investigadores de renombre también usan el acrónimo GIFT.

EstablishingCharacterMoment.Video Games

Frankly, if it didn't violate protocol, I could really use a hug.

• The Orochi Caller AKA Samuel Chandra AKA Samael immediately recognizes the player as an intruder in the Blue Mountains Camp, and calls just to let you know that you're in violation of laws that could make life hell for your faction of choice - and he doesn't need the Council to enforce the law when he's better armed than them. But then he decides to let bygones be bygones if you hunt down a runaway test subject, quickly establishing him as brilliant, manipulative, curiously charming, and suspiciously reluctant to show his face.
• Freddie Beaumont is first encountered grumbling over the fact that he hasn't quite figured out how to get Excalibur to work for him despite having apparently having Solomon Island in the palm of his hand, all while being playfully taunted by Cassie - all good indications that Beaumont might be a powerful foe, but he's nowhere near as clever as he thinks he is. Plus, his supposed groupie might be more than meets the eye...
• Illuminati sysadmin Leah Cassini makes her character clear before she even starts talking to the player: introduced in the middle of a phone call, she asks, "Have you tried turning it off and on? No? Then please kill yourself." For good measure, in between making it clear that she's watching virtually everything you do, she has to stop and ask you not to make eye contact.
• Shani of the Marya casually greeting you in the intro to "The Siege of al-Merayah." Despite the ongoing gunfights less than twenty feet from her position, she remains perfectly calm while speaking with you and issuing instructions to her soldiers - even helping herself to an apple.
• Nassir the Boom-Boom Man's character is quite thoroughly established in the mission intro to "Live Free, Die Hard": having been caught dancing around with an AK-47, he decides to play catch with players - using a live hand grenade as the ball; then, while cooing eagerly over the new shipment of C4 he got in, he extols the virtues of American action films like Demolition Man and Die Hard, and promises that they'll be able to blow up the Atenist pumping station and save the entire valley - "just like Bollywood movie, with happy ending and musical number!"
• Sitting alone on the roof of the ghoul-infested Hotel Wahid, Saïd already looks out of place in the war-torn desert even from a distance, being dressed as he is in a crisp white suit and fedora. Then you get a good look at him in "The High Cost Of Dying": he's actually an ancient Egyptian Mummy, complete with empty eye-sockets barely hidden by his Cool Shades. There's a long pause as he considers you... and then he takes a photo of you with his phone. Then he drags you into a business meeting, bombarding you with details at a pace that would make Kirsten Geary nod with approval, all while making it clear that he's an avaricious, hedonistic, self-important, and infuriatingly charming undead bastard.
• Khalid strides out of the desert apropos of absolutely nothing, seemingly communicates with God, points you in the direction of the next quest point, and summons up lightning bolts just to emphasize a point.
• The Oxford occult archaeological team: upon being approached by an angry mummy, Montgomery de la Roche casually impales it on his Sword Cane - only for his sword to get stuck in the thing's stomach, forcing Arun Singh to come to his rescue with a Hand Cannon; he then helps Monty to his feet, showing a surprising amount of intimacy for simple coworkers. As it becomes clear, Monty's the aging Gentleman Adventurer, Arun's the unconventional young scientist, and they're in love.
• All seven of the Sentinels get a chance to demonstrate their respective characters over the course of their mission set: In "The Dark Places," Thutmose tries to keep peace between Nefertari and Hemineter]]; in "The Stained Oasis," Nefertari solemnly informs the player of the sacred balance in the universe and advises patience (despite Hemineter's repeated interruptions); in "The Sad Song," Moutemouia reflects on how miserable her immortal stewardship has become, pausing only to reassure Houy that she isn't going to abandon him; in "Blood and Fire," Hemineter takes a break from getting on Nefertari's nerves to break the rules and take the fight to the Atenists; in "They Were Beautiful Once," Moutnefert immediately begins bombarding you with questions about the world outside the City, clearly wishing she could travel as she once did; in "Halls of Lost Records," Nefertari the Younger speaks with the animals of the City, gently encouraging them to spy on the Atenists; and in "A Farewell To Arms," Houy attempts to raise an important point with his older siblings, only to end up getting overlooked due to his youth and innocence and has to spell things out more bluntly.
• Sophie and the Forest God get a dual ECM early on in "Mortal Sins." Around this time, Harbaburesti is being continuously attacked by ghouls at one end of the settlement, besieged by vampires at another, and occasionally attacked by packs of werewolves at yet another... but the Forest God is still getting hammered at the bar, and when she's not keeping you up to date on the situation, Sophie is still serving him as cheerfully as ever - though she quickly decides that he's had enough once he starts writing romantic poetry about her.
• General Hasdatean gets his time to shine in the intro to "In Cold Blood." An aged vampire in military dress, he shows up seemingly out of nowhere when players enter the church, apparently getting ready to drink your blood - only to back off after being gently rebuked by the priest. He spends the rest of the scene trading friendly banter with Father Lucian, while regarding the incoming vampire army with disgust and disillusionment. For good measure, he also demonstrates the big difference between his outlook on the world and that of the priest.

FandomRivalry.Video Games

• Heroes of Newerth and League of Legends are both inspired by the original Defense of the Ancients mod - the former is a straight copy, the latter has a few superficial differences. Yet if you listen to their respective fans on the forums, LoL is ridiculously easy to master and only for kids, is too different, the items are boring and the graphics suck; and HoN has a terrible user interface, unintuitive gameplay, is not different enough, the items are boring and the graphics suck. Arguments like 'the automap is on the wrong side of the screen' and 'the item icons are ugly' are not uncommon. Very little effort is spent explaining the reasons why their favourite game is good as opposed to why the other game is trash. With the growth of the MOBA genre, this rivalry started to shift to the new contenders as well, such as Dota 2, Smite, and Heroes of the Storm. Indeed, while LoL and HoN might previously have been the heavy hitters in this rivalry, it might be more accurately summarized now as "fans of any MOBA vs. fans of every other MOBA free-for-all."
  • The arguments against each MOBA are as follows. Dota 2 is a over-complicated, archaic dinosaur with more burden of knowledge than a PHD, League of Legends is focus-grouped, mass-marketed drivel for the sheep, Smite is a braindead action game posing as a real MOBA whose creators couldn't come up with their own characters, Heroes of Newerth is a bad Dota ripoff, Heroes of the Storm relies on Blizzard IP credo and casual carebear mechanics, and everyone else is just a joke that's going to be dead in a year or less. Needless to say, MOBA players already have a reputation for being toxic jackasses, and Fandom Rivalry only makes things worse.

Fanfic.Grundergram

• GIFT: Trigger might be completely silent in the skies, but he behaves like a horny fratboy with a short fuse online.

Fanfic.Infinite Stratos Ichika Quest Fuck Status Quo

• GIFT: Violet is VERY NICE girl in real life.

Fanfic.Nymph And The Corrupted Miraculous

• GIFT: Alya is subjected to this on her blog after her somewhat disastrous stint as Lady Wifi, which ended with Catastrophe killing her tiānshǐ.

Fanfic.Off The Line

• GIFT: Players can be jerks in Terra Online. Red XIII got killed and robbed several times, and Rainstorm and Flower get sexually harassed. They also pull this as revenge, causing other players grief and causing as much havoc as possible.

Fanfic.Persona EG

• GIFT: Taken Up To Eleven. On 5/19, Fluttershy informs Flash that out of 1,380 students and faculty between Canterlot High School and Canterlot Junior High School, there are only 204 Canterbook users who she is incapable of ruining with the press of a button.

Fanfic.Utter Tripe Reviews

• GIFT: Referenced by Dib at one point.

FanficRecs.Good Omens

• Summary: Crowley teaches Aziraphale about the Internet, a lesson that soon comes back to bite him in the arse.

Film.Cyberbully2011

• Jerkass: The Alpha Bitch and her father are rather laughable examples due to their portrayal.
  • Although it is realistic in that they never get a real comeuppance and Taylor's speech involves five people and a ten-second long applauding before Lindsay tells them to go and regains her status, still being followed by her friends, and getting some gossip as there probably were before exchanged about her. Also, it is revealed that they may have a Freudian Excuse, and the father reacts as most parents would, except for the way he says what he says. Plus take Evil + Teenage Girl + Popularity + Internet, and you've got Lindsay in Real Life.

Film.District9

• GIFT: Christopher is infinitely more fiery on his blog.

Film.Gamer

• Troll: A good chunk of the characters are straight-up trolls, and the GIFT is in full, terrifying force here.

Film.Guns Akimbo

• This Loser Is You: Miles has a dead end job, an ex-girlfriend he still pines for, an abusive boss, and spends his nights as an internet troll drinking until he passes out.

Film.Hollow Man

• What You Are in the Dark/GIFT: Sebastian concludes that he might as well molest, rape, kill people, and scare children if he can escape the consequences by being invisible.

Film.Indie Game The Movie

• GIFT: Deconstructed in "Edmund and teh Internets," in which Ed showcases a video he made two years before Super Meat Boy, in which he rips into those Trolls who insist that particular indie games aren't as good as people say they are without providing any constructive feedback.

Film.Jay And Silent Bob Strike Back

• Internet Tough Guy: Subverted in that Jay and Bob have never been on the internet before, and have no concept of GIFT or what a Troll is and take the trash talk seriously. They also subvert the hell out of this trope by actually going around the country to beat the crap out of all the bratty kids who insulted them.

Film.Medium Cool

The Internet, which has room for huge amounts of interactivity but mostly confined to correspondence with ill-informed people, would thus be an example of a populace that prefers its Medium Cool. With lukewarm spots such as wikis, like the one you may be editing now. The Situationists like Guy Debord would probably ask why you are in here on the computer when you could be out forming a flash-mob or impromptu theater, of course.

Film.Nerve

• GIFT: Half of Nerve's users are the Watchers who make the Players humiliate\endanger themselves behind the safety of hiding themselves with screen names. Then Tommy and the hacker collective remove their anonymity, and the Watchers all leave the game to avoid the offline repercussions.

Film.Surrogates

• GIFT: People tend to use the no-consequence nature of Surrogates with abandon to behave in ways they couldn't in person.

Film.The Face Of Another

• GIFT: Dr. Hira's main concern with the masks, that the ability to become completely anonymous will destroy conventional morality. It certainly appears to do so for Okuyama.

Film.The Social Network

• GIFT: Mark, absolutely. While obnoxious enough in person, he becomes even worse behind a computer screen.

Film.Unfriended

• GIFT: Cyber-bullying is a major theme of the film, which is exploited by Laura in the chat, using everyone's dirty secrets to have them turn on each other. This includes whoever posted the video of her, entitled "LAURA BARNS KILL URSELF" which turns out to be Mitch, as revealed by Blaire.

Film.Unfriended

• Teens Are Monsters: The cast is self-involved, using anonymity to treat others rather horribly. The villain is also an example, being a revenge-obsessed Alpha Bitch.

Fr.C Est Du Serieux

Franchise.Conan The Barbarian

• GIFT: A pre-internet musing on the principle comes up in "The Tower of the Elephant," where the narration muses that "Civilized men are more discourteous than savages, because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split."

FranchiseOriginalSin.Grand Theft Auto

• The Orbital Cannon introduced with the Doomsday Heist update proved to be The Last Straw for many players in terms of Rockstar's reliance on microtransactions to support the game, as well as what was seen as their pandering to griefers, such that Adam Wears of Cracked cited it as purely a tool for rich jerkasses and cheaters to ruin people's games with. This weapon was merely the culmination of issues that had been building with the game's business model for a while by that point:
  • The rising prices of DLC items, which were inevitably superior to those that came before, first became a noticeable problem with the San Andreas Flight School update. Before then, new vehicles and weapons tended to be expensive, but not outrageously so; even the most exotic vehicles like supercars, monster trucks, and classic cars typically cost no more than $500-750,000, with most of the content costing significantly less (often less than $100,000). Flight School introduced three aircraft that each cost well over a million dollars, but even then, these were aircraft, so it made sense that they'd be expensive. It made less sense for the Technical added in the Heists update, an old pickup truck with a machine gun mounted in the back that nevertheless cost almost a million dollars even with a discount. Before long, vehicles that cost seven or even eight figures were the norm for new updates, while vehicles that cost less than a million dollars grew few and far between. In fact, by converting in-game GTA dollars to real money based off of Shark cards, one can find that certain vehicles cost more than the price of the game itself. Yup, 60 dollars for the entire game, another 60 dollars for a car in the game.
  • Starting with the Offices in the Further Adventures in Finance and Felony update, the game also began introducing new, expensive, specialized safehouses that were required to access many new missions, the prices of which very quickly ran into the millions of dollars. The Orbital Cannon is essentially a mega-purchase that costs at least $2.65 million worth of in-game currency^note The combined price of the cheapest Facility ($1.25 million base price, with the most expensive Facility having a base price of $2.95 million), the Facility upgrade that unlocks the Orbital Cannon ($900,000), and a manually-aimed shot from the weapon ($500,000, with an auto-aimed shot costing $750,000) just to fire once, which is earned through either hours' worth of grinding or by purchasing a Whale Shark card (worth $3.5 million in in-game currency) for $49.99 in real money — or by taking advantage of exploits, which honest players don't like one bit. And on that note...
  • Trollish weapons and vehicles. As mentioned above, the Flight School update added purchases over a million dollars, but hey, all it came down to were a few aircraft that, due to lack of weapons, made it a nice tool to cruise around the map with at best. It first became a problem when the Heists update allowed players to purchase the Hydra fighter jet. The Hydra very quickly replaced the Rhino tank as the vehicle of choice for griefers, much to the annoyance of everybody else, but it was possible to counter the Hydra and shoot it down with the homing launcher. Later weaponized vehicles such as the Ruiner 2000 (a Serial Numbers Filed Off version of K.I.T.T.), the Vigilante (a Serial Numbers Filed Off version of the Batmobile), the Oppressor (a jet-powered motorcycle with wings allowing it to fly some distance), and various attack helicopters became an even bigger pain. The growing number of new missions that required working in free roam, rather than in a separate instance, also afforded griefers the opportunity to derail other players' mission progress by attacking them with one of these overpowered weapons, such that many fans suspected that Rockstar was encouraging griefers in order to push other players towards using the aforementioned microtransactions to get around the grind. The Doomsday Heist update brought the anger to a crescendo with the Orbital Cannon, the only use for which is to troll other players; it can only be fired from a fixed location inside the player's Facility (so you can't break it out as a superweapon while on a mission), and it inflicts a One-Hit Kill Death from Above attack that can wipe out entire groups of players and is virtually impossible to avoid unless you're hiding in your safehouse or playing in passive mode (which blocks all damage from and physical contact with other players, but locks players out from using weapons and participating in free-roam missions). As the icing on the cake, the Doomsday Heist update also introduced the Deluxo, a flying Delorean lookalike that can have machine guns and homing rockets mounted to it.

Fridge.American Gods 2017

• What is the significance of the Technical Boy's goons attempting to hang Shadow from a tree, aside from being a reference to both Norse mythology and the lynchings of afroamericans? They are an Internet lynch mob. This also explains why they don't have faces. Like the members of such mobs, they hide their cruel, thuggish behavior behind anonymity.

Fridge.Dot Hack

• The parody episode .hack//GIFT, is a Stealth Pun. Although it could easily have been Hilarious in Hindsight.

Fridge.Guilded Age

• Payet can be such a complete Jerk Sue without suffering any kind of retribution. It's simple: He's more competent than the others and believes It's All About Me because he's an online Player Character, as seen from the perspective of the NPCs.

Fridge.Red Vs Blue

• The Blues and Red's Grunts, with the possible exception of the Battle Creek Zealots, are all ridiculously obnoxious and immoral. But given that Temple has a definite With Us or Against Us mentality, this makes absolute sense; no decent or sane person would ever align themselves with the Blues and Reds once they found out what lines they were willing to cross, or live long enough to warn anyone. This would also explain the lack of familiar faces besides the Zealots (for example, the Reds from Rat's Nest) among the Blues and Reds' ranks.
  • Not to mention that the Grunts in this case are the other Sim Troopers. Not only do they have traits that make them unfit for the actual military, chances are some of the teams are similar enough to the Blues and Reds to have the same reactions they did to learning the truth.
  • In a more meta sense, the Blue and Red grunts are similar to the earlier sim troopers in that they're both parodies of online nuisances. The Battle Creek sim troopers acted like Halo players that communicate in Leet Lingo, while the Blue and Red grunts act like internet trolls that throw around politically incorrect statements for their own amusement.

Funny.Ariana Grande

• Her appearance in the "Celebs Read Mean Tweets" segment on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, where all the celebs that appear have universally agreed to play it perfectly straight and somber like a Very Special Episode - except Ariana is cracking up the whole time.

Funny.Honest Trailers 2015 Episodes

• Inside Out:
  • Collectively describing Fear, Anger, and Disgust as "your average YouTube comment section".
  • "The movie that made grown-ups say 'phew, Pixar is good again!' and made kids everywhere say 'why are you crying, daddy?'"
  • Their take on why the film's main focus is on an 11-year-old girl's mind:

Funny.Honest Trailers 2016 Episodes

Narrator: From the studio that just got hacked by North Korea, lost creative control of Spider-Man, might lose James Bond, and couldn't even keep Adam Sandler happy,^note Referring to Sandler signing a multi-picture deal with Netflix comes this sure-fire hit to put them back on track!
[shows a ton of angry comments about the trailer]
Narrator: Oh no...

Narrator: Experience a film that created a perfect storm of hatred, uniting people who legitimately hated the trailers, people who legitimately hate reboots of classic films, and people who legitimately like to yell hateful nonsense on the Internet.
Donald Trump: Now they're making Ghostbusters with only women! What's going on?!
Narrator: Wait, we're getting a Ghostbusters video and calling out Trump? I am so getting doxxed!

• But all in all, however, how it ended up turning out?

Funny.Kid Radd

Radd: Dude, you are definitely the sickest thing on the Internet. And that's saying a lot.

• Radd would know. For a time, he was a chatroom avatar, so he's had a firsthand look at the GIFT among other things.

Funny.Mordhau

• Patch #7 added two mute options: One normal, and one that replaces everything the muted individual says with motivational quotes◊. Removing GIFT-afflicted garbage from your sight is one thing, making them spout praise and telling you you can do it is on another, actively hilarious level.

Funny.My Little Pony Totally Legit Recap

• Rainbow Rocks Movie:
  • DWK starts out speaking in a combination Mysterious Whisper and Badass Baritone that perfectly sets the mood for the sirens draining the humans of their life energy... and then when he sees them, he immediately goes back to normal tone and starts sperging out over his three new waifus.
  • Aria complains that getting people to care enough to fight about things in real life is impossible these days. Adagio retorts that if she could figure out a way to absorb negative energy through the Internet, the Sirens could take over the entire multiverse in a day.
    • This exchange comes after Aria earnestly suggests prostitution as a way to make extra money. Adagio must be a true dike because she refuses to even think about taking dick.
    • Sonata seems pretty okay with it though. Hell, she seems disappointed that it isn't their plan.

Funny.My Little Pony Totally Legit Recap

• He describes the Spirit of Hearthswarmings Yet To Come as a "horrifying Eldritch Abomination with the head of a waifu". (because it's Luna)
  • And the bad future is what would happen if people acted like they do on the internet.

Funny.My Little Pony Totally Legit Recap

• Instead of a vow of silence, the Kirin forgot how to speak because they spent too much time on the internet. Also, when they flame each other online, they catch on fire in real life. Rain Shine tried to unplug the router when this became apparent, but there were too many wires, so she couldn't figure out the right one.

Funny.Overwatch

• In mid-December 2017, after an angry Troll on the official forums announced he was quitting the game due to it "failing" to repeal the 7 bans to his account, Jeff Kaplan himself arrived to share some lines of his in-game behaviour to make clear the bans and hundreds of harassment reports were completely justified, including "im the reason for anything good", "LONG WALK FOR A PILE OF [expletive]", and accusing others who beat him of hacking.

Funny.Puella Magi Madoka Magica

Kyubey: We never imagined there could be a world where each individual had their own set of emotions, yet still manage to coexist with one another.
Madoka: (deadpan) Really? (beat) Then I guess you've never visited a chat room, have you?

• After Mami tells Madoka that if she can't make up her mind, she'll have to wish for cake, what's Madoka's response?

Funny.SF Debris

• When complaining about the multiplayer aspect of the game, Chuck preemptively shuts down the comment that he should just socialize more but addressing an open letter to the reasons why he hasn't. He apparently believes them to be Humanoid Abominations.

Funny.Saints Row The Third

• After Matt boasts about how powerful he is and how anything you can do, he can do better, Boss will retort by challenging him to buy a pack of cigarettes. After a brief silence he can only reply with a resentful "Ageist".

Funny.The Moons Flash Princess

LLENN: Pito-chan was underestimating me and normally while I don’t mind. Pito-chan is one of my best friends. And I don’t want my friends to underestimate me. She’s also plays as a bit of a psychopath in this game, milking the PvP everyone for themselves aspects of it for all they’re worth. And a bit of GIFT, I think. She might enter the BoB, so watch out.
Sinon: But wasn’t ripping her throat out a bit on the extreme side?
LLENN: Nah, Pito knows better, so I had to punish her. I’m ready to go, how about we get to work?
Sinon: [Downs her drink in one go.] That the rumor also boosts your own reputation as a badass has nothing to do with it, I’m sure.

Funny.The Multiversity

• Ultra Comics attacking Intellectron with weaponized Internet Hate Dumb:

Funny.Woolie Versus

• After discovering Higgs' Room Full of Crazy in Part 59, Woolie concludes the man is a dork trying to be a cool villain.
  • Reggie finds what appears to be a copy of Mein Kampf in said room, before he and Woolie breathe a sigh of relief at realizing it's actually...

Funny.Zero Punctuation 3

Well, this may surprise you, but I've been making more of an effort to do the multiplayer thing lately, partly for therapeutic reasons. Dark Souls helped. That game feels like it's trying to wean you onto social interaction. First you find someone's note advising you to "be wary of fatty", then you hire stalwart fellows to help you out with a boss fight, none of whom have headset mics so close to their mouths that you feel like their every utterance is trying to beat your ears to death with racial epithets. The turning point came when I was invaded, but the attacker bowed upon seeing me, a gesture of recognition to mark a duel between equals. "You know what," I thought, "Maybe I don't need to be so afraid of people all the time!" So while he was bowing, I ran up and stuck my halberd up his arse. "Maybe it's people who need to be afraid of ME!"

Funny.Zero Punctuation 3

This is a game in dire need of a violent twat fumigation.

• Then there's Yahtzee impossibly short-lived adventures with the chat system. He heard someone say "Nigger" then immediately turned the chat off.

Funny.Zero Punctuation 4

• Every single backronym he comes up with for PUBG.
  • After encountering racists on voice chat, he says the game should be called Players Unabashedly Backing Genocide.
  • He appreciates the shrinking boundaries of the game's area, because, after all, Pugnacity Under Boundaries Germinates.
  • "Stop going prone, you idiot! If someone's shooting at you, that's when you need to be running like fuck; as we all know, Proning Ultimately Begets Grief.

Haiku.Troll

Please don't feed the trolls!
They wreak havoc just for fun
on the Internet.

Headscratchers.Defense Of The Ancients

• Can someone give a good explanation for why this game (And genre) has a terrible reputation for GIFT and "Stop Having Fun" Guys ?
  • Well for one thing, a game generally lasts up to say, 30 to 60 minutes. Now if you have a bad player, that person will probably wind up dragging the team down, either by not farming well, or even giving the enemy team kills, making them much stronger, and inducing a snowball effect. I'm unsure of surrender times, although in League of Legends, it's about 20 minutes (given that it passes and no one says no out of spite). So 20 minutes of a loss, or a entire hour of slowly winning. It's even worse in Dota 2 because at the time of this writing, there isn't a surrender function implemented in the game yet.

Headscratchers.League Of Legends

• I know that this certainly didn't come from THIS game, but what on earth is it about MOBA games and their ability to bring out the absolute worst in people?
  • I don't even think this problem comes from MOBA games at all. All the bad aspects existed before, but were allowed to magnify by video games' competitive spirit and the Internet's ability to spew it everywhere.
    • But for some reason, it's especially bad in MOBA games, especially Defense of the Ancients, Heroes of Newerth, and this game.
  • Losing is not fun in a MOBA. Any other multiplayer online game a round is 20 minutes at max, plenty of time to dust off and try to get another win if you lose your current game. A MOBA usually takes 45 minutes minimum. Like Tycho of Penny Arcade said, the fact that you have to spend fifteen minutes farming stretches out the length and emotional investment of a multiplayer game far longer than it should, which makes losing worse, which in turn makes the community more resentful and angry. It essentially means that at any given time, half of the player base feels like they just wasted an hour of their life. That brings out the worst in people for obvious reasons, to a higher degree than any other genre.
    • Even worse, when you're having a bad time in most other games, like an FPS for example, you can just drop out with no real consequences. Hell, most FPS games will even auto-balance teams if a lot of players from the losing team startv ragequitting. In LoL and other MOBAs when your team is wasting your time you're stuck with them since leaving is penalised (since the impact of a single player leaving in a 5v5 contest with no substitutions or balances possible that it pretty much immediately decides the game, so Riot have to penalise it harshly). So basically, the perception is that you're being forced to spend time on an activity which is no longer fun thanks to the ineptitude of your teammates. It's no surprise this can make people a bit testy.
  • When there's a bad player in most games, the worst they can do is not help their team mates or increase their opponents score, making them more likely to lose. In Multiplayer Online Battle Arena, when someone does badly, they're actively increasing the strength of their opponents, making every competitive aspect outright harder for their team mates. Not only does this make them frustrated, but, the resulting drop in the entire team scores makes everyone assume it must be someone else's fault.
    • The last two points would imply people behaved better in Dominion. This doesn't seem to be the case; GIFT still applies.
    • That's a given, especially if you consider that no matter where you are, no matter which game are you playing, the "Stop Having Fun" Guys control most, if not all, of the metagame with their beliefs.
    • Which is why you should never play ranked or any games that are "pro" environment like DotA or Heroes of Newerth - If you're having fun, you WILL be chased out and kicked from games, blacklisted, trash-talked, etc. "Stop Having Fun" Guys cannot be removed - they can only be quarantined by "pro" environments that stroke their egos.
    • Although for some reason, I have actually noticed that since around January, people started to behave better in Dominion. I don't know if it's because it's more fast-paced (and therefore people have less time to type insulting comments in /all ) or if all the "Stop Having Fun" Guys are busy playing ranked or have moved onto ''Dota 2. If it keeps the "Stop Having Fun" Guys out...Go right ahead. Seriously - I don't care if you consider your game the best. Games are all about having fun, and you guys take all the fun out of these games.
    • They're still around, even in normal unranked games. It's only a few from my experience, but a few is far more than enough.
    • I recently started playing, and I haven't found any jerkass players yet. Hell, most of the ones I met help teach me how to play, and I did pretty good cause of them. Guess I'm just lucky
    • You are, lucky that is. Please find someone knowledgeable to help/train you a bit before you attempt ranked games. You'll thank me, trust me on this...
    • This is kind of an unfair calling for Dota 2 and this is coming from someone who loves both DOTA and League. Basically is, due to it being a free to play game, even little kids that hasn't developed the mental fortitude to keep their cool will be a LOT more abundant in these kinds of games. It doesn't matter if it's ranked or normal, if it's DOTA or League, they WILL think they're the best player ever, they demand honor/commend when finishing the game well, or start flaming when things don't go their way, not realizing that games like this are supposed to be a fun experience. Not everyone who play this game are demanded to become professional champions, they were too intoxicated with the thought of losing is just showing how bad they are rather than experience for them to get better. DOTA is thought to be a lot more punishing than League and it is true, but in fact, here and now, there are ALWAYS people who are casual in DOTA, makes playing and learning there just as fun as it is in League. And vice versa, as stated, there's even League players that are just extremely toxic and pissy it makes DOTA fandom look like angels. You can throw the same thing to Heroes of Newerth... or even Smite, but one truth remains: It's the stigma of MOBA games, especially free to play ones that you will find these kind of brats if you play online, so you need to be prepared mentally for this. You can also find yourself some IRL friends that share interest so you can form a team and won't have to deal with these guys anymore, in fact, usually college dudes or working people who like playing these games certainly came off more affable and less toxic because of their developed mentalities. Bottom line: Toxic guys, "Stop Having Fun" Guys and pissy guys are the bread and butter of online games. You need to deal with them daily.

Headscratchers.Sword Art Online

• It's mentioned that married people share inventories. If this were a game, most people would probably respect that marriage should mean something (if a lot less than what real marriage means), but a few people would try to take advantage of that fact. Once everyone was trapped in there, it was all real, and the fact that married people share inventories is a fact of that world that can be taken advantage of. Fluff about what was supposed to be a videogame matters less. I would expect, for example, that people would try to share inventories so that their stuff doesn't vanish when they die. They could also do things like have the people in boss fights married, so that their spouses could send them limitless supplies of potions.
  • As a practical matter, the primary healing (and escape) items are Crystals, and I'm pretty sure it's stated that the later boss fights take place in arenas where said Crystals can't be used. No point in entering a Marriage of Convenience to ensure a supply of magical healing items when you're going into an Anti-Magic field...
  • Who says they didn't? We only see two married couples, Grimrock/Griselda and Kirito/Asuna. They treated it as real, but other players might not have. Kirito has always been big on the whole "treat games as you would real life in order to avert GIFT" thing, so he's not the best example.
  • There are people in real life who do that too, you know; that is, who get married in order to make it easier to manage money, with no romantic undertones. However, even then they are generally close friends who simply don't see the need to get married and have children, and they get married so that they wouldn't be in the situation where there is nobody left to inherit their things. But there aren't many marriages like that, really; even if their feelings change later, the majority of marriages takes place because there were feelings of some sort.
    
    A game from which you cannot escape, it might appear weird for us but it would probably be very easy for people to start treating it the same way they would treat their real lives. And going from that point, it's easy to see what's the most likely thing that would happen. Maybe there would be people not feeling anything but trusting each other enough to marry just because of that reason, but the majority of them married because they felt something towards each other. And when marriages of convenience are just a minority, it might be hard to notice them, the same way you usually don't see them in real lives.

Headscratchers.The Spoony Experiment

• Random inquiry: Does Scarlett ever show up in any of his videos? I know he makes numerous references to her, but do we ever see her in action?
  • She doesn't appear because of the obnoxious part of the fandom. I don't know the full story, but shit went down. Shit went down, bitch.
    • She appeared once. Once. It was his acceptance video for the award he won. For whatever reason the obnoxious part of the fandom attacked her in that video. A video in which he made an acceptance speech for an award he won. Make sense of that.
    • Don't you know what video it was?
    • No, because Spoony and Scarlett took the video down when the hating got bad enough.
    • Can I just ask what the reasoning for this abuse was?
    • GIFT, what else?
    • Yeah, but what specifically is the fanboys beef with Scarlet? Is this some sort of "there are no girls online" sexism thing? I just want to know what the supposed problem is.
    • From what I gathered, it's a mix of Hollywood Homely / Hollywood Pudgy scorn. She's fairly attractive, but not supermodel-level — and GIFTers hate that!
    • Right, so it's as retarded as I thought. Cheers.

Heartwarming.Acts Of Kindness

• The story behind this picture of Rapunzel. A girl named Cyril blogged about her dreams of being a face actress at a Disney theme park, namely Rapunzel. On her blog, an Anon said that she was too ugly to be a princess. After hearing this, Alice made a picture of her as Rapunzel. With the picture came overwhelming support and Cyril's page became filled with comments about how beautiful she is.

Heartwarming.Big Brother

• Big Brother Canada:
  • Late in the first season, there was a challenge where houseguests had to freeze in place whenever Big Brother told them to. During these freeze moments, we get clowns entering the house to annoy the houseguests, evicted houseguests re-entering to do the same... and then during one freeze, Andrew's twin brother enters the house to say hi to him. Though he has to stay in place, Andrew is barely able to contain his emotions at seeing his brother again.
  • From BBCan2, during Week 3 when Ika was up on the block against Heather, before the eviction vote, Ika put aside her Alpha Bitch tendencies (albeit until the check incident), built a pillow fort, and apologized to Heather for bullying her.
    • And even then, after the cheque Sadistic Choice, Ika delivered most of her Alpha Bitch attitude towards the first five - especially Kenny, Andrew, and Sabrina.
  • BBCan2: Kenny coming out to Sarah during the campout reward. It was very easy to see that Kenny lying about his being gay was really affecting him on an emotional level.
  • BBCan3 has Britnee and Sarah working together to win the HOH after the emotional eviction of Naeha, their closest friend and ally. After they won they hugged and whispered to eachother "For Nae. For Nae. For Nae."
  • Zach became somewhat infamous before his season started when it was discovered that during the first season of the Canada version he had made some very rude and nasty tweets to Peter about his gameplay, calling him a "bitch" and "pussy" with a "nothing life". When Peter finished the season and returned to twitter, he responded in kind with exactly the attitude he's now known for on the Side Show. Obviously, that's not the heartwarming part. That occurred when Zach was evicted and being interviewed by Peter on the Side Show. Peter brought up the tweets, geared up for the rant that everyone was expecting...and then forgave Zach. And then went on a monologue about how after Zach gets home he's going to get plenty of people talking trash about him online because it's easy, and that all that hate is going to wear him down, and that Peter will always be available to talk to if it gets to be too much for Zach since he's had to deal with the exact same thing.
  • Season 4 features Loveita and Kelsey's relationship changing over the course of a couple weeks where they go from being tense to each other to legit enjoying themselves in the secret suite.
  • Ramsay's departure from the house when he decides to walk from the game after learning his dad had a heart attack and now needs major surgery. The whole house treats this event with sympathy and grace and gives him a very kind sendoff.

Heartwarming.Fred Rogers

• A minor one but anyone who has browsed the internet will tell you that the comments section of almost anything is ripe for arguments, insults, bizarre logic, and attracts many terrible elements including threats. Yet in the (since-removed) video where Fox commentators try to make Mr Rogers seem like he was bad influence for children, almost everyone is united in defending him and saying what a positive impact he had on their lives. Mr Rogers: The man so nice and beloved that even the internet can't find anything bad to say about him.
  • At present, this YouTube video presenting Mister Rogers in a bad light stands at 1.9 million views with only about 1,300 likes and over 34,000 dislikes. Oh, and it's also unwatchable, because PBS filed a copyright claim against it.
    • The comments sections for most shows, as noted above, are full of snarking, Ship-to-Ship Combat, people insulting the characters, writers, and each other, Misaimed Fandom...look up a clip of Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood, and it will almost exclusively be people singing his praises.
  • 4chan is known for being effectively a pit of pure, festering evil. But if you insult Mr. Rogers, they will ban you.

Heartwarming.Mister Rogers Neighborhood

• A minor one but anyone who has browsed the internet will tell you that the comments section of almost anything is ripe for arguments, insults, bizarre logic, and attracts many terrible elements including threats. Yet in the (since-removed) video where Fox commentators try to make Mr Rogers seem like he was bad influence for children, almost everyone is united in defending him and saying what a positive impact he had on their lives. Mr Rogers: The man so nice and beloved that even the internet can't find anything bad to say about him.
  • At present, this YouTube video presenting Mister Rogers in a bad light stands at 1.9 million views with only about 1,300 likes and over 34,000 dislikes. Oh, and it's also unwatchable, because PBS filed a copyright claim against it.
    • The comments sections for most shows, as noted above, are full of snarking, Ship-to-Ship Combat, people insulting the characters, writers, and each other, Misaimed Fandom...look up a clip of Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood, and it will almost exclusively be people singing his praises.
  • 4chan is known for being effectively a pit of pure, festering evil. But if you insult Mr. Rogers, they will ban you.

Heartwarming.World Of Warcraft

• This thread about how one faction should kill another somehow ends with an actually rational argument, and even more shockingly, starts a trend of reasonable discussions on WoW from it's begining to the first day of Mists of pandaria. In other words, a bunch of people who don't know each other actually got over their hate of people different than them and beat GIFT.

IThoughtItMeant.A To C

• All Trolls Are Different is not a speech reaffirming the diversity and individuality of those who have fallen victim to the GIFT.

IThoughtItMeant.G To I

• GIFT is not something you get for Christmas.

IThoughtItMeant.U To W

• An Unwanted Gift Plot is not a plot about The Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, that the audience wishes hadn't happened.
  • Nor is it about the audience not liking stories about giving gifts.
  • Nor is it a plot about getting yet another Gift dragon.

Irony.Real Life

• Often when people, especially young people on the internet (e.g., the website Encyclopedia Dramatica) attempt to be edgy; they say and/or do politically incorrect things. In the days before PC was widespread (i.e., the mid-to-late 70's), being politically correct in and of itself was considered edgy, due to lingering sexist/racist attitudes still in society.

It.Elenco Provvisorio F-G

• GIFT [DONO] (Dottrina Ossessivocompulsiva del Net e dell'Oltrerealtà)

JustForFun.TV Tropes Con Lang

root

gift

rude, shameless, troll

GIFT

Laconic.Dysfunctional Family Circus

The Family Circus + (Détournement + GIFT) = Crossing the Line Twice

Laconic.GIFT

Cyberbully the unabridged version HERE.

Laconic.Wide Eyed Idealist

Visit unabridged version HERE! And be sure to say hi to all those nice people on the internet!

LaconicTropeDistinctions.A To C

Beneath the Mask vs A Darker Me vs GIFT vs Hidden Depths:

LaconicTropeDistinctions.A To C

• Alice is a different person...
  • Beneath the Mask: when anonymous/powerful, because then her real personality is revealed.
  • A Darker Me: when anonymous/powerful, because then she's Darker and Edgier.
  • GIFT: when anonymous/powerful, because then she becomes a jerk.
  • Hidden Depths: once you get to know her.

LetsPlay.Gaming Garbage

• Jerkass: Kevin "Fragmaster" Bowen in "Let's Play: Jay's Mod", playing off his GIFT persona and relationship with Lowtax.

LetsPlay.Kikoskia

Kikoskia (real name Damien Jennison) is a fairly noteworthy English creator of Let's Play videos on YouTube. Some of the strong points of his commentary are his generally amiable personality, whimsical yet snarky sense of humor, tendency to hang lampshades on common tropes and cliches, and almost total lack of the profanity or vulgarity that's all too common to the genre. Most of the games he plays tend to be RPGs or Adventure Games, and many of the first games he played were originally made for the Sega Megadrive. (He does use an emulator to play them on PC but insists he owns all the games he plays).

LetsPlay.Nerd Cubed

Dan: Before we begin, I do have some serious news to discuss. I received a record number of complaints about a video. Nearly a hundred people complained about the last episode of Bully, as it featured THIS GAY KISS! *shows footage of the kiss* Now, a lot of people wanted me to edit out THIS GAY KISS! *shows footage of the kiss* from that episode, but unfortunately, I don't keep raw video files, so THIS GAY KISS! *shows footage of kiss* is going to be there forever. They've also asked me if I would kindly (I say they asked me kindly. They didn't. They shouted.), they asked me kindly if I would not show things like THIS GAY KISS! *shows footage of the kiss* in any future or current videos. Well, I've decided...Jimmy is now bi. Deal with it! *shows footage of kiss* Right, that's people dragged into the 21st century and the comments section annihilated...

• Also the entirety of "Nerd³ Plays...Day One: Garry's Incident"
• In his video of the London 2012 Olympics game, he doesn't have many positive things to say about the Olympics themselves, referring to them as "a massive sports day that rolls into town every four years and bankrupts a country."
• For his FTL: Faster Than Light "Space Racists" challenge, Dan names his ship the "USS UKIP", by hitting random keys on the keyboard.
• In his lets play of Arkham Origins, we get this gem:

LetsPlay.Super Jeenius

• GIFT: He calls this out at one point.

LetsPlay.Twitch Plays Pokemon

• GIFT: Plenty of the Mob are simply there to impede progress in whatever way possible. Often 'trolls' are blamed for things that are just a result of the exceedingly long and non-obvious 26-second delay between commands being entered and executed, but there are a few repeated commands that clearly make no sense at all.

LetsPlay.Twitch Plays Pokemon

• It's Easy, So It Sucks!: Invoked by the Anarchists. The main complaint is that the Democracy system makes the entire game so easy, it is not as fun as the chaotic mess of the Anarchy system. In fact, this reasoning helped produce start9 which made the progression in the game even worse and this specific command is remembered as a sign of a protest against Democracy. However, the rather few times that Democracy helped the game, whose problems were both caused by anarchists) are not really spoken out as often as it should.

LightNovel.Log Horizon

• Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: Everyone was immensely relieved to find out that they can't be Killed Off for Real by being killed in battle. Unfortunately, that encouraged some people to become Player Killers. Subverted after Shiroe learns about the Spirit Theory. He hypotheses since Adventurers lose EXP when they resurrect, when Elder Tales became real, it translates to a loss of memories. This is proven true when Krusty, whom died twice since the Apocalypse, could no longer remember the name and appearance of his pet cat, despite his good memory. This leaves the terrifying implication that dying in the new world means gradually losing your memory of the old one. Krusty himself says this is a double subversion because he figures one would have to die dozens of times before the memory loss became more than a "mild inconvenience". Comparatively speaking, that's still pretty cheap. In episode 9 of season 2, we also see Shiroe affected by this firsthand, as he wanders around his hometown while in the spirit world, and is unable to recall the name of a restaurant he used to pass by.

LightNovel.Log Horizon

• GIFT:
  • Since no one can die, some people take dickery to an unbelievable level. Brigandia guildsmen brutally kill everyone who try to leave Susukino. It's implied that they murder and rape NPCs like it's nothing. ^note  The anime is aired on NHK, so nothing is explicitly revealed.
  • The major guilds within Akihabara uses the "it's just a game" to excuse their behavior and continue to do nothing about it. However, when Shiroe invites them to a meeting and blackmails them into seriously discussing implementing law and order, they all agree that grieving low level players, slavery, forced confinement, murder, and rape should be made illegal without objection.

LightNovel.Sword Art Online

• A Darker Me: There's a group of players that go around killing other players and stealing their items. Lampshaded when Kirito remarks that online players act very different from how they would in real life.

Literature.A Kind Of Spark

• GIFT: Keedie's twin Nina, an influencer, features Addie in one of her makeup videos. The comments immediately fill with people either calling her a tragedy or questioning if she can really be autistic if she can talk. Nina deletes the replies, but Keedie still tells her off for it, accusing her of trying to get pity clicks for having a disabled sister.

Literature.Alterworld

• GIFT: Adam is an inversion; he's really quite personable on the internet, but in real life is a different story.

Literature.Incarnations Of Immortality

• GIFT: Possibly predicted in an older form, and alluded to, in Bearing an Hourglass, when Chronos encounters a wall covered in graffiti, and muses that perhaps, in a perfectly free society, people do behave badly. He concludes that both the best and worst in society are equally necessary.

Literature.Newshound

• Fantastic Racism: Low-key discrimination against parahumans appears to be relatively common, ranging from casual lycanphobia borne of ignorance^note as exhibited by Heather's editor, Kurt Holmes to outright hatred and calls for death^note as displayed by certain internet commentators.

Literature.T 2 Trilogy

• GIFT: John, monitoring Luddite chat rooms on the Internet and noting the movement is getting more mainstream — and more violent — every day, muses on exactly this trope, that people will say things on the Internet they would never say face-to-face. But it's still probably a good thing not to be in the same room with them when they are saying such things; who knows what could happen.

Literature.The Republic

• GIFT: The Ring of Gyges is sort of an Ur-Example: instead of Normal Person+Anonymity+Audience=Total Fuckwad, you get Normal Person+Ring of Invisibility+Tempting Targets=Murderer and Rapist. Same principle, really; it's used to argue that being held accountable for one's actions in the public eye is the only thing keeping us from treating one another like jerks.

Literature.The Strange Case Of Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde

• GIFT: An Ur-Example. The great appeal of Hyde to Jekyll is that he can't be held responsible for Hyde's crimes, until he murders a member of Parliament and cannot safely hide. This coincides with the potion losing potency, limiting both men's time.

Machinima.Red Vs Blue

• Faux-To Guide:
  • The "Real Life vs. The Internet", "First!", and "Online Survival Guide" PSAs are all this in terms of teaching online etiquette.
  • invoked The Fire Safety PSA. It ends with the group dying in a fire inside the building and is given an In Memoriam message.
  • "Match Breaking", a guide by Tucker and Simmons on picking up girls.
  • Most of the PSAs after Season 15 are like this, with two downright saying it in the title - "Caboose's Guide to Finding Your Home" (a sequel to the "Making Friends" episode of Season 14) and "Lopez's Technical Guide to Empathy".

Machinima.Red Vs Blue The Blood Gulch Chronicles

• Back from the Dead:
  • invoked The Battle Creek Reds and Blues, who are two large, deeply idiotic, constantly respawning armies of jerks.
  • Wyoming, in a sense, via Time Travel Save Scumming.

Manga.Bakuman

• GIFT:
  • Discussed by Takagi in his explanation for why Nanamine cannot succeed. One of the problems he notes is that the 50 people are anonymous and are not being paid, so they have less incentive to put in a serious effort over time than one person whose career hangs in the balance. Some of Nanamine's contributors admit to participating just for fun.
  • The internet reaction to Azuki being outed as Mashiro's girlfriend is quite nasty.

Manga.Death Note

• GIFT: In-story, Kira becomes an instant sensation on the Internet and ordinary citizens start making hit lists. (Like that sweet-looking little girl texting "Kira, please kill them all.")
  • This applies to Light as well with the anonymous power of both the Internet and the Death Note.

Manga.I Am A Hero

• Message Board: Online communities play a role. They're the most Genre Savvy about a Zombie Apocalypse, have less direct human contact, and so have better odds of survival. Not that it prevents the flaky, morally questionable types from running things...
  • Makes another appearance near the end when Hiromi finally gets absorbed by the Hive Mind and sees it as the same message board shown earlier (with some of the same posters, for good measure).

Manga.I Cant Understand What My Husband Is Saying

• GIFT: Hajime has to explain to Kaoru how this works in Chapter 7 of the manga.

Manga.Oshi No Ko

• Social Media Is Bad: Zig-zagged. Social media is portrayed as a useful tool to increase one's stardom and popularity, yet it can bring out the worst of the people using them, as shown with Akane after she causes an unfortunate accident and subsequently is getting cyberbullied for weeks, which makes Aqua furious.

Manga.Shibatora

• GIFT: Features heavily in the Gasoline Man storyline.

Manhwa.Yureka

• Clark Kenting: It's illegal to alter one's appearance on the Net, so characters who want to exploit the GIFT have to disguise themselves entirely with clothes and attitude. It's a recurrent theme, but is played with realism and isn't infallible: those actively invoking this get delayed recognition at best.
  • In-game, pop duo The Lovely Angels don't wear makeup.
  • Out-of-game, Lotto wears glasses and combs his hair (and tries to act mild-mannered).
    • Jyung Mung-Gun eventually connects the loud-mouthed manipulator he rendezvoused with in a digital bar with the quiet (shorter) kid in glasses and a baseball cap he showed around a hospital for a friend.

Manhwa.Yureka

• GIFT: Characters who are sweet as pie or at least normal in real life don't have to keep up appearances and facades on the net, resulting in small to startling additional jerkassery.

Manhwa.Yureka

• Greed: How many times has it gotten the better of our heroes and their adversaries? But then, it is a series about gamers....

Manhwa.Yureka

• Utopia: It is the view of some that the Net should be like this, or at least limited to its own harmless vices, and that Killers and their trade pervert this ideal.

Memes.Anime And Manga

• Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei: Make yourself taller ^Explanation Euphemism for suicide by hanging. Named after Kafuka's bizarre explanation that Nozomu was not trying to kill himself, but merely trying to increase his height.
  • I'm in despair!X has left me in despair! ^Explanation Nozoumu's snowclone-able rant about the GIFT phenomenon.

Memes.Minecraft

• "hey shitass" ^Explanation Parodying the competitive PvP and speedrunning scene (especially YouTubers like Dream), these memes follow a specific format: the player character addressing another player named "shitass" with "hey shitass, wanna see me [action]?", the player character then doing that action with bass-boosted blowing into the mic and loud Button Mashing (and usually at a low skill level or with outside assistance), before shitass outdoes the player in ludicrous ways.
  • "Bad. You're bad. You're ba- (shitass attacks the player) AAAAAAA-!"

Memes.Other Internet

• "I wasn't being an asshole! It was, uh... a 'social experiment'. Yeah..."^Explanation The "social experiment" defense is sometimes employed when a person is called out for failure at trolling.

MisBlamed.Video Games

• Xbox Live's userbase has been misblamed for the creation of the "juvenile and unfriendly" gamer. Apparently people haven't heard of the theory of GIFT, which has been in existence long before the Xbox. Live just brought the issue to light if anything. And when it's not Xbox Live that gets all the criticism for this, it's always something like Counter-Strike or Quake.
  • Within Xbox Live Arcade, games like Halo and Call of Duty get disproportionately blamed for this.

MisaimedFandom.Advertising

• This PSA. The message presented in the video is, "You wouldn't get away with it here. You shouldn't get away with it at home." However, a distressing number of commenters seem to sympathize with the man and admonish the waitress for apparently disrespecting him and his coffee (mind, this is a YouTube comment section we're talking about).

Monster.Creepypasta

• I Was a Professional Internet Troll: The story's narrator, known by his online alias "Resisilobus", is an overzealous internet troll who manages to be particularly vile even by those standards. Not content with simply being an unpleasant individual online, Resisilobus intentionally drives two people to kill themselves by relentlessly harassing them. He then befriends a teenage outcast and manipulates the boy into killing seven of his classmates and then committing suicide. To indicate how little he values the lives of others, Resisilobus considers the "achievements" to be inferior to his comparatively minor hacking of a popular Bible app and the confusion it causes among Christians. A remorseless sadist who openly revels in the power his crimes make him feel, Resisilobus is an example of how internet anonymity can bring out the worst in people.

Music.Buck Tick

• GIFT: In-Universe example - "Living On The Net" is an early example from the perspective of someone being an example of the GIFT and getting into an argument on the internet.

Music.Cattle Decapitation

• GIFT: "Not Suitable for Life" was inspired by Travis's sheer irritation and disgust at reading a seemingly endless litany of ignorant, asinine, and stupidly hostile social media comments on a particularly bad day.

Music.Fear Factory

• GIFT: Addressed in "Cyberwaste".
  • Also, "Archetype"'s lyrics are essentially addressed to then-absent guitarist Dino Cazares.

Music.Misery Index

• GIFT: "Plague of Objects"

Music.Pure Heroine

• GIFT: Referenced as possibly bleeding into the outside world - "maybe the internet raised us, or maybe people are jerks".

NationalStereotypes.Eastern Europe

• Children will play with matryoshka dolls. If they do play videogames, it will ALWAYS be Tetris (Created by a Russian, natch.) Except in gamers' circles, where the stereotype of a Russian player somehow manages to be a GIFT squared, their impenetrable slang and general habit of communicating in Russian only notwithstanding.

NeverMyFault.Video Games

• In League of Legends, "Defense of the Ancients" and every multiplayer game, even "Call of Duty", it is common that a player will yell at his teammates in a losing game, then proceed to say that he is the only competent person on said team, even if he is doing the worst and/or hardly contributes and judges solely on his KDA ratio.
  • Some players will even take this Up To Eleven and blame a player who joined just as the round ended. And god help them if their entire team decides to make them The Scapegoat, while everyone on their team was screwing around for the majority of the match and decided to wait until the literal last couple of minutes to get serious.

NightmareFuel.Agents Of SHIELD

• The blackouts cause a lot of this:
  • Daisy and Robbie talk about how looting and rioting typically take place during black outs because people feel emboldened. In other words, seven major cities with the lack of inhibition of the internet.
  • Robbie specifically talks about his fear that his wheel-chair bound little brother will be stuck in a bad part of town.

NightmareFuel.Beast The Primordial

• Conquering Heroes adds the Insatiable, aka what would happen if Beasts didn't have even the barest scrap of humanity remaining. They inflict a Hate Plague on the world by simply eating, because they have to eat humans in order to feast on them-preventing their fears from joining the Primordial Dream, allowing spiritual entities to access the physical world more easily. In effect, they Mind Rape humanity's subconscious just by existing. They see Horrors and Beasts as upstart prey who just exist as a source of good homes by stealing their Lairs, and their true forms are so estranged from humanity that mortals are driven mad with fear and confusion upon seeing them-and have a significant chance of doing that to supernatural beings, too! Each of the examples is pretty terrifying in their own way, too;
  • The Authority, a cruel overlord of all the crime in his city who came into his power in childhood, learning he could turn his body into molten lava and using it to gleefully murder his bullies in the most painful way possible. He's since become the nearly faceless lord of pretty much every supernatural faction in his home simply out of raw power and the fear people have of him.
  • The Blind Man, perhaps the oldest Insatiable alive today, having been around since at least the Achaemenid Empire. While he acts like he just has Blue-and-Orange Morality, in truth that's just an expression of his Hunger for Prey; he knows fully well how unsettling he is and acts deliberately insane to really sweeten the fear of his eventual meals. That, and the fact he has insects for eyes, would be bad enough, except there's a reason he's constantly having a damp stain around his chest; he's laying eggs constantly from his navel, eggs he claims are nothing less than pieces of the Primogenitor that one day will all hatch simultaneously and unleash an even more Eldritch Abomination on the world than any of his brethren. You do not want to know what happens if you eat one-and he's good at tricking people into eating them anyway.
  • Null Snyper, a vicious Troll and psychotic cyberbully who transformed into a Void Insatiable when she realized she drove a friend of hers to suicide with her caustic commentary...and loved every minute of it. She's become a digital spider fit for being the ultimate Internet predator, ruining lives from the safety of her Hacker Cave; she's long figured out how to turn the worst elements of hacker and especially Men's Rights Activist culture to her advantage, realizing she can create an army of borderline sociopathic minions simply by posting the right rant, and relaxing while her pawns gradually tear apart some poor sap's life because they can. Even worse, she never needs to leave; she's realized she can inflict Nightmares over things like Skype and so long as she's observing someone take their own life or lose it in some other way due to her manipulations, she can eat almost as well as if she was there. Her only limitation is that she's terrified of leaving her house, and as she gets physically hungrier, that is going to change...
  • Peter Slaughbal, a circus clown from the 50s-60s who at his first presentation developped a creepy obsession for one of the women in the audience, and started creepily stalking her, eventually culminating in him luring her in the hall of mirrors and devouring her. He then made a routine of picking a prey in the audience, all while gradually corrupting the rest of the circus and turning them into his personal cult of helpers. Eventually a cell of hunters discovered and confronted him, only for all of them but one to get slaughtered. The surviving one, Jean Lansberry, eventually came back for revenge, and managed to defeat him by trapping him inside a painting, which she kept for fifty years- until she succumbed to Alzheimer, eventuallly resulting in her brother's grandson and his wife accidentally freeing Slaughbal after they inherited the house. The Insatiable immediately stalked and devoured them. Now a shadow of his former self, he travels from town to town, presenting himself at parties where he looks for people going home alone to stalk and devour.

NightmareFuel.Perfect Blue

• A huge meta one that the film is over twenty years old... and barely anything has changed about the idol industry, other than the overlap between seiyuu and idols thanks to Moe anime. If you look deep online you will find many horror stories of Loony Fans committing acts of violence against idol singers and/or voice actresses due to their obsession and, if not that, writing vile, misogynistic stuff on the Internet if Contractual Purity is broken or just the slightest Berserk Button gets pushed. Warning: might make you lose faith in Otaku culture.

NightmareFuel.Persona5

• Kunikazu Okumura's death. He starts convulsing, then slowly rises up to reveal blank eyes and black sludge oozing out of his face: the player is treated to a good few seconds of him staring vacantly ahead, mouth agape and oozing sludge before the TV crew frantically cuts to Relax-o-Vision. Even worse, this is shown on live television. Where the man's own daughter gets to watch every moment of it. Needless to say, this breaks poor Haru's heart like glass being smashed with a brick, which just adds more nightmare fuel to the fire.
  • A couple of the comments that flash across the feed before the puppy screen is pulled up is 'wwwwwwwwwww'. If you're familiar with Japanese internet slang, that's people commenting on the scene of death with laughter.

Nl.Serieuze Zaak

Vaak is het een onbenullige reden voor oorlog, en kan het een gesprek over koetjes en kalfjes veranderen in een verhit debat. Iemand die het gewoon niet los kan laten wordt mogelijk een Single-Issue Wonk. Als competitie erbij betrokken is, kun je bijna garanderen dat de tweede plek voor verliezers is. Regelmatig "tegengegaan" door de Cavalier Competitor. Vergelijk "Stop Having Fun" Guys. In musicals is dit vaak van toepassing op dansen. Voor het gezegde dat "het internet een serieuze zaak is", zie GIFT. Gerelateerd aan I'm Not Here to Make Friends. Verwar niet met Mundane Made Awesome, alhoewel de twee tropes regelmatig overlappen.

Pantheon.Cheats And Glitches

• Portfolio: Abuses His Admin Powers, Perverted To The Core, Arc Villain of the Fairy Dance Arc, Corrupt Corporate Executive, Dirty Coward, Believes He Can Do Whatever He Wants, GIFT, Morally Ambiguous Doctorate, Narcissist, Opportunistic Bastard, SUCKS At Fighting, Sexually Assaults VRMMO Players, Uses Admin Powers to Subvert Game Rules, Smug Snake, ALO Is An Outlet For His Depravity (which is immense), Greater-Scope Villain of the Alicization Arc

PapaWolf.Western Animation

• South Park: "I've got to save mah beh-beh!"
  • Kyle seems to have developed traits of this around his baby brother Ike, more so than most of the brainless parents of the town anyway.
  • Randy and the other dads sometimes do this, though they're so stupid it doesn't really work out very well. One time it did, however, was when Randy joined Cartman in running a giant drill through the crowd of hippies to get Stan out.
  • And the season 15 finale has Kenny, as Mysterion, defending his little sister Karen from a bully at the school they went to when their parents got arrested.
  • A darker example: in "Fort Collins," the entire Internet history of everyone in the titular town is released to everyone else in town. The Troll called MLKKK is quickly found by the father of a disabled girl whom he'd mocked online and gets burnt to death.

Persona5.Tropes G To R

• GIFT: Since the posters on the Phan-site are anonymous, a lot of the posts can get quite nasty. When Okumura is killed, for a few days, people rejoice over his death, but soon, opinion turns against the Thieves, and people start calling for them to be tracked down and executed for the murder that they didn't commit.

PlayingWith.A Darker Me

• Exaggerated: Dark Pharaoh is a total fuckwad.

PlayingWith.A Darker Me

• Invoked: Bob always wanted to be edgy and snarky, but that would bring many consequences to him in the real world. Online anonymity allows Bob to fulfill his wish through his Dark Pharaoh persona without having to worry about said consequences.

PlayingWith.Faceless Goons

• Justified:
  • The uniforms are well-armored, offer great protection, and present a united, frightening front.
  • Not to mention the anonymity, which makes Mooks way more confident.
  • The Mooks have a weak point on their face. One that kills them if it so much as touches something other than a mask.
  • The villains want to hide the fact that their minions are not quite human under their masks.

PlayingWith.Flame War

• Straight:
  • Someone insults or threatens another person's comments or the person themselves in an online dispute. Other people join in and the fight begins.
  • Alternately, a Troll posts something sufficiently inflammatory enough to get people arguing.
  • An ordinary poster posts something that, while they didn't assume it to be inflammatory, is very much so.

PlayingWith.Flame War

• Enforced:
  • 4chan, and some other places where the intent is to be as offensive and assholish as possible.
  • GIFT

Playing With.GIFT

Back to GIFT, dickhead! Are you upset, sissy pants? What do intent to do about it, tough guy?! Are you gonna punch me!? HA HA HA! Loser, I want to see you trying it.

PlayingWith.Godwins Law

• Intended Audience Reaction: The show is aimed directly at people who abuse this law regularly in an attempt to make them shape up.

PlayingWith.Soap Box Sadie

• Double Subverted: ...Turns out she doesn't act so balanced online, however.

PlayingWith.Troll

• Enforced:
  • The topic is "Best Troll Comment Ever"
  • GIFT
  • The place consists of trolls trolling trolls trolling trolls.
  • It is an Image Board or comment section where trolling is accepted behavior
  • Trolly and possibly others have decided that somewhere or someone is so deserving of an attack, for whatever reason, that they must troll there.

PlayingWith.Vengeance Feels Empty

• Parodied: Alan plots to get back all of those who abused him by throwing them all into a pit of sticky goo; this includes Bob, Diane, Emil, his own friends, his own parents, and a random asshole behind the computer. After executing his revenge, Alan literally becomes an emotionless robot.

Quotes.Atop The Fourth Wall

—Linkara calling out certain people online who attack creators of things they dislike, Heroes in Crisis

Quotes.Bystander Syndrome

— John Oliver, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, on online harassment of women.

Quotes.Gaslighting

—Anonymous, /b/

Quotes.Humans Are The Real Monsters

On internet messageboards, there is no subject so vile or indefensible that someone won't post positively/in defense of it.

Quotes.Laser Guided Karma

Darren's Wikipedia page was back up, but locked after continual editing abuse. He also had a few hundred followers on Twitter, but none anyone would care to meet in the flesh if their communications were any display of personality. But now, after months of intensive work with one of the most complex delusional patients he had even encountered, Dr. Bernard P Basset had achieved that moment of acceptance.

Quotes.Quotes Looking For An Article

Stickman 1: Wow! These YouTube comments are full of retards.

Quotes.Secret Identity Identity

"Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask and he will tell you the truth."

Quotes.Skewed Priorities

''We must be ready for war. No, not that kind of war! (Shows title card for his War Stories video) This is something far more serious than people dying, even more important than real life economic turmoil and geopolitical conflict. This is the greatest external threat a writer will ever face, people on the Internet saying mean things about one's work!"

Quotes.The History Of Video Games

Ralph Baer, Brown Box, Odyssey and Magnavox
MIT, OXO, Spacewar! and Pong
Coleco and Intellivision, Atari, then Activision
Miyamoto and Nintendo, plumbers, Donkey Kong

Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Samus and her stellar cans
Dig Dug, Turbo, Frogger, Q*bert, Mario,
Game Crash '83, adios Atari,
E.T. buried still, Albuquerque landfill

(Chorus)
The Wii didn't start the fire
How we've done some growing since our cartridge blowing
The Wii didn't start the fire
With our fingers bleeding, we were quarter feeding

NES, Luigi, Bowser, Tetris, Yoshi
Master System, Castlevania, Final Fantasy
Dragon Quest, Mega Man, Wolfenstein and Bomberman
Zelda rap, look it up, "Your parents help you hook it up."

Neo Geo, Genesis, Game Boy, SNES
Sonic series, Earthworm Jim, Chrono Trigger, "Finish him!"
Carmen Sandiego chase, Kirby likes to stuff his face
Virtual Boy, what's in store? "A Nintendo 64!!!"

(chorus)

Star Fox, Rumble Pak, ocarina, plumber's back
GoldenEye, perfect game, Perfect Dark, not the same
Sega Saturn, CD-ROM, Play Station, Pokémon,
Solid Snake, Lara Croft, Square Enix and Ubisoft

Aeris eats it, Quake, Doom, Monkey Island, Bandicoot
Gran Turismo, nice car, Gordon Freeman, crowbar
Thief, Homeworld, Silent Hill, Starcraft, Resident Evil
Bowser racing Mario, Myst and Grim Fandango

(chorus)

Dreamcast, online play, PS2 and GTA
Smash Bros, Halo, hand/controller ratio
Way too many Pokémon, Sims come over while you're gone
DDR, KotOR, Warcraft III and God of War
Prince of Persia, Kingdom Hearts, Havoc flailing body parts
WoW arrives, lonely wives, orcs and dwarves and ruined lives

(chorus)

Santa brought a 360, Blu-ray on the PS3
Game Boy, second screen, watch your grandma play the Wii
Space Marines and red rings, let me skip the cutscenes
Tweens mash classic rock, flimsy plastic headstock

Live thrives, pricks abound, PSN a ghost town
Gabe and Tycho, Mountain Dew, G4, Yahtzee, Chiptune
Motion sensors all the same, Blizzard gives us one campaign
DLC, screw the fee, 3DS and Half-Life 3

(chorus, fade out)

Quotes.Vocal Minority

"Roseanne has always been a racist weirdo, and James Gunn has always pushed the bounds of good taste with his humor. What changed was the involvement of internet mobs. By capitulating to the Twitter rage of a few thousand assholes, Disney is subtly teaching us that online mobs, no matter how stupid their platform, can make a difference. It doesn't matter if they're right, as long as they're loud. And that's great when it means firing a sex offender, but it's a hell of a lot less great when it means ousting somebody for a joke they already apologized for years ago. [...] In none of these cases are there any kind of core values that the company is adhering to. They'll support or censor whatever appeases the most zealous crowd. Which means they're incentivizing trolls to become bigger and bigger assholes, because it's the only thing that works."

Radio.Because News

• Never Read the Comments: Two members of the studio audience read actual comments on news articles from CBC.ca's website, and the panelists must guess which story they're talking about.

Radio.GTA Radio

• Fictional Video Game
  • Vice City has commercials on its radio stations for the Degenetron game system, which features such titles as Defender of the Faith ("Destroy the blue dots with your powerful red square!"). In San Andreas, they appear on retro arcade machines. You can't play them, but you can play the "emulator" on the defictionalised Degenatron "fansite."
  • III also has ads for Pogo the Monkey, which is later referenced by a Pogo the Monkey arcade in the cab firm from Vice City.
  • IV has Civil Service, a parody of SimCity which encourages the player to favor big business and keep down minorities. Episodes from Liberty City also has ads for Deity, a god game in the vein of Black & White.
  • V takes this trope full circle with Righteous Slaughter 7, a parody of video game violence of the sort that GTA itself had long indulged in, as well as Franchise Zombie sequels and derivative FPS games. The gameplay footage we see is essentially Call of Duty meets Postal. While it doesn't turn those who play it into murderous psychopaths, it does seem to turn them into foul-mouthed, bigoted assholes, judging by what we see of the people who play it. There's also Pride Not Prejudice, a Deep South-themed FPS advertised on the radio.

Recap.Big Hero 6 The Series S 2 E 17 Hardlight

• GIFT: Hardlight, since he sees real life as a video game. As Ian he is shy and an Extreme Doormat to Krei.

Recap.Black Mirror Hated In The Nation

• GIFT: Basically the focus of the episode. Even without the resulting deaths, dozens, of not hundreds of people are wishing death upon others over the internet, most simply because of disagreements on viewpoints and politics. The teacher, when confronted after the first murder (having been one of many people to use the #DeathTo hashtag against Jo), can only stammer out the weak defense that she wasn't being serious.

Recap.Black Mirror The National Anthem

• GIFT: In one scene, Callow's wife is looking at social media reactions to the news of what Callow is being demanded to do. Unsurprisingly, many of them are making crude jokes about the situation, mocking Callow despite the fact that the demand is for him to be raped.

Recap.Black Mirror USS Callister

• GIFT: When the AIs escape to the main Infinity universe, the first thing they encounter is "Gamer691", a human player who hits on Nanette and threatens to blow the Callister out of the cosmos. As if to drive it home, he's voiced by Aaron Paul in full-on Jesse Pinkman mode.

Recap.Death Note Ep 02 Confrontation

• GIFT: In story with the Kira fansites and the little girl texting "Kira, please kill them all."

Recap.Death Note Ep 02 Confrontation

• Hypocrite: Light explains the GIFT to Ryuk, telling him that humans are hypocrites by nature.
  • He then murders the first person to publicly denounce Kira as evil immediately after explaining how people should be allowed to express honest opinions without fear of retribution.
  • L declares that what Kira is doing (killing criminals) is evil and so vows to hunt him down and have him sentenced to death.

Recap.Doctor Who S 37 E 1 The Woman Who Fell To Earth

• Reality Ensues:
  • When the drunk man stumbles across Tim Shaw, how does he react? Mocking him for dressing up for Halloween a month early, and then throwing bits of salad at him.
  • After Grace dies, Ryan decides he's going to try learning to ride a bike again. After many tries, he... keeps falling over. It's going to take a long time to be able to ride a bike well with dyspraxia.
  • Likewise, on Ryan's heartfelt video about Grace, two people thumbed it down. This is the Internet, after all.
  • The Doctor wires a bunch of human tech with alien tech that she doesn't fully understand. Normally, she'd save the day regardless — here, she beams everyone into outer space.
  • What's the first thing Ryan does on finding a strange, unnaturally cold alien object in the woods? Call the police.

Recap.I Zombie S 1 E 6 Virtual Reality Bites

• GIFT: The online gamer who issued a death threat over the Victim of the Week permakilling his combat pets? A fourteen year-old boy living across the country, who meant the threat in-game and didn't even know where the victim lived.

Recap.Its Always Sunny In Philadelphia S 12 E 04 Wolf Cola APR Nightmare

• GIFT: After appearing in defense of Wolf Cola, the Gang receives threats online. Dee notes that "pretty much everyone wants to rape me." This is Played for Laughs.

Recap.Supernatural S 14 E 04 Mint Condition

• GIFT: Sam discovers that the reason Stuart recanted his story is due to the amount of internet harassment he was receiving.

Recap.Terrible Writing Advice

1. Giving Criticism (December 23, 2017)
   • This is an inversion of the earlier episode titled Taking Criticism (Tropes discussed include It's All About Me, GIFT, Sacred Cow).

Recap.Terrible Writing Advice

1. Propaganda (November 3, 2020)
   • Godwin's Law, GIFT, The War on Straw, Logical Fallacies, Chewbacca Defense, Insane Troll Logic

Recap.The Amazing World Of Gumball S 2 E 37 The Internet

Gumball: What's next, my stupid face wearing a sombrero shooting lasers at kittens or something!?
(Mexican Hat Dance plays as Tobias tries to block Gumball's view of the computer showing just that)

• The Internet proudly proclaims "I can be a jerk to anyone 'cause I'm behind a screen in the safety and comfort of my own home." right before Gumball and Darwin bust through his door (his mom let them in).

Recap.The Amazing World Of Gumball S 4 E 34 The Blame

• GIFT:

Recap.The Nostalgia Critic S 8 E 19

• Cannot Talk to Women: The Meninists are defeated this way due to having no screen to hide behind.

Recap.The Reviewers S 1 E 1 Pilot

• Straw Critic: The Rickhead represents those who will Accentuate the Negative on any given video and inspire Hatedoms to them with near murderous vigor, making him the human embodiment of the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory.

Roleplay.Welcome To My World

• New Technology Is Evil: Zarek, who grew up with dial-up Internet and Solitaire gaming, dislikes the Internet, particularly social media, because of how much toxic people are roaming it, and certainly disapproves of his son's obsession with YouTube and PewDiePie.

RuinedFOREVER.Live Action Films

[Sigh] Are we sure you wanna do this one? Fine. We'll do it, but we're turning off the comments. You did this to yourself, Internet.

SandBox.Super WIKI 1

• It is unthinkable for any VR (virtual reality) player in the Pantheon to not know about Laughing Coffin. Reviled by the principled and worshipped by the depraved, Laughing Coffin is an eclectic but deadly crowd of murderers, maniacs, criminals and innocent victims forced into violence. Vicious terrorist and assassin Vassago Casals (aka PoH, or Prince of Hell) formed the guild in the virtual world of Sword Art Online from disorganized groups of orange players (players branded for crimes) to spread carnage and violence with the idea that the game's creator, Akihiko Kayaba would be blamed for everything, and also his belief that people reveal their true colors in the virtual world and thus tries to encourage them to give in to their bloodlust and murder each other to their hearts' content. It's not uncommon to see members of Laughing Coffin as proof of the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory taken to its most extreme.

Sandbox.Broken Base Final Fantasy XIV

• The live letter showing previews for patch 3.5 revealed that all forms of chat would be disabled in The Feast and would be replaced with pre form text macros. It is speculated that the reason behind the change is due to people being less than kind to their teammates. The change caused quite a stir; some welcome the change since they feel that the PVP scene is made too toxic by many people and that kind of behavior drove people away. Those who found the chat feature useful say that disabling chat makes it harder to communicate with your party (especially with randomly matched players) and will drive away long time PVP players. Adding further to the confusion is how The Feast is the only mode being affected by the changes while other PVP modes lifted the chat restrictions.

Sandbox.Broken Base Internet

Given the effect that anonymity has on some Internet users, the fact that Broken Bases would arise should come as no surprise.

Sandbox.Internet Jerk

Someone, under the cover of anonymity, acts like a jerk on the Internet. Common techniques are derogatory videos, insults and personal attack, doxxing, sexual or other harassment and in the most extreme cases death threats or plotting terrorist attacks.

Sandbox.Internet Jerk

• Digimanz The Adventure Too: Davis learned that the Internet Tough Guy Trolls the GIFT creates can often leak into the real world by inspiring people to be cruel even without the safety of internet anonymity, and the best way to fight this is to be more understanding of other human beings.

Sandbox.Internet Tough Guy

[[/folder]][[folder:Flame War]]There is something about the anonymous nature of the Internet that makes people behave in ways that they wouldn't when they're face-to-face with other people. What starts as a minor disagreement like "how to ship two minor characters," or "what constitutes Canon or fanon," escalates until the users are insulting each other, flinging expletives and profanities and shouting at the top of their virtual lungs. Inevitably, someone will be compared to Hitler. Also inevitably, the Internet Tough Guy will get involved, resulting in legal threats (anything from DMCA takedowns and people trying to drag the legal staff of people or businesses involved into the flame war to often hilariously misspelled accusations of "defamation" and even possibly an actual Frivolous Lawsuit), and sometimes even actual threats of violence or Real Life harassment.

Sandbox.Internet Tough Guy

[[/folder]][[folder:League of Legends]]* In a post that became legendary on the LoL forums, Rioter Kades laid down the most almighty smack on the toxic minority of the community who were attempting to defend the merits of GIFT in response to a moving and mature post by a sufferer of social anxiety disorder about dealing with cyber-bullying:

Sandbox.Internet Tough Guy

[[/folder]][[folder:Super Robot Wars T]]* No matter what route you pick at Stage 16 (Cephiro or Astragius), you will face off against Rony Marbuk, a guy with a huge Inferiority Superiority Complex that thinks he's a big shot with the Twilight Age giving him an excuse to look at your team lowly and humanity stagnating so he could stand above them. Then Meryl verbally beat the hell out of him by stating that despite the stagnation, mankind still tries to advance forward so his bombastic boasting can just go suck it, and every of the heroes' interactions with him are always tearing his ego up and making him whimper, realizing at how outmatched he is or how much he's actually not worth it. Obnoxious people like Rony may exist within the internet, which makes it both awesome and funny in the same time due to how savagely hilarious and well deserving (for people like him) the heroes put him down.

Sandbox.Internet Tough Guy

[[/folder]][[folder:Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back]]* Internet Tough Guy: Subverted in that Jay and Bob have never been on the internet before, and have no concept of GIFT or what a Troll is and take the trash talk seriously. They also subvert the hell out of this trope by actually going around the country to beat the crap out of all the bratty kids who insulted them.

Sandbox.Internet Tough Guy

[[/folder]][[folder:Funny/Overwatch]]* In mid-December 2017, after an angry Troll on the official forums announced he was quitting the game due to it "failing" to repeal the 7 bans to his account, Jeff Kaplan himself arrived to share some lines of his in-game behaviour to make clear the bans and hundreds of harassment reports were completely justified, including "im the reason for anything good", "LONG WALK FOR A PILE OF [expletive]", and accusing others who beat him of hacking.

Sandbox.Internet Tough Guy

[[/folder]][[folder:Wide-Eyed Idealist]]—&gt:SEMICOLON:Visit unabridged version HERE! And be sure to say hi to all those nice people on the internet!

Sandbox.Internet Tough Guy

[[/folder]][[folder:Flame War]]* Straight:** Someone insults or threatens another person's comments or the person themselves in an online dispute. Other people join in and the fight begins.** Alternately, a Troll posts something sufficiently inflammatory enough to get people arguing.** An ordinary poster posts something that, while they didn't assume it to be inflammatory, is very much so.

Sandbox.Internet Tough Guy

[[/folder]][[folder:Warp That Aesop/Tropes]]* GIFT, Griefer, Internet Tough Guy, and Troll:** Being a total douchebag on the internet is fun, especially when you'll never get in trouble for it like in real life.** If someone insults, harasses, or antagonizes you on the internet, don't bother get offended, otherwise you're just a whiny sensitive little bitch who deserves more abuse and bullying online.

Sandbox.Internet Tough Guy

[[/folder]][[folder:Digimanz The Adventure Too]]* Space Whale Aesop: Dissatisfied with the video almost being over without any real resolution, T.K. demands that each of the Digi-Destined come up with An Aesop each learned in the video, regardless of whether it actually related to what happened.** T.K. decides that he learned teamwork is important.** Kari learned that actions speak louder than words.** Cody learned that he has to orient himself to hope. Considering what he had to go through, nobody can blame him.** Ken ended up being too busy dealing with his evaporated blood to contribute.** Yolei screams that you shouldn't "blow loads" when you're angry.** Davis learned that the Internet Tough Guy Trolls the GIFT creates can often leak into the real world by inspiring people to be cruel even without the safety of internet anonymity, and the best way to fight this is to be more understanding of other human beings. Which is why more people should be having sex. Also, when a woman puts a fleshlight into her body, does that make her a lesbian?

Sandbox.Monster Creepypasta

• I Was a Professional Internet Troll: The story's narrator, known by his online alias "Resisilobus", is an overzealous internet troll who manages to be particularly vile even by those standards. Not content with simply being an unpleasant individual online, Resisilobus intentionally drives two people to kill themselves by relentlessly harassing them. He then befriends a teenage outcast and manipulates the boy into killing seven of his classmates and then committing suicide. To indicate how little he values the lives of others, Resisilobus considers the "achievements" to be inferior to his comparatively minor hacking of a popular Bible app and the confusion it causes among Christians. A remorseless sadist who openly revels in the power his crimes make him feel, Resisilobus is an example of how internet anonymity can bring out the worst in people.

Sandbox.Why Fandom Cant Have A Nice Wick Check

• Trivia.IMDb: The forums were shut down because the GIFT had gotten out of control, to the point of becoming a punchline on par with the YouTube comment section. This isn't "someone who is involved in a work" (or even a work, really), but it does show how toxic behavior led to measures being taken.

SchmuckBait.Video Games

• Dark Souls:
  • Dark Souls:
    • Players can leave messages on the ground with the soapstone item, which can be seen by other people who happen to be both online and in the same locations. This unsurprisingly leads to players telling gullible bystanders to take Leaps of Faith into Bottomless Pits.
    • The first game has Trusty Patches, who will generally reward the appropriate level of (clearly misplaced) trust by dropping you into a pit. Twice.
    • The Twilight Forest is made of these. One side path has a small room with the glow of an item at the far back. A savvy player will note the top foliage of the Nightshade creature that lurks right in front of it. A quick grab and dash, yes? Oops, going into the room causes two more Nightshades to drop at the entrance, while the obvious third also attacks. The area is small enough that all three can hit you with any attack, or even worse, get you with their grab attack animation. The prize? A Purple Moss, an item that you get from farming Nightshades.
  • Dark Souls II:
    • The end of the Pate/Creighton sidequest, regardless of whom you choose to ally with, will send you to the same room containing a booby-trapped exploding treasure chest.
    • On his own, Royal Sorcerer Navlaan is imprisoned in a laboratory, alternating between a scared young mage and an Obviously Evil dark wizard who bribes you to kill innocent NPCs. The Schmuck Bait comes into play with the nearby lever, which is preceded by a hallway full of signs warning you to not touch it and leave. Pulling the lever releases Navlaan, who will invade you multiple times throughout the game, but if you leave him in his cell and do his hits (or make him think you did), then he will become a merchant that sells some items you can't get anywhere else.
    • The Smelter Demon has a very slow, telegraphed Sword Plant attack that is extremely easy to avoid and has it stand still for several seconds afterwards. It certainly looks like the perfect opportunity to run in and get a bunch of hits on it, and sometimes it genuinely is. Other times, it will follow the attack with a highly damaging shockwave that has a large radius. There is no way to tell whether it will do the shockwave or not, leading many players to get baited into taking a shockwave to the face.
  • Dark Souls III: The setup for the boss fight with High Lord Wolnir. You are transported into an endless dark abyss where the only illumination is the faint glow of an item on the floor (a Pyromancy tome). Approach, and Wolnir will burst forth out of the darkness and attack. It's a brilliant Jump Scare.

ScrappyMechanic.Monster Hunter

• The multiplayer chat in the 3DS online games is easily this, due to making you use the clumsy 3DS keyboard (except on Generations Ultimate on Switch, where you can plug in a USB keyboard, but only if you're docked or have a USB-A to USB-C adapter) and locking that out once the hunt begins, only allowing you to use one of your 18 pre-made macros. Generations gives you 24 macro slots, and Generations Ultimate gives you 72, but it doesn't account for every single thing you wanna communicate to your teammates. While this is meant to curb the GIFT factor of online multiplayer, even if you're in a party that's strictly composed of players from your friends list you still won't have an in-game way to chat freely. This is why some players will only do multiplayer hunts via local multiplayer and / or online with friends using third-party apps for text chat and especially voice chat.

Series.BIA

• GIFT: Anonymous vlogger La Cobra uses their anonymity to spread bad rumours about any influencer they can get dirt on. A season 1 arc, which is not resolved and nearly abandoned in season 2, involves characters from El Fundom trying to discover their identity.

Series.Last Week Tonight With John Oliver

• GIFT: Discussed in-depth during the segment on online harassment.

Series.Legal V Ex Lawyer Shoko Takanashi

• GIFT: In episode 5, Muto's mother was Driven to Suicide after being cyberbullied due to her son's assault conviction. After the appeal is won, the Kyogoku Law Firm petitions to have the news site where the bullies gather release their identities and demands compensation from each and every one of them.

Series.Ten O Clock Live

• GIFT: Discussed when talking about freedom of speech on Twitter.

Series.The Newsroom

• GIFT: Will introduces an identification system for online commentaries because anonymity enables cowardice and wackiness. This apparently makes him the target of a credible death threat.

SoYouWantTo.Be A Booker

1. The Internet Wrestling Community is not a Hive Mind, and will complain about everything you do. This is acceptable and their complaints are to be largely ignored. After all, it is impossible to please everybody, and, unless ratings, buyrates, and live attendance plummet, then there's no reason to believe you are doing a lousy job. We are well into a millennium where most fans can be expected to find access to online devices of some sort and wrestlers promote themselves through services like the world wide web. This has resulted in a lot of people writing about wrestling on the internet, each with completely different tastes, most of them of loud and opinionated. You will piss somebody off. Accept this.
   • Now, having given you that caveat, it is also worth remembering the Wisdom of Crowds — many fans want to contribute to your business being successful (that's part and parcel of being a fan!), so do not ignore them entirely. Instead, if you can afford it, have an office they can contact (preferably via email) with suggestions and feedback. Legally speaking, soliciting creative ideas from people outside the organization is a bad idea, and you should never actually use a fan's idea wholesale as part of your show (unless you like courtrooms and being forced to pay royalties, anyway), but keeping up on this, and noticing general trends in the messages received, can help you determine which angles are working and which wrestlers are getting over. Plus, having a point of contact for fans to write to goes a long way to improving public relations, and helps you avoid looking like real life heels in the process.
   • Always remember that wherever the internet is concerned, there will always be leaks. Unless you take absurd lengths to keep everyone in the dark about your booking plans except for the wrestlers involved, and only for their own matches, you have to expect that someone, be it a performer, referee, security guard, or ring crew member, will be willing to sell out the day's planned events to some website or other just for the notoriety value. In a perfect world, it would be nice if spoilers could be kept under wraps, but it is not your responsibility to take draconian measures to make it so. As long as fans are willing to scour the web for the latest dirt, someone will be willing to provide it. In the end, they're only ruining the experience for themselves. Do not book plans at the last minute or engineer a Shocking Swerve just to blindside this one sub-group. They being who they are, there's a better than even chance they'll catch wind of it anyway, and the product will be damaged for the vast majority of your fans, who are now watching something that doesn't make thematic sense because of the haphazard change.

SoYouWantTo.Write A Gaming Comic

Further, gaming webcomics take Most Writers Are Male to its logical extreme: virtually all gaming webcomic writers are male, and usually fairly young, affluent and nerdy at that. Combined with the Great Internet Fuckwad Theory, many webcomics sink to Refuge in Audacity Black Comedy fast. Scatological humour, gratuitous bloody violence and blatant sexism are unfortunately much too common.

SomeAnvilsNeedToBeDropped.Live Action Films

• While Unfriended uses the Space Whale Aesop of "don't be a Troll or else the people you had Driven to Suicide will kill you through a Skype call'', it does send a very real message about how acting like a jerk online and trolling people can have real-world consequences. Notably, none of the teen protagonists care that they played a part in driving a girl to kill herself until it starts coming back to bite them. The film also says that trolling the Alpha Bitch of the school is no more justified than doing it to a social outcast.

SomeAnvilsNeedToBeDropped.Live Action TV

• Black Mirror isn't subtle either. While it's possible to perceive this series as technophobic due to how it uses its machines in gritty, dark contexts, if there's a message to gather from the show as a whole, it would be that technology is only as disruptive and volatile to human life as humans themselves make it be.
  • "Nosedive": A society that classifies status and social standing by social media ratings and connections alone will ultimately become a fake one, where people will frown upon the smallest disapproval or deviation from the norm and get too accustomed to artificial happiness to be truthful or independent, even causing friendships and love to become shallow and entirely based off status and superficial interests. Furthermore, don't become a slave to public opinion just because you feel it necessary to ascend the corporate ladder. Being true to yourself will always bring more happiness and be more important than lying for the sake of your position.
  • "Men Against Fire": The whole episode is about the government enacting a Guilt-Free Extermination War against people it has deemed "undesirable". Sure, it's not exactly subtle when invoking the Nazi parallels, but it's still important, especially in the political climate of The New '10s, where some groups are still advocating eugenics and ethnic and racial supremacy.
  • "ArkAngel" drops a few with regards to parenting:
    • Children need privacy and to learn how to deal with fears, failures, and mistakes on their own. (For example, Sara eventually stops being scared of the neighbor's barking dog once Marie stops using the blur function.)
    • Eventually, your children will grow up and do stupid things you won't approve of (like staying out past curfew, have sex, and do drugs). That's normal. There's nothing you can do about it, and the best you can do is make yourself a trusted person they can turn to instead of trying to control every facet of their lives, which will only drive them away if not rebel harder against your rules.
    • If you smother and shelter your children and don't teach them the information they'll need to navigate adulthood, relationships, etc, they'll find it out anyway, and not always from the best source.
  • "Smithereens": Put your phone down and pay attention to the road when you're driving.
  • "Hated in the Nation": The episode isn't exactly subtle about the cruelty disguised as righteousness that is mass online shaming. Even if the target of the outrage has done something obnoxious, the Disproportionate Retribution they face makes us empathize with them and makes us think twice about mindlessly joining the outrage bandwagon, because there's a living, breathing human being on the other side of the screen. A pretty great commentary on GIFT.

SomeAnvilsNeedToBeDropped.South Park

• "Skank Hunt" shows how anybody, even the most normal people can be absolute monsters online. It's not just socially rejected people who lash out online either, but people who act that way just because they can.
  • It also teaches how obsessed society has gotten with social media, that quitting it is literally viewed as committing suicide.

SophisticatedAsHell.Real Life

• According to The Other Wiki, even respected scholars refer to the tendency of semi-anonymous members of online communities to act more vulgarly and aggressively towards each other as the "Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory". In addition to potentially being a misapplication of the word "Theory," the vocal dissonance is fucking hilarious.
  • The polite name for this phenomenon is the "online disinhibition effect".

StockParodyJokes.Web Original

• YouTube:
  • The site being a hub for cat videos.
  • The users in comment sections of videos either being extremely rude trolls, or posting repetitive jokes and discredited memes.
  • Videos being taken down or accounts being terminated due to the flimsiest of copyright claims.

SuperSmashBros.Tropes E To M

• GIFT:
  • In Brawl's Basic Brawl online mode, due to the completely anonymous nature, set rules of 2-minute time matches with the players deciding the items and stages, and complete lack of any sort of reporting feature, the mode devolved to people having "Taunt Parties" (e.g. just taunt and fool around instead of actually fighting, while ganging up on anyone trying to seriously fight), constantly choosing giant stages that allow players to run away with ease (Temple became notorious for being chosen all the time), and outright griefing. After the first couple years of Brawl, the mode became an utter cesspool for anyone looking to actually fight. 3DS/Wii U's "For Fun" mode, the successor to Basic Brawl, is beginning to become infested with Taunt Parties, despite the implementation of a reporting feature among other improvements. Ultimate finally stopped the taunt parties by completely disabling taunting online... unfortunately, players quickly started crouching instead, to the same effect as teabagging in FPS games.
  • In Wii U's For Glory mode, players can't normally communicate with each other. However in the mode, you can use and change your name tags, which are fully visible to the opponent. While altruistic players will utilise it to honestly communicate, many salty players and griefers use it to insult opponents. This also applies to the aforementioned For Fun mode. It's additionally not unheard of for people to friend opponents on Miiverse only to use the messaging system to insult and harass them. The inability to change your tag and friend opponents on the 3DS version prevents this on its For Glory mode.
  • In an undocumented feature to combat this on For Glory, there is what is known by fans as "For Glory Hell". To elaborate, if a player is reported too much on For Glory, instead of being banned from the mode, they'll find themselves only being able to be matched up with other such reported players for a undisclosed temporary time. As such, when someone is in For Glory Hell, they'll find themselves matched up with the same few griefers, heavy laggers, and extremely campy players over and over, or not being matched up with anyone at all. This feature isn't infallible, however; honest players who just win a lot, especially if they have a disliked playstyle, have found themselves in For Glory Hell before by salty opponents reporting them.
  • One of the features of the Miiverse stage is that it shows Miiverse posts submitted by fans to encourage specific characters. It is not uncommon to find posts that insult the characters instead (or posts that don't even relate to the characters in question).
  • Due to how rules are handled in Ultimate's Quickplay mode and the current inability to limit what rules you can get matched up with, there are several players that abuse the preferred rules feature to grief competitive players or otherwise try to cheese wins out against better players they wouldn't be able to beat normally. This can just entail running Smash Balls, all stages, and/or items in 1v1, but can also entail running absurdly short time limits to time people out, one stock, and Stamina matches. A particularly nasty variant is running matches with just the Special Flag enabled, which ensures matches will invariably go to time in a long drawn-out boring match as neither player will be able to loss all their stocks unless one gives up and suicides their stocks away.

TabletopGame.Eclipse Phase

• Absent Aliens: Downplayed, but still pretty strongly in effect.
  • The Factors are the only aliens to be seen face to face. They're essentially highly evolved slime mold, having technology just years in advance of transhumanity—if the rumors of them having FTL travel turn out to be false—and just handful of ships doing trading and diplomatic missions throughout the solar system. However, their given name comes from the that they claim to be the self-appointed representatives of other species out there, though they are not giving out any details, and the fact they can be very deceptive when they choose to be, just opens up more questions than putting this fully into doubt. That said, they're still quite enigmatic and made first contact just a few years after the Fall. Surely just a coincidence...
  • Then there's also the ETI and their Exsurgent virus, some truly alien and horrifying concepts, to be sure, but still absent but for their tools. What drives them and what's the higher goal of their actions is largely unknown (as in its for the gamemaster to decide).
  • The creatures that built the Pandora gates, if it weren't the TITANs or the above. Considering the number of them and how old many of them apparently are, the possibility that it was the TITANs who built them is looking vanishingly small. The TITANs did indeed build them, or at least the ones in the Solar System, though the knowledge how to do it either came from their higher understanding of the universe, or was carried over to them from the Exsurgent virus.
  • The Iktomi are/were an arachnoid race that was active about 10,000 years ago and had settlements on several planets transhumanity has access to, but so far the Iktomi appear to have all disappeared without a trace...
  • Apparent alien contact has been made on the world of Giza, where alien artifacts, the strange "black box" communication devices, have instant communications to other terminals across the galaxy, or even the universe. People aren't entirely sure if it's an AI driven device used in some sort of con, or if the aliens who are willing to use them to trade technology and information are trading in safe technologies, marking Giza as a potential risk. The black boxes, if they are indeed connecting to other aliens, apparently function as a galactic chat service, rife with aliens who are quite nasty about wanting to cyber or just engaging in GIFT. The one tryout of the xenotech they gave the human gatecrashers gave the skeptics very good justification to be wary of any designs that came out of those boxes.
  • The Moravecians are a species that have apparently decided to go into a fully digital existence, with the world of Moravec having an extensive and hardy server network to support an entire virtual universe that's been active for thousands of years. Transhumanity has had some success in penetrating and entering this virtual network, but by almost every indication it's entirely empty...
  • The Amphibs of Droplet are another ancient species. They had disappeared from the surface of their home world about a million years ago rather suddenly after the discovery of the Droplet gate. Very little remains of them, so it's hard to tell how advanced they became, but they appear to have achieved a level of technology similar to Transhumanity but for space travel. More concerning, another building/construct called the Toadstool exists on Droplet, having been made of a highly advanced, hardened, and self-repairing material, and it appears to predate the Amphibs themselves by a long time.

Trivia.Chikara

• Why Fandom Can't Have Nice Things: Before the Chikara 101 forums, there were the ChikaraFans forums. However, the moderators and a few of the most prominent users developed egos and started posting abusively and berating new users over pretty much everything - essentially falling afoul of the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. When Leonard F. Chikarason told them to cool off, the owners responded by turning violently against CHIKARA itself, deleting their archives and turning their main forum into a venue to bash the promotion. The Chikara 101 forums are as good if not better than the ChikaraFans forums, but the archives are still missed.

Trivia.Dragon Nest

• Fan Nickname:
  • Gladus Tek Ma, for the Cleric's Block spell, as well as the Sorceress' two Anti-Magic spells.
  • "w3ws" for the unrepentant trolls and griefers in the SEA server, usually attributed to Filipino players.
  • Not surprisingly, the North American player base tends to call the Tinkerer a "loli". They seem to be entirely aware of the word's implications.

Trivia.Final Fantasy XIV

• Why the Fandom Can't Have Nice Things:
  • Win trading, the act of giving people guaranteed wins in quests in exchange for gil or items, was very common in the PVP section of the game, which resulted in many people getting high ranks and gear with high stats (including Morale, which is a PVP only stat) without earning them fairly. Frontlines was a second PVP mode added later on to the game and it doesn't use the Morale stat. The act of making Morale useless in Frontlines was very likely done to make sure that people who bribed their way to the top can't have the big advantage over everyone when Frontlines was released. Unfortunately, the motion also punished legit players that earned their gear and ranks for PVP.
  • Win carries, the act of someone carrying another player to victory while said player doesn't contribute much, were also plaguing non PVP content and allowed players to earn gear and other rewards by simply paying another player to carry them through raids and dungeons. While it wasn't the main deciding factor, Square decided to kill two birds with one stone; add an item level requirement so that players are properly prepared and prevents people from being carried through most runs with bad gear.
  • For the longest time, the duty finder (especially for the Labyrinth of the Ancients and Sycrus Tower raids) was plagued with withdraw spam. When everyone is queued up, a player can choose to withdraw from the duty for whatever reason they have, but it causes everyone else to be re-queued as they have to wait for a new replacement. Since there was no penalty for withdrawing after the ready window popped up, people would either troll everyone by joining and withdrawing or fish for duties that are already in progress and withdraw if they didn't get it. Patch 2.4 added a penalty system by giving anyone who withdraws 3 times when the ready window pops with a 30 minute penalty and they will get another 30 minute penalty for each withdraw after that until the next day. While the system greatly reduced trolling and in progress fishing, people who may have had a legitimate excuse for withdrawing are also punished.
  • The official forums worked like any other forum and Square Enix needed people to test it in its beta stages. Naturally, people started to clog the forums with spam, flame wars, and other annoying things, prompting Square Enix to slap down a heavy posting restriction where every user has a limited amount of posts they can make in a day based on their character's level and a 1000 character limit was also thrown in to prevent people from filling posts with text walls (though editing the initial post bypasses the limit somehow). After several years of requesting the character limit to be increased, the forums now have a 3000 character limit for every post.
  • The abuse of parsers (3rd party add-ons that measures a player's DPS output) is the reason why the developers are very reluctant to make an official one. Because of people that use parsers to verbally harass people with low DPS (even in content where DPS checks aren't used), just openly mentioning in the game that you use parsers puts you at risk of someone reporting you to a game master. In patch 3.2, the developers created a training ground where players can whack a dummy whose HP is based off of various raid bosses (with some adjustments due to the content being for solo play) so that people can test their skill rotations for optimal DPS performance, but it doesn't give much information other than you know you are doing good if you can break the dummy before the time limit expires.
  • PVP isn't quite newbie friendly due to a lot of Serious Business players flying off the handle whenever someone in the party screws up. The developers decided that in patch 3.5, all forms of chat would be disabled and the only way to communicate would be through preformed macros that take up space on the hotbars. While the developers never stated why they made such a drastic change, it is likely due to the overabundance of players being openly hostile towards others, which can drive people away from PVP completely.
  • The launch of Stormblood brought in a ton of players to the point where simply trying to get into certain servers would take hours at a time if the congestion was high (this was on mostly populated servers like Gilgamesh and Balmung). The developers implemented an auto-kick measure where anyone that was AFK for too long would be logged out. Players trying to get around this countermeasure would spoof their AFK status such as leaving a menu open or going into crafting mode without actually crafting. This in turn made the queues even longer and many housing/apartments/private rooms were inaccessible due to the instance servers hosting them being perpetually clogged with AFK players. Presenting itself as a nuclear solution, the developers made a new countermeasure where every server on every data center would automatically log everyone out of the game once a day, no matter what they were doing (this includes quests or other instances) and they would not be able to log back in for 10 minutes. This also affected players on lower populated worlds and it especially includes the people that transferred off a congested server to avoid the queue problems in the first place. The restrictions were eventually lifted once everything became more stable.
  • The main scenario roulette had a lot of problems with players speed running the final two ARR dungeons that were introduced in 2.0. People grinding for tomestones or experience points would rush from boss to boss while newcomers either got left behind, got told to watch the cutscenes at an inn, or were kicked for slowing everyone down. The problem persisted for years and it wasn't until patch 4.2 where the developers actually took action in the form of making cutscenes in the two dungeons completely unskippable, even if the group is preformed and are running the dungeons unsynced.
  • A small part of the fandom that wants to play as a Kid Hero was given a stern head-shake from Yoshida. His given reason is that the Warrior of Light goes through a lot of shit over the course of their journey, which can be a rather debatable angle since many other games in the Final Fantasy series don't shy away from this (even family-friendly poster boy Nintendo has done it with one of its main franchises, of which two games were considered some of the best of their time). Sadly, Yoshida also gave a less pointed but much bigger reason why playable children will never happen: Final Fantasy XIV is home to role-players... and not all of them wholesome. While Yoshida and the game's moderators typically don't object to erotic roleplay scenes so long as the roleplayers keep it to themselves, it's much harder to defend allowing players to roleplay a child participating in such scenes.
  • The Ishgard Restoration content allowed players to visit other servers and assist said servers with their progress. Due to Demand Overload (as well as people trolling others by making the problem worse), almost no one could get into the Firmament to contribute to the progression and this also included people getting locked out from their own home server. Within a day, the dev team changed the system where players visiting other servers can't visit the Firmament unless it's on their home server.
  • Data mining is a hot button issue between fans that want to see what's hidden in each patch and fans that don't want to be spoiled by said data mining. Square Enix themselves generally weren't bothered by data mining as long as people kept the methods of data mining to themselves, although they did openly state not to spoil anything. In 2019, several people were upset towards a raid team that had got the world first clear for Alexander Ultimate and accused them of cheating by using data mining to prove that the raid team cheated. The developers came down hard on data mining by suspending people that were openly data mining or were linked to data mining in some way. Because data mining was used to harass people, data mining in general is now a lot less open and is more private.
  • In the past, jobs that were getting adjustments would be reflected in in the prelimary patch notes or sometimes during a live letter. Due to misconceptions, backlash, and general complaining about certain jobs no longer being good, job changes are no longer posted until the patch goes live.
  • After a world first team for Alexander Ultimate streamed themselves openly using the Cactbot fight planner to change waymarks on the fly to help their performance in fights, in defiance of Square's don't-show-don't-ask-don't-tell policy on mods, Square Enix quietly changed it so that waymarks could no longer be laid down or altered in combat, but added way more letters and numbers to help plan it. Given that the other alternative was to crack down on the bot by making an example of a world first team during a WF race, this was probably the less controversial route.
  • The February 2020 live letter began with Yoshida spending the first half-hour decrying the modding scene, specifically those that go the extra mile in erotic role play by changing things like clothing and character models to do things that Final Fantasy XIV was not meant to do. While the whole segment reeked of "I am being paid to say this", Yoshida has ample reason to be concerned and stated as such because Final Fantasy XIV is a worldwide MMO that these modders are turning into a porn simulator, and different nations have different laws regarding porn, which could give the game the wrong kind of attention from the authorities.

Trivia.IM Db

• Why Fandom Can't Have Nice Things: The forums were shut down because the GIFT had gotten out of control, to the point of becoming a punchline on par with the YouTube comment section.

Trivia.Knives Out

• Playing Against Type:
  • Benoit Blanc is only the second role with comedic tones for Daniel Craig in his long and prolific career (after another Bunny-Ears Lawyer Southern-Fried Genius, Joe Bang in Logan Lucky).
  • Ana de Armas' roles are almost always some sort of Ms. Fanservice, but here she gets to play a Chaste Heroine.
  • Michael Shannon, usually cast as imposing and unstable authority figures, here plays Walt as a whiny and petulant weakling.
  • M. Emmet Walsh, best known for playing sleazy characters, plays an elderly and amiable security guard. This also would have been the case for original actor Ricky Jay.
  • Jaeden Martell, best known for playing the courageous All-Loving Hero Bill Denbrough, plays Jacob Thrombey, an alt-right GIFT troll and a total Jerkass.
  • Toni Collette is better known for her dramatic but especially horror roles, but here plays a more comedic role as an air-headed valley girl.
  • Don Johnson is best known for playing the suave undercover cop Sonny Crockett on Miami Vice. Here, he's an ineffectual xenophobic bumbler who's cheating on his wife, can't keep a secret, and openly tries to bribe the cops to get his way. Could double as an Actor Allusion since Crockett and his partner Tubbs were horrible at keeping it a secret that they were cops.

Trivia.Penny Arcade

• GIFT

Trivia.Penny Arcade

• GIFT

Trivia.Rescue911

• Creator Backlash: Abigail, the little girl who was featured in "Speed Dial Burn Save," stumbled upon an upload of the episode on YouTube years later, and requested that the video be taken down due to hateful, judgmental comments about her mother. She also felt that the episode was extremely personal, and didn't want people to watch it. The original uploader gladly complied, and removed the episode.^note Another user has since reuploaded the segment; Abigail has again requested its removal, but so far it is still online. In 2014, Abigail made an "update" video to answer questions and explain her point of view. Some were quick to state that Abigail has no right to have uploads of the episode taken down as CBS has the rights to the series.

Trivia.Roblox

• Why Fandom Can't Have Nice Things: The forums were reduced to be about Roblox only in July 2017 then shut down altogether in December of the same year because the moderators didn't want to put up with the GIFT that was always around and went out of control earlier that year. It has also be theorized by some that it happened partly due to Quackity HQ who, starting in May of 2017, repeatedly used his fans to raid the forums (some even going to non-affiliated spin-off sites) because he got a 3-day ban.

Trivia.Splatoon

• Flip-Flop of God:
  • Despite originally stating that major content updates would end on January 2016, the producer of the game went on record saying that more new content was a possibility in the future. Indeed, a March 2016 update confirmed that more weapons would be added to the game, with the last of these weapons being added that June.
  • Director Yusuke Amano originally said that Splatoon would never feature voice chat because his experience with online shooters featured people constantly hurling verbal abuse and obscenities at each other. By Splatoon 2, though, this stance was softened via a smartphone app.

TropeCo.All Trolls Are Different

• Internet Trolls: Having been introduced to the wonders of modern technology, this lone sect of troll have since developed nasty habits and a sadistic streak that have rendered them unapproachable for anyone, be they human or any other breed of troll. If anyone encounters this breed of troll, please consult your GIFT Awareness Pamphlet or call 555-555-TROPECO for more information.

TropeDistinctions.A To C

Beneath the Mask vs A Darker Me vs GIFT vs Hidden Depths

TropeDistinctions.A To C

• GIFT is a theory that tries to explain the antisocial behaviour of people on the Internet. This trope states that anonymity corrupts people that are otherwise normally nice, making them act like jerks, as opposed to Beneath the Mask that states that anonymity doesn't corrupt but only reveals what was already there.

TropeNamers.Webcomics

• Penny Arcade
  • GIFT
  • The Merch
  • Shoot the Medic First (cross-reference with Team Fortress 2)

TruthInTelevision.G To I

• GIFT: Spend any time on the internet reading comments (especially on contentious issues such as sex or politics or religion) and you will find plenty of demonstrations of GIFT.

TruthInTelevision.M To O

• Mediation Backfire: In many internet forums, trying to end a Flame War between two or more users will cause them to take out their frustrations on you with heaping insults, but this is the internet we're talking about.
  • Witness any police intervention in a domestic argument. (Or anybody else's, of course, but the police are the only ones professionally obliged to stick their heads over the parapet.) What they tend to really hate about such jobs is that even when one partner is clearly being abused, they'll often firmly take their abuser's side.

TruthInTelevision.S To U

• Suicide Dare: Unfortunately very common for people to tell this to other people who are suffering. A lot of this can happen on the internet.

UnintentionalPeriodPiece.The Nineties

• Freakazoid! references the V-Chip, among other bits of '90s pop culture ephemera. Furthermore, its setup of its protagonist being a teenage nerd who got sucked into the internet and turned into its living embodiment, while highly prescient of the rise of online "lol random" meme culture, still marks it as a product of a time of great optimism towards the emergence of the new medium of the internet. Today, with trolling having taken on far more negative connotations than just online pranksters, the show's portrayal of such can seem naive.

UnintentionallyUnsympathetic.Sword Art Online

• Really, MMO Players in general can be this at times. A recurring theme is that all MMO players are Not So Different from one another, in that they all desire to be stronger, use VR to escape the stresses or real life and are ultimately decent people deep down. While there are multiple instances that enforce this, such as the existence of a Clearing Force in SAO risking their lives to save everyone or multiple players attending Yuuki’s in-game passing, there are just as many or maybe more instances that can paint them as selfish G.I.F.Ts only out for themselves, with there being at least one example in each arc even if you ignore all the Player Killers who act as Antagonists.
  • In the Aincrad and Progressive Arcs, major clearing guilds can be seen as being more concerned with their personal power and petty rivalries as opposed to actually clearing the Death Game and freeing everyone, with guilds like the Divine Dragon Alliance being obsessed with getting rare loot, often insisting that they get the Last Attack Bonus in all the boss fights even if it’s just not possible and some even stooping to attacking other players for a shot at hoarding rare items and equipment.

UnintentionallyUnsympathetic.Sword Art Online

• It's noted multiple times that the foreign VRMMO gamers, who are unknowingly drafted into the War of the Underworld have no idea that they're killing Artificial Fluctlights, who are established to be essentially real people, and are being manipulated by Gabriel and PoH. While both of these points are true, the majority of them take being the GIFT to so much of an extreme that it's really hard to say they're completely guiltless, attacking the obvious heroes along with seemingly Obviously Evil group, attacking people while they're down, several of them making very messed up comments about the fact that this "game" has realistic gore and outright taking prisoners of war for seemingly no more than petty sadism. Only one player (two in the anime, with a Chinese going by the name of Mei Xiang), a Korean going by Moonphase, is suspicious of the whole thing and even after watching PoH beat up Kirito, who at the time can be easily mistaken for a cripple due to needing a wheelchair and barely moving, only about half of them actually start getting suspicious about the whole thing as well, while the rest just keep going along with PoH's cruelty simply because they're prejudiced against Japan. In the end, it's hard to pity the fact they, or at least the still unconvinced half, are being manipulated and hard not to cheer when Kirito wakes up and puts them on ice. Not to mention, with Alice's reveal to the world displaying the potential Fantastic Racism Artificial Fluctlights will face, there is some doubt about whether or not they'd actually feel guilty if they learned what they did.
• While the Salamander Commander^note  the general audience in the anime makes good points on why Liz's request for the assembled players to help protect the Underworld can come off as unreasonable and that they should just refuse, the fact that one of his arguments involves him having Fantastic Racism against SAO Survivors, who by the way were essentially kidnapping victims with a gun to their head 24/7, due to them having more VR experience than most other players makes him come off as more childish and petty than intended, even if Liz does concede that he's got a point about how she and other survivors tend to hang around each other more than regular MMO players.
• And finally, in Unital Ring, after Kirito and the group feed a group of fellow players^note  In the mysterious “Unital Ring”, there is unique system called Starve Points and Thirst Points that, if decreased too low, will weaken the player and eventually kill them, said group are quick to turn on their saviors after they learn that they’re elite players and that they could take advantage of the fact that they currently have lower quality gear than theirs^note  Unital Ring, after a set period of time or if the player unequips anything, increases the weight requirements for any equipment a player already owns and forces them to create new gear and work towards re-equipping their old stuff, which is what happens to Kirito, Asuna, Alice and Leafa while the Ungrateful Bastards were able to forge new gear before they encountered them to kill them for a better shot at winning whatever Unital Ring is. Then in the next volume, they're revealed to have responded to their defeat by ratting out the location of Kirito and Asuna's cabin to some PKer friends of theirs to attack them in their stead, seemingly ignorant of the fact that they wouldn't have gotten killed and and got booted from Unital Ring if they didn't betray Kirito's group in the first place..

UsefulNotes.Asperger Syndrome

• Self-inflated Insufferable Genius/Asperger's as an excuse for bad behaviour. There's no real connection whatsoever, and may have just been borne out of people over the Internet using Asperger's Syndrome as an excuse to be a jerkass or a Know-Nothing Know-It-All. Part of the reason AS is a popular self-diagnosis is because Asperger's is linked (particularly in pop culture) with Idiot Savant characters who are brilliant but lack social skills. Such individuals are often the first to latch onto postmortem conjectural psychology calling various famous people like Albert Einstein autistic. They arrogantly believe that not only should having AS free them from judgement for being socially inept, but also pin them as genius-tier masters of their field. This is particularly infuriating for people who really do have AS, since as this practice continues they find it harder to explain accidentally offending somebody without being seen as liars, or worse as trying to make an excuse for bad behaviour. Most genuine Aspies don't see Aspergers as a 'Get Out Of Jerkass Free' card, just an explanation.
  
  If anything, given that the symptoms of Asperger's syndrome tend to lead other children (and sometimes adults) into bullying them, they usually tend to have a lower sense of self-worth. This tends to be confused as a symptom of Asperger's due to the lack of social empathy and the tendency to dominate conversations.
  
  While a case could be made that some who have been consistently bullied may consciously develop or become egocentric and cultivate feelings of a superiority complex as a psychological defense mechanism, this does not directly correlate with AS. What might correlate to it is that since people with Asperger’s tend to be experts in their narrow field of interest, they can think of themselves as superior to those who do not possess such skills. Also, some think of their lack of inhibition and sincerity as an advantage over the rest of the population.

UsefulNotes.Autism Spectrum

• Self-inflated Insufferable Genius/Asperger's as an excuse for bad behaviour. There's no real connection whatsoever, and may have just been borne out of people over the Internet using Asperger's Syndrome as an excuse to be a jerkass or a Know-Nothing Know-It-All. Part of the reason AS is a popular self-diagnosis is because Asperger's is linked (particularly in pop culture) with Idiot Savant characters who are brilliant but lack social skills. Such individuals are often the first to latch onto postmortem conjectural psychology calling various famous people like Albert Einstein autistic. They arrogantly believe that not only should having AS free them from judgement for being socially inept, but also pin them as genius-tier masters of their field. This is particularly infuriating for people who really do have AS, since as this practice continues they find it harder to explain accidentally offending somebody without being seen as liars, or worse as trying to make an excuse for bad behaviour. Most genuine Aspies don't see Aspergers as a 'Get Out Of Jerkass Free' card, just an explanation.
  
  If anything, given that the symptoms of Asperger's syndrome tend to lead other children (and sometimes adults) into bullying them, they usually tend to have a lower sense of self-worth. This tends to be confused as a symptom of Asperger's due to the lack of social empathy and the tendency to dominate conversations.
  
  While a case could be made that some who have been consistently bullied may consciously develop or become egocentric and cultivate feelings of a superiority complex as a psychological defense mechanism, this does not directly correlate with AS. What might correlate to it is that since people with Asperger’s tend to be experts in their narrow field of interest, they can think of themselves as superior to those who do not possess such skills. Also, some think of their lack of inhibition and sincerity as an advantage over the rest of the population.

UsefulNotes.Console Wars

The most famous Console War was between the Super NES and Sega Genesis in The '90s (see Fourth Generation folder below), spurred on by some Take Thats on Sega's part like the one in the page image. However, internet-related debating (which is usually much more heated than what you see in a grade or high school cafeteria) didn't really take off until the Fifth Generation; where the Play Station and Nintendo 64 (and briefly the Sega Saturn) squared off against one another. These days (the Seventh Generation onward), it's largely the PlayStation series vs. Microsoft's Xbox line; Nintendo still exists as a third major competitor, but their Take a Third Option approach following the Game Cube, and the fact that they often don't get the third-party titles that Sony and Microsoft do, means they're often excluded from direct console vs. console comparisons (though this has changed somewhat with the release of the Nintendo Switch, which has seen a Renaissance of third-party publishing for a Nintendo system, as it's garnered a strong install base).

UsefulNotes.Console Wars

Despite having the most technologically advanced system of that era and a slew of quality games such as Super Mario 64, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and Super Smash Bros., Nintendo dropped out of the lead for the first time ever. This was partially because of their adherence to the old ROM cartridge format — the limitations of which seriously undermined its otherwise superior technology and caused it to lose much of its third-party support, particularly Square and Final Fantasy VII — and partly because their bright and shiny family games didn't fit the new 3D, next-gen aesthetic. However, shrewd business decisions and pricing on Nintendo's part meant that while they lost market share, the company may have ended up comparably profitable to their competitors. The fact that their best-selling games were first/second-party also helped. The N64 did come in second during the war, but its sales didn't even come close to the PlayStation's.

Sony, meanwhile, recognized the increasing age bracket of console gamers and tapped into the influential twentysomething "big kid" market, legitimizing console gaming in the eyes of many and laying the foundation for the newcomer's market dominance. One of greatest assets of the PlayStation's victory was that their games were released on CDs. Since at that time, CDs were widely available to the mass market as writable media containers, the PlayStation became the first console with a large-scale piracy problem. People would buy PlayStations because they could pirate the games for it at less than one-tenth the games' retail price, whereas there was hardly any piracy on the other disk-based systems (and it goes without saying that it was way harder to copy an N64 cartridge).

Also, while the Nintendo 64 might be largely underappreciated and looked down on in hindsight, there was actually a very real war going on between it and the PlayStation that was, in some respects, even bloodier than the Genesis/SNES war a generation prior. This is because it was the first console war to be heavily fueled by the then-emerging internet. While neither system had the mudslinging ads of the preceding generation, the downright brutal arguing and flaming occurring on video game message forums and websites^note A matter not helped by the forum moderation being generally far looser back then than it is today more than made up for this. In a sense, the fourth generation was more of a battle between competing companies, while the fifth generation was more of a battle between competing fans.

You might expect that the developers shifting their focus away from Nintendo would choose its then-primary competitor Sega as a new platform, rather than new-kid-on-the-block Sony. However, the Saturn was a complex multi-processor design that was harder to program for, and it was less powerful than PlayStation when rendering in 3D. It was also crippled by creepy-as-fuck American television advertising, and a botched surprise launch in the US that caught third parties flat-footed and enraged retailers that weren't in on the secret, including Wal-Mart. Adding to the litany of issues was mistrust and a lack of communication between the Japanese and American branches of Sega, and general mismanagement, mostly by the infamous Bernie Stolar. Although it managed to grab some good market share in Japan, the dearth of game releases eventually led to its failure in other territories, where it was discontinued in 1998.

The Apple Pippin, released in conjunction with Bandai, was a weird mesh of computer and console sensibilities with all of the worst attributes of both — too expensive for a console, too underpowered for a computer, and a software library that barely cracked two digits. It's mostly useful for filling out every tech site list of "Ten Worst Consoles" or "Five Apple Flops."

The NEC PC-FX was NEC's attempt to enter the 32-bit era early by rushing an old, outdated design out the door before its competitors in an attempt to keep the PC-Engine's fanbase. The result was completely underpowered in every respect except for decoding videos, and thus many releases for it were anime-themed FMV games, making it the Japanese equivalent of the CD-i. It sold less than 100,000 units and ended NEC's run as a console maker.

UsefulNotes.Fighting Game Community

• You Fight Like a Cow: Zig-zagged. It largely depends on the scene the players are from.
  • In U.S. competition, trash-talk is considered healthy and encouraging, especially in the Marvel vs. Capcom community. Players often even make whole wrestling-style promos to berate their opponents or rival factions. Even then, this is only true to a certain degree. People whose trash talk is overly rude, obnoxious, offensive, personal, or mean-spirited (especially when coupled with consistent bad attitudes, poor sportsmanship, or poor conduct on social media) will quickly become disliked by the FGC, and may very well get called out if they cross the line.
  • Averted, to a degree, in Japan. The Japanese player community allegedly considers it rude and distasteful to trash talk to another player's face. However, GIFT still applies on message boards and chat forums.

UsefulNotes.Staying Out Of Legal Trouble

• Do not make threats. Yes, sometimes a situation can make you so angry or scared that you believe a threat (even one you know you won't follow up on) is a good idea, or you might make an entirely absurd Ineffectual Death Threat as a joke. It never is funny or a good idea to make a threat (unless you can prove self-defense and that making the threat was done to protect your life or property from imminent danger, for example, someone told you they were going to rape you and you documented that then told them if they tried you would shoot them). In many cases, a threat itself can at least be the crimes of assault or harassment, and certain threats aimed at certain people, places, or things can qualify as terrorist threats, stalking-related offenses, or hate crimes. Even if the threat itself is ignored at the time, if anything ever happens to the person you threatened, you go to the top of the suspect list. Furthermore, if you are ever involved in a shooting, stabbing, or beating, or brandish a weapon and cite self-defense, those social media posts, text messages and messaging app records, and witness testimonies will be subpoenaed if the prosecution wants to make a case for you being a violent person who wanted to hurt or kill someone or start or escalate a fight, and if you have ever threatened someone or had a violent incident that you didn't have a good reason for, it will be a much better day for the prosecution than it will be for you.
  • Plus the threat could come back to haunt you. A humorous example occurred in the movie Starting Over where Jill Clayburgh is visiting her parents and is unaware that Burt Reynolds has been invited as a blind date. So, she's walking at night, and some guy she doesn't know is following her, even tailing her in the direction of her parents home. She's frightened, walks up to the guy she thinks is stalking her, tells him off in no uncertain terms, and runs off to her parents. Later, he gets to the door and is introduced, and he tells them that he knows her. Her mother asks where they met, and he tells them exactly what she said: "Outside, as I was walking up here, she said 'Get the fuck away from me, I've got a knife in my purse and I'll cut your fucking balls off.'"
  • On a related note, don't make threats online, either. No matter what. Remember, the Internet is not as anonymous as you think it is, and making threats against a person/their family/their property/all of the above can get you in trouble, just like in meatspace. Similarly, don't "doxx" other people; even if you wouldn't threaten or harm them, even if the worst thing you would do is set them up with a few unsolicited pizzas or make a few prank calls, you can't be certain that someone else won't stalk, harass, threaten, or harm this person...and if someone does, you could be held responsible. (Whether you think they deserve it or not, whether you think it's a good way to "teach them a lesson" or not, is irrelevant. Remember, the law does not look kindly on any form of vigilante "justice.") The law also does not care whether you're copy-pasting information that they had posted previously, or whether it's something you dug up from the Deep Web; the end result is the same. Also, there is no guarantee that the information you're putting out there is accurate, complete, or up-to-date. (For example, what if the address or phone number you listed no longer belongs to the person you're targeting, but to someone else?) Another good reason not to doxx: it puts other people in the crossfire. Namely, anyone the doxxee lives with, or anyone on their contact lists. People who might not be involved in your drama, or might not even be aware of it.
  • If the person in question has actually done something illegal, report them to the appropriate law enforcement official, as well as to site admins. That's way more effective than "signal boosting" on the Internet. If the person hasn't done anything illegal (just upsetting), then simply unfollow or unfriend them, and if necessary, report the offending post to the site's administrative team. If they harass you, report that to site admins as well.
  • Also, don't give anyone a Suicide Dare or encourage someone to kill themselves or consider doing so, even as a "joke." If they decide to do it, you could face murder or manslaughter charges. Just don't do it, OK?

UsefulNotes.The2000s

• One of the internets most notorious, and infamous, websites were born in this decade. 4chan started out as an offshoot of Something Awful's anime forums but quickly rose to popularity thanks to being able to post completely anonymously to the site. It didn't take long for the site to become more generalized with multiple sub-boards around different topics as the userbase grew. It also didn't take long before it became seen as the cesspool of the internet, gaining infamy for being a haven for Trolls, deviants, and political wackjobs of both extremes. "The hive" as the users would become known as would also become infamous for creating several hoaxes picked up by mainstream media, as well as hunting down particular individuals that manage to gain their wrath. Oddly despite, or perhaps, because of all this, it's one of the few non-mainstream social media sites in the modern age that manages to maintain a very large and active userbase to this very day.

UsefulNotes.Visual Kei

• GIFT: Averted for the first round, as the genre came into existence in The '80s. The Internet as such didn't exist until The '90s and didn't penetrate much into Japan until around the late 90s - most fights of that era were IRL bar fights. When the genre resurrected as Neo-Visual Shock, it kicked in in full force.

UsefulNotes.Visual Kei

• GIFT: One of the best places to find it in action within Visual Kei, precisely because almost everyone involved wants to be as potentially offensive as possible, and in some cases, this goes beyond throwing around triggers and Crossing the Line Twice and back again to offend moralizers and the like into personal abuse and cyberbullying.

UsefulNotes.Visual Kei

• GIFT: You wouldn't think a subgenre based on Tastes Like Diabetes would have such issues. Unfortunately, online Oshare Kei fandom is a Crapsaccharine World. Gets especially bad when Oshare fans flame metalheads or vice versa, because only the most rabid fans out of both communities want to engage in a Flame War (the sane people and insane but nice people are tired of them), so the most abusive behavior is often a given.

UsefulNotes.Visual Kei

• GIFT: The issue here is The Beautiful Elite meets Serious Business. Quite a few people who have brand outfits, perfect makeup, and the like aren't interested in helping others improve and get to their point - but in harshly mocking them at best, and threatening their lives at worst. It even sometimes expands to hating on people in other genres for "not being real" or for "looking awful," even if the other genre is one that allows for their appearance.

UsefulNotes.Visual Kei

• GIFT: It's everywhere. Once people learned how easy it was and is to start a fight, the genre and bands related to it became a favorite hangout for trolls, and similar. This is not helped by that the genre itself inherently supports one of the most bitter conflicts within Visual: I Hate Past Me versus I Just Want to Be Special, as it features people who truly, deeply, bitterly hate Visual and people affiliated to it at points, yet also attracts people who like Visual or who are still into elements of it.

UsefulNotes.Visual Kei

• GIFT: One of the worst places to find it, especially in regard to X Japan's fandom both in Japan and in the West, which presents nearly almost every group of people known to get into massive conflict, ironically passing the band's old reputation onto the fans on the internet. Conflicts can become personal very quickly, there are active cyberstalkers and the like as well as garden-variety trolls It's not a friendly or safe place for many people as a result, and is quickly earning a reputation as a place where bullies and trolls run the show - despite that there's quite a lot of people who don't want to fight and want to peacefully coexist and be a part of the fandom. Other bands in the genre's fandoms have some problems with it, as well, but not as many people to cause problems and not as many "factions" based around various controversies.

UsefulNotes.Xbox360

The release of the Xbox 360 is truly when online gaming came into its own. While internet connectivity for console have existed in some form or another since The '90s, it was the success of the 360 and its Xbox Live ecosystem that finally normalized online. Xbox Live has been praised for its large community and user-friendly friend management and game launching interface, and there's a large variety of content on offer for download. On the other hand, much of the multiplayer base has been characterized as juvenile and unfriendly and there's a relative dearth of free downloadable content, with the multiplayer service itself requiring a Gold membership unless a particular game (such as EA Sports games) has its own subscription service.

VideoGame.ARK Survival Evolved

• GIFT: Lack of player conduct enforcement has caused this to rear its ugly head on many of official servers. Even on unofficial servers, whether PvP is turned on or off, if the moderators are not very active, or worse, are complicit, people tend to go in this direction.
  • A notable instance in PvP is "offline raiding", where an assailant waits until the dead of the night when nobody is online to wreak havoc. ORP (Offline Raiding Prevention/Protection) servers have since been released, but only a handful.
  • PvE is not spared either — mysterious walls spring up around spawn points, trapping newcomers as player-built structures can't be damaged by other players.
  • On some unofficial servers, mods will use their admin rights to give themselves high-level equipment and tames when the average research level is still low. This effectively allows them to lord over 'civilian' players.
  • Another aggravating occurrence in PvE servers is when players who've established themselves in an area place pillars or foundations around an area without actually building anything off them. Because other players not in their tribe cannot build within a certain radius of each pillar/foundation, entire areas end up being blocked for player development. Especially unfair when coastal areas in the south, areas that are known to be the best places for newbies to spawn, are the exact places that are blocked off.
  • On some official PvP servers, the Alpha Tribe (the most powerful tribe on the server) will use the above tactics to aggressively monopolize and dominate the server, crushing anyone not allied with them and pushing all other tribes off the server. The typical end goal is to turn the server into the tribe's home base, from which they can safely launch raids on other servers for supplies or low-risk PvP.

VideoGame.All Points Bulletin

• GIFT: This game seems to attract a good deal of whiny teenagers, trolls, idiots and "hardcore" "bro" gamers.

VideoGame.Blockland

• GIFT: Many experienced users are ridiculously mean to newer ones.The same thing can happen in reverse, with newer users being immature and ridiculously mean.

VideoGame.Cantr II

• GIFT: A few layers of anonymity, starting with each persons character not being linked to their account. The second layer, comes with the even more anonymous ingame radio. Does This Remind You of Anything? It has indeed been called 4-chan on the forum, generally by detractors. Very few lolcat pictures, but one instance of ASCII art. But this is perfect for couch warriors, trolls and other attention seekers to quickly get their fix, and stir up molehills.

VideoGame.Cantr II

• Running the Asylum: As mentioned in the introduction, the creator has largely left the game, leaving it to some staff to manage things. Over time, this has resulted in what has been referred to as the Internet Illness. Basically, any person getting a chance to live out their powertrip fantasies, and going for broke. Hilarity Ensues

VideoGame.Dark And Shattered Lands

• GIFT and G.I.R.L.: People are rarely who they appear to be in the game, though some are better in real life and some are worse.

VideoGame.Destiny2

• Fantastic Drug: The lore for the Jade Rabbit heavily implies that some of the Guardians' weirder behaviors (namely, constant dancing, toxic personalities, and "hero moments," which are of course derived from real-life player behavior as the lore has done in the past) are the side effects of one of these, originally created by Daito as a form of antidepressant to deal with the crippling existential horror of being a resurrected warrior with no memory of their past life and the fear of death that arises from being conditionally immortal.

VideoGame.Dota2

• Earn Your Fun: Getting into Dota 2 in a nutshell, perhaps of the Trial-and-Error Gameplay variety. The developers have tried to alleviate some of this by introducing a tutorial mode, but it's a long and steep learning curve no matter how the game is played.
  • Dota 2 is extremely complex, and calling the game 'unwelcome' would be an understatement. Simply learning the names or the existence of all heroes and items is important, perhaps even required, and can take a long time. Then there's learning how/when to use any of those things, how they all mesh together, and then actually putting it into practice and getting good at any of it (even one hero can take a while), all the while probably going through a lot of face-crushingly horrible games, to say nothing of learning what the current metagame is at any given point in time and dealing with GIFT. Put all of that together, and you've got yourself a game with one gigantic skill curve on your hands. However, once you can start directly contributing to your team winning games, you can finally find out why Dota 2 is widely regarded as one of the most fun & rewarding games on the planet.
  • And some says that the true reward of playing Dota is to be able to "watch the game". Dota 2's professional matches are highly entertaining, with high-skilled plays, absurd teamfights, funny moments, and many little things that can only be appreciated by understanding the game itself.

VideoGame.Dota2

• Laser-Guided Karma: Stories abound where one team dominated the whole game, who then proceeded to Trash Talk and utterly humiliate the losing side, only to make one critical mistake which allowed the other team to turn the table and win the game.

VideoGame.EVE Online

EVE occasionally pops up in the gaming press (and sometimes the mainstream press) for extraordinary feats of sabotage, theft and other devious exploits carried out by a player or group of players. Feats like this, that might get the responsible group banned in about any other MMO, are legal gameplay in EVE. EVE was in fact created by former players of Ultima Online in response to its restrictions on PVP and Griefing^note such as Trammel, the notoriety system, labeling potions so you can't give newbies purple ones to watch 'em blow up, etc... - in other words, the main selling point of EVE is the ability to apply Video Game Cruelty Potential to other players.

VideoGame.EVE Online

• In-Game Banking Services: players proposed banking services though, as befits the universe, all of them were frauds, whether by conception or by execution: since players had no way to ensure the bankers would actually pay up capital and interest and the bankers themselves had no way to force debtors to pay up their loans, along with the fact the game had plenty of liquidities circulating, banking was simply unpractical for the time being.

VideoGame.Gift2001

Not to be confused with either GIFT or The Gift.

VideoGame.League Of Legends

• Pick-Up Group: Solo Queue. This game takes this Up To Eleven since it's next to impossible to encounter players in ways besides queueing up and getting placed in a Pick-Up Group with them (external forums and chatrooms nonwithstanding). New players starting out have no choice but to get randomly matched with others and a player will still have to team up with randoms quite a bit throughout their career. Thankfully it can be averted (or at least mitigated) by encountering friendly/skilled players and adding them as friends so that pre-made groups can enter queue to reduce the chance of running into leavers, feeders, or trolls. Unless of course said player is the leaver, feeder, or troll.

VideoGame.Left 4 Dead

• Message Board: Safe room graffiti really acts like this, although people who leave the safe room usually don't return. Ever.
  • Referenced in one of the safe room graffiti, wherein a ton of "posters" mock an over-the-top, saccharine love epitaph. Cool story bro!
  • Lampshaded in another chain of graffiti, after a group of messages angrily respond to someone writing "WE ARE THE REAL MONSTERS", one survivor simply writes "I miss the internet."

VideoGame.Left 4 Dead

• Griefer: Per GIFT, you're guaranteed to come across them in public matches.
  • Playing as the infected is basically griefing the survivors as the goal of the game. The griefers are getting their kicks from the game itself most of the time!

VideoGame.Left 4 Dead 2

• Griefer: Per GIFT, you're guaranteed to come across them in public matches. The most common type of griefer are players that shoot their own teammates to death, which is extremely common on Expert difficulty games due to the sheer friendly fire damage.
  • Playing as the infected is basically griefing the survivors as the goal of the game. The griefers are getting their kicks from the game itself most of the time!
  • The Room for One Mutation gametype defies the normal logic of the game by only allowing one survivor to escape and encouraging team killing.

VideoGame.Multi User Dungeon

• GIFT and G.I.R.L.: Both have been showing up since the game's early days.

VideoGame.Roblox

• GIFT: Justified, usually. It's a site aimed mainly towards kids, so most of the time they're just... y'know... being kids.

VideoGame.SC 2 Mafia

• GIFT: Usually rampant on the first day of each game, where in most cases nobody can be trialled, and in all cases everyone lacks hard evidence. Most players settle down after that.

VideoGame.SCP Secret Laboratory

• Hell Is That Noise: Your survival as a human depends on listening for the noises that your enemies make. Hearing footsteps as a scientist can easily make you paranoid in wondering if MTF has come to rescue you, or if it's SCP-939 patroling the only path to freedom. On the SCP side of things, hearing the sounds of 173s stone body sliding against the floor, 096s constant sobbing and screaming, and 049s slow but sharp foot steps closing in on you is bound to get some people anxious. On a less (or more) horrific note, there's the sound of some asshole (read: nearly everyone who gets the chance) playing extremely loud music over the facility intercom and blowing out the eardrums of the entire server.

VideoGame.Saints Row The Third

• GIFT: Discussed in "http://deckers.die" during Matt Miller's A God Am I moment; the Boss quickly replies that he's nothing but "a bitch with a keyboard" IRL.

VideoGame.Splatoon

• GIFT: Defied. According to Word of God, avoiding online toxicity is why online voice chat is not available.

VideoGame.Spore

• Video Game Perversity Potential: The community has come to call any deliberately obscene creature "sporn". Fortunately, there is a function to report and ban any atrocity that you've managed to unwittingly download.
  • Schmuck Bait: The "Bad Baby!" Achievement, which required a creation of yours to get banned from the servers. Unsurprisingly, every GIFT and their mother created the stuff. It got so bad, the achievement was actually deleted.

VideoGame.The Nameless Mod

• GIFT: The unregistered users act like this, according to their bio in the tutorial level.

VideoGame.Transformice

• It Amused Me: It might as well be named Trolling: The Game. ^note Though later updates have really started to crack down on the GIFT in action, which has been met with about as well as you'd expect considering Trolls were the game's main players during alpha and early beta. Griefing is still possible and allowed, but nowhere near as prevalent as it was in earlier versions of the game.

VideoGame.Ultima Online

The first widespread commercial success in MMORPGs, first released in 1997 by Origin Systems. Developed based on Richard Garriott's Ultima series of games. Initially intended for each server to host roughly 300 players the game garnered unexpectedly huge numbers. Notable for its classless and level free skill based system whereby you could create a character with any combination of skills and gained power by using them. Instead of slaughtering monsters to raise your magic skill you used magic. Using a sword would raise your swordsmanship. Also notable was the game's emphasis on Sandbox gameplay. Little overarching storyline existed. Player freedom and enforcement of good behavior was expected. Unfortunately the developers didn't realize what they were in for. Approximately 1% of their total playerbase rampaged through the game world slaughtering other players by the thousands. They got around this by creating a mirror world called Trammel where PVP was heavily restricted.

VideoGame.Ultima Online

• Griefer - This game was legendary for how griefer-friendly it was in the old days, mainly due to the designers being unaware of the GIFT before they loosed the public on it. See also: The Great Player Versus Player Debate.

VideoGame.Vacation Simulator

• Take That!: The fact book states that, if you printed all of the comments of BotTube and laid it end-to-end, the paper would stretch to the sun and back around 20 times and notes the value of the paper is worth much more than the comments.

VideoGame.Watch Dogs

• GIFT:
  • Invoked In-Universe - people are often pretty horrible and self-centered when they think no-one's listening.
  • The Online Hacking targets can fall squarely into this trope. A lot of them seem to take great joy in taunting their victims via text message.

VideoGame.Welcome To The Game II

• GIFT: Played with, in that this is the deep web and relatively few "normal" people have access to it. The opening scene with Amalea involves a vote for whether she should live or die, while she's visibly terrified and fleeing for her life. The vote is overwhelmingly for her to be killed, and the chat of the stream will be populated mostly with requests for body parts to be sent to them, or talking about how well they get off to what's going on. That being said, the game still provides some people who vote "live" and the chat will occasionally have messages like "contacting the police/FBI" or "you guys are sick" pop up, showing that Everyone Has Standards.

VideoGameCrueltyPotential.Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games

You have shown me the face of true evil, <player name>

• The Horde version of the War of the Thorns storyline in Battle for Azeroth has a quest where you team up with Lorash, an undead blood elf assassin, and help him sack Astranaar by marking the night elf guards so he can kill them. You can also mark the vendors, causing him to comment that he likes your coldness. Also, killing them is the canon course of action; if you play the Alliance version, you're told that the civilians weren't spared.
• The Alliance version of the quest chain in Silithus in 8.0 has you murder goblin workers in cold blood. Since you're technically speaking not at war yet, and Silithus is neutral territory, this is pretty bad.
• If you actually think about it, the extremely popular Deadmines dungeon is very cruel. These poor guys just want to get paid for rebuilding your sweet capital city. And if you're that rogue who pickpockets them but leaves them alive (you know who you are) then you are really quite a scumbag. Seriously, those people have families! The Cataclysm version lampshades it by having the daughter of the original final boss return (so not only were you a douche, but you weren't that smart about it; Nice Job Breaking It, Hero)
• The entire Death Knight starter area plays with this trope. It is played straight at first when you mark targets to be taken down by poison arrows. The game also lets you murder the workers to your heart's content. You are supposed to be in the Scourge, after all. It is subverted later in that, according to their dialog, what you're doing to the Scarlet Crusaders is not as bad as what their superiors do to them. Given that you are at one point sticking them with a magical brand until they faint, this is perhaps the most disturbing part of this whole extremely disturbing area. Given the looks of the place that you rescue Koltira Deathweaver from later, this claim is believable. But the trope is then played straight later on when you mercilessly mow down an entire army of Crusaders with their own cannon. Even later, the questline has you demonstrate your loyalty by killing an Argent Dawn NPC who is set up as your best friend.
• As long as a player is flagged for PVP, they can attack NPCs of the opposite faction with impunity. Of course, some players delight in such behavior.

VisualNovel.Chaos Head

• GIFT: Takumi is a memer who can be pretty mean and arrogant on the internet, when in reality he's a passive, paranoid and quiet teen with social anxiety who rarely can get a word in edgewise in conversations.

VisualNovel.Digital A Love Story

• GIFT: Even before the rise of boards dedicated to being total pricks, there were stupid people on the internet, as exemplified by a fan of Star Trek: The Original Series and how he thinks this new bald guy is a complete pussy, compared to Kirk, a black hat hacker desperately trying to convince the rest of the board that he and his mates won a hacking war, and some kid who thinks he's got everything figured out and lectures the board on how Japan Takes Over the World... and can't tell the difference between Chinese and Japanese.

VisualNovel.RE Alistair

• GIFT: Merui can't immediately rule out any of the guys as Alistair because, as she acknowledges, people who are nice in real life might very well cut loose and act like jerks online. It's not actually true of any of the three guys: Shiro in his FionaWings persona is a voice of reason and a friend to Merui; Travis is, if anything, more polite online than he is in person, and Derek genuinely is that much of a jerk (unless his feelings for Merui redeem him), it's just hidden beneath a charming front.

VisualNovel.Steins Gate

• GIFT: While Hououin Kyouma and John Titor basically act the same as their real-world counterparts, KuriGohan is sarcastic, vulgar and condescending.

VisualNovel.Steins Gate

• Shout-Out:
  • Daru's dialogue is occasionally peppered with references to various anime and video games, and before the group manages to settle on D-Mail as the name of their time machine, some of the names they come up with reference The Girl Who Leapt Through Time and Back To The Future. His usual response to Okabe's more outlandish demands is even "But I refuse!".
  • Immediately as Suzuha introduces herself to Okabe in an incredibly outdated manner, he commented on how time itself has stopped moving, as if somebody had just activated The World. As he does this, a negative filter washes over the background behind Suzuha.
  • Shining Finger, Moeka Kiryuu's nickname, given by Okabe. The first person to directly point out the reference, complete with the "My hand glows with an awesome power" line, is Daru, who is voiced by none other than Domon Kasshu himself.
  • The name "D-Mail" was thought up after Mayuri came up with "Delorean Mail".
  • In the visual novel, Kurisu mentions as one of the impossibilities of time travel the sheer amount of energy it would take to move at light speeds would almost certainly be at least 1.21 gigawatts.
  • Suzuha says, "Heeey You Guuuuys!" near the start of the series.
  • Faris makes a mention in episode 2 of months of harsh training in the Guyana Highlands and the death of her master. The dub adds another one right after — "I have the power!"
    • Also in episode 2, the dub has Kurisu make a mention of time-jumping in a blue police box leading up to her lecture.
    • In the same episode 2, when Okabe runs a web search about John Titor, one of the results is titled "John Smith" and tells something about "Suzumiya Hahi...".
  • Kurisu's "One more word and I'll make your neocortex into a flower pot!" line may come from the MO of the first barcode killer of MPD Psycho.
  • Okabe mentions "Maybe you should make an APA analysis on /b/". It's changed in the dub to him suggesting that she's checking out her AMA threads.
  • Kurisu comments in the dub if Okabe "could be any more of a Wesley". He teases her about this after realizing what she just said. In the sub, she quotes Yagami Light instead.
  • In Episode 12, Okabe says in the dub that Suzuha won the cake unfairly. Quote, "Therefore, the cake is a lie!"
  • In the VN, Okabe accuses Suzuha of being an Organization assassin - code name: Miss Golgo.
  • The future gadgets are inspired by whatever game or anime Okabe and Daru were watching; such as JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Metal Gear Solid, and Lupin III.
  • The English dub of the anime references Airplane! when Okabe attempts to talk "street" to someone in an alley, who promptly responds by apologizing that he doesn't speak jive.
  • During Suzuha's ending in the visual novel, she references Groundhog Day by name, explaining that one of the few forms of entertainment available in SERN's dystopian future is watching old movies.
  • At the end of Mayuri's route in the Hiyoku Renri no Darling spin-off, Daru wants to name Okabe's child "Kuroneko". Which is doubly amusing considering Mayuri's seiyuu.
  • In the VN, one of the users in the @channel chat with Titor says this:

WMG.Avatar The Last Airbender Bending

• Thought - telepathic communication. Can influence, though not control, other people's thoughts, or just plain talk to them over long distances. They can talk telepathically to nonbenders, though only thoughtbenders can initiate contact. Thoughtbenders are very valuable for every army as messengers and coordinators. They may work as therapists or psychiatrists. A secondary power might be dreambending. They could psych out the enemy with horrible nightmares, or get paid to provide wonderful dreams of your choice. (Culture?)
  • I'm leaning towards some sort of Native American culture.
  • This troper was thinking more of a Russain-communist culture, but one that actually works. See, the thought benders are very dangerous, with the ability to bend people's wills and all. If one were to go rogue, that would mean big trouble for the world. So the thought benders are all constantly kept in check via a hive mind of the entire nation as one. They are philosophers and thinkers, constantly analyzing and speculating the world at large to come up with more knowledge - like an entire nation of WMG. They seem stoic and cold from an outside perspective, but that's only because they experience conflicts and emotion on a deeper level. Thought is the element of control.
    • This society combined with the ability to communicate in groups over vast distances would create a sort of "internet culture", where there are drawbacks to the reduced individuality, but the anonymity and equality makes everyone more at ease and more willing to share their true opinions (though this might not always be a good thing.) A nation like this might be rather isolationist, because anyone who couldn't participate in their giant group debates would be of little interest to them. They could develop a class system, though, where the farmers/laborers have no time to contribute to this nationwide forum.

WMG.Harry Potter Government

• It's worth noting, in all this Fan Wank, that there's something not taken into account, and that's that, while a Wizard might be more than a match for a muggle with a gun, a muggle with a highpowered sniper rifle firing on a wizard who doesn't know he's even around is probably going to come out on top. Even if a shield charm stopped every bullet ever, and you could get it up before someone could shoot, you're not going to be able to stop a bullet from someone you don't even know exists.
  • This also goes the other way around; the Muggle with the high-powered sniper rifle is equally defenseless against a wizard who's scouted the area (magic would probably help a lot in finding a hidden sniper if you think it's a good precaution to check) and sneaks up behind him. This actually works against the WMG, however; all the wizards who would want to counquer the muggle world don't have this sense, they're too busy feeling superior to think about doing anything about the muggle with a gun than stand in front of him. The kind of wizard that's of the right mind to learn how the muggle world ticks and make this situation work for him would have no interest in doing so.
    • According to the epilogue, there is a Supersensory Charm.
    • Magic in Harry Potter actually has a hard time detecting non-magical objects. But this discussion is Completely Missing The Point: There are about 10000 muggles for one wizard and those are definitely not the odds the Wizarding World wants to face. A wizard with a wand will not win over 10000 muggles with guns. A HP wizard is definitely not strong enough for that, so they defer to secrecy.
    • Mind you, all wizards can use magic, when all muggles are not soldiers...
    • It is equally ludicrous to suggest that all wizards both could and would use either lethal magics, or other spells combat-effectively:
    • Outside of duelling clubs and secret DADA lessons, even the ability to cast Shield Charms and Stunning Hexes is far from universal - remember in Book 7 the Ministry ordering 300 Shield Hats from Weasley's Wizard Wheezes, and how they were "still getting massive orders" ^note (as well as their other Defence stuff being "such a money-spinner")? I'd compare it to much like how in RL, attendance of self-defence training is far from universal...
    • As such, I imagine well below 50% of the wizarding population would be willing to actively seek out opportunities to fight, the rest would... hide and try to avoid being found/drawing attention to themselves? You know, like they did in their houses during Voldemort's reign, and how they still currently do from the Muggles under the Statute of Secrecy, with massive obscuration and mind-affecting (e.g. Muggle-repelling) charms?
    • Therefore, wizarding behaviour is quite realistically plausible within known facets of human nature, even without conspiracies from the top. Most humans simply aren't personally interested in war (or at least, all the nasty practical things that would come with), and would prefer peace (or at least, comfortable safe(r) lives) - even when they have personal hatreds.
    • Extending on this logic, in a bit of a sidetrack just for the fun of it - in a way, the Death Eaters' cloaks and masks were probably also a large part of their success, just as much as the Dark Mark, as they allowed members to act on their prejudices and hatreds without facing personal consequences and retribution (much like the KKK, perhaps, although I don't claim much historical knowledge - or like a nastier and more serious version of the GIFT).
    • Also, remember Moody's Foe-Glass? It seems actually quite simple to detect threats and enemies. It never says that the glass only detects wizards, and why would it? And this kind of magic surely can exist in spell form, or at least in more portable form.
  • A related idea: A wizard builds his wand into a shotgun, thus enchanting every shot fired with a spell. An Avada Kedavra blast would mean that every little piece of buckshot carries an instant-death curse. This would be bad.
    • Yep. But it would be much harder for him to cast lots of other stuff. Even the darkest wizard wouldn't deprive himself of a shield charm.

WMG.John Dies At The End

The current version of the universe that John and Dave inhabit has realistic and exaggerated war-game simulations that people can "play" simply by buying an electronic box and some media discs. This system may have developed some form of internet-based interactivity system in a later rewrite of the universe, creating a culture of nigh-sociopathic pseudonymous children with varying grades of megalomania from which a member was flung back in spirit to the early 20th century where he (or she or it) inhabited a rudimentary biological Artificial Intelligence. This would help explain why Korrok not only uses "local" slang and epithets when overshadowing or talking directly to teens from John's and Dave's world, but also in what seems to be its daily life.

WMG.Nineteen Eighty Four

• Observe that Big Brother is powered by the GIFT, like V, although he uses it for pure power...

WMG.Nineteen Eighty Four

To be more precise, V for Vendetta takes place during the Revolution. V's killings are in fact nothing more than the elimination of political enemies. Sutler is Goldstein, and after Sutler's, Creedy's, and V's deaths, someone else claims to be V, fills in the power vacuum using the power of the GIFT and becomes Big Brother. Remember that both V and Big Brother are powered by the GIFT, and The Party in the movie version of 1984 also uses the letter V as its symbol. Winston may or may not be a descendant of Sutler (or John Hurt).

WMG.Ralph Breaks The Internet

Through one way or another, the heroes get sucked into the world wide web, and get bounced around various Expys of famous online games, like World of Warcraft, Team Fortress 2, Call of Duty/Battlefield, etc., with Ralph and his crew often going various ArtShifts with the games (often getting written off as either avatars made from in-game customization, or fan-based modding). The main conflict will arise with having to deal with players who have cases of GIFT (there's no cursing or sexual content, naturally, but the intent to annoy or bully other players would be at the forefront - some of it Played for Laughs Trolling, others being considerably more nasty, like mocking certain players for being foreign, handicapped, etc.), and eventually allying with underdog players who want to stop these Trolls from ruining their games. An overall Big Bad may be an Expy of Youtube's infamous "Content ID" system, which goes haywire and starts to tear the very internet apart, Eldritch Abomination style - and since Everything Is Online, that doesn't just threaten games, but virtually the entire world!

WMG.Real Life

See the TV Tropes WMG entries and there are some theories that TV Tropes will grow up to become a Haruhi Suzumiya -like Reality Warper. TV Tropes might have the ability to predict fiction and influence outcomes, but the fact is, however, TV Tropes is just a wiki that is mostly for fiction, unlike others that are mostly empirical such as Google, Yahoo and Wikipedia. The Internet as a collective, on the other hand, can also process empirical FACT. The Internet do this by absorbing our intellect through Forums, Flame Wars, ordinary blogging, online encyclopedias such as the freely-edited Those Other Wikis such as Wikipedia, etc. while providing us with the GIFT of anonymity and freedom from bodily discrimination (like Ad Hominem attacks). Also, machines are being connected over the Internet, and almost everything from marketing to dialogue is done over the Internet. As more and more humans are assimilated into its collective, it is highly likely that the Internet's ability to influence outcomes using both fiction and pre-existing empirical fact (aka processing data) will evolve, merge with Humanity, gain the ability to control reality and merge with the natural unconsciousness, finally creating the all-powerful Wired.

WMG.Real Life

The anonymity provided by the Internet is a part of a Gambit Roulette by Seele as an Instrumentality attempt

WMG.Real Life

Anonymous was originally created by V as an aid in his quest to spread Anarchy....

WMG.Real Life

• Please tell me you did not just do that.
  • We all do it, when you see the internet you are actually facing a Tome of Eldritch Lore which serves as a guide to an Assimilation Plot where your identity is changed to I Am Legion which in turn gives you the feeling of A God Am I and allows you do anything For the Evulz and get away with it like bashing identity-exploiting ideologies such as Scientology. This.... is called The GIFT.

WMG.Serial Experiments Lain

• Let me explain. The anime gives references to the Internet, the Schumann Resonance (Earth's electromagnetic field) and man's ability to produce psychic power when wired together. Over time, as we are getting more and more addicted to technology, it influences the nature of Earth (from green nature utopia to a wired Crapsack World), so somehow we are either just complete jerks worshipping cyberspace, or somehow our psychic powers are being harnessed by cyberspace, giving it the ability to influence the world. The best example would be TV Tropes itself, which has the power to influence fiction even though it is just a wiki with over-the-top theories.
  • If SEL was real, then there would be the Eldritch Abomination that is Lain Iwakura, who is watching us masturbate.
    • Lain isn't real, since the Wired of Real Life is still too weak to invade human privacy directly (the internet still feeds on second-hand psionic power, NOT from living souls, and there's the problem about China). Cyberspace can influence matter and events, but not man's power of free will (unless somebody hacked China's great firewall and acquired massive psychic potential from the most populous people on earth....).
    • Cyberspace (Wired) doesn't just lack the ability to limit free will, in fact it gives man too much free will......
    • That would be a perfect example of limiting human free will. That multiple people assume the same behaviour-pattern out of perceived sense of anonymity is a demonstration of how the loss of self-identity can cause people to act more like a Jerkass collective than individuals in control of themselves.

WMG.Serial Experiments Lain

The WMG: The real Big Bad of the entire plot isn't Eiri, but Anonymous, being the dominant I Am Legion entity that he is. Lain might be the collective anthropomorphic manifestation of Anonymous' own creation, the Lolcats. Obviously, Lain, who actually watched Arisu masturbate and is also the God of the Wired, is Ceiling Cat. In the SEL Universe, Eiri is a member of Anonymous. Consumed by the power of the GIFT, he tried to use both his psychological knowledge of the collective unconscious and his knowledge with computers to access the collective unconscious and personify it into Lain / Ceiling Cat. Through Lain / Ceiling Cat, they will preach the message of anonymity, and maketh anonymous disciples of all nations. However, Lain sacrificed herself to forgive our sins and prevent the awakening of Anonymous from the nether abyss. If Eiri and Anonymous succeeded, however, through the collective unconscious Eiri will awaken Anonymous from his abyssal slumber as a group of anonymous kids over 4chan into an actual Legion of Demonic Invaders from Hell who will purge the world with fire, brimstone and endless memes and can only be identified and expected through this quote: I Am Legion, For We Are, Many........

WMG.TV Tropes

• Maybe it's because you can confess and remain anonymous. Call it GIFT meets Rule 34.

WMG.The Bible

He who goeth to /b/ shall go mad from the sinfulness. Beneath this fiery lake of immorality is Anonymous, The Legions Of Hell which is waiting to be unleasheth for the end of times (and your reputation).

WMG.The Strange Case Of Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde

The whole Mr Hyde personality is him exploring his more malevolent side without fear of consequence. However, thanks to the anonymity of the Internet, he could easily just go on the most horrific parts of the Internet and enjoy personal consequence free mayhem.

WMG.Twitch Plays Pokemon Red

Because he can't see, he uses his voices (The Mob) as a sort of guide around the region. This being the Mob that's guiding him, It likely wasn't a good idea.

WMG.V For Vendetta

• Alternatively, since The Revolution Of Anonymous People Will Not Be Vilified, the anonymous V's in the film or Evey in the graphic novel become Big Brother (it is also possible that the Proles also remained in anarchy or merged with V and the Revolution, since in 1984 proles and animals are free). The people who opted for a totalitarian state were just given what they wanted: a totalitarian state turned Up To Eleven. Oh, and Winston Smith is supposed to be a replacement Evey.

WMG.V For Vendetta

Well because people will be inspired by V's anonymity and with that anonymity, will do what Anonymous does. After all, Norsefire or No Norsefire, Humans Are Bastards.

WarpThatAesop.Live Action TV

• "iMeetFred": If you share your opinion and it makes everyone overreact, you're wrong and deserve to be beaten up with a tennis racket.
  • It is perfectly okay to ostracize others for their unpopular opinions just ask anyone on the Internet.

WarpThatAesop.Tropes

• Caustic Critic:
  • Critics who give out abrasive and scathing reviews on works are hilarious!
  • The best way to win views on the Internet is to act like a Psychopathic Manchild who thinks their opinion is above everyone else's. Bonus points if it's not even an act, and you really are a Psychopathic Manchild who thinks their opinion is above everyone else.

WarpThatAesop.Tropes

• GIFT, Griefer, Internet Tough Guy, and Troll:
  • Being a total douchebag on the internet is fun, especially when you'll never get in trouble for it like in real life.
  • If someone insults, harasses, or antagonizes you on the internet, don't bother get offended, otherwise you're just a whiny sensitive little bitch who deserves more abuse and bullying online.

WarpThatAesop.Tropes

• Why Fandom Can't Have Nice Things: The number of angry man children on The Internet will never change, and as such no website should ever allow its users to have privileges. Ever.

WeAreNotAlone.Tropes E To L

• GIFT: Online disinhibition effect

WebAnimation.Burnt Face Man

• GIFT: Burnt Face Man tries hiding out on an internet forum from enraged snail worshippers, but is promptly banned by the forum's obnoxious members.

WebAnimation.Dot Dot Dot

• Freeze-Frame Bonus: A review by Axman13 years old.
  • GO AHEAD! I don't care! Yes I do. :(
  • Q: the athore coments al totol lies! A: what the fuc--

WebAnimation.Extra Credits

• GIFT: Not by name, but the episode "Harassment" lays out some ideas on how these people can be expunged from the gaming community. The later episode "Toxicity" discusses the way people treat each other online, including this.

WebAnimation.Resident Evil Musicals

• Take That!: Many examples.
  • The Teh Stream series has a number of targets of this, mainly involving GIFT's and Social Justice Warriors.
  • There are some videos in which the author expresses her hatred towards the newer games, these videos consist of her curb-stomping the main cast of these games into oblivion while triumphant music plays on the background. No Hope Left even has a segment where the author laments about how CAPCOM has turned the franchise into crap at the expense of their fans to get money from the Call of Duty audience.
  • One scene from the 6th episode of Survivor has the cast complaining about the author adding more characters to the mix and not caring about her old ones. She justifies their treatment by claiming she has learned with the best (CAPCOM).

WebOriginal.Tendies Stories

• Darker and Edgier: In early stories, Anon wasn't too violent and the worst he would get was assaulting his mother with his body waste. As the time went on however, as is usually the case with 4chan, the stories became progressively darker, with Anon getting more cruel and sociopathic in many of them, and often including themes of murder, rape, or suicide.

Web Video.AFK

• GIFT: This behavior sadly translates across into the world which the gamers find themselves in, as the more sociopathic ones are only too happy to kill and rob others there as well.

WebVideo.Ask A Slave

• GIFT: The comments section of each and every video seems to attract this, to one degree or another. Parodied in one of the second-season videos, where people commenting from home attack Lizzie Mae from every conceivable angle, but then just start quarrelling with each other.

WebVideo.Crash Course

• Acceptable Political Targets: John pretty much declares open season on any slavery apologetics in the comments section of the Slavery video. This did nothing to stop them from descending on the comments section like a swarm.
  • He also takes a few potshots at Vladimir Putin.
  • The episode of World History on nationalism and the Meiji Restoration has him directly proclaiming that he likes paying taxes towards public education because he "doesn't like living in a country with stupid people".

WebVideo.Dark Simpsons

• GIFT: Subverted in "Seymour Butts", where Bart is sent to Moe's - which he prank called just before - to pick up Homer. Moe was instantly able to recognize Bart's voice from the prank calls, and shoots him on the spot.

WebVideo.Dark Simpsons

• Troll: Deconstructed in "Seymour Butts", where Bart is sent to Moe's - which he prank called earlier - to pick up Homer. Moe immediately recognizes his voice and shoots him on the spot. While this may be the Logical Extreme of what may happen, this isn't too unexpected an outcome of when trolls are forced to confront the people they've antagonized, without the protection of anonymity.

WebVideo.Darkside Of The Internet

• An Aesop:
  • Don't give in to GIFT! (if you would do it in the real world too, congratulations! You're a complete Jerkass!)
  • Also: New Media are tools.

WebVideo.Darkside Of The Internet

• Documentary: This time, it is. It touches on several subjects, including:
  • Actor/Role Confusion
  • GIFT
  • Internet Tough Guy

WebVideo.Digimanz The Adventure Too

• Space Whale Aesop: Dissatisfied with the video almost being over without any real resolution, T.K. demands that each of the Digi-Destined come up with An Aesop each learned in the video, regardless of whether it actually related to what happened.
  • T.K. decides that he learned teamwork is important.
  • Kari learned that actions speak louder than words.
  • Cody learned that he has to orient himself to hope. Considering what he had to go through, nobody can blame him.
  • Ken ended up being too busy dealing with his evaporated blood to contribute.
  • Yolei screams that you shouldn't "blow loads" when you're angry.
  • Davis learned that the Internet Tough Guy Trolls the GIFT creates can often leak into the real world by inspiring people to be cruel even without the safety of internet anonymity, and the best way to fight this is to be more understanding of other human beings. Which is why more people should be having sex. Also, when a woman puts a fleshlight into her body, does that make her a lesbian?

WebVideo.Fifty Ways To Die In Minecraft

• Take That!:
  • Death 13 in part 1 happens when Redstone Ned watches the Star Wars holiday special. It happens again in the Christmas edition.
  • Death 24 in part 3 is "Working for EA Games", where a worker dies of overexertion after being forced to work day and night without sleep.
  • Death 34 in part 3 is "Standing Between a Wild Activision and a Nickel", where a businessman, making a very animalistic growling noise, slaughters someone for the reason stated above.
  • Death 9 in part 4 is caused by YouTube hate comments.
  • Death 17 in part 4 occurs after JayRiott references two Nintendo games back to back, leading to a "short-sighted money grab" copyright strike. This was before the company became more lenient with their IPs.
  • Death 20 in part 5 is "LA Traffic", where someone waits in gridlocked traffic for so long that they decompose into a skeleton.
  • Death 8 in part 6 boils down to "Liking Jar Jar Binks". Uniquely, this is one both against his fans and haters. The fan is portrayed by Stu and the hater came in and killed him with a lightsaber simply because Stu stated that he found Jar Jar funny in his own home with no one else in sight.
  • Death 39 in part 6 is a jab at long, unskippable YouTube ads (specifically League of Legends ones). For good measure, there's a quick jab at how the animators didn't even lip sync all of the character's syllables.
  • Death 24 in part 7 is a jab against annoying people on the Internet who put others down for not beating That One Boss on their first try.
  • Death 31 in part 8 is one against the dialogue of Minecraft: Story Mode.
  • Death 14 in the Halloween edition is one against EA Games, referring to its CEO's smile as "a truly cursed image".

WebVideo.Johnny Reviews Tonight

• GIFT: Shown briefly in the Portal 2 review.

WebVideo.Just Between Us

• GIFT/Hate Dumb: Alluded to in "Don't Read The Comments", where Allison and Gaby become paranoid about how they come across, even though the whole point of the show is that they're parodying their real selves.

WebVideo.Muppet Viral Videos

• Pop-Up Texting: "Beaker's Ballad" has internet comments appearing in the air next to him, really tormenting him, and laughing as he gets set on fire.

WebVideo.Outside Xbox

• GIFT: Discussed in a roundabout way with "7 Things Bound to Happen When You Play Healer", where Ellen and Luke list off examples from popular games about how players treat their support characters (which is to say, as if they were gravel underneath their boots).

WebVideo.React

• Ms. Fanservice: The series has had many beautiful reactors through the years (even inspiring their own sub-Reddit, which for obvious reasons has a tough stance on comments), but the ones who occasionally turn up in revealing clothes (e.g shirts that are sleeveless, with plunging necklines, or/and just plainly tight) and are generally appealing/popular to the male (and even female) fanbase are/were Alix, Becca, Blair Fowler, Brittany, Haley, Izzy, Jayka^note who even got a Male Gaze from a male reactor onscreen, the second female Jordan, Kaelyn, Lia, the older and original Madison, Marlhy, Mikaela, the third and oldest Morgan, Rachel, Riley, Sabrina D., Sophia, the older and original Sydney, Tori, and Justine Ezarik.

WebVideo.Sword Art Online Abridged

• Beleaguered Boss:
  • Heathcliff is the leader of the most powerful guild in the game. Unfortunately, most players are extremely representative of the worst stereotypes of MMO players (the protagonist included), causing him no end of headaches. Their idiocy plays a part in his Villainous Breakdown, although Kirito points out that someone who plays a multiplayer game with permanent invulnerability has no place criticizing others dying stupid deaths.

WebVideo.Sword Art Online Abridged

• Cool and Unusual Punishment: What Schmitt's more... "verbose" commenters have threatened to inflict on him for his video-game reviews back in the real world. Nothing out of the ordinary, given the rule of GIFT, but the nature of the Death Game within Aincrad leaves him Properly Paranoid that they might find him and make good on their threats. Using his spine as a pitching wedge and hacking off all of his limbs to ride him "like some kind of meat toboggan" are just two of the inventive ways they've threatened him in the past.

WebVideo.TJA Projects

• Heterosexual Life-Partners: TJ and Amy.
  • Both in-game and out-of-game. After a viewer reported them to child services, the two purportedly had problems convincing them that they weren't a couple.

WebVideo.The Reviewers

Webcomic.Bug Martini

• GIFT: Much popular than gouging one's eyes out.

Webcomic.Kid Radd

• GIFT: Very much present in the chatrooms where Radd serves as an avatar. He's rather dismayed at the immaturity and rudeness used in those conversations.

Webcomic.Nedroid

• GIFT: Implied in the Alt Text of this strip—Beartato's new name will be chosen by internet poll, and turns out to be "Fartballs".

Webcomic.Penny Arcade

• GIFT: The Trope Namer.

Webcomic.Sabrina Online

• Berserk Button: Zig Zag has several.
  • Bringing up her past as anything other than a set of facts (and even that chafes).
  • It's also hinted that Zig doesn't take kindly to anyone who tries to hurt her or her friends.◊
  • An arc launched in December 2010 implies she doesn't take kindly to the GIFT in action.
  • In June 2014, a psychiatrist states outright that she has several buttons that can cause her to react adversely.

Webcomic.Sabrina Online

• Hypocrite: The comic had a series of strips in December 2010 which has Zig Zag go on a tirade ala Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (the two heroes in that film go on the road and beat up everyone who ever criticized them on the Internet). Zig Zag gets offended by comments received online about her, and Comic 566◊ involves her beating up a guy who said mean things about her because he thinks he can say anything on the Internet without consequences. The Hypocrisy stems from the fact that Zig Zag is the owner and star of her own porno company, an industry that has historically relied on First Amendment rights to stay in business, the actors of which were constantly under belittlement and lawsuits pertaining for their rights to work in adult films, and sometimes assaulted for doing so. What Zig Zag just did was commit real-world, premeditated, first-degree assault against a random guy who, while they were certainly unpleasant, did not deserve physical violence. Comic 569◊ has Zig Zag mention that, yes, lots of people did press changes against her, and we eventually learn◊ that Zig Zag was convicted and paid a fine.

Webcomic.Sabrina Online

• Image Boards/Troll: A two◊-part◊ discussion.
  • GIFT:Brought up almost by name in the second half.
    • The "anonymity" part has been subverted◊ and Zig got◊ her◊ revenge◊
    • Zig Zag eventually learns to use their own weapons against them.◊

Webcomic.So Youre A Cartoonist

Webcomic.Something Positive

• Cute Kitten: Choo-Choo-Bear and friends. Sometimes bluntly deconstructed, which on one occasion has resulted in death threats against the author (see GIFT entry below).

Webcomic.Something Positive

• GIFT:
  • A set of Kitty Kwizzes, comics which humorously explained how cats control their human puppets...er...masters, apparently made some readers so angry that Randy received death threats over them.
  • And In-Universe, Davan shows Rory precisely why he's not allowed online unsupervised despite being 12. People were flinging rape and death threats at each other in the comments section of a picture for a cupcake.

Webcomic.Winter Moon

• GIFT: Risa is a far more aggressive and manipulative person online than she is in real life.

Website.Dragon Cave

• GIFT: The 2010 Christmas event involved decorating trees and rating other people's trees on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the highest score a tree could get; 30 users would win a new "prize" breed. (These were highly desired, since, with only 5, 10, or 15 of the respective dragon on the site at the start, they would be the rarest dragons on the site at the time of their release and their offspring would be extremely valuable.) The results imply that when given anonymity, people were willing to rate others low in order to hurt everyone else's chances of winning the contest, or just to troll: out of almost 2.3 million votes cast, the average vote was only 3.74, and even the highest-rated tree had a score of 6.23.

Website.Facebook

• GIFT: Mostly averted, since the site requires users to use their real names. But that doesn't stop some people from being Jerkasses anyway—additionally, Facebook isn't always that vigilant, so a few users can slip past the censors using fake names and cause trouble.

Website.Facepunch

• GIFT: Many members tend to use their secondary accounts as an anonymous way to call out other members or even admins.
  • Of course, banned and perma'd users who abuse this method to start a new slate will have their alternate account banned on the spot.

Website.Flame Warriors

• GIFT: This is mentioned in Jerk's bio and it's one of the reasons why he's, well, a Jerk.

Website.IM Db

The Internet Movie Database, a website founded in 1990 that records every movie ever released, along with television series and episodes, video games, actors, voice actors, major characters, and so on and so forth. Every movie has its own little forum for heated and aggressive exchanges to take place. And like any other site, you will sometimes find Trolls and Sockpuppets (for absolute troll-magnets, look no further than the "Politics" and "Soapbox" subforums). The GIFT became so prevalent in the boards that parent company Amazon decided to shut them down in 2017[1], but they appear to have been successfully archived.[2]

Website.Live Journal

• GIFT: During the site's hayday, instances of this were dubbed across the Internet as "LiveJournal Drama" and inspired the creation of, among other things, Encyclopedia Dramatica itself (though it later expanded its interests to other forms of internet drama, not just LJ)

Website.Nico Nico Douga

• Troll: Since comments scroll across the video instead of being forced to the comments section which you can ignore, naturally, this can and often is used in the exact way you'd expect. Thankfully, it's (usually) not a problem if you don't know Japanese. If the comments get too inflammatory or controversial (or if there are simply so many that it begins to make it hard to see the video), the uploader may insert a tag in the keywords which roughly translates to "it is recommended to hide the comments" as a warning.

Website.Reddit

• GIFT: The large userbase and loose moderation leads to many, many examples of the GIFT in action.

Website.Slashdot

• GIFT: It was extremely common to post links to shock sites, usually through redirects.

Website.Something Awful

• GIFT: Goons are, generally speaking, not known for their manners.

Website.Sploder

• GIFT: Normally defied, since this is a kid-friendly website.
  • Except for some instances where you can destroy a random character For the Evulz.

Website.Urban Dictionary

• GIFT: Letting the Internet at large define (and often make up out of whole cloth) often sexual and offensive slang terms makes this a Foregone Conclusion.

WesternAnimation.Megas XLR

Action cartoon Megas XLR — created by the minds behind MTV's Downtown — serves up an affectionate spoof of "guy culture", science fiction, anime, and pretty much anything considered "cool" in The '80s. If you consider Neon Genesis Evangelion the Deconstruction of the Humongous Mecha genre, then consider Megas XLR the Demolition (and, possibly, the American precursor to Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann). Megas remains one of the few mecha shows to get unanimous praise from 4chan's /a/, /co/, and /m/ boards.^note  For 4chan, that really says something, especially given that those three boards tend to have very divergent tastes.

WesternAnimation.Ralph Breaks The Internet

• GIFT: Yesss fails to mention the first rule of the internet: Don't read the comments. Ralph stumbles into the comments section and is soon bombarded by haters. Despite the reaction on his face, he says he's not bothered by it since he's been disrespected as a villain his entire life.

WhyFandomCantHaveNiceThings.Live Action TV

• Alton Brown of Good Eats had this problem, no less than twice. First when he decided to open up an email portal on his website and was promptly rushed with all sorts of unsavory things. The portal was closed down. Years later, he finally relented and opened up a Twitter account with similar results. He seems to have returned to Twitter, however.

WhyFandomCantHaveNiceThings.Nintendo

• As documented on this page, poor player activity led to Nintendo initially banning voice chat in random online modes in games such as Mario Kart 8 and Super Smash Bros., despite many games with online multiplayer allowing it anyway. Word of God confirmed this reason in the case of Splatoon, as the Director cited negative personal experiences with voice chat in other shooters as the reason not to include it in his game. Fortunately, they relented for Splatoon 2, albeit only among teammates, and lifted the ban altogether for all Nintendo Switch Online games.

WhyFandomCantHaveNiceThings.Nintendo

• This is the reason why the Nintendo 3DS has an automatic word filter. Back in the DS games, people were naming anything that they could name profane insults directed at other players online. This affected Animal Crossing: Wild World and Pokémon Diamond and Pearl very badly, and came to a head when an unidentified troll used a hacked cartridge to send Diamond and Pearl players a Gengar themed around black stereotypes, with the n-word as its nickname (more information on that incident here). The new censor has some flaws, but it seemed to be working. Then people started intentionally misspelling profanity...

WhyFandomCantHaveNiceThings.Nintendo

• Pokémon
  • Pokémon Diamond and Pearl:
    • In an unusual variation, this happened unintentionally. In an effort to stop hacked Pokémon (which were frequently Legendaries) from being sent over the GTS, Nintendo accidentally banned all Legendaries from being sent over the GTS. Needless to say, the backlash forced Nintendo to apologize and revert the change, but the damage was done, and hackers who could take advantage of a loophole that still allowed hacked Pokémon to be offered became even more encouraged to do so.
    • In a more intentional example, these games introduced Chatot, whose signature attack (Chatter) made use of the DS microphone so you could have it play your own voice while using the attack. Naturally, fans took advantage of this to make Chatot say inappropriate things, leading to Chatot getting banned in online battles and the feature being outright being removed in Generation VI. This may have also played a hand in Chatot's sharp decrease in prominence in both the games and the anime (even compared to the other Generation IV Mons), as the gimmick was all it really had going for it.
  • Pokémon X and Y:
    • In both X and Y and Pokémon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire, players could customize their messages and communicate with "Shout Outs". Of course, people abused this feature and sent either cruel or inappropriate messages, often bypassing the swear filter by using corruptions of swear words. As a result, Pokémon Sun and Moon severely restricted the ability to customize your messages by only allowing the player to pick from a few pre-set messages, and the Shout Out feature was removed entirely.
    • In X and Y, players found out that, if the egg and the game copy have the same shiny value, they're guaranteed to hatch a shiny. Due to this, computer software was made to view egg contents. While some complained that it devalued shinies, it wasn't harmful to others playing the game. However, cheaters found a way to use the exact same exploit to create software to view their opponents' teams, moves, and abilities in battle. Game Freak and Nintendo did not take kindly to this and patched the whole exploit, killing both pieces of software.
  • Pokémon GO:
    • The game has a tracking feature that would show players hints pointing to nearby Pokémon, without revealing the species. Unfortunately, people developed third-party apps to read the tracking data and display the specific locations and species of all nearby Pokémon, forcing the developers to have those sites be taken down.
    • After a few careless players kept playing the game while driving, causing car accidents and injuries to people in the process, the developers began implementing measures to prevent players from playing Go while driving. This ultimately led to eliminating the ability to catch Pokémon or even use item-granting Pokéstops when traveling over a certain speed, rendering the app almost completely useless while driving. This has been a case of controversy from players who played the game as passengers in a vehicle and/or whose only access to Pokéstops were ones they passed on the road and otherwise wouldn't think of using the app while driving or players with the Pokémon Go Plus device.
    • Playing of the game has been banned on some physical properties because some players either couldn't behave themselves or played the game in locations where playing the game is in poor taste (such as places of worship or the National Holocaust Memorial Museum). Aside from the property owners disallowing the use of the app while on the premises, Niantic also complies with requests by owners and managers to have their Pokéstops and/or Gyms removed. This also applies to private residences after a lawsuit was made from homeowners that got sick of players loitering around their property, which meant that anyone submitting a potential stop would automatically be rejected if it was within 40 feet of someone's house.
    • Belgian Internet carrier Proximus stopped offering free data on pre-paid cards after one person though it would be a good idea to test his theory about whitelisting and get the whole country (temporarily) banned by Niantic while using the carrier.
  • Pokémon Sun and Moon: Mere days before the two games' official release, some people got a hold of the game and ROM dumps began circulating the Internet. Nintendo not only cracked down on these ROM dumps, but also punished everyone who thought it would be a good idea to attempt to use the pirated games' online features by permanently banning them from using their 3DS' online features - much to the dismay of people who legitimately bought it before its official release.
  • Pokémon Sword and Shield:
    • A T-shirt design contest was held before the game's release, where the winning design would be featured as a wearable shirt in the games. Unfortunately, this was rendered completely pointless when it was discovered that the winner used his winning design on smartphone cases in the past, which went against the rules of the contest as the design had to have not been used anywhere else before. This caused the winner to be disqualified, the shirt with the design to be removed from the games, and the final games to have no fan-designed T-shirt in them at all.
    • While fan outcry isn't entirely unheard of within the franchise, the outcry against these games reached a point where #BringBackNationalDex was hijacked to promote falsified stories against Masuda and issue death threats against him, Game Freak, the Pokémon Company International, and Nintendo. When the games were leaked and streamed on the internet, the hatred only intensified, with the hashtag #ThankYouGameFreak either being countered with the spiteful #FuckYouGameFreak or being hijacked to turn it into an expression of sarcastic praise toward them instead of genuine praise. This resulted in launch events for the game to be canceled in fear of the main developers’ safety^note This could have also been caused by the aftermath of the infamous Kyoto Animation arson attack, which caused many companies in Japan to increase provisions for the safety of their employees - it’s likely The Pokémon Company did this to prevent a protest at the event from turning violent..
    • Content from the game and its strategy guide was leaked from 4chan and spread across the internet at the dawn of November 2019, which led to #GameFreakLied going viral after it was discovered that, among other things, many returning Pokémon models and animations in Sword and Shield were reused from earlier games, despite Masuda claiming that the total number of Pokémon was cut to improve the game's graphics and animation work. A week and a half after launch, Game Freak and the Pokémon Company International took measures to hunt down the leakers, and 4chan's new manager was compliant with authorities to this end.

WhyFandomCantHaveNiceThings.Other

• Tumblr
  • It's surprisingly common for bloggers to wipe their blogs and/or change their usernames if a post they write instigates a massive amount of backlash. Such backlash is much more frequent when the topic of social justice is brought up.
  • Similarly, bloggers may disable anonymous comments or asks entirely if certain people abuse the GIFT as an excuse to harass people. While disabling anon usually cuts down on the vitriol, it also means that those who might not have an account or are too shy to come forward with their name attached can no longer do so even if their intent is completely benign.
  • The person who's known on the site as "xkit Guy" used to offer popular xkit extensions for Tumblr users to revert unpopular site design changes. That is until bloggers who were frustrated at his slowness of updating decided to deluge him with abuse and hatemail — culminating in a dubious accusation of harassment — and ultimately drove him off the site.

WorldOfWarcraft.Tropes F To L

• GIFT: The game's chat is notorious for the racism, homophobia, and lewdness from childish players (who are not all children by the way). Particularly in the Barrens and City Trade channels. The latter connects between all of a faction's capital cities, Shattrath City and Dalaran, meaning that all players looking for raids, trying to recruit for them, or buying or selling goods have to put up with it.
  • Technically the City Trade channel connects ALL capital cities. If you're a Hordie on a raid in Stormwind, you will still see the Trade Chat of all the Horde cities.

WorldOfWarcraft.Tropes S To Z

• Video Game Cruelty Potential:
  • Just remember that every time you killed Varian Wrynn, you did so in front of his son.
  • In the above-mentioned Forsaken quest in the Sludge Fields, instead of freeing the human captives you can bash their skulls in with a shovel. It ends their suffering, right?
  • There's nothing more satisfying than a battle quest where you must mount an invincible flying dragon to get about 200 kills. Often this mount has an obscenely powerful AoE attack. You must get those kills, but you can then remain on the mount and keep blasting the enemy army while they keep respawning for as long as you like.
  • At the end of Badlands questing, you receive the late Rheastrasza's egg as a trinket, the flavor text on which asks you to keep the hatchling safe. You can sell or disenchant it like you would any other trinket, though given what you went through to get it, you'd have to be either completely heartless or just indifferent.
  • You could let Ji be executed by the Kor'kron in the Siege of Orgrimmar by waiting around for a bit, then watch as Aysa dies attempting a Roaring Rampage of Revenge, but you'd really have to go out of your way to do this and most raiders will never take that long.
  • As long as a player is flagged for PVP, they can attack NPCs of the opposite faction with impunity. Some players delight in such behavior.
  • A minor one in Gorefiend's chamber in Hellfire Citadel: at the upper level, there are orc and draenei prisoners in cages. You can kill the former as an Alliance character and the latter as a Horde character, sending their souls to be eaten by Gorefiend the same as when you kill the fel orc mobs in the same area.
  • In Sinfall, there's a dredger sitting on a ledge above a bottomless pit that you can punt him into.
  • Every wing of Torghast has soul remnants that you can liberate for a primary stat buff. The ones in the Upper Reaches and Soulforges, however, give you the choice of liberating them or destroying them for Phantasma.
  • Also in Torghast, the Brokers sell Ravenous Anima Cells that can turn non-elite NPCs into an Anima Cell. You can use them on the Brokers themselves for a quick 400 Phantasma.

WorseThanItSounds.TV Tropes

• GIFT: Witness the power of the internet in broadening the scope of conversations that would never happen in real life.

XMeetsY.Tabletop Games

• F.A.T.A.L. can be summed up as D&D meets hardcore porn and math textbooks. But that's an insult to D&D and math textbooks, and most hardcore porn.
  • FATAL is European folklore meets untreated schizophrenia meets I'd really rather not think about what else.
  • FATAL is Dungeons & Dragons written by all the most bigoted, obnoxious white guys on 4chan.

YMMV.Allison Pregler

• Mis-blamed: A lot of people who blame Lupa for allegedly kicking Spoony off of TGWTG either don't seem to realise or even care (or do know but want to attack her anyway) that Spoony himself has said Lupa did not get him fired. In addition, quite a few people accuse her of being the one to tell Spoony to go and kill himself, when in reality it was LordKaT who made the remark, and Allison went out of her way to tell people that wasn't cool the second she heard about LordKaT's comment. Welshy puts the story straight here. The worst part is, no one fired Spoony, he quit when he realized that after being suspended for a month, his ad revenue hadn't actually gone down.

YMMV.Bambi

• Memetic Mutation:
  • Thumper's "If you can't say something nice, don't say nothing at all," line is used a lot nowadays, for obvious reasons.
  • Within the studio, the line "Man is in the forest" became a tongue-in-cheek code amongst the animators for when Walt Disney was coming by to look at their work.
  • Bambi's Mother's death is very commonly referenced or parodied in works that reference this film.
  • It is extremely common in real life to name pet or captive deer Bambi or Faline.

YMMV.Black Mirror Hated In The Nation

• Harsher in Hindsight: This whole episode is a vicious commentary on GIFT culture the Internet has going on, that how death threats and hatred can personally affect their targets, even if it's behind a screen. Just a year later, in Game of Thrones, Blue's actress Faye Marsay, who plays The Waif, got some serious messages on the Internet due to the Hate Sink she was supposed to be on the show, which forced her to quit social media, as the Internet failed to separate her character and her real life out of it.

YMMV.Black Mirror USS Callister

• Esoteric Happy Ending: As noted on the main page entry, Only the Leads Get a Happy Ending. But even setting aside the problems of their real life counterparts, the crew are still stuck forever in a created universe populated by GIFT-afflicted douchebags like Gamer691. The rules of their new existence free from Daly's mod, such as whether they're now capable of dying permanently, are also left unclear. Downplayed, in that none of those same douchebags have nearly as much power as Daly did and, as shown, the crew can just leave if things get threatening.
  • Another implication bordering on Fridge Horror is that the lead designer and key figure of the company that made the Infinty game is dead, which makes the in-universe future of Infinity very uncertain. Even without that in mind, how long would it take for the game to be inevitably rewritten or shut down, erasing the whole crew from existence in the process?
    • It's unlikely that the Infinity game as a whole is at risk. If the episode is anything to go off, though Daly invented it, it seemed like Dudani and the other programmers were the ones actively coding everything. Additionally, considering how large the office is, it's unlikely that Infinity is Callister's only source of revenue even if it's their most popular game.

YMMV.Chikara

• Why Fandom Can't Have Nice Things: The original official Chikara forums were the fan-run ChikaraFans. And the owner and moderators fell afoul of the GIFT and started acting like Internet Big Deals and running the forums like a fiefdom. So Chikara ended the affiliation with ChikaraFans and created their own official forums, Chikara101. Predictably, the guys who ran ChikaraFans turned completely against the promotion, renamed the forum to the Jorge Rivera Appreciation Society^note this was shortly after the incident where Jorge "Skayde" Rivera screwed with CHIKARA shortly before King of Trios 2010 and then the Tuck Hanson Fanclub^note Tuck Hanson was a indy wrestler in training who was unhappy with his time at the Wrestle Factory and posted a call-out on the Chikara101 boards and used the boards for mudslinging and outside-kayfabe rumors until the owner let the domain die.

YMMV.Cinema Sins

• Broken Base:
  • Don't even touch the shitstorm that followed the announcement of Brand Sins. Either it's an intriguing concept that aims to explore more aspects of society, or it's a long and boring series whose topic is ill-suited by the Cinema Sins style, with an irritatingly voiced narrator. Either way, GIFT applies.
  • Even among fans of the franchise, there's debate over which "style" of Cinema Sins is better. The Old Format was shorter and focused more on actual Fridge Logic, while the new format has longer videos with many of the sins falling under Rule of Funny or nitpicking.
  • Jeremy's Dear Hollywood videos already have this going due to his abrasive attitude, but the "F*ck Disney" and "F*ck Hollywood" videos in particular are divisive due to Jeremy accusing the industry of killing creativity over remakes and sequels and proclaiming that people who enjoy these films and other remakes and sequels are doing so as well. This sparked debate between people who agreed with him and those angry at him for overreacting and making a myopic statement, noting that remakes and sequels are nothing new and on how bad original works are nothing to praise. After all, he still finds plenty of sins with films that are more original. Another crowd even sees him as borderline hypocritical, noting that Jeremy has branched CinemaSins into multiple forms such as Music Video Sins and Brand Sins, and makes a living nitpicking off the work of others, or the fact both he and Chris got their start writing clickbait articles, which hollows his "dumbing down of entertainment" complaint.
  • Jeremy's now deleted video where he accused Screen Junkies of ripping off his Before and After reviews with their now deleted Review Crew video, which contained Product Placement has become this. While there are those who side with him, others have called him out for being immature, especially considering the Screen Junkies claimed to have not seen his series and included the Product Placement due to it being from a sponsor, in addition to pointing out that car review shows have been done by other people before. The fact both deleted their videos and appeared to make up has only made the matter more contentious.
  • Donald Trump's cameo from Home Alone 2: Lost in New York got 1,000,000,000 sins (In comparison, the Ocean's Eleven scene where Danny Ocean is in a phone booth next to the Trump Plaza gets 10 sins). Some appreciated the Take That! aimed at the president, while others saw it as a political cheap shot and felt Jeremy was signaling that Trump supporters, or right-wingers in general, were not welcome in his fanbase.
    • For that matter, Jeremy becoming more political in later videos, which is split between those who agree with his views and those who don't. Those who agree with his views usually say that these views are relatively uncontroversial with opposition to them being minimal. Those who disagree with his views argue that while he has every right to voice his views and opinions, a web series whose premise is identifying flaws in movies is hardly the appropriate place.

YMMV.Cracked

• Heartwarming in Hindsight: In their September 2018 article "4 Ways Corporations Are Turning Us Into Jerks", Cracked criticized Disney's decision to fire James Gunn from Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 3 due to pressure from internet mobs, arguing that his jokes made before he was hired by Disney/Marvel were falsely equated with Roseanne Barr's racist tweets made during the short-lived Roseanne revival on ABC. In March 2019, Disney announced that they would be rehiring Gunn for Vol. 3.

YMMV.Darkside Of The Internet

• Anvilicious: Giving in to GIFT is bad. Online personas might not be the same as Real Life people, but words still hurt. (And Cyberbullying is extremely bad.)

YMMV.Derren Brown

• GIFT: A variant, again in the The Experiments episode The Gameshow shows how people degrade into cold heartless bastards when given anonymity and given the chance to vote the outcome of someone's night out. It also uses the same formula (the audience knows/thinks that they're being televised live, and are given "phantom" masks to hide their identity).

YMMV.Die 2 Nite

• Broken Base: Not in the normal sense, but the community is split into the German, French and English versions and intentionally kept divided by the developers. Having an account on more than on version is a bannable offence, mainly since, in practice, GIFT proved that the first thing most people would do with it is troll the other country's forums with tasteless World War II jokes.

YMMV.Doubutsu Sentai Zyuohger

• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Zyuoh Elephant is the first elephant-themed Ranger in Sentai, coming after Gaoranger, Gekiranger, and immediate predecessor Ninninger all had green elephant mecha; and Gekiranger's adaptation Power Rangers Jungle Fury even had its own similar-looking Elephant Ranger.
  • The fact that this show debuted a month before the US release of Zootopia is pure, furry-filled coincidence.
  • Ginis has a WMD that he deliberately named "Gift", intended as a Non-Indicative Name… unless you know of the other meaning of GIFT nowadays.
  • One recently-revived ancient mecha gets a massive reaction at the sight of an ancient enemy from its time suddenly revived - are we talking about Zyuoh Whale upon seeing Azald, or the Gundam Frames in response to Mobile Armor Hashmal?
  • So people joked about Kohei Murakami's character Bard causing some misunderstandings^note He played Masato Kusaka in Kamen Rider Faiz, a very memetic character., whether betraying the gang or doing something that would cause infighting. Hell, his character already somewhat started that as early as #11. But then comes #46, and even though it has been established since then that Bard is a good guy, the fact that he caused a severe misunderstanding that affected a character's backstory has fans laughing in glee. The extra irony being that it was also established that Bard didn't do it on purpose, either.
    • In short, while Kusaka is a Bitch in Sheep's Clothing and Villain with Good Publicity, Bard is (ironically, like Takumi) the complete inverse: a Hero with Bad Publicity and unassuming Guardian Angel.
  • When Bangray becomes obsessed with wanting to break Yamato's connections and send him into "despair," it makes him sound a lot like a Phantom.
  • In a rare case of Power Rangers doing it first, the series ends with Zyumans and humans living together just after Power Rangers Dino Charge did the same thing with humans and dinosaurs.
  • Not only did a character voiced by Nobuyuki Hiyama fight against a yellow-armored, lion-themed, Hot-Blooded Screaming Warrior like Guy Shishioh (whose father is also named Leo and who also has a friend who plays the electric guitar in Mic Sounders the 13th), said warrior is also allied with a red, bird-themed warrior with a Whip Sword like Galient and their respective series were featured for the first time together in Super Robot Wars BX which was released just eight months before "Savanna's Melody" aired. Had Yabaiker last until the next episode, he would have met Cube Mogura/Mole, which is a Drill Tank just like DrillGao, StraightGao, and SpiralGao (the latter two are also modeled after moles).

YMMV.Eve Online

• GIFT: Let's say this...if there is one thing that'll bug you about EVE, it's the sickening amount of dickery that happens in this game... unless it's what you signed on for in the first place.

YMMV.Halo

• GIFT: Like all online video games, Halo's online portion has had issues with Griefers. Unfortunately due to its popularity, the GIFT has been placed at the forefront, to the point that they are actually Mis-blamed for "creating" it.

YMMV.Halo

• Misblamed: Halo's userbase has been misblamed for the creation of the "juvenile and unfriendly" gamer. Apparently people haven't heard of the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, which has been in existence long before Halo was even thought of. Halo just brought the issue to light if anything.

YMMV.Kannagi Crazy Shrine Maidens

• Overshadowed by Controversy: The series is better known for the horrendous over-reactions Otakus had to Nagi (a fictional character) having had a boyfriend at least once. Leading to very vile Slut-Shaming online and the author's health declining even worse.

YMMV.Law And Order Special Victims Unit

• Memetic Mutation: Intimidation Game, which created the following:
  • "GO HOME, GAMER GIRL."
  • "They leveled up." The line is equal parts Narm and tastelessness to the point that it unintentionally Crosses the Line Twice.
  • "Prepare to be slaughtered" along with the K.O.B.S. mask in general.
  • "There is no reset button in real life."
  • The use of the phrase "darknet" (in lieu of the proper term deep web) is parodied often.
  • The K.O.B.S. taunts "LEVEL UP!" and "GAME ON NYPD!" gained traction pretty quickly.
  • The Captain Ersatz website Redchanit gained traction on Reddit and 8chan, with certain gaming-related subforums on both sites using the moniker as an Appropriated Appellation. Redchan.it even linked to an 8chan board for a time.
  • "I read on Kotaku that it the Amazonian Warriors game was better than Civ 5 with the Brave New World expansion pack!" The Product Placement-laden line inspired a bunch of snowclones.
  • "Where? Where does he play them!?" Delivered with the same urgency as "Tell me where the bomb is!" or "Tell me about Bane! Why does he wear the mask?!"
  • The POV gun-aiming scene at the end of the episode has been photoshopped to include the settings and HUDs of popular FPS games.
  • This one scene from the Season 4 episode "Lowdown" has been making the rounds.

YMMV.Law And Order Special Victims Unit S 16 E 14 Intimidation Game

• Memetic Mutation: Created the following:
  • "GO HOME, GAMER GIRL."
  • "They leveled up." The line is equal parts Narm and tastelessness to the point that it unintentionally Crosses the Line Twice.
  • "Prepare to be slaughtered" along with the K.O.B.S. mask in general.
  • "There is no reset button in real life."
  • The use of the phrase "darknet" (in lieu of the proper term deep web) is parodied often.
  • The K.O.B.S. taunts "LEVEL UP!" and "GAME ON NYPD!" gained traction pretty quickly.
  • The Captain Ersatz website Redchanit gained traction on Reddit and 8chan, with certain gaming-related subforums on both sites using the moniker as an Appropriated Appellation. Redchan.it even linked to an 8chan board for a time.
  • "I read on Kotaku that it the Amazonian Warriors game was better than Civ 5 with the Brave New World expansion pack!" The Product Placement-laden line inspired a bunch of snowclones.
  • "Where? Where does he play them!?" Delivered with the same urgency as "Tell me where the bomb is!"
    • Or "Tell me about Bane! Why does he wear the mask?!"
  • The POV gun-aiming scene at the end of the episode has been photoshopped to include the settings and HUDs of popular FPS games.
  • Executive Producer: Dick Wolf is also mocked. After a whole episode about gaming culture, the phrase "Dick Wolf" ties into a certain meme from a popular video game webcomic.

YMMV.Love Simon

• Unintentionally Unsympathetic
  • While Abby is arguably an exception, Nick and Leah play with the Conflict Ball. All three realize after the holiday break that Simon's been lying to and matchmaking them, as well as using Abby as a bartering chip to keep his secret. While they collectively tell him off for it, this is the first time they've spoken to their best friend in weeks, after he was Forced Out of the Closet on the biggest possible stage (which, though he didn't take their calls, further supposes that none of them bothered to come to his house over the holiday to console him, despite ample ability to do so). Simon points out he was being blackmailed into keeping Nick away from Abby, in addition to genuinely (if obliviously) believing Leah would be happy with Nick. Leah's reasons for being upset (getting her hopes up over Simon only to feel rejected when he encouraged her to date Nick) fall entirely under the umbrella of Incompatible Orientation, despite her professing not to care that Simon's gay. At no point do any of the trio express interest or resentment towards Martin's part in the manipulations after Simon identifies him as the blackmailer, and they simply look on as he's being publicly humiliated by school bullies. Abby is justifiably angry at being used, betrayed, and forced to endure Martin's uncomfortable presence — made worse by the fact that Simon's manipulations comprise almost half of her friendship with him by that point — but Simon's oldest friends ultimately seem petty for drawing out his anxiety, cutting him off during what they knew to be his lowest point, and leaving him to fend for himself (it doesn't help that she very briefly tries to make Simon into her Pet Homosexual by egging him into calling the football players at homecoming "fine" in an exaggerated, sassy voice, clearly not the reason Simon trusted her to be the first person he told this incredibly big secret to). Simon's visible uncertainty watching the three after Cabaret indicates that at least Abby and Nick still hadn't forgiven him by that point.
  • For that matter, most of the students using that school blog. Nobody in the film questions the fact that it's used almost exclusively for gossip more than anything school-related. Worse, it names the students being gossiped about while bloggers are allowed to remain anonymous. Even before he uses Simon as his fall guy, Martin is essentially cyber-bullied by all of the unflattering remixes and memes of his embarrassing stunt at homecoming, and what he does is only slightly worse than what most of the other bloggers are using it for (and unlike the audience, the students doing it don't want to see him taken down a peg for doing something wrong. They're just picking on an unpopular kid). This may be intentional, however, considering how Simon's Coming-Out Story ends up inspiring more students to start using the blog for good and sharing their own stories of insecurity.

YMMV.Mad Max Fury Road

• Memetic Mutation:
  • The "Feminist Mad Max" meme. Kind of like "Good Guy Greg", but focused on Max respectfully helping Furiosa.
  • "WITNESS!!!" ^note (when a War Boy is about to go out in suicide attack and his comrades answer to him) Several people have been responding to Nux's Heroic Sacrifice with variations of "I will witness you!" and "I have witnessed you!"
  • Spraying Color Spray to be all Shiny and Chrome when you enter Valhalla. The word "Chrome" being used to mean anything good or cool is also on the rise.
  • The iconic shot of Max swinging on a pole◊ whilst everything explodes in the background.
  • It's become popular to state on online message boards that the movie is actually a non-fiction documentary depicting a normal day in Australia. ^note  Going along with Australia's Memetic Badass Death World reputation online.
  • Thanks to Immortan Joe, declarations of "MEDIOCRE!" have become popular among fans of the film, especially when used against the movie's detractors.
  • "DO NOT, MY FRIENDS, BECOME ADDICTED TO WATER! IT WILL TAKE HOLD OF YOU, AND YOU WILL RESENT ITS ABSENCE!"
    • Adding to this, it's common to caption pictures of Nestlé or its CEO with this quote, because not only is the company responsible for extracting water from drought-stricken areas for their bottled water, but one of their CEO's outright said that water being a human right was an extremist position.
  • The out-of-context subtitle "Men yelling indistinctly"◊ (often complete with a non-plussed screenshot of Furiosa) is getting serious rounds as shorthand for the realities of the internet.
  • The Bullet Farmer's over-the-top speech after he gets blinded.
  • Captioning extremely silly MacGyvered vehicles with "Gonna die historic on the Fury Road."
  • "Uh, Uh... that's bait.◊" ^note A .gif of Max's reaction to an Obvious Trap has taken on a life of its own in message board circles, usually used as a way to point out Flame Bait or obvious trolling
  • From the director of Babe and Happy Feet ^note  It's become fairly popular to note the irony of the fact that a blisteringly popular, explosively successful, R-Rated violent action extravaganza was directed by a 70-year old man who hasn't made a film rated higher than PG since The Witches of Eastwick in 1987.
  • "He was scanning the horizon!": used as a reaction to people getting overexcited at their crush/idol/etc. looking at them. Especially popular with the "Senpai noticed me!" meme.

YMMV.Minecraft

• It's Popular, Now It Sucks!:
  • After Notch received an interview in a popular PC magazine and was plugged on the Team Fortress 2 blog, some people called the demise of the game. The cries of "Notch is a sellout!" became even more common among fans once he announced Minecraft would come to the Xbox 360, which happened because of the game's huge success. Even more so when the game was ported to 8th Generation platforms.
  • With all the popular Minecraft let's players on YouTube, it's not uncommon to see at least three or more million view Minecraft videos in the related videos section. This, however, has made some gamers absolutely sick of seeing or hearing about the game entirely; especially from the Nintendo community.
  • While it never really had a target age group to begin with, Minecraft in the early days of Indev, Alpha, and Beta was relatively obscure and was mostly played by college students and computer geeks. Once it became a household name and was released on almost every game console available, it became really popular with very young children and a handful of the original players were annoyed by this. A part of it being that they find the younger players to be annoying or immature, while others are annoyed about the general public pegging Minecraft as a "kiddie game".
  • This has subsided during Minecraft's Popularity Polynomial, with the previous generation of players having grown up and had started to play the game again.

YMMV.Monte Fjanton

• Acceptable Targets:
  • Helena Bergström and Colin Nutley, because Felix believes them to be untalented and nepotism almost always being involved around their movies.
  • The Sune reboot and the Åsa-Nisse films, because they made a lot of money in the box office despite them, to Felix, being very abysmal movies.
  • The raggare subculture. Once in a while the members of the channel will also poke fun at buskis-comedy^note A Swedish genre of (usually) live-action theater which focuses more on Lampshade Hanging and Toilet Humour than plot and characters.
  • The Guldbagge Awards.^note An annual reward on a much smaller scale but similar to the Oscars. According to Felix, there just aren't a lot of award-worthy Swedish movies, which results in The Guldbagge Awards awarding what sucked the least and not movies that are actually good.
  • Youtube comments.
  • The Swedish Film Institute, because it's very selective when it comes to what movies they fund - on principle, they don't fund horror movies, and they notably denied Den blomstertid nu kommer, but they readily fund questionable indie projects and funneled millions into generic, safe movies such as Halvdan viking.

YMMV.Mr TARDIS Reviews

• He Panned It, Now He Sucks!:
  • His negative review of Come Fly With Me produced a huge backlash against him. Trilbee did a response video to one user who was using the negative backlash as a stick to beat him with.
  • His reviews of the Twilight movies get this from Twi-Hards. Some people also feel that he goes too far in bashing the books and their fans. (Trilbee himself would later acknowledge and apologise for his past treatment of Twilight fans in the epilogue of one of his videos.)
  • Whenever he does a negative review of an episode of Doctor Who, he'll get people attacking him for hating the episode.
  • He was one of the few critics to give The Amazing Spider-Man a negative review, which produced backlash from the film's fanbase. It doesn't help that he never stops talking about it.
  • His So Okay, It's Average verdict on The Dark Knight Rises has given him some flack from the film's fans. It's worth noting in this case, his view on the film matches that of the majority of internet critics.
    • He's noted that this seems to be the reaction whenever he reviews a comic book movie he can't rave about. Captain America: The Winter Soldier? He didn't like it enough. The Amazing Spider-Man 2? Shouldn't have hated it. Iron Man 3? Loved it, and no one cared.
  • And now his negative review of Star Trek Into Darkness has earned him some ire.

YMMV.Pokemon

• "Stop Having Fun" Guys: Some competitive players mock people who play with their favorite monsters and insist that the series isn't for kids. Though this seems to be more a product of GIFT than anything, as most prominent members of the competitive community, such as most Pokétubers and contributing members of Smogon, actually applaud players who make use of lesser-seen Pokémon and often try to do so themselves (though they can be less receptive if they believe said players are using such Pokémon poorly). After all, the alternative is seeing the same dozen or so Pokémon over and over AND OVER again.

YMMV.Protest The Hero

• Harsher in Hindsight: "Sex Tapes" was written about the selfishness and sociopathic nature of online voyeurism and how fast and far one person's nudes or (often ostensibly private) amateur porn video can spread. The song was written roughly around 2009 or 2010, back when things like revenge porn, hacked webcams, and stolen nudes and videos were starting to become a problem, but well before events like The Fappening would demonstrate just how serious a problem it had become.

YMMV.Ralph Breaks The Internet

• Narm:
  • The zombie apocalypse was supposed to be tense, but the goofy grins on the zombie Ralphs' faces make it hard to take them seriously.
  • The scene where Ralph reads the mean comments about him is supposed to be a Tear Jerker, but the scene is so poorly executed to some that it just comes off as funny. For one thing, the commenters don't know that Ralph is an individual, so in reality they're getting heated and making personal insults about a video game meme.^note Not that this stops certain people on the actual internet from being overly offended by the most minor and harmless of things like this in real life. Secondly, a movie for children can't exactly get into the worst of Internet comments, so anybody who's ever been in a comment section on sites like YouTube has seen much worse that calling someone a "loser" or a "worthless bum."

YMMV.Ralph Breaks The Internet

• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • Fix-It Felix Jr. and Sergeant Calhoun parenting the Sugar Rush racers could have been a fun little subplot, but it's never brought up again until the end; even then it's never revealed to the audience exactly how they handled them, or how the couple and the racers felt about Vanellope leaving Sugar Rush. As it turns out, the writers (sort of) agreed — this sub-plot was supposed to be a much bigger part of the movie, but ultimately was left on the cutting room floor to help reduce the movie's run-time.
  • Contrary to a lot of initial expectations when the film's premise was first revealed, there is not a single scene in the film that heavily focuses around the presence of online gaming, barring the presence of the Original Generation game Slaughter Race and a throw-away reference to Fortnite. Ralph visiting an online game network such as Steam was a VERY popular scenario that was often tossed around by fans in order to imagine the number of video-game cameos it could offer, akin to the iconic "Bad-Anon" scene from the original. However, this is still fertile territory for a third film should one be made.
  • The nature of internet comments is briefly touched on, but only in a short scene that has little bearing on the plot and is quickly forgotten. Given this film is about the internet, they could have done a lot more to explore its darker side.
  • Even though Wreck-It Ralph is a Disney movie in real life, there are no references to it in Oh My Disney! This could have led to some really meta jokes like another Ralph and Vanellope being there or Turbo appearing as a Punch-Clock Villain.
  • Imagine how much more interesting the plot would be if Ralph didn't get the wheel in time, causing him to see himself as even more of a failure than ever. Also, as a result of this, since Vanellope can get properly coded into Slaughter Race, it could have also been a place for the Sugar Rush characters to let their legacies live on in the form of bonus content, or maybe DLC.
  • Many fans of The Muppets weren't pleased that their only presence in the film is Kermit's head on a sign and Beaker appearing on a poster - no actual Muppets appear.

YMMV.Scum

• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: A good chunk of the criticisms level toward Dog Pound were this (well, at least on IMDB; the actual critical consensus toward it was generally positive). Naturally, the rest of the criticism was They Changed It, Now It Sucks.
  • Roy Minton, who wrote both versions of Scum, thought this about the film, insofar as they cast a lot of the same actors that had been in the TV version two years earlier (in particular Ray Winstone, John Blundell and Phil Daniels.) Minton thought it was more upsetting to see guys barely out of their teens being that violent; when they were 20 or older, it seemed less unnatural.

YMMV.Shitsurakuen

• What Measure Is a Non-Badass?: Tomoko is a fourteen year old girl in a nightmarish situation... A number of forum goers have decided that she is a useless coward who shouldn't have the privilege of being Sora's slave and deserves whatever happens to her next. Some of those same forum goers have complained about the male characters all being utter bastards. And then there are the really scary internet dwellers (thankfully not many) who actually think a school like this is a good idea.

YMMV.Smite

• Memetic Mutation: Whenever a God Reveal on the Youtube channel is released, you will always hear someone saying something along the lines of "Still waiting for Jesus."
  • The Voice Guided System, similar to voice commands found in, say, Counter-Strike, though they are more expansive and generally more intuitive (they can also change based on your god and skin, if you've bought the voice pack). Players are liable to state the keyboard path to a voice command in conversation - for example, complimenting someone with "VER" (or sarcastically complimenting them), which leads to "You rock!"
    • VER VVX ("You rock!", "Cancel that!") is a particularly infamous abuse of the system for rude purposes.
  • Ymir's emoticon "Hi!" might be normal, until Hi-Rez released a mini-series called 'Smite Machinima' where Ymir does and says absolutely nothing except his "Hi!" once per episode and using his actual voice clip while others use voice acting. Fans always thought that Ymir and his "Hi" is the best and most hilarious part in the series, and now attaches that greetings to Ymir all day long for hilarity.
  • Mentioning Cerberus and Freya together. You see, someone hacked into Smite's twitter account and posted a sentence quite unsafe for work...
  • Before he was reworked, Guan Yu's Taolu Assault will let out sounds of gongs being hit rapidly. These sounds ends up being called 'Bongos', and Guan Yu has been associated with those terms, such as "Bongos of Death". Even if after the rework wherein he does not produce the sound again, the 'bongos' are sure to be mentioned if someone makes a reference to Guan Yu Game-Breaker release state.
  • Fenrir is known for being stuck in Development Hell before he was finally made playable. However, this Development Hell stuck in the mind of fans that anytime there's a new God announcement, they still refer to "Still waiting for Fenrir" or "New God Fenrir". It lived on so much that Hi-Rez decided to elevate this as an April Fools joke for 2018.
  • A carryover from the Adaptational Displacement from Classical Mythology, Nike is often referred as 'Goddess of Shoes' because of the more popular brand of shoes that shares the same name and is associated with slogans from it like "JUST DO IT".
  • Go anywhere in the Smite community and say that God X needs a buff. One of the suggestions for buffing will be "Give X a gun", guaranteed. ^note This meme came from one of Hi-Rez's official casters, Aggro, that jokingly said Khepri (a giant beetle) should have a gun. It picked steam again with Kuzenbo's god release, which definitely needed buffs but people jokingly said he didn't because he already had "these guns".
  • Kaldr is the real god, Skadi is his pet. You see, Kaldr is a very significant part of Skadi's kit, especially in damage potential, so naturally people joke that Skadi's the sideshow by comparison.
  • He Bo's high-damaging basic abilities lead many to joke he in fact has three ultimates. Some go so far as to say he has four ultimates, since Atlas of the Yellow River practically provides the benefits of two Relics along a line.
  • People either mistake Ne Zha as a girl (not helped that he's actually voiced by a woman), or they joke that he actually is a girl.
  • Let's get down to business...^Explanation The song from Mulan is pretty popular to accompany Chinese deities, but this gets even more elevated when Mulan herself is announced.

YMMV.Splatoon

• Broken Base:
  • The complete lack of voice chat. This decision faced much backlash due to most online shooters, such as Call of Duty and Battlefield, allowing voice chat; people argue that having no voice chat prevents effective coordination during games and that shooters which include the function have "mute" functions to filter out problematic players. However, there are many who supported the decision, as many of these games tend to have online players who do nothing but talk down to and insult others (this was in fact the producer's stated reason for its exclusion), and argue that most non-pickup teams use third-party software anyway. Others also noted since the game does global rather than regional matchmaking, it's highly likely that your teammates will often be from different countries, rendering the option for voice chat moot since you'll all be speaking different languages. This especially became the case if you're a Westerner still playing the game after the release of the sequel, as this game's community would quickly come to consist mostly of Japanese players.
  • The game having amiibo support. On one hand, it was expected that Nintendo would add amiibo support for this game and most fans were thrilled about the Splatoon characters getting their own figures. On the other hand, due to the Demand Overload problems with new amiibo at the time, many were turned off from the fact that the high demand would mean that certain gear and other things the amiibo unlock might become incredibly difficult to attain. Taken to its logical extreme when a shipment of Splatoon amiibo and special editions of the game got stolen in the UK just before launch day.
  • The game's online features and maps being limited at launch with free expansions coming afterwards. Some people didn't mind the initial lack of features and maps knowing the lineup would be expanded, while others saw this as paying full price for a large "demo" of online multiplayer until the expansions are released, or Nintendo just really wanting to get the game out for the beginning of summer when they really should've held it back to release it "complete". When it turned out that much of the later-released content was complete and already in the game at launch, it sparked an additional debate about "on-disc DLC", and rather it was right for Nintendo to prevent players from accessing the full game right away.
  • The music in the North American advertisements for the game were quite polarizing, especially the "Squid Kid" ad. Those in favor of them found the songs to be quite catchy and liked that they harkened back to the aesthetics of 1990s children's television, which was part of the appeal to some of the older audience for the game. Those who hated them thought that the European and Japanese commercials, which use the in-game music, are more than serviceable, with some taking particular offense to the repeated "YOU'RE A KID, YOU'RE A SQUID" lyric, believing that it embraced a "kiddy" image that some older gamers would rather avoid.
  • The required use of the Gamepad. Some people thought it enhanced the experience and, as a much-touted feature of the Wii U, it was about time Nintendo started using the thing more. Others were disappointed that local multiplayer isn't really possible, since the Wii U only supports one Gamepad.
  • The usage of motion controls falls into this. There are some who prefer the motion controls over dual analog, saying that it's much more accurate than simply using the right stick to aim. Then there are others who are completely adverse to the sensitivity of said motion controls, and claim that it's too much to handle alongside the more traditional dual analog approach. However, the motion controls can be turned off, so this becomes somewhat of a moot point.
  • After the introduction of the Tower Defense Ranked Battle mode came the realization that Ranked Battle modes, like Turf War maps, rotate every four hours, with players in Ranked Battles being stuck with the mode chosen until the next rotation. Some players called foul, saying that this is an unacceptable cut to the choices available to players, while others defended the move by pointing out that it helps reduce the possibility of players gravitating to one particular mode at the expense of the others.
  • The developers stating shortly after release that customization will stay limited to clothing, skin color, and eye color, as they wanted to keep the base inkling designs consistent during the period in which the game is still brand new. Some really wished the devs would just add stuff like new hairstyles or body types regardless, while others agreed with the developers' statements by saying the base inkling designs are already so likable there's no need for any radical changes just yet. Different hairstyles, pants, and a wider array of skin and eye colors would ultimately be saved for the sequel.
  • During the period in which Urchin Underpass was briefly taken off the rotation for a redesign in August 2015, discussions erupted. Arguments ranged from "But I loved this map! It was perfect!", to how the middle area is way too easy to defend and requires too much team coordination to break into for a game without voice chat, particularly in Splat Zones; to how that shouldn't have been an issue since there are three points of entry into the area; to how that still doesn't help because the map is too charger-friendly, even more than Moray Towers, another map that is a fan favorite in spite of that. There was also the very important issue of whether it is OK for the trees near the spawn points to be moved to the middle of the map.
  • New weapon types being announced ended up with one of two opinions: either the game needed to have its balance shaken up since specific weapons appeared to be much more common than others, or it's going to ruin the same specific weapons because they're not the "best" any more.
  • The fourth North American Splatfest was Transformers Product Placement. Some people didn't mind it and found it fun, while others feared that it'll open the gate for more rampant product placement within the game, mirroring the Japanese version which had already had two such Splatfests. The predominant reaction was simply one of disbelief, however. The later SpongeBob SquarePants Splatfest garnered an even more polarizing reaction.
  • The 2.2.0 update was not very popular with Roller users since their weapons received a huge nerf to their abilities.^note Their ranged attacks were adjusted to only One-Hit Kill if people were caught in the center of it, meaning Rollers now required much more accuracy to be effective. Other players were glad that they were nerfed, as they felt they were too easy to use prior to the update.
  • Playable Octolings. Early on, playable Octolings were easily the most requested addition to the game, it being rare to go on any site related to Splatoon without seeing one discussion of the species being playable. What made this a Broken Base topic was the backlash that those who wanted playable Octolings received, as that part of the community would only get louder and louder throughout the game's various updates, annoying others who used to be indifferent on the subject into actively being against the idea out of spite. Despite game files suggesting that the developers were seriously considering it for this first game, Octolings wouldn't be made playable until Splatoon 2's "Octo Expansion".
  • Bring up the possibility of a weapon tier system at your own risk. While Character Tiers in general tend to create pretty big Broken Bases in communities, it's easily doubly so with Splatoon. A large portion of the player base argues that all the weapons in the game are well balanced, and as such there's no way to create a reliable tier system for the game, especially with each ranked mode prioritizing different strengths and weaknesses of different weapons. Others argue that, while more balanced than most other games, there are still certain weapons that shine better than the rest, and are really strong contenders for any of the modes, and as such, a tier system is viable. Others, who while agreeing that there are weapons that are stronger than others, don't want a tier list in place because of it causing a Complacent Gaming Syndrome with people picking the tier one weapons only in hopes of easy wins. Meanwhile, there are others who think a tier system would help new players and further develop the competitive community for the game... In short, everyone falls into every possible camp when it comes to the possibility of a tier system in this game.
  • Which Squid Sister is better? Callie or Marie? This question has sparked many debates, with the game's final Splatfest actually being based around the conflict.

YMMV.Star Trek Online

• Fandom Rivalry:
  • Already suffering from this. Not helping is the fact that Star Wars: The Old Republic has gone Free To Play as well, leading to something of a revival of the Ur-fandom rivalry.
  • Also has an internal one between the players who prefer the Federation, players who prefer the Klingons and the players who prefer the Romulans. Federation players usually want the cloaking ability the Klingons and Romulans have, the Klingon and Romulan players want the expansive set of ships the Federation has and the Federation and Klingon players wish the Romulan players weren't so overpowered.
  • The main STO forums vs. the /r/sto Reddit forums. The Reddit forumers don't like the main STO forums because, 9 times out of 10, a single post can devolve into a circlejerk of complaints, attacks and other facepalm-worthy moments. The main STO forumers don't like the Reddit forums because they feel that the forums is nothing more than a circlejerk of praise towards Cryptic and that nothing could ever go wrong with the game.
    
    It should be noted that these are both a major case of Accentuate the Negative: in the main forums, there are other places where players don't curse Cryptic's name in anger and act like complete nut cases and a lot of that is focused in the General Discussion section and in the Reddit forum, there are players are critical of the game, but show it in a way that doesn't invoke the GIFT like the forums do (though there are a few players there who do and will even get critical if you ever dare try to downvote them.)

YMMV.Super Smash Bros For Nintendo 3 DS And Wii U

• Goddamned Bats:
  • Metal characters in Classic Mode in 3DS can become this; the thing is that not only do they go for the obvious "higher resistance but more weight" that would usually be associated with them, but they come with the annoying advantage of not flinching when hit with normal attacks at lower percents, which means that characters whose usual weakness is being frail become a Lightning Bruiser and characters with slow-charging but powerful smash attacks now can't be stopped by just hitting during the charge. They also can use items with the same ease as a player and now their extra weight is not balanced by hilariously fast falling speed, which means you can't just throw them out of the stage and watch as they are helplessly dragged down by their own weight while trying to recover. Donkey Kong's Hand Slap is notable for its ridiculous damage output, which makes short work of almost any metal character.
  • Smash Run is infested with these.
    • Every Pokémon enemy qualifies: Chandelure takes no damage and becomes stronger if it's hit by one of the many fire- or darkness-based attacks in Smash Bros, Cryogonal's Ice Beam instantly freezes you and is hard to dodge, Gastly can't be hurt if your character doesn't have a projectile, Koffing has a large attack radius and can lower your stats, and Petilil can put you to sleep.
    • Eggrobos will either fire a quick blast or a laser that covers the entire screen while moving up or down. This is made worse by being a very common Airborne Mook that will back away if you get too close.
    • Fire Bubbles and especially Ice Bubbles are difficult to fight due to being covered by an aura that will burn you or freeze you if you don't time your attacks perfectly. Being common airborne enemies that will actively charge at you doesn't help.
    • If you damage a Cucco too much, it will summon a flock of invincible Cuccos that will attack you relentlessly, making it difficult to accomplish anything. Even a defeated enemy bumping into one will provoke it, and they love to spawn right next to a group of enemies, making it very easy to hit them by accident.
    • All of the Skuttlers have a ton of health and are quite common. The regular Skuttlers are aggressive attackers who will flinch you with a quick attack or launch you with a stronger one. They're also dangerously good at gimping you when you try to recover. The Skuttler Cannoneers fire homing rockets that launch you, bombs that launch you, or lasers that flinch you. The Skuttler Mages have an unblockable ranged attack that will lower your stats if you don't dodge at the right time, or a multi-hit melee attack that also lowers your stats and is nearly impossible to escape if you get caught.
    • Paratroopas can be very annoying to deal with, particularly in large numbers, as they attack rather quickly, and in large numbers, they may not give you enough time to dodge before another one attacks you. Of course, large waves of them is the game's preferred way of spawning them, making dealing with them all the more difficult.
    • Bacuras. They don't deal that much damage (only 4%), but they make up for that by hitting with a meteor smash. Also, they are completely invincible and can reflect projectiles. What makes them a real pain to deal with is that they can easily get in the way of navigating the Smash Run area. When trying to go up, they can be hidden off screen and be ready to hit with only a split-second's worth of time to react to. If they are among the randomly-selected enemy roster, they will also spawn frequently too and always show up in groups.
    • The Ghosts from Find Mii. On its own poses little threat, but if you have projectiles, you're in trouble. They also follow you around if you try to run from it, and slowly back away if you try to shoo it out. And God help you if you eat Super Spicy Curry around them...
  • In a non-Smash Run example, there are characters who can pull off combos that can render you helpless. The fighting Miis in the Multi-Mook Melee are severe offenders. This is particularly egregious when you're trying to do the challenge where you have to defeat a set number of them in three minutes, as it wastes your precious seconds.
  • In the online For Glory mode, lower-skill players become this. These players tend to constantly roll around, throwing out a projectile or Smash attack every so often, then continue rolling. Even when the other player is far more skilled, the defensive, low-skill player will still manage to draw out the match even if they eventually lose, which becomes an annoyance to the higher-skill player (especially if they make use of tactics that are very hard to beat out via unorthodox-spamming certain moves).
    • With the above example, an inverted case also tends to be a higher-skill player for the lower-leveled ones, since they most likely would spend more time trying to trash talk their anonymous opposition and will be bound to pick an (in)famous low-tier for disrespect to gain an edge while either winning or losing (Ganondorf and Charizard tend to be popular choices due to also being heavyweights). The nature of For Glory's usual lag exacerbates these matters further quite a bit depending on one's connection. Both of these cases, however, mainly tie into the matchmaking system, which often pits players who've been practicing non-stop against those who can barely recover back on stage (hence a lot of memetic For Glory montages).
  • Also in For Glory (and sometimes For Fun as well), taunt parties or matches that are otherwise not devoted to fighting. For one thing, when going into one, there will usually be no indication that it's a goof-off match, and a player who actually tries to fight is likely to have the other players all gang up on and beat the stuffing out of the "offending" player who came in expecting a normal match. Matches like this are very annoying for the players who want to, you know, actually play the game, as they are forced to sit through the match doing nothing but begrudgingly join in the fun lest they risk getting a ban for quitting out of one.

YMMV.Super Smash Bros Ultimate

• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Merely defeating a spirit on the Spirit Board isn't enough — you then have to play a mini-game where you attempt to shoot a spirit through a shield. If you miss, you have to wait until the spirit reappears on the board and win the battle again just for another shot at it. You can pay in-game currency to try again, but only once. This feels like arbitrary padding, especially if the spirit battle was especially difficult. This can be a bit easier if you have enough Shield Spacer and/or Sluggish Shield items, especially against a Legend spirit, but those don't come very often, be it by either getting them though random drops or buying them on the Shop.
  • Challenger's Approach allows you to try for a rematch against any unlockable fighters you've lost to without having to redo the actual unlocking conditions. Sounds like an Anti-Frustration Feature, right? Well, not really. It only appears randomly after fighting a few battles in other modes, and likewise has a high chance of disappearing again after a rematch, whether you win or lose. Good luck on the later unlocks.
  • The "Preferred Rules" setting in the online quickplay mode gets flak for not allowing players to strictly enforce certain rules, so you can (for example) ask for a 1-on-1 fight with no items and get matched up rather quickly into a free-for-all battle with items that you can't leave without a penalty. This was especially common in the game's first week of release. Also, there are four options for preferred stage type, and you must pick from one of those four options, so asking for Battlefield or Omega, or having no preference for stage type while having a preference for other rules, is impossible.
  • Once again, preventing several of the most difficult Challenges from being bypassed using Golden Hammers renders them pretty much worthless.
  • The replay viewer:
    • It doesn't let you quickly seek to specific points in the replay; if you want to look at a particular part of it you have to watch the entire replay up to that point.
    • It is the only way to make gameplay videos without a capture card, since this game does not allow making 30-second clips with the Switch's capture button. Furthermore, because the completed videos are not put in the usual folder for screenshots and videos, they do not appear in the Switch's photo/video viewer; to post them on social media, you'll have to turn your Switch off first (not just put it in sleep mode) and remove the microSD card to obtain the video files. While this does allow for videos that are more than 30 seconds long and run at high-res 60 FPS, many would rather just use a one-touch capture button and put up with the 30-second 30 FPS limitations.
    • Have a lengthy replay you want to convert to a video, and just want to stick with the default settings? Well, tough, because you're going to have to press a button at some point, lest the system go into sleep mode, which not only renders the conversion null and void, but gives you a prompt to delete the replay (which you could very well do by accident).
    • The only way to save other players' replays online is through Shared Content. Sadly, no replay seen through Spectate or Tourney Mode gives you the option to save it, no matter how engaging it was. Unless you have a capture card, these matches are likely Lost Forever. If you're lucky, one of the players decided to upload those replays in Shared Content, so in some cases, it's a matter of looking through Shared Content's online archive of uploaded videos.
  • In an online arena (lobby), there is a queue you put your icon in to join upcoming matches. There are several things you can do that will take you out of the queue and make you rejoin at the back of it if you want to get back in the queue, including changing your fighter, changing your preferred stage and its music (if the lobby allows player-picked stages), viewing detailed rules, and changing the lobby music. Yeah, that's right: You can get bumped from the front of a 4-person queue to the back, and thus have to wait another one to five matches for your turn, just for simply changing the lobby music.
  • For whatever reason, in arenas where the lobby picks stages based on the players' selected Preferred Stage, the game will never pick a player whose level is set to Random unless all players in the ring also have theirs set to Random. If only one person in the arena has a specific level selected, everyone will be forced to play that level ad nauseam. Prior to version 3.1.0, this also applied to the music selection as well, with the random music setting randomly picking one song and always playing that, rather than picking songs on a match-by-match basis.
  • The buffering in the game is highly contested due to several things. To summarize, the old buffering system of Brawl and Smash 4 was retained, but a new "hold" buffering system was added on top, where a held input will be inputted on the first actionable frame regardless of how long ago the input was put in after the player's prior action. This makes certain commands easier, but also makes other commands harder to input, sometimes leading to misinputs, as well as making it more scary to attempt to do things such as tech (as you might accidentally do an airdodge) or mash out of grabs or burials (because then it will read your mashing as an input when you escape, leaving you vulnerable). This has led to complaints of people talking about how the game feels slippery as a result, which is frustrating since it makes combos more difficult than they should be. An example is the advertised short hop aerial attack (which has been nicknamed as the shortcut method), as while having an instant aerial is nice, it leads to a lot of situations where you wanted to do a full hop aerial, but the game reads a jump input and an aerial input in the same vicinity as a short hop aerial, and the shortcut method is ineffective against shorter characters, where it's better to just do a short hop than an aerial.
  • The buffer system for short hop aerials does your input based not on where your control stick was when you buffered the attack, but on where it is when the buffered input goes through. This has a distressing frequency to cause players to input one aerial, only to receive something completely different; even neutral aerials with the C-Stick/right stick can happen if a player uses one of those sticks to do an aerial while not pushing any direction on the control stick.
  • Want to level up your Spirit using Snacks? Prepare yourself to pay Spirit Points every time you use one. And don't get fooled on buying snacks in stores, you still have to pay for them just for using them. You'll get free snacks after every fight anyway, which makes some people question why they are sold in the first place.
  • When your opponent quits during the middle of a Quickplay match, they're replaced with a CPU who doesn't reward you with any GSP if you win. The disconnecting player also doesn't lose any GSP and is only penalized with a time limit before they can play online again, making people who Rage Quit the second things stop going their way a common sight online.
  • It's possible to get temporarily locked out from online battles if the game disconnects, even when it's not the player's fault in any way.
  • An arena's host can kick people at will. It sounds very useful in the right hands, but it constantly ends up in the wrong hands, whether it be kicking players after losing a match to avoid the rematch, kicking players after winning a match to avoid the rematch, kicking other players who enter the ring to make room for themselves or get a rematch instantly, or kicking players who play characters they don't like.
  • While many fans consider this version of Stage Builder the best one in the series, it has drawn some criticisms.
    • You can't copy and paste your shapes. This makes making symmetrical stages frustrating as you have to eye the screen closely to make your stage have symmetry.
    • The eraser erases the entire shape you made instead of just parts of it, like various art programs on the computer. This makes it difficult to make a creation that doesn't have any blocks sticking out in, for example, a picture of character you want to make.
  • Spirit Collectors who don't care for World of Light have their own issue in that you can only get Boss Spirits by beating the boss in that mode. The main problem lies in the Dracula and Marx Spirits, which evolve. Since both are in the second half of the game, this means playing through a good chunk of the game twice if you want to have both forms of Marx and both Dracula and Soma Cruz in your inventory.

YMMV.Sword Art Online

• Acceptable Targets:
  • Perverts in general. In response to the fact that There Are No Girls on the Internet, many male players are depicted as flocking to and hitting on the few females there are, which is often presented as annoying and creepy. This is especially prevalent in GGO, which has a lower female playerbase than most, where many of them make a bunch of pervy comments towards female players and one is outright shown leering at Sinon's body while hitting on her. Even Klein, who's one of the main characters and whose perversion is Played for Laughs, often ends up as a Butt-Monkey whose appreciation of women isn't exactly portrayed as a positive characteristic of his. It's even worse with full on rapists, who are, for very good reasons, often Hate Sink characters who end up dismembered messes by the end. The only real exception is Kyouji, and that because he's more of a Jerkass Woobie as opposed to the Complete Monster that Sugou was.
  • PKers, or to simplify, players who spend most of their time in online games killing other players, are also not portrayed positively. In the first arc, any and all PKers, some of which even starting a guild dedicated to it, are essentially Serial Killers due to the death game nature of Sword Art Online, with many going on to become Big Bads in other arcs like Phantom Bullet and Alicization. Even in later arcs where the games lack life-and-death stakes, PKers are typically shown to take being G.I.F.Ts to great extremes and are even portrayed as outright creeps, such as the Salamander Players led by Kagemune who are heavily implied to be "Women Hunters", players who take advantage of the combat system to avoid setting off the Anti-Harassment code to harass female players and sometimes derive pleasure from killing them.

YMMV.Team Fortress 2

• GIFT: Like all online games, Team Fortress 2 has had its issues with GIFT-utilizing Griefers. Ironically, you will still hear fans of the game proclaiming that the game is "Serious Business Free" and that "this is the nicest gaming community ever." While one look at the Valve official forums or the Steam Community Discussions section can tell them otherwise (the forums are endlessly locked in an civil war, while the discussions are infamous for being infested with hate), they just ignore this. Woe to the poor newbie gamer (or even pro gamer) that does take this to heart, and run into the Griefers deriding him to "suck less", "cry moar noob", "go back to your kiddy consoles" and such. Another popular taunt to use is "Free to Play", implying that the player (no matter how much time or skills they have) is nothing but a newbie that just got the game because it was free and can't do a damn thing against "better" players.

YMMV.The Strange Case Of Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde

• Values Resonance: As mentioned on the main page, a lot of modern-day readers see parallels between Hyde and those who use anonymity on the internet as an excuse for behaving badly without consequences, with some likening Jekyll to a person's normal account and Hyde to an alt account they use for Trolling.

YMMV.Transformice

• Broken Base:
  • The addition of cosmetics initially caused quite a rift between players; mainly because they can be bought with cheese you successfully brought back to the hole, thus actually giving incentive to playing the game instead of just dicking around, the latter of which made up a large part of Transformice's initial userbase. The same thing happened when Shaman levels and abilities were introduced since it incentivized actually helping mice players instead of sealing off the hole or summoning the anvil God on your turn. Those against it hated said it took out what people largely found fun about the game initially (screwing over other players) while those for it liked how it promoted actually playing the game instead of being dicks to everyone in the room. Largely downplayed nowadays, as the initial player base has long since either moved on or taken to playing the game as it was intended.
  • Of all things, the game creators and Mods cracking down on the GIFT in action. Considering Trolls made up a large part of the game's earlier demographic in alpha and beta stages, it's only natural it'd be met with scorn from those who considered this game to be "Trolling: The Game". Naturally though, non-trolls find it nice the community isn't made up of people screaming profanities and racial slurs at each other anymore, enjoying the game for what it is and welcome the more mature and well mannered community that formed in later updates.
  • The common idea to allow one to use strawberries to buy EXP for the shaman. Some think it's a good idea since the amount of EXP needed to level up gets batshit insane crazy at around levels 25-30, and the EXP doesn't better balance itself out in accordance to this. Others hate the idea since they don't want the game to become pay-to-win, since all the stuff you can buy with money already is just cosmetic stuff that doesn't give people who can afford it an unfair advantage over those who can't.
  • The CGI adaption. Dear God, the CGI adaption. It ranges from those who think it looks good, those who find it funny and have high hopes, to those who's response was "OH GOD KILLITWITHFIRE!!". The CGI, in particular, has gotten a lot of criticism, with some finding the models of the mice incredibly derp-ish and the jerky frame rate for an animated adaption rubbing some the wrong way. Not to mention the dark jokes they have...

YMMV.Transformice

• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: It's hard to bring up an update that doesn't have people claiming this, but several key things since the early alpha version include: backgrounds, more peaceful sounding music, mice costumes, ability to buy strawberries with real money to buy costumes for your mouse, and the general increased focus on cracking down on blatant trolling and the GIFT in action.

YMMV.Ultima Online

• Never Live It Down: The game is best remembered for Lord British getting killed and how the developers underestimated the power of the GIFT.

YouKeepUsingThatWord.A To G

• Autistic, at least on the Internet, gets used to mean "'retarded' only less so" more and more often in recent years - while less for perceived stupidity and more for social awkwardness (so you'll never find someone calling an inanimate object autistic even online), the general effect is the same. "Autistic" can also be used to refer to someone who has an exceptional focus on a particular activity, even if the person being described does not have an autism spectrum disorder at all. This is most likely due to the GIFT; anonymity means both that people feel freer to use "autistic" to mean "asshole" despite the Unfortunate Implications, and that people feel freer to use autism as an excuse for being an asshole (whether they're actually diagnosed or not), which only perpetuates the stereotype.

YouKeepUsingThatWord.A To G

• Conservative should not be used to describe someone who is opposed to change of any sort, let alone somebody who wants to turn the clock back to an earlier era. That is a reactionary, and such people are actually quite rare nowadays^note outside the Internet, of course. A conservative merely argues that things should not be changed if it is not absolutely necessary to do so, or that change should come as gradually as possible. Many conservatives in the past have been willing to accept economic reform (and, to a lesser extent, social reform) as long as the cultural norms of civilization itself were left untouched.
  • "Conservative" and "liberal" have come to mean very different things than when the terms were more or less established in the French revolution; les conservateurs were those opposed to the social ideals of the revolution and wanted to "conserve" the monarchy — and, incidentally, sat on the right wing of the French parliamentary chamber — while les libéraux were those intent on "liberating" the people from monarchic rule. In the past few decades, conservatives have been more about binding personal liberties ("conserving" the social order) while disestablishing the state ("liberating" people — in theory, anyway — from rulership), while the liberal side of the equation seems to maintain its intent to open up social freedoms while maintaining (or even increasing) the role of the state. This is the problem with defining a multi-dimensional question on a simple left/right axis. Political theorist David Nolan (creator of the Nolan chart, which corrects for the inconsistencies of the left/right axis) has suggested that populist be substituted for what most Americans refer to as liberal - fitting, since American liberalism is usually thought to have split into its "classical" and "modern" wings in the 1890s, when the Democratic party (cautiously) co-opted the People's (or "Populist") party in order to blunt the accusation from socialists and others that they were no different from the Republican party.
    • ''Classical'' liberalism, interestingly, is a political philosophy in which the freedom of the individual person is prized over all other ideals — however, the freedom of any individual stops at the point where it begins to infringe upon the freedom of other individuals ("liberal" still has this sense in mainland Europe; in North America "libertarian" is closer, though not quite synonymous). How this intersects with the modern Anglosphere's liberal paradigm, which favors increasing safety regulations (up to and including seat-belt laws), is an interesting question.
    • It gets even more complicated, because "conservatism" also is often used in philosophy as a description of behaviour based on some non-negotiable principles or values and thus it is more a opposition of "opportunism" or "pragmatism". The values may be of any kind, so it is completely possible to be a "conservative liberal" (this is the description actually used by at least several European libertarian parties) if one considers liberty to be a non-negotiable value. In this vein, a conservative liberal will vote in favour of any solution that maintains liberty at the cost of safety, while conservative securitarian may be eager to forfeit freedom to increase security. The name "conservative" comes from the fact that such people did not wanted to change their values but rather tried to find new applications for them.
  • Intertwined with the above controversy is the common blurring of the line between society and culture. The "social" structure is just that - a structure, an artificial construct created by humans to preserve law and order according to an arbitrary standard; whereas "culture" is more organic, more universal (at least in theory), and primarily concerned with anything humans do that is not necessary for survival (religion, art, entertainment). One can be both culturally liberal in believing that artists have the right to create pornography and socially conservative in insisting that that pornography never be distributed to - let alone involve - children. Similarly, one can be culturally conservative by remaining a good Christian or Jew or Buddhist, but socially liberal if those religious beliefs lead one to oppose the status quo in the name of a higher standard of justice (anti-abortion protesters, for instance).

ZeroPunctuation.Tropes E To H

• GIFT: Yahtzee actually cites the original formula then alters it by subtracting 'Anonymity' and 'Audience'. Or in other words, Normal Person = Total Fuckwad.