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Jordan Maron, better known under his YouTube alias CaptainSparklez, is a Let's Player and YouTube star who is based in Los Angeles, California. His channel predominantly features videos made with Minecraft, be they mod playthroughs, adventure maps, challenge maps, and so on and so forth, although he does supplement his channel with various games such as Trouble in Terrorist Town, Garry's Mod, and many others. Jordan is often known for his rather dorky yet endearing personality when on camera, as opposed to many other Let's Play series, which tend to be wackier, though in many cases this leaves Jordan as The Comically Serious. He used to post under the channel of ProsDONTtalkSHIT, but has since abandoned that channel owing to its somewhat more vulgar name, in part at least.

In August 2013, Jordan reached 5 million subscribers, becoming one of the most popular gaming channels on YouTube. As of May 2023, he has over 11 million subscribers.

Jordan was the second channel on Twitch to reach 1 million followers (after The Syndicate Project). He is currently the ninth-most-followed streamer on Twitch.

    Games CaptainSparklez has played 

Jordan has appeared in:

This gamer provides examples of:

  • Alcohol-Induced Idiocy: Downplayed in Markiplier's "Drunk Minecraft" videos when he guest-stars. He makes quite a few mistakes he probably wouldn't have when sober, but he's not that drunk and he's obviously the least drunk person in the video.
  • Angrish: A variation where he starts laughing his arse off and mumbling various words.
  • Badass Bookworm: Out of games, he's taken up gymnastics and actually seems rather good, and if you watch his video of him skating at age 13, you'll see he's quite talented, although not at Tony Hawk levels.
  • Berserk Button:
    • Copyright laws on Youtube are something he gets very annoyed about, in no small part due to how outdated and biased they are; given he's been the victim it's completely understandable.
    • Insulting Minecraft is a less noticeable one. He's hardly sycophantic, acknowledging many of the game's flaws, but saying that you prefer other games because of graphics will often annoy him.
    • When he doesn't succeed in achieving the goals of the game/Minecraft map he's playing (usually when he keeps falling while doing parkour), he'll get frustrated and angry enough to shout and swear. Sometimes his face turns red and sometimes he gets so frustrated he actually takes off his earphones and turns away from the screen.
    • Mazes in Minecraft maps are another one for him. If he ever comes across one during a playthrough of a map, expect him to lose his mind and start criticising the map-makers for including a maze in the map.
  • Brief Accent Imitation: Occasionally speaks in a vaguely sounding English RP accent, with no explanation as to why.
  • Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Despite his various quirks, he's very good at playing video games.
  • Butt-Monkey: If something bad happens in a multiplayer game, Jordan will almost always be on the receiving end in spite of his skill; it's not unheard of for him to play Survival Games and find that almost an entire map tries to kill him straight away. Other famous gamers tend to invoke this with him, with Felix shooting him to pieces even when he was innocent, Minx constantly killing him in TTT and Adam trolling the hell out of him.
  • Catchphrase: "Alright, what's going on dudes, and today..." for when he starts a video. He generally finishes with "see ya next time". Also in his Hunger Games videos he always says "In a world where we're back with another round of hunger games."
  • The Chew Toy: In spite of his skill, Jordan does get mocked repeatedly.
    • In TTT, he often gets gunned down randomly even when innocent.
    • In a livestream for Grand Theft Auto V, everyone in a race started ganging up on him, flipping him over and then pinning him into a wall, forcing him to respawn. He took forever to get past them, finishing in 5th place.
    • His performance in Arma is so bad that everyone starts mocking him for it.
    • His viewers have called him an idiot and a fool so many times that it's turned into a catchphrase that Jordan also mentions ("Jardon, you fool!") and he's made a Twitch emote that subscribers can use called 'cptFool' that shows Jordan with his hand on his face and U FOOL written in red at the bottom of the picture.
  • Cluster F-Bomb: During his playthrough of Slender. Not that you can blame him.
  • Comedic Sociopathy:
    • He generally avoids this, but in his Hexxit playthrough he kills at least one Chocobo which he'd adopted beforehand, as he needed feathers and couldn't be bothered to go out hunting. He later leaves its successor in a jungle after he finds out that he can move quicker with his boots that let him walk on water.
    • In React, he's got little sympathy for anyone willing to do the Knife Game Song, as he claims they're being extremely stupid.
      Jordan: If they are dumb enough to do it... they deserve the consequences.
  • Cool Car: Jordan is a known car enthusiast and, as such, has a few nice cars of his own. His Ford GTnote  is probably his most notable one.
  • The Comically Serious: Compared to other Lets Players, he comes across this way, owing to his slightly more grounded persona.
  • Crossover:
    • Regularly does videos with SeaNanners, GassyMexican and that group.
    • He's also done videos with Jacksepticeye, Mangaminx, Sjin, BajanCanadian, Sky Does Minecraft, Parv, PewDiePie and others.
    • Once appeared on a charity livestream that Lewis Brindley and Simon Lane were hosting for the Yogscast Minecraft Series. He also appeared on a charity livestream with TheSyndicateProject and many other youtubers that was hosted by Games for Change and Game Changer Charity.
    • During the second Hat Films charity stream in 2014, Jordan appeared to referee a few challenges and play games with the trio. Sjin and Lewis joined their lobby a few times and trolled them as well.
    • He's even played Team Fortress 2 with Tay Zonday for charity, having also played it with Duncan Jones, William Strife, Nilesy and others.
    • As part of Polaris' Tomorrowland series, he played alongside Lewis and Duncan of the Yogscast, as well as LittleLizardGaming.
    • In July 2014 he joined a Minecraft server that TheSyndicateProject had created called Mianite. He played this game for two seasons (110 episodes that went on for a whole year) and uploaded edited versions of his livestreams. iiJeriichoii and OMGitsfirefox were also part of this world, along with other Youtubers (such as the two former Yogscast members who form FyreUK, and Waglington, who becomes a main character in the second season).
    • In between the first and second seasons of Mianite he, TheSyndicateProject, iiJeriichoii, and OMGitsfirefox decided to play a shorter game in Minecraft they called Trinity Island, where they lived on an island and had to complete a list of challenges while playing in hardcore mode (meaning they can't respawn if they die, so it's game over for anyone who dies).
    • From August to December 2016 did a Minecraft-Pokemon series using the mod Pixelmon with youtubers Crainer and SSundee.
    • From August 2016 to the present, he has been doing the series Trollcraft with both Crainer and SSundee.
    • Around March 31st onward, Syndicate revived Mianite as a spinoff/prequel called Mianitian Isles, which uses the Mianite formula with everyone living on islands, with Sparklez also rejoining it on April 3rd onward, though without Jericho and Firefoxx, a new streamer named Lrakinidas has replaced them both.
  • Deadpan Snarker: When he doesn't laugh it up, he tends to do this in response to odd situations.
  • Early-Installment Weirdness: "Fallen Kingdom" is a cover of Coldplay's "Viva La Vida" with the lyrics changed. Its sequel songs are all original compositions.
  • Epic Fail:
  • Failed a Spot Check: He absolutely failed to notice the coal right next to him in his 101st Ultra Modded Survival video when he was cooking some food about 8 minutes in
  • Gosh Darn It to Heck!: This is partly the reason he moved from his old channel to his current one. He also tends to do this on a lot of his Minecraft videos, on account of the kids watching, though as some of his other videos show, from both his old channel and new one (as well as a few of his appearances on React), it's not from a hatred of swearing.
    • This trope is enforced on his streams by way of a "Swear Jar"; when someone swears on one of his streams, they gift five subs to his channel.
  • Gravity Is a Harsh Mistress: Due to lag, this ends up happening a bit when he and Ryan play Mineplex Dragons. Ryan even ends up dying in a matter akin to Wile E. Coyote at one point.
  • Griefer: Tends to get hit by these a lot in Grand Theft Auto V, notably when racing. Being a big name Youtuber will pin a target to you. A few people did this when he was doing a charity livestream, and in Minecraft it's something that happens to him a bit as well, although in Hunger Games the grace period generally gives him enough of an opening to escape.
  • He Cleans Up Nicely: The A Gentlemen's Dispute skit with Markiplier featured Mark and Jordan in tuxedos and fedoras. Damn, did they both rock them.
  • Hidden Depths: He used to study chemical engineering before moving to computer science, and later took up gymnastics. He also shows he's very internet and political-savvy, as his anti-SOPA and PIPA videos show.
  • Home Base: For his survival playthrough, he has a tree platform with some mod cons, lots of chest for storage, a bed and good decoration. It's pretty high up, too. It's called Jerry's Tree, named after a pet slime he found in his first survival playthrough, and every time he changes maps after switching modpacks he takes the tree with him. In Mianite season 1 he asked the wizards (the players could pay the wizards to build them things) to build him a giant version of Jerry's Tree with Ianite (the goddess he followed in the game) elements, which he called Jerry's Tree 2.0.
  • The Hyena: Find something ridiculous enough, and Jordan will laugh his head off.
  • Idiot Hair: He considers his 13-year-old self to have had this.
  • Loophole Abuse: When his parody of Gangnam Style was taken down, he edited the tune just enough so the instrumentation counted as a loophole, and reuploaded it.
  • Nerds Are Sexy: Jordan is considered this by a lot of the girls (and some of the guys) that watch his stuff. He is really confused as to why- and also slightly weirded out by some of the Google autocomplete results that relate to him.
    • He began a health kick in 2016, which produced some pretty spectacular results. Many fans have claimed to be distracted by his arms and newfound penchant for tank tops, and he has been more confident posing sans shirt on his Instagram.
  • Never Say "Die": In recent videos, mainly those in Minecraft, Jordan tends to use this trope, often saying "unalive" instead of "kill" or "die" due to the worries of being demonetized. He has also taken it to exaggerated extremes with this being applied to words that have little to do with actually dying, such as "dye", "diorite", or even "dead end". Although the recent video standards since then have loosened up, he still does it because it's part of his brand. Even his Minecraft resource pack, which mostly keeps the main textures with a few cosmetic changes, has Minecraft's death messages rewritten to contain the word "demonetized" to describe when players die.
  • Nice Guy: Jordan is almost always unfailingly polite.
  • The Nicknamer: Does this to many of the various creatures he encounters in Minecraft.
  • Not So Above It All: In spite of his generally stoic and good natured playing, when with gamers such as Minx and PewDiePie he can get a bit trollish himself.
  • Not So Stoic:
    • When playing Slender, he drops his normally happy and cheerful side and starts getting spooked out, swearing nonstop.
    • His performance in Arma 3 is so bad that he starts spluttering helplessly and angrily shouting.
    • After the PAX video he uploaded got taken down for copyright because the guy that gave him the backflip footage randomly decided to flag it for copyright again, Jordan's tweets following that were clearly infuriated. Basically, anything to do with copyright abuse will result in this.
  • Only Known by Their Nickname: Beyond being called his real name or his screen name, CaptainSparklez, he is often addressed as "the Captain".
  • Only Sane Man: In Drunk Minecraft, owing to him being just a little more sober than the others.
  • Orphaned Series: His playthrough of Pokemon HeartGold ended after only four episodes for unknown reasons, possibly owing to Nintendo being a bit iffy about Let's Play videos of their content on Youtube.
  • Precision F-Strike: Jordan's not normally known for swearing so much, but annoy him significantly and he will do it happily. He will stop going "god dang it" to "goddamnit", and so on.
    • At one point during a frustrating round of Prop Hunt he shouts son of a bitch very loudly.
    • On React, he discovers that the Farting Preacher meme is done with artificial sound effects, having believed it to be true, and goes "I am so fucking gullible!"
    • And again in "Coffee Tactics" in Prop Hunt.
    • He basically throws the no swearing rule out of the window when playing Slender.
    • And again in this video on copyright.
    • He sometimes swears during live streams.
    • He forgoes all censoring when he plays slither.io, calling the snakes who kill his snake 'son of a bitch' almost every time he dies (which is often), though sometimes he changes it to 'son of a banana'.
    • On Jordan's series Trials with Nick, he will usually curse any word but "fuck," but in a few episodes he has been angry enough to drop an F-strike, such as in the episode "Explosive Anger". Nick, on the other hand, makes no attempt at censoring himself, saying "fuck" in most episodes.
    • He also drops an F-Bomb in MCC19, when Ph1LzA punches him into the void during the last round of TGTTOSAWAF, to the surprise of his teammates.
  • Self-Deprecation:
    • He's read some of his fanfiction which often depicts him as a smooth ladies' man. He mocks himself for not being like that at all in the videos when he does.
    • He has mocked his channel name several times, both in his videos and in other people's.
  • The Smart Guy: With regards to his songs, he mostly leaves to vocals to his friend TryHardNinja, but does most of the sound mixing himself, with some support from various people from time to time. He did some of the old animation as well, but has since deferred to other people for that. He used to edit all his videos himself, but since 2013 lets Nick (NFEN) edit them so as to give him more time to do other things. Since 2014 or 2015 he's been uploading two videos a day almost without fail, due to his hard work and Nick's editing.
    • His series of videos on browsing Reddit usually involve him pausing to go on tangents about the science behind the acts being viewed.
  • Tempting Fate:
    • Jordan has a habit of doing this in Prop Hunt, where he will run out in an effort to rub in a potential victory in a hunter's face as time is running out. This has backfired at least twice, with him being killed with less than five seconds to go.
    • Does this when playing Slender a lot, saying "I see you, ain't gonna sneak up on m- AHHHHH" (as the titular character will attack and nearly kill him while saying it).
  • Vitriolic Best Buds: With SeaNanners. The two bicker a lot in their collab videos, but it's all in good fun and Adam actually helped Jordan get off the ground in terms of Youtube. He also jokes around with Nick in their collab videos.


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