Trivia / Markiplier

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• Ascended Fanon: Darkiplier started out as a fan concept back in 2012, which Mark would allude to from time to time without fully confirming the character's existence. That changed in A Date With Markiplier, when Darkiplier was finally made into a full-fledged character.
• Breakthrough Hit:
  • While Mark was already a rising star on YouTube by August 2014 (with nearly 3 million subscribers accumulated over the course of two years), the release and subsequent craze of Five Nights at Freddy's drew many more people to his channel for his playthrough, as he was among the first Let's Players to complete a full run. In less than a year since his first FNAF video, his subscriber count had passed 8 million and Mark became an even more prominent figure in the Youtuber community. He also became inexorably linked with FNAF, playing the sequels and several fan games, plus creating a few original sketches and songs based on the franchise.
  • Another example would be Slender. Mark had about 2,000 subscribers when he uploaded his first video of it in July 2012. By September, his subscriber count had grown to 10,000 and it ballooned to nearly 50,000 by the end of the year. His videos of Slender and its many craze-spawned fangames, along with the horror reaction compilation of those games, were the most popular of his early videos and were what bought his channel a lot of initial attention.
• Creator Backlash:
  • Despite being a fairly popular series on his channel for a time, Mark has admitted that he doesn't particularly enjoy making the "Try Not to Laugh Challenge" videos, due to finding them to be lowbrow in nature and because they aren't very difficult to produce. His last video regarding Try Not To Laugh was a 2022 livestream of him watching previously-recorded videos, where Mark himself barely even cracks a smile while watching them.
  • In Anthony Padilla's "I spent a day with MARKIPLIER", Mark also stated he hates how "MEOW" is his most viewed video. He clarified that he doesn't hate the video itself, just how it's so successful.
• Creator's Pest: Based on what he said during his February 2017 charity livestream, Mark avoided using Darkiplier in his videos because of the way Dark was being romanticized by the fans. However, when making "A Date With Markiplier", he decided to bring Dark back to his horror roots and take the character seriously.
  Mark: ...over time Darkiplier became less and less about the scary figure and more about this romantic figure, and it always rubbed me the wrong way. And I kind of shied away from Darkiplier for a while. And I really really really- if I was going to bring Darkiplier, and when we thought about this, we thought, okay there should be a Darkiplier route. And that was there from the beginning, and so when I wanted to do it I wanted to do it my way, and I wanted to do it right, and I wanted to have this unending level of creepiness.
• Colbert Bump:
  • It's hard to say that Five Nights at Freddy's would have become as immensely popular as it is now had Mark not done a let's play of it back in the day. It's worth noting that the first episode of him playing a Freddy game (complete with the enticing title of "SCARIEST GAME IN YEARS") sits at over 100 million views as of February 2022, making it easily his most viewed video, so this example goes both ways.
  • Mark's brother is the writer for the webcomic TwoKinds and has appeared in several of his videos. As you can probably imagine, considering Mark's popularity, that helps a lot when it comes to getting a larger fanbase.
  • While Cyndago was already a popular channel before Mark's involvement, his interaction with Daniel and Ryan helped boost the channel's popularity.
  • The Garden Scene from Nanalan has more than doubled in popularity after he watched it in his "Who's Markiplier's Girlfriend?" video.
  • Shirk's "Haunted" (Mark's outro theme for horror games) has gotten a boost in popularity ever since he started using it.
• Doing It for the Art: Mark has stressed from time to time that he doesn't do his channel for money but rather to just make people smile and be entertained, as well as just whatever he feels like doing. And even with whatever money he gets from the videos, he donates to charity, whereas the money he makes from Youtube is used for whatever he likes, which half of the time are for projects he wants to do (such as the Markiplier tour and the Heist with Markiplier series).
• Follow the Leader:
  • When Mark plays a horror game, other channels who make horror game content tend to play the same games sometime later. Some smaller channels, like POiiSED, even use Mark's "3 Scary Games" format occasionally.
  • Mark attempted to defy this trope with the resurgence in popularity of Minecraft in 2019, complete with video showing his vehemence in his usual style. He came around to this trope a year later, where he started a new Survival Let's Play.
  • Mark's playthrough of Completing the Mission has him citing the Henry Stickmin series as part of his inspiration for his "choose your own adventure" videos, like A Date With Markiplier and A Heist with Markiplier.
• He Also Did: Though mostly known for his Let's Plays and internet videos, he's also the voice of 5.0.5 in both the English and Spanish versions of Villainous.
• Life Imitates Art: Nine years after Mark launched the Crashy McSplodey, ARCA Space unveiled plans for their new EcoRocket Heavy Launcher. Assuming it ever flies, let's hope theirs fares better.
• Magnum Opus Dissonance:
  • For Drunk Minecraft, Mark, Bob, and Wade have all said that Episode 29, the one where they legitimately try to build a house, is their favorite episode. The fans, however, mostly see it as the weakest one due to the trio actually being serious throughout the entire video until the end, leading to accusations of them being sober. The episodes where the trio get royally smashed such as "MARKIPLIER LAND" and the final 3 episodes are the ones usually considered the best. This has been lampshaded multiple times, even years after the upload.
  Wade: It'll be like that one episode of Drunk Minecraft that everyone hated that we loved.
  • The "Try Not To Laugh Challenge" is one of Mark's more popular video series due to its low production value and simple premise: watching Mark react to various funny videos on the internet. However, Mark himself isn't particularly fond of it precisely because of how low-effort it was to create, which is why he hasn't revisited the challenge since 2022.
• Meme Acknowledgment:
  • Mark is aware of him looking like Maes Hughes from Fullmetal Alchemist. Guess what happens when he styles his hair similar to Hughes?
  • During his playthrough of Garten of Banban, thanks to "E" being the interact key, Mark says "E! E! I'm E'ing as hard as I can E!", referencing the "E" meme involving a photoshop of Mark, Lord Farquaad, and Mark Zuckerberg.
• Playing Against Type: His usually humorous persona is nowhere to be found in a dramatic reading of The Scarecrow Corpse.
• Promoted Fanboy:
  • Remember that fan who did a backflip for Mark at Pax East 2015? That's Ethan Nestor (AKA CrankGameplays), one of Mark's current video editor and good friend.
  • On a similar note, small-time YouTuber Lixian went from making quality fan animations that were praised by Mark and the community, to becoming another one of Mark's video editors, notably being directly addressed in Mark's videos and occasionally appearing in them in cartoon form responding to Mark when this happens.
• Referenced by...: "Markiepoo", a memetic nickname associated with Mark, is one of the officially recognized player character names in Fallout 4 (meaning certain characters have it programmed into their voice acting).
• Series Hiatus: Although Mark takes pride in not taking breaks, he has had a few:
  • He quite understandably took some time off after Daniel Kyre^note One of Mark's friends and the secondary half of Cyndago with Ryan Magee's death.
  • In late 2017, he went away for a month to both spend time with Amy and because he felt his latest videos weren't up to his own standards.
  • June 24th, 2018 had him take a few days off to process the death of his niece, who was killed in a car accident.
• Unfinished Episode: His playthrough of the release version of Subnautica: Below Zero failed to record properly and was thus never published.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Mark revealed in his Undertale livestream that he made five episodes of the game during his initial run, but didn't release the next three episodes due to being discouraged.
  • Team Four Star has approached Mark to play a role in Dragon Ball Z Abridged several times, with Broly being their top choice for him, but Mark's work schedule has always been far too busy to allow it.
  • Mark was initially going to play Half-Life: Alyx upon its release in March 2020, but he ended up having to scrap those plans after accidentally damaging his VR set before he could start recording. With almost 12 months passing since that incident and no sign of an update, it seems that an Alyx LP might not happen.
  • Was asked to cameo in Five Nights at Freddy's (2023) as the former guard who is killed off in the opening scene, but scheduling conflicts with Mark's own Iron Lung adaptation prevented it, sadly.
• Why Fandom Can't Have Nice Things: Mark's first playthrough of Undertale is a huge example of this. After his first two videos, Mark was hit with a very vocal section of the Undertale fanbase heavily criticizing him on his voices for the characters^note giving Toriel a masculine Scottish voice, Sans a dumb redneck voice, and Papyrus a posh Englishman voice to the point they rudely demanded he change them to what the fandom more readily accepted as their head canon, not to mention aggressively spoiling the game's plot and attempting to push a specific playstyle on him, proclaiming that he "wasn't playing the game right". As a result of this, Mark decided to abandon the series with no intention of ever returning to the project, making his aversion to Undertale somewhat of a Running Gag. After awhile, Mark decided to give the series a second chance, but did so on livestream with Tyler, stating outright he was ignoring people's spoilers or criticisms and that he would play the game his own way.
  • Mark (and Jack) would later on distant themselves from the Septicplier ship due to the content becoming too overly sexual and the many rude and vulgar things the hardcore fans of the ship would say about their respective girlfriends.
• Written-In Infirmity: "Try Not To Laugh Challenge #19" was done two days after Mark had his wisdom teeth pulled.

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