Web Video / Call Me Kevin

You can call him Kevin.

Hey there, friends, my name is Kevin! And today we're playing TV Tropes.

Call Me Kevin is a Let's Player on YouTube. He plays through all sorts of games, often intentionally or not-so-intentionally messing up while playing through the games and seeing what chaos can ensue. One of his more well-known Let's Plays is 'The Sims 4 with Jim Pickens'.

Kevin is part of a group of Irish Youtubers affectionately known as the Irish Lads.

On 13th April, 2024, Kevin announced they were taking a break from Youtube for a bit to focus on hobbies and other personal stuff.

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"Trope Me Kevin":

• Adaptational Heroism: For much of his Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix videos, he jokingly praises Dolores Umbridge, claiming that, "she gives super cool tattoos to students and stuff like that." However, she crosses the line when she comes for Hagrid, at which point Kevin declares, "That's it, joke's over. This is no longer a comedy channel. This is about saving Hagrid."
• Adaptational Villainy: Parodied in his Harry Potter videos, where he portrays innocent or heroic characters as being corrupt or evil by taking the games out of context.
  • Hagrid is portrayed as using Harry for child labor, and then tricking him into helping hatch Norbert in order to make him pay child support, which includes using his own money to buy things Norbert needs.
  • He refers to Dumbledore as the one who originally opened the chamber, due to the game not explaining the plot of the book well. This includes editing the dialogue in the last scene to refer to Tom Riddle as being Dumbledore instead of Voldemort.
  • Flitwick's class in Prisoner of Azkaban includes fighting monsters after getting the spell. The rationalization is that Flitwick is making Harry murder all the monsters because they know he opened the chamber of secrets. When the trio survive, he's smiling and awarding house points, but is still portrayed as being a Child Hater who's secretly angry nobody died.
  • Ron is repeatedly portrayed as being a bad friend and possible villain, especially in Prisoner. He attempts to leave Harry for the dementors in order to become the new protagonist, later attempts to kill Hermione when he no longer needs her as a friend, and is only useful for torturing innocent ghosts.
• All Just a Dream: Played for laughs when the game glitched out at Jim and the Grim Reaper's wedding because several Sims kept dying. Kevin was forced to reload a previous save and cut to Jim Pickens getting out of bed.
  Boy, what a weird dream that was.
• Ambiguous Gender Identity: Grognak is always seen with a feminine body, lacks hair and eyebrows, has a prominent jaw, dresses androgynously save for high-heels, and Kevin always voices them with his regular voice. Other characters usually refer to them with a mixture of gender-neutral and female pronouns.
• Angsty Surviving Twin: Played with by First Name Pickens, who doesn't seem to care that his younger sibling died in childhood. Though his behavior in his teen years seems to indicate that it did have an impact on his personality and ability to socialize.
• Argument of Contradictions: One scene in "PS2 Prisoner of Azkaban is an amazing fever dream" involves Kevin "arguing" with Harry over who to send Hedwig to. Harry keeps repeating to "fetch Hermione", while Kevin keeps responding with "no, Dumbledore!"
• Back from the Dead: After Jim Pickens got killed by the Mother Plant in the Strangerville pack, Kevin got him resurrected. On Easter Sunday, as people requested.
• Boarding School of Horrors: In the long form Harry Potter game videos, he interprets Hogwarts as being a dangerous and neglectful school where Harry is starved, bullied into doing physical labor, and singled out by every teacher for the sake of doing dangerous tasks. He also describes their classes as being "like Squid Game" and portrays every person in the school as being a potential traitor and attempted murderer. Numerous jokes are made about students dying in the process of simply navigating the castle, with half-assed apology letters written to the parents. For example, a letter about Hermione dying simply reads:
  Oh, btw Hermione died doing wizard stuff
  Signed Rubeus Hagrid for some reason
• Breeding Slave: Played for Laughs. One of his The Sims 2 playthroughs has him force Vidcund Curious, the enemy of his self-insert, into being an alien breeding slave. Vidcund is then forced into a corner outside the house where he's fed rotten grilled cheese and has his two children taken away from him.
• Card-Carrying Villain: In his "movie about the car accident", the villain is a stereotypical 20's gangster-accented evildoer who does evil things just for the sake of being evil. It's later revealed that the entire town, save for Kevin himself, is also openly and proudly evil.
• Crack Ship: invoked During his play of KFC's dating game (in which the player attempts to date Colonel Sanders), he names his character Ronald McDonald - the mascot of rival fastfood chain McDonald's.
• Creepy Circus Music: Invoked and Played for Laughs in "How EVIL can you be in Bitlife?" Shortly after Kevin's character Eve Hill gets a job as a clown, he adopts a child and then promptly abandons them. Kevin hums "Entry of the Gladiators," the standard circus tune, while preparing to click the option to abandon the child.
• Cruel Cheerleader: Exaggerated. In "How EVIL can you be in Bitlife?", Eve Hill becomes a cheerleader specifically to get as much attention as possible; Kevin calls him an "Evil Cheerleader" and the cheerleaders proceed to have a chant of "five, six, seven, eight, we think that evil's great!"
• Cult: Jim Pickens is characterized as a cult leader, not just in individual games, but for the channel as a whole (which is jokingly referred to as being a cult). This is taken further in "Stardew Valley but I made a cult", where Kevin played as Jim Pickens running a cult in multiplayer, with rules such as "always obey the leader", "never go into town without permission", and "you only eat what the cult leader has assigned to you". The game unfolds with everyone working themselves into exhaustion at Jim's orders, praising him for everything he says, supplying him with constant gifts, and attributing everything that happens in the game to his powers. At the end, Jim declares that the cult must disband peacefully, meaning that the entire thing was a scam to get a melon garden and a ton of property without doing any work.
• Depraved Bisexual: Jim doesn't care about the gender of the sims he seduces, just whether or not he can successfully murder, rob, or imprison them for his own amusement.
• A Day in the Limelight: Sims 4 but a drug mod was a bad idea switches focus over on First Name Pickens, the first son of Ryland Oakley, and his new job as a drug dealer.
• A Dick in Name:
  • The earlier Sims games portraying Jim's parents reveal that his father was called Dick Pickens. He routinely ignored his wife and son, flirted with anyone he laid eyes on, and tended to have people drowning in his pool for the sake of entertainment.
  • Dick Tator in "This is what happens when you're a horrible king in Bitlife" is a young prince who assassinates his parents to usurp the throne, becoming a cruel and tyrannical king.
• Does Not Like Spam: Kevin's hatred of soup pops up often, with one of his life tips even saying "a loss with a friend is better than a win with someone who likes soup".
• Kill It with Fire: Kevin is devastated by the fact that he mismanaged his actions and thus didn't burn the Bully's house down in Beyond Two Souls.
• Easy Amnesia: Played for Laughs. Grognak suffers from "amnosia", which is essentially this combined with being Literal-Minded (although in their own words, the difference is that amnosia isn't medically recognized), and has a tendency to forget things right after they've been said.
• Establishing Character Moment: Jim Pickens is introduced to both the audience and Kevin by him randomly wandering into Urp's apartment, chatting to his child for a bit, dumping trash onto the floor, and then leaving. He also gets a meta moment, where his debut is in the episode entitled 'Everything Goes Wrong'.
• Extreme Omnivore: In "How EVIL can you be in Bitlife?", Eve Hill adopts a cat called "The Nightmare". He then proceeds to feed the cat treat after treat before releasing it into the wild. Someone brings The Nightmare back and Eve promptly starts feeding it again.
• Girls Love Chocolate: Played With. When he attempts to test various "life hacks", one involves giving a girl chocolate to calm her down when she's mad. He tests this on his girlfriend, Anna, trying to cheer her up with chocolate after she discovered he signed her up for a cult. She takes the chocolate, but was still fuming, especially when he later came to take the chocolate back for a second life hack.
• Hard-Work Montage: A recurring gag in videos is for him to play through a chunk of the game just to progress the plot along without commentary, with clips of the game being set to original music parodying the game he's playing as we watch Kevin's character farm, fish, cook, etc. for the duration of the montage.
• Hijacked by Ganon:
  • His The Sims 4 game originally started with Urp John, a womanizing character with absurdly thin arms. But a few videos in, Kevin switched control over to the sim Jim Pickens and has stuck with him since, creating up to a hundred videos following Jim's life and evil shenanigans.
  • On a similar note, Jim Pickens seems to have perpetrated Kevin's other videos as the name 'Jim Pickens' or similar ones get used for any Hello, [Insert Name Here] games.
• Hilariously Abusive Childhood: Jim Pickens's backstory is explored in "Sims 1 but my family is insane". He's given a cramped bedroom, forced to do most of the housework, and frequently misses school, as neither Dick or Janice Pickens care for their son. His exposure to Dick drowning people at pool parties, and seeing the Grim Reaper revive his mother, likely influenced his murderous tendencies. He's later sent off to military school, though his relationship with Dick only barely changes.
• Humiliation Conga: Vidcund Curious in one of his The Sims 2 playthrough. After moving into Kevin's house, he has his savings spent, his brothers are drowned in Kevin's pool, he's abducted and impregnated by aliens, forced into a corner of the backyard and turned into a Breeding Slave, and finally gets scared to death by the ghost of one of his brothers.
• Hypocritical Humor: Intentionally done while he plays Bitlife and complains about there being an ad in the middle of his playing the game, only to immediately switch to an impromptu ad for his Jim Pickens Portrait in his merchandise store.
• Identical Stranger: Dennis Racket looks very much like Jim Pickens, to the point that Kevin has Jim murder Dennis and try to impersonate him, to get ahold of his money and house. It works despite Dennis' seemingly Resurrective Immortality.
• Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: His videos follow the naming pattern of '[Name of Videogame] But' and then mentioning how he ends up failing. In many choice-based games, the first one is called 'But I Choose All The Bad Options'.
• "It" Is Dehumanizing: Whenever his Sims have children (or in any game with a child-rearing mechanic), Kevin tends to refer to any such child as "it", often in the context of complaining about their welfare requiring any expenditure of resources or effort on his part.
• Karma Houdini:
  • Zig-zagged with Jim Pickens, who rarely gets any comeuppance for the multitude of Sims he kills off. But when Kevin had the Extreme Violence mod installed, Jim ended up murdering so many Sims that the Grim Reaper himself got pissed off with Jim and beat him up.
  • His Sims 2 playthrough ends with his character fleeing the house and leaving it to Bigfoot, never facing any retribution for his heinous acts.
• Master of the Mixed Message: Intentionally plays Clementine as one towards potential Love Interest Louis by ignoring or antagonizing him, only to turn around and spend time with him. Then he has Clem carve a heart around their initials on the piano and say how great it is that the two are friends.
• Mickey Mousing: In "This is what happens when you're a horrible king in Bitlife," Kevin has his character escape prison while humming the theme from The Pink Panther and syncing his character's movements to the music.
• Monster Clown: In "How EVIL can you be in Bitlife?", Kevin has his evil character get a job as a clown because he figures that's a good job for an evil person.
• Mythology Gag: In a Sims 3 LP on Kevin's old channel, Jim's nemesis was a pre-made Sim called Dennis Racket. In The Sims 4, Dennis Racket returns, seemingly as one of Kevin's custom creations, this time being an Identical Stranger to Jim.
• Non-Indicative Name:
  • Surprisingly, Grognak the Destroyer, Attorney at Law is not an attorney.
  • In his Series Makers video, Kevin makes a show called You Must Be Jochen: A Fex Comedy Special. There is no humor in the show at all.
• Out of Focus: Once Jim Pickens takes over the Sims 4 videos, the original protagonist Urp John is forgotten and merely mentioned a dozen episodes later, to point out how the series came to switch over to Jim. Kevin eventually encountered Urp's grown-up children and learned that Urp had since died of old age.
• Parental Neglect: Jim Pickens is often depicted as ignoring his various children, whether it's his biological children, adoptive children, or stepchildren.
• Pay Evil unto Evil : In his Beyond Two Souls gameplay, Kevin has little moral barriers stopping him from taking revenge on the Bullies. However, he may be going a tiiiiiiny bit too far according to some viewers.
• Punny Name: A staple of the Bitife videos.
  • In "How EVIL can you be in Bitlife?", Kevin names his character Eve Hill. Evil.
  • His character in "This is what happens when you're a horrible king in Bitlife" is Dick Tator. Dictator.
  • In "Bitlife but I'm a terrible Amish man", his character is Noah Electric. No Electric.
  • "I became the worst politician ever in Bitlife" features him playing as Pee Resident. President.
• Resurrective Immortality: The Racket parents in The Sims 4 seem to have this, as they kept coming back to life despite Jim constantly murdering them. When Jim steals Christmas, he drags Dennis along in order to kill him as a distraction. It does eventually turn out there is one death they seemingly can't come back from, old age.
• Revenge via Storytelling: In Series Makers, Kevin's shows were repeatedly trashed by a critic named Jochen. So, he spitefully named one of his shows "I Hate Jochen". Jochen must've thought it was Actually Pretty Funny, though, because he rated the show an 8/10.
• Right-Hand Cat:
  • Jim adopted Pumpkin Pickens specifically so he could be a supervillian with an evil cat.
  • Eve Hill in "How EVIL can you be in Bitlife?" adopts a Persian cat which Kevin names "The Nightmare." Kevin lampshades how villains usually have Persian cats.
• Running Gag:
  • Kevin being run over by cars, and cars overall being a constant danger to him and his characters. To the point that he inserted himself into The Sims 4, just so he could get his Sim-self killed by being run over by a car.
  • Stuart Little and eating things in AI Dungeon.
  • Steven Seagal tends to be the butt of many jokes in his videos, culminating in him dedicating an entire video and diss track to mocking the actor and his questionable antics.
• Scooby-Dooby Doors: In Jim's third hosue, he has a Bookcase Passage to the dungeon, along with a set of others that lead into empty rooms. Shortly after moving in, Human Racket ends up entering and exiting two of them repeatedly, which Kevin compares to "a bad episode of Scooby-Doo", cuing a Song Parody of What's New, Scooby-Doo? with a montage of Human entering and exiting doors in random places, fully creating this effect.
• Self-Deprecation: In his Until Dawn playthrough, during a scene where a character is forced to watch footage of something horrific, he edits in one of his own videos.
• Serial Escalation: The moment Jim shows up, his evil starts escalating very quickly. He starts by breaking up a family, moves on to trapping people underground, advances to starting multiple cults, starts a family only to use them as a makeshift blood bank after he turns into a vampire, and that's just the beginning of things. Kevin even lampshades it by saying his Sims 4 videos began with 'the forearm god' and went to 'Shrek impregnating the entire neighborhood.'
• She Cleans Up Nicely: Downplayed in the first NoPixel featuring Grognak, where they are given a makeover by Dawn and Sherry, ditching their plain shirt and jeans for a patterned midriff-baring shirt and Painted-On Pants.
• Short-Lived Leadership: In one Bitlife video, Goodat Cools-Politics was only president for a single day because he immediately wrote a book and got impeached. He was forced to time travel just to get the position back, holds onto it for one term... and then loses it to a fascist.
• Soft Reboot: After the Eco Lifestyle expansion for The Sims 4 was released, Kevin decided to do one of these, referencing the trope by name. Specifically, Jim Pickens bombed the neighbourhood, wiping out most of the cast. Afterwards, him and Turg become roommates and move to Evergreen Harbor together.
• Speak of the Devil: One of his jokes in his Grand Theft Auto V Chaos Mod outings is that he can't blurt out "Jesus!" because if he says it three times, it'll summon in either Griefer Jesus or Extreme Griefer Jesus.
• Stock Scream: When playing Cooking Simulator's TV show DLC, he repeatedly throws things at the audience, one of which results in an added Wilhelm Scream.
• Stylistic Suck: When making advertisements for Appnana, Kevin intentionally made them as bad as possible through the combination of a low effort script, visual errors, false information, and the use of unrelated memes and sound-effects. Each "attempt" to fix them only made him produce an even worse product, starting with a generic incompetent ad and ending with an incoherent, noisy mess.
• Tempting Fate: During one Bitlife playthrough, where he was a hundred-year-old YouTube sensation:
  Kevin: The Grim Reaper's never gonna take me. [hits the Age button, immediately dies] You'd swear I just edit these in, but no, it's just my timing.
• Time Skip: The Sims 4 But Eco Lifestyle Was A Bad Idea begins one in-universe year after the previous video, as part of a Soft Reboot.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist : Zig-Zagged and used alongside Not-so-well intentioned extremist. Kevin is very quick to resort to violence to punish the bullies in his Beyond Two Souls gameplay, but by the end he makes it clear that his goal isn't to make them turn into better people but to just cause them pain and suffering. Although it should be noted that at the start he seems to be legitimatly angry with the (mis)treatment of the main character.
• Unexplained Recovery: Dennis and Emma Racket constantly return after Jim murders them, and even Kevin can't seem to figure out how.
• Very Loosely Based on a True Story: His definitely-factual movie about the car accident features him as an All-Loving Hero, a Card-Carrying Villain who turns out to be Hitler, space travel, time travel, and a woman simply named "Strong Female".
• Writing Around Trademarks: Kevin eventually gets the Pickens family a mystery-solving dog for the Strangerville gamepack, and calls him 'Scobay Du'.

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