Today's page will be dedicated to Dean of Doom, a YouTube web series that began in 2020 by MtPain27
. As his aforementioned Opening Monologue states, the series reviews wads largely based on Doom and Doom II, which, for the uninitiated, are sets of levels for the aforementioned games; ranging from the officially released campaigns from the 90s, to well-known fanmade level sets, to newly-released hidden gems still being released from the community.
Similarly to fellow classic shooter reviewer Civvie 11, Dean of Doom is framed within its own in-universe setting, with MtPain27 himself playing the eponymous Dean giving lectures on the featured Doom wads. Unfortunately for him, his only regular student is a talking, deadbeat Pain Elemental fittingly known as the Delinquent of Doom, who would rather be playing modern shooters like Titanfall 2 than cultivate an appreciation for the classics. However, lore usually takes a backseat to focus on the Dean's review of the wads.
So here's how the show works. Every map gets one grade for quality and one for difficulty. Quality grades go from A to F. Grade A levels are fun, memorable, visually distinctive, creative, and a fair challenge. We grade difficulty from X to E; X for Extreme, E for Easy, A through D in between. Keep in mind, his idea of a great map is not the same as ours, but that's okay; disagreeing is part of the fun after all.
At the end of the day, this show is about spreading the joy of Doom, so let's do so.
Before we start, the rules are: we play on Ultra Violence, or in this case, "Ruin My Life", and must pistol-start each level, he needs to play the wad twice before reviewing it, saves are allowed, and we go for 100% kills on all levels, making exceptions where it's just not worth it.
And now, to the tropes:
- Broke the Rating Scale:
- The Dean was about to hit "Citadel at the Edge of Eternity" from Community Chest with an F for its "incredibly mean and intentionally exasperating" difficulty before going on a Digression about how a level like it "breaks my grading system" and admits "the grades don't matter" ultimately, restating the show's mission to "spread the joy of Doom." At the Season 2 graduation episode, he doesn't list it among the failed maps, saying it "rejected my F, went off and started its own Doom school in hell itself."
- To a lesser extent, some of the most brutally difficult levels in Junk Food, several of which at the time of the episode did not have a non-tool-assisted DSDA demo, are simply graded DNF (Did Not Finish), largely because he needed to get through the wad quickly to release the episode on April Fools' Day.
- Most of the maps in joke wads like Mock 2 The Speed of Stupid and in the Deliquent's episode for Sunlust are given nonsensical grades outside of the established grading system.
- Hidden Depths: The Delinquent is revealed to be a surprising competent Doom mapper, with a number of maps in his in-universe wad, Lunar Eclipse, legitimately impressing the Dean, who gave it a passing grade of D overall in spite of his multiple F-graded maps, many of which are deliberate trolling on the Delinquent's part.
- I'm Standing Right Here: The Delinquent pops in as the Dean and Doomkid are killing a group of Pain Elementals during a co-op session in Memento Mori and the Dean jokingly says "Kill the Delinquent's family!""Caught in 4K live! Gonna put this on YouTube! Gonna cancel the Dean of Doom!"
- Letting the Air out of the Band: A failing grade for a map will typically cause its music track to abruptly stop as the F is given. The Dean will also cut off MIDIs he finds particularly grating, such as "Bye, Bye, American Pie" from Doom II, and replace them with calming synth music.
- Precision F-Strike: While he has yet to verbally drop an uncensored f-bomb, he will often show save games titled as expletives during particularly frustrating maps and megawads and showed the keys from a keyboard he broke attempting the notoriously difficult map "Swim With The Whales" spelling out "FUCK WHALES." He is also not above explicitly referring to overly frustrating maps like "Poison Ivy II" from Speed of Doom as "bullshit."
- Running Gag:
- Any Pun by the wad or the Dean himself will elicit an Archvile death cry acting as a groaning Lame Pun Reaction.
- Superflous enemies placed tediously on unreachable ledges (referred to by the Dean as "Monster Window Dressing") will elicit an imp pain state sound accompanied by the monster's death sprite, referencing to a commonly-placed offender.
- Starting when one of his favorite maps, "The Mucus Flow" was immediately followed by a Gene Bird map in Community Chest 2, whenever a map the Dean likes is followed up by a mediocre-to-bad one, he will say some variation of "Well... It's no [Name of previous map]..."
- Shout-Out:
- Right before the level in Hell Revealed that uses the MIDI song "How'd I Do," from Rise of the Triad, which Civvie 11 uses as his outro music, H4MMER from the aforementioned channel pops in to tell the Dean to "Play the game, MtPain27."
- At the beginning of the Junk Food episode, after the map demonstrating the power-ups appropriately reskinned to resemble Mountain Dew, Doritos, and McDonald's, the Dean states, "This can't be good for me, but I feel great."
- Sound-Effect Bleep: While standard bleep sound effects are typically used for cursing, the Delinquent's uses a dog bark... for some reason...
