Web Video / Failboat

"Welcome to the Failboat channel! It only goes downhill from here."

Fail, understating the chaos that happens on this channel.

Well, good morning, good night, or good afternoon tropers depending on your timezone…

Daniel Michaud, also known as Failboat or simply Fail, is a YouTuber known for making content of Let’s Plays that was originally just Minecraft videos, but has since branched out to other games, mostly Let’s Plays of Nintendo games, such as Kirby, Splatoon, and Animal Crossing: New Horizons, though he often plays a couple of Indie titles, mainly A Hat in Time, all of which is coupled with humorous commentary and often chaotic moments on the side.

Fail has collaborated with many other content creators, most notably his close friends Fyrus, GG Gabriel Gaming, and JayMoji in a group formally known as the Failing Four, but have recently rebranded as a podcast called Mouthfools.

Failboat streams regularly on YouTube on his channel. Most of his streams are uploaded to his Stream Storage after they end. He also has a second channel for less edited content called Failboat’s Dinghy.

---

I'll list them this time! Trope attack!

• And I Must Scream: Chat playing as Bandana Waddle is interpreted (through text-to-speech donations) as not being in control of his body and thousands of people randomly controlling him instead, which is true, but Chat paints it in a more horrifying light
  Waddle Dee: Oh sweet brother in Christ, why can I not control my body? I am conscious, but this is a living nightmare. I feel as if I hear three-thousand voices all at once.
• Annoying Laugh: In a bit of Self-Deprecation, during one of his ad reads for his Youtooz figure, Cthulhu says his laugh sounds like an oxygen deprived chicken.
• A Rare Sentence:
  • While chat plays Mario 64, Dan makes the command to go forward the poop emoji so less people are spamming the clown emoji which makes Mario crouch, which leads to him saying this:
    Fail: We're literally going to make you guys take a dump so powerful it outpowers the clowns, which is a sentence I didn't even think was possible until now.
  • During Dan's playthrough of the Magolor Epilogue:
    Chat: Father, cannibalism is not a crime, it is how you procure the meat that is.
    (Beat)
    Fail: This and more sentences to expect on the Failboat YouTube Channel!
  • During Failboat’s challenge to beat the first level of Kirby and the Forgotten Land while bosses spawn every 30 seconds;
    Fail: Why is it always either the tree or a depressed penguin? Very specific curse, I know.
• Arc Words: One of the islands featured in the Animal Crossing series had "Do you trust me?" as one.
• Artificial Intelligence:
  • In "I made an Ai Grandma", Dan created a (faulty) image-recognition software and gave it the personality of a senile Grandmother who can't name the simplest of objects, always confusing it for something else. Daniel spends the stream trying (and often failing) to get her to recognize an image correctly.
  • Another stream has him use A.I. generated scripts to make the dialogue of his Animal Crossing villagers more interesting, or more accurately, meaner and ruder to Fail himself, making this an invoking of A.I. Is a Crapshoot.
• Audience Participation: Plenty examples:
  • Fail has had a couple streams where he allows his live chat to play games alongside him, each viewer typing in inputs to control the character, akin to Twitch Plays Pokémon. Things tends to go off the rails quickly.
    • The first time they did this was with Super Mario 64, where they tried to get the first star in the game. See A Simple Plan to see how that fiasco went down.
    • Later, Chat controlled Bandana Waddle Dee in Kirby and the Forgotten Land and joined Failboat in defeating all three arena boss rushes. The experience was heightened by Chat roleplaying as Waddle Dee through Text-to-speech.
    • Soon after, Chat played another Kirby game, this time Kirby Star Allies, with Chat playing as Kirby and Daniel playing the allies. The goal was just to beat the first level. They ended up beating the Final Boss^*They skipped nearly all the levels to get there though.
  • The "Animal Crossing but Strangers" series has Fail visiting subscriber islands in Animal Crossing: New Horizons.
  • For one stream of playing New Horizons' Happy Home Paradise DLC, Fail would ask Chat with help decorating the villagers' homes, asking for two numbers from them, relating to the row and column of the object selection screen. When Chat wanted to be paid, Fail begrudgingly complied and paid them their requested wage: a PNG of Gex. Yeah, it Makes Just as Much Sense in Context.
  • During Dan's "if you a collect a coin, you die" challenge for Kirby and the Forgotten Land, Chat was able to vote on what they predict he would die to the most in each level. If they guess correctly, they would receive a point, if not, Dan would.
  • Dan has also done a couple of live performances where he brings audience members to compete in a contest of Mii making (using Miitopia to create popular characters from Miis).
  • Failboat's creations made during his Photoshop Streams are prompted by requests from Chat.
• Badass Boast: Chat playing Bandana Waddle Dee gives a pretty epic one that turns hilarious while fighting Chaos Elfilis:
  Chat: I will keep climbing out of hell so I can kill God. Or date him, can't decide.
• Bait-and-Switch Comment: While playing Super Mario Sunshine:
  F.L.U.D.D.: It appears to be headed toward Corona Mountain!
  Fail: Corona Mountain? Seems like that would be a pretty poor spot to hide out in, you know, in today's day and age, huh? (Beat) Dude, mountains are dangerous is all I'm saying.
• Beat Without a "But": Upon messing up his recovery in Smash Bros., Dan has this to say:
  Fail: I may not be good. (Beat) That's the full sentence.
• The Bet:
  • invoked Before watching the latest Nintendo Direct, Dan made a bet with his viewers that if they showcase any major Kirby content, he would spend $100 on random Kirby merch. On top of that, he would buy $200 more if they confirmed his Kirby car theory. It turns out he would be right, and ended up spending $300 on the weirdest Kirby stuff ever bought.
  • Later on, he would do this again with another Direct, betting that if they showed any new Animal Crossing: New Horizons content, he would eat a Tom Nook plushie. After the announcement of the Happy Home Paradise DLC, he would stuff two in his mouth, as well as a Tom Nook cake along with two of his friends.
• Big Bad: Eyea, in the "Animal Crossing but Strangers" series, who appears to be a Vengeful Spirit taking revenge on Fail for burying her in the first episode of his playthrough. She also has a Cult dedicated to her, with many of Dan's viewers being members, to the point that Dan's not even surprised when they show up when he visits islands.
• Big "WHY?!": Fail's reaction upon seeing a Mii Fighter wearing Sans's head and a Creeper's body.
• Biting-the-Hand Humor: During a Photoshopping segment, Gab calls Google Images a place of villainy and filth. Dan lampshades this by thanking Google for a recent paycheck, causing Gab to double back.
• Blatant Lies:
  • While first playing Pizza Tower, Fail keeps saying that he actually beat the game before and actually 100% completed it a couple times, which explains why he has every costume available (he actually just downloaded a mod to get them). When the chat calls his bluff, he ends up discussing in-depth events in the game's story that never happen.
  • When Fail played certain Kirby games like Triple Deluxe and Planet Robobot, he wants it to be known that he's definitely playing on an official Nintendo console, not an emulator, no sir!
• Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick:
  • While designing Static's home:
    Fail: We have them, we have the room, we have the nice house, we have their mother. (places a pile of bones on the floor)
  • When describing his Minecraft OC, Dirty L:
    Fail: He's just a Wifi Steve main who builds dirty L's on people whenever he takes a stock. He's also a wanted felon for theft and murder, but that's like a whole other thing.
  • While editing Eyea's design on Animal Crossing:
    Fail: (changes color pallet) That's just Dedede- That is King Dedede. (switches again) That's an Octoling! That's an Octarian! (switches again) That's a paralysis demon.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: In Hat in Time but its a cinematic movie experience, Daniel plays a Hat in Time mod called "Hat Kid Steals the Declaration of Independence". In it, the Conductor uses the document to become an all-powerful (or "Omniexistant" as he says it) being that breaks the fourth wall and edits the very mod itself. Failboat in editing takes this one step further and the Conductor starts editing the very video itself, restarting it and even switching to other Failboat videos. If you look in the description, he even got the hashtags!
• Brick Joke:
  • Lampshaded in one of his Animal Crossing videos. When a glitch cause the characters to strip naked (see Naked People Are Funny below), Fail remembers he made a joke when first starting the Happy Home Paradise DLC about being naked, realizing the gag has come full circle.
  Fail: Chekov's Nudity! If you mention their lack of clothing in the first arc and they aren't stripped butt naked by the third, it's a bad movie!
  • In his Kirby and the Forgotten Land coinless challenge, he conducted a “streamer vs. Chat” challenge where they have to guess in a poll what Dan will die to the most. One of the options was “bear mauling” and someone mentioned that they paid for a bear to break in his house and presumably kill him. At the end of the video, when Fail gets up to answer the door, the bear is there waiting for him.
  Chat: I will pay for you to not remove bear mauling as an option. It will win this time, I swear.
  Fail: What do you mean by that?
  Chat: I have already ordered the bear and it’s on its way. Please, don’t remove the option it was an expensive bear.

  (At the end of the video)
  Someone rings the doorbell.
  Fail: Oh— Hold on. Sorry, let me get the door. One second.
  Fail gets up to answer the door.
  Fail: Hello?
  Sounds of a bear growling and stuff breaking is heard.
  Fail: Oh! Wait… no! Waugh!
  Chat: Oh, good. My bear is here.
• Bystander Syndrome: Played for Laughs. While playing Super Mario Sunshine, Fail comes across a Pianta that is on fire. Instead of spraying him off with F.L.U.D.D., he stands there watching the poor guy run out aflame while he drinks a glass of water before splashing it on himself.
• Call-Back: During one of his visits to a viewer island, a member of Eyea's cult makes reference to the first episode of Dan's Animal Crossing: New Horizons playthrough, when he buried Eyea in the ground. Dan lampshades the Call-Back.
• Calling Your Attacks: "Maybe this one'll hit him! BEAM ATTACK!"
• Camera Screw: Invoked in "Letting Chat break my Kirby stream", where Dan downloads a mod that allows his live chat to move the camera around in Kirby: Return to Dream Land while he tries to beat certain parts of the game. Chat, as expected, makes the challenge as hard as possible by either pushing the camera so high up or far down that Dan can't see the gameplay or rotating the camera around to the point of nausea.
• Cheaters Never Prosper: During Fail's Kirby and the Forgotten Land speedrun, he implements a mod that increases Kirby's speed exponentially in order to beat the world record. Later on, he brings back the "No Animations" mod from another stream to make himself go even faster. And when he's still behind the world record holder, he decides go to an already complete save file and skip to the final level from there. Finally, with two seconds on the clock, he pauses the timer and continues, despite explicitly saying seconds before that he wouldn't do that because "he has honor". Despite all of this, he still fails the challenge.
• Chekhov M.I.A.: During his second playthrough of Miitopia, Lee is mysteriously missing when Friend appears again. Once Screamith has been beaten, Lee knocks down the Dark Curse, and reveals himself as Hank, the Dark Lord from Failboat's first Miitopia playthrough, back to get revenge for being forgotten.
• Chroma Key: Dan uses a green screen for his streams. However, during his playthrough of Pokémon Legends: Arceus, he uses one to make it appear like he's playing the game in first person, with incredibly hilarious results.
• Circle of Shame: Invoked in "Splatoon 3 but my Live Chat can talk", where every time Fail dies during a Splatoon 3 level, a bunch of gifs appear on his stream and laugh at him, and he has to add another one each time. It gets to the point where he asks his parents for a photo of them laughing and they get in on the action.
• Cluster F-Bomb: Purposely done when Chat played Mario 64. In order to encourage Chat to press the poop emoji which makes Mario go forward, he has to break his family-friendly rules and say "sh*t" multiple times. When Chat dies to King Bob-Omb, Fail even lets out an enraged Precision F-Strike.
• Coincidence Magnet: Downplayed. In the second Fight Mii tournament, when the prompt was the Squid Sisters, JayMoji and Failboat find someone cosplaying as Marie to play (who they even treat as the real deal, no less). During the next round, which was Sonic the Hedgehog, the two hosts pick someone who was wearing a hoodie with Sonic's colors. Failboat soon lampshades this.
  Failboat: "How do you keep finding people that are just the prompt?"
  JayMoji: "Good at my job, Dan. That's what you hired me for."
• Couch Gag:
  • Most of the intros for the Photoshopping videos start with Daniel giving "The Problem" and then giving "The Solution", which leads into the focus of the photoshop segment.
  • His Animal Crossing videos focused on special events start with a scenario illustrated with stock images, starting with "It's a [time of day]" and "You wake up". Here's a compilation of them, in all their chaotic glory.
• Did You Just Romance Cthulhu?: Played for Laughs. While fighting Chaos Elfilis, Chat (playing as Bandana Waddle Dee) attempts to do this and starts hitting on it, much to Fail's amused shock and annoyed protests. Chat continues to do this to more Kirby bosses in future streams.
  Chat: Hey Kirby, is it just me, or is Chaos Elfilis kinda fine tho? Like, hey what you doing Elfilis? Should we get married and lay waste to this forgotten land?
• Distinction Without a Difference:
  Fail: "Is that an electric chair?" No no no no no, surgical chair. That produces electricity. Chair that produces high voltage- potentially lethal electricity directly into the person that sit in it. Not an electric chair, don't get it twisted.
• A Dog Named "Cat": When the Failing Four visit Fyrus' Animal Crossing island, he introduces them to his pet spider called Anthony. Gab lampshades it:
  Gab: But he's not an ant.
  Fyrus: Yeah, but it's a spider, Gab.
  Gab: But why call him "Ant-hony"?
  Fyrus: Because it's a NAME, GAB! It doesn't have to relate to it! It's not like if you called yourself "Humaney" cause you're a human!
• Dull Surprise: Lampshaded when Fail narrates Static's 'adventure':
  Fail: In a rush, our hero of this adventure, steps out. The tragedy fills their eyes. As you can see, every single emotion riding on their face at once.
• "Eureka!" Moment: When Chat "helps" Fail make a vacation get-away for a villager, Fail has a hard time trying to piece together the random elements into a cohesive narrative. It isn't until he reads a suggestion from Chat that he figures it out:
  Fail: Garage sale? (Beat) Garage sale.
• Face–Heel Turn: This is how the King Salmonoid from Splatoon 3 is interpreted in "The Salmon Run Experience", as Chat (being shown as a Small Fry) turning into the giant monster from all the eggs it's eaten and attacking Fail and his teammates.
• Freudian Slip: During the glitch that causes some Animal Crossing characters to become naked, Fail has this slip out:
  Fail: Huzzah, another win for Big D-Denny's-DENNY'S! Not Big-D, not Big-Denny's DENNY'S! Poor words were used today.
• Fun with Acronyms: Invoked. While Fail plays Super Mario Bros. Wonder, his Talking Flower Bloom says that the name "Failboat" is actually an acronym. It's not, but Fail makes one up.
  Fail: Forgetful And I Love... uhhh.. Boat... Or A... Toad. Failboat!
• Fusion Dance: Many of Fail's and his friends' Photoshop creations are crosses between two characters, usually with hilarious (or horrifying) outcomes, with one session focused solely on merging two Pokémon together.
• Gag Censor: While buying art from Red in Animal Crossing, Fail walks in and see Red has a very... mature statue in stock. Panicking, Fail pulls up the first image he has on him to censor the statue, which hilariously is just a zoomed-in picture of Carl Wheezer's face.
• The Gambling Addict: If there's a Betting Minigame, Gacha mechanic, or anything sort of random element in a game, Fail will get hooked, and spend a lot of his in-game money on them, trying to get the best possible item.
• Game Mod: Dan has played many mods for a variety of different games.
  • Most of his A Hat in Time streams and videos are focused on playing with modded-in characters, costumes, levels, and more.
  • Dan also has a modded Minecraft server for him and his friends, the Failing Four to play together on.
  • More recently, Dan has been playing around mods for Kirby games, mainly ones that absolutely break the games they're in, ranging from removing all of Kirby's animations, making him faster every second, a boss appearing every other minute, and so much more.
    • For one stream, Fail's friend Jay joined on a playthrough of Kirby's Return to Dream Land with over 40 mods thrown into it, creating very odd and hilarious moments such as Bubsy kissing an M&M while fighting a bunch of Half-Life scientists.
• Good Bad Bugs: In-Universe. There are many streams specifically focused on finding glitches in games and having fun with them. Sometimes Fail Exploits these bugs, one notable example being the Hammer Jump Glitch from Kirby and the Forgotten Land, where Fail uses it to skip levels and farm stars by glitching the arena.
• Grandfather Paradox: While playing Pokémon Legends: Arceus, upon meeting Kamado, Fail realizes that he is Professor Rowan's ancestor, meaning without him there's no Gen 4. Fail then proceeds to stab Kamado, with the video then showing Rowan, a copy of Pokémon Diamond, all of Nintendo's videos on Pokémon Legends, and even the very video itself fading from existence.
• Guinness Episode: In "So I cheated a Kirby Speedrun...", Fail attempts to beat the world record on Kirby and the Forgotten Land using cheats that make Kirby go faster every second. He doesn't beat it, despite everything he did to rig it (see Cheaters Never Prosper above).
• Hollywood Atheist: In My Chat forced me to protect a NPC in Kirby, Kevin the Poppy Bro repeatedly states that he is an atheist, and doesn't believe in anything. When he nearly falls into a pit and dies, the experience causes him to no longer be such and he starts quoting actual scripture. He does apparently fall back into Atheistism when he meets Zelda.
• Hollywood Psych: While playing Kirby's Epic Yarn, Fail plays therapist to help his live chat with their insane and violent mindset and Cloudcuckoolandish ways, which really just boils down to him saying vaguely therapeutic things, which none of it really works on the Chat. At one point he admits he's running out of therapist practices to say.
• Hypocritical Humor: While playing Kirby and the Forgotten Land's arena, Chat (as Bandana Waddle) drops this little piece of gold^*Neither Kirby and Waddle Dee wear clothing, if you didn't know:
  Waddle Dee: Alright Kirby, I've been respectful of your choices for a while. But for the love of Dee, please put on some pants.
  Fail: Rich coming from you!
• Insane Equals Violent: Played for Laughs. Fail's of the opinion that his own Live Chat is this, a description that the Chat wears with pride. Whenever they play games alongside Fail, Chat talks about killing everything in sight or even drinking the blood of the bosses they fight. This leads to Fail acting as their therapist to try and help them, but this only seems to encourage them to be more bloodthirsty.
• Insane Troll Logic: When playing Super Mario Sunshine, the first things Fail does is have Mario jump into the ocean and drown, as to prove his own innocence, because "you can't go to jail if you're a corpse."
• Lame Pun Reaction: While playing around with the Hammer Jump glitch in Kirby and the Forgotten Land, Fail manages to land on a large chain hanging from the celing. He then makes a The Legend of Zelda quip off of it, before giving himself a Lame Pun Reaction.
  Fail: I didn't think I was playing Breath of the Wild, yet here I am: Link. (Beat) You-you can boo now... -2 streamer points.
• Meta Twist: Think that Failboat's second Miitopia playthrough will follow the same plot as the first? Think again. After defeated Screamith, rather than possessing the Great Sage, the Dark Curse is knocked down by Lee, who reveals himself to be Hank, the Dark Lord from the first playthrough, seeking his revenge on Failboat for forgetting about him. He then absorbs the power of the Dark Curse, and captures Great Sage Peppa.
• Mind Hive: Chat playing as Bandana Waddle Dee is portrayed as such. Considering all the disconnected motives it has and the Non Sequiturs it's throwing out, it might as well be true.
  Waddle Dee: I call out for salvation, for a thousand souls speak from my lips.
• Monster Clown: A downplayed example: when Chat played Super Mario 64, Fail mapped the crouch/groundpound input to the clown emoji. This allowed members to start spamming the input to make Mario stop dead in his track and halt their progress, essentially making them the antagonists of the stream.
• Mook Promotion: To help him defeat Kirby, God turns Waddle Doo into a King Doo. It doesn't help much.
• Moving the Goalposts: Lampshaded in "So I forced my friend to beat a Modified Kirby Boss..", where Fail challenges Jay to beat a modded King Dedede, with his reward being various gift cards. When Jay finally beats him after a couple of attempts, Fail reveals he has one more boss for him to fight: Galacta Knight (modded over Meta Knight). Jay namedrops the trope when this is revealed. Even after Jay easily beats that boss, Fail tried to download more mods for him to fight, but it doesn't work and Fail gives Jay his prize.
• My Eyes Are Up Here: Played for Laughs during one the Failing Four's Minecraft sessions, where Gab says the line when equipping a mod that gives his avatar large breasts.
• My God, What Have I Done?: At the end of his Magolor Epilogue playthrough, he has this reaction when he realizes that he retroactively added microtransactions to Super Kirby Clash by collecting the pieces of the gem apple.
  Fail: What have we done?! NOOOOO!
• Naked People Are Funny: invoked During what was supposed to be a chill Animal Crossing stream, Fail accidently runs into a glitch where all the villagers wearing his custom clothing appear butt naked. Obviously, hilarity ensues. Things ramp up even more when he has to take pictures of them both in and outside of the building, and when he invites them to the end of the game dance party (yep, they're dancing on the beach fully nude). At one point, Fail muses that if he put a naked character with a censor bar in the thumbnail, it would get ten times the average views. He then decides to do just that with Shino.
  • An intentional example with Naked Sans, a Mii Brawler Dan made in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate that has Sans' head and K.K Slider's body, making it appear like Sans is fully nude.
  • He attempts something similar again with Naked Rabbid, but Chat points out that Rabbids are already naked.
• Nightmare Face: Eyea, from Fail's Animal Crossing series, is literally just a Nightmare Face, with only huge Creepy Blue Eyes and a Slasher Smile. While her original design is relatively tame, the community took her to whole new levels. Trust us, once you see Eyea in HD, you really can't unsee it.
• Nightmarish Factory: During his playthrough of the Animal Crossing DLC, Fail designs a very creepy factory for Stitches that creates living Teddy Bears by infusing human bones into teddies, complete with an electric chai- er, a surgical chair that produces electricity. Fail jokingly assumes this is how Build-A-Bear makes bears.
• NOT!: While racing to beat RubberRoss’s Super Mario Maker world, Failboat and JayMoji play n one-word improv game to pass the time while Fail struggles to beat a level. This was the first result:
  Jay: Failboat.
  Fail: Suffering.
  Jay: From.
  Fail: Ball.
  Jay: Is.
  Fail: Really.
  Jay: Funny.
  Fail: ...NOT!
• Please Subscribe to Our Channel: Like any good YouTuber, Failboat makes sure to ask the viewer to subscribe, although this is sometimes Played for Laughs depending on the situation.
  Fail: If [glitched Animal Crossing characters becoming naked] disgusts you, consider subscribing! Or if you're into this kind of stuff, also consider subscribing. The community is vast, you'll fit right in.
• Plot-Triggering Death: Invoked by Fail while designing Static's home in the Happy Home Paradise DLC for Animal Crossing. Fail creates the narrative where Static's mother is killed by the villain, who then burns down their home before disappearing, which Fail describes as prompting the larger call-to-action for Static's dreamed adventure. Static's not too happy that this is the start of his adventure.
• Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: Failboat’s team in his Miitopia playthrough includes himself, a demon hunter from Mario Kart, a joke version of Shrek, a cleric with a Hair-Trigger Temper, a destructive and sociopathic mage with a massive chin, an AU version of Deku, a joke version of Lancer, a normal girl who everyone thinks is Rosalina, a walking and talking flower, and Joker from Persona 5. This also extends to his next playthrough on the Switch, where the team consists of a joke version of Mario with massive eyebrows, a legendary warrior who gets given unfitting makeup by his seven year old daughter, a bald guy who has an extra face stuck on his forehead, a shark that wants to become a singer, the easily angered cleric and sociopathic mage from the previous playthrough (who are now a warrior and a scientist respectively), Failboat himself but in a cat costume, a Boo sent as a spy by the Dark Lord, Failboat’s live chat, and a muscular duck.
• Rousing Speech: Parodied. While Chat struggle to beat a level in Kirby Star Allies with a lot of Bottomless Pits, one member suggests to remove the option that makes Kirby drop into the abyss (which is mapped to the foot emoji for context). Fail has this to say in response:
  Fail: You know what, you can't just go through life expecting the hardships to be removed. What are you gonna do if you go about your day, and someone has feet? What are you gonna do, tell them to cover up their feet? You have to swallow your pride, you have to move on with your life, and you have to walk past their feet with abandon. You can't be scared of feet, Chat. You have to accept that people. Have. Feet!
  (Kirby immediately falls into a pit)
• Running Gag:
  • "The idea is simple!"
  • invoked During Fail's playthrough of Kirby: Planet Robobot, he made a joke having Waddle Doo saying "BEAM ATTACK" whilst trying to attack Kirby, only for Kirby to incinerate the poor creature, sending it straight to heaven. Memetic Mutation caused the bit to spread like wildfire across YouTube. Fail acknowledged this, and now any time a Waddle Doo appears again, the joke has to be made. Click here for the entire story so far.
    • Also during the Planet Robobot playthrough, Fail kept talking about which Kirby character would jaywalk.
  • While Fail was first playing Super Mario Odyssey, he called the Power Moons "Mooms" and says such when collecting them. Later, when playing Super Mario Sunshine, he calls the Shine Sprites "Stooms", and then in Bowser's Fury, one of the chat members names the Cat Shines "Mewums".
  • Chat hitting on Kirby bosses, much to Fail's annoyance.
  • Chat's random obsession with Gex.
  • Ever since his first playthrough of Miitopia, Fail's chat keeps calling him a Cat Furry, much to his annoyance. It's gotten to the point where if a Cat Suit is equipable, Fail has to put it on his in-game avatar.
  • Dan ending his videos with "Anyway, thank you for coming to my TED Talk."
• Sadistic Choice: During an Animal Crossing stream where Fail had his Live Chat help design vacation homes for villagers, they found themselves in a situation where Chat had to save one of two people from drowning, Phoenix Wright or one of their own, a fellow Chat member. The chat ultimately votes to save Phoenix, leaving the chat member to drift away into the ocean, along with the piece of Gex that chat had earned from the last house they worked on. We promise, this all makes sense in context.
• Scatterbrained Senior: The AI Grandma Fail creates emulates this. It's supposed to be a image recognition program, but the AI fails to recognize even the most simplest of objects, often confusing them with entirely different things, driving Failboat mad.
• "The Scream" Parody: During one of his Pokémon Photoshop streams, he recreates the famous painting… using a screenshot of a Bellsprout morphed into a screaming Pikachu. His friends (and the Chat) react with disgust, with Gab comparing it to a skin mask from The Silence of the Lambs.
• Self-Deprecation: Daniel's no stranger to throwing a couple of jabs at himself from time to time. Here's a bit from his playthrough of Super Mario Sunshine:
  Pianta: Your first job is to get rid of all that ugliness.
  Fail: I've been working on that for the last 25 years of my life pal. Hadn't started early, ain't gonna start today.
• Self-Imposed Challenge: In-Universe examples:
  • Fail plays through Kirby and the Forgotten Land with a mod that instantly kills Kirby if he collects a coin. It sounds easy at first, except lots of things give Kirby coins, including killing an enemy, touching a flower, kicking a rock or a piece of garbage, or even just walking through a gathering of butterflies and birds.
  • In addition to regular Pokémon nuzlockes, Fail has also done this with Super Mario Odyssey, where every costume/outfit counts as a life, and dying makes him lose that costume.
• Shout-Out:
  • Fail named his Animal Crossing island "Denny's" after the restaurant and made a house designed after it's decor.
  • While playing Splatoon 3's Salmon Run, whenever a Big Shot enemy appears, a low quality kazoo rendition of BIG SHOT plays until it's killed.
  • Dan has made a couple of Shout-Outs to Exploding TNT, referencing his friendship with the creator and his reoccurring roles in his videos:
    • While playing Steve in ''Smash Bros.'':
    (standing next to a lit TNT) Hey I remember this old Minecraft channel. (TNT explodes while old channel theme plays)
    • Both he and Skip the Tutorial make a couple to the channel in one video (see Take That, Audience! below).
  • In the beginning of his Animal Crossing playthrough, Fail quips that K.K. Slider is a demon that attacked the village and one that Fail can call upon in his worst moment. One of his chat members confuses it for Naruto.
  • In So I glitched Kirby.., when trying to get back into bounds after using the Hammer jump glitch, Fail compares the experience to using a glitched Skyrim horse. Later, when he manages to glitch under the arena, he says that he's entering The Backrooms.
• A Simple Plan: Dan rigged up his stream to allow his live chat to control Mario in Super Mario 64. Their goal was to get the first star in Bob-Omb Battlefield. Easy, right? It took nearly three hours, Dan changing the controls multiple times, multiple clowns halting their progress, the introduction of poop emojis to combat the clowns, the loss of general sanity, and Fail breaking the rules of the stream and swearing up a storm to encourage them, but they eventually did it. Later, Dan calls it "the worst stream he's ever done".
• Smug Snake: Dan has a habit of getting cocky and boastful when he's doing good in a game, only for him to fail spectacularly while doing so. Here's a good example of such a time when he and Vernias were playing Kirby's Dream Course.
  Fail: Oh I'm too good! I am just too good! I am just way too good for me to understand my own actions. It would take scholars YEARS to get on my level, to even comprehend 10% of my actual brain. (misses hole that was right in front of him) I hate myself.
• Spoof Aesop: How Dan ends a couple of his videos. They will most always require context.
  • From the end of his second Bowser's Fury video:
    Fail: And at the end of the day, the lesson we learned from this game, is why dress like a furry when you can stab someone?
  • From "So I glitched Kirby..", when Fail manages to get back to a level after glitching by glitching some more:
    Fail: So the moral of the story, if you ever break something, just break more things until everything is fixed. And once everything is broken, nothing will be.
  • invoked Dan's friend Gab from the Failing Four also throws out a Broken Aesop at the end of a Photoshopping segment:
    Gab: War crimes win every day people, remember that.
    Fail: And that's where we're gonna end it, on that life lesson!
• Symbiotic Possession: In Adding dread to Animal Crossing, Anarea ends up trying to kill Daniel near the end of the video with the spirit of Eyea.
• Take That!:
  • Fail repeatedly throws shade at the Wii U, at one point calling it a doorstopper.
  • In Animal Crossing but salt :), Fail questions why no one has made Mario Party in Animal Crossing before. Cue images of amiibo Festival and it's low reviews.
• Take That, Audience!: Daniel's also no stranger to throwing out some light-hearted jabs at his live chat or his audience in general.
  • Here's a good one from his Bowser's Fury Let's Play:
  Fail: "Bowser Jr. is just an oversized turtle?" That's like saying Isabelle is an above-average dog. Like give them a little bit of credit, they got sentience, that's already three steps higher than most of my chat members.
  • While playing a modded Super Mario World that allows his friend Skip the Tutorial to control the enemies, Dan reads a suggestion that they should make a code so that the Chat could control them. Dan and Skip then mock common complaints that viewers have as if they're the enemies.
  Fail: It's all fun and games until the Koopas start criticizing my content.
  Skip: "I liked you better in the Exploding TNT videos!"
  Fail: "Make more Animal Crossing videos!" The naked man starts asking where Purple Shep is.
  • Fail is also of the opinion that his Chat is "clinically insane", to the point where he starts playing therapist to them.
• Tempting Fate: While playing Pokémon Legends: Arceus, Fail expresses disappointment that the battle mechanics haven't changed much. As soon as he says that, the Shinx he was in the middle of catching breaks out of it's Pokéball, instantly raises all of it's stats, and nearly takes out Fail's own Pokémon, terrifying Fail.
• That Came Out Wrong:
  • During the latter half of the stream where Chat played ''Mario 64'', the input for walking forward was the poop emoji and the punch/grab button was the punch emoji. This combination of inputs (alongside Fail deciding to swear to encourage the Chat) leads to Fail saying this when the chat is fighting King Bob-Omb:
  Fail: Ok, we need an even balance of fisting and shitting! (realizes) I'm sorry-wow, WHOA, hold a second there!
  • In "Playing Kirby the wrong way", while playing Kirby Tilt 'n' Tumble, Fail tapes his controller to his VR headset and says this while putting it on:
  Fail: I'm entering Kirby! (cue image of Kirby making a suspicious face)
• Too Good to Be True: While designing villages' paradises in the Animal Crossing DLC, he often starts the builds normally, without a cursed thing in sight. The chat, knowing Fail, doesn't "trust it for a second", and they're almost always justified in saying that.
• Tournament Arc: In "Animal Crossing but I made Fall Guys", Fail hosted a minigame tournament on his island in a manner designed after Fall Guys, with six of his friends participating in the games.
• The Triple: While designing Static's house:
  Fail: From them, they will learn many things, the thrill of adventure, the wiles of being an adult, but most importantly, how to kill someone under three second, using just breathing techniques.
• "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: The ending of "Splatoon 3 but my Live Chat can talk" ends with a parody of this by showing that Dan never experienced laughter again, his parents would take over the Failboat brand and sell it for just over $12, Lil' Chatty is still an unhinged maniac, possibly a felon, and the 100% volume reverb fart would never be played.
• Yank the Dog's Chain: When Dan finally completes an incredibly hard Super Mario Maker 2 level, he breathes a sigh of relief, thinking it's over. Turns out, that was his 100th completed level, and the game rewards him... with a Cat suit for his Mii avatar. Dan can only react in shock and despair as he equips the outfit on his Mii.

---