Web Video / Lady Emily

Just a girl who loves analyzing media, both popular and obscure.

— Channel Description

Lady Emily is a video essayist who analyzes various works of pop culture. She is a co-writer for her friend and fellow video essayist Sarah Z, and eventually began creating videos of her own. Her very first video was on The Failure of Channel Awesome's Demo Reel.

The video was so wildly popular that she soon became a well-regarded essayist in her own right. Since then she has also become known for videos on subjects like anime, reality tv, and internet history.

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Tropes:

• Author Appeal: Emily generally makes videos on whatever media she is interested in, such as her videos on Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy's relationship, which is her favorite ship, or her video on her favorite manga Berserk. She also loves making videos about So Bad, It's Goodinvoked content.
• Author Catchphrase: Emily uses the word "buckwild" at some point in all of her videos.
• Bait-and-Switch:
  • In "The Many Adaptations of Berserk", she discusses which adaptations of Berserk are worth watching. At the start, she quickly answers that the manga is the best way to enjoy the series, going to credits and pretending the video is over before talking about the series’ other adaptations.
  • "The Failure of Channel Awesome's Demo Reel" starts by talking about Neon Genesis Evangelion, and how the series came to be coloured by director Hideaki Anno's declining mental state over the course of production. While not directly tied to the video's subject matter, it serves as very deliberate foreshadowing for the trajectory Demo Reel's writing would take over the course of the series. "The Return of Channel Awesome's Demo Reel" likewise opens by talking about Rebuild of Evangelion, and how what was intended as a simple remake split off in its own direction to reflect Anno's changing outlook on life — which Emily then admits has nothing to do with Demo Reel's brief Halloween 2021 revival, before she segues to the main topic with an awkward "Hey, did y'all know Demo Reel made a comeback?"
  • The same video initially claimed to be about the reboot of Demo Reel, but this ended up only being the focus of the first half of the video. The second half instead focuses on Nostalgia Critic's clipless reviews. The true purpose of the video is to analyze and criticize Doug Walker and his work rather than just looking at the Demo Reel reboot.
• Bile Fascination:invoked This is why Emily is fascinated by awful works like Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark and often makes videos about them.
• Body Horror: She compares her now intrinsic connection to Demo Reel by nature of her video on it blowing up to the main character of The Fly (1986) getting insect DNA mixed up in his own.
  Emily: Some of Demo Reel got in the teleporter and now I'm growing Donnie Dupree's fedora out of my flesh.
• Call-Back: "The Return of Channel Awesome's Demo Reel" features many references to her previous video about Demo Reel. She only made the video because the semi-reboot of the series made her feel the first one was incomplete and she needed to look at the bigger picture of how Doug's work changed after it ended.
• Everything is Big in Texas: Emily is Texan and her videos are usually very long, many of them over an hour in length.
• Hatedom:invoked Discussed in her video on The Angry Video Game Nerd, where she talks about the group of people who hate AVGN and James as a person for the declining quality of his videos. She mentioned having received backlash from this group for defending James.
• Idiosyncratic Ratings Scale: She rates various adaptations of Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy based on scales of "be gay" and "do crimes".
• The Gadfly: She enjoys putting references to shonen anime in the scripts that she co-writes with Sarah so as to make Sarah sound like a weeb.
• Laughing Mad: Emily starts laughing maniacally at the end of "The Return of Channel Awesome's Demo Reel", driven to insanity at how the Demo Reel reboot ended exactly like her previous video about it.
• Mistaken Nationality: Emily is often assumed to be Canadian due to her friendship with Canadian Sarah Z, when she is actually from Texas.
• Motor Mouth: Emily tends to speak very quickly in her videos.
• Narcissist: Not her, rather, she argues that Doug Walker is an entitled narcissist who always thinks his opinion is right and constantly looks down on others.
• Phrase Catcher: On Sarah's videos, she's referred to so often as "my co-writer Emily" that some commenters like to joke that it's her full name.
• Ping Pong Naïveté: One of Lady Emily's complaints about the first episode of Demo Reel is the inconsistent portrayal of its main character Donnie's intelligence level and motivations. The movie remakes he directs are written in a harshly satirical tone as if they're a deliberate attempt to mock the source material, but Donnie himself is depicted in the behind-the-scenes mockumentary footage as an earnest-yet-incompetent would-be filmmaker who loves movies but doesn't understand what makes them work; this jarring dissonance resulted in a main character switching back and forth between "idiot trying to make a masterpiece" and "Caustic Critic trying to make a farce" at seemingly random intervals.
• Piss-Take Rap: She is not a fan of the "Supervillain Shuffle", a rap from Demo Reel featuring Batman villains, seeing it as extremely lame and unfunny.
• Queer Colors:
  • The channel's icon and banner use the transgender colors of pink, white, and blue to represent Emily's trans identity.
  • The thumbnail of "The Evolving Relationship of Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy" uses rainbow colors to reflect the queer ship.
• Radio Friendliness: Discussed in her Plastic Beach video. After gushing at length about the album's lead single "Stylo", Emily bluntly admits that it never had a chance of being a hit like the label had been hoping for, pointing to its almost 5-minute length and unconventional structure with no clear verses or chorus as reasons why it was a poor fit for pop radio, especially in 2010's pop music landscape.
  Emily: [Stylo] rules and is great, but it wasn't something you'd hear being blasted at a party or on the Top 10 charts.
• Rapid-Fire "No!": Her reaction to the Demo Reel return was met with the following statement on twitter (and later repeated in her video on said return):
  Emily: It has come to my attention that Channel Awesome is teasing something Demo Reel related and nope nope nope nope nope nope nope nope nope I can't not again not anymore nope nope nope nope
• Running Gag: Emily tries to insert the word "buckwild" into all of her scripts.
• Seasonal Rot:invoked
  • In "A Deep Dive Into The Cinemassacre Backlash", she discusses the decline in quality of The Angry Video Game Nerd.
  • Emily argues that Nostalgia Critic heavily declined after its revival, with its focus shifting to unfunny sketches rather than just talking about movies. These issues become especially prominent with his clipless reviews, which feature no footage from films and instead are just made of awful recreations.
• Shout-Out:
  • "The Return of Channel Awesome's Demo Reel" features multiple references to Neon Genesis Evangelion, as the video uses the series to understand the history of Nostalgia Critic, and the video's thumbnail parodies the series.
  • The channel's banner features a Batman figure and a Neon Genesis Evangelion poster.
  • Her video on Plastic Beach has her mention the term "trainwrecord", coined by Todd in the Shadows.
• So Bad, It Was Better:invoked Her video on Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark argues that in some ways the arguably worse version of the musical was also far more interesting than the final product (if only because, as she puts it, "Peter Parker needs to marry a spider to death").
• So Bad, It's Good:invoked Emily is fascinated by terrible content, such as Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.
• The Stinger: Most of her videos feature a stinger after a sponsorship and showing a list of her patrons.
  • The stinger of "A Deep Dive Into The Cinemassacre Backlash" has Emily get attacked by Rex Viper for insulting his band. His venom causes Emily's face to change into a new profile pic, and she fights back using a Dragon Slayer sword.
  • In the stinger of "A Narrative Analysis of The Spider-Man Musical", Emily reveals that the real reason she made the video was to get her viewers to help her find a Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark blanket that isn’t sold anymore.
  • The stinger of "The Evolving Relationship of Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy" has Emily point out that Injustice 2 perplexingly had a pride event where the player gets rewarded for repeatedly beating up Poison Ivy. The event was canceled due to backlash.
  • In the stinger of "The Return of Channel Awesome's Demo Reel", she remembers she never recounted how the Demo Reel reboot concluded. After doing so and realizing that the reboot's ending has the same conclusion as her previous video on the series, she begins laughing maniacally.
  • "Plastic Beach: The Masterpiece That Almost Ended Gorillaz" ends with Emily talking like a pirate while reading her patrons names, before thanking the viewers and patrons.
• Strawman Has a Point:invoked The time travel Framing Device for The Nostalgia Critic's Christmas with the Kranks review is supposed to convey how much the show has improved since its early days, and tries to paint anyone who prefers the classic style as simply being afraid of change by having the Critic's past self make easily-refuted complaints about the modern episodes. However, Emily argues that the attempts to show how much better the new format is only highlight why it doesn't work. For instance, when the modern Critic attempts a classic-style review, he's surprised that his short quips no longer segue into lengthy Cutaway Gags that are only tangentially related to the review and add nothing to the initial joke — and this is treated as a bad thing.
• Surprisingly Improved Sequelinvoked: While she heavily panned Demo Reel, she legitimately liked its reboot special, which she thought improved on the original in every way and is one of the best videos ever created for Channel Awesome.
• Sympathy for the Devil: While she points out that Doug Walker is a bad person who ignores the horrible treatment of his employees and coworkers, she almost feels bad for the many failures in his career and even bashes his fans for putting him in this position.
• Take That!:
  • She joked that the New York Times hates Plastic Beach so much, that you’d think a trans person wrote it, referencing the newspaper's transphobia.
  • Originally wanting to individually break down each clipless Nostalgia Critic review for "The Return of Channel Awesome's Demo Reel", Emily stated that she decided against it because she didn't want to force herself to recap episode by episode in a needlessly thorough manner to achieve an arbitrarily inflated runtime like some other creators, all whilst the Doug Walker footage zooms in on a piece of Garfield merchandise.
• Take That, Audience!: Her analysis of Demo Reel's ending and the general direction of the Nostalgia Critic reviews that came afterwards comes to this conclusion. She feels that any time the show addresses how things have changed over time it's always the belief that it's for the better, and that the detractors simply don't like change instead of having legitimate criticisms regarding his work.
• Talk Like a Pirate: Emily used a pirate accent when reading the names of her patrons at the end of her video on Plastic Beach.
• Thanking the Viewer: Emily often thanks her viewers for their support at the end of her videos.
• Theory Tunnel Vision: Happens to her in her Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark video, as she attempts to make sense of Arachne's infamously bizarre role in the plot. As her analysis touches on more and more thematically significant details, she starts to wonder whether the musical is secretly a work of underappreciated genius... before admitting that her interpretation is just the result of her severely overthinking things for a decade, and that it requires you to overlook many glaring issues with Arachne's character to reach that point.
• Torch the Franchise and Run:invoked Emily discussed how Doug Walker suddenly ended Demo Reel by killing the entire cast because he didn’t care about the series anymore due to its unpopularity.
  Emily: "At one point this might've been Doug Walker's magnum opus, but at this point everyone has rejected it, so who cares if he ruins everything, kills everyone, and just stops it? Sure, there are some people who are fans of Demo Reel to this day who were upset by this ending, but... why should Doug care? In his eyes, all he can see is the massive amount of backlash people gave him, so why give them a respectful ending?"
• Uncertain Audience: invoked Of the many questions Emily brings up regarding the Nostalgia Critic's clipless reviews, the most pertinent one is "Who are these videos made for?" She notes that, by filming low-budget remakes of movies he's reviewing instead of showing clips from the original movie to riff on, Doug Walker falls onto a double-edged sword: viewers who haven't seen the original movies will have no idea what he's talking about and won't get the jokes because of that, viewers who have seen the original will be put off by the flagrant liberties Doug Walker takes with the source material, and both groups will dislike the videos in general just because of their embarrassingly low production values.
• Viewers Like You: At the end of every episode, Emily thanks her patrons on Patreon for their financial support and displays a list of all of their names while reading out the names of the highest paying patrons.
• Vindicated by Historyinvoked: In "Plastic Beach: The Masterpiece That Almost Ended Gorillaz", Emily discusses how the album Plastic Beach was divisive when it was first released but is today viewed as one of the best albums by Gorillaz. This applies to Emily's thoughts on it too — despite admitting early in the video that Plastic Beach is one of her all-time favorite albums, she later shows a Facebook post she made at the time of release saying she found it disappointing and couldn't get into it.

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