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Web Video / Markiplier

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"And welcome to TV Tropes!"
"Hello, everybody! My name is Markiplier."

Mark Edward Fischbach (born June 28, 1989), better known online as Markipliernote  is a YouTuber from Cincinnati, Ohio who is currently based in Los Angeles. He broadcasts daily Let's Play videos on YouTube and occasionally streams on Twitch. His channel predominately features over-the-top playthroughs of Survival Horror games, as well as monthly charity livestreams.

As of this writing, Mark's channel has surpassed 34 million subscribers and 19 billion views across all videos. He has also raised over 3 million dollars for different charities. His brother, Tom, makes the webcomic TwoKinds and has appeared in some of his videos.

For a sampling of his best material, horror games such as Amnesia, Ib, Mad Father, The Witch's House, OFF, SCP – Containment Breach and all 15 of the Five Nights at Freddy's titles are a good place to start. He also recorded LPs of non-horror titles, such as Happy Wheels and Dishonored. Another unusual aspect of the channel are user-submitted Mods, frequently those adapted from Amnesia and Half-Life (notable examples of the latter include Cry of Fear and Afraid of Monsters); Mark enjoys spreading the love to indie developers and plugs their submissions almost weekly. For a long time, he had also recorded a series of videos called Drunk Minecraft with his two friends, LordMinion777 (Wade) and Muyskerm (Bob), but it was discontinued after 69 episodes due to Mark's inability to process alcohol properly.

Over the years, while he affirms that he will never abandon LPs, Mark has slowly been branching out from gaming into other areas such as acting and voice talent. He frequently does multiple comedy skits and challenge videos portraying several characters of his own, most notably the pink-moustached Wilford Warfstache and his own Evil Counterpart Darkiplier. He’s additionally appeared in multiple music videos by Random Encounters, most notably the Five Nights at Freddy's songs. In 2017, he started the improv-based “You’re Welcome” tour, which has visited the USA and Europe to date.

Additionally, Mark has taken part in more ambitious original content that relies considerably on audience engagement. He created the four-part original video seriesnote  Who Killed Markiplier?, which ran from October 10-13, 2017, where viewers worked to solve the murder mystery surrounding the death of the actor Markiplier. Later, in 2019, he and various other content creators worked together to make A Heist with Markiplier, in which the viewer plays the role of Mark's partner in crime in an interactive narrative with multiple branching paths. A sequel to Heist, titled In Space with Markiplier, was released on April 4, 2022.

On November 15, 2019, Mark and Ethan Nestor created Unus Annus, a channel made with the intent to be deleted after exactly one year, a premise that manifested in recurring themes of death's inevitability and making the most out of life as well as utterly bizarre, frequently semi-NSFW content made in complete defiance to any and all advertiser-friendly monetization guidelines. The channel was deleted on November 14, 2020 at the end of a 12-hour livestream, with almost 1.5 million concurrent viewers tuned in at the stream's final moments.

In May 2021, Mark, Wade, and Bob started their own podcast, Distractible, and in February 2022, Mark and his friend Tyler Scheid started another, Go! My Favorite Sports Team. Both podcasts are currently ongoing.

On April 21, 2023, Mark formally announced that he would be directing a self-financed full-length film adaptation of the indie horror game Iron Lung. He also wrote the film's screenplay, co-produced it, and will star in it. It is planned for a theatrical release.

    Games Markiplier Has Played 

    Original Works with their own pages 

Markiplier and his videos provide examples of:

    open/close all folders 

    A-C 
  • Aborted Arc:
    • Drunk Minecraft and, by extension, drunk playthroughs of anything else, is pretty much done forever, considering Mark's body can't process alcohol correctly and continuing the series would mean putting his health at risk.
    • His Undertale playthrough would have ended prematurely due to the fanbase berating him for not playing it "the right way", with some inadvertently spoiling the more serious side to Sans while criticizing Mark's goofy-sounding choice of voice acting for said character. However, he eventually streamed his playthrough of the entire Pacifist route along with Tyler, who had no prior experience of the game.
  • Absurdly Dedicated Worker: Accidentally aces The Mortuary Assistant by diligently tending to the cadavers, bluntly yelling "NO VISITORS!" at the apparitions (and in one case, charging a Shadow Person while jabbering nonsense), and bumbling around with Letting Paper occasionally; being more concerned that his boss will be upset he hasn't done his job than an actual demon trying to possess him
  • Achievements in Ignorance: Quite a handful of the games Mark plays have puzzles in them, and whether he admits it or not at any given time, there are quite a few puzzles and other problems he's managed to solve without having any idea what to do.
    • Mark managed to solve a riddle in his playthrough of The Witch's House without knowing what the riddle was.
    • He knew the numbers in the safe combination in Ao Oni, but the clue provided was of no help, so he was relegated to making a guess. He got it right on his first guess.
    • During his playthrough of Ib he managed to solve a puzzle involving several of the same paintings... by walking to a row and happening to pick the right one without even knowing how the puzzle worked.
    • In the Silent Hill Alchemilla, Mark solved a box puzzle by mashing random buttons and a valve puzzle by turning random valves. In his words, "this game sure is good at making the dumb feel smart!"
    • In Mad Father, he used the mini-chainsaw on a random person, causing the person to explode into bloody chunks. While it caused him to have a Heroic BSoD, it was nonetheless the correct solution to advance.
    • In his second episode of Five Nights at Freddy's, Golden Freddy appeared right at the end of the phone call on the third night. Mark promptly pulled out the camera multiple times in a panic, and managed to accidentally follow the instructions to de-summon Golden Freddy without even knowing what he was doing.
    • In Five Nights at Freddy's 3, Markiplier achieves this when he is the first one to receive the demo from Scott Cawthon along with a set amount of youtubers who were specially picked hours before the game's release. There are no playthroughs online, no instructions - the Phone Dude is about as helpful as a brick - and yet he manages to somehow beat nights 1 and 2 with very little trouble spoiler. This is strengthened when the full version comes out and he breezes through the nights with no issues at all. This becomes even more noteworthy when he does a second playthrough to get the Golden Ending while actually knowing how to play, and ends up failing repeatedly on the levels he'd accidentally breezed through prior.
    • In his first playthrough of Until Dawn, while playing as Mike he is Jump Scared by a wolf, and fails the quicktime event to punch it. The wolf turns out to be docile.
    • Lampshaded in Slither.io, where he got into the top 4 before he had any idea what he was doing.
  • AcCENT upon the Wrong SylLABle: Often a part of his delivery. Once, upon discovering the player character was a woman, he referred to her as a "F'mail."
  • Adaptational Villainy: In the fan game With the Addition of Markiplier, Tiny Box Tim is the main antagonist, having grown extremely bitter after Mark "abandoned" him in Amnesia: The Dark Descent. In the true ending of the game, in-game Mark ends up destroying him, much to the real Mark's dismay.
  • Added Alliterative Appeal:
    • Attempted in his playthrough of Silent Hill: Alchemilla.
      Markiplier: Is some diabolic demon gonna come dashing down this dank and dusty hallway filled with death and destruction? Dare I say that it doesn't... know... what... I am gonna do to that demonic... dastardly devil. Yeah!
    • In his Five Nights at Freddy's playthrough, he initially calls Bonnie, the bunny animatronic, "Bunny Bolliday", which doubles as this and a Shout-Out to Billie Holliday. In Five Nights at Freddy's 3 he takes to calling Springtrap (the main animatronic) "Bunny Bastard Bitch Balls".
  • Affectionate Parody: The commentary for episode 14 of Turbo Dismount mostly consists of him affectionately making fun of the Game Grumps - of which he is an honourary member.
    Mark: [ambiguously australian accent] Hey boys, hey boys, it's me, Ross from Game Grumps, hey, what's your favorite episode, boys- [ragdoll crashes on the first obstacle]
    Mark: [normal voice] God dammit Ross.
  • A Good Name for a Rock Band:
    • During his Outlast playthrough, he comes up with "Tea Party of the Dead" and immediately lampshades it.
    • From the final part of White Night, he suggests that "Eyeballs in the Wall" would be a good name for a Death Metal band name.
    • In Fibrillation he comes up with "Origin of Insanity". He then demands that anyone who uses it give him 25 cents for every note they play.
    • In The Crooked Man, he gives the name "Menagerie of Insanity". Humorously enough, Menagerie of Insanity is already the name of a few things, including an e-book by Jacob Russell Dring.
    • And in The Evil Within, he's come up with "Sounds of Nightmare" after hearing the incredibly loud scraping of a thresher trap.
  • Alcohol-Induced Idiocy: Drunk Minecraft. The only conclusion where you get a group of drunk adults playing Minecraft with an admin that's happy to give them whatever they want, provided they don't piss the admin off, which of course they do.
  • Alter-Ego Acting: Mark has created quite a few alter-egos, with the most famous of them being Wilford Warfstache (an eccentric, pink-moustached reporter) and Darkiplier (a crafty Humanoid Abomination). Whenever they make an appearance in his videos, they’re portrayed as being completely different characters while he interacts with them as Markiplier (his online persona). All of them are listed on the characters page.
  • Always a Bigger Fish: Darkiplier and Antisepticeye are equally threatening as evil alter-egos of Let's Players, but there's one thing they fear: a hungry Dark Chica!note 
  • Amazon Chaser: Why he's so invested in Lady Dimitrescu. His explanation behind his massive crush on her character is that "it's not a sexual thing, it's about power". Sure enough, any scenes where he sees Lady Dimitrescu give a beating to Ethan are reacted quite positively, most of them with an impressed lovestuck grin. Then there's this quote from his first video about her:
    "I want a woman that can crush my head in-between her thighs."
  • Ambiguous Syntax: In part one of his "Fear Amnesia" playthrough, he takes note of a giant-ass knife. He then clarifies "Not a giant ass-knife, a giant-ASS knife. Got to watch where your hyphens are."
  • Angrish: His commentary regularly ventures into this, especially while playing particularly obtuse puzzle games or ones riddled with Fake Difficulty.
    • His playthrough of "Getting Over It" often devolved into this, usually just before he broke something.
    • Some of his reaction videos lampoon this with on-screen text attempting to decode what he just said — or giving it titles like "Walrus" and "Man-Baby Mating Call".
      itsamonstermidgymonster
      ESSAGUNAGETME
      UHNOWANAZAPPIN
      WHUTISZIZHATHING?
  • Arch-Enemy: For the purposes of Five Nights at Freddy's 2, onward: Balloon Boy ends up being the bane of Mark's existence.
  • Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: When he plays Whack the Cheater, Markiplier's complaints are that you shouldn't kill people, that you should direct your anger at the proper person if you're being cheated on, and that the game had no sound.
  • Artifact Title: His "3 Scary Games" series was initially titled accurately, but now can more accurately be described as "however many scary games I can fit into a ~30 minute video". Sometimes it's 2, sometimes it's 5.
  • Artistic License – Gun Safety: Lampshaded in his video THE ULTIMATE BET when he pulled out a prop revolver and accidentally pulled the triggered. An actual gunshot was edited in, and he said "Oops!"
  • Ascended Meme: Whoever made A Late Night Drink put in a reference to the "Where's the blacksmith?!" meme.
  • Atomic F-Bomb:
  • Author Appeal: Russians, he loves Russians. He also loves dogs, as multiple vlogs and playthroughs will show you.
  • Back-to-Back Badasses: Mark and his brother Tom stand together against the orcs in Orcs Must Die! 2.
  • Badass Boast: Markiplier will make ridiculous boasts while playing horror games, usually to the effect of him being "too tough" or "so handsome" that the monsters are avoiding him, only to have one crash in and scare him into screaming bloody murder.
    • Mark declares that "I am the KING of Five Nights at Freddy's!" after beating the game's Sixth Night, one of the hardest modes.
    • In part six of his Eleusis Let's Play, he brags about how he could take on a wolf.
  • Bad "Bad Acting": Mark's attempt at hiding his knowledge of the fact that "Error #53" is a horror game and not a cutesy adventure game is... unconvincing. Especially noticeable as unlike his other videos he doesn't react to the scares at all, and blames all the monsters and jumpscares on Techno Babble terms.
  • Bad Santa:
    • Mark-in-a-Santa-suit acts like he belongs on the naughty list when playing the Christmas versions of A Very Organized Thief and Viscera Cleanup Detail.
    • Mark plays the Happy Wheels in-game version of Santa as a total jerk. He's not too far off from Happy Wheels' "canon", however, as Santa laughs jovially when his elves die.
  • Bait-and-Switch: In his joke video about what he does while he's not making Let's Plays, he has "Steal other Youtubers' ideas" at Number 4. We then have a shot of him staring at PewDiePie videos... before he tells his digitally-voiced parrot Jacque to shut up about stealing them.
  • Berserk Button: Multiple.
    • Interrupting him mid intro isn't smart, as several Drunk Minecrafts will show you:
      Markiplier: Hello everybody, and welcome back to...
      Bob: Adjga...
      Markiplier: SHUUUUUT UUUUUP!!!

      Markiplier: Hello every...
      Bob: Third time in a row!
      Markiplier: Goddammit! - *incoherent babbling and Face Palm on webcam* I'm finishing off this bottle of wine.
    • Gameplay that involve Some Dexterity Required. Mark liked Octodad itself but was in a constant rage over its bad controls throughout his playthrough. Similarly, his first attempt at playing I Am Bread causes him to be so angry that he appears to be crying at one point.
    • He stated in Ragdoll Runners that he hates video games with bad controls.
    • Basically any intentionally frustrating videogames or Rage Games will set him off.
    • Backseat Gaming. Be it people complaining in the comments or giving stuff away in chat during streams, he really, REALLY doesn't like it and his reaction is usually to either ignore all chat or straight-up troll the people.
      • During his playthrough of Visage, he got so fed up with chat that he spends 15 minutes running through the upper floor of the house, lamenting how he can't find the door which would be opened with the key titled "Basement" while instructing his mods to permaban anyone that tries to have him go downstairs.
      • He did a few episodes of Undertale before aborting the series due to the comment section demanding him to "fix" mistakes and putting spoilers in. Almost a year later, he revisits it with his friend Tyler during a stream in which he ignores chat, purposefully demands to be cruel to the characters and doesn't take the game serious. In the final section, he goes into a big rant on how he acknowledges that he would have loved Undertale as it is very charming, but it all got ruined by people spoiling and forcing him. Ironically, he gets informed soon after that the chat got again filled with demands on how to do a fight "properly", causing him to again fly into rage and considering out loud if they should abort the stream.
    • He simply can't stand Vanish due to victory being based on random chance rather than individual skill or ability. Even mentioning it will generally get Mark on the defensive, with him typically insisting that he beat it fair and square. This created an amusing scenario in which Vanish was mentioned in a fan-made game, setting in-game Mark off on a rant that supposedly lasted four hours and ended with "and people died", which inadvertently sets off the real Markiplier, who only realizes just in time that he too was about to start ranting about Vanish.
      • Actually, cheating, taking an easy way out, or relying on luck at all, even in real life - especially in real life - is a good way to set him off. Even suggesting that he take a shortcut (whether in playing Subnautica or signing calendars) can seriously upset him. In the game "You Left Me," he actually refused to see the final ending of the game, because it required him to - even in a hypothetical, fictional universe - select the option "Give Up."
    • Quicktime Events tend to annoy him, especially if they're overused (as was, in his view, the case with Man of Medan).
    • Perhaps THIS is his best known example of something in particular setting him off.
  • Big Damn Heroes: He uploaded a livestream video titled "I Literally Won't Shut Up Until You Subscribe To PewDiePie", where he desperately urged the viewers to subscribe to PewDiePie as fast as possible to not let T-Series become the most-subscribed channel on YouTube. For reference, at that point, PewDiePie had 60 thousand more subscribers than T-Series, but the latter gained them two-three times faster than the former. The result was PewDiePie gaining a million subscribers in just two days.
  • Big "NO!": Occurs when he accidentally knocks the heart that he needed to transplant out of the edge of the screen in Surgeon Simulator 2013. He also does this occasionally whenever he loses a patient, but he then cuts it off with an 'oh well', or 'next patient'.
    • Occurs again when Mark thinks he's finally completed Vanish, only to be killed while unlocking the gate.
    • Many, many, many examples in his playthrough of I Am Bread, for obvious reasons.
    • He lets out two Big No's when he finds out that he's about to harvest the fur of his in-game cat for money in Exoptable Money.
    • He does this in response to a particular comment telling him that he'll never be a Grump during a roast video.
    • In his playthrough of HuniePop upon receiving the Bestiality achievement.
    • He lets out a comical one during his 'Reading Your Comments' video in response to one of the questions asking for marriage.
    • He has a surprisingly large one during his first Until Dawn play-through when he accidentally lets Ashley die.
    • In this video, the titular event has him let out one.
  • Big "YES!": He celebrates with one whenever he manages to complete a night in Five Nights at Freddy's as a result of their infamous difficulty of keeping the animatronics at bay. Special mention goes to the time when he beats 4-20 mode.
    • Another example worth mentioning was in the "Don't Touch Anything" video, when he was able to complete a Morse code puzzle from memory. Followed by "Oh, man, let me high-five myself a million times!"
  • Bizarrchitecture: A staple of the Drunk Minecraft series, with so much of what they're building resembling penises, and whatever else they make typically not having any resemblance to what they initially had in mind.
  • Black Comedy: Occasionally dabbles in it, sometimes at his own expense.
    Dr. Glenn Pierce: In the event that this elevator does not wake you up, please don't interact with anything that strikes you as psychologically significant. For example, if you see your parents, please punch them in the face as hard as you can and immediately run away.
    Mark: Okay... alright, got it. If I see my dad, I'm gonna punch him in the face and then run away. Which makes sense, because he would be a zombie. Explaining the joke
  • Blasphemous Boast: Played for Laughs in a promo for his podcast, Distractible. Mark drops it right in the middle of his House (2020) playthrough, and tells Lixian to make it big and bombastic, which he does. Then he tells him to make it blasphemous, stops and reconsiders for a moment, and then tells Lixian to go ahead and make it blasphemous. Lixian proclaims that the podcast is "more entertaining than The Bible".
  • Blatant Lies: "Totally not afraid" of X. Running to the exit for "efficiency". "Just unlocked this door here, with a super secret code I guessed on the first try."
    • Drunk Minecraft is a kid-friendly all-ages series. Just ask all the penises.
    • Besiege features the line of Nota-Pe-Nis tractors, which are most definitely specialized farming equipment and absolutely not vaguely phallic siege engines.
  • Bloody Hilarious: His Happy Wheels Highlights is basically Bloody Hilarious: The Series due to the creatively gory situations in which the Made of Plasticine characters get reduced into Ludicrous Gibs.
  • Blue Screen Of Death: One level in Super Mario Maker has him rage to a point where the video goes into a mock BSOD.
    Markiplier.exe has stopped working

    (
    RAGE_MAXIMUM=YES;
    TANTRUM: THROWN;
    //

    If this is the first time you've encountered this error, please restart your computer. If this error appears again, please follow these steps:
    Remove Mario Maker game disk. Break disk in half.
  • Book Ends: His Hotel Remorse video starts and ends with the presence of the creepy Woody mask on a black background.
  • Borrowed Catchphrase: Says "Top of the mornin' to ya, laddies!" often enough for this to qualify.
  • Brain Bleach:
    • While playing Outlast: Whistleblower, he's grossed out by an inmate aggressively masturbating over a pile of corpses. Later in the DLC, he was so disturbed by the tableau that the Groom created of "a woman giving birth" that Mark actually blurred out the scene and told viewers if they wanted to see it, they'd either have to play the game on their own, or go watch someone else's playthrough.
    • In his Five Nights at Fuckboy's 3 playthrough, he finds the "hydra dildo" in room 7 and begins to quip "does it have like... nine-heads and when you cut one o-" then he stops short with a vaguely disturbed look on his face and simply continues playing.
    • Mark is quite disgusted in his first episode of Soma when he believes that the black fluid dripping from the machines is robot semen.
    • During Claire's side of the Resident Evil 2 (Remake), Mark declares for the game to burn when he reads a file about Chief Irons saying that "[Irons] almost came" while cutting open a tiger for his taxidermy hobby. He's also grossed out when he encounters said taxidermied tiger later while looking around the office.
  • Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs:
    • When playing "Cry of Fear: Halloween Collab", Mark hears a noise he's never heard before. He says "What was that!? I never heard that! It was like a frickin' bull! Or a moose! Or a moose bull! Or a boose! Or a mole! I don't know. It was something. I didn't like it."
    • In his KOREAN McDonalds vs AMERICAN McDonalds video.
      "As an American, I like a select few things: I like freedom! I like money! I like boobs! I like... boob freedom with money!"
  • Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick: His playing of Dan and Phil's 7 second challenge app, which has him naming three things that will be invented come the year 3000.
    "Hoverboards, time travel, and then.. robots you can have sex with."
  • Break the Cutie: What Presentable Liberty does to him. It starts normal and humorous, but gradually Mark undergoes a Sanity Slippage, getting so immersed in the game that the deaths of Sal and especially Charlotte leave him broken and empty.
    '"I stopped playing the game and just started living it halfway through that."'
  • Brick Joke: "Where's The Blacksmith?" He finds it and it turns out he was the blacksmith all along.
  • Bring My Brown Pants:
  • Broken Record: He has released three videos ("rar", "BOOP SUPERJUICE", "RÖKNING FÖRBJUDEN") that consist of a single short loop repeated over and over for 10 minutes.
  • Bullying a Dragon: In episode 13 of Drunk Minecraft, Mark spends a large chunk of the episode teasing Latingoddess (the server moderator) by shipping Zombiemold (Latin's boyfriend and the owner of the server) with all of his female fans. Needless to say, the end result is her making him regret every last bit of said teasing.
  • Button Mashing: In this video, he demonstrates that yes, he can button mash very fast with his mouse.
  • Captain Obvious: His reaction to seeing an unmoving man covered in blood and wounds in part two of Grey was simply: "That guy is dead!"
  • The Cameo: He's the announcer on the SMASH! track on Starbomb's Player Select album.
    • In an example of someone appearing in his videos, Arin shows up a couple of times in the second part of his Sonic Dreams Collection playthrough. Given that he sometimes records at the Grump Office, this isn't surprising.
  • Camera Abuse: "Fast.EXE" ends with Sonic Mark running head-on towards the camera and slamming into it.
  • Catchphrase:
    • "I got a chair!" in Amnesia and "I don't trust you!" in Dead Space. "(HOLY) BALLS!!!" in general.
    • Addressing each scare as an unwanted door-to-door salesman. "(shuddering laugh) "Noooo, thank you" and "I don't want any."
    • "Hello, Baaaaaaaaaaaabay!" to female characters, statues, and pictures in his Amnesia playthroughs.
    • "Like a boosh!", "I booosh you!" "I boooll you!" while playing box-jumping puzzles.
    • "Haaaaa-biskey!" or "SHABOOSHKI!”
    • He ends his video with this sentence: "Thank you all so much for watching, and as always, I will SEEEE YOOOUUU... in the next video. BYE BYE!"
    • "I'm too pro!" Almost invariably, something bad follows this statement.
    • "SHADDAP, NURSE!" (apropos no one in particular). Spawned from his playthrough of Surgeon Simulator, he invariably says this line whenever he’s put into a doctor role.
    • In Drunk Minecraft: "ZOMBIE!!!" (the owner of the server) and "Shut up, Wade!/I blame Wade".
    • "BOXES!!" whenever he spots a pile of destructible crates in a GMod horror map.
    • "All right, all right, all riiiiiiight."
    • "Dick-punching party!" Said when extremely frustrated at a game's developer.
    • Expect Mark to say "OW, MY ASS!" or "OW, MY PENIS/BALLS!" if he dies a rather... painful or embarrassing death in Happy Wheels.
    • "All right, kiddies!", for whenever he's imitating Santa Claus.
    • He occasionally calls monsters - such as the Ao Oni - "buttstabbers".
    • "That's what she said." Spoken whenever he makes an innuendo.
    • In Outlast, he's taken to saying "Little piggy no no, little piggy go go home now" whenever he goes through a narrow squeeze, thanks to the big burly guy calling him a "little pig" before tossing him off a two floor ledge.
    • Asking "Did I won? Diiid I woooon?" whenever game endings are unclear, not even providing A Winner Is You screens.
    • In Happy Wheels, whenever he plays as Wheelchair Guy, he starts off by saying, "I'm just an old man!" Doubles as Captain Obvious.
    • Every time he successfully accomplishes anything in Dishonored, be it teleporting behind a foe, sneaking by a guard, slaughtering his way through a group of enemies, or picking up a piece of bread, he will proudly say "Like a shadow in the NIIIIGGHHT...", or "Master Assassin!"
    • When figuring out game objectives, he'll usually say "I'll play your game, you rogue", or "I'm picking up what you're putting down..."
    • "You are so weird!" for whenever he comes across a strange person/creature repeatedly.
    • Saying (or screaming, rather) "I'M GONNA LOSE MY MIND!" when he's particularly frustrated with a game, mostly when he's getting killed multiple times, very quickly.
    • "I saw a shadow!/I saw something in the darkness! You can't say I didn't!/Don't tell me you didn't just see that!" usually said when he spots something moving in a dark corner, or running past him.
    • When confronted with a Jump Scare or other monster, he'll say "HI!" or "Hiiii." in his inimitable, exaggerated fashion.
    • In Octodad, his catchphrase is "If I could just stop doing X" when he's trying (and failing) to accomplish a task. "Normal human! NORMAL!" also frequently comes into play when characters’ attention are focused on him.
    • "Fuck a duck!", "I'm fluuuuuubernucked!", and "I'm so boned, I'm so boned, I'm so BONED!" whenever he's screwed up.
    • "What a bunch of bull!" when he dies or gets hurt in what he considers to be a bullshit way.
    • "Goody-goody gumdrops!" when he does something right or something doesn't fuck up.
    • "How big are your boobs?" seems to appear a lot in his play through of HuniePop.
    • "I could've been an engineer..."
    • Mark tends to gush "this is SO COOL" when a game features something he's interested in, especially space. Naturally this reaches ridiculous levels when he plays Universe Sandbox.
    • "Once more into the breach" when it's usually after a retry or two.
    • "From Downtown!" Originally from his playthrough of Doom Eternal, it's occasionally used whenever Mark's about to ambush an enemy, usually from above.
    • "You wanna run that by me again?" for extremely brief visual or audio events.
    • "Life is ours to choose!" from Who Killed Markiplier? is sometimes invoked in the context of living one's life to the fullest, and is quoted in his "About" description on YouTube.
  • Cassandra Truth: Nobody believed Mark when he started screaming about Latin's return during a game of Drunk Minecraft. It's not until the very end of the video when she blows Mark and Yami up that anyone finally believes him.
  • Censored for Comedy: The entire point of his Unnecessary Censorship videos, where he bleeps out innocent words to make them seem more dirty.
  • Cerebus Syndrome: The first three chapters of Who Killed Markiplier? tell a comedic story that heavily references Clue. The fourth chapter is a dark Gainax Ending that kills off the Featureless Protagonist, and reveals the origins of Wilford Warfstache and Darkiplier.
  • Christmas Episode:
  • Circling Birdies: Mark sees stars and hears tweeting birds while in a Punch-Out!! parody.
  • Cloudcuckoolander:
    • Between belting out utterly nonsensical commentary and giving random inanimate objects he finds in-game the Companion Cube treatment, Mark has a tendency to be somewhat eccentric, to say the least. It's particularly obvious whenever he's sick and yet makes videos anyway or when he's playing Google Feud.
    • His theory regarding what happened to Glamrock Bonnie during his playthrough of the Ruin DLC is a shining example of how... interesting his thought process can be. While Security Breach proper implies that Monty may have secretly murdered Bonnie in order to claim his spot in the Glamrock band, Mark posits that Bonnie killed himself during a round of bowling practice via accidentally bouncing a bowling ball off a nearby wall and into his head. He then goes on to claim that Monty discovered Bonnie's remains after slipping on a puddle of the latter's Machine Blood (giving his mohawk its signature red color in the process), kept his death a secret so as to keep the band's morale up, and placed wet floor sign bots all around the Pizzaplex in order to improve the establishment's safety standards.
  • Cluster F-Bomb: Markiplier typically makes a conscious effort to use PG language (saying such things as "hecky-heck" or bleeping his own language), even while playing video games that qualify as an M-rating, though will start swearing (sometimes A LOT) when he gets too frustrated with glitches in the games, his inability to overcome obstacles within them, or just generally freaked out.
    • His Let's Play of Dreadhalls is notable for possibly having the highest F-Bomb count in any Markiplier video to date.
    • One part of his Surgeon Simulator 2013 Let's Play had him so furious that he stopped playing for a moment just to let out a series of cusses.
      "I have to get all the fucks out."
    • On his second playthrough of Vapour, he dies very many times causing him to rage. In the end, he gives us an amazing series of f-bombs, while Flipping the Bird with two fingers.
      Markiplier: God fuck me! God fuck it, fuck-fuck it, I dont want it! Fuck you, and fuck all of you, fuck you to hell, FUCK OOOOOFFFF!
    • A sudden unexpected facehugger out of nowhere prompts another one near the end of Alien: Isolation. Mainly because he hadn't saved in a bit and had to repeat things in order to get back to where he was.
    • One of the Animated Adaptations of his Five Nights at Freddy's 3 play through highlights a somewhat creative string of you, fuck, and "fucky".note 
    • His first playthrough of Depth, due to combining his dislike for the ocean and especially sharks, is close to 20 minutes of Mark delivering rapid fire "fucks" as he tries to survive the onslaught (by one viewer's count, nearly 106 fucks).
    • Basically any game with jump-scares or "rage" games (like I Am Bread or Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy) promises TONS of profanity from Mark as he shits himself either in fear or in frustration.
  • Companion Cube:
    • In the Amnesia custom story A Late Night Drink, Mark finds a tiny version of the normal wooden box and grows fond of it, calling it Tiny Box Tim. He gets separated from it later on, much to his sorrow, and when he finally crosses paths with the tiny box once again near the end of the story, he's unable to pick it up. Tiny Box Tim has since become a recurring "character" in any of his Let's Plays of Amnesia custom stories, and a familiar sidekick showing up in the gifts his fans send him, including many fan-created Markiplier games.
    • In his Let's Play of The Forest, he's attacked by a female native who he kills and accidentally dismembers, grabbing hold of one of her arms. He quickly discovers the arm to be a powerful and easy way to clear out branches and vegetation, adopting it and calling it "Armanda." He even starts freaking out when he thinks he's lost the arm.
    • In Subnautica, he names the four building robots Jeffrey, Samwise, Billy and Marshal, saying they're his sons, presumably with his computer "wife" Karen.
    • In Firewatch, he gives the forest ranger cutout Forrest Byrnes a demonic personality and seems saddened when he isn't able to take him with him and accidentally throws him down a cliff.
    • Red Dead Redemption II has Mark develop an obsession with a bear pelt hat he wears starting from part 10 of his playthrough and ends up developing an irrational hatred against NPCs questioning Arthur's clothing (at one point knocking one out) and against story missions forcing Arthur to wear something else.
    • Resident Evil Village has the Crystal Dimitrescu be this for him in that he refuses to utterly sell it and wanted to get through House Beneviento as quick as possible so it would reappear in his inventory again. He also believes in He's Just Hiding even though she literally crumbled to dust after her boss fight... and still holding what's essentially her Soul Jar!
  • Comical Angry Face: From about 20:32 to 21:02 of his video of the Cry of Fear mod The Stairway, he makes one of the goofiest-looking angry faces imaginable.
  • Comically Missing the Point: In his playthrough of Five Nights at Freddy's 2 he sees the check after completing five nights and presumes that the date is the main character's birthday. It takes him the next video to realize it's a sign that the game's actually a prequel.
  • Cool Chair: Makes frequent use of and references to these during Amnesia: The Dark Descent and its subsequent Mods as a useless weapon/security blanket against the unkillable monsters featured in the games.
    Markiplier: I have a chair! Yeah! You didn't like it last time! You'll like it even less this time. 'Cuz it's goin up yo butt. Whole chair, up yo butt!
  • Corpsing: In-Universe. In his World's 2nd Quietest Let's Play, he realizes that he can't whisper his Santa voice without breaking down laughing.
  • Curb-Stomp Battle: Played for Laughs in his Lichtspeer video, where it's him with the titular weapon vs a whole crowd of people with "light whips" (glowsticks) It's essentially an anti-climactic line-up as they all take turns getting stabbed one at a time.
  • Curse Cut Short: The second episode of his playthrough of I Am Bread features this, plus a Smash to Kitten Mark after Mark fails to climb over a duvet in the bedroom level, hits his Rage Breaking Point and begins smashing his controller in a fit of serious rage.
    Mark: "I don't care. I really don't care. I just don't- I don't wanna play this anymore- [begins smashing controller, starts shouting] I FUCK, FU-"
  • Cutaway Gag:
    • When enraged by Amnesia: A Late Night Drink, Mark takes a break to calm himself down. During this break, he cuts to images of kittens.
    • He also makes multiple kitten-scenes when climbing the octopus in Octodad. However, even the kitten-scenes become increasingly traumatizing the more frustrated he grows.
  • Cuteness Proximity: His response to finding a tiny version of the wooden box in the Amnesia custom story A Late Night Drink, whom he names Tiny Box Tim. This also happened when he did his Slime Rancher video when he encounters the perpetually joyful and carefree slimes.
    • It's touched upon in his video of the Markiplier mod for Don't Starve, explaining that he has a tendency to become fascinated by tiny versions of normal objects (like baby shoes, for example).
  • Cut His Heart Out with a Spoon: Mark beginning to realize the stalker with Vader Breath is SCP-106. "He's gonna get me and... bite my nipples off!"

    D-G 
  • Deadpan Snarker: Common to most Let's Play videos, Markiplier is humorously underwhelmed by the lack of logic that motivates the storyline, making aside comments to defuse the tension and point out cliches in games.
  • Deconstructor Fleet: "A Heist With Markiplier" takes normal, cliché horror, drama, and thriller genres and subverts or destroys the definition of them. For example, a zombie apocalypse can be defined as desperate for someone else to bond with them; the set is manipulated in the film itself; obvious fallacies in a defining genre's plots are made note of.
  • Delayed Reaction: During his let's play of The Crooked Man, it took him about a second to realize that the Crooked Man is standing behind him in one segment. He promptly lets out a terrified shriek upon the realization.
    • A better example is when he played the demo version of It Moves. It took him a while before he realized that there was a red face getting more visible during the Labyrinth section.
  • Deranged Park Ranger: In his let's play of Firewatch, he envisions the wooden cutout of park ranger mascot Forrest Byrnes as a loud-mouthed lunatic raving about the oncoming end.
    Markiplier as Forrest Byrnes: "HELLO! HI FRIEND! HOW'S IT GOING!? DEATH ONLY AWAITS YOU IN HERE! WATCH OUT FOR FIRES! DON'T BE SWIMMING NAKED WITH FIREWORKS, OR I'LL COME FIND YOU!"
  • Despair Event Horizon: Part 13 of his playthrough of Until Dawn has him end up making a choice to "Investigate Voice" with Ashley. This results in Ashley getting her head torn off by a Wendigo. Mark leaves the screen, screaming in frustration, then returns, burying his face in the back of his chair, along with several Big Nos. He even plays through the entire game again just to avoid the outcome, complete with an Atomic F-Bomb.
    • Mark almost has another one in the same playthrough when Mike dies in the final action sequence because Mark thought not moving was the correct solution. It wasn't. But, before the game can save, Mark quits to the title screen and reloads the game.
  • Determinator: Mark has shown time and time again that he hates giving up on finishing games or looking at walkthroughs, since he's determined to prove that he can figure things out himself. If he ever looks at a guide, it's because he's really stuck.
    • Despite how much the game frustrates or scares him, Mark is determined to beat Vanish, even though the game appears to be equally determined to never let him win. Eventually, after nine videos plus hours of playthroughs that we never saw, he finally succeeded.
    • The same can be said for his playthrough of Five Nights at Freddy's. He spends seven hours offscreen attempting to beat "4/20 mode" (the hardest custom difficulty possible) until he finally wins. Exaggerated with him doing the same with the sequel, where he plays the Golden Freddy mode, AKA 10/20, for nine hours straight.
    • Mark displays his amazing staying power in the fifth episode of his playthrough of Ben and Ed, where he attempts to do an incredibly difficult jump course in Level 10. The level in question is optional, and within the level, said jump puzzle is also optional. Mark nevertheless tried for two and a half hours to finish one relatively short challenge. He nevertheless gets infuriated due to the game's strange, difficult physics engine and poor, unreliable lighting.
    • Then there's the part where he solos two levels of GTFO, a game meant to be played with four people. Take note, the game is already Nintendo Hard even with four players. Obviously it took him hours to finish those levels through trial and error but he just won't quit.
    • Naturally, though, his crown jewel is Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy. No matter how angry, annoyed, or spiteful he becomes, Mark will beat it. Not even losing his original save file deters him from the game.
  • Did You Just Flip Off Cthulhu?: Until Dawn Animated has Mark casually slap a wendigo in the face while retrieving Ashley's body.
  • Did We Just Have Tea with Cthulhu?: Invoked when Markiplier encounters Springtrap; he tries to survive by making friendly Chit-chat with him. It doesn't last, but it does stall for quite a while.
  • Did Not Think This Through: in Subnautica, he builds "Big Box Barry" in waters that are too shallow for her, causing her to list to the side after building. He berates one of his "sons" (the building robots) for building it wrong.
  • Die, Chair, Die!: When playing an Amnesia custom story, Markiplier will usually make sure to smash any of the small glass display cases lying around.
  • Dissimile: Mark describes A Good Husband during part one of its playthrough:
    Mark: It's kinda like The Sims... except not at all like The Sims, because it's not at all like that.
  • Distracted by the Sexy: Quite a lot in HuniePop — when he first sees Lola in a bikini, he spends about a minute screaming.
  • Does This Remind You of Anything?:
    • In the bloopers for "DARKIPLIER vs ANTISEPTICEYE", Mark has difficulty saying his lines when he realises how many of them sound like he's hitting on Jack.
    • In Mark's third video for Sort The Court, his inability to "Say no to Magic" each time it is offered to him, despite it constantly giving him bad luck, comes off as very reminiscent of someone with a drug or gambling addiction, something he eventually acknowledges.
  • Do Not Taunt Cthulhu: He practically waves his hands and dances in front of SCP-096, then barricades himself behind three doors to see if it gives chase. Yep.
    Mark: [wiggles eyebrows] ...Is he coming after me? YEAH, HE'S COMIN' AFTER ME! AAAAGGGH! [ripped to shreds]
    • He has a bad habit of doing this to the Evil Monkeys in Dark Deception.
      Mark: I know I shouldn't mess with them, but they're so much fun to mess with.
      [Later On]
      Mysterious Voice: Run, they're right behind you!
      Mark: SHADDUP he's not right behin- OHGODHE'SRIGHTBEHINDME
    • A strange example, but in One Night at Flumpty's, Mark sees Grunkfuss the Clown in his office, and scared of the jumpscare that he thinks is coming very soon, he taunts Grunkfuss by saying this-
      Markiplier: [playfully] N-nothing can happen to [Birthday Boy Blam attacks] MEEeeEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!! AAH FUUUCK!! WHAT WAS THAT?"
  • Don't Celebrate Just Yet: In Part 9 of his Red Dead Redemption II playthrough, Mark discovers the bear hat you can collect from the Legendary Bear pelt. Absolutely delighted at the discovery, he rides off into the hills.
    Mark: Cause number one, things never work out for me like this! Things absolutely never 100% work out for me like this, so to have just, this... fall in my lap where I have the bear pelt already, the trapper's got it, I get my hat, that's all I [rides horse over a cliff] wa- wa- NO! WAIT! NO! OH GOD!
  • Double Take: During his Ao Oni playthrough, after spending quite some time stuck on a puzzle and finally, proudly, passing it.
    [While going to a locked door he'd just found a key for]
    Mark: Okay, sorry, I get way too excited about this sort of stuff. I never get these puzzles right, so you gotta give me credit when I get it! And I get it good, yeah. Sorry, little too excited. Little too excited!
    [When attempting to enter a door that had previously opened with no problem, and finding it's now locked]
    Mark: Little too excited! Everyone was else was probably- Wait what?
    [The titular monster appears right on cue]
  • Dramatic Dislocation: During one session of Uno.
    Wade: I jazz-handed so hard my-my wrist dislocated...!
  • Drinking Game: The Drunk Minecraft series, where Mark and his two real life friends Bob and Wade drink alcohol while playing Minecraft. For a drinking game within a drinking game, take a shot every time a reference is made to The Walking Dead.
    • For his YouTube channel in general: take a shot for every video that has the words "scariest game ever" (or a variation thereof) in the title.
  • Dr. Jerk: This is how he portrays himself when playing Surgeon Simulator. He's constantly yelling at his "nurse", and the way he treats his patients could be considered Meatgrinder Surgery... except calling it "surgery" is probably being generous.
  • Eagleland: In his eighth Vanish playthough, he passes a lot of the time by recounting the history of America to his viewers.
    Mark: We Americans like coffee. We dip our hamburger and donuts into coffee every morning and then we drink that, and then we pray to the American flag, which has a big middle finger on it, by the way...
  • Early-Installment Weirdness:
    • His first batch of videos didn't use a facecam. Since Mark's reactions are considered one the best things about him, it makes watching his earliest videos feel very strange.
    • In the early days, Mark was significantly more panicky when it came to reacting to horror games, and his jokes were more subdued and grounded compared to the bombastic and zanier tone he would adopt later on.
    • Mark's voice initially had a more Midwestern accent during the channel's early days, due to him living in Cincinnati, Ohio. Midway in 2014, the Midwest aspects of his voice faded away, as he ended up moving to California.
  • Earn Your Happy Ending: Invoked; Mark got right up to the final area of Subnautica, but then ended his playthrough, saying that because he hadn't earned it legitimately (the game was still incomplete at the time and he had to use console commands to progress) any ending he got would be hollow and meaningless. However, he did promise to pick the game back up once it's officially released.
  • Eldritch Abomination: The wool statues that he, Bob and Wade created in the now discontinued Drunk Minecraft series can count as this, though it's always Played for Laughs.
  • Empty Room Psych: Lampshaded by Mark after running into another room with nothing but creepy dolls in Neverending Nightmares.
  • Epileptic Trees: invokedIn Markiplier's explanation of his video "DAMIEN", he mentions that his viewers have a tendency to miss questions that he felt should be obvious in favor of over-analyzing smaller details.
    Markiplier: ...This is what I mean when "People focus on the nuances". People worry about what the voices are saying. They're not worried about why you're hearing voices. [...] They skate right over, they're like "Oh yeah, of course there would be voices in that void. I've been in voids before..."
  • Epic Fail: A lot of his Happy Wheels highlights highlight these moments, especially the assassin levels where he somehow manages to kill himself a bunch of times, but never the target.
    • Of course, bad enough when he manages to stab himself in the head a few times. But repeatedly stabbing yourself in the ass?
    • Especially in this moment where the most damage he does to the target is knock him over.
    • Not to mention the running gag of his accidentally decapitating himself on pogo levels. Just normal levels, not traps or explosives.
    • In Prop Hunt video 13 he manages to die before the round starts. Twice.
    • During The Impossible Quiz he opted to use a skip on a question that could never be gotten wrong.
    • In Outlast, he ended up wandering around for several minutes (even adding in a Jump Cut to cut out even more wandering) when all he had to do was jump up to a small ledge. He immediately called himself out on it.
    • In Ross' Super Mario Maker level, he managed to completely screw up a puzzle by putting a spring in an awkward position, causing the shell to fall off the platform and screw his chances of beating it. Mark immediately suffered a Heroic BSoD as a result of his screw up.
    • In Dead by Daylight, after Mark warns Wade about a bear trap by him, Mark proceeds to step into that same trap. He runs into another trap shortly after.
    • In Trouble in Terrorist Town, after failing to kill the traitor and getting killed himself multiple times, Mark gets fed up and goes for the kill-them-all approach. The end result? He ends up killing the only two innocents (besides himself) before being gunned down by the traitors.
    • In Golf With Your Friends, he completely missed one of the game's most basic elements (the power bar) because his microphone was in the way and didn't realize until Wade mentioned the bar while giving the others advice. The guys tease him about this for a while.
    • In Hand Simulator, he, Jack and Pokimane play the Grenade Toss game. Mark accidentally blows himself up nine times in a row. It isn't until Seán tells him to let go of the grenade that Mark realizes his mistake... Before Mark kills himself once more.
      Pokimane: This feels weird to say, but you're really good at killing yourself.
      Mark: Thank you. Thank you.
  • Even the Subtitler Is Stumped: In his 'reaction compilation' videos, the subtitles often simply revert to question marks, a cascade of letters, or the word 'derp'.
  • Everyone Has Standards:
    • Mark obviously does not like Dr. Drevis, especially as the game is winding down. He wonders why the doctor would cheat on his wife when she's very attractive and very loving and devoted. He even becomes disgusted with him wanting to turn his daughter into a doll and wanting her to be "ripe enough". His treatment towards Maria is even worse and Mark voices his disapproval of it.
    • He's very disgusted by David the cannibal leader. He's obviously not very keen of cannibalism, but he's downright furious with David using this as a means to keep a whole village alive, especially since women and children live there. What makes him hate David even more is his interest in a fourteen-year-old girl.
    • He reaches the good ending of Misao and is disgusted by what the villains did to the titular character.
  • Evil Laugh: Sometimes does this, such as in this video, when he accidentally kills a patient in Surgeon Simulator 2013 and goes a little crazy, pretending to be a Deadly Doctor..
  • Eye Scream: The Watson-Scott Test asks a question where every possible answer ends in being specifically stabbed "in the eyes" — the first three (come what may) by the mysterious narrator, the fourth by "yourself". Mark selects the fourth, then proposes "stabbing" himself "in the eyes, with the reverse of the knifes, so the blades are poking up, and when you try to stab me, I stab you with my eyes."
  • Failed a Spot Check:
    • Mark fails to notice on-screen prompts and hints quite often in his Let's Play of Dead Space 3.
    • In Part 4 of Ao Oni, he manages to miss a hanging body, as he's more focused on solving a puzzle at the time. It's only after it hits the ground that he notices it.
    • In Part 2 of Five Nights at Freddy's, he begins the fourth day listening to the starting phone conversation as per usual. Unfortunately, he becomes so interested in it that he completely forgets to check any part of the building and defend himself, in a game about checking parts of the building so he can defend himself. Needless to say, he's killed before the phone conversation even ends when Foxy sprints into the office.
    • A particularly egregious example occurs when he plays Monstrum. Mark hears the monster stomping around a floor above him, but when the footsteps fade away for a brief period, he assumes he's safe and launches into his usual amused ramblings. When you watch the video, you can actually hear the monster stomping up to him and see the light flickering off of him, but Mark is too busy talking to the ceiling to notice. Amusingly, the monster waits for Mark to stop speaking before roaring right into his ear, making him freak out.
    • In The Evil Within, he somehow manages to miss picking up the Agony Crossbow (a silent and very versatile weapon) multiple times throughout his playthrough, ironically complaining about the lack of a crossbow whenever he picks up various types of bolts for it. It takes him until part 7 of his playthrough to finally get one, and only because it was well lit and easily noticeable that time around. Similarly, he fails to notice that there are options for upgrading Sebastian's maximum sprint time, all the while cursing every time he has to take a breather after jogging for 3 seconds.
    • In SOMA, he frequently misses key interactions with objects on his first pass, causing him to spend excessive amounts of time solving even relatively simple puzzles. Partially justified due to the game developers making objects fit so well into the background that you often won't know you can click on something until the prompt appears.
    • Double Subverted in the Undertale livestream. Mark noticed Alphys giving you the correct answers during Mettaton's quiz... but he and Tyler ignored it when Mettaton started trolling them.
    • In his Spooky's Jump Scare Mansion playthrough, he rushes through Specimen 8's room so fast that he fails to notice the monster at all. He then manages to remain completely oblivious to Specimen 8 chasing him, in spite of the monster's telltale Interface Screw and creepy chase theme.
  • Failure Is the Only Option:
  • Five-Second Foreshadowing: Has one of these in his playthrough of Five Nights At Freddy's 4 during the cutscene that shows The Bite; right before it happens, his jaw drops as if he realizes what he's about to see.
  • Flat "What": Has a visual reaction upon finding the "Dancing Room" in The Darkest Words.
  • Flipping the Bird:
    • Done in Vapour when he decides to Rage Quit.
    • Also in "F*ck This Game", where he dances with middle fingers out on the bottom left.
    • "OCULUS RIFT FAIL" ends with him doing this with both hands after getting a vicious kick to the groin.
  • Foolish Sibling, Responsible Sibling: This is somewhat the case with his brother Tom. While Tom acts more mature, Mark acts more silly. This can be seen in their Orcs Must Die! 2 Let's Play. Also, Mark likes to tease Tom occasionally. In his The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Let's Play, Mark makes fun of furries... His brother writes a fairly famous furry webcomic.
  • Foregone Conclusion: The Five Nights at Freddy's fail compilation. The whole point of that video is to show a couple of different ways Markiplier lost in 4/20 Mode.
  • The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: Parodied in the Sonic.exe playthrough.
    Don't turn around; that thing standing directly behind you will just get pissed off.
  • Framing the Guilty Party: In his Trouble in Terrorist Town videos with other Youtubers, Minx is everyone's go-to Butt-Monkey as they repeatedly accuse her of being the traitor. At one point, Mark leaps to his death and tells everyone Minx murdered him (on no basis whatsoever), who amusingly turned out to be the actual traitor. Subverted, it was Spoon who was actually the traitor but from Mark's POV, it did look like it was Minx.
    Mark: Minx didn't actually kill me, but boy you guys really went for it!
  • Freeze-Frame Bonus: In his first Dungeon Nightmares playthrough, when a skeleton falls all of a sudden, there's a text reading: "OMG u so handsome" appearing over it. It's quite easy to miss if you freak out.
    • Also, a lot of compilation videos with in-video subtitles have - at times - small text appear for a split second, making it sometimes a rally for commenters on who can list all the "secret" gags first.
  • Freudian Slip:
    • From one of his Amnesia custom story videos:
      Mark: My mouth is just watering at the thought of that giant juicy sausage! Can't wait for the flavour to blow in my mouth. [Beat]' Explode in my mouth. Wait, what am I talking about? Wait a minute!
    • Says the following during a livestream of Jackbox Party Pack 6, which leaves even himself confused:
      Announcer: Uh oh, here comes trouble!
      Mark: Here comes trouble in the shape of my ass! [shakes head and laughs] I don't know what that means... I don't know what that means, but you should feel threatened!
  • Friend to All Living Things: During his Firewatch playthrough. Mark claims that back when he was a child, he fancied himself as this; of course, that turned out not to be true.
  • Funny Background Event: One of his Subnautica videos has a small ad appearing on the corner of screen that has Wilfred Warfstache doing a silent promotion for a game show called "Disc of Wealth". This foreshadows the "Markiplier TV" skit in which Warfstache hosts said game show.
  • Fun with Subtitles: His first video for HuniePop has his introduction subtitled in Japanese before aping the opening to Neon Genesis Evangelion.
    • Happens to great comic effect throughout his Five Nights at Freddy's reaction compilations.
  • Geek Physique: Nope, he's got a healthy amount of muscle. Especially in his arms.
    Mark: Who the hell're you calling girrrly, boy!?
  • Genre Savvy: Tends to quickly figure out how to avoid monsters in the games he plays. And usually can tell when things are going to get scary very fast. He's also able to pick out suspicious places and people very quickly in games, which is particularly amusing when the non-suspicious person he off-handedly said was probably evil turns out to be evil after all.
    • In his playthrough of The Evil Within he figures out pretty quickly some of the reveals, particularly the detective main character having a Dark and Troubled Past, the entire game being a shared dream, and the villain's plan being Grand Theft Me.
      • In addition, during the final battle, he runs out of ammo and dies. As the game buffers for him to try again, he says, "It's a Rule of Three; you're supposed to get three shots on him! That's, like, that's like the thing!"
    • He pays attention to who has Misao's body parts and is able to reach the good ending by killing Mr. Sohta, who had a connection to her hands, instead of Tohma, who had no body parts.
    • In his Until Dawn playthrough, he correctly guesses that the psycho that made death traps was Josh within seconds of seeing him.
    • In his Prey (2017) playthrough, he figures out the biggest plot twist of the game that he was a Mimic half an hour in his first episode.
    • In his playthrough of We Happy Few, he figures out that Arthur stole Percy's ID instead of just lying about his age right after he sees the hallucination of the Bobby who calls Arthur Percival.
    • The second he lays eyes on Monika, he suspects that she's either going to be the first to die or turn out to be evil. Later, as early as Act One, he susses that Monika is manipulating things behind the scenes, but he's not sure what her motive would be.
    • As early as part 5 of his Red Dead Redemption II playthrough, Mark guesses correctly that one of Herr Strauss's debtors infects Arthur with tuberculosis by coughing in his face mere minutes after said spoilered event happens. Bonus points with how subtle the connection is (to the point where most players would need another playthrough to put two and two together). He even made the guess completely nonchalantly to boot! Ironically, Mark completely forgets about this moment by the time he reaches chapter 6, wondering if the start of Arthur's Incurable Cough of Death is just him having a cold.
    • Any horror game he plays where he gets a tutorial on how to run is always given the response of "Why do I need to run?" many horror games don't tell you how to run until it's the first time you need to run from something
  • Ghostly Animals: A short video features "Ghost Dog", which is a (supposedly) ghostly version of Mark's dog Chica floating through a graveyard.
  • Gilligan Cut: In Five Nights at Freddy's: the Lost Episode, Mark does one of these.
    Mark: I'll be fine. So long as something hasn't changed, I'm good.
    [Fade out. Fade in]
    Mark: [nervously] Oooookay, something changed.
    • Another of these happens in the Golden Freddy Mode of FNAF Sister Location.
      Mark: Without further ado, I'm going to be trying Very Hard Mode, and let's see how long it takes. It is currently Tuesday, December 20th. It is now 12:36 PM. I'm going to let you know the exact time that I am done. Ready? Here we go.
      [A few seconds of intense game play is shown. We suddenly cut back to the level select menu with Mark now wearing different clothes.]
      Mark: Hi. It's now day two.
  • Girlfriend in Canada: Mark and Bob tease Wade in this way during Drunk Minecraft, tying in with his being the group's Butt-Monkey. Subverted if you watch Wade's videos, where his girlfriend Molly is a presence in several of his LPs, most prominently 7 Days to Die and his own Minecraft videos.
  • Gosh Dang It to Heck!: Most of the time, Mark keeps the language PG-13 and tries not to outright curse if he can help it, with the exception of loud freak-out reactions. When he starts dropping Cluster F Bombs repeatedly, he's really unnerved or angry.
    • A couple of Super Mario Maker videos have him donate money to charity, with $100 added for every time he swears.
  • Gratuitous German: During his playthrough of The Last of Us, he repeatedly says, "Scheiße" (crap/shit).
  • Groin Attack: In "OCULUS RIFT FAIL", someone records Mark playing a Rift game while standing up and talking to his audience, only for another person to run up and give him an almighty kick to his nads. Mark is cut off mid-sentence, drops his controller, and promptly crumples to the ground in pain. And then flips them off.
  • Gushing About Shows You Like: In-universe. When he likes a game he's playing, he doesn't hesitate to compliment it and even explains his reasons for liking it.

    H-L 
  • Ham-to-Ham Combat: He attempts to out-ham the Stanley Parable narrator, directing insults at him and generally refusing to go along with his place.
  • Heel Realization: He has one at the end of The Witch's House, where he literally spends about a minute in total silence after finding out that he was playing Ellen the Witch and he was fighting the real Viola.
    • A more lighthearted example is mentioned in Cuphead, where (on account of figuring out how not to set off the balloons), he "realizes" he was just running through a carnival shooting at random, and that's bad. (A later enemy gets him saying that they're the "murderer" here; that wasn't him...)
  • Hell Is That Noise: invoked SCP-173's music cue whenever he's in the vicinity. Somewhere.
    "WHAT? WHY IS THERE IS THERE MUSIC?!"
  • Heroic BSoD: When going through his first let's play of Slender: The Arrival, Markiplier was foiled by the proxy in chapter 3 just as he was about to escape via the mine-shaft elevator, sending him into a screaming mess. The next time, he manages to get to the elevator and up the shaft before this can happen again, and everything seems okay with the level effectively over. Then a bug in clipping issues when stepping off the elevator platform towards the exit sends the player character plummeting to their death. Mark is so utterly shocked and unprepared for what is quite possibly the most epic unintentional "screw you" destiny could ever give a gamer, that his commentary stops in its tracks, as does his ability to even use facial expressions as he stares blankly at the screen for the next fifteen to twenty seconds in absolute silence, un-moving.
    • His playthrough of Mad Father featured a puzzle where he had to recreate a murder scene. He used the mini-chainsaw on the "terribly frightened" girl in the puzzle room, causing the girl to explode into bloody pieces. Mark sat, unmoving, with his mouth hanging open for a good five seconds.
    • Both monsters from his Monstrum playthroughs (of the two he's seen so far, anyway) have caused him to Freak Out followed by a Heroic BSoD, due to how badly he was caught off guard.
    • During his playthrough of Five Nights at Freddy's 4, when the bite incident occurs after the fifth night, Mark can do nothing but stare in open-mouthed horror for almost twenty seconds. Even after he recovers, he's still visibly disturbed for the rest of the video.
    • When he accidentally gets Ashley killed in Until Dawn by forgetting that a wendigo can mimic human voices, he covers his eyes with his arms for a good twenty seconds before removing his headphones and walking offscreen to scream out his frustration. The saddest part is he remembers this vital information the second he screws up and can't go back.
  • Heroic Self-Deprecation: Mark will occasionally point out moments that he Failed a Spot Check, or otherwise couldn't figure out a relatively obvious solution to a puzzle. The most notable of these moments was during a playthrough of Outlast, where he spent a good few minutes wandering around, only to find that he only needed to jump up a small gap, which caused Mark to declare himself "the biggest idiot who ever lived." Even worse is that Mark added in a Jump Cut to cut out even more pointless wandering around.
    • Mark will even express disappointment in himself if he takes a while to figure out any puzzle, even if his method of figuring it out was actually quite clever or not the most straightforward way. Expect the comments section to express amazement when this happens (if the puzzle was particularly frustrating for a lot of people).
  • Hoist by His Own Petard: During Mark's playthrough of A Late Night Drink, Mark spends 15-20 minutes searching for 4 keys in a library. He pulled out books for 20 whole minutes. One key was behind a candlestick NEXT to some books, but other than that, Mark needlessly pulled out books for 20 whole minutes. He eventually did recognize it as his own failure when he included it in one of his compilations, putting arrows pointing to the keys everytime one is in-frame to show how obviously he missed some of them (specifically the key next to the statue).
  • Hollywood Tone-Deaf: His "attempt" at singing in this video fits the bill, especially considering Mark has shown to be capable of singing very well.
  • Hope Spot: Mark very, very narrowly escapes being mauled by Freddy on his first night, and celebrates accordingly... before being immediately reminded he has fournote  more days to go.
    Mark: Oh no... ohnononono... [Freddy Appears] HI! OH GODDAMNIT! HOW'RE YA DOIN!? [6 A.M.] Did I make it...? I MADE IT! YEAH-HAH! [2nd Night] Ohgodnotagain...
    • Then there was the infamous moment in Vanish, where he got the keys, found the door, unlocked the door... and was killed before being able to leave.
    • In part 6 of Amnesia: Killings in Aldstadt, Mark is tormented by a neverending loop of the shop theme from Ocarina of Time produced by a soundtrack bug, and tries to end it all by repeatedly jumping off a tall balcony. When he goes up the stairs to do it again, the loop stops... only to start all over again.
  • The Hyena: In Mark's own words, he's "a giggly bitch by nature."
  • Hypocritical Humor: In one of the Garry's Mod horror maps Mark ran with Yamimash, he takes a second to good-naturedly mock a "bananus buttsex" poster, saying "We'll stick with our highbrow humor." He then turns on noclip and proceeds to fart his way across the map.
  • Idiot Ball: Alien: Isolation gives the player a tool to track the motion of enemies: the aptly-named "motion tracker". Despite this, multiple times in Markiplier's playthrough (especially in the final third of the game) he'll forget about this crucial gameplay tool and instead cower in fear in a dark corner calling out, "Is someone there?!" or "Where did you go?!" to the NPCs. While it's true that an enemy can hear the tracker's beeping, and that might have influenced his decision to not use it, testing it out would have revealed they can only hear it if you're close enough to give them a rectal exam, not fifteen feet away.
  • Idiot Hero: At least as far as he's concerned, he can be somewhat ditzy.
  • I Hate Past Me: In part 17 of "Afraid of Monsters" Mark is forced to backtrack through an area he had already went through. He's forced to fight several monsters he had originally run past and wonders why he left so many. "Damn you, past me!"
  • I Have Many Names: Sometimes (although very rarely) in his "hello everybody" intros, Mark will fuck up saying his name, which results in things such as "bagamum", "woOoOoOoOoO", or even simply "welcome".
  • The Immodest Orgasm: In Golf With Your Friends with Jack, Bob and Wade, Jack says "Top o the morning!" triumphantly after a good hit. Bob then asks if that's what he says when he "finishes" and then jokes that all Youtubers do that. Which cues all of them to grunt out their intros in the funniest way possible.
  • Improv: For his final Mad Father, he uses a real cough for a piece of dialogue.
  • Inelegant Blubbering: His first run-in with SCP-106, aka "Radical Larry" resulted in this.
  • Insistent Terminology: Invoked during his playthrough of Huniecam Studio in order to maintain his kid friendly atmosphere. Mark repeatedly insists that the girls in the game are filming Let's Play videos, that they are going to the photo studio to make thumbnails for their Let's Plays, and that they go to the sleazy motel to search for cash under the furniture. Naturally, everything you see from the game itself makes it immediately clear what's really going on.
  • Instantly Proven Wrong: On the first episode of his Five Nights at Freddy's 4 playthrough, he remarks that the first night is usually not that bad. Literally two seconds later he gets jumpscared.
  • It Makes Sense in Context: A lot of his lines tend to be very odd, but they do make sense, even these ones:
    Markiplier: "The head of my dead child is pinned to my ass!"
    Markiplier: "At least it's in my ass, it can't kill me if it's in my ass!"
  • Jump Cut: A Running Gag whenever he takes too long in tedious grinding or if he’s screwed something up.
  • Jump Scare: He falls victim to many in horror games. And manages to pull one on us nicely.
    • This video of Slender: The Nine Pages has Mark encounter an incredibly frightening jump scare that greatly terrified Mark so much, it looked like it could have given him a heart attack.
    • Deconstructed quite well in "Are Jumpscares Scary?"... Or not.
    • At the start of the Hotel Remorse video, Mark's creepy-as-all-hell Woody mask pops up all close to the camera right out of nowhere accompanied by a scream.
  • Kubrick Stare: Invoked for two minutes and thirteen seconds in his Hello Kitty Online episode. It's not a still photo.
  • Kill It with Fire:
    • Has this reaction to one of the alien's body parts making noises in Surgeon Simulator 2013.
    • Similarly during his OFF playthrough, when a head starts emerging from the mouth of a Pastel Burnt.
    • In The Last of Us and Alien: Isolation, he loves using the flamethrower on certain enemies. Even though he's overjoyed to have this weapon on hand, he quickly learns to use it in a more controlled manner.
  • Lame Pun Reaction: In episode 22 of the "Try not to Laugh" series.
    Squidward: That's just a stupid boulder!
    Spongebob: It's not just a boulder! It's a rock! [Spongebob hugs the rock, then a political map of Iraq appears over it]
    Mark: ...I hate you.
  • Large Ham: One of the appeals of watching his Let’s Plays are his hilariously exaggerated reactions to everything. Especially when he does his "Isaac Clarke voice".
  • Laser-Guided Karma: During Mark and Bob's Rust playthrough, Mark killed a guy who offered to help break into a building. Mark killed him the moment he turned his back on him and it turned out that he didn't have anything of value. Later on that same player came back packing a pistol and killed Bob. The fact that they built their home right next to the house they were breaking into didn't help.
  • Laughing Mad:
    • The Markiplier Land episode of Drunk Minecraft, where the gang (or Mark and Wade at least) are at the end of a session and a lot drunker than normal. Mark dissolves into fits of laughter half a dozen times, to the confusion of his friends, with the first one lasting almost two minutes straight.
      Bob: What's going on with Mark?
      Wade: I don't know. He broke.
    • At the end of his Dead Space 2 playthrough. It even got a Highlight.
  • Leader Wannabe: Odds are, if he's playing with other Let's Players in a team, Mark will declare himself the leader of the group, regardless if he knows the game or not.
  • Let's See YOU Do Better!: While he was playing Surgeon Simulator 2013's new mode (Meet The Medic) on the birthday stream, and after finally beating it, Wade was laughing in the background at Mark taking as long as he did and almost failing. Cue an angry Mark making Wade play until he either won or failed, while he was sitting in the background with a rather funny (but angry) expression.
    • While playing Skate 3, Bob criticized Mark for not doing enough funny stuff. Mark hands the controller over and tells Bob to do it, if he thinks he can be funnier. The very next thing Bob does is run his skater into a pole groin-first, which makes Mark crack up.
  • The Load: invoked in his "Heave Ho Mega Episode", Wade is this, partially because he didn't have nearly as much playing time as Bob, Jack and Mark, who played several rounds of the game together, and partially because after a few beginners levels, they went straight to the levels after Bob, Mark and Jack had played, a major Difficulty Spike for a newbie.
  • Luck-Based Mission: He states that he's not a fan of these in his Five Nights At Freddy's 4-20 mode video, since success in a game should be dependent on a player's skill. Note that in this specific instance, he's attempting an nigh-impossible challenge and has died to Freddy dozens and dozens of times due to random chance despite playing as perfectly as possible.
  • Lonely at the Top: Discussed. In an interview with Anthony Padilla, Mark explains the origins of his memetic crying reaction. Upon being sent a compilation of his fans thanking him for doing what he does, Mark starts crying not out of happiness but because he grew his channel from the ground up and formed a personal connection with each and every one of his earlier subscribers: now that he's become successful, he cannot form that kind of personal connection with his fans due to how many there are. Nevertheless, Mark still tries his best to help others out, any way he can.

    M-R 
  • Madness Mantra: In his penultimate Vanish video, Mark undergoes a major Sanity Slippage from anger and desperation, repeating phrases over and over again, pleading with the game to just let him win.
  • Malaproper:
    • The most common one is Mark pronouncing the word "room" almost like "rum". He doesn't take it very well when Jacksepticeye points it out, and he lampshades it himself at the start of his playthrough of Run Rooms.
    • "Amm-ro" for "ammo," "dablit" or "dablage" for "dammit/damage" respectively.
    • After a particularly hearty laugh in a Skate 3 video, his lungs hurt, and he says he thinks he "tore up his areola a little". The word he's looking for is alveoli.
  • Manipulative Bastard: Played for laughs, but Mark's Trouble in Terrorist Town videos with other Youtubers show that he's actually pretty good at plotting to get the others to kill each other (even if he's not actually the traitor that round) when he's not too busy screwing around.
  • Manly Tears: Mark has occasionally choked up on camera, especially during emotional moments in certain video games, or when talking about how honored he is by his fans. He’s also seen trying to hold back tears while talking about his friend's death. Contrary to what Mark hilariously insists, it doesn't take away from his manliness one bit.
  • Miles Gloriosus: According to his boasts, Markiplier will gloriously kick the butt of any monster he encounters. Just don't get him anywhere near the actual monsters.
  • Mistaken for Foreigner: While reading viewer comments, he came across one which read "Mark! Are you going to America soon?" and was completely baffled. He had been born in Hawaii and grew up in Cincinnati.
  • Monster Clown: World's Quietest Let's Play 2 Animated has Mark eaten by one of these. then finds himself surrounded by clown versions of Bob, Wade, Jack, Pewds, and the Game Grumps.
  • Motor Mouth: As a natural reaction when pants-shittingly terrified, Mark will tend to babble anything that comes to mind. The best example of this is during his Five Nights at Freddy's 3 playthrough, he talks with the animatronic that's about to kill him like he's having a tea party.
    "Hey, buddy! How’s it going? You wanna- you wanna get a noise? Like, over there? Like over there. There’s a bunch of noises. Like, noisy noises… I heard the noisest noise I ever heard over in room 10… Is that a room, room 10? You might wanna check out room 10, because room 10, whew, boy lemme tell you all the stuff that’s in room 10…"
  • Mundane Made Awesome: "Markiplier in Slow Motion", in which Mark manages to use overcrank to make the tasks of burning paper, spinning a bag of bread, and jumping on a couch all look equally badass.
    • His Best Fiends trailer to promote the charity. Yes, it was unnecessarily over the top.
  • My God, What Have I Done?:
    • Mark had a heartbreaking case after playing ''Ripest of Fears", a fangame dedicated to him. He realized that he's been trying so hard to get more subscribers that he's been neglecting the fans he already has. He promised to go back to how he used to be, and was desperately holding back tears at the end of the video.
    • He has an in-game example for Mad Father when he was setting up the final murder scene in the memory section. He playfully swung his mini chainsaw at the female statue only to successfully kill her. Obviously, he didn't realize this was part of the game and was just messing around.
    • Another in-game example is when he played Calm Time. He admitted that he just finished Drunk Minecraft and wasn't prepared for such a dark game. He especially felt bad for being forced to kill the only kid there.
    • He slowly starts thinking this during his playthrough of Off. After seeing the purified zones, he starts wondering what he's really doing. Meeting the Judge after defeating Japhet, having to kill the helpless Burnt in the subway tunnel, and being forced to kill Hugo eventually make him realize that he's done bad...
    • During his playthrough of Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, he expresses horror over killing Mia the first time.
      "I was gonna run for it! I didn't want to be a part of this!"
  • Never Heard That One Before: When they're playing together, Bob or Wade will sometimes say "Oh hi, Mark". In one episode of The Forest, Bob even mentions the trope by name.
  • Never My Fault: One of the running gags of Drunk Minecraft is Mark's utter refusal to accept blame for anything that goes wrong during play, preferring to blame Wade for everything. Taken to silly extremes in this episode, where Mark accidently spills his drink on his keyboard, breaking it, and spends the rest of the episode running in and out trying to get a new one. An episode later, he's blaming it on Wade.
    • Lampshaded by Jordan on his guest appearance when he's told of this:
      Jordan: So that's your excuse?
      Mark: No! It's not my excuse!
  • The Nicknamer:
    • Markiplier will, on occasion, randomly nickname characters in video games things like "Billy" (that's the name given to SCP-173 as well as to the Scavenger Bots in Dead Space 3) if he doesn't trust the character (as seen in his play-through of Penumbra and Nightmare House 2 as well as a sewer pipe he called "Jerry" in an Amnesia Mod.
    • The Brute from Amnesia: The Dark Descent was dubbed "Mooseman" by Markiplier, mostly due to the sound he makes.
    • "It's just not a party without my good friend, Mr. BunBun. Or Mr. Happy Duck. Mr. Quacky Smack."
    • He also nicknamed the robots in the Vehicle Bay in Subnautica Jeffrey, Billy, Marshall, and Samwise, the Cyclops as USS F**k the Ocean and Big Box Barry, the female AI voice is his computer wife, Karen, the P.R.A.W.N. suit is Mr. Fister and his various Seamoths are F**k A Duck, Bubblebutt, Bumblebutt and Bubblegum. In the finale, he names the Cuddlefish "Calvin", and gives his rocket the same name in its honor.
    • During his playthrough of Vanish, he called the monsters "Molepeople", which led to the fandom calling them Molemen.
  • No Indoor Voice: Mark can get quite shouty under the right circumstances, to say the least.
  • "No. Just… No" Reaction:
    • During his Outlast: Whistleblower playthrough, Mark reads the subtitle "childhood, sexual, reptile imagery" in reference to weird dreams a patient is having. He starts asking what that is and seems to start asking for someone to make fanart of it, but he stops himself at the words "draw some f-" and says, "No, no. God", instead.
    • Whenever a game he's playing has Rape as Drama implications, he either has this reaction, says something along the lines of "Not going to touch that with a X ft pole", or just tries to ignore it completely.
    • In Happy Wheels Highlights #67, he has this reaction upon seeing Tiny Box Tim with a massive boner.
    • During his playthrough of Phobia, he keeps repeating "No" when someone, or something, keeps knocking on his bedroom door. Obviously, he knew something was wrong and he really didn't want to open the door. There's even an animation of the scene.
    • And you have this reaction during his playthrough of Until Dawn'.
  • "No More Holding Back" Speech: Played for Laughs in his Papers, Please playthrough.
    Mark: Dude, I'm doing good. Hey, you're cold? Whatever. You're gonna be warm tonight, so...shut up. [Dramatic music starts] I ain't dealing in penalties anymore, I'm frickin' balling! I'm balling out my ass! [Dramatic music stops as Mark makes a cringey face] Ueeegh...ugh.
  • Noodle Incident: Mark mentions one to introduce his alcohol of choice while playing Five Nights at Fuckboy's. Said alcohol of choice is the 'delicious cinnamon whisky that got [Mark], Bob, Wade, Jack and Yamimash in trouble in Boston at PAX East.' Apparently, none of them will ever tell what actually happened, although Mark says not too much trouble.
  • No-Sell: World's Quietest Let's Play 2 Animated has Mark's sword breaking on Little Johnny's head despite having the objective to kill him in a round of Happy Wheels .
  • Nothing Is Scarier: Markiplier often praises game developers for making use of this and gets easily freaked out from a games suspense and atmosphere when this trope is successfully implemented.
    • His collaboration with Yamimash on the Abandoned Metro Garry's Mod map shows that he has little tolerance for games and maps which seem like they're building suspense and atmosphere, but then don't do anything with it.
    • Mark's produced this trope by himself in some cases, like the "Don't blink" and "Don't move" videos. Or in the credits of some games, like "Hotel Remorse".
  • Obfuscating Stupidity: Puts it to truly glorious use in Among Us.
  • Oh, Crap!: A couple in-game reactions:
    • In his play-through of The Last of Us, he was not happy to encounter a second Bloater.
    • Encountering Chris Walker in Outlast: The Whistleblower. The character was so impactful that he somehow remembered his name.
    • Just about anytime a monster from Vanish appears. Usually, though, he gets upset with them.
    • The instant he realizes that Five Nights at Freddy's has more than five nights, his glee at "beating" the game vanishes.
    • One out-of-game example is when he dropped his iPad in a tub of water. Yes, he kind of overdid the reaction, but he was very upset that it happened.
    • In Part 13 of SCP – Containment Breach, when he spends several minutes admiring a new part of the map he's just discovered.
      Mark: What the hell is... What the hell is this? What is this? There's a camera... Hi! And it's frickin' following me and I hear one-
      [Gas suddenly starts getting pumped into the room en masse]
      Mark: Ah! Aw crap, what the- what- what is this?
      [Mark finds a piece of paper revealing that the room he's in belongs to SCP-682.]
      Mark: Oh no! [starts running]
      [SCP-682 roars from behind a wall]
    • Witnessing The Bite Incident in Five Nights at Freddy's 4. He suddenly realizing something is horribly wrong when the Big Brother Bully decides to put the main character's head in Fredbear's mouth and is rendered speechless when it clamps down.
    • He had multiple ones in Monstrum, though he had a very visual one when encountering the cameras for the first time:
      [camera activates alarm]
      Mark: Roar? [realizes that the monster will follow the noise] OH CRAP!
    • During his playthrough of a demo title called HUMAN, Mark's usual playful and sarcastic demeanor goes right out the window when he realizes that the excessively loud footsteps he was hearing throughout the game were actually a second set of footsteps closely following his. Even worse, rapidly turning around reveals nothing else in the room with him. For the next few minutes, Mark is almost as deeply unsettled as when he played Dreadhalls on the Oculus Rift.
  • O.O.C. Is Serious Business:
    • In a general sense, most of Mark's vlogs fit the bill. They're not all-caps titles, usually cover a serious real-life topic, and Mark's tone of voice is down to earth. If he's getting emotional, it's not in a comical, exaggerated manner like most of his other content.
    • Beginning with Five Nights at Freddy's: Sister Location, Mark stopped adding all-caps clickbait to the titles of FNaF videos. This is likely due to the game being the flagship series that helped rocket his channel into stardom (as well as earning him the unofficial title of the King of Five Nights at Freddy's), and as such he treats the games with enough respect that he feels he doesn't need to put clickbait in the title in order to draw an audience for them.
    • Mark's time with Getting Over It is probably the angriest he's ever gotten at a game since I Am Bread. We're talking screaming like a banshee, swearing like a sailor, chair-throwing levels of rage. It's absolutely frightening to see Mark get this mad, and at one point, he venomously says that he hopes Bennett Foddy dies in a fire.
    • YouTube has a huge problem... has Mark trying not to blow his lid in most of the video as he describes what amounts to a website-related version of a Game-Breaking Bug that affected a large portion of his viewer base shortly after the release of A Heist with Markiplier.tl;dw
  • Orphaned Series:
    • His Dementium II play through. Despite claiming that he was enjoying the game the series abruptly ended at part 4. And since that was uploaded back in December of 2013 it looks like Markiplier isn't interested in finishing it.
    • His Spore with Wade as well. Latest video was uploaded on Oct 7, 2014... or not. It was just on an incredibly long hiatus, as the newest episode was released on May 18, 2015. Also semi-Played Straight, as it's a reboot with Wade as well as Tyler now.
    • His long series, Drunk Minecraft, is now on permanent hiatus as Mark reveals that he's had to go to the hospital because of drinking alcohol.note 
  • Out-of-Character Alert: An odd example happens in Mark's playthrough of the fangame A New Home, as he repeatedly points out that the representation of him in the game isn't like him at all (being an arrogant Jerkass who neglects his fans and friends, and prefers salad over meat). He soon figures out that it's someone pulling a Grand Theft Me similar to The Witch's House, and that the real Mark is the white-cloaked being chasing him.
  • Overcrank: Utilised in the videos "Markiplier in Slow Motion" and Slow Mo Dance | Markiplier & TomSka.
  • Overly Long Gag:
    • Mark while playing Neverending Nightmares on medicine for an ear infection.
    "You're not gonna get me this time. I'm ready for ya! I'm ready for ya, creepy painting of a little girl! I'm ready for ya, Slenderman in the distance over there! I'm ready for ya,... crop... symbol of Ohio! I'm ready for ya, screamin' baby! I'm ready for ya, town about to be consumed by weather! I'm ready for ya, picture of a soldier! I'm ready for ya, picture of crows fly- *bird flies by window* uhhhh. I wasn't ready for ya, vulture."
    • One of the endings for A Date With Markiplier has him attempting to dig through the concrete floor of a jail cell for ten minutes straight while making no progress, and he continues to dig as the video ends.
  • Overly Narrow Superlative: When he plays "BWAK", he describes it as "a horror chicken game unlike any other" and jokingly says he knows there have been a lot.
  • Painful Body Waxing: Mark's waxing challenge video sees him, well, getting his body painfully waxed. Funny thing is, he actually enjoyed it.
  • Paranormal Investigation: Parodied in "The Drowned Man", in which Mark plays a ghost hunter investigating unexplained water damage in Wade's house.
  • Perfectly Cromulent Word: Coined in the finale of HuniePop — Resipriciousness: "A strong urge to engage in coitus with anime women."
  • Power Up Let Down: During his second run of Subnautica, he was thrilled when he finally was able to (legitimately) earn the Prawn Mini-Mecha... only to climb in and realize that the suit on its own has no special abilities (other than being able to survive massive sea depths).
  • Pre-Asskicking One-Liner: The animated "MAGICAL MISCHIEF (with chica!)" turns what was originally just a normal comment about The Binding of Isaac into one of these.
    Markiplier: By the way, death is permanent and whatnot. [attacks the monster and kills it]
  • Precious Puppies: Mark is very much a dog person, as multiple videos illustrate. In some videos he plays with his mom's and brother's dogs, and in November 2015 he got one named Chica. Plenty of vlogs feature Mark fawning over her.
  • Precision F-Strike: 2020 - A Comprehensive Review, in the light of the year's problems, consists of only a single word, which is of course...
    Mark: Fuck.
  • Press X to Not Die: Mark does not like Quicktime Events, as he repeatedly expresses during his playthrough of Man of Medan.
  • Product Placement: Mark plugs his and Sean's clothing brand, Cloak, multiple times in part 10 of his Red Dead Redemption II livestream (and half of the times he does it, he's Corpsing).
  • Properly Paranoid:
    • Because Mark has played so much Amnesia, he has become terrified of mannequins. Even if they're inanimate, he freaks out and takes off their heads.
    • He gets really freaked out he first meets the Working Joes. The first thing he does is spastically shooting at it. He was right to be scared of them.
    • During the first night of Five Nights at Freddy's 2, Markiplier hears the word "golden" in the Phone Guy's introduction and immediately latches onto it. With good reason, because Golden Freddy is in this game, and is more of threat than ever.
    • Subverted in his recent playthrough of SOMA, when he has to make the choice of whether he should kill or spare the WAU. He ultimately makes the decision not to go through with it, based on his interpretation of Ross - that of a sinister stalker with an unknown agenda. Apparently, the many humans who had either been killed or preserved by the WAU, along with its progressive destruction of the Earth's remaining ecosystems, weren't significant factors against the question of preserving its life.
  • Pyrrhic Victory: One of the Drunk Minecraft episodes revolves around Mark, Bob, Wade, and Zombiemold attempting to make TNT cannons... except the first three have no clue how to and decide to improvise. The video ends when Mark finally manages to land a shot on Zombie's fortress, but the sheer amount of explosives he used blew away most of what he built.
    Mark: I blow up my own shit all the time, I don't care about that, but I got ya. I got ya! I GOT YA! Woooo!
  • The Quiet One: Tyler as seen in the Spore videos isn't particularly chatty in comparison to Mark and Wade. As a result they nickname him "One Word Tyler" and "Stone Face Tyler". His later appearances in Mark’s videos avert this trope, since he’s either playing the Straight Man to Mark’s goofy antics or partaking in the same sense of humour.
  • Rage Quit: He does this at the end of Hell Was Here, when he invokedimmediately dies upon spawning in an empty room.
    • He also does this towards the end of "The Hat Man". He was getting into the game at first, but after the Hat Man started cornering him, he got angry when he was forced to replay the whole game again. It was even worse when he had another Yank the Dog's Chain moment when the Hat Man got him at the last stage.
    • I Am Bread exasperated him so much that he lost his voice and smashed a hole in his controller, followed by vowing to never play the game ever again. This wasn't a vow that he kept for very long.
    • His Let's Play of Until Dawn when he inadvertently led Ashley to her death. However, it's more of a "Rage Restart" than a Rage Quit.
    • He does this after Welcome to the Game 2 just pushes his buttons. He didn't even die before rage quitting. He just decided to back off from the computer and go on a tirade before quitting.
  • Rapid-Fire "No!":
  • A Rare Sentence: Drunk Minecraft in general tends to produce these. Some gems include "This waterfall doesn't touch the penis!", "I'm being molested by an albino spider", and "Get your head out of my thong."
  • Rated M for Manly: This AMA video, which gradually crosses into Testosterone Poisoning territory.
  • Reality Is Unrealistic: Markiplier failed the Markiplier quiz, somehow.
  • Real Men Eat Meat: Mark gets considerably offended when he reads a letter of resignation in Amnesia: Rain where, among other things, the maid criticizes him for being stupid because "isn't the fact that you eat animals and I don't proof enough?". He spends a few minutes afterwards gushing about how good meat tastes.
  • Real Men Wear Pink: His Warfstache logo is pink, he actually enjoyed his waxing challenge, takes pole dancing lessons, and is actually an easy crier when it comes to how much he loves his fans and fan community. When he dyed his hair pink as a result of a livestream goal, he liked it enough to keep it and recolor it into a softer shade of cotton candy pink. It borders on In Touch with His Feminine Side, honestly.
  • "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Has one for the developer of Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy in part 3 of his playthrough:
    Mark: This is the worst game I have ever played in my entire life. I have never hated a game more than this game. And it's fucking pretentious. "Oh, it's hard, therefore it's rewarding," no, it's hard because it's bullshit, and you made it that way, so you fucking know it's bullshit. It's not any wonder of game development, no, you made it bullshit because you know how to make a game bullshit! You're not a fucking prophet because you made a hard game! You are no saint. You are not better than me, just because you made a bullshit game. You are not. You are not.
    [Mark falls, and Bennett begins to quote William Carlos Williams]
    Mark: Shut up. Shut up. Shut up. You know you're making it worse. I know you know you're making it worse, with your bullshit quotes, from people who are actually contributing to society when they were alive, which is not you, developer of this game! You are doing nothing, just the same as I am! You and I are the same temporary bullshit piece of human organism, which we all know and hate! We all know!
  • Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: In-Universe. He wasn't too fond of Natuski in the first act of the game, but when act two kicked in and Yuri and Monika both go crazy, he wastes no time clinging to her.
  • Retirony: Discussed in Foreign Creature.
    Mark (about the security guard that the titular creature was about to kill): Let me guess, it's your last day of retirement,note  you don't have a care in the world, do ya?
  • Rouge Angles of Satin: Try Not To Laugh #3 has Mark cracking up over someone reading all the various misspelled ways people have asked pregnancy related questions.
  • Rule of Three: He has a long running "3 Scary Games" video series, where he plays 3 scary games and reviews them.
  • Running Gag:
    • "Poof! :3" occurs mostly in the compilations as a sound effect.
    • "Hating" Wade, especially in Drunk Minecraft and Prop Hunt.
    • "Pressing B to Blow" is a running gag for the channel as a whole, coined after a weirdly-named prompt in his let's play of Dungeon Nightmares. Any livestream would often have Mark reading out a comment, particularly if he's stuck on a difficult game.
    • In his Besiege videos, he repeatedly insists the death machines are in fact farming equipment.
    • His Self-Deprecation for dropping out of college to pursue YouTube. "I could have been an engineer..."
    • Throughout his Until Dawn playthrough he makes jokes about "partying like porn stars", based off an early line from Josh. Also, mispronouncing "wendigo".
    • He's Purple Guy. He first states it in one of his playthrough videos ("Maybe I'm Purple Guy!"), in the opening for Game Theory's 'Why FNAF Will Never End' video he appears out of the locked box stating "It was me!", and his title card in 'Warfstache Interviews Markiplier' video lists his occupation as 'Purple Guy'.
    • Mentioning cranberries when reading dialogue spoken by old people.
    • Bear traps, first encountered in Limbo (2010), then in Dead by Daylight, and now they're all over the place in Lethe. And he just keeps stepping in them.
    • After he quit his Undertale playthrough due to an unruly fanbase, any mentions of the game will have Mark react with some kind of horror.
    • When he returns to the aforementioned game in a live stream format, he humorously lampshades that they mention Hitler in nearly every stream of the game.
    • While playing Subnautica, he constantly forgets to pay attention to the Oxygen meter. The game has a verbal Low Oxygen warning, and he still misses it.
      • After he equips the Stillsuit, each time it reclaims water, Markiplier will comment that he pissed himself, regardless of the situation, sometimes interrupting himself to do so. This culminates in the finale, where his time capsule consists of an epitaph and is filled with bags of reclaimed water.
      • In the livestream finale of Subnautica, he has a running gag where he ignores the pleas to turn off the Precursor gun and says that it's just a urban legend. Later in the episode it turns into a running gag where he says didn't accidentally kill Calvin the Cuddlefish and then reload his save.
    • Mark's obsession with conducting sneak kills in The Evil Within 2. He insists on sticking to this method even in situations where using other weapons are more preferable, comes up with several pre-mortem one-liners involving food (particularly soup) before one-shotting zombies, and is reluctant to upgrade any abilities that are not related to sneaking to the extent that even Tatiana chides him for not doing so.
    • This one is shared with Bob: Derrick. "HOW DARE YOU?!"
    • Conversing, or arguing with, his editor Lixian.
    • Pronouncing Genius as Junyus.
    • From his review videos, asking for a sponsor, and admitting that he would be willing to shill their products if given one. Thus far, only two companies have responded to Mark's requests for a sponsorship deal... with absurdly insulting gifts instead of sponsorship deals.

    S-V 
  • Sanity Slippage:
    • After a tough time in the final boss fight of Dead Space 2, he goes Laughing Mad and fills his inventory with nothing but Pulse Rifle ammo and health kits, and it's a little bit like watching The Joker do a Let's Play.
    • His entire Surgeon Simulator 2013 video is an 11-minutes plus epitome of this trope as he plays an increasingly unhinged doctor.
    • Throughout the first play in the final video of Vanish, Mark becomes increasingly frazzled and panicked.
    • In a Happy Wheels montage where he played ONE Dark Souls-based level, he slowly slipped into this. And he was well aware of this.
      "Do you think - in the future - when I'm at my insanity hearing, that they'll use this as evidence that I really did lose my mind?"
    • I Am Bread makes Mark so angry with the controls/the physics/himself/life in general that he just breaks down and weeps. No big surprise that it was made by the same people behind Surgeon Simulator 2013.
    • He undergoes another during his playthrough of Presentable Liberty- except it isn't played for laughs at all.
  • The Scrappy: In-universe. He isn't a fan of Zacharie, which is amusing considering his reputation in the fanbase.
    • Whenever he plays Happy Wheels, he makes it an objective to kill Little Johnny.
    • He's not a fan of Sohta. When he found out what Sohta did to Misao, he had immense hatred for the guy and even when learning how much his life sucked due to so much bullying for his appearance and childhood, Mark was still hateful towards Sohta. When the game reveals that Aki forgives Sohta for what he's done, Mark flat out states that Sohta cannot be forgiven that easily for what he did.
    • He doesn't seem to be fond of Phone Guy, sighing and groaning when Phone Guy starts in with his normal "Hello, hello?" and even theorizing that he might be the killer during 2.
    • In Until Dawn, he doesn't seem to like Mike or Josh very much. The former he dislikes for being a Jerk Jock, while the latter he dislikes for his creepy behavior. When Dr. Hill asks him which one he dislikes more in one of the therapy sessions, he has to take a moment to think it through. Both wound up rescued from his Scrappy heap - eventually he warmed up to Mike because of him befriending a wolf, and while his hatred of Josh only increased after the reveal that he's the psycho making death traps, one of his late segments shown Through the Eyes of Madness started Mark toward calling Josh's schtick retrospectively one of the coolest things in the game.
  • Save Scumming: Does this towards the end of his playthrough of Until Dawn to bypass the game's autosave mechanic and get the game's best possible ending after making several mistakes that resulted in the death of characters during the finale.
  • The Scream: Becoming cornered or trapped by SCP-173. In one playthrough, SCP-173 hops through an office window rather then use the door as expected...
    Mark: No! NO! NOOOOO—AAAAAUUURRGHG! [neck snap]
    • And in another, Mark faces it down as his eye meter depletes to zero...
      Mark: I'm taking you with me! KEEP LOOKING AT ME! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA— [neck snap]
    • In Part 8, Mark finally gets the jump on 173 via surveillance cam, then does an end run around it. (Or does he?)
      Mark: Imma getcha. Imma getcha. Imma getcha! I SEE YA! I SEE YA! I SEE YA! Oooohh yeah, like a boss! (neck snap)
    • Part 10, "Worst Scare Ever", is so named for 173 zipping right in front of Mark, who grips his forehead in pain from so much screaming. Finally, he just saunters up to it.
      Mark: [snarls angrily] HI!♥
      [pokes statue]
      Mark: 'SCUSE ME!
      [173 doesn't budge]
      Mark: Fine, kill me! [neck snap]
  • Screams Like a Little Girl: Virtually every horror Let's Play sees Mark let out some rather unflattering screams. It's especially funny if he had been boasting about his toughness beforehand. Quite a few videos in general, particularly Drunk Minecrafts, have him screaming in high-pitched fury as well.
  • Screw Destiny: Even though Mark knew that the point of Until Dawn is to live with the choices made, he snapped when he accidentally got Ashley killed, and decided to play the entire game over again, just to give all the characters a satisfying ending.
  • Screw Yourself: Admits in his fifth "Reading Your Comments" video that he'd like to go to Mars with his sole company being an Opposite-Sex Clone.
  • Self-Imposed Challenge: He pulls off a Solo Run in GTFO, a game meant to be played with four people. He's currently done A1 and B1 in his name.
  • Sensory Abuse: Lixian seems to be a fan of doing this, if his edits are any indication.
  • Set Right What Once Went Wrong: In his Until Dawn playthrough. As soon as Ashley gets killed, Mark's response after he calms down is to vow to play the entire game over again so that everyone is still alive.
  • "Shaggy Dog" Story: His Grand Theft Auto V antics with Wade and Jacksepticeye. They spend an entire video trying to get into a military base and steal jets. Jack and Wade succeed multiple times, but Mark keeps getting killed in silly ways. Until he finally manages to steal one... and promptly crashes it in a pile of crates without even managing to get it to fly because he doesn't know how to turn the thing. Goes to full Shoot the Shaggy Dog levels in the following video, where he opts to keep the helicopter they got to the base with rather than try again, only to go down in flames to a badly aimed missile of Jack's. A later episode has him succeed again in stealing a jet, but gets shot down after about 10 seconds by a military plane.
  • Shaking the Rump: There's a backstory to this. One time, a fan asked Mark if he knew how to twerk, and he didn't. And so, he followed up with a video where he tried to twerk.
  • Share the Male Pain:
    • Can't go through a Happy Wheels highlight video without a character being shot in the crotch and Mark screaming "Oh, my dick!"
    • While playing the Gluskin section of Outlast: Whistleblower, he moved uncomfortably around his chair while watching Gluskin castrated his other victims.
    • When Lisa of Whack the Creeps kicks one of the titular creeps in the nads with a blade sticking out the front of her shoe, Mark goes Instant Soprano for about a second.
  • Shipper on Deck: He's a huge fan of Ashley/Chris. How much? When he gets one of them killed in a pretty stupid manner (he forgot that wendigos can impersonate voices), he breaks down and resolves to play the game over just so they can have their happy ending.
  • Shmuck Bait:
    • The thumbnail for Penis Cloner displays an image of Mark with a repulsed look, and says "DON'T CLICK". Naturally, no one listened; it became one of his most viewed videos from 2013.
    • He falls for one himself in The Impossible Quiz Book. One of the choices for Question 26 is "Please Don't Press This"; he presses it anyway, and ends up resetting the entire game.
    • Happens again in Super Mario Maker when he's doing the expert 100 Mario challenge. He sees a pit filled with powerups, and though suspicious, decides to get them. He ends up trapped in the pit.
  • Shout-Out:
  • Shown Their Work: Praise has been given to "Are Jumpscares Scary?" for really living up to its title, by producing a haunting and unnerving atmosphere that most games produce before dropping the jumpscare... although Mark's video ends on a Cat Scare.
  • Signing-Off Catchphrase: "Thank you all so much for watching. Click the annotations for more videos that I've done. And as always, I will see you in the next video. Bye-bye!"
  • Skewed Priorities: When he first plays Five Nights at Freddy's 2, the loading screen reveals that he is receiving even less money than last time, and he really starts yelling, apparently more worried about that than survival.
  • Skipping School: As revealed by this Seth Meyers interview, Mark used to do this back when he was still in college, since his biomedical engineering degree was something he just followed at the behest of his strict Korean mother instead of something he actually wanted to do with his life. Since he couldn't just move out of the house on a whim at the time, hanging out at Starbucks for several hours every weekday was how he hid both his lack of interest in higher education and fledgling YouTube career from his mother.
  • Skyward Scream: In Until Dawn Animated, after he gets Ashley killed, he goes to Pride Rock and lets a couple of them out.
  • Slasher Smile: One of his running gags is his tendency to crack deranged-looking grins. Case in point.
  • Smite Me, O Mighty Smiter!: The Latin's Wrath episode of Drunk Minecraft. At one point Mark jumps on top of the house to taunt Latin (the moderator of the Minecraft server).
    Mark: Latin, bring it on! Bring it OOONNN! EVERYBODY WANTS TO BONE YOUR BOYFRIEND!
  • Sore Loser: He completely melts down after losing 4-1 to Wade in Mole Hammers.
  • Squee: If you ever doubt that Mark is a big dork, just look at his reaction to anything related to space. A good chunk of his Alien: Isolation playthrough was appreciating the scenery of space, and he takes his geeking out up to eleven when he plays Universe Sandbox.
  • Stalker with a Crush: He acts like this during his Flappy Fedora and Yandere Simulator playthroughs. This is Played for Laughs, of course, with the former being a parody of neckbeards and the latter being an exaggerated interpretation of the Yandere archetype.
  • Stealth Prequel: His version of Drive Time Radio puts him in Kyle and Brett's position as the Eldritch Abomination radio host and the viewer in the driver's seat, leading up to a segue for In Space with Markiplier if they get the answers correct.
  • Stunned Silence:
    • This happens to him when he sees the Twist Ending in The Witch's House. He stays quiet for over a minute before he recovers.
    • He stays quiet and wide-eyed for several seconds during a scene in FranBow. He blinks himself into working again and continues on.
    • More so when he completes the game Reunion. He finally reaches the boy he had been trying to find, to find out that the character he had been controlling was trying to kill the boy due to him suffering from schizophrenia. Mark is in complete shock from that point until the end of the video .
    • More humorously, when he finds the "Dancing Room" easter egg in The Darkest Words all he can do is stare.
    • Happens several times when playing Monstrum. The first two times it happens when he hadn't realized there was a monster so close (or, in the second case, he hadn't realised there was a monster at all), but the third time it was the brutal manner of death that got him.
    • During his playthrough of the "Silent Hill: Alchemilla" demo, he stays silent for seven seconds after he realizes the last part of the demo has changed.
    • After witnessing the Bite Incident in Five Nights at Freddy's 4, Mark can do nothing but stare in open-mouthed horror for almost twenty seconds.
    • Mark and Tyler are both shocked when Flowey kills Asgore after they spare the latter. Tyler is the first to respond by saying that he hates Flowey.
    • When he finally reaches the earliest memory of Johnny during his playthrough of To the Moon, he enters a quick one between a couple of Wham Lines when everything starts to click about what just happened.
      Eve: Didn't you see it in his room, Neil? ...Johnny slept on a bunk bed.
      (Mark goes silent and gives the camera a look of horror)
      (a new text bubble pops up at the bottom of the screen)
      Mark: (reading in a very quiet voice with the same expression) Joey...
  • Streisand Effect: Invoked. His Penis Cloner video has a thumbnail of him with a repulsed look with the caption "DON'T CLICK". As you can imagine, all his subscribers and many, many other people clicked on it.
  • Surrounded by Idiots: While playing Jackbox Party Pack 6, he plays a minigame involving making up definitions for fictional words. At the end of one round, Mark goes on a tirade about how juvenile the audience's sense of humor is, because a definition involving a sex joke got the most votes over Mark's.
  • Survival Mantra:
    • "Little piggy no no, little piggy go home", starting with his first encounter with Chris Walker in Outlast, he sings this little verse in an attempt to ward off another incident of the man pulling him out of his hiding places. It even transfers over to Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs when he's running from the manpigs.
    • He briefly uses a modified version of it again later in Among the Sleep while trying to hide from the giant woman.
    • From his playthrough of Five Nights at Freddy's 2: "Don't wake the baby!", his frantic cry when trying to keep the music box wound and "the baby" from killing him.
  • Suspiciously Specific Denial:
    • In Besiege, Mark insists that the Killdeathinator5 is NOT a murder machine, but a farming tool.
      Mark: It's got a plow in the front for tilling the field, for when you kill everyone, and they fertilize the soil.
    • Same goes for its Spiritual Successor, the Nota-Pe-Nis.
    • And again in his Stardew Valley livestream. The crops are planted in that pattern because it makes for aerodynamic farming, that's all!
    • Mark isn't a masochist. He just wants to see how much pain his body he can take.
    • Mark will have you know that his obsession with Lady Dimitrescu is not sexual in nature. He just respects her power. Please ignore the boob textured mousepad and body pillow.
  • Swear Jar:
    • In Mario Maker #15, he decides to donate $100 to charity every time he swears. He ends up owing $3,700.
    • Mark creates the "Destroy My Channel" challenge for a livestream of Getting Over It, in which he challenges viewers to unsubscribe from his channel if he swears and to re-subscribe if he makes progress. He manages to not cuss most of the time and makes do with Gosh Dang It to Heck!, but ends up making very little progress.
  • Synchro-Vox: Used in MEOW, WOOF and MOO to hilarious effect, where Mark's mouth is overlaid over cat and dog videos respectively.
  • Take That!:
    • Usually doesn't do these and if he has a problem with a game, he's usually direct with expressing it. Still does this occasionally, such as in Part 2 of his The Curse of Blackwater playthrough, when he gets attacked by a Necromorph, he comments that there must be a portal in the game to the Dead Space universe and mocks that it's where all the scariness of the series went.
    • There's also this little bit from Probably Archery:
      Mark: "I'm like Legolas crossed with that guy from Avengers that no one cared about!"
    • The Flappy Fedora video is stuffed to the brim with pot shots at men's rights activists and "nice guys".
    • He's not fond of the Minions movie and made a video making fun of it. He even stated that the video is not sponsored and that he'll never want that sponsorship.
    • In one video, Markiplier talks about Halloween decorations have to be good whether you live in a house, a van, or the garbage, and if one looks closely when he mentions "garbage", it's actually a picture of Ricegum. Ricegum apparently wasn't happy about it.
    • As seen in his Try Not to Laugh videos, Mark has noticeable disdain towards the "Deja Vu" meme,note  as he gets more and more annoyed when it appears in the videos he watches. The latest video to feature it had Mark stopping the video less than a second in and declaring it to be a dead meme.
  • Tempting Fate: If Mark is bragging about how good he is at a game (along the lines of "I'm too pro!"), expect something to go hilariously wrong in a few moments.
    • Poor Mark just can't win in Containment Breach. He was sure that he'd eluded 173, only to open a sliding door and see the statue leering at him. Mark had just blinked before opening the door.
    • In another instance, Mark fled SCP-106 by ducking into an elevator. 106 simply walked through the wall.
    • In his Cry of Fear LP, Mark laughs off a warning telling him to 'watch out for the trees'. Guess what happens next..
    • In Vanish:
      Mark: That doesn't necessarily guarantee there's a monster nearby, that only means that something's start-
      [Monster appears, killing Mark]
    • Lampshaded in Five Nights at Freddy's 4:
      Mark: So the first night is usually never that bad in any of the games so I play thro-
      [Chica kills Mark]
      Mark: It's always when I'm saying something. It's always when I'm "Oh, I'ma be okay. Oh, everything's fine!"
    • In Part 8 of his Until Dawn playthrough, Mark brags about how he's made good choices so far since all the protagonists are still alive. Ten minutes later, Matt dies because of two wrong choices he makes at the beginning of the video: letting Emily keep the flare gun and choosing to try to save her when the wendigos attack the radio tower.
    • In Boogeyman #5:
      Mark: The good thing is: It's quiet!
      [Music box starts playing]
      Mark: Nevermind!
  • Tender Tears: Mark's known for keeping his heart on his sleeve and being unafraid to cry on camera. For example, he made sure he recorded his immediate response to the six million subscriber fan video because crying was the only genuine reaction he had.
  • That Came Out Wrong:
    • In his playthrough of The Visitor Returns Mark mentions how the assimilation of the raccoon was not as violent as it could have been:
      Mark: Normally when I go inside things, they explo- Okay, THAT really does not need to be taken the wrong way.
    • In "Reading Your Comments 8", one comment is "HuniePop is a porn".
      Yes. And it's very fun. Oh, I shouldn't say that. Oh that's not what I mean, I take it back. I mean it is fun, it's a fun game, I'm not saying porn is fun. Uhh, oh God...
    • "Oh man, I didn't even see Chica comin'!" (suddenly realizes what that line sounds like) "Aaaah, that's not a joke for the Internet to enjoy!"
  • There Are Two Kinds of People in the World / Rule of Two: Markiplier intentionally invokes this in "A Heist With Markiplier".
  • "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Gives one to himself when he causes Ashley's death in Until Dawn
    Mark: ''I can accept my mistake with Matt, I can accept that, I can accept it, I can accept that, what I cannot accept is the bullshit that you just made me watch you freaking stupid Markymoo. I'm yelling at myself, because I'm a freaking idiot. (Points to himself) YOU! HOW DARE YOU! HOW COULD YOU LET ASHLEY DIE LIKE THAT?! ASHLEY WAS COOL!
  • Too Dumb to Live: During a segment of Drunk Minecraft, Mark teases the server's mod, Latingoddess, that Zombiemold (the server's owner and Latingoddess's boyfriend) has a lot of fangirls. She then proceeds to kill him. With lightning. A lot.
  • Totem Pole Trench: Mark claims the scientist from Sort The Court may in fact be one of these.
  • Trademark Favorite Food: Takis. Mark has gone on numerous tangets about his love of takis. Bizarrely, he doesn't actually eat the chips. He likes to suck the powder off.
  • Tranquil Fury: While he usually averts this in his rage games, during his Slender: The Arrival playthrough he finishes the particularly difficult third level after a concerted effort - and glitches through the floor upon taking the elevator out of the level, requiring him to start over. Cue a murderously silent, stone-faced glare into the camera for a good twenty seconds followed by a grim "I'm done."
  • The Unintelligible: Lapses into this when he's particularly upset. Or after he's consumed hot sauce.
  • Verbal Tic: He has a few. While playing horror games, he'll emit a rapid-fire, "Why-why-why-why-why" when he's genuinely creeped out.
  • Villainous Breakdown: The Flappy Fedora video is pretty much him acting as the stereotypical "Nice Guy" slowly going insane from constant rejection.
    It's an awfully euphotic day, don't you think? So just come on, give me a chance! Please! I-I-I I DESERVE IT, DON'T I?! I'M THE ALPHA MALE!! I'M FVEHRY TELGENT! ARHVHRGA!!
  • Violation of Common Sense: Occurs in his Limbo (2010) LP.
    Mark: These look dangerous. I should probably not jump face-first into them... but when have I ever listened to good reason? Whop! [jumps into bear trap] Ew...
  • Vitriolic Best Buds: With Wade. They pick on, insult, and screw each other over in games all the time, but they are friends. When Mark and Wade did a joint LP of 7 Days to Die, Wade mentions that Mark's treatment of him in Drunk Minecraft has actually convinced a lot of people that Mark is actually a massive Jerkass. They don't actually believe that Mark and Wade are friends, and ask Wade if he's being forced to go along with Mark and do things. They both find this hilarious, and though Mark and Wade both assure viewers that they are indeed friends, they do nothing to correct people's assumptions in the Drunk Minecraft videos themselves.
  • Vocal Dissonance: His rather deep voice initially contrasted his sinewy appearance and Asian features until he began developing more rugged features.
  • Vocal Evolution: Compare how Markiplier sounded in 2013 to how he sounds in 2015. (Note: he blamed it on Octodad causing him to ragescream so hard it changed his voice.)

    W-Z 
  • Waiting Skeleton: In his "A Date With Markiplier" Gamebook series of videos, Markiplier encounters one of these in the cell he and his date can find themselves in after being imprisoned by the Chef for not paying for their restaurant bill. This prompts him to search for a way out - either dig through the cell floor with a fork he stole (which proves to be ineffective) or pick the lock with said fork.
  • Waxing Lyrical: During Part 4 of his Five Nights at Freddy's playthrough, on the sixth night:
    Fill my life with hate...
    Cut my life into pieces
    Don't shove me in a suit
    I hate you to your head
    Right down to your glute
    ...or brand-new boots
  • We Are Experiencing Technical Difficulties: Markiplier has one of these after he rages on an Amnesia custom story. Also done in Octodad, together with a background collage of increasingly disturbing kitten videos.
  • Wham Episode: 2017's A Date With Markiplier initally seems like a silly interactive movie, until the audience chooses to go to the Horror play. The route isn't notable in that it's Darker and Edgier than the other routes, but that, after years of fan speculation, established that Darkiplier was Real After All.
  • Who Names Their Kid "Dude"?: One episode of 3 Scary Games has Markiplier hung up over an unusual dog name for several minutes.
    Mark: I've never criticized a dog's name in my entire life, but... Bob Bingi!?
  • Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: Creepy mannequins/suits of armor are his archenemy, seeing as he encounters them a lot (starting with Nightmare House 2 and then again in the Amnesia custom stories). After a particularly hair-raising puzzle involving false books and stalking mannequins in Kraven Manor, one of them is crushed in a bookcase trap, prompting Mark to cackle maniacally.
    • Dolls tend to be in the same vein as mannequins. In his playthrough of Fatal Frame II, he immediately stops his rant about a hidden well he had to discover once he sees the hanging dolls in the Kiryu house. He gets even more freaked out when he takes a picture of the Kiryu twins and the title is “Fleeing Doll”, making him worry that he’s about to deal with possessed dolls.
    • He’s also not too fond of creepy things pertaining to children or babies in horror, referring to them as "diabolical"
    • Courtesy of the Working Joes in Alien: Isolation, Mark reveals that he has automatonophobia.
    • While all of the death animations in the "Whack Your/The _____" games gross Mark out, the ones that get the most reactions out of him involve neck trauma.
    • He has alluded to being afraid of the ocean, particularly the idea that something could be lurking in the water to harm him, and sometimes informs his fans that if he ever gets stuck in the ocean, they are to come and save him. During his Depth LP, he admits that while he hates the ocean, he finds sharks in particular truly terrifying. Hence "F*** the ocean" is a common refrain for him while playing both Subnautica and Raft, which is a name for a ship in the former and the latter features a shark enemy.
  • Would Hit a Girl: Discussed here, he would hit a girl in self defense but also believes that violence is wrong.
  • Wouldn't Hurt a Child: He tends to get very upset when a game requires him to attack/kill children.
  • Yandere:
    • In Best Friends Forever, Markiplier acts pretty much exactly like this to Ken. It's... surprisingly terrifying, even when Played for Laughs...
      Video Description: "Markiplier wants to be your best friend! Who are you to ignore my love? No one ignores my love..."
    • When he plays Yandere Simulator, he gets into character quickly. He sings about his obsession with Senpai while attempting each of the murder methods.
    • Darkiplier is heavily implied to be one for the audience in A Date With Markiplier. It's especially creepy considering he also happens to be a Humanoid Abomination.
  • Yank the Dog's Chain:
    • In his fifth episode of Vanish, he finally reaches what appears to be the end of the game and begins to unlock the exit door. Then a monster sneaks behind him and kills him. Cue several Big "NO!"s. His eighth Vanish video had him get the keys twice, but he was unable to find the door and escape.
    • In Five Nights at Freddy's, he just barely beats Night 5 in a display of true awesomeness and is very ecstatic about it... only to be crushed when he sees that there's a Night 6.
      "WHY IS THERE A SIXTH NIGHT? WHY?"
    • The (almost) Perfect Run in 60 Seconds!. He had a really great start, almost made it to the end, and then all of the bad luck starts.
  • You Monster!: Tyler responds to Flowey killing Asgore during the Neutral Run by saying, "Oh, I hate him."
  • Your Other Left: Mark falls victim to this in part six of his playthrough of Five Nights At Freddys VR Help Wanted. In the first "Parts & Services" stage, he's instructed to remove Bonnie the bunny's left eye. Because the game has him facing Bonnie, Mark takes the eye on his left, Bonnie's right, and is promptly killed. This happens one more time before he works out that the game means Bonnie's left, and he's able to do it correctly on the third try.
"And as always, I will SEE YOU... in the next video. BYE-BYE!"

(Alternatively...)

"And as always, I will SEE YOU... in the next video. BYE-BYE!"

 
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Video Example(s):

Log Sled versus Crane

Mark, Bob, and Wade discover that their improvised drawbridge is useless because Log Sleds cannot cross Cranes due to a hitbox collision error.

Example of:
Hitbox Dissonance

Mark Fails to B...

Cyndago laughs ...

Colonel Sanders

What's In His Bag?

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Log Sled versus Crane

Mark, Bob, and Wade discover that their improvised drawbridge is useless because Log Sleds cannot cross Cranes due to a hitbox collision error.

How well does it match the trope?

5 (10 votes)

Example of:

Main / HitboxDissonance

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Log Sled versus...

Mark Fails to B...

Cyndago laughs ...

Colonel Sanders

What's In His Bag?