Web Video / Muselk

Prepare yourselves for the most over-the-top YouTube trailer for the channel that nobody knows how to pronounce. Introducing Muscle-K. ...moose, Moose-cleh. Moose-click? Missile launch? (groans) Who cares, it's a dumb name anyway.

—Honest Trailers Narrator, Epic Channel Trailer

Muselk (pronounced "Mew-selk", real name: Elliott Watkins) is a YouTuber who specializes in Team Fortress 2, Overwatch, and Fortnite gameplay videos. While his more recent videos have focused on Fortnite, he has returned to posting up content he used to do on his alt channel, MoreMuselk. While they feature plenty of random silliness ala Star or Jerma, Muselk tends to be more organized in that his vids are usually divided into series. The most common videos he does include:

• TF2/Overwatch Mythbusters: Where Muselk tests out fan-submitted tips and claims about glitches in the game to see which are true and which are not.
• The Worst Loadout in TF2: Where Muselk plays as a single class with the worst possible combination of weapons he can think of.
• Is it OP?: A commentary series where Muselk discusses the pros and cons of a weapon commonly claimed to be overpowered.
• Top 10 Loadouts: A ten-part series where Muselk describes his favorite loadouts for each class.
• TF2 Map Tips and Tricks: Muselk reveals some hidden ways to cross maps faster or to reach secret camping nooks. Frequently Uncanceled.
• High Stakes: A Self-Imposed Challenge series where Muselk must avoid dying and losing in-game or be forced to eat or drink something disgusting.
• Tryhard Tuesday: A weekly series where Muselk tries to get a 20 kill streak in one life, sometimes with a randomized loadout. Rarely, if ever, debuts on Tuesday.
• Extreme Rancho Relaxo: Muselk finds crazy places to sit back in his Rancho Relaxo chair, whether it be in a wall, in the sky, off a cliff...
• Road To Unusual: Muselk opens Valve Gun Mettle crates in hopes of finding an Unusual item. Usually he just finds SMGs.

Muselk provides examples of:

• Attack! Attack... Retreat! Retreat!: The last ten seconds of SUPER SERIOUS 1v1 SHOWDOWN, when him and Tyrodin get to play Reinhardt:
  (Muselk has very low health, Tyrodin advances)
  Muselk: NO!
  (Muselk at the last moment charges and pins Tyrodin)
  Muselk: YES!
  (they slam a wall, Tyrodin is still alive)
  Muselk: NO!
  (Muselk delivers the killing blow)
  Muselk: YEEEEEEEES! FUCK YES!
• At Least I Admit It: His reasoning for doing so much Fortnite content rather than TF2 or Overwatch is because he finds the latter games don't update frequently, and get's put off by it.
• Berserk Button:
  • Hackers. It's more subdued than most examples, but if a hacker shows up in a video, Muselk will go out of his way to Dominate said hacker into ragequitting before returning to whatever he was doing before.
  • In a more Played for Laughs example, Scout presses it in Scout Radio by implying that he can't unbox anything other than SMGs.
  • Getting killed by random crits to the face.
• Big "NO!": Very prone to dropping these in Tryhard Tuesday videos. Quite frequently in other videos, as well.
• Born Unlucky: As time has shown, Muselk's bad luck can get downright absurd at times.
• Brick Joke
  • During the Scout Radio video: "I thought (Tracer) was just another dude with a nice ass! Like me." His next video Pubbing With Scout, Scout and Muselk teleport into Overwatch, and Scout was turned into Tracer. He says "Holy crap, look at my ass, it looks better than ever!"
• Butt-Monkey: When he's not kicking ass, he is often the butt of many jokes thanks to his Born Unlucky tendencies trolling friends.
• Catchphrase:
  • "What is up, guys!" At the start of many of his videos.
  • "Yeah baby!" When things go well.
  • "Gaben why!" When things go badly. Referring to Gabe Newell, the CEO of Valve and God of TF2.
  • "How am I alive?!" When he survives something that he had no business surviving.
  • "That's going in the montage!" When he accidentally executes a stunt.
    • And he actually released one!
  • "Hammer time!" When he brings out the Powerjack as the Pyro, or when he's made a lot of kills using the Powerjack.
  • "I gotta go!" Whenever he finds himself in trouble and having to make a hasty retreat.
  • "Holy bananas, that's a lot of bad people!" Whenever he runs into what seems to be entire enemy team at once.
  • "Holy bananas!" in general shows up all over the place.
  • "Far Out!" in general on some of his videos.
  • "I am a GOD!" when he pops off with a nasty killstreak.
• Compelling Voice: Played for laughs. In The Worlds Worst Widowmaker, Oasis was able to use her voice to convince a player to jump off a cliff and convince an offense class player to switch to a support class character. She even convinced some players to help Muselk get the "Floor is Lava" achievement as Lucio, which is one of the hardest achievements to get in the game.
• Crazy Enough to Work: The concept of several of his Overwatch videos, involving certain bizarre teams that require great coordination to work out, or incredibly daring maneuvers that need stellar dexterity or luck to execute.
• Disproportionate Retribution: In JACKASS! TF2 EDITION!, Muselk successfully fools a friendly Medic into thinking he's an enemy Spy. Once the Medic figures out the trick, he calls a vote to kick Muselk.
  • And then, Muselk tries to do the same thing to a friendly Demoman, but the Demoman sees through the ruse immediately... and calls a vote to kick Muselk (which passes!).
• Do Well, But Not Perfect: His Tryhard Tuesdays need him to have enough time to rack up kills and reach a killstreak of 20. If either side is performing too well, the round ends before he can accomplish that. As a result, some of his Tryhard Tuesday videos have him beg that the enemy team makes some progress so that the round timer gets extended.
• Eat That: The entire point of High Stakes.
• Epic Fail: In the words of the man himself:
  Who's better at Mortal Kombat, Muselk or an iPhone charger... the answer won't surprise you...
  • The end of "Road to an Unusual". He fails to find a single Unusual after unboxing over three hundred crates in the series. And in his whole time playing TF2, he's only found one Unusual total in 2500+ boxes. And this is when the usual chance is 1 out of a hundred.
• Excited Title! Two-Part Episode Name!: Most of his videos, often with three or more parts.
• Failure Gambit: Worst Loadout series in a nutshell. To his credit, he at least tries to make the loadouts work, which sometimes leads to a special kind of failure, especially where the Spy is involved.
• Foreshadowing: His "I can fly" Market Gardener montage has a part where a super-fast ambulance truck Heavy runs by. This ends up being the intro to his "Worst Admins Ever" video.
  • Five-Second Foreshadowing: During his Overwatch: 101 Halloween Loot Box unboxing, someone named Kahmea says "REAPER LEGENDARY ISADORABLE[sic]" in the chat. Guess what Muselk gets in his very next loot pumpkin?
• Guest Star Appearance: Vikkstar123 from the Sidemen did several sessions with Muselk on his non-Sidemen/Minecraft channel VikkstarPlays starting on November 2016, mostly doing the same ridiculous strategy antics that the Muselk's crew did on their videos.
• In-Series Nickname: Their Overwatch group is nicknamed as the "Cancer Crew", mainly because they often uses ridiculous strategies. It came from an Overwatch player not amused by their antics, which they immediately made their own.
• Irony: In Mercy is EVIL!!, Muselk purposefully lets his entire team die so he can resurrect them all and earn Play of the Game. Sure enough, he does earn it... but for a completely different incident earlier in the game where he only resurrected two teammates, followed by his mouse disconnecting.
• Keet: Muselk can be this due to his cheerful and easily excited nature.
• Laborious Laziness: Extreme Rancho Relaxo. Reach improbable places... and sit on a chair in them.
  • Relatedly, the Sexy Junkrat strategy. Spend all that time finding the exact right spot where the game will let you lay around and not be seen.
• Made of Iron: His "Invincible Demoman" loadout is built around this, as it uses the Chargin' Targe to let him fight on the front lines while being nigh-immune to fire and explosives.
• Mundane Made Awesome: Extreme Rancho Relaxo, where Muselk sits in a chair... IN THE SKY! ON A ROOF! IN THE FLOOR! OFF A CLIFF!
  Narrator: Six-minute montages of a fat man in an armchair... (Record Needle Scratch) Wait, people actually watch this crap?
• Negated Moment of Awesome: "The WORST map in TF2" ends with Muselk's team winning, at which point Muselk prepares to taunt-kill an enemy spy who seems to have accepted defeat. The taunt-kill fails because Muselk is a few inches too far away, and the scoreboard appears before Muselk can try again.
• N-Word Privileges/Self-Deprecation: Being an Australian himself, Muselk enjoys taunting Snipers about their "dirty" heritage.
• No Experience Points for Medic: Inverted. Team Muselk's medic Oasis tends earn Play of the Game as Mercy to a massively disproportionate ammount, to the point that Muselk and co. have turned it into a Running Gag of their resigned annoyance.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: In "Pro Gibus Spy!" Muselk wears the Ghastly Gibus, an easy-to-get hat commonly associated with the newbies, in an attempt to bait some players to fall for a trickstab. It works.
• Old-School Chivalry: In one video a player refused to change from Widowmaker for Muselk but did it after Oasis innocently asked the player to change character. This happened multiple times in the same video. One player switched to support despite mainly playing one character, another enemy player jumped off of a cliff for her and she convinced multiple enemy players to sacrifice themselves for the Floor is Lava achievement but when Muselk left to put the game on Overtime, one player stunned him and taunted him as the game ended.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: Goes by Muselk most of the time, with his real name popping up very rarely.
• A Rare Sentence:
  • Happens a lot in "Worst Admins Ever". Most prominent example:
  Is that a penis Heavy riding a fucking ostrich?
  • Lampshaded in his Crazy Custom Maps video
  There's another scout on the other side of the sandwich! ^* It was actually a Soldier, but he saw a scout charging at him, which he killed. ...That is a line I never thought I was gonna have to say in my entire life!
• Recurring Character: His quiet server admin Tava and the guitar-strumming Black Blues Player are the two most notable ones.
  • Recently, Tyrodin and Zylbrad and his friends seem to be appearing more often than Tava ever did.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: Every time Tava plays with him as a partner or something, his quiet and deadpan attitude sharply contrast with Muselk's peppy and perky commentary.
• Running Gag:
  • Unboxing SMGs in his unboxing videos, or generally any video where anything ends up unboxed. As of writing, he has roughly 31 of them. He is not even trying to get all these SMGs.
  • Praising Gaben after getting a string of random crits or pleading to him when things start to go wrong.
  • Choosing King of the Hill maps for Tryhard Tuesday, which by their nature tend to give him precious little time for him to pursue his Godlike kill streak.
  • Dying on a Tryhard Tuesday just five or so kills away from completing his goal. Bonus points if he died from a random crit.
  • Gibuses appearing out of nowhere. Always lampshaded, and sometimes accompanied by The X-Files theme song.
  • Whenever Muselk plays in Randomizer servers, he tends to die rather quickly if he gets what he think is a good combination and said it on-screen.
  • His tendency to press the E button to call the Medic in TF2, to the point that he had two Tryhard Tuesday episodes where he must not press the E button otherwise he will automatically die and resets his streak if he did it.
  • In Overwatch back during his days with Tava, stupid tactics that he thinks will not work will end up working very well.
  • Using Reinhardt solely for cliff-charging.
    • Speaking of cliff-charging, he often gets D.Va as his cliff-charging target, and nine times out of ten the D.Va manages to escape with her boosters.
  • "I told you! The size of the hammer doesn't matter!"
  • Brad and Oasis getting a disproportionate amount of PoTG's in Overwatch.
  • Roadhog's hook = Soldier: 76 and Bazza Gazza's worst nightmare.+
  • On a meta scale, having bad things that he talks about (e.g. unboxing SMGs, deaths to random crits, Zylbrad getting PotG) happen to him right after he says it.
• The Rival: Zylbrad (And occasionally Tyrodin) In his overwatch videos. It’s mostly a Friendly Rivalry but occasionally it gets a little bit more heated especially when Zylbrad feels a little bit dickish.
• Scenery Porn: Part of the point of the Extreme Rancho Relaxo videos. Most of the improbable locations he reaches have a spectacular view of the map.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Upon unboxing a Blue Mew SMG in Taunt Killin Contracts!, he gets up and leaves the room.
  No...Are you kidding me?! {Beat} Not again! Nope! Screw this, I'm out! *door closing*
• Self-Imposed Challenge: High Stakes (eat/drink something disgusting after each death), Worst Loadouts in TF2 (use a loadout that doesn't synergize well and/or is underpowered), and Foot Pyro (control a Pyro with his foot instead of his hands.) He also makes it a point to try to dominate every single hacker that interrupts his videos.
• Shower of Angst: He did this in the beginning of a video where he commented in an Overwatch video about a Lucio buff that time. Cue that he had trouble skirmishing against Lucio the day before the development update regarding the buff.
• The Smurfette Principle: In his Overwatch videos, Oasis is usually the only girl on the team. This causes a bit of confusion with viewers during the times that it's averted, such as when Bec / Blarue played with Team Muselk and subsequently got mistaken for Oasis.
  Bec: All the comments are like 'Oasis sounds so happy!'
  Muselk: Wait, are you telling me that there's more than one girl in the world?
  Bec: I know! It's crazy!
  Muselk: What?? It's only 2 pm; I'm not ready to have my mind blown this early.
• Springtime for Hitler: His Worst Loadout challenges have occasionally gone this way.
  • His Worst Demoman Loadout (Claidheamh Mor, Sticky Jumper, and Booties) went surprisingly well, with Muselk flying all over the place as a leaping Demoknight.
  • Same for his worst Spy loadout (Amby, stock Invis Watch, Wanga Prick), though in that case he admitted he had trouble trying to create a terrible loadout for Spy.
    • Happens once again in his updated worst Spy loadout (L'etranger, Red Tape Recorder, Big Earner, Cloak and Dagger). He also mentions that it's impossible for the Spy to have a truly useless loadout, because he can still backstab, which is always a One-Hit Kill.
  • In his Prop Hunt video, he tried his best to get caught by the Pyros, but ends up failing.
  • Happens very often in his Overwatch videos. Often, he (and in some video, along with his old Overwatch partner Tava) tries ridiculous tactics (Torbjörn Tank, five Mei's in one team, etc.) that he thinks will not work, and said tactics works very well when they tested it.
• Suicidal Overconfidence: Most prominent in his Tryhard Tuesday videos. He's become pretty aware that he usually dies from a stupid mistake after 15-17 kills, and yet it keeps happening.
• Super-Persistent Predator: In one Tryhard Tuesday video, Muselk runs into a Pyro who then proceeds to chase him down for about 2 minutes, only stopping when Muselk manages to take him down. Muselk himself describes it as the longest chase of his TF2 career, and ends up fast-forwarding that part of the video.
• Tempting Fate: A running gag is that bad things happen to him right after he says them. He is often aware enough to Lampshade the absurdity of the situation.
  • Bazza had a notable one in this Paladins video, where he said he thinks he can't get hooked in Paladins. Cue Makoa hooking at him before he even finishes his sentence.
  Bazza: I don't think I can get hooked in this (immediately gets hooked) FUCKING GAME!
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: Whilst playing in a custom weapon TF2 server in this video, Muselk asked the admin to gave him the secret weapons that has not been played in that server before. Cue a rocket launcher minigun. As if it's not enough, the admins also gave him a rocket launcher minigun... with bouncing ammo.
• Too Dumb to Fool: In Pro Gibus Spy, in which Muselk speculates that wearing a Gibus will trick other players into thinking he's a noob and fall for his trickstabs, the player he has the most trouble fighting ends up being a Sniper also wearing a Gibus.
• Throw the Dog a Bone: After 3 years and over 3500 opened crates, he finally managed to find an unusual hat in TF2 crate.
• Thunder Hammer: Whenever he's playing Pyro, he's guaranteed to be using the Powerjack, which is basically a car battery strapped onto a metal rod fashioned to look like a hammer. When he goes on a killing spree with it, it's known as "Hammer Time".
• Tranquil Fury: In "How Valve Became Gamings WORST Developer", Muselk, with an uncharacteristically calm demeanour, gives Valve a very angry "Reason You Suck" Speech. He mentions them abandoning Team Fortress 2, doing nothing to fix the persistent bot problem that has plagued the game in casual for several years (in his case, making Australian casual unplayable unless he finds a vanilla community server, which are frequently full), all the while they continue to profit off of player-created cosmetics and maps with an unfair profit cut (90% of the revenue goes to valve, 10% for the creator) simply for existing. They eventually call their behaviour "disgusting" for employing this tactic to end the video.
• The Unpronounceable: His name can veer into this, as admitted in the channel trailer. According to Muselk, he thought of his name just by stringing together random syllables and choosing some that sounded nice, only to watch his viewers completely butcher his name every attempt at pronouncing it.
• Wins by Doing Absolutely Nothing: A Running Gag within Muselk himself, as he has three ways to do so (one in TF2, two in Overwatch):
  • The Boxtrot Spy strategy, usually used in Payload maps where he, as a Spy, uses the Boxtrot taunt to hid himself in a rather secluded area where the payload will move, thus preventing the payload to move and making the enemy team confused as they will think there's no one near them without knowing that Muselk is hiding nearby.
  • His playstyle of Torbjorn, especially on Payload maps where he'll simply sit down on the payload while his turret mows down the enemy team.
  • The "Sexy Junkrat" strategy. It's basically similar to the Boxtrot Spy, except that he has to hid somewhere much less obvious and has to sometimes stop sitting, otherwise he will got disconnected due to the game thinking that he's been inactive for too long.
• You Have GOT to Be Kidding Me!: Muselk's reaction to finding four Hoovies eating sandviches in the spawnroom in the video The Hoovy's Last Supper.
• You Were Trying Too Hard: In "How to be a Hanzo Main", Muselk and Bazza suffer through several rounds as Hanzo and Widowmaker respectively. As they start another match, Muselk realizes that the more he seems to try, the worse he becomes. As soon as he makes the decision to not try so hard, he gets a triple-kill.
• Zerg Rush: During his days with Tava (i.e. before he got introduced to Brad and co.), most of his Overwatch tactics involve having five out of six members of his team being the same hero. Examples include:
  • In this video, he was defending, using five Mei's and one Lucio. His tactic? Simply block the path of the attacking team with Mei's Ice Wall constantly. His team ended up winning when, during Overtime, they realize that all they need to win is to simply don't let the attacking team go touch the B point. So the Mei's built Ice Walls in every possible path to block the attacking team's access.
  • In the second part of this video, he tries to play one Assault game with a team of five D.Va's and one speed-boosting Lucio. His tactic this time? Rush to the two control points in the fastest time possible. Like most of his tactics, it ended up working very well. In fact, it worked so well, Muselk and his team nearly won the game in around two minutes.

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...hope you guys enjoyed it, and I will see you legends in the next one. Bye bye!