Web Video / Quinton Reviews

"These are all just words on a page, they mean nothing, I'm wasting my life, and you're encouraging me."

— The End of Victorious

Quinton Kyle Hoover (born December 7, 1996), known as Quinton Reviews, is an American YouTuber and Garfield enthusiast who makes commentary and reviews on various TV shows, movies, Internet content, and Garfield paraphernalia.

His Fallen Titans series documents the careers of various YouTubers and Internet trends that were once extremely popular, but have since faded into obscurity, faced significant backlash or vanished altogether. Many of these videos allow him to talk about his personal relationship with channels that were significant to his childhood.

He also has a video series about The History Channel, a multi-part long, rather comprehensive series of videos analysing iCarly^note which also encompasses Victorious and Sam & Cat. The series concluded on March 26th, 2024, with "We Don't Talk About Dan Schneider" (which also briefly discussed the revival series)., several conspiracy-related videos, quite a few parody videos, and several Halloween-themed videos.

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Tropes used or discussed on this show:

• The Abridged Series: A Fallen Titans episode discusses the rise and fall of abridged versions of series.
• Abusive Parents: Frequent in the Schneiderverse, and a particular sore point for Quinton. Aside from the elements of iCarly characters that are eerily similar to those of Jennette McCurdy's mother, he dislikes not only how these parents' actions are Played for Laughs in what he sees as a running gag of child abuse throughout these shows, but also how parents never repent for their cruel actions in favor of comedic resolutions.
• Alternate Reality Game: A Fallen Titans episode discusses the rise and fall of ARGs, including lonelygirl15.
• Alternative Character Interpretation:invoked Discussed during his Victorious review when Quinton tries to figure out the fandom's love of the characters despite all evidence from the show itself being that they are all jerkasses of some flavor or another. He eventually concludes that, since a lot of the characters backstories and personal lives are fairly ambiguous, it makes it easy for fans to create their own backstories for characters or explanations for their issues, thus causing fans to have their own interpretations for why certain characters act the way they do. He especially notes this with the character of Jade pointing out that, since she is rarely an open book, she is perfect for fans to interpret any and all of her interactions with the rest of the cast, especially Tori.
  Quinton: Because virtually all of Jade's emotions get kind of filtered out into the same language and tone, it's possible to interpret her literally any way you want to. If Jade is incapable of showing love in a way that doesn't come off as hatred, then maybe her obsession with Tori is something internalized. Maybe she has some kind of feelings that she doesn't want to have but she secretly does. [Beat] Or maybe she wants to kill Tori and she's tried numerous times!
• An Aesop: Averted. Quinton discusses in the final video about the NSU that he originally intended to fully condemn enjoying those sitcoms after learning what Dan Schneider put the cast through, but he can no longer in good consciousness say that, because there is something enjoyable about them and people are nostalgic about them, even if a lot of it is now marred in Harsher in Hindsight tones. He ends that segment saying he does not know if it is ok to still watch and appreciate these shows now, and doesn't want to take a hard stance if he is unsure.
• Anticlimax: Quinton invokes this in the second half of the Victorious review when he counts down the final episodes of the show. After finishing the thirteenth episode of Season 4, he tells the audience to get ready for the fourteenth and final episode, before he raises his coffee to his lips and drinks as the screen Fades to Black... and then fades back in as Quinton finishes his drink and says that he lied and there is no fourteenth episode. Quinton says he did this to replicate the whiplash fans of the show felt when it was abruptly canceled with no resolution.
• April Fools' Day: On April 1, 2020, he released a Fallen Titans video on Sargon of Akkad. Not the YouTube political commentator, the Mesopotamian king.
  • On April 3, 2024 (delayed due to technical difficulties in its uploading), a 38 hour video on The Beverly Hillbillies and its Shared Universe hosted by Quinton's father Russ was uploaded to the channel, paying off a remark near the start of the Nickelodeon retrospectives that he was revisiting his own childhood favorite shows.
• Arc Welding: His parody of Channel Awesome's anniversary films, as a way to make fun of how the likes of The Nostalgia Critic and Linkara get so invested in their own Running Gags and how familiar their audiences are with them that they use them as serious plot points for big, bloated storylines.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: In his Watchmen Sequels video, his list of 2020 events ends with "My local Waffle Hut isn't even open right now".
• Artistic License – Historyinvoked: Quinton calls out two examples in "Bad Nazi Documentaries":
  • He says that the photographic evidence used in Amelia Earhart: The Lost Evidence to "prove" that Earhart ended up around Japan can be debunked by using Google's reverse image search option, which shows you that the photo was taken two years before her disappearance.
  • He is appalled when Hunting Hitler stumbles upon a picture that they claim "facial analysis" indicated was a picture of an elderly Adolf Hitler, only to discover that it was quite easily proven to be a photo of an elderly Moe Howard of The Three Stooges.
    Quinton: How fucking stupid does every goddamn person on this stupid fucking channel have to be that they can't fucking tell the difference between Adolf Hitler and fucking Moe Howard?!
• Audience-Alienating Premise:invoked
  • Juiced, an incredibly disgusting and exploitative prank series where the entire concept is "O.J. Simpson intimidates people with his presence and fame for having been acquitted of a double murder", but was so incompetently made that it couldn't even live up to that. Quinton mentions it's so obscure that he couldn't even find a torrent, meaning that nobody thought it was worth stealing.
  • He regards Sam & Cat as having issues down to a fundamental level, pointing out that both Sam and Cat inherently do not play to each other's strengths. Sam's Hidden Depths cannot be brought out by Cat, a character made to be a Plucky Comic Relief, who in turn doesn't work because Sam can't provide a plot for her to be relief from. As a result, the show can't utilize its main premise of them running a babysitting service, instead having Sam and Cat get up to generic sitcom shenanigans. Quinton concludes that Dice and Goomer, the characters most frequently used to get episodes rolling, should have just been the main characters of their own show.
  • He mentions this in regards to some Victorious and Sam & Cat episodes which serve as spoofs of media that their intended audience would be way too young to watch. The former show has an episode spoofing The Breakfast Club, while the latter has a parody of Breaking Bad, in which the protagonists starts an illegal blue soda operation, and a parody of Silence of the Lambs, where Dice gets kidnapped by Sam's old nemesis.
• Author Appeal: In "We Don't Talk About Dan Schneider", Quinton examines the infamous accusation that Dan Schneider has a foot fetish and that's why his sitcoms have such a heavy focus on foot humor. Quinton is willing to give the benefit of the doubt by acknowledging that the world has become far more aware and obsessed with fetish culture and that all media that feature weird or gross out humor is often unfairly accused of being someone's kink. As such, it's possible that Dan Schneider is simply really eccentric and finds feet humor to be really funny with no perverted intentions. However, Quinton also acknowledges that many of the jokes about feet do have a strong feel about them that is very indicative of a fetish and that Schneider himself frequently discussed the feet of his wife and his underaged actors on social media. Quinton admits that its tough not to believe that Schneider's love of foot humor doesn't have some kind of dark intent behind it but he's not willing definitely say it does either.
• Author Avatar: Quinton believes that Spencer from iCarly and Helen from Drake and Josh to be ones for Dan Schneider. Spencer is a grown adult who is friends with a bunch of teenagers, just like Schneider tried to be with his actors, while Helen is a former sitcom star who moved into a leadership position. He also accuses Christopher Caine, Rex's "real life" actor, of being one as well due to the puppet demanding a foot massage from Victoria Justice under threat of blackmail, which lines up with many of the accusations against Schneider.
• Bait-and-Switch:
  • In the intro to his Sam & Cat retrospective, Quinton explains that Nickelodeon had a habit of generating new shows overtly to retain their acting talent within the network. He explains that Drake & Josh was made because the network wanted to keep Drake Bell and Josh Peck on their payroll after they had their breakthrough as actors in The Amanda Show, and how iCarly was in turn made as a vehicle for Miranda Cosgrove, after she got popular through Drake and Josh. He goes on to say that iCarly itself was no exception to this pattern, because it just happened to have a talented, stand-out actor of its own, who the network was confident would to be able to carry a new show of their own. As he explains this, clips from iCarly focusing on Jennette McCurdy plays in the background, suggesting that this is the preamble to talk about Sam & Cat proper... The video then suddenly cuts to several clips of Noah Munck as Gibby, making it clear that, actually, he is going to speak a bit about the attempted Gibby spin-off (which was cancelled after the production of one unaired pilot) first.
  • Quinton points out that, while it may not be obvious, the villain of A Fairly Odd Movie: Grow Up, Timmy Turner! was inspired by... Biff Tannen from Back to the Future Part II. Who was, in turn, inspired by Donald Trump.
• Bait-and-Switch Lesbians: Quinton theorizes that Victorious may have invented modern queerbaiting, noticing that starting in season 3, there is an uptick of scenes that seem to hint at Tori and Jade as possibly having feelings for each other, with the episode where they go on a fake date together being one of the most popular. Quinton ultimately reveals that he was unable to see a ship between the two before that episode but became a fan of the pairing afterwards, now seeing the two's other interactions in a different light.
• Big Good: Quinton seems to regard Neil Cicierega as this for YouTube and much of the internet at large, citing how his body of work not only influenced much of the internet's humor and sensibilities but still surprisingly hold up to this day.
• Black Comedy: In "The Timmy Turner Movies (A Fairly Odd Saga)", Quinton responds to the main villain of Grow Up Timmy Turner attempting to run an activist over with a bulldozer by saying that, if the same thing happened at a Trump rally, nobody would doubt it.
• Blah, Blah, Blah: As one of the Sam & Cat episodes features a guest appearance by Penny Marshall and Cindy Williams of Laverne & Shirley fame, Quinton notices that he doesn't have a lot of context as he is far too young to have any real idea what Laverne & Shirley is about. He sits down with his father, Russ, who saw Laverne & Shirley back in the day, gives him his microphone and asks him to explain the show to him. Russ proceeds to start with an explanation of Happy Days, the show Laverne & Shirley was spun-off from, including a mention of how the Fonz wasn't originally the show's focus and how the cast initially featured Richie's older brother Chuck. As Russ goes on, the camera cuts to a close of Quinton, as he sits with a glazed over expression on his face, and his father's explanation starts to get gradually distorted by reverb to the point where it eventually because unintelligible. The video briefly cuts back to Russ, as he starts to explain to how Happy Days coined the phrase "Jump the Shark", before cutting back to Quinton looking even more distant and hearing even louder and grating reverb. Quinton then suddenly snaps back to reality, as Russ comes around to talk about the episode guest starting Robin Williams, and how this started the other Happy Days spin-off, Mork & Mindy, and how this incidentally also started Laverne & Shirley, before Quinton tunes out again. A quickly cut back to Russ as he explains that eventually Cindy Williams left the show, leading fans to jokingly call it "Laverne without Shirley", before a cut to an extreme close up on a genuinely despondent-looking Quinton, whose face take up the entire screen. Russ finally states that Happy Days itself was a spin-off of Love, American Style, and that Laverne & Shirley itself lasted 8 seasons and would get an Animated Adaptation. Quinton comes to again, mutters "Oh, fascinating..." and takes back his microphone.
  • Later, Russ watches some of Sam & Cat along with Quinton, and appears somewhat puzzled at the scene at the Bots restaurant. Quinton picks up on this and tries to explain to his father that the Nick-sitcom-verse is established to have sapient robots in it, and how it makes sense in the contexts of shows such as iCarly and Henry Danger. The video then cuts to a close-up on Russ, who sits with the same glazed-over look as Quinton had earlier, while Quinton's explanation goes on the background but is increasingly drowned out by reverb.
• Blunt "No": After Quinton and his father, Russ, has watched the Sam & Cat episode guest starring Penny Marshall and Cindy Williams, Quinton asks him if he wants to watch the rest of Sam & Cat with him. Russ's immediate response? "Not really." The reply causes Quinton to chuckle.
• Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick: "But in my mind, Pawn Stars was an attempt to create a show like The Office, except on a quarter of the budget. The goofy cast, the hilarious weekly mishaps, the mockery of hierarchical capitalist systems which create a toxic workplace yet seem to always come back around to creating a profitable business model, it's all there."
• Broken Pedestal:invoked Quinton isn't afraid to admit that like many review shows, he was inspired by Channel Awesome and The Nostalgia Critic. However, his growth in taste and sensibilities eventually made him see his enjoyment of the content as adolescent cringe. What truly makes this a case of this trope is that while Quinton eventually saw Doug Walker's work as So Bad, It's Good, he lost all respect for him and was genuinely hurt when he learned about the #ChangeTheChannel controversy.
• Call-Forward: In the retrospectives for iCarly and Victorious, because he produced different parts of the videos at the same time, he'll often refer to a gag or moment in a later video. Mainly the running tallies of the crimes and certain jokes, as well as when he finally got a haircut. Lampshaded when he started to point out he got the haircut in the first Victorious video, but then went, "Now that I think about it, I guess you guys might've already seen my haircut befo-I don't know. Sometimes these projects get confusing to film," as he remembered he might not've shot the remaining parts of the second iCarly video at that point. It creates some interesting rewatch value for both retrospectives.
• Cerebus Retcon: Throughout the Schneiderverse series, there's a Running Gag where Quinton pretends Dan Schneider doesn't exist, often making a big deal about how nobody created these shows. When he finally did a video discussing Schneider's career and the allegations surrounding his shows, he revealed this whole joke was meant as a satire on how trying to Unperson Schneider ignores how much of a hand he had in these shows, including the parts people actually remember fondly, as part of a broader critique on cognitive dissonance in these show's fandoms.
• Cerebus Syndrome:
  • Invoked out of necessity due to heavy subject matter for the Fallen Titans episode on Tobuscus.
  • The last third of The Collapse of Sam & Cat is devoted to Jennette McCurdy's traumatic life from her childhood through her time with Nickelodeon and beyond. The section is largely devoid of music and edits, and begins with a Long List of Content Warnings for what occurs throughout Jennette's story. Additionally, it acts as a deliberate contrast to the end of "The Scandal of Sam & Cat", which focused on co-star Ariana Grande's far happier life and transition from sitcom actress to chart-topping singer... and, more significantly, "The Collapse of Sam & Cat" also ends, finally naming Dan Schneider, with a frankly disturbing distorted audio mix of different openings, showing him in stark relief.
  • "We Don't Talk About Dan Schneider" adopts a stark, matter-of-fact tone given the allegations put before Schneider, and is relatively sparse on jokes.
• Celebrity Resemblance: Quinton notices that he is often told by people that he looks a quite bit like Robert Pattinson. He doesn't think the comparison is entirely fair:
  Quinton: I get what they're trying to say, but it just makes me feel worse... 'Cause it is like: "Ah, I got all the shit he got... I got put together fucking wrong!"
• Cluster F-Bomb: Quinton unleashes a string of profanities after a particularly bad factual error on Hunting Hitler, a series that looks on the possibility that Adolf Hitler somehow survived World War II. At one point the hosts are shown a picture of an elderly man that looks like Hitler, but as Quinton reveals later on, the man in the picture is Moe Howard.
  Quinton: How fucking stupid does every goddamn person on this stupid fucking channel have to be that they can't fucking tell the difference between Adolf Hitler and fucking Moe Howard?!
• Comic-Book Time: One of his complaints about Victorious is that since none of the characters aged, they weren't allowed to change as people or even develop personality traits outside of their basic archetypes.
• Common Knowledge: invokedA Discussed Trope.
  • He discusses how parts of the iCarly fanbase tend to see Carly as just the main character, without a personality or core gimmick of her own compared to the rest of the main cast of the show, but refutes this saying her main thing is being a big ball of anxiety in the first video of his retrospective for the series.
  • With regards to Victorious:
    • Quinton believes that the show's fanbase completely misremembers the show, based on the fanbase's sincere belief in Jade/Beck being a cute relationship in spite of the constant canon fighting, which Quinton views as Strangled by the Red String.
    • In a "Where Are They Now" section at the end of the series, he says that many fans believe that Victoria Justice is a try-hard that failed to make it as a singer after the show ended. He refutes this by showing that through her post-Victorious era, she released only a single and then broke with her record label, not releasing or trying anything for years up until releasing a handful of songs in The New '20s, which he believes is an indicative that she was actually either burnt-out from the show or simply uninterested in actually following through with the career of pop star.
  • The first Sam & Cat video opens with addressing the misconceptions about the Gibby! pilot and its relationship with the creation of Sam & Cat since many people (including himself) always thought that Sam & Cat was basically just transplanting the two most popular characters from iCarly and Victorious into the premise of the premise of Gibby!, but after the script for the pilot leaked it turned out that the two shows were nothing alike aside from being iCarly spin-offs and that Sam & Cat and Gibby! were actually supposed to be sister shows airing at the same time.
• Condemned by History:invoked The Fallen Titans series discusses Internet phenomena that were once massively popular, but have since faced significant backlash and/or fallen into obscurity. Specific examples covered include Ray William Johnson, The Nostalgia Critic and the Channel Awesome debacle, and The Abridged Series.
• Confirmation Biasinvoked:
  • In "The Decline of History Channel", Quinton mentions that most early archaeologists had an agenda, hunting for the past "with a pickaxe in one hand and a Bible in the other", and that this might have led to the loss of key moments in history. He thinks this is a bad thing, and thinks shows like Ancient Aliens are guilty of similar sins.
  • In "That Time the World Ended", Quinton says that the guest speakers just want to see their biases confirmed.
  • "Hunting Hitler" has hosts who refuse to believe anything that contradicts their preset views, to the point they'll eagerly accept a picture of Moe Howard as Adolf Hitler and one host saying at the end of the first season they refuse to accept facts as facts til they decide they're facts.
• Content Warnings:
  • Played for Laughs in "Bad Nazi Documentaries". The opening of the video warns that it will contain a Hitler sex change and exploding pancakes. Later, Quinton warns that the video will mention suicide, before making the counter-content warning that "it's about Hitler's suicide, so who gives a shit". A similar comment is made about Hitler's bones.
  • Played straight in "The Collapse of Sam & Cat" before Quinton delves into Jennette's autobiography, as it deals heavily with topics like child abuse, eating disorders, and cancer. He acknowledges some people may want to watch the entire video to flex that they watched a nine-hour video, but he has no shame on anybody who needs to skip this particular section.
• Crack Pairing: In-Universe, Quinton comes up with various Victorious ships, some of which have little to no basis in the show. Some examples are Beck and Trina (as Quinton felt their fake dating plot actually was convincing), Robbie and Berf (since one episode has some Ho Yay between the two that convinced Quinton that Berf is bi), and Tori and Rex, Robbie's puppet.
• Damned by Faint Praise:
  • When discussing the second Fred Figglehorn movie: "This movie has one of those covers from the time, where it's like, if you move it a little bit, the image changes. So one of the images is Fred looking scared and one of the images is Fred as a vampire. So when you do this (wiggles the case) it's like it keeps changing between Fred being scared and Fred being a vampire. This is the most interesting thing about the movie."
  • Quinton's verdict on Foop (Anti-Poof): "Foop is truly the opposite to Poof in every possible way — He talks, has an actual impact on the show, and there's something to say about him."
• Denser and Wackier: During his reviews of Victorious and Sam & Cat, Quinton asserts that Nickelodeon sitcoms and children's television as a whole suffered this trope starting in the early 2010s. He theorizes that teens and pre-teens, whose attention used to be all but owned by cable television, shifted towards online platforms for their entertainment and the only kids still watching shows on cable were babies and grade schoolers too young to have a phone or tablet, resulting in networks adjusting to appeal to them more. This is why Sam & Cat and the Gibby pilot were both considerably more silly and juvenile than iCarly.
• Distant Sequel: During his tenth intermission in his second Victorious episode, Quinton comes up with ideas for a Victorious reboot set in the future similar to iCarly (2021). He imagines that Nickelodeon would either do a series where the Hollywood Eight are now teachers at Hollywood Arts instructing a new group of students (which he thinks is bad), that it would be identical to the iCarly reboot (he also dislikes this idea), or that it would be "Euphoria with a laugh track" (which he thinks is the cringiest and thus most plausible and funny idea).
• Doorstopper:
  • His series on the Nickelodeon Shared Sitcom Universe have all been multiple hour-long videos, with the shortest clocking in at little over three and a half hours and the longest at nine and a half hours, all of which are quite lengthy, even by standards for analysis videos. With the conclusion "We Don't Talk About Dan Schneider", the series spans a total of about 45-46 hours.
  • The retrospective on The Beverly Hillbillies by Quinton's father Russ is only a couple hours shorter at 38 hours. Unlike the NSU videos however, which consist of eight videos, all 38 hours are contained in a single gargantuan video. At around the 10-hour mark, Russ even tells viewers that they should take a break if they've been trying to watch the entire video at once.
• Double Standard: As he says in his video about Ancient Aliens, he mentions that while the speakers tend to justify the technical achievements of Amerindians, African, and Eastern societies with the interference of aliens, they do not apply the same logic to European societies who also had great technical achievements, like building castles and churches, furthering the understanding that there is a racial bias in the theory (or, as Quinton jokes, that Aliens just don't like white people).
• Downer Ending: invoked "We Don't Talk About Dan Schneider" effectively ends the entire NSU saga on such a note. At the end of the video, Quinton makes it clear that by singling out Dan as being the sole cause of the backstage drama of all of his productions, we are not only applying reductive logic to the overall topic surrounding child actors in the entertainment industry, but unless something is actually done, we are at risk of having another "Dan Schneider" pop up from the woodwork. But not only that, we also have the epilogue: After casting a brief look at the production of the 2021 reboot of Head of the Class, in particular the fact that it got cancelled after a single ten-episode season, Quinton highlights another harsh truth: We are now living in an era where television shows are no longer allowed to find the time to grow and attract an audience, are liable to get written off and thrown away (and are at an increased risk of not being preserved), and only seem to get made for the sake of name recognition alone.
  Quinton: (over a prolonged shot of television static) So... are you ready for the future? Because I'll tell you one thing. I'm not.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: In the context of the iCarly miniseries. In the first video, about Fred, Quinton appreciates that while Fred is coded as having special needs and Kevin is shown to have multiple unmasculine interests, neither of these are treated as fodder for jokes. Once the videos transition into the Schneiderverse proper, he finds the shows frequently make fun of people with special needs and men with feminine attributes.
• Elephant in the Living Room: Discussed in "The End of Victorious," when Quinton is about to approach some very fetishy content within TheSlap.com.
  Quinton: A big theme of this project to me is the utter paradoxical nature of trying to do something like this, like with these specific shows... because there's this big elephant in the room... that just looms over, and is just always, always there. And I've taken a little bit of pride in the fact that I've been able to save so many of the details surrounding that for a standalone video at the end of this mini-series. And I've also taken some pride in the fact that I feel like we don't have to talk about the elephant in the room, because you can just always feel it. The further we get into this, the more weird it gets, the more shocking stuff gets, the more it feels like there's this big, elephant-shaped shadow that is just... looming over everything.
• Expospeak Gag: At the end of "The Transformers' Corporate Origins", Quinton refers to the franchise as being "a greater quantity than was introduced to the cornea". In other words, it's more than meets the eye.
• Fix Fic: invoked Downplayed. During the final intermission of his Victorious series, Quinton makes a shipping board, connecting which characters he thinks could be together in a way to make interesting plotlines, he ends up spitballing some ideas for a Distant Sequel to the original series, some of which befit his personal tastes, like explicit queer relationships in the story (particularly, either Berf/Sinjin or Berf/Robbie, and most notably, the Fan-Preferred Couple Tori/Jade), as well as a very happy ending for Trina (a character he is very sweet on) on which she cut relations with her family and friends that were so cruel to her and got her life together, even more so than anyone else in the cast.
• Flat Character: Quinton regards Andre in Victorious as this. Toward the end of the "End of Victorious" when he recounts the crimes of the various characters, he notes that he has nothing to say about Andre because he's too boring to be offensive but too nothing to even like.
• Follow the Leaderinvoked: Discussed in the "Knockoff YouTubers" episode of Fallen Titans, where Quinton talks about various YouTubers who imitated successful shows, and in the Channel Awesome episode, where he notes that the site's other reviewers tended to be clones of The Nostalgia Critic.
• Franchise Original Sin:invoked In "The Decline of the History Channel", Quinton argues that the channel has always featured sensationalist programming and shows that only portray The Theme Park Version of history. The problem just got worse over time.
• Freudian Slip: Comes up in the Victorious video when analyzing Sinjin's character.
  Quinton: I have kind of a soft spot for Shinji- [Beat] Wow...
• "Friends" Rent Control: Discussed early in the iCarly video, when he points out that Spencer should not be able to afford a huge apartment that apparently spans three floors. This leads to a theory that Spencer is actually Banksy.
• Fun with Subtitles: In the To Boldly Flee review, Quinton covers the "ThatGuyWithTheGlasses.com" watermark and replaces it with stuff like "ssssexdoll.com".
• It's Hard, So It Sucks!invoked: Discussed in the "Knockoff YouTubers" episode of Fallen Titans. Quinton says that both The Angry Video Game Nerd and its knockoffs tend to criticize games for being too hard, but while the AVGN had valid complaints about Fake Difficulty, many knockoffs would just bash every single challenging game.
• Harsher in Hindsight: invoked
  • Discussed when covering the man behind the Poggers face. Quinton notes how difficult it is to find out that a fairly harmless meme has a terrible backstory or association. The source of the face, Gootecks, turned out to be a COVID denier as well as a supporter of the attempted insurrection of the U.S. government on January 6th, 2021 and usage of the meme steadily became frowned upon in spite of Gooteck's disdain for the meme itself. Quinton compares it to Pepe the Frog being briefly co-opted by Neo-Nazis in spite of the character being a fairly harmless drawing in of itself.
  • Discussed in the second part of the iCarly review where Quinton mentions that a recurring fear of his when editing the video was that one of the actors in the show would get canceled for something actually heinous as soon as he posted the videos, since he specifically mentions the actors' performances as a positive about the show.
  • Discussed in further detail in the later videos of the Nickelodeon miniseries. Intentional or otherwise, the parallels between many aspects of iCarly and Sam & Cat with Jennette McCurdy's troubled life make the shows very difficult for Quinton to watch in the present day. He sees Sam's binge-eating while maintaining a very slim figure as a very cruel juxtaposition to Jennette's actual eating disorders, if not a justification for them, and both Sam's negligent mother and Freddie's boundary-disrespecting mother have disturbing similarities to Jennette's own mother. Furthermore, the allegations of emotional and sexual abuse against the casts by Dan Schneider and others would quickly sour him on these shows, though he ultimately avoided disavowing them entirely because the first few iCarly seasons were genuinely good by his standards.
  • Deliberately invoked in "The Timmy Turner Movies (A Fairly Odd Saga)" — Quinton states his dissatisfaction with so many film villains being based on Donald Trump given his (current year) 2016 Presidential Campaign. He then expresses the hope that, "after Hillary wins in November", they never hear from him again.
• Important Haircut: In a segment of the video regarding Sam & Cat, he talks about Ariana Grande's hair history. Ariana Grande, when playing Cat, would dye her hair cupcake red, but outside of recordings, she'd focus on her music and dye her hair back to her normal color, leaving her hair damaged to constant bleaching and dying. At some point, however, Ariana dyed her hair back to her natural color and never painted it red again, using a wig to perform as Cat. He regards this as the moment that Ariana's focus truly, completely shifted from being a character actor that does music outside of it, to primarily being a musician who also does acting.
• Inciting Incident: The 2007 Writers' Guild of America strike has had an effect on much of the media Quinton discusses, such as History Channel's pivoting harder towards reality shows and sensationalism or the shorter seasons of shows like The Office and iCarly.
• Inherent in the System: In "We Don't Talk About Dan Schneider", Quinton briefly speculates that part of the reason why Schneider has been so vilified (to the point of being blamed for Lindsey Shaw's problems on the set of Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide when he never worked on the show to begin withinvoked) is because the mistreatment of child actors in Hollywood is such a wide-reaching problem that it's easier to have a "fall guy" as opposed to confronting the system head-on.
  Quinton: [If] we go out there and we say that this is all in the past, the industry will simply turn around and create a new Dan Schneider. And personally, I don't want to be standing here in 38 years having this exact same conversation.
• Informed Ability: At several points when discussing Victorious, he notes that while Victoria Justice isn't tone-deaf by any means, the show (particularly early on) seems to rest a lot of its ideas on her being some kind of once-in-a-generation virtuoso. He says that this is likely a reason why Ariana Grande and Elizabeth Gillies did not do much performing in the show despite both having a background in music and musical theater, since this helped obscure the fact that Justice was not as excellent of a singer as the story proposed.
• Jumping the Shark: invoked He points out in "The Collapse of Sam & Cat" that the term "Jump the Shark" is frequently misused to call an episode bad, when it's really more about a show achieving a peak in intensity that it never quite manages to live up to again, citing that many episodes that are considered shark jumps, including the trope namer, weren't considered outwardly bad when they originally premiered, just extreme. He then reveals that he's come to consider the iCarly episode "iPsycho" to be that show's shark jump, despite also coming to appreciate it for being the last episode where Gibby felt genuinely funny, the last event episode to have a coherent plot, and the last episode to explore the repercussions of being big internet celebrities.
• Kayfabe: Discussed in the Pawn Stars episode, where Quinton talks about how much of it is fake. He says that the "B-plots" have always been fake, but the sales in the early seasons are genuine to some degree. In later seasons, however, a lot of them just wanted to show off some cool stuff and get on TV. He also points out that the show made the pawn shop so popular that the main cast couldn't work in the shop normally, and the guests they do meet are vetted ahead of time.
• Keep Circulating the Tapesinvoked:
  • Being an avid Garfield fan, his quest is to find lost and obscure Garfield media, such as discovering the franchise's precursors Gnorm Gnat and Jon, which he found at a regional Indiana newspaper in 2019.
  • Discussed in the "That Time the World Ended" episode, where Quinton mentions that the Mayan Doomsday prediction documentaries are now hard to find. He speculates that The History Channel buried them out of embarrassment, since pretty much all of those documentaries took at face value that the world was going to end in 2012 (only a few made as the date was getting closer tried to interpret it as a "change" rather than the end of the world).
  • Also discussed in the CN Real video, where he mentions that nobody recorded CN Real shows because nobody cared enough to record them, and so finding clips for the video was significantly more difficult than he had expected. Same goes for Juiced, the Candid Camera Prank show starring... O.J. Simpson. invoked
  • He has documented several instances of lost iCarly and Victorious-related media, mentioning that some content (such as videos and Flash games) is permanently lost due to website restructuring, copyright blocks, or other outside circumstances. He actually managed to save all of the videos from TheSlap.com, as well as iCarly interstitials from the 2008 Kids' Choice Awards.
  • He reconstructed the lost Gibby! pilot by taking the leaked shooting script and using animated puppets and voice actors to fill the gaps, with accounts from the cast and crew to fill in any gaps in knowledge. Later on Twitter, he joked that his reconstruction made people realize that the Gibby! pilot is better off staying lost.
  • Discussed in "We Don't Talk About Dan Schneider", where Quinton ends the video talking about the 2021 Head of the Class sequel series and how it was wiped from HBO Max, stating that there is now no legal way to watch the show "without some extreme forward thinking". He uses this to briefly start a discussion about the current state of television — where "reboots are greenlit based on name recognition alone, and then are shuttered away without pause for the effect that this has on the consumer".
• Keep the Reward: Throughout the Victorious videos, Quinton is exasperated that Ariana Grande seems to be repeatedly denied opportunities to sing in the show, apparently to avoid having her upstage Victoria Justice. He is therefore confused when he reveals early in The Scandal of Sam & Cat that when Ariana was grafted onto what became Sam & Cat, she was offered the chance to sing in that show but declined.
  • Undesirable Prize: However, it becomes clear when Quinton discusses Ariana's early music career later in Scandal that singing in Sam & Cat would likely have been against her better interests; as demonstrated by the single, "Put Your Hearts Up", Nickelodeon seemingly wanted Ariana to sing in-character as Cat Valentine rather than play to her strengths. If Nick had wanted to leverage Ariana's popularity as a singer, Quinton suggests that a Hannah Montana rip-off where she essentially plays herself would have been a better move.
• Lawful Stupid: Quinton mocks the guy in The Mystery of the Crystal Skulls for looking for crystal skulls he believes can prevent the Mayan Doomsday... while being perfectly willing to waste valuable time waiting to obtain a permit to excavate the site he believes contains some of them. Apparently that paperwork is more important than saving the world.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: Discussed. Quinton notes that, starting with the later seasons of iCarly, Nickelodeon sitcoms tend to do this, with characters constantly making meta references to how they're in a show. Quinton finds it annoying to the point that he considers the later episodes of iCarly to be almost unwatchable due to how self referential the humor had become.
• LOL, 69: Quinton's disappointed in his second iCarly video that by the end of the Season 6 review, he's only counted 68 "iCrimes," which doesn't feel right. He's excited to bring that total to 69 after "iGoodbye," due to Sam riding an uninsured motorcycle at night.
• Long Runner: Subtly Lampshaded at the conclusion of the "iCarly Miniseries", which Quinton labels a "400k Subscriber Special". His subscriber count has practically doubled since.
• Malicious Misnaming:
  • In the To Boldly Flee review, Quinton brings up that Brad Jones hated being called "Bradakin" in the script and fandom, to the point of wanting references to it removed from the IMDb page. As Quinton dislikes Brad, he of course decides to call him "Bradakin".
    Quinton: So, Bradakin is what I'm going to call him for the rest of Time.
  • He also calls Hugh J. Magnate Jr. (the villain of Grow Up Timmy Turner) "Drumpf" in reference to his obvious inspiration, then switches to calling him "Trump" and his wife "Ivanka".
    • In the same vein, he consistently refers to the live-action portrayals of the Fairly Odd Parents cast as "Tommy", "Tootsie", "Cocker", and "the Fairlies".
• Manipulative Editing: "How Documentaries Lie to You" discusses how documentaries can mislead the audience. One strategy is to have trustworthy sources provide non-essential information to make the narrative as a whole seem more trustworthy.
• Massive Multiplayer Crossover: His "Virtual Vidcon", which includes cameos from content creators from all walks of Internet life, from popular YouTubers, to other video reviewers, to storytime vloggers, musicians, you name it. Amazingly, Linkara himself shows up in spite of Quinton making fun of him many times on his own show.
• Mayan Doomsday: "That Time the World Ended" discusses and mocks various failed doomsday predictions, with an emphasis on the 2012 one.
• Millennium Bug: "That Time the World Ended" brings up the Y2K problem, which was fairly well-defined ("computers think it's 1900 and go haywire"), to contrast it with the numerous contradictory Mayan Doomsday predictions.
• Mis-blamed: invoked In "The End of Victorious", Quinton breaks down how the "I think we all sing" meme is less cruel in context. This segues into a point about how people harass Victoria Justice over the irony of her character being the future pop star of the cast rather than Ariana Grande's character, even leading into rumors that the two girls hate each other, when it was a decision by Nickelodeon and the show's producers.
• The Mockbuster: Quinton devotes some of Knockoff November to reviewing mockbusters (of e.g. Bee Movie).
• Mood Whiplash: Quinton thinks it's odd that early Pawn Stars seasons juxtapose the main cast doing "stupid shit" alongside tragic stories about people who have to take out loans they probably won't be able to pay back because their lives were torn apart by the recession.
• Moving the Goalposts: In "That Time the World Ended", Quinton mentions that some doomsday prophets claimed that they got the year wrong when the apocaplypse didn't come as they had predicted.
• MST3K Mantra: invoked
  • In "The Rankin/Bass Cinematic Universe," he notes that Vixen the reindeer is a baby in The Year Without a Santa Claus but an adult in Santa's origin story, Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town. So how does he explain this contradiction to his theory that all of the Rankin/Bass films take place within the same universe?
    Quinton: It's a movie.
  • To Boldly Flee justified a lot of its shortcomings both in and out of universe by claiming that reality was being warped by the Plot Hole. At the ending, where Santa Christ declares that plot holes no longer matter now that their universe resides within a literal mistake, Quinton response is:
    Quinton: Oh, innocent innocent Santa Christ...plot holes never mattered.
• Network Decay:invoked Discussed in the video "The Decline of the History Channel", where Quinton talks about how The History Channel went from focusing on genuinely informative (if flawed) history-based shows to stuff like Reality TV and conspiracy theories. He also describes Network Decay — even mentioning it by name — in its general form:
  Quinton: So there's this concept that comes attached to a lot of hyper-branded channels that's called "network decay". The idea is that as networks struggle to compete over time, their content broadens and broadens until the stations become increasingly homogenized.
• Non-Indicative Name:
  • He admits at times that the Fallen Titans title is misleading, and the episode on himself has him set the record somewhat straight that the title has more to do with his personal relationship and histories with the subjects rather than the larger overall perception of them. His episode on Filthy Frank even addresses how the title and the past episodes make it seem like Quinton is going to talk smack about the series and its "downfall" when really the "fall" was more controlled and deliberate in this case, and Quinton has nothing but praise for the series and its infamous influence on online culture.
  • At The End Of Victorious he questions whether the series first title, The Failure of Victorious, was a fair title, and he admits that it depends on how you define failure and success. While it's hard to argue that the central premise of launching Victoria Justice into stardom was a failure, other aspects of it can be argued. Was the show a success for kickstarting Ariana Grande's career or was it a failure for not capitalizing on it during the show? The show also has quite the loving fanbase, but he argues they're more interested in the show they think they remember from their childhood than the one that they actually watched.
• Nostalgia Filter:
  • In the Pawn Stars episode, Quinton says that many fans of the show think it used to be authentic, but is now fake. He argues that while the show did get more fake as it went on, the main reason it feels more fake now is that most fans started watching as kids and thought the show changed when they grew up and gained the ability to see through the Kayfabe.
  • Quinton argued that a lot of the Victorious fanbase has a big nostalgia for the show...though mainly the version of the show they remember over what was actually made and broadcast.
• Not Hyperbole: During one of his digressions of how iCarly sometimes plays child abuse for laughs, Quinton notices that he considers Freddie's mom to be "one of the most uncomfortable characters in sitcom history", he then emphasises to the viewer that he is making that statement "with no hyperbole."
• Not-So-Cheap Imitationinvoked: Quinton thinks the CinemaSins knock-off Cinema Wins is actually better than the original. He thinks Sins consists of clickbaity videos that focus on having complaints instead of criticism, and disguise nitpicking as film analysis. While he doesn't think Wins is real film analysis either, he appreciates that it celebrates films instead of mocking them, and points out neat details that add to the viewing experience.
• Occam's Razor: During the second half of the Victorious review Quinton brings up the various conspiracy theories that arose about the show's abrupt cancellation. After going through them Quinton points out that most Nickelodeon sitcoms only last about sixty episodes anyway and that only shows that draw in huge numbers, such as iCarly and Henry Danger, get more then that. He notes that the truth is likely that not enough people were watching the show and so Nickelodeon didn't see the point in renewing Victorious for a fifth season.
• Old Shame: invoked
  • In "That Time the World Ended", Quinton claims that The History Channel likely buried their failed doomsday prediction programmes out of embarrassment.
  • He suspects that Nickelodeon views Sam & Cat as one, as it never has its footage appear in other Schneiderverse shows as a cameo the way other shows do, and characters and other elements of the show are quietly distanced from it when appearing in later works. In particular, when Ariana Grande's red wig is shown in a Henry Danger cartoon, it's said that she wore it for Victorious, even though she was dyeing her hair for that show and only began using the wig for Sam & Cat.
• Once an Episode: Every installment of the NSU series has at least one segment where Quinton uses his bulletin board to illustrate a specific in-depth analysis or theory about the show, sometimes playing it as String Theory. In later videos, he struggles to find topics but feels obligated to use the bulletin board anyway.
• One-Hit Wonderinvoked: In the "Knockoff YouTubers" episode, Quinton discusses the channel FanMadeStuff, noting that while their fanmade Epic Rap Battles of History video got millions of views, they got almost no following out of it. He thinks it's a shame that this one hit contained poor rapping and lyricism (especially the overuse of Black Comedy Rape) that ended up overshadowing the channel's high production values and impressive ability to make their fan works feel similar to the originals.
  Quinton: It's fascinating and terrifying that a channel could have a viral hit that big and can still garner almost no following from it whatsoever.
• Only in Florida: A big section of his "Requiem For a Themed McDonald's" focuses on two particularly eccentric Florida Franchisees, and he makes note of this trope with discussing them. Especially this line:
  Quinton: For a brief moment in 1998 if you played your cards right, you could go inside of a McDonald's and have alligators in a fish tank watch you eat, which is the most Florida sentence ever constructed!
• Padding: Exploited. He really wants his second Victorious video to make it past eight hours because people won't see it as an eight hour video even if it's only a couple minutes short of that. So at the very end of the video, he goes in a few tangents to make up for the time, like talking about the gifts he received from his fans after the last video. He also uses this as a breather since he says the next episodes would have some darker content. The same goes for the first Sam & Cat video, which ends with a tangent meant to push the video over five hours, including a moment where he demonstrates how long he can hold his breath. invoked
• Poe's Law:
  • In "That Time the World Ended", Quinton mentions that the parody religion Church of the SubGenius somehow got unironic followers and served as the basis for some Mayan Doomsday predictions.
  • A Running Gag in the "iCarly Miniseries" is that Quinton never refers to Dan Schneider by name, only ever calling him "the creator". The final part of the series reveals that this was done specifically as a means of lampooning fans who had taken to openly avoiding even as much mentioning Schneider so to distance the shows from the allegations surrounding him (which Quinton notes is futile, given that Schneider's fingerprints can be felt in every part of their creative influence). Because the series went for so long however, and attracted many people who weren't even familiar with what was being talked about, many came to the assumption that Quinton was doing the exact same thing.
• Questioning Title?: Mocked in "The Decline of History Channel", where Quinton reads the question mark in the title Conspiracy? out loud.
• A Rare Sentence:
  • Used as part of a Take That! in The End of iCarly when discussing the Nick Verse: "I'm about to say a sentence that has never been said before in the history of the human race: I want to talk about Game Shakers, because there's a lot of interesting stuff going on in that show."
  • Shortly afterwards, during the Game Shakers episode discussion, Quinton explains, "They end up fingering Kress's pizza, which is an odd sentence to say."
  • Downplayed in The Scandal of Sam & Cat, in which he says a sentence that, while not necessarily rare on its own merits, is something he never thought he'd have to say in one of his videos: "Let's talk about the history of Ariana Grande's hair."
  • Again used as a Take That! after Timmy and Tootie straighten out the Leaning Tower of Pisa: "Remember when Superman III did this better?"
• Running Gag:
  • In the last Sam & Cat video, whenever a quantity of money is mentioned, he always makes sure to adjust it for modern-day inflation. This gag was brought into other videos, which extended the joke into things other than money.
  • During the Attack of the Toybots section of the Nicktoons Unite! analysis, Quinton repeatedly cuts to a short clip discussing the Easter Egg on Mr. Huggles' box with a different person performing the narration each time (with some repeats screwing with the segment by playing footage upside down or having everybody's audio played at once.).
  • Through the entire Unite video, following up every mention of a character getting digitally tracked by saying they should have gotten Nord VPN.
    Narrator(s): One of the most recognizable enemies in this game is Mr. Snuggles, a pink teddy bear who seems in no way inappropriate for a Nickelodeon game. That is, unless we use the freelook tool included with the Dolphin emulator so we can unlock the camera and get a closer look at Mr. Snuggles' box. While the image here is actually oriented upside down, given they never expected anyone to actually see this, what it actually says is: "I'll hug you and kill you, you'll never sleep again, I'll kill your parents." Always fun knowing there's all kinds of traumatizing stuff hidden just out of view in kids games.
• Scare Chord: When discussing Jennette McCurdy's history during iCarly's production in "The Collapse of Sam & Cat", an ominous sound plays when "The Creator" is first mentioned. It stands out as the segment is otherwise entirely devoid of background music.
• Seasonal Rot: invoked In The End of iCarly, Quinton shows a clear distaste for the latter seasons, which tends to be less liked by the fanbase for focusing less on the web show and more on generic sitcom concepts, Flanderization, and Leaning on the Fourth Wall humor. However, he also argues that part of why the show started dropping in the ratings is that the emergence of streaming at the time started to eat into the cable audience.
• Self-Deprecation: In "Paul is Dead | A Beatle Conspiracy" Quinton makes fun of himself for being hairy while explaining the difference between zoologists and cryptozoologists.
  Quinton: Zoologists ask for proof and cryptozoologists do not. A cryptozoologist will look at a grainy photo of a hairy creature and say, "Look, that has to be evidence that I'm right about Bigfoot!" And a zoologist will then say, "I'm pretty sure that's famous YouTuber Quinton Reviews."
• Serial Numbers Filed Off: invoked Quinton suggests that Dan Schneider leveraged his experience as a sitcom actor to create effective sitcom episodes without having formally studied the craft. At times, this would translate to Schneider playing with plots and tropes to mixed effects, but Quinton illustrates several instances where he simply borrowed Head of the Class plots and played them straight with his own characters.
• Series Fauxnale: He argues that the episode Tori Goes Platinum of season 3 of Victorious, which he considers to be the actual finale of the season, did this too well, and that might have contributed to the panned ending of the show. Because the season 3 finale really is what one would expect for the ending of Victorious, closing plotlines like Beck and Tori being a possible couple, Jade finally admiting that she sees Tori as a friend, and Tori's rise to stardom, it was the perfect moment to end things, and any finale after that would just play the same notes, which is a likely reason why Nickelodeon would be unlikely to finance a second episode too similar to what they've already done. He also thinks that despite not being the final episode aired (though it was the final episode produced), "Slap Fight" makes for the best ending, fitting on the accidental anti-sitcom vibes Quinton said the show has, with Trina and Sinjin getting the upper hand over the unlikable protagonist, whose film is panned casting a dark shadow on the character's possible futures in their careers.
• Serious Business: A recurring gag across the Nickelodeon Sitcom Universe reviews is that he is spending objectively too much time and effort analyzing TV shows made for literal children, though that doesn't stop him him from making entire 10-15 minute long segments about logo design, character relationships, the confusing interconnectivity of the Nickelodeon Sitcom Universe shows, and the characters' opinions on the complex geopolitical topic of climate change and treating them all as equal topics of analysis.
• Shallow Parody:invoked
  • In the To Boldly Flee review, Quinton says he has heard that the script for the film didn't mention the films the scenes were copying, so the actors often didn't even know what they were parodying. "Which, obviously, makes the parody work a whole lot less."
  • During "The Decay of Sam & Cat", while searching for parodies of iCarly, Victorious, and Sam & Cat, Quinton criticises the later seasons of Robot Chicken for doing the bare minimum of research into subjects that the writers clearly didn't grow up watching. In particular, the iCarly sketch seems to have been based entirely on the first two sentences of the Wikipedia synopsis, as Carly's military father (a very minor character who only appears in person in the finale, but is mentioned early in the Wikipedia description) plays a major role where he nukes Iran after Carly streams herself in the shower while main characters Sam and Freddie are completely absent, while the sketch based on The Wild Thornberrys completely ignores the core premise of Eliza being able to talk to animals (which is the third sentence on Wikipedia) in favour of putting the cast in a Discovery Channel parody.
• Shoddy Knockoff Product: Quinton devoted some of Knockoff November to reviewing knockoff merchandise.
• Shout-Out:
  • Discussed in the To Boldly Flee review, where Quinton says that the film (like Doug Walker himself) has a bad habit of thinking that referencing or outright copying the source material counts as a joke. He compares it to two of Seltzer and Friedberg's films, but says that even they at least found some interesting ways to lampoon the films they were spoofing.
  • In "How Garfield Lost His Magic", during the voiceover of a strip where Garfield wonders why he's wearing a watch, the first two panels are read out normally but in the last panel, the voice gets more high-pitched and zanier and ends in a "OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!" as the camera zooms into Garfield and the picture gets tilted whilst shaking - a reference to the start of the review of Cool Cat Saves the Kids by I Hate Everything.
  • In his review of A Fairly Odd Movie: Grow Up, Timmy Turner!, Quinton directly compares Timmy's reality-warping powers (done via Cosmo and Wanda) to ''The Twilight Zone's "It's a Good Life", saying that the two works share "that kind of energy".
• Skewed Priorities:
  • In "The Decline of History Channel", Quinton finds it baffling that a documentary about Andrew Jackson decided to spend 15 seconds on his crimes against Native Americans and 20 minutes on 19th century drama.
  • In "That Time the World Ended", Quinton mocks two people for this:
    • In a doomsday preparation video, he calls out the elderly lady for saying that coffee is almost a necessity.
      Quinton: I hear that! 90% of humanity is dead, but as long as I got my coffee, who gives a damn?
    • He also mocks the guy in The Mystery of the Crystal Skulls for looking for crystal skulls he believes can prevent the Mayan Doomsday... while being perfectly willing to waste valuable time waiting to obtain a permit to excavate a site he believes contains some of them. Apparently that paperwork is more important than saving the world.
  • In "Bad Nazi Documentaries", Quinton lambasts several Nazi documentaries for focusing on something like "were the Nazis obsessed with the occult?" or "was Hitler gay?" while barely mentioning their crimes.
• Small Role, Big Impact: Quinton points out that in Sam & Cat, it's Dice who kicks off many of the plots in the later episodes rather than either of the two leads. He also notices that he often leaves episodes part way through, likely because the show's 17 hour filming days means his underaged actor has to be written out of episodes early.
• So Bad, It's Goodinvoked: The idea of entertainingly bad media has been brought up on the show:
  • In "Quinton Reviews 'To Boldly Flee'", Quinton says that The Room (2003), Birdemic, Manos: The Hands of Fate and Plan 9 from Outer Space cannot be called truly bad because you can put them on and have a great time. To Boldly Flee, on the other hand, is the sort of bad "that crushes your soul" and "makes you want to turn it off every frame that goes by".
  • In "That Time the World Ended", Quinton thinks The Mystery of the Crystal Skulls (a show where an explorer tries and fails to find the crystal skulls he believes can save the world) is so stupid and boring that it's funny. The two highlights are the part where the explorer wonders if he has found Atlantis, and the anticlimax that comes when he thinks he has found a structure that holds some of the skulls... but can't excavate it because he needs to apply for a permit.
  • In the "Knockoff YouTubers" episode of Fallen Titans, Quinton says that many The Angry Video Game Nerd knockoffs are so bad that he laughs at the creator instead of with them. He even compares their work to Ed Wood's films.
• Status Quo Is God:
  • Quinton points out that few or none of the "B plots" in Pawn Stars have a long-term effect on the show, which gives away that they're staged.
  • In his review of Victorious, Quinton notices that many plots end with members of the cast seemingly succeeding in their quest for fame by successfully performing in front of a large crowd or impressing some major figure in the entertainment industry, only for it to never be brought up again in subsequent episodes.
  • In the unmade Gibby pilot, the main character would have been kept as a 16 year old high school student despite years having past in-universe during iCarly. The same was true for Sam & Cat where both the titular characters are stated to be minors and Cat still attends Hollywood Arts. Quinton theorizes that this was an attempt by Nickelodeon to keep the characters "frozen" so that if they decided to make more episodes of iCarly or Victorious they could just reinsert them back into their shows without any issue.
• Strawman Has a Point: Invoked at one point in his discussion of Sam & Cat, where an early episode has Sam and Cat have to deal with a bunch of negative reviews of their babysitting service that turn out to have been faked as part of a scheme by a competing babysitting service. As Quinton notes, Sam and Cat's service is at the point where getting negative reviews is not only entirely believable, but rather light, considering that they've endangered their charges multiple times by dragging them into Zany Schemes that regularly cross the line into criminality.
• String Theory: Invoked in "The End of Victorious," where after using a bulletin board to discuss the characters several times in his series, he realizes he wasn't doing it right because he wasn't using string to connect the characters together like they do for conspiracies in television. He designs a reason to use string (or yarn in his case) on the board: create a shipping chart of which pairings he would dislike, like, or love to see in a hypothetical reboot where the characters are adults.
• Subverted Sitcom: In the first part of his iCarly review, he discusses a dream he had in which he was part of the show in Carly's place, doing standard sitcom activities to a laugh track. Suddenly, a character (possibly Gibby) dies and the tone of the show immediately shifts to be more serious. Spencer goes from cracking jokes to being concerned for revenge, and Quinton-as-Carly is paranoid that he'll be next and wants to get back to the sitcom world.
• Suckiness Is Painful: Quinton hated To Boldly Flee to the point where he found it painful to watch. However, he was delighted by the awfulness of Atop the Fourth Wall: The Movie.
• Suddenly Shouting: While talking about the original series finale of iCarly, he dscribes the events of the episode in the same tone of voice he's been using for the rest of the video until he sees that Freddie doesn't properly put the lens caps on his lenses and goes into a tirade against Freddie and his poor camera discipline.
• Take That!:
  • "The Decline of the History Channel" compares Ancient Aliens to MatPat videos, and it's not a compliment — Quinton says that MatPat always distracts you with "stupid bullshit" when he should be showing evidence for his theories.
  • This comment on the "Jimmy Fallon episode" of iCarly:
    Quinton: At the start of the story, Spencer is watching Jimmy Fallon and is laughing hysterically, which is how you know it's fiction.
  • During the commercial break in The Decay of Sam & Cat, Quinton plays a Nesquik commercial starring Jennette and Ariana, but replaces all of the branding with screenshots of articles referencing Nestle's various high-profile controversies.
• Take That, Audience!:
  • A pretty harsh one in The Collapse of Sam & Cat — starting, of course, with the innocuous observation that everyone who calls Jennette McCurdy a nickname ends up having a measurably negative impact on her life:
  Quinton: ...The Creator calls her "Netter", her mom calls her "Nette", Steven calls her "Jenny", and you call her "Sam"!
  • "We Don't Talk About Dan Schneider" has a lengthy criticism about how the fandom for Dan Schneider's shows (which naturally overlaps a lot with the fandom for his Schneiderverse videos) ignores Schneider's impact on said shows so they can continue praising them. He also calls out members of his own fandom who don't really take his analysis seriously, clearly taking quiet offense to people who "defend" Quinton by saying they fall asleep to his videos.
• The Scapegoat: While Quinton believes that Dan Schneider deserved to be fired from Nickelodeon for his actions, he also believes that Nickelodeon fans tend to declare him to be the cause of all the mismanagement issues in all teen sitcoms, even ones he had nothing to do with, because it's easier to just ignore his involvement and keep enjoying their favorite shows than it is to acknowledge that Schneider's alleged behavior was symptomatic of an industry that regularly exploits and abuses child stars for profit.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!invoked: In the "Knockoff YouTubers" episode of Fallen Titans, Quinton says that many The Angry Video Game Nerd knockoffs would bash video game adaptations whenever they deviated from the source material.
• They Copied It, So It Sucks!invoked:
  • In the "Knockoff YouTubers" episode of Fallen Titans, Quinton says that The Irate Gamer was very unpopular in the reviewer scene because of how much material it lifted from The Angry Video Game Nerd.
  • One of the reasons Quinton hates To Boldly Flee is that he thinks it copies too much from other films without really parodying it.
• Trapped by Mountain Lionsinvoked: In the "Knockoff YouTubers" episode of Fallen Titans, Quinton says that many The Angry Video Game Nerd knockoffs spent a lot of time on "an extremely embarrassing plotline that has nothing to do with the review".
• Unfortunate Implicationsinvoked:
  • Quinton thinks that Ancient Aliens has a nasty undertone of "nonwhite civilizations were stupid" because it keeps attributing their accomplishments to aliens and claiming that their folklore was "misunderstood" or "misinterpreted" alien stuff, while not doing the same to Europeans' accomplishments and folklore.
  • He then notes that Hunting Hitler and other History Channel documentaries inverted this in comparison, puzzling over how could the Nazis have lost when they were so brilliant. (Side note: Hitler was one of the worst generals ever in history, to the point the generals with at least half a brain were surrendering or outright ignoring him, including Gen. Rommel.)
  • His review of A Fairly Odd Movie: Grow Up, Timmy Turner! points out that Jurgen's initial plan — shoot Timmy with Cupid's Arrow to make him fall in love — isn't well-thought out:
  Quinton: Jurgen was going to shoot a grown man with Cupid's Arrow while he was surrounded exclusively by children! [while displaying Drake Bell's mugshot] This could've ended very badly.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: invoked In his iCarly and Victorious retrospectives he notes that he finds Lewbert and Trina this, explaining that he thinks the writers meant for them to be so annoying that viewers would find their status as a constant Butt-Monkey funny, but that this was unsuccessful. He elaborates that Lewbert's backstory portrays him as having previously been a pretty normal guy with a good career as a male model, but he got into an abusive relationship with a Control Freak which is all but outright said to have traumatized him to the point of insanity, playing a large in part in making him the way he is. Meanwhile, Trina is indicated to have been constantly mistreated and ignored throughout her childhood by her and Tori's parents, due to her status as The Unfavorite, and developed a Inferiority Superiority Complex as a result. Quinton notes these are both actually rather sympathetic and depressing backstories, and as a result, it ends up being just kind of sad to watch Lewbert and Trina getting constantly screwed over and mocked time and again.
• Unperson: A regularly reoccurring joke in the Nickelodeon shows is that whenever Quinton tries to figure out who made these shows, he mentions that he either blacks out, or can't find anything about them. At one point during the Victorious reviews, the credit for said person is even cropped out when it shows up. In the first Sam & Cat video, Ariana Grande's personal thanks to him is abruptly cut off with television static. He does briefly broach the topic when discussing TheSlap.com, mentioning that he wants to keep the Elephant in the Living Room sequestered into a separate video so that he doesn't have to address it every time it comes up. When he eventually does mention Schneider by name in "The Collapse of Sam & Cat," it thus serves as a Wham Line, segueing into the more serious discussion of his impact on Nickelodeon and its talent. The final episode in the miniseries reveals that Quinton intentionally invoked this to comment on "the ridiculousness of this mentality" and how it's essentially "fruitless to try and watch shows like iCarly without thinking about the series' creator" because Schneider's fingerprints are all over the show.
• Volatile Second Tier Position: At the end of "The Collapse of Sam and Cat", Quinton describes how Jennette McCurdy found herself in this position during the filming of Sam & Cat: as she was considered a less-valuable talent than Ariana Grande, she was expected to take on a greater burden. Ariana was frequently allowed to be absent from filming to advance her music career, while Jennette had trouble getting time off even to visit her dying mother.
• Weird Crossover: Discussed in his first iCarly video — he wants crossover fanfiction of iCarly and Frasier since they both live in Seattle, and edits a few short clips of the characters interacting, with the Cranes' proper nature contrasting the characters' wackiness.
  Nigel: I'm surprised the trains are even running on Carly Shay Day.
• Wham Line:
  • Right before the Wham Shot below, Quinton discusses how the end of Sam & Cat marked the end of the Nickelodeon Sitcom Universe as it existed in the iCarly era, a somewhat grounded and sensical sitcom world, which then transitioned into the more fantastical one portrayed in shows like Henry Danger. However, he also mentions another way in which the show marked as an end to the era, becoming the first time a specific person is mentioned by name in the entire mini-series.
    Quinton: But more than that, it's the end of an era. It's the end of the innocence that was once associated with these shows. It's when people started to notice things...and started to ask questions — and when Nickelodeon started to intervene. And arguably, this was when the collapse of Schneider's Bakery would begin. But it would take several more years for the extent of the damage to be discovered.
  • In the episode after the one above, Quinton reveals the controversial hot take he's been holding on to since the first episode:
    "Spencer Shay is a Dan Schneider stand-in."
• Wham Shot: The final shot of "The Collapse of Sam & Cat", teasing Quinton's next video, is a slow zoom in on a television tuned to static while an eerie mix of sitcom themes plays, which eventually shows a pair of eyes, and then a face. After being deliberately unpersoned and largely ignored throughout the entire Nickelodeon mini-series, the creator of these shows is finally named and shown.
  Next Time: We Don't Talk About Dan Schneider
• What Would X Do?: An Inversion. Quinton has said that if he's feeling stressed or angry with his actors, he'll remind himself that he's "being a bit of a Doug Walker", and move on instead of being an asshole.
• Xtreme Kool Letterz: Quinton takes a jab at the spelling "Syfy" in "That Time the World Ended".
  Quinton: Airing on Sci-Fi back when "sci-fi" was spelled right...

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"...I'm Quinton Reviews, and that's all you need."