"Hello, I'm Tyler, this is the Imaginary Axis"
— The introduction to each episode.
The Imaginary Axis, produced by Tyler, is an Analysis Channel that looks primarily over comic books and their lore. He covers a range of subjects exploring the different statistics and abilities of various fictional characters and items. Often they will explore the scientific and philosophical ramifications of a character, place or artifact. While most of what he looks over is comic book related, some videos like "Why the Death Note Would FAIL" look after other media (ie: anime).
The Imaginary Axis provides examples of:
- Anti-Nihilist: Tyler espouses this philosophy in a couple videos.
- Beyond the Impossible: "How Fast Is The Flash" calculates absurd speeds, before reaching Wally West's greatest speed feat of beating instant teleportation. As he is capable of moving in less than a Planck time, the shortest duration of what we understand of time, what he's doing can't even be classified as speed anymore.
- Blessed with Suck: "The TRUTH Behind Dr. Manhattan's LIMITLESS Power" explores this in relation to Dr. Manhattan's powers; his ability to exist in a higher dimension may have given him godlike powers, but being a Non-Linear Character means he sees everything at once and is unable to change it; it might as well be an And I Must Scream scenario for him. His crossover to the DCU finally lets him subvert it since unlike Watchmen it has multiple timelines, letting him experience a lot more.
- Clap Your Hands If You Believe: "Solving the DC Universe's Biggest Mystery" posits that the reason The Phantom Stranger has a Multiple-Choice Past is that he wiped it from everybody's memory, so the collective consciousness makes his origin stories a reality despite contradicting each other in order to explain who he is.
- Dark and Troubled Past: The conclusion of "Solving the DC Universe's Biggest Mystery" is that whatever the true backstory of the Phantom Stranger is, he would rather bury it in various contradictory origin stories than have people know what it is, to the point he'd rather be remembered as Judas than who he really was.
- God of Evil: The second Darkseid video labels the New God as the abstracta of evil instead of "just" a god representing evil or the god of tyranny. Specifically, he compares him to Saint Augustine's take on the nature of evil; a hole/absence of good, rather than a physical entity.
- Heel Realization: Tyler's conclusion on why nobody can truly hold onto the power of The Infinity Gauntlet; Thanos allowed himself to be defeated because he and anyone who holds the power gains complete awareness of the universe, only to realize they don't deserve the power.
- Immortal Breaker: "Can Deadpool Die" and "Can Wolverine Die" explore how to do this to these near-immortal characters. He determines the latter can die through oxygen starvation or extreme old age.
- Made of Indestructium: Fictional materials are compared to one another in "Unobtanium: What Is The Strongest Metal", starting with perhaps the strongest Real Life material(graphene) and going from there. The strongest metal he finds is Amazonium, which in all its Pre-New 52 appearances has never been broken, even by gods.
- Medium Awareness: Played for Drama in the conclusion of "The Joker's Big Secret", where he concludes his "insanity" is actually because the Joker being "super-sane" means he knows he's in a comic book. His Straw Nihilist personality and Lack of Empathy is because he knows no-one he kills is truly real and he wants to keep the comic going by being a villain. His brief lucidity in "Going Sane"
is because the writers would never kill Batman off so when he thought he died, it briefly convinced him his line of reasoning was insane. - More Than Infinite: "How Powerful Is The Infinity Gauntlet" uses this trope for how there can be beings who can be stronger than the Infinity Gauntlet, which is supposed to make the user The Omnipotent. Tyler uses an example of how an infinite line is still lacking width, an infinite flat plane is still lacking depth, and so on.
- More than Three Dimensions: Something Tyler notes when exploring multiversal/extra-dimensional characters is that having more dimensions basically allows you to be infinitely more powerful than the beings below you, akin to how we are infinitely more powerful than a flat drawing. This is also his conclusion for how Dr. Manhattan is a non-linear Reality Warper; his consciousness exists in a higher dimension so he can control the fundamental forces of the universe.
- Multiple-Choice Past: "SOLVING the DC Universe's BIGGEST SECRET" attempts to explain how The Phantom Stranger can have five multiple conflicting origin stories; unlike most DC characters he's usually immune to mass retcons and in some stories multiple backstories are implied to be mutually true. Tyler's conclusion for how this is possible is because enough people believe these origins to be true they become so, allowing the Stranger's original origin story to remain secret.
- The Multiverse: "DC's Guide To The Multiverse" and "Marvel's Guide To The Multiverse" details on how their multiverses works scientifically-speaking.
- Our Souls Are Different: "The TRUTH Behind Dr Manhattan's LIMITLESS Power!" touches the theory of mind-body dualism, essentially meaning that one's mind and soul are ultimately separate but connected entities. The reason why Jon Osterman survived having all fundamental forces ripped from his body is that the mind-body dualism theory is corrected in the Watchmen universe.
- Sanity Slippage: Tyler almost has one when attempting to diagnose The Joker. It's... surprisingly creepy. Especially the way he constantly has to reaffirm his sanity.
- Platonic Cave: The concept of Plato's theory of forms is used in the second Darkseid video to properly explain what he and the other divine figures are. He concludes that Darkseid is the abstracta of evil and his victory in the higher realms is why the heroes start losing in Final Crisis.
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Technology Marches On: "Why the Death Note Would FAIL" establishes why Kira's plan would never work with the modern era's communication. - Theseus' Ship Paradox: "Groot Is STILL Dead!" explores this trope to determine whether Baby Groot is still the same person as Groot, eventually concluding that they're separate beings and should be treated as such.
- Trope: "The Seven Dark Gods of DC Universe" suggests that this is what the Endless essentially are; concepts and narratives that define existence. Being living tropes is why they're so powerful; ideas they represent are so necessary to a story or our ideas of reality that outright lacking them is inconceivable.
