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  • Adorkable: Abel surprisingly edges into this when Sarah resets the haunted cartridge to its pre-corruption 2010 state. He gushes about how he didn't think that was even possible and nerds out over the entire thing, revealing a bit more about the creation of the cartridge in the process.
  • Alternative Character Interpretation: Numerous examples, including bentruth.rtf, a fan-created Perspective Flip of thetruth.rtf, depicts BEN as a lonely, mostly neutral entity that alternately helps or teases Jad, while Jad is presented as a crazy, paranoid kid who reads too much into everything. Awakening reveals that there's some truth in this; BEN isn't as malicious as he appeared, while Jad was understandably more than a bit paranoid and distrusting as a result of BEN's actions. Some of "BEN's" dialogue in the game might not have been him.
  • Awesome Music: Every song that was used for the website, especially the third one.
  • Catharsis Factor: Rosa's rescue at the hands of Sarah and the players is this to everyone who tried and failed to save her from Kelbris during the Moon Children arc. Even the Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines video had its tags changed from "YOU DIDN'T SAVE HER" to "YOU SAVED HER" to show everyone's accomplishment.
  • Cliché Storm:
    • Uses almost every cliche in "haunted video game" stories. The difference between "haunted Super Mario 64" and "haunted Majora's Mask"? Jadusable actually has a game to back it up. And at least a few of those clichés are because they originated here.
    • Also, "Hey I'm BEN".
  • Complete Monster: Matt Hubris is a high-ranking member of the Moon Children, a fanatical pseudo-religious order that doubles as a front for the Eternity Project. A murderer even before joining the Moon Children, Matt—under the online handle of Ifrit—was complicit in crimes that range from praising suicide to inciting a school shooting. After his digitization into The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, Matt came up with the idea to use the Father as a tool to destroy all of World Alpha and remake it as a nightmarish hellscape in his own image. To do so, Matt manipulated Sarah into activating the 4th Day glitch to release the Father, twisting World Alpha and killing its dozens of inhabitants before trying to dispose of the girl.
  • Discredited Meme: No matter your opinion on the story itself, fans are tired of any Majora's Mask discussion devolving into a Ben Drowned "discussion".
  • Epileptic Trees: Some people think that Ben is really not the bad guy, and that he's trying to help us so nobody else suffers the same fate he did. There's some truth in this: Ben and BEN are two different beings - Ben is the first successful Brain Upload patient from the project, and BEN is a mental gestalt entity made from the minds of Ben and the Moon Children.
  • Fountain of Memes: Everything. There's a reason the creator has (jokingly) apologized for ruining all future discussion about Majora's Mask. He even thanked the viewers at the end of the final video for them.
  • I Am Not Shazam: Drowned is not his surname. The reason the story is called Ben Drowned is because Ben is the first name of the boy, and he died by drowning. There is, however, a character named Drowned involved with the story, though he's also not Ben. Or BEN.
  • Just Here for Godzilla: While most of the hardcore fans follow every element of the story, the views on YouTube show an obvious favour towards the Zelda and BEN-themed videos, with the Methods of Revolution and .txt videos falling behind significantly and a lot of returning casual fans confused by what's going on, even with the context of the first arc. Alex Hall himself exploited this by using video tags to game the YouTube algorithm towards gamers who'd take a passing interest in the series, such as using tags referencing the Every Copy of Mario 64 Is Personalised creepypasta that was popular at the time of Arc 3's release schedule.
  • Memetic Mutation: According to Know Your Meme, Ben Drowned has reached memetic status.
    • You shouldn't have done that...
    • You've met with a terrible fate, haven't you?
    • Type "Ben", "The counter resets.", "Majora's Mask", "You shouldn't have done that.", or "You've met with a terrible fate, haven't you?" into Cleverbot. Go on, try it.note 
    • SWAGGGGG
    • BEN Drowned is the best shonen anime.
    • Related to the above, "Remember when this was a story about a haunted video game?" started to crop up in response to the societal collapse elements in the live-action segments and the increasingly action-oriented Genre Shift of gameplay thereafter.
  • Narm: During the original video (Day Four.wmv), the moments when Link is being attacked with the fire attack had some people laughing, especially when he's about to finish the Song of Time and is instantly killed.
  • Nightmare Retardant: king kong.wmv is flat out hilarious. Then again, it's an April Fools' Day joke.
  • Once Original, Now Overdone: Some people find the creepypasta to be cliche, but it was one of the first "haunted game" creepypastas. Not to mention that this one turned into an ARG.
  • Paranoia Fuel:
    • Word of God says Ben has leaked out onto the internet by now.
    • The latest announcement, which declares that you will be notified when the game restarts, whether you have internet access or not. This was followed up when anyone who had donated (and therefore indirectly "submitted" their street address) received a typed, somewhat threatening letter in the mail accompanied by a suspiciously apropos newspaper clipping.
      • Which led to a different kind of Paranoia Fuel, combined with Fridge Horror, that the reason we haven't heard from the Author in so long might be because a recipient somewhere didn't realize it was part of the ARG and called the police, who traced it back to Jad and (at best) ordered a cease-and-desist... as the person who proposed the theory said, "The situation is hypothetical, but not implausible." note  It was deemed highly unlikely, but still sparked a small-scale scare.
    • Earlier on in the story, there was a cult known as the "Moon Children" that worshiped the moon and believed in the "moon apocalypse theory" (that the moon, like in the game, would crush all of Earth), and on the website there was a place where you would put in your name and phone number to "become one of them." People who'd done this had begun reporting calls from a blocked number. It would be a song that would morph into the Elegy of Emptiness or music from the site. Another was the reversed Song of Healing followed by a voice saying "You shouldn't have done that." Imagine this, but not knowing what the creator of the story was REALLY doing (notifying people that the "game" had started back up), and you'd be really, really in for a treat.
    • THE FATHER.wmv adds a lot of this retroactively, since it reinforces exactly how much our perception of in-ARG events was manipulated by BEN, nevermind the fridge version that comes with realizing someone or something is now actively screwing with BEN by uploading the unaltered footage, and the implications of that fact.
  • Parody Displacement: Some of the above Memetic Mutation (i.e. the Elegy of Emptiness statue and "You've met with a terrible fate") is taken straight from the original unaltered game, but some fans (especially those who haven't played the original game) tend to associate them with this creepypasta instead. Judging from YouTube comments, when trailers and gameplay footage for the 3DS remake of Majora's Mask showed the Elegy of Emptiness statue, some fans actually thought it was a reference to Ben Drowned.
  • Player Punch:
    • When the ARG started back up, the players desperately tried to figure out how to save Kayd Hendricks/Ryukaki. In his last video message, he lets the players know that they were so close to figuring things out, but they were ultimately unable to save him.
    • The reveal of the fact that Jad's been dead since the first arc ended in THE FATHER.wmv.
    • The players' decision got Player 2 killed in "Day 11."
    • Sarah's death at Jad's hands. The possibility of bringing her back only somewhat lessens the blow, and the fact that it was seemingly unavoidable doesn't help either. The players did in fact revive Sarah, but to the worst possible scenario: in the Final Hours, without the Adult Mask, unable to escape Clock Town, with two Moon Children still free, and the Father is almost awake.
  • "Stop Having Fun" Guys:
    • Almost every Alternate Reality Game gets guys like this, but this one seems to be full of them: Guys with no concept of immersion who love to scream "This isn't real and you're all morons for falling for it!" at everyone, and respond to any explanations of "Yes, we know it's not real. It's a game and we're playing along." with "Well then you're even bigger morons than I thought! How can you enjoy it if you know it's not real?"
    • On the flipside, there are also people who take the game so seriously, anything that breaks the immersion is instantly deemed an offense. The biggest example thus far is king kong.wmv, an April Fools' Day joke vid posted on Jadusable's account. Cries of ruination resounded among the comments section (though they generally were in a very vocal minority).
  • That One Puzzle:
    • The first cipher of File 59, which wasn't solved until 2018, seven years into the hiatus.
    • Word of God says participants were not supposed to get into the unknown stuff yet (the unsolved ciphers and the still locked files) as the keys to those things will be provided in the upcoming interactive game. He said they are still welcome to try, but he doubts they would be able to pull it off without the clues from the game. This was before the game itself was cancelled, obviously.
  • Viewer Name Confusion: It's a common mistake to refer to the character of BEN as "BEN Drowned", with "Drowned" acting as a surname of sorts; the character is actually just known as BEN, and the series is called Ben Drowned because, well... BEN drowned.
  • The Woobie:
    • Poor Jadusable, all he wanted was a little nostalgia...And in the end, it got him killed.
    • Surprisingly, BEN as well. Or rather, the original Ben, who just wanted to live the life of the hero in his favorite video game only to wind up sealed in the elegy statue.
    • Sarah in the final episode. Finding out that after everything she did, she would be removed from the system and everyone in it would likely never remember what happened, not even Rosa, would be bad enough. Then she's told that there's no telling what might happen to her now that she has to be removed to properly reset the world to before the Moon Children corrupted it - her physical body might by dying, and there's no telling if she'll survive. Yet she insists anyway, because she wants to be a hero and save everyone anyway. It's apparent that she's absolutely crushed, but remains resolute.

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