YMMV / Brainbent

• Base-Breaking Character: A sort-of example with Vriska. It's not the character herself, it's that the readers and writers are having trouble with her diagnosis. She's supposed to have Borderline Personality Disorder and Histrionic Disorder, but there's been plenty of discussions about how she doesn't apply for either.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Nepeta is quite popular among the Autistic crowd. The fact that her portrayal is fairly well researched and free of stereotypes helps.
• Fridge Brilliance: Quite a lot of it. There are a lot of connections/parallels to canon that take a bit of thinking to realize. For instance, why does Nepeta hate the color purple? Purple is the signature color of Canon!Gamzee, who killed Canon!Nepeta.
• Harsher in Hindsight: In her backstory, Rose became an alcoholic due to her competitiveness with her mother. In more recent events in canon, Rose really has become an alcoholic. The reason likewise has to do with her mother but not because of their relationship; it's out of guilt and stress Rose is feeling over Mom's death.
  • Something similar happens with Dave. When the blog started, the idea of Bro being reallistically abusive was seen as a divergence from canon, or an exageration of Bro's traits. As of newer updates, we know that he was, in fact, an abusive parent, and it's not played for laughs.
• Ho Yay: Nepeta ships Karkat and Sollux. Sollux canonically goes both ways and has stated that Karkat is hot, and Karkat's found himself thinking about Sollux naked.
  • John also thinks he may have had a bit of a Stupid Sexy Flanders reaction to Karkat and his puppy dog eyes.
• Les Yay: Both Nepeta and Sollux ship Kanaya and Rose. Kanaya has an ex-girlfriend and has talked rather enthusiastically about how nice roses taste (which even gets a Lampshade Hanging), and talking with Kanaya took up most of Rose's response to an anon's question about whether Rose had a crush on a resident.
• Memetic Eldritch Abomination: The FUSB is often the subject of jokes, both in-universe and out, that depict it as an Eldritch Abomination. Even the author does this.
• Moe: Calliope. So...cuuuute...
• Nausea Fuel: In-universe, when the cast is being asked what their favorite foods are, John trolls everyone by mentioning casu marzu (a sheep's milk cheese intentionally infested with maggots).
  Jade: eew, john! i looked that up and almost blew chunks!!!
• Nightmare Fuel: Karkat's nightmare. It involves Eye Scream, a possible reference to Lord English, the gruesome deaths of Tavros, Sollux, Nepeta, Rose and WV, and a heaping dose of Mind Screw.
  Karkat quietly wakes, safe in bed in the gloom of six in the morning, and remembers why he doesn’t sleep much these days.
  • Gamzee's ex-girlfriend used to take drugs and often ended up hurting him badly (hell, she nearly strangled him once). When he left her, she cut his face with a garden trowel.
  • Speaking of Gamzee, well...this was supposed to be a joke reply but reading Gamzee having something resembling a sober freakout is pretty scary...
  Gamzee: HONK honk HONK honk HONK honk HONK honk HONK
  • Calliope in this verse is a tiny child with severe burns on her face. Let that sink in for a bit.
    • Worse still, a non-canon contribution reveals that Caliborn did this to her. Given what Caliborn's like in canon, this is NOT out of character for him...
• Romantic Plot Tumor: Recent updates tend to focus more on the sexual relationships between the characters, notably Manic!Sollux, than the Slice of Life antics of the other residents.
• Tear Jerker: Jade admitting that she used to worry that she was the only person left alive in the world.
  • After Dave's brother loses the hearing:
  Your name is Dave Strider and you give up.
  • Pretty much anyone's backstory.
  • Many of the Real Life submissions, when they aren't a Heartwarming Moment.
  • This passage. What makes it even more of a Tear Jerker is that stuff like this is actually true!
  Nepeta: :33 < my mom and dad are very active in my therapy because there is a lot of bad stuff out there being taught to autistic kids thats supposed to be for our own good but really only makes us pretend to be not autistic so other people wont have to be uncomfortable.
  Nepeta: :33 < thats kind of insulting dont you think
  • Calliope admitting that she wears the mask because she feels sad when people look at her face.
  • The story of the anonymous poster on Page 15 of the blog who was molested by their stepfather, can't go to their mother about it, and has come close to committing suicide, but can't because they don't know what would happen to their siblings.
  • Some of the non-canon reader contributions are tear jerkers as well—this one features Eridan before he was entered into St. Lobaf's discovering that his parents and teachers found his notebook, which is filled with very...unkind things written about the classmates that bullied him, and now everyone's convinced he's going to do something heinous. He desperately tries to convince them otherwise, stating that he only needed to vent, but internally all he can ask is where all this concern was back when he was actually being bullied.
  They don’t believe you. And the only person you want to kill now is yourself.
  • Even OCs aren't safe—this tale focuses on an ex-boyfriend of Vriska's whom she falsely accused of assaulting her, and who, as a result, had his life utterly destroyed, to the point that even his own father believed Vriska over him, with only his mother and two of his friends siding with him (and the latter only do so because they personally know what Vriska is like). By the end, Vriska manages to even shatter his own self image. The worst part? When the boy was eight years old, his older sister was assaulted, and when he learned what it meant he vowed he would NEVER do such a thing himself.
• The Woobie: ...It's about a mental hospital. The only people who don't have Woobie moments are the staff, and even then WV and Tavros were Woobies in their backstories.
  • Jerkass Woobie: Karkat is more Woobie and less Jerkass, but Vriska...hoo boy... Then there's Eridan, who has a rather creepy attitude towards women and once attacked a classmate using brass knuckles, but comes off as the most consistently miserable character in the fic.