YMMV / BrainScratch Commentaries

• Accidental Innuendo:
  • "Hey Ryan, show us your Mews."
  • "Ryan, are you wearing the school girl outfit?"
• Adorkable: The way Lewis rambles during his own playthroughs (specifically Sonic 1):
  Lewis: Now, I hesitate at every single crusher down here because I'm a pansy. I hesitate like that, crushers make me nervous.
• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Many fans believe that Ted secretly loves Gen 4 and The Legend of Zelda and may possibly be BillyMC.
  • The Kirby games would like you to believe that Kirby is the hero. The BSC Crew doesn't really see it that way.
    Ted: Our villain-I mean hero, Kirby...
  • The guys talk about how Animal Crossing after going into the mythology of the Kappa end up thinking he's taking you to purgatory.
  • For the Resident Evil commentaries, they'd like to believe that Chris is a giant meat head who can't figure out a metaphor to save his life, and Albert Wesker is Johnny Bravo.
  • According to the Mario commentaries:
    • Luigi's a silent, but snarky sociopath who loves money and hates everyone.
    • Waluigi's an annoying jerk who's not only a drug addict, but he also has a gambling problem.
    • Wario and Waluigi are the Scapelli brothers, as seen in the Super Mario Bros. movie.
    • Mario is positively obsessed with seeing Boom-Boom (the fortress miniboss of Super Mario Bros. 3 and Super Mario 3D Land)
    • Toad is Satan, and Chance Time is hell.
    • Yoshi's a drug addict, who apparently makes logs of everything that happens around him. Along with being incredibly unlucky.
    • Peach is either really lucky or she pays Toad to tip the game in her favor.
    • Bowser can't do anything (not even rearrange his spice rack) without either Mario, Luigi, Peach, Toad or all four coming to beat him up. As well, he's invited to everything they do except for the parties. As Ted puts it:
      Ted: No, parties are too formal for Bowser.
  • Neo Cortex is a wannabe YouTube Personality who often relies on clickbait titles, overly played games, and zany faces for his thumbnails to get people to watch his content. Meanwhile, N. Tropy is an actually successful YouTuber with 5 million subs who decided to ditch Cortex because he only had 30 subscribers.
• Arc Fatigue
  • For those who aren't fans of the series, the Mass Effect commentary can be a real slog to sit through, for one primary reason (to Lewis's credit, this is more a result of the game's design than the fault of his playstyle).
  • Averted with most of their RPG playthroughs nowadays. The commentaries for Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door and Final Fantasy IX were released in blocks and went back-and-forth in order to keep either game from dominating the channel. Lewis's Persona 5 playthrough was designated as a weekend upload so as not to break the pace of the regular commentary schedule.
• Bizarro Episode: Michael Jackson's Moonwalker. Lampshaded by Ted in the opening.
  Ted: John, what were you drinking?
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Clement and Gareth enjoy noticeable popularity over the other guest commentators.
  • The Mario Party videos. They provided a lot of laughs and many fans requested them to do more playthroughs of them.
    • A lot of people also seem to like the longer videos, like lists, retrospectives, and impressions. They ARE nice to have going in the background while working on something or playing a game on mute. The impressions videos in particular seem to make people forget that videos take time to record and render.
  • Out of the guest commentators, Nathan, Masae, and Tom have all been very popular. This may be due to them naturally fitting in with the chemistry of the group (tone, style, etc.)
    • Special note goes to Masae, especially after their The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess commentary, where her enthusiasm and banter with the crew earned a lot of fans. After the playthrough, comments have requested she do more with the group.
  • Qatherine, after she recorded the footage and basically chaired the commentary on Spyro 2.
• Fan Nickname: Because of the Pokemon Crystal commentary, everybody refers to "SonicandShadowfan15" as "The Girl".
• Fridge Logic: Lampshaded in the Pokémon Crystal commentary as they got confused why the people of Lavender Town dig up Pokémon graves in the Pokémon Tower and turned said tower into a radio tower when they clearly had trouble in the town Ghost Pokémon because of disturbing the graves.
• Growing the Beard:
  • The Resident Evil 4 commentary, the humor becomes more consistent, the group ends up bouncing off of each other much easier than before along with the introduction of Ted as the unofficial fourth member of the group, this commentary marked the point where the group finally got a grasp on what they were doing.
  • The Sonic 06 commentary was also a growing the beard moment. It was the first commentary that had Clement, one of their most popular guest commentators. It was also one of their funniest due to them riffing on an infamously bad game from a franchise they love.
  • Amanda's commentary in their playthrough of Sailor Moon R was seen as a significant improvement. She's largely quieter than she used to be, her chipper personality is a nice contrast to the guys' deadpan remarks, and her enthusiasm for things she's a fangirl of give her a Genki Girl appeal. While she still has some quirks to iron out, her reception is much better with several comments expressing a desire to see her more often.
• He Panned It, Now He Sucks!:
  • Ryan has gotten flak for his hatred of The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword; even its detractors believe that he bashes it too much.
  • Ryan again with Gen 3. It's not that he outright bashes it so much as that he feels the need to repeatedly say that he doesn't know about its Pokémon nor considers them worth learning about. Johnny actually has a similar attitude toward Gen 3, but gets off with relatively little hate for it because he's not saying "Gen 3, don't care" every time he sees one of its Pokémon. Ted's apathy toward Gen 3 has also netted him some ire, but not nearly to the extent of Gen 4. Gen 5 seems to be the first generation since Gen 2 all 3 that still care have completely embraced, particularly Black and White 2.
  • Ted in particular tends to get this more than the others, whether it be Gen 4, The first Legend of Zelda, the Mother series, or Pikmin 2, most of this comes from the fact that early on, he was more than willing to insult those that were fans of said games. Come the actual Platinum commentary, his nitpicking is viewed by many as annoyingly excessive, though his criticisms are delivered much more calmly than before and he acknowledges in the first part that he'd been an asshole about it.
    • Many viewers were displeased with the general tone of the Platinum commentary (aside from Ted, Ryan is ambivalent and Lewis had no prior experience) and lamented that Johnny was not around to balance it out.
  • Interesting, an aversion of this trope with Pokémon has somewhat helped Amanda's popularity, with her usually being the only commentator in Pokémon videos without a bias toward any generation, such as Ted's blind nostalgia for II and hatred of IV, or Ryan's indifference that still somehow causes him to compulsively bash them with III. In fact, Amanda has almost no bias to speak of.
  • Lewis ended up receiving a lot of flack when he criticized the graphics of Dragon Ball Fighter Z'
• Ho Yay:
  • Invoked in Kirby's Return to Dream Land.
    Ted: Get off of him so I can kiss you!
  • Invoked yet again in Sonic Boom with Johnny and Ted making jokes towards a 'BrainScratch Porno'
• Love to Hate: Ted's behavior has earned him much mocking (some merely joking, others actually spiteful) from several viewers, as well as Gareth and the mysterious entity called Fake Ted.
• Memetic Badass:
  • Join the Church of Captain Falcon today!
  • That fucking boat from Pokémon 2000: The Movie.
• Moe: Amanda. A cute Genki Girl with a tendency to be shy, comes off as Adorkable, and The Woobie as she takes fan criticism personally and seems to have trouble with social cues.
• Most Wonderful Sound: Pretty much any time Johnny laughs. Simply put, that man's laughter is very contagious.
• Never Live It Down: Pretty much every member has one. Here's a list:
  • Ryan: The Sonic 3 & Knuckles playthrough, and dying to Toad Man.
    • Though Ryan's editing skills have gotten better, the internet will never forget Parts 7 and 8 of the Mega Man 3 playthrough.
  • Johnny: IT'S STORM EAGLE!^note Ryan is completely dumbfounded by Johnny failing to defeat Storm Eagle easily in his Mega Man X playthrough, and thus, constantly references it.
  • Ted: The Zelda play through. Oh so much.
  • Lewis: He attempted to fight Brock using a Kakuna's Poison Sting rather than Level Grinding Mankey and spamming Low Kick.
  • All of them: Kirby's Return to Dream Land World 6-2... while it IS That One Level the guys end up spending a part and a half having to do the level over and over again.
    Ryan: We're NEVER playing that level again!
• Scrappy Mechanic: The Curse in Paper Mario is this to Ted, especially shown in the playthrough since it ends up doing the worst possible things at the worst possible times, the worst being in the battle with the Superboss in part 36 in which it ups his attack on the turn he's CHARGING HIS ATTACK.
  Ted (multiple times): FUCK YOU, CURSE!
• Seasonal Rot: Commentaries that don't have Johnny in them tend to be this for many viewers.
• Squick: Gareth's reaction to a joke about There Are No Girls on the Internet is this, however it can be seen as hypocritical as this is from the guy who claimed that Eggman powers his robots with semen (see the Hellfire Commentaries Funny Moments page for more information on that).
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The group's commentary of Dragon Ball Fighter Z' only covered the first storyline, which is universally agreed to be the weakest one in the game, a lot of people lamenting the fact that they decided to skip out on the villain and android storylines.
• The Woobie: Amanda, a nice, energetic commentator who is often hounded by the viewers for some forced attempts at humor to the point that some will leave the video the second they hear her voice. It's only become even worse in recent livestreams, where it's clear just how deeply Amanda has been affected by all the criticism. She's been trying desperately to improve her commentary style, though some would a little too desperately.

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