YMMV / Channel Awesome

• Actor Shipping: Doug/Lindsay was pretty popular, as like a Lighter and Softer pairing to Critic/Chick.
• Arc Fatigue: The Psychotic Love Triangle between Chick, Todd and Lupa went on for a long time, finally getting resolved in To Boldly Flee. By the end, RL Todd, Lindsay and Alison had all expressed wishes for it to be over, feeling like it had strayed into creepy territory instead of just Black Comedy.
• Archive Panic: Each critic has multiple hours of content, not including crossovers. Then you get to their cameos, other critic's works, vlogs, the anniversaries... if you're trying to catch up, you have our condolences. The plus side is that you can generally hop around if you get bored of one critic.
• Bizarro Episode:
  • The Cool World review with Linkara and MarzGurl, since the movie required it...
  • The Björk Show. There's a genie, and jump cut teleportation, and a rotting bologna sandwich?
  • All the Warrior reviews by Linkara and Spoony, also because the source material is so weird.
• Broken Base:
  • Do you love the lack of fourth wall, with them reading fanfic (often calling it hot), giving fanservice based on Fetish Fuel pages and seeing constantly what people write about them on this very site, or are you freaked out by it like some of them are?
  • Some fans are annoyed at the sheer number of critics who review movies or anime, saying that TGWTG should hire critics who review books or television. Others argue that each critic brings funny enough jokes/ a different enough opinion to make it work.
  • A lot of producers (along with a lot of fans) were angry about their patreons/kickstarters/indiegogos ^note and with most promising no more mid-rolls, it can be assumed they just need the support and the money not being allowed to be advertised on the site, especially since the site itself has an indiegogo with not much to show for it. Other fans have dismissed the complaints with essentially "you don't work for the site so you should be on your own" or "you just want special treatment".
  • As mentioned in both "Ignition Point" and "Jake The Dog", the Adventure Time vlogs have created a split between those who just want Doug/Jason/Jori (usually they complain about Jason or Jori being there in the first place) to shut up about personal stuff and talk about the episode in detail, and those who don't care so much about the reviews and just watch to see Jason/Jori be cute/treat Doug kindly or see what TMI Doug will spout this time.
  • Doug with Jason/Jori vs Doug with Rob. There's no doubt that the Laws treat him nicer, call him out when he's being a dick, and Doug is more open about his beliefs with them. But a substantial amount of people are uncomfortable with that, and for numerous reasons they would go as far as to say they like Rob better than Doug, so enjoy the vlogs with him more.
  • The decision to move to a completely new website instead of finally getting that damn site update. Some are fine with it and like the new site (Arguing that the drop down menus are a lot more easy to function), while some think it looks worse than the old place (Due to an over-abundance of white) or feel that the site advertises Critic/Doug above the others with the cartoons of characters from his shows instead of a team shot or just a site logo. Ask That Guy fans are particularly irked, as the only video announcement of the site changing was in his finale and he died just to supposedly change the focus from Doug (That Guy With The Glasses) to everyone else (Channel Awesome) but as many people have stated including former producers, the banner is majority characters from Critic, which should tell you what show the company cares about.
• Character Perception Evolution: Melvin is still not exactly liked, but he was the start of Doug wearing eyeliner just for the sake of it and more importantly the start of him putting more drama into his work, a talent he would definitely fine tune over the years. So he is at least appreciated for that.
• Crosses the Line Twice:
  • "Spooning With Spoony". Which was tame compared to "Spooning with Spoony 2".
  • The Solid Snake Video Game Confessions may just be the best example. A five-year-old Snake witnessing his parents' murder as he hides under a box: horrifying. The killer proceeding to do a tap dance on their bodies, put on a puppet show, and so on: bloody hilarious.
  • LordKaT. Oh God, his non Until We Win stuff is some of the most foul and hilarious stuff out there.
    "I wonder if that Asian boys ass is still tight."
    (after a review ends) "Just in time for recess."
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • 8-Bit Mickey, thanks to his appearance in the Brawl.
  • Bhargav Dronamraju as Ma-Ti, who first appeared as a cutaway joke in the Critic's review of Captain Planet, and has since become a recurring character in his videos, and elsewhere.
  • Guru Larry has gotten this in light of the controversies surrounding Channel Awesome in April of 2018, mainly because he admitted that he's only sticking around out of spite for the site forgetting his videos for so many years, and to say he was the last remaining contributor before it all burned down.
• Estrogen Brigade: Jason likes to joke that he's the fanservice in the vlogs instead of Doug because there's more gifs of him shaking his ass or showing his crotch. A lot of women actually do like him because they think he's adorkable, a nice husband and dad, more healthy looking than Doug, defends good female characters and does the best job of keeping Doug in check. Plus there's nobody else that Doug has lampshaded Ho Yay with anymore.
• Fandom Rivalry: While a lot of people enjoy Doug being on Awesome Comics because he gets on well with all of them and everyone shares their opinions in a nice way, some complain on the comments that they'd rather he just be with Rob.
• Fanfic Fuel: In the To Boldly Flee Making Of extra, everyone talked about what they would like the next anniversary to be. While most people wanted the usual, like a musical or a murder mystery, Doug was surprisingly morbid and said he had an idea for the TGWTG universe to really be hell. But as there's no budget for that kind of story, the fanfic writers took it and ran with it.
• Gratuitous Special Effects: Many reviewers use special effects such as when The Nostalgia Critic had a laser shootout with The Angry Video Game Nerd. The effects add quirky, funny elements to the videos but would not normally be expected in movie reviews.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • The jokes on Transmission Awesome about Aussie wanting to fire other people (especially Sean) turn into this considering what happened to him.
  • In Future's End, Smarty is one of the Bad Future people, saying CA met its final end in 2019. He was one of the producers who left in 2015.
    • Just the video claiming that Channel Awesome ended in 2019, in light of the mass exodus of talent and #ChangeTheChannel revealing how much mistreatment they went through in Spring 2018, to the point where only Doug Walker, Brad Jones and Guru Larry (who stayed out of spite) remained.
  • The BarFiesta intro, made years before the first mass exodus of content producers from the site in January 2015 due to heavy grievances with site CEO Mike Michaud, had Michaud himself as a shadowy dark figure kidnapping Rob and dismissing Doug as a performer monkey.
  • In 2012, Doug did an interview where he joked he had a teabagging incident with Justin that went badly wrong, which reads extremely poorly after Justin's grooming and assault allegations came into light.
  • In “Nostalgia For The Nostalgia Critic”, released for free in February 2015 but filmed in late 2012 for a Critic tribute, there's a couple of awkward moments, like when Doug says this would be the last DVD thing he ever wanted to do with Critic, that he made bad financial choices when he was younger (so didn't want people knowing he was a Basement-Dweller) or going between fatigue from working or feeling guilt for sleeping when he could have been working.
  • The tribute videos to JewWario and anything related to him become harder to watch after allegations came out four years later that he had groomed and sexually assaulted young girls. Plus in "Rejected Spooning with Spoony Ideas", Holly fires Justin for sexual harassment, less than a year before that happened for real.
• He Panned It, Now He Sucks!:
  • Bennett seems to have attracted a bit of the old nerdrage for insulting Doctor Who.
  • Neither Doug/Jason/Jori's Adventure Time vlogs of “A Glitch Is A Glitch” and “Lemonhope” were popular, as they were rude to the creator in the first one, and missed the realistic point of the second. For Jason alone, he doesn't like a lot of mainstream movies (especially Disney) and gets a lot of hate for it, sometimes even from Doug when he forgets his anti Opinion Myopia stance for a moment.
  • Doug and Rob's generally negative review of Sonic the Hedgehog (2020) was met with some criticism from viewers who enjoyed the film, mainly due to them calling it overly-clichéd and comparable to a "bad 90's film".
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • In the "Sibling Rivalry" review of Frozen (2013), Rob describes the film as "X-Men in Epcot's Norway". A Frozen ride, titled Frozen Ever After, would eventually open at Epcot's Norway pavilion in 2016.
  • In the Paranormal Activity III review, Doug very jokingly calls the Women Are Wiser trope offensive to men and giggle-wonders if he's a “meninist”. A few years later in the 2015 Ghostbusters news talk, he brings that up as an actual thing (as the term has replaced MRA it seems) and clearly finds the idea of males being oppressed for being male hilarious.
  • In a fanfic livestream "Day of the Fanfic", Brad gave an affectionate nod to all the BDSM punishment fics Critic had post-Kickassia, teasing that he (Critic) had been a naughty boy. In The Last Angry Geek's 2014 Future's End Bad Future review, Critic is Snob's Sex Slave.
• Ho Yay: So often it needs its own ever-growing page here.
• Idiosyncratic Ship Naming: The Head OT3 (Todd in the Shadows/Paw Dugan/Pushing Up Roses), so named because of the Head review the three did together.
• It's Popular, Now It Sucks!: There are some people who don't watch the Critic, Linkara or Spoony for the sole reason of their "big three" Fan Nickname.
• Just Here for Godzilla: Post-To Boldly Flee, the Vocal Minority of Critic fandom took this to mean-spirited levels, threatening to leave the site after the movie but instead hanging around to not only make Doug's life hard, but to fill the other producer comment sections with hate for not being Critic. Linkara brought Douchey out in one of his fuck-ups to address this, Kyle was polite about it◊, and if you watch Doug's con interviews in that time period, you can see him getting progressively snappier when the issue is brought up.
• Memetic Badass: Santa Christ! He fights monsters for fun and hangs out with Mr. T and if you are able to kill him, he will raise again in the third day, in fulfillment of the awesomeness!
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Along with the memes the Critic created, as the site was losing everyone jokes emerged about There Can Be Only One, or how "Archived Shows" is the best remaining contributor.
  • "Oh well, plot hole!" ^ExplanationWhen the "#ChangeTheChannel" movement started, it was noted by Allison Pregler that whenever things like a continuity error within To Boldly Flee was pointed out, Rob would brush it off with those words. It's been used to mock the general ignorance of Channel Awesome's higher ups as a result.
  • "Sorry you feel that way." ^ExplanationAlso became a meme during the "#ChangeTheChannel" debacle, when Channel Awesome's first response to the allegations was to release a short statement which included this line. It became infamous as the most damning early sign that whatever happened, Channel Awesome would probably not own up to any mistakes or offer any sincere apologies to the people involved.
  • "Accusation:___" "Fact:___" ^ExplanationChannel Awesome's response to the allegations was in this format.
  • ♪Critic and The Snob (and Larry)♪ ^ExplanationWith Doug Walker (and his co-stars), Brad Jones, and Guru Larry being the only contributors left on the site, comparisons to a certain episode opening of Pinky and the Brain were made.
  • There's also been a reccuring Bait-and-Switch meme with the Critic randomly shooting a hole through the screen, with the rest of the intro to The Nostalgia Critic continuing to play.
  • The sequence of images of Doug Walker clapping has become prominent in "21st century humor" memes.
  • Slander ^Explanation A popular gif to use in "slander" memes is the usage of the clips from The Wall review, the scenes in the sponsor where Doug is flipping out.
• Misaimed Fandom: The audience at large just doesn't seem to get the intentionally pathetic characters screaming at movies aren't something to emulate. Doug (with the entirety of Demo Reel, the "When Is a Movie Just a Movie" editorial and "The Ice King's Glasses") and Kyle (with videos like Melancholia and Vase de Noces) have gone even further trying to get this into heads, but comments of "yeah this raped my childhood too" (or defensive "you're offending me by trying to Appeal to Worse Problems!" in regards to Doug/Kyle) still prevail. If anything, characters like Spoony, Critic, Chick, Todd, and Jerk would have been in jail, in mental homes or at least have a few restraining orders by now.
• Misblamed: Scarlett, Holly Brown, and especially Lupa were treated like scapegoats for Spoony being let go, until Spoony himself clarified that Lupa did not get him fired.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: Enough to have its own page.
• Portmanteau Couple Name: Despite the rampant amount of shipping in the fandom, there are relatively few of these. A few that do seem to stick, however, are Spoonkara (Spoony / Linkara), Padd (Paw Dugan/Todd in the Shadows) and Topa (Todd in the Shadows/Lupa). Inskara (Dr. Insano / Linkara) is also quite popular.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Film Brain and Phelous are contributors whose first few reviews weren't too well liked, but have long since come into their own.
• Reviews Are the Gospel: Due to a combination of being so well-known, well-liked and the in-character Jerkass Has a Point moments, many reviewers are held up as the gold standard despite the fact they're more meant to be entertainment than serious reviewers. Some of the site's members, such as Doug and Lindsey, have tried to argue against this mindset.
• Seasonal Rot: Quite a few detractors feel that the site generally dropped in quality after 2014- no anniversary celebrations, numerous producers saying controversial things or getting caught in controversies and the site's business management coming out into the forefront (less so than 2015, however) with some insane policies like not allowing for Patreon advertisements for a while. As well as that, the above mentioned new site stirred up more backlash.
• They Copied It, So It Sucks!: Sage drew quite a few negative comments for his "Comic Conventions" feature for being in more or less a copy of Atop the Fourth Wall (futon and all) despite Linkara having suggested it to him.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: The Despicable Me 2 Sibling Rivalry got a bad reception for a few reasons, like Doug in Alter-Ego Acting mode again (as a jerkass no less), Rob being the Butt-Monkey, the set being too dark and Doug's black clothes making him blend in with the background, distracting microphones and the boys being so far away from each other that the sibling closeness felt dropped. Thankfully with the next segment, Thor II, it went back to brotherly-feeling vlogs.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: You'd think that since the Channel Awesome reviewers often review children and family films and entertainment that it'd be appropriate for children. You'd be wrong. Even Linkara (the "tamest" of them all) shows comics featuring gore, sexual innuendo, drug use, and fanservice (though to be fair, he is criticizing these scenes).
  • On an August 2011 edition of his Radio Dead Air Internet radio program, Channel Awesome contributor Nash recounted the story of Pushing Up Roses receiving an angry letter from a parent which admonished her for using "foul language" in her videos because "children watch them". Nash was rather noticeably furious while recounting this, noting that Channel Awesome is not a site for children. The reaction from his stream's chat was similarly astounded and angry, especially because the letter was sent to Roses, who rarely uses profanity in her videos.
  • In a vlog, Doug gets pretty upset with the fact that ten-year-olds come up to him at cons and say they love his stuff, as he thinks they really shouldn't be watching him at such a young age.
• The Woobie:
  • Melvin, Brother of The Joker. Unlike Doug's other woobie characters though, he wasn't OTT enough to be funny as well.
  • Lori Prince. Straight Man, older than Doug's other characters, tormented by the Joker and can do a wonderful pouty face.

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