YMMV / Civvie 11

• Aluminum Christmas Trees: "Hellraiser - The Infernal Cartridge" begins with a lengthy preamble where Civvie explains that Color Dreams (the original form of Wisdom Tree, creators of Bible Adventures) somehow got their hands on both the license to Hellraiser and an "improved" version of the Wolfenstein 3-D engine, and then somehow created a supercharged custom cartridge that would allow them to run said engine on the NES. Given that the entire pretext of the video is that the game Civvie is playing isn't real (being created for an April Fools joke), it's easy to think that he made the whole thing up as part of the joke. However, nearly everything he claims about the game's history is, in fact, true.
• Crosses the Line Twice: Civvie launches off his review of TNT: Evilution's Ballistyx by immediately dropping "you guys ever pump-and-dump at a family reunion?", right off the bat. Granted, he then qualifies that it isn't "[his] own family reunion, obviously, but somebody else's", but that doesn't really erase the initial shock. Every word afterwards only digs the hole further.
  Civvie: I call this Goldilocksing.
• Fandom Rivalry: A minor one between fans of Civvie and Gmanlives, due to both being prominent reviewers of “boomer shooter” games with contrasting styles (with Gmanlives having more straightforward reviews versus Civvie’s comedic tone) and tastes (for instance, Gmanlives has frequently praised Brutal Doom and other mods by Sgt. Mark IV while Civvie has expressed disdain for the mod), as well as Civvie making a light jab at Gmanlives for praising Blood: Fresh Supply in its Obvious Beta state. That said, there is also a significant overlap between the two fanbases. The two also seem to be on opposite ends of the political spectrum, with Civvie leaning left and Gmanlives leaning right (although both are still relatively centrist and an apples-to-apples comparison is pointless given that Gmanlives is Australian and not American), but to their credit neither makes their politics a core aspect of their videos.
• Friendly Fandoms: With Ross Scott, due to their similar review style and focus on old PC games and first-person shooters. Ross even makes a cameo in Civvie's Half-Life video.
• Genius Bonus: Katie's first appearance begins with her saying "Hello, world!" Creating a program that produces text output that reads "Hello, world!" is often used as the first exercise when learning a programming language.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • In some older episodes (dating back to 2017, 2018 and 2019), Civvie sometimes makes mention of a plague going on outside and him being under quarantine while being incarcerated. With the COVID-19 crisis going on and people having to stay in their homes for quarantine due to virus, some of the things Civvie says are rather prophetic.
  • Civvie's mistaken assumption in his review of Shadow Warrior (1997) that John Galt, the voice of Lo Wang, had died (which he corrected in the video description) became much more uncomfortable to hear when Galt actually passed away in January of 2022.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • During Pro Blood, Civvie makes a joke about how he was pissed that Noah Antwiler was making more money on Patreon then he was. Cut to the present and Civvie's patreon earnings have surpassed Noah's, although the reasons for this cross over with Harsher in Hindsight
  • Civvie finishes his video on Clive Barker's Undying with "Oh Jon St. John, where will you turn up next?" The video was uploaded one day after Postal 4: No Regerts entered early access, which features St. John voicing the Postal Dude.
  • At one point in his Dark Forces review, Civvie wonders if The Rise of Skywalker will involve time travel due to Avengers: Endgame using such a plot point. While Episode 9 itself didn't, The LEGO Star Wars Holiday Special sure did.
  • During the Half-Life: Opposing Force/Blue Shift combined video, Civvie mentions offhandedly that he won't be playing Decay "because it's coop and Civvie doesn't have friends". That Trav Guy must not count, since Civvie ended up playing Decay through Sven Co-op in Trav's video about Half Life Decay.
  • Civvie describes the shotgun in Soldier of Fortune as having "a firing sound which rivals whatever sound they're gonna be using for the bomb in Oppenheimer." Which is amusing after the movie came out as it chose to depict the detonation in complete eerie silence.
• Jerkass Woobie: Civvie himself. He is trapped in a facility where human rights are practically non-existent, where he's tortured in very unpleasant ways. He is stripped of his name and referred to only by either CV-11, or the nickname Civvie. At the same time comments made by him indicate that he is no saint and has spent time in prison even before his current predicament, which in combination with his abrasive attitude doesn't paint a pleasant picture of the man. But even he doesn't deserve what he's going through now.
• Memetic Badass: Civvie sees "the benevolent hyper-intelligent architect of the post-singularity simulation we all live in", "super genius alien in human suit", "time travelling and interdimensional overgenius and actual rocket scientist" (and many other names) John Carmack, as a one of the super genius variety, even considering some of his exploits (like creating a thermite mixture to steal computers when he was 14) as a foretaste of what he's really capable of.
  Civvie: There is a much darker timeline where he kills us all.
• Memetic Loser: The Cyberdemon of all characters becomes one of these on the show, due to the "Humiliating the Cyberdemon" Running Gag, where Civvie finds new and humiliating ways to defeat the poor thing (such as cheesing it with the Soul Cube, or exploiting the BFG and Weapon Wheel).
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Commenters reminding Civvie of his promise to review Duke Nukem Forever at 100k subscribers, a milestone eventually reached - as a result, a video on the game was thus made.
  • "Pro [FPS game released in the 90s] when, Civvie?" is a recurring joke amongst the fans, and eventually even AX3, H4MMER and later Katie get in on it. It reached the point where the pinned tweet on Civvie’s Twitter page is currently a screenshot of him muting the words “Pro” and “when Civvie”.
  • Fucking RAW! ^ExplanationA clip of Gordon Ramsay plays whenever Civvie is confronted with an undercooked, unfinished, buggy game with Special Effects Failures.
  • NICE FUCKING MODEL! *honk-honk* ^ExplanationFirst used in the video on Bad Day: LA, where he tries to put his dislike of the poorly-modeled characters in a manner 'this game in particular would jive with'.
  • "A lot of these areas are copied and pasted, whole hallways, rooms, so it gets a little confusing." ^ExplanationFirst used in the video on Kreed, where Civvie 11 uses this phrase multiple times to describe the extremely repetitive level design.
  • "Quit winning!" ^ExplanationA line from Kreed. It was obviously a typo of "Quit whining" that the voice actor read verbatim. As the game, the ur-example of Slavjank continued to batter Civvie senseless, the line repeatedly played to taunt him, obviously engaging in Fun with Homophones. Since then in any FPS game made in an Eastern Bloc nation, expect this line to make a comeback.
  • As referenced in the entry above: "Slavjank", a term Civvie uses for janky games from Eastern Europe, in which said janky games often tend to have their own unique brand of oddness that usually stems from the developer's clear inexperience with game design, a lack of resources, poorly translated and poorly spoken English and references to Eastern European culture.
  • Any pistol-start playthrough of Doom II: The Plutonia Experiment on Ultra-Violence is bound to have comments referencing Civvie's remark about how it allows you to pick up girls at Quakecon.
• Mis-blamed: He takes potshots at John Romero in the Quake video over the intermission text, but Lovecraft fanboy Sandy Peterson usually handled the "prose" side of things for id Software. He also criticizes Romero for the level names, but many of those were Peterson too.^note  In an interview, Romero recounted a time he asked Peterson for a cool Dungeons & Dragons-sounding title, and Peterson immediately replied "Deathkings of the Dark Citadel".
• Spiritual Successor: Civvie is often compared to Noah Antwiller of The Spoony Experiment by fans who grew bored of Noah's apatheic slump in the mid-2010s, with his channel usually being compared to Noah's content from his prime for people looking for similar material.
• Unpopular Popular Character: Civvie absolutely detests Cancer Mouse. Often lamenting the adorable radioactive rodent is unkillable, while simultaneously taking years off his life just by his lethal presence alone, and that's before he starts his alt-right rantings. The fandom surprisingly love the pestilent mouse.