Follow TV Tropes

Following

YMMV / Gaia Online

Go To

YMMV Tropes:

    open/close all folders 

    General Tropes 
  • Accidental Innuendo The store Sam's Body and Parts, anyone?
    • Let's not forget "Ruby's Rack", which Ruby lampshades sometimes by saying "The store is named after my clothing racks, smartass."
  • Broken Base
  • Fanon: Flynn and Cordell are apparently widely believed to be gay. Word of God disapproves with regards to Cordell.
  • Memetic Mutation - Clementine. For some background, she was a user who fell for a scam. Her mother more-or-less told a journalist, who wrote of her exploit, and got her stuff back. GD laughed at her. Why? She fell for the most simple scam - ones asking for your password, which the website advises against nearly every page.
    • "Dancey Dancey". Ian and Rufus dance together so much that they won the dancing contest at the '08 prom, much to Gambino's frustration— he'd been planning to hook up with the winning lady, and was embarrassed at having been outdone by a cat.
    • "Twinkie Brows" stemmed from a fanart of Gino in which somebody commented that his Big Ol' Eyebrows look like twinkies.
    • "Hay ur not a bishie", a line spoken by the fourth-wall-breaking yaoi fangirl upon discovering that Cordell is, in fact, female.
    • Cresento landed on it.
    • Although it's past its prime and considered a Discredited Meme, one memorable thread from 2005 asked "How do you get giftrape?" Of course, it was a simple typo and the original poster had meant gift wrap, but that didn't stop the forum posters from running with it due to the unintentional hilarity.
    • Gaia is also the birthplace of the Drama Llama meme, which managed to escape the site and found widespread use throughout the rest of the English-speaking internet.
  • Moe: Kanoko, Rina, Peyo, Rufus, Diedrich (not anymore), Timmy (as a child).
    • More recently, Vanessa and Edmund's baby daughter, Violet, who is adorable.
  • The Scrappy: A lot of characters, depending on your point of view. Sasha's too dumb. Kanoko's too successful. Rina's too hyper. Louie's too emo. Devin's too gay. Timmy's too annoying. And Julie's a living advertisement for MTV.
    • The Orion siblings (Saiph, Hatsya, Rigel and Mintaka) have been taking a lot of heat recently for marking the introduction of the inventory sparkles and animated items, which have been pretty harshly opposed, as well as putting Flynn on a bus to space.
      • The sparkles thing is even harsher when you consider that Gaians get the option to turn the damned thing off if they want to.
    • Wild Things is a Scrappy in Monthly Collectible form.
    • Diedrich is quickly becoming the reason why everyone hates the yearly Easter events.
    • Flynn's Scrappydom has become a Cyclic Trope. Before, users were annoyed by her popping up with birthday reminders and the like, but the aforementioned putting her on a bus made even haters upset, and her subsequent return as a Space Pirate made people excited... but then came the economy-destroying Flynn's Booty/Chest items, and now a significant portion of Gaia wants her gone all over again.
      • Her scrappydom has gotten so vicious that they have to lock her profile out of public view.
    • Animal Avatars. While the userbase is divided in their inclusion, those who hated it has reasons:
      • Animal items has their own items- they are not compatible with regular items.
      • Nothing is stopping on you getting an animal item, whether you are using one or not. This can happen with Random Item Generators. Got an item you really want? Too bad, it's the animal variant.
      • Different bases/skins costs money, way more than regular avatar skins.
  • Scrappy Mechanic: The in-site dream avatar builder. They deliberately take it down for several days whenever they plan on releasing new gear, so to "avoid spoilers" (as opposed to, you know, setting the builder to not show unreleased content), meaning it's been offline significantly longer than it's been online in the time it's existed, but in the extremely rare pockets of time where it is available, it's a user-unfriendly mess. Occasionally it comes online for "tests", which seems to mean everyone piles on it for an hour or two until the thing crashes. Adding insult to injury is that this mechanic was only added sometime after Gaia took down a widely-beloved unofficial dream avatar builder on outright hypocritical reasons. To add insult to injury, to this day, official FAQs on the website still link to tektek, the site that hosted this builder.
    • It's not said why this is but, when the currency was changed from gold to platinum, the amount of gold a user had didn't translate into the platinum (i.e, if a user had about 1,000 gold, they'd have about 200-600 platinum). Likewise, zOMG! still displays the currency of being and the monsters dropping gold.
  • They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Pretty much every time a new feature comes out or something is changed. Eventually, most get used to the changes... until a new one is made. Vicious cycle, no?
    • Every update, no matter how small or grand, will often be met by thousands of angry users chanting They Changed It, Now It Sucks!. When the developers initiated a 2% tax in the market place, it was pretty bloody for a while.
    • There's the fact that, "due to inflation", they changed the site currency from gold to platinum. What doesn't help is that the amount of gold didn't transfer, leaving many previously "rich" Gaians poor. Unsurprisingly, no one was pleased

    Gaia Events 
  • Good Bad Bug: For a while, sacrificing a teammate on the evil altar in Frontier Skies didn't actually kill your teammate, but did confer huge bonuses to health, food, and speed. Teammates that actually were dead periodically turned up as the subject of random events anyway.

    Gaia Forums 
Not yet

    Gaia Games 
  • Good Bad Bugs: It's possible to use the new Pathfinder function in Towns 2.0 to glitch into areas you're not supposed to get into, like, say, the side of a building. It's also possible to make yourself explode or be struck by lightning by deliberately triggering the spam filter, although only other people will see it happen.

    Gaia Items 
  • Fridge Horror: Keiko's Cake is a frilly item about baking and cakes, but the final pose is an "I Am" pose, wherein the avatar turns into a cake. When you sit down, that cake is on a dessert tray with a slice taken out of it.
  • Good Bad Bugs: A few item combinations have had some... unexpected poses. Wearing two specific item poses from both Rosamund's Revenge and Shadowlegend will, for instance, leave anyone with an entirely bare chest — even users with female avis. The devs noticed this, but evidently decided to leave it in because the few users who could afford to make such a combination would have been in an uproar if it were patched.
  • Les Yay: Rapid EI Sainte Ciel, tells the story of a nun and a princess. Dr. Singh's reaction to the debut of Sainte Ciel was... interesting.
    • Rina asked Nicolae if he was selling Alruna's Rose during the zOMG intro comic, specifically mentioning wanting "a sexy succubus", and then supported Sentinel's Infernal Nation during Halloween 2009. Think about it.
  • Nightmare Fuel: The King Cheep poses of the Cheepz items. Gahhhhh...
  • What Do You Mean, It's Not Symbolic?: A monthly collectible was released that had a back-mounted cross item and a floor pentagram item. Conservative players squirmed.
    • And another was themed on the Four Horsemen, though there was less squirming about that.
      • Or for the Holy Gauntlets...

    Gaia Manga / Mini comics 

    Gaia NPCs  
  • Badass Decay:
    • Louie, and Johnny Gambino most notably.
    • Also Louie's sisters.
    • Gino Gambino. He went from being a masked hero (The Masque) to a Butt-Monkey after he was free from his father's genetic influence. He's slowly getting better, though.
  • Creator's Pet: Diedrich. A lot of users find him really annoying, and it doesn't help that Gaia seems to think he needs stuffed into every other event. It doesn't help that Diedrich is occasionally scripted to post trivia in threads at random, much to the despair of many a roleplayer and vendor. Oh, and the spamming often ends up bumping threads with serious TOS violations because the bot has no means of discretion. Oops.
  • Die for Our Ship: Fans of Ian or Gino tend not to be fond of Sasha. She seems to have lost all her romantic connections with both since then, but the stigma remains.
  • Draco in Leather Pants: Zhivago.
  • Ensemble Dark Horse: Every so often, a CI character will gain widespread fan adoration. Loyal (from the Cirque du Gothique) and Principal Mills (from the Love Charm) are notable examples of this.
  • Hollywood Homely: Timmy as an adult, as a Take That! to everyone who expected him to be a conventional Bishounen.
  • Launcher of a Thousand Ships: Everybody. NPC Shipping discussions tend to turn into Crack Ship contests very quickly, and people who like mainstream pairings get openly bashed for not being "creative".
  • Memetic Badass: Carl, and the moth from Frontier Skies after it was established that the millions of deaths by chasing after moths and falling off airships were all caused by the same moth.
  • Portmanteau Couple Name: Sentiseer, which is the coupling of The Sentinel and The Overseer.
  • Shipping: Too many to name, even branching down to items. To a certain extent, this has been fueled by the storyline sometimes.
    • Ship Sinking: Ian, Louie, and Gino were all revealed to be siblings. Ivan and Meredith turned out to be cousins. Jaws turned down the Overseer's human form. Grand prize goes to Don Kuro, who broke the fourth wall to set the books straight on him and Devin.
      Don Kuro: *Aside Glance, indicating doujinshi* This isn't canon.
    • Ship Tease: Oh god where do I even start. The devs and artists are among us, and clearly read the fanthreads.


zOMG!, Gaia's MMORPG contains examples of these YMMV tropes:

    z OMG! 
  • Demonic Spiders: Kokeshi dolls. While they're initially non-aggressive, woe betide if you give them any reason to gang up on you...
    • The pink giftboxes!!! When they fly... you die.
    • Fluffs. In the first two areas, they're harmless little things, but from Zen Gardens on, if you piss off a fluff you usually start regretting it pretty quick. Bonus points go to the Mother Fluff, who sends all the fluffs surrounding her to kill you if you bother her.
    • Bladed Vases and Tiny Witch Doctors. The former because it's really easy to find yourself with four or five of them ganging up on you (but a Fire Rain attack charged with full rage will wipe most of them out); and the latter because it keeps paralyzing you so, so many times each time you try to attack. And if you don't have ANY kind of ranged attack...
  • Good Bad Bugs: You used to be able to buff NPCs. Cue people spamming speed buffs on the Pizza Delivery Guy just to see how fast they could make him run.
  • Low-Tier Letdown: Iron Will was considered weak until the Willpower mechanic was properly implemented. Adrenaline and Knife Sharpen were disregarded as weak after they became debuffs. And the number-crunchers on the forums all despise Diagnose as a heal for its low efficiency and high aggro, though other players like it for its ease of use.
  • Memetic Badass: Landshark. In-game he's been pretty heavily nerfed.
  • Memetic Molester: Marshall.
  • Memetic Mutation: GIFTRAPE!
    • "DEFIB PLZ DEFIB PLZ DEFIB PLZ" and its cousin "HELP HELP HELP".
    • "CREW ME PLZ"
    • Because the servers virtually never get cycled for maintenance, and because they take far more abuse than they should, server lag is a problem. It's often so bad that someone will almost always cry out "THE LAG MONSTER X!" in Shout after a really bad lag spike. The most popular phrases to insert are "demands a human sacrifice" and any variation on "is eating the server".
  • Nightmare Fuel: When Gaia first released videos of the Kokeshi Doll animations, many a viewer nearly wet their pants.
    • The flying gift boxes at Bass'ken Lake. Little cute pink boxes with tiny wings, but get their attention and suddenly they have More Teeth than the Osmond Family , giggle dementedly, and cry "FILL THE BOX!" over and over again. And they hunt in packs.
  • That One Boss: There have been dozens of threads made to complain about Kat's Kokeshi Doll. Even after it was nerfed.
  • Paranoia Fuel: The Flying Giftboxes, as the events with those are random and, even worse, they hunt in packs.
  • Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Debuffs turn out to be really handy against vampires and werewolves in Deadman's Shadow, so Knife and Adrenaline are now important for every DMS crew. Diagnose's aggro-drawing properties are likewise utilized by tanking builds to distract supernatural nasties for other players to defeat.

Top