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YMMV / GoAnimate

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General examples:

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    A-D 
  • Alas, Poor Scrappy: Even those who dislike characters like Caillou and Dora can feel bad for them due to the insane and lethal punishments they often receive.
  • Animation Age Ghetto: An unusual case in that it's mostly kids (rather than adults) believing any show on a network made ostensibly for younger children is a "baby show" and thus deserving of their wrath in the grounded videos. Even shows with large followings such as Cyberchase, Arthur, Bluey, Lu & the Bally Bunch, and Sofia the First are often hated by the fandom, simply by proxy of sharing network space with legitimately disliked shows such as Caillou. This is probably due to the fact many users of the site are actually tween kids who intentionally (and irrationally) hate on shows intended for small children just to look "cool".
  • Badass Decay: A very strange variation of this trope is in play with these videos - a troublemaker can perform any act, commit any crime, assault or even kill any person, all without any hesitation or remorse. But the moment an authority figure confronts the troublemaker and demands an explanation, they immediately surrender and reveal the truth and sit there and take any and all punishments given to them. Very rarely will they strike back against the person and usually doing so will only cause the other to get angrier.
    • Similarly, videos where a character throws a temper tantrum that results in massive damage to either a building or even an entire city. The troublemakers may have grown into giants and have uncontrollable anger. But the moment their parents yell at them, they immediately crumble like paper and shrink back down into their normal selves so they can be punished.
    • This also applies to non-troublemakers; whenever they encounter a troublemaker, they are annoyed and indifferent. However, the moment the troublemaker threatens to do something to them, they lose all composure and say "No" repeatedly, allowing the troublemaker to do what they want to them. This mostly applies to people like GoAnimate users and OCs, but this can also sometimes happen to the parents as well.
  • Bizarro Episode: Most Uolliac videos, particularly if the user who made it otherwise makes typical grounded videos.
  • Catharsis Factor: Some viewers have taken satisfaction in watching the either the parent or teacher characters get either grounded, arrested, executed or killed.
  • Creator's Pet: It's fairly easy to tell when a certain character is particularly favored by the user, usually by being the most frequent grounder or punishment-giver to a trouble-maker, treated as The Ace by all the other characters, being the "yes" character in a "(Something)Yes(Something Else)No" username or always having great things happen to them even if they are a Karma Houdini, exhibit huge amounts of Protagonist-Centered Morality, and/or get hate directed at them by users in the comments. Boris, Rosie, Gina, users' Author Avatars, and many of Macusoper's peers (particularly his dad Diesel Busters) tend to be the most frequent characters to fall under this.
  • Crosses the Line Twice:
  • Designated Hero: Now has its own page.
  • Designated Monkey: It's not hard to find yourself feeling more sorry for Caillou, Dora, and the other kids who get grounded for trivial reasons than their Big, Screwed-Up Families and so-called "friends":
    • Sometimes characters have little to no involvement in ruining someone's day and get grounded for it anyway. For example, in this video, Caillou's family is trying to go see movie that Rosie wants to watch for her birthday (a movie which is established will never be publicly released afterwards). Despite Caillou's various efforts to waste time on the drive there, they arrive at the theater 15 minutes before it starts... only to find out from a woman that the screening had just finished. When Rosie points out that the schedule states a much later time, she rudely blows her off and even calls her an idiot. Boris and Doris then angrily blame Caillou for making them miss their movie and ruining Rosie's birthday, even though (despite trying everything he could to make them miss the movie) he clearly isn't to blame for the change in schedule and not telling them.
    • Then we have the times when characters, usually "baby show" characters, actually help people or right their wrong-doings...and still get grounded anyway, because...well, just because. When the grounded party is Caillou or Dora, one could simply chalk it up to them being baby show characters.
      • An example of this is seen in Boris Fails To Rob The Bank. Caillou overhears his dad planning to rob the bank and decides to stop him by calling the police. Once Boris is arrested and comes out in handcuffs, Caillou mocks him on the way to the police car. The police then decide to arrest him for no reason other than being a baby show character. In fact, not only does he get a far heavier sentence than Boris, but they are forced to share a cell where only Boris has access to the amenities (including a TV!) and he is free to beat his son as much as he likes.
    • Macusoper, particularly in videos by the user D-Future2K17 as mentioned above, where Macusoper's groundings come by way of bad luck more often than from his own wrong-doings, despite everyone and everything including the titles and descriptions of some videos note  suggesting otherwise. Many times, Macusoper just comes off as a big time Woobie who is having his life being made an utter hell by willfully blind adults and his Jerkass friends and father.

    E-G 
  • Ending Fatigue:
    • Behavior Card Day/Dead Meat videos are the most common victims of this, because of the potentially huge cast to be judged one at a time. This is not helped when the teacher always explains each card and what happens when someone gets it which, if paired with a large cast, means these can go on for quite some time. Worse, the teacher will often repeat the same dialogue for every student who gets a card, making it all the more boring to sit through. Sometimes, it can take over 30 minutes to get to the student(s) who got in dead meat.
    • Some Punishment Day videos can become this depending on the amount of punishments. After the troublemaker's initial misdemeanor, up to five or more minutes of the remainder of the video can be dedicated to the parade of punishments they receive in a Punishment Day.
    • In a similar vein, videos that end with a number of characters coming over to the troublemaker's house to introduce themselves and express their disgust with the troublemaker over whatever they did. One at a time. Depending on the amount of characters, scenes like this can take up two-thirds of the video's ending. It's worse when combined with the aforementioned Behavior Card Days and Punishment Days.
    • "Dora Gets Gina Expelled/Grounded BIG TIME", after Dora is grounded with heavy amounts of Sensory Abuse to go along with it, ends with a segment between Gina and her mom that seemingly only exists to hammer in the fact that Gina is flawless and better than Dora.
    • This Shinji Gets Grounded video seems to want to list as many artists or songs that the author could think of, as the ending is nothing more than 5 minutes of Yui Ikarinote  listing off which songs/artists Shinji is no longer allowed to listen to after his Walkman gets taken away. Though given the nature of the Shinji Gets Grounded series, this was likely intentional.
  • Ensemble Dark Horse:
    • Caillou and Dora the Explorer are far and away the most popular subjects of mockery.
    • Eric, a red-haired and bespectacled Comedy World character who is often seen with Latios accompanying him also sees frequent usage across many users' videos. (Usually as either a bystander or as a Troublemaker-of-the-Day.)
    • Latios himself is arguably an example of this trope as well, as he frequently appears with or without Eric in other videos.
    • Warren Cook is actually a rather popular character among those who don't hate him. Many videos where he isn't being grounded see him getting the last laugh or simply being a Recurring Extra gag character defined by his love for making fake VHS openings.
    • Ms. Christina, an African-American teacher most commonly seen wearing a strapless red dress with "Mrs. Claus"-like fluff at the hem and gray boots, is commonly seen as the main teacher in several Comedy World-oriented grounded videos (but most frequently videos featuring Dora as the troublemaker).
  • Esoteric Happy Ending: Numerous videos often wind up being this way, especially when the video ends with the trouble-maker severely injured or dead. For example, the "Gets Executed" videos end with a bratty baby show character or a "bad user" getting executed and ending with everyone celebrating their death. This is supposed to be seen as a good ending considering how much audiences are supposed to hate them, but consider the facts: The characters just brutally murdered a child and are dancing on their grave (which often reads "BIH (Burn in Hell)". Rather than being a happy ending for the "good guys", it comes off as immensely unsettling.
  • Fandom Rivalry:
  • Fan Nickname: Dora's parents were never given official names in the show, so GoAnimate creators made up their own: Elena and Veena are sometimes used as Mami's two nicknames. Miguel is the name typically given to Papi, though Cole is sometimes used as well.
  • Fanon: "Anderson" being the family name of Caillou's family (presumably after Isaac Anderson).
    • Mami and Papi Marquez's first names being Elena or Veena and Miguel or Cole, respectively. Interestingly, the movie Dora and the Lost City of Gold confirms that Dora's parents are indeed named Elena and Cole.
    • Mr. Hinkle's first name being "Cockfucker". Your guess is as good as ours, since it was already established in the Caillou canon that his first name is Paul.
  • Fanon Discontinuity: Strangely, some former GoAnimate users reportedly became upset over the discovery of GoAnimate For Schools (where Comedy World and other favorite themes lived on until they were removed from there) and took to harassing people using that version of the software, apparently refusing to believe that the beloved themes were back after making such as big deal over them being discontinued in the standard software. Now that the themes have been removed from there, it seems that they got the last laugh.
  • Fetish Retardant:
    • "Fetish videos", a series of vore and inflation videos highly looked down in the GoAnimate community, especially for their abuse of circle props.
    • Any and all sex scenes tend to wind up as this, as it's impossible to have the characters actually be naked (only have Nude-Colored Clothes) and most attempts to get around that tend to come off as laughable.

    H-M 
  • Harsher in Hindsight:
    • Infamous "prank" channel DaddyOFive is basically a real-life version of the families in "X Gets Grounded" videos, and not in a good way.
    • This video where Caillou asks for beer and gets grounded by African Vulture can be a bit harder to watch in light of the Caillou Christmas Carol episode where it's revealed that Boris (in African Vulture's canon) acts the way he does because his friend and his cousin died in a drunk driving accident.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight:
    • In the 2014 video "Eric's Dad Discovers The Truth", after the titular character claims that the voices inside of his head keep telling him to do bad things for others, his wife claims that he got the idea from a cheesy movie plot. A year after that video was made, a movie with the exact premise got released to theaters.
    • This video involves Arthur getting in trouble for sounding like the New York Yankees home run siren. In response, David Read grounds him until the Chicago Cubs (who notably never won a World Series for over 100 years when the video was made) win the World Series. A cruel punishment then, now hilarious as the Cubs finally won the World Series the year after the video was uploaded.
    • In The Berenstain Bears story "The Berenstain Bears' Report Card Trouble", Papa Bear shouts some oddly prescient dialogue after finding out about Brother Bear's bad report card:
      "That's right!" roared Papa. "[You are] Grounded! Grounded, grounded, grounded, grounded! There'll be no more TV, no more video games, no more movies, no more skateboarding, no more rollerblading, no more soccer, no more sports of any kind. And furthermore-"
    • This video, where Boris hires Peter Griffin to babysit Caillou, Rosie, and Cody, becomes a lot funnier when over two years after the video was uploaded, an episode of Family Guy would feature a cutaway where Peter is at the park, on the swings, eating unsalted saltine crackers with Boris.
    • Caillou has canonically gotten grounded now, thanks to this episode of the Caillou's New Adventures reboot.
    • Two names commonly given to Dora Marquez's parents are Elena and Cole, respectively. The film Dora and the Lost City of Gold actually makes these names canon.
  • Informed Wrongness: The kids can do literally anything (even do something nice or behave) only for their parents to still ground them for no stated reason whatsoever even when the kids weren't misbehaving or otherwise weren't at fault. There's a perfectly good reason why the Designated Villain section on this page is as big as it is.
    • The "bad guy" in this and other videos by the same user is made out by Caillou and all the other characters to be an unhinged Jerkass who is liable to "go crazy all of the time". However, the "bad guy" is usually shown to mostly be a somewhat ditzy Motor Mouth who spends more time standing in one spot going on long-winded tangents about the bad things he supposedly does (or does not do) than he does actually doing these bad things everybody (including the bad guy himself) claims he does. Caillou also counts in this video, as when the bad guy says he is stupid, Caillou calls him stupid, and he gets expelled and grounded by Boris for it.
  • Inferred Holocaust: The end of the Gina Gets Taken Away mini series may not seem as happy, given that a Child Mage had killed the corrupt social worker that took Gina away from her Dad and the police will likely believe that Gina's Dad may have killed her.
  • Memetic Psychopath:
    • While Canon!Boris is for the most part a good and friendly father, in GoAnimate he's portrayed as a psychotic child abuser who gives extreme punishments for minor things, as you can see from the rest of the tropes on this page.
    • Caillou himself is no better. While in canon he's an occasionally bratty child, in GoAnimate he is willing to physically harm or even kill people just to get his way.
    • In most Scooby-Doo installments, Fred is often portrayed as a stoic, good-natured if occasionally dimwitted leader; in GoAnimate he is a psychotic Control Freak who punishes his "friends" by or anyone who wronged him by giving them concussions.
  • Misaimed Fandom:
  • Misblamed:
    • Alvin Hung is often accused of having a grudge against the fandom and going through drastic measures to stop any access of the former non-business themes. In reality, Vyond's decisions to shift towards a to business demographic is due to the increased usage of drag-and-drop animation for businesses, the decline of Adobe Flash software in place of the new HTML5 system, as well as the fading relevance of the non-business themes.
    • Some characters voices eventually became unavailable to use with the GoAnimate interface, (forcing users to find alternate ways to use them) including "David", the standard voice for Caillou beside "Ivy", and the infamous "Kidaroo" voice (aka the "WHYAYAYAYAYAYOLODAD" voice used when characters are angry). The non-ironic Grounded fanbase took this as another attack against them via Alvin Hung, but the truth is that the licensing on the voices expired and the company simply chose not to renew them.
  • Moral Event Horizon:
  • Multiple Demographic Appeal: Despite being an animation software with colorful characters and child-friendly settings, it isn't really intended for kids, as the site requires users to be 13+ in order to register. Despite this, it's not marketed as an adult/teen-only website, and there are plenty of younger kids who enter a fake birthday to sign up anyway, and they enjoy creating Grounded videos on the site just as much as they like viewing. In addition, it's not hated by adults and teens for being too kid-oriented either, as it caters to mature people as well since it is possible to bypass filters to make the characters swear, and characters can drink wine or wear rather provocative clothing.

    N-R 
  • Never Live It Down: Alvin Hung and the company can distance themselves from the Grounded fandom as much as they like, but that isn't going to keep people from thinking of grounded videos, which has quickly become what the site is best known for.
  • Nightmare Retardant: With a few exceptions, most attempts made to scare people in GoAnimate usually come off as ineffectual, and almost painfully so at that.
  • Older Than They Think: Contrary to popular belief, the business-level subscription plans didn't replace the casual-level subscriptions in 2015, as they were around at least since 2012.
  • Padding:
    • Many "Behavior Card Day"/"[Character] Gets in Dead Meat" videos will have dozens of students receiving behavior cards, before the final one gets in trouble and is punished. There seems to be some kind of contest among the community to create the "longest behaviour card day."
    • This video has a trouble-making Tyrone facing the "Guardians of the Land of Make-Believe" for setting off a nuclear bomb in Romania. About 7 minutes of the 12-and-a-half minute long video is taken up by the 37 characters introducing themselves, briefly expressing their disgust with Tyrone and his actions, and detailing one of his punishments.
      • Even then, the video's main plot only takes up less than 10 minutes, as the final 2 minutes are dedicated to the creator of the video announcing that they're taking a break while they're on vacation as well as pitching an idea for a grounded video to another creator. And by pitch, we mean they explain their desired synopsis and every single detail that they want from the video.
    • This 12-minute long video, where Warren Cook goes to the movie theatres to see Wreck-It Ralph, is an absolutely insane version of this trope. Despite the simple concept, it takes Warren around 11 minutes to actually see the movie, since most of the ten minutes prior features different Super Mario Bros. characters and Vanity Plates lining up to receive their tickets. By the time Warren gets punished, there's barely more than a minute of it left.
    • Most of Roku Kun the Vyonder's videos have a lot of this, being full of redundant dialogue consisting of characters constantly repeating information and pointing out the obvious. Special mention, however, goes to the now-private "Dora burn down Eri Karan's band/Concussion Time By Eri Karan/Arrested", which is padded with said dialogue to where it's almost a butt-numbing 2 hours long (compared to the usual length of between 20 to 40 minutes). To put it into perspective, it takes 20 minutes for Dora's family to make it to the concert, and the actual explosion occurs almost an hour in.
    • Black Bear Goes To Night Detention is filled with this. Scenes often last for way too long, being filled with redundant dialogue that merely re-establishes information the audience already knows, as well as random pauses between dialogue, the longest of which lasting for 42 seconds. In addition, there is a scene where Black Bear does nothing but sleep for 4 minutes and 32 seconds, as well as a scene where the characters do nothing but stand around listening to music for 1 minute and 46 seconds. This adds up to over 7 minutes of filler, taking up over half of the video's 12 minutes and 43 seconds-long runtime.
  • Periphery Demographic:
    • The website was originally intended for people to easily make animations, but it quickly became popular among children to make cartoons about people or characters they dislike getting grounded. Then said cartoons gained their own periphery demographic of older people who find them funny for all the wrong reasons. It's partially for this reason that the GoAnimate team reworked the site into a business-only animation tool.
    • Some of the ironic GoAnimate fans have made their own GoAnimate videos, and got subscribers and fans from the actual GoAnimate community, who didn't realize they're being made fun of.
    • And then it comes back around again with users like NotSmirks, who deconstruct typical GoAnimate videos by taking Grounded Video tropes and cranking the weirdness (and audio levels) up, yet gain followings from the users who make the videos.
  • Put on a Bus: The removal of several commonly-used voices such as Alan, Julie, David, Veena, Grace, Kidaroo, Allison and Bridget (due to expired licensing) caused several characters to be removed from "(character) Gets Grounded" series. This is either through being Killed Offscreen, not appearing in the videos, or by simply remaining speechless in cameos. However, this has since been rectified with the discovery of Oddcast and VoiceForge, the websites that provide the voices for these characters, and even without that solution, some users forego even removing them at all and simply use another voice for the character.
  • Replacement Scrappy: Overtime, the business themes for the program have become this for Comedy World and other popular non-business themes. This is an interesting case as the business themes were already present in the program as early as 2012 (although weren't as regularly used at the time), along with the other themes in a lot of Grounded videos. However, following the removal of the non-business themes in 2016note ...well, suffice it to say that you can probably count the amount of Grounded video makers who don't have a grudge against the business themes on one hand.

    S-V 
  • The Scrappy: Many of the parent characters for the ironic fanbase. Characters like Boris and Dora's parents are known to stretch the boundary of punishment into outright abuse. Even if the troublemaker did do something legitimately bad, it can still be easy to feel sorry for them when their parents put them through another punishment day. And that's ignoring the times they ground their kid for very minor things or sometimes literally nothing at all.
  • Signature Scene: The living room background, where grounded videos usually end so that the parents will ground their kids. Caillou is perhaps the most popular troublemaker, while Boris and Doris (usually the former) are the most well-known punishers.
  • So Bad, It's Good: The limited animation and bizarre subject matter have attracted a rather devoted following who love to watch the videos completely ironically.
  • Strawman Has a Point:
    • Crossing over with an unintentional Black Comedy version of Hypocritical Humor, In this video, Dora mouths off to Miss Christina and calls her psychotic. The video obviously treats this as a terrible thing for Dora to say...but the fact that Dora's teacher tears up the classroom when Dora tells her this and gives her a "detention" that is really just Miss Christina torturing Dora in Dora's parents' room, it kinda makes you wonder how wrong Dora actually is.
      • Two later videos from the same creator basically take a common situation (Dora falling asleep in class and Dora refusing to do her math problems) and instead of Miss Christina gently waking her up and asking if she sleeps well or needs math help, have her command her do her work or be punished, then get in Dora's face by calling her "little girl" in the manner of a fire and brimstone preacher with an animation of her literally spitting angry. Both situations end up with Dora beyond annoyed at the teacher and beginning to toss things around in the classroom, or her waiting until Miss Christina leaves the classroom and steals her wallet, then her getting in trouble. In both cases, Dora only acted up due to being treated unfairly by her teacher and deciding to get revenge.
      • Finally, this video from that same creator casts Dora as frustrated when she only knocks down one pin in the first roll of her first frame ever of ten-pin bowling. Instead of doing the responsible thing of reminding Dora that there are 22 other rolls and 9 frames coming up for her to do well and encouraging her (and that they paid for three games; and for her age why they wouldn't consider bumper bowling to help her learn the game), they catch on her cursing and antagonize her for her slip of the tongue, then whine about her being a 'big baby, spoiled brat, spoiled loser with a bad attitude'. It's no wonder she tosses a bowling ball at an employee in annoyance about her 'bitch-ass family'.
    • While most "(Character) Gets a Job at (Place)" videos show that the central character brings their termination from their jobs upon themselves, due to the characters getting jobs just to lie to customers, some videos show the characters losing their jobs when one or more customers make ridiculous orders (such as ordering two billion cheeseburgers from a McDonald's or asking for a Whopper at a Wendy's) or when one or more of the customers tries to buy something they don't have enough money for; when the central character understandably questions their impossible order or tells them they don't have enough money, the customer gets pissed off and causes a scene, usually leading to the main character telling them to leave the store like anyone would do. (If the customer doesn't leave for a competing establishment in a huff themselves.) When the manager/boss finds out about what happened they side with the customer(s) one hundred percent and fire the main character despite their protests. While the intention is for the viewer to agree that the employed character deserved it and was harming the business, the character's protests that the customers were being unreasonable, that they couldn't possibly fill out the customer's absurd orders, and/or the customer not having enough money for what they were trying to buy aren't entirely invalid.
    • Little Bill in this video. Granted, he was being a bit of a smart-ass, but the car accident caused in the video was entirely his mother's fault thanks to her losing her temper and turning to yell at Little Bill instead of paying attention to the road. Little Bill actually points this out, but the video treats him as being insubordinate and trying to shift the blame for saying this even though, in a way, he is actually right.
    • The detention teacher from Dora Misbehaves In Detention orders Dora to write a report on the American Civil War by the end of the period with a threat of punishment if she doesn't. Although Dora did something to receive detention (and disobeys the teacher's orders in detention later on), she is not wrong to internally complain about the short time and difficulty of such a task, especially considering she doesn't appear to be even junior high-aged in the video. The principal later demanding the same report be done by the end of Dora's five-month suspension seems a lot more reasonable in comparison.
    • Roku Kun the Vyonder's videos often have this in spades, specifically "troublemakers" like Dora, Caillou and Little Bill openly calling their parents "psychopaths" and "abusers". While each of them is a Villain Protagonist who'll go so far as to commit mass murder for a petty reason or For the Evulz, they are nowhere near incorrect to denounce their parents as immoral, given these adults will inflict disturbingly extreme Disproportionate Retribution at the drop of a hat. Not helping their case is that they often respond in a fit of rage to their kids' truthful statements with an act of violence.
  • Squick: Some of the more gross-out situations really do sound and/or look disgusting in spite of the rampant Special Effect Failure:
  • Take That, Scrappy!:
    • The very premise of the "(preschool show character) Gets Grounded" videos are this, as kids who dislike the lead characters for being "baby show" characters are venting their frustrations on them with these videos.
    • It's more common with the ironic fanbase, but there are many videos where the widely disliked parent characters' Karma Houdini Warranty runs out, often via the kid characters calling them out or getting them grounded or arrested. Boris (who is one of, if not the most hated out of all the parent characters) is the most common recipient of these types of videos.
  • They Copied It, So It Sucks!: Many people have noticed that the animation in the Comedy World theme looks suspiciously similar to the early seasons of Family Guy, with some of the same background settings being recycled. As such, people often wrongfully believe that the website was ripping off Family Guy and detest it on that basis alone, even though there are other themes beyond the aformentioned Comedy World. It was debunked by Alvin Hung that they plagiarized Seth MacFarlane's work and he in fact confirmed that he acquired the rights to recycle the style and backgrounds.
  • Too Bleak, Stopped Caring:
    • The "grounded" videos are often drowning in this trope. Samster5677's Dora, Caillou, and Scooby-Doo videos are pretty much the worst with this, and the constant meme references, suicide jokes and constant ear rape don't help either. Same thing with PaperLuigi99's videos, but with the cynicism and violence cranked up to the nth degree.
    • Roku Kun the Vyonder and Harry Strack the Go Animator’s videos could easily one-up both, with the troublemakers often not above causing chaos or straight up mass murder (usually for a petty reason or just For the Evulz), their extremely violent parents constantly treat them horribly on a hair-trigger. The brutal torture and/or capital punishments at the end of every video don't really help one bit.
    • Everything PC Gaming’s Caillou/Cody gets Grounded videos can invoke this feeling given on how they often end with Caillou and Cody getting humiliating punishments and physically assaulted, mutilated (and sometimes even killed) by their adult peers, especially Boris and they often get no consequences for their violent actions. The childish humor and hypocrisy don’t help either.
  • Toy Ship: It's not uncommon for video makers to put Caillou and Dora together.
  • Unintentionally Sympathetic: A problem with the "Grounded" videos as a video maker takes the Disproportionate Retribution of the punishment way too far. Being grounded for a ridiculously long time because you beat up your teacher is more silly, depending on the number. Being assaulted and killed for failing a test, however, is just disturbing and cruel.
    • For a specific example of this involving Caillou, we have this video where Caillou goes downstairs to open his birthday presents... only to be tricked into receiving a Punishment Day from his family. While normally Caillou does something terrible to deserve it, here he does absolutely nothing to warrant such a Punishment Day from his parents and Rosie. Add the fact that this occurs on his birthday, Caillou comes off as a big time woobie; having his birthday ruined and subsequently being bullied by his own family for a petty reason.
    • Another video (which is probably now deleted) had Caillou's family go to Chuck E. Cheese's, where Caillou behaves himself. However, Rosie is scared by Chuck E. and, for no reason, Caillou gets blamed for scaring Rosie. Despite his attempts to explain he was behaving himself, Doris straight up admits that they don't care and he's grounded anyway.
    • In this video, Justin Bieber gets made fun of and beaten up by Mario and Luigi. Because of that, he's expelled on the spot and given a punishment day by his parents, which includes pouring boiling hot water on him and forcing him to consume excrement. We're supposed to root against him, but it's pretty hard not to side with him.
  • Unintentionally Unsympathetic:
    • In general:
      • The parent characters and some of the troublesome kids' friends, teachers, and family members. While this could arguably be in affect for all grounding videos (considering the ridiculously long grounding times), some videos depict these characters as being massive Jerkasses towards the trouble-making kids by going out of their way to make them miserable, excluding them from parties or trips seemingly just to be mean, or even trash-talking them to their face. Oftentimes this is before the trouble-maker has even done anything wrong. Combine this with their treatment of the trouble-makers when they do cause trouble, and you can see why many of the trouble-makers are seen as Unintentionally Sympathetic.
      • Caillou's family and friends (particularly Boris) most frequently fall under this trope, to name a specific example. Any sympathy that is attempted to be given to them often falls flat when previous videos (or even the very same video) show them to regularly physically and verbally abuse Caillou.
      • Videos such as "Stop disliking my videos" or "My feelings right now" are this, mainly because the users who do these events seem to bring it on themselves (especially VGCP/UTTP users). And even if that isn't the case, they still come across as whiny and childish (Especially in "Stop Disliking" videos, which give off Can't Take Criticism vibes). "Destroy" videos, on the other hand, are clearly taking this up a notch too far.
    • Specific examples:
      • To name one example, here, Caillou pranks Rosie by putting a shark tank in her room. When he gets busted by his parents, Caillou seems genuinely remorseful over this and apologizes to Rosie. Rosie, however, refuses the (actually reasonable) apology and Caillou is sent to his room as the others celebrate. The intention is like all the other videos, namely that Caillou has gone beyond their apologies. However, the context of the situation (Caillou actually realized what he did was wrong and clearly tried to apologize, not to mention the shark was only a few feet long and had no way to attack Rosie) makes Rosie come off as an unreasonable Jerkass. (As well as Boris and Doris, by extent, as they side with Rosie without a beat when she shrugs off Caillou's apology.)
      • The Thomas & Friends characters in this video. The basic plot is that one of Dora's friends, a blue train named Azul, challenges Gordon to a race around the Island of Sodor, and two of the rules Sir Topham Hatt gives is that nobody is to cheat or intentionally block the lines. While Dora, Boots, and Azul are rude characters in the video (as intended), so is pretty much every character: During the race, Azul cheats by sending Boots to stand in Gordon's way on the tracks, which they are instantly called out on. Gordon ultimately secures a victory by having James block Azul at a train station, i.e. the exact same thing Azul did. This appears to be an attempt at writing in Laser-Guided Karma, but the morality of this action not being questioned at any point when it happens to Azul's team and the engines and Sir Topham Hatt rubbing Gordon's victory in Dora, Boots, and Azul's faces later (even calling Azul a "fake train" while they're at it), make the Thomas & Friends characters come off as really no better than Dora and her friends here.
  • Unintentional Period Piece: The original "Politics and Celebrity" and "White Houserz" themes that came with the program are clearly dated in 2007. The themes contain several politicians (e.g. Sarah Palin and Mitt Romney for example) from the 2008 and 2012 US elections, respectively, an Expy of Osama bin Laden called "Been Hiding" that came 4 years before his assassination, and the PC Guy and Mac Guy characters from Apple's former Get a Mac advert campaign.
  • Unintentional Uncanny Valley:
    • This is what happens when a user tries to make a character super accurate to their real counterpart, including changing their eyes, often resulting in them looking creepy and unemotional.
    • This also happens whenever people try to make more dynamic poses with characters, such as making them move their head to the other side, or up or down, particularly in the Comedy World theme. That theme simply isn't advanced enough to make said poses look even remotely natural or right, and 100% of the time they just look off.
  • Vindicated by History: The Business Friendly theme, once the most loathed theme, has become popular with users due to having more effects, the many ways people use to access the Flash themes, and because the other two HTML 5 themes are seen as lacking and complicated in comparison, whereas Business Friendly can be used casually too.
  • Visual Effects of Awesome: Yes, even GoAnimate has its fair share of VEoA moments.
    • Exhibit A.
    • NotSmirks managed to create a 3D water effect that's pretty impressive by GoAnimate standards, as shown here.
    • Other animators like African Vulture and Issac Anderson have been able to, with some decent work, make well-animated scenes with what little Comedy World has given them.
    • While the video itself suffers from Special Effects Failure, "Dora Babysits Abuela" has a Noveltoons-esque intro that doesn't look too shabby.

    W-Z 
  • What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: Happens a lot of times, intentionally or not. Some videos will feature characters from children's television series engaging in Troubling Unchildlike Behavior involving sex, drugs, profanity, and violence. Generally, some videos can have these themes without the user leaving a warning beforehand, and it's all too easy to mistake the video as appropriate for kids if the title is harmless and the thumbnail contains bright and colorful animated characters. It doesn't help that YouTube often mistakenly tags these videos as "for Kids" simply for being animated, even the ones that contain blatantly inappropriate themes.
  • The Woobie:
  • You Look Familiar: Since the Flash era had a subset of real-life politicians being parodied known as "White Houserz", it was common to see Sarah Palin being Dora's teacher, Hillary Clinton as a news anchor and Newt Gingrich generally portrayed as a grumpy authority figure (and because kids might not know who these people are or what their views are, the vast majority of these videos are pretty light on political attacks, unlike grown-ups on the Internet). It's usually the troublemakers that are causing all the issues that politicians need to solve in this world.
    • The Paul voice has had other appearances: in mid-2016, he was licensed to NOAA Weather Radio, and (more infamously) he has also been used in certain scam pop-ups that claim that the computer that the Internet browser is running on has a virus on it. Some weather radio enthusiasts and scambaiters have noticed this and made "grounded grounded grounded" jokes as a result.
    • The Wiseguy voice setting was heard in various GoAnimate videos before being used in the infamous "Garfielf" video and as the voice of SiIvaGunner.
    • You might be able to recognize the music track that plays during news reports as being the same one used by Keemstar for his Drama Alert videos. It has been also used frequently in It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia (including in the episode "Gun Fever Too: Still Hot", right before Frank Reynolds says the memetic "So anyway, I started blasting" line).
    • The interactive doll My Friend Cayla uses the Ivy voice setting. Coincidentally, there's another GoAnimate voice called Kayla (best known as the main voice used for Dora the Explorer).
    • The voice most often used for Boris (Eric) was used for Hugh Neutron in Jimmy Neutron Happy Family Happy Hour.
    • Some of the VoiceForge voices were featured as announcers in Loadout.
    • The Eric, Joey and Paul voices have also been used for scam robocalls (most often IRS scam calls).
    • The David voice was used in several audio communiqués for a certain hacktivist group.

YMMV tropes with their own pages:

  • Show Spoilers
  • Night Vision
  • Sticky Header
  • Wide Load

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