YMMV / Mark Does Stuff

• Applicability: Everything seems to map to class struggle and/or Mark's personal experiences.
  • "Angel wanted to escape his horrific past, so why shouldn't he get to decide how to portray himself to others? It reminded me of my first year of college."
• Broken Base: Some of Mark's discussions about social justice can cause heated debates in the comments of the posts. These tend to come down to violent differences of opinion between pro- and anti-social justice warriors, with the former defending Mark and latter attacking him.
  • On the Spoils site, a discussion about Beverly Katz being killed on Hannibal went south, creating a very ugly meltdown that resulted in several people getting banned, including moderators, and more deciding to leave on their own rather than risk it happening again. And now the show is more or less considered off limits for discussion. It's essentially the Joel vs. Mike flamewar in miniature.
• Draco in Leather Pants: He gushes his adoration for Admiral Cain from Battlestar Galactica (2003) to a kind of disturbing degree.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: The commenter "enigmaticagentscully," actually a British woman named Alice, got a sizable fanbase of her own while writing her own thoughts on viewing Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel for the first time. Mark got several questions asked about her, and some even suspected they were the same person.
• Fan Nickname: Commenters use rot13 to discuss spoilers. Sometimes, a character's name in rot13 will be amusing enough to become one of these. For instance: Wbanguna for Jonathan, Ybear for Lorne and Furybo for Shelob.
  • And while he stopped doing Mark Plays before it got to be used, many were anticipating the fun of calling Wrex "Jerk."
  • "Byvivre" for Olivier in Fullmetal Alchemist. Given the character's badass nature, this led to "By Vivre!" taking on the meaning "that's awesome!"
  • Discworld fans were rather pleased to discover that 'Nanny Ogg' in rot13 becomes "Anaal Btt". The Heh Heh, You Said "X" is made all the sweeter by the knowledge that Nanny would have the exact same reaction.
    • Plus, Greebo is "Terrob." It's noted that it's a shame he wasn't named Greebe just to make it perfect.
  • Before he read them, he could never quite remember the name of Beka Cooper, so he started calling them the 'Doggy Books'- especially funny considering the series' darker tone. The name is now used throughout the Tamora Pierce fandom.
    • Ditto calling the four protagonists of Circle of Magic "the goats".
  • Benny from Supernatural, who happens to be half of a popular Ho Yay couple, translates to "Oraal."
  • Lexa from The 100 is "Yrkn," with notes about how appropriate it is to pronounce it "your kin."
  • "Funzfury" for the Angel Shamshel from Neon Genesis Evangelion.
• Growing the Beard:
  • Noted about Farscape, where he says it feels like the show just needed to get "Jeremiah Crichton" (nigh-universally considered its worst episode) out of its system before it was able to leave its early issues behind and become a truly great show.
  • The 100 got off to a very rough start with him thanks to its absurdly straight-faced use of Black Dude Dies First, enough that he stated he probably would have Rage Quit the show right there if he'd been watching on his own. By halfway through the first season he'd completely turned around on it, declaring it one of the most relentlessly paced and constantly messed up shows he'd ever seen (and keep in mind that includes the likes of Battlestar Galactica (2003), Farscape, and Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood).
• Harsher in Hindsight: While reviewing the Buffy episode "Blood Ties", he says that even as depressing as the show is at that point, at least Joyce was still alive. He quickly posted in the comments that he'd already seen "The Body", and rereading the review before posting it made him cry all over again.
  • It quickly happened again as during his review of "Spiral", he said the only thing he was sure of about the season finale was that Buffy wouldn't die.
  • His guessing that Woody Goodman is gay while watching Veronica Mars.
    • Quickly followed by "Everything is tainted in this episode, except maybe Mac and Cassidy."
    • Early in season 3 he did a rant about people who make light of rape in any way, to which anyone who'd seen the show thought "This is going to be ugly."
  • Praising John Spencer's performance in season 6 of The West Wing and saying he really looks like he had a heart attack, unaware that not only was this development inspired by Spencer's real heart problems forcing him to take a smaller role, but he would suffer a fatal heart attack a year later.
    • And then he says that he feels like he's going to have a heart attack after the "three years later" opening of the season 7 premiere, just seconds before Spencer's credit appears.
  • After finishing season 1 of Hannibal, he hopes Beverly Katz gets more development in season 2. This is doubly painful not just for what happened to her, but how it tore apart his own fanbase (see Broken Base above).
  • While watching episode 11 of Revolutionary Girl Utena, he notes that he had to get the episode with a bunch of "caged bird" imagery on the day that Maya Angelou died.
  • He says of Furlow in the Farscape episode "Daedalus Demands" " My god, she’s so endlessly entertaining and hilarious, she’s proudly morally ambiguous, and I could watch her sass everyone until the end of time," "She’s managed to survive in such a fierce and brutal world without being all that brutal herself," and " Sure, her own survival is important, but at what cost? At what point does morally detached pragmatism become a horrible thing?" Then came the next episode...
  • He retweeted LeVar Burton's stunningly poignant quoting of To Kill a Mockingbird in response to the horrific miscarriage of justice in Ferguson, just a few months before starting Star Trek: The Next Generation.
  • Leonard Nimoy passed away less than a month after he watched Spock's death in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.
    • And a couple weeks later Terry Pratchett passed, while he was still doing both Star Trek and Discworld.
    • A bit later still came Christopher Lee, the voice of Death in several Discworld adaptations. Even worse, the specific book Mark was reading at the time was Reaper Man, in which Death becomes mortal and is terrified at the prospect of dying himself.
  • While watching Supernatural, he was disappointed that Metatron was played by a white actor after all the buildup about him being Native American. Given what kind of person he turns out to actually be, and his motivation of revenge on the Archangels for throwing him out of Heaven, casting him as Native American probably would have been far worse.
    • A month before "Dark Dynasty" aired, he said that he may well have Rage Quit the show if Charlie's death in "Slumber Party" hadn't been undone.
  • While reviewing Season 3 of The Legend of Korra: "I wonder what Ba Sing Se would be like if it wasn’t run by some corrupt force. I imagine that it could truly thrive!"
  • He notes one himself when Kirk says he'll die alone in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier: "That's really sad now that both those actors are dead. Hope I didn't ruin the scene for anyone."
  • One of his predictions for Season 2 of The 100: "Some of the 100 will become part of the Mountain Men." Specifically, their bone marrow.
    • Also, Baize predicts/hopes that the Mountain Men will include some black people that make it through the season after the show's less than stellar record with that in its first season. There are a few, but none of the Mountain Men, even the little kids, survive the season.
    • After declaring the first two seasons the most fun he's ever had making videos for a show, he put Season 3 on his list of the next shows he'd do once it was over. Fans watching in real time proceeded to cringe as that season features several things he's harshly spoken out against before: awkward use of non-white characters as metaphors for racists, magical healing of physical disabilities, and even a near-exact repeat of how Willow and Tara ended up.
    • This gets worse when he actually starts watching, as he refers to Lexa's upcoming death as "the thing that broke the Internet," when the last time he used that phrase was in reference to Korrasami. Plus, Baize's joy to see another black character is quite bitter knowing the role Pike actually plays.
    • And just when it seemed this couldn't get any worse, the Orlando gay nightclub massacre happened just a few days before he saw Lexa's death.
  • On Ellie and Joe from Broadchurch: "They have such a great relationship!"
  • Anton Yelchin died while Mark was still quite a bit away from seeing him as Chekov in the Star Trek reboot films, and also shortly after he'd given a rave review of Yelchin's film Green Room.
  • One of his predictions for "The Wizard's Dilemma" comes devastatingly close to the actual plot and resolution. Usually this kind of thing would go under Hilarious In Hindsight, but this particular book is so legendarily heartbreaking that it has to be here instead.
  • After he'd spoken against sexism in the sci-fi/fantasy realm so much, it was particularly devastating when Sunil Patel, a frequent and highly popular commentator and moderator since the site's beginning, was exposed as a serial sexual harasser in 2016 after several of his victims started talking to each other and realized they were all talking about the same person.
  • After being introduced to fusions in Steven Universe, he looked forward to the "super organization" of Pearl and Garnet's fusion, whose impact on the Crystal Gems is anything but organized.
  • In his review of "Year of Hell" he added on a note nominating Janeway for President, a nod to Hillary Clinton who became the first female nominee for a major party that year. It was published on November 21st, almost two weeks after she lost.
  • He watched a Patreon commissioned episode of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. where Dr. Streiten appears in the Previously on… very shortly after Ron Glass' death. Naturally, this got a pretty big reaction.
  • Nobby's crossdressing in Jingo naturally earned some stern discussion about how much he hates the whole concept of playing a guy in a dress for laughs. Meanwhile, anyone who'd seen Star Trek: Deep Space Nine knew that he'd soon be getting to "Profit and Lace", a notoriously offensive case of the trope.
    • When Bashir's attraction to Dax is brought up again in "Change of Heart": "Where could this be going? Because she's super into Worf. I don't see that ending any time soon."
  • After watching Galaxy Quest, he notes how huge Tim Allen was in The '90s and wonders what he's been doing lately. Allen had recently been in the news for an Insane Troll Logic statement that being a conservative in Hollywood was like being a Jew in Nazi Germany, resulting in him being denounced by the Anne Frank Foundation.
  • He read a chapter in Young Wizards mentioning a spell to protect against school shootings the very same week as the Parkland school massacre.
  • Mark has commented numerous times during his reviews of Babylon 5 how disturbingly relevant the multi-season arc of Earth becoming controlled by a fascist, xenophobic, authoritarian government/dictatorship is, given the current political climate in 2018-2019.
  • The latter half of Jane the Virgin features a ton of quite eerie parallels to the death of his former boyfriend Baize several months before he started the show.
• Heartwarming in Hindsight:
  • In the final episode of Star Trek: The Original Series, he sadly notes that this will be the last time he sees Nurse Chapel, which is technically correct. Doctor Chapel, on the other hand...
  • In Season 8 of Supernatural he began getting very critical about the show queerbaiting with Dean and Benny, and wished he could see a show whose writing crew didn't chicken out like this. Shortly before, he'd announced he would soon be watching a show where that's just what happened: The Legend of Korra.
  • The first piece of Discworld he read after Terry Pratchett's death was the section of Eric about how the universe is cyclical and endings are just new beginnings.
  • While reading Circle of Magic, he notes a lot of subtext between Lark and Rosethorn, but he doesn't want to get his hopes up and be disappointed. The fans who've read a bit farther ahead and know they're actually together are waiting eagerly for his reaction.
  • His occasional complaints about the difficulty of finding good homosexual characters in fictional works were already good enough knowing what was waiting for him at the end of The Legend of Korra. Then just days after he first started picking up on the vibe between Korra and Asami, the US Supreme Court declared gay marriage legal across the entire country.
    • By season 4 of the show, he's shipping Korra/Asami, but his various comments on it are all in the vein of 'this is absolutely adorable, but there's no way it's gonna be canon'. When he sees that it does, he ends up in tears.
  • He instantly loves the depiction of autism in "A Wizard Alone," and wonders just how much was in the original version of the book. In fact, many people had complained about the book being offensive (it ends with Darryl's autism being depicted as an evil influence on his mind that he ends up "cured" of) and Diane Duane responded by educating herself far more about the condition and taking care to provide a better depiction in the New Millennium Edition.
  • After the sudden death of Baize, the devastated Mark talked about how thankful he was to have so many videos in which Baize appeared, which can stand forever online as a monument to him.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Many of the comments Mark makes during his reviews will be quite amusing to him upon later viewing, due to it inadvertently predicting or being ironic about something which will happen in the future of said book/show. Of course, to readers who know the work, it's funny in the present.
  • From his first reading of Harry Potter, his early comments in Philosopher's Stone about spiders and his readers' amusement about them became clear with the reveal of Aragog in the next book.
  • Also during Harry Potter, Mark frequently requested that certain characters he disliked "DIE IN ALL THE FIRES". This was quite funny in light of Crabbe's eventual fate.
  • In The Hunger Games review, Mark wonders whether Suzanne Collins will be able to kill off a character, especially children; he then read her kill off about half of her cast of characters in a single chapter.
  • Another common wish for particularly vile characters is that the earth would open up and swallow them. This paid off with the fates of Lord Asriel and Mrs. Coulter in His Dark Materials.
  • From his review of the last chapter of The Hobbit: "Would you let me walk into a volcano if you knew a certain path led straight into it?" Even better, the review is actually a Real-Person Fic of Tolkien reading the book to his son Christopher, so you can easily read it as how he got a certain idea.
    • Plus, Tolkien insisting there are no ghosts in Middle Earth.
  • From his review of The Lord of the Rings Book II chapter 8 — and note that Mark read the books before watching the LotR films —
    Actually...okay, I'm trying to think of a good example and I'm coming up empty, but have you ever seen a movie that "ended" like fifteen times?
  • From Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the time he wrote an entire paragraph all about how Willow was straight but he still wanted to be big gay friends with her. For bonus irony, this all happened one episode before Tara was introduced.
    ...I refuse to be judged for projecting my big ol' gay life all over you Willow. I don't even care that you're straight, you are my big ol' gay best friend and this is all I want from you...
    • "Hush" was the one episode whose title had been spoiled for him as one of the most popular episodes, so he posted the notes he took while watching it, preceded by an introduction written before he saw it, where he worried that there wouldn't be any interesting dialogue to make the approach worthwhile. One of those notes is "WHY DID I SAY THAT? I REGRET EVERYTHING I'VE EVER DONE."
    • In his review of "Conversations with Dead People" he told Andrew to give up, as the Scoobies would never let him join them.
  • The epic Wendy Davis filibuster took place shortly before he reached "The Stackhouse Filibuster" in The West Wing.
    • And then the government shuts down shortly before he got to that happening in the show.
    • "SANTOS FOR PRESIDENT, PLEASE."
  • One that skirts the border between this and Harsher: One of his first comments about Alex Armstrong from Fullmetal Alchemist was to note how he seemed to be an exaggerated version of Mark himself. And from all we've heard, the relationship between Mark and his sister is rather similar to Alex and Olivier's.
    • Noted himself in his previous remarks about Selim in Fullmetal Alchemist that were wildly off course.
    • And then he hopes Kimblee is eaten and doesn't come back. Yeah, about that...
  • While watching the Veronica Mars episode "You Think You Know Somebody", he notes that he's regretting saying so much nice stuff about Troy
    • His very first comment about Aaron Echolls: "Much nicer than his son."
    • He wrote that nothing could possibly make him like Lamb, just one episode before the one good, decent thing that Lamb does in the whole show.
    • Upon Woody Goodman's first appearance in the season 2 finale, he shouts "Blow up!"
  • The very first thing he wrote about The Westing Game: "I feel like this is an elaborate prank."
    • Shortly after he started the book, "America the Beautiful" came back into popular consciousness thanks to Coca-Cola's Super Bowl ad.
    • And he read this book about a bunch of people snowbound in a hotel in the middle of one of the snowiest winters in recorded history.
  • While reading The Light Fantastic he comes quite close to calling the Librarian a monkey, then does a Last-Second Word Swap to "orangutan." Fans of the series know this is exactly what a typical in-universe character would do.
    • Every time he wishes for Death to show up again, not having caught on yet that he appears in almost every book in the series.
    • He says of dwarfs during Wyrd Sisters " it seems like Pratchett isn’t doing much at all to explain why it’s bullshit that these characters stick so rigidly to gender norms."
    • On Dios from Pyramids: "Is he 70, 80? He seems a little older."
    • He runs into a bit of trouble with the title of "Guards! Guards!" in the video, having to specify that the title isn't literally "Guards Guards with Exclamation Points." This is the book that introduces Carrot, who has the exact same problem.
    • Halfway through "Guards! Guards!" he wonders if the Watch is ever going to get more people.
    • Around the time he finished "Guards! Guards!", a chapter from Circle of Magic got him to talk about how he was only able to buy his first pair of boots that very year, instantly bringing to mind the Samuel Vimes Boots Theory of Societal Unfairness.
    • Upon meeting Astfgl in Eric, he's immediately reminded of Crowley from Supernatural. The end of the book reveals that he's made Hell boring, just like Crowley's "standing in line" idea.
    • In Witches Abroad he pauses to discuss his confusion on how to pronounce the word "Duc," just like the witches themselves have later in the book.
    • In Hogfather he's quite proud of his attempt at reading the noise one of the boars makes, quite similar to Vimes' pride at his hippo noise in Thud!.
  • Early in the first episode of Star Trek: The Original Series, he predicts there's a ton of slash fic about it. This from the show whose fans invented the term.
    • About Gary Mitchell in "Where No Man Has Gone Before": "He looks kind of like Karl Urban, doesn't he?"
    • From the same episode: "Is there coffee on the Enterprise?"
    • In "The Return of the Archons", he theorizes that the only way to actually insult Spock would be to call him human.
    • His incredulous reaction to Harlan Ellison's writing credit on "The City on the Edge of Forever". Ellison himself would agree.
    • During that scene from "The Trouble with Tribbles", "Is someone back there chucking them at him?"
    • In "The Ultimate Computer", he wants to see something with dinosaurs.
    • In "Bread and Circuses", "You know what I'd like to see? The Academy."
    • When a mysterious figure transports aboard in "Assignment: Earth", "It's Abraham Lincoln!"
  • He watched the Supernatural episode "The End," set five years in the future at the time it was made, just one month before that setting.
    • Early in the video for "Sacrifice," he notes that it's raining and says "That's my sadness falling from the sky."
  • The last Farscape episode he watched before a five week break for a tour was "Look at the Princess Part 2," of which he says he's glad he won't be leaving it on a cliffhanger. This story is actually the first instance of the show's fondness for three parters.
    • During the "Liars, Guns, and Money" trilogy he said he loves heist series, and would adore a show that was nothing but heists. A couple days later, he announced he would soon be watching Leverage.
    • Though the post didn't go up until the following week, he watched "Kansas" just two days before Halloween.
  • Given his famous hatred of spoilers, it's quite fun to see him watching one be used as a major plot point in In the Flesh.
  • In Fifty Shades of Grey he gushes a bit over how attractive Jose sounds, a couple chapters before realizing he was Jacob in the original Twilight fic the book is based on.
  • He watched the Leverage episode "The Ho Ho Ho Job," in which Parker is depressed over having a snowless Christmas, during a particularly cold and snowy winter. The video has quite a few comments about how everyone in Boston was currently the exact opposite of her.
    • From early in "The DB Cooper Job," "Please tell me Eliot is DB Cooper."
  • He started Season 2 of The Legend of Korra at the same time he was reading Moving Pictures, and didn't take long to note the similarities between Varrick and Dibbler in that book.
    • His comment on Korra and Asami in the Season 3 premiere (ie when the writers first starting seriously laying the groundwork for their romance): "I want these two together forever. FOREVER."
  • One of his predictions for Cold Fire is Daja falling in love with a boy. Just wait til he gets to Will of the Empress.
    • Early in the series he mispronounced Frostpine's name as "Frostporn." Then comes his nude meditation scene in "Cold Fire."
  • Just a couple weeks before starting Star Trek: The Next Generation, he watched the Leverage episode "The Juror #6 Job" and noted that Brent Spiner looked strangely familiar.
    • The speculation posts usually have some of it, but the one for Season 3 of TNG deserves special mention for three separate items that together form a quite accurate description of "The Best of Both Worlds"
    • He asks for an episode centered around O'Brien in one video, which naturally to fans brings up the annual "O'Brien must suffer" episodes from Deep Space Nine.
    • The various delays in the double features resulted in him watching the Robin Hood episodes of TNG and Doctor Who only a week apart.
    • In the review of "The Game", he says he's finally narrowed down what's really been bugging him about Wesley: that he never once faces consequences for his actions, even when they put the whole ship in danger. Wesley's very next appearance is devoted entirely to deconstructing this problem, which the writers had noted themselves.
    • Early in "Starship Mine", he wonders how Voyager will distinguish itself from the three previous shows. Then Tim Russ shows up, and he notes he looks very familiar in something of a follow-up to the bit with Brent Spiner above.
  • He scheduled Neon Genesis Evangelion to be watched in 2015, the then-twenty years in the future year the show is set.
  • The double features contain two shows in a row that feature a character named Silas who's a brutal authority figure humanized by his love for his daughter.
  • During the early episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, he makes a few comments that Kira seems a bit too similar to Ro Laren, with no idea that she was intended to be Ro until Michelle Forbes refused to become a series regular.
    • Upon seeing Q appear, he immediately predicts Sisko's going to punch him in the face.
    • He mistakes the Odyssey for the Enterprise in its first appearance in "The Jem'Hadar". Promos for the episode prominently displayed the ship's destruction, specifically to give the impression that the Enterprise had been destroyed.
    • He calls Bashir and Kira's kiss in "Fascination" "really sloppy," when Alexander Siddig and Nana Visitor were a real couple.
    • He makes a Running Gag of demanding Morn get his own episode, little suspecting that actually did happen in Season 6.
    • In "Rejoined" he asks if Susanna Thompson could just become a new cast member. A bit later she got a recurring role as the Borg Queen on Voyager.
    • After "To the Death", he regrets not being able to see more of Jeffrey Combs as Weyoun after he's killed. Not only is it revealed after this that the Vorta are a clone race with plenty more Weyouns, but this development occured entirely because the crew loved what Combs did with the role so much that they wanted to see more of it.
    • During "Things Past", just before Star Trek: First Contact: "Star Trek has been doing a lot of time travel lately. I don't think I can deal with another time travel episode." He'd go on to call First Contact his choice for the best film in the franchise.
    • Due to going far ahead of his schedule to make up for the time he'd be traveling in Europe, he went through the first half of Season 5 without any input from the fans, and took until "The Darkness and the Light" to consider that the storyline of Kira carrying the O'Briens' baby was created because Nana Visitor was actually pregnant. The hindsight part comes from how this was actually her first episode back after the birth of her son, and she's wearing a fake belly in it.
    • He says while going into the second part of "In Purgatory's Shadow"/"By Inferno's Light" "I hope this is not a ten parter." No, that's the last ten episodes of the show.
    • His constant seething hatred of Damar, prior to his development into a heroic resistance leader.
  • In Agent Carter he suddenly gets the desire to see Peggy and Angie make out. Just a few scenes later, Dottie kisses Peggy.
  • He watched an episode of The 100 with a horror movie sequence scored with "Carol of the Bells" just a few days before Christmas.
  • This gem of a line from early in Neon Genesis Evangelion: "I’m wondering if the show will address the possible PTSD or trauma that Shinji or other pilots experience."
  • His Twitter post just before watching the pilot of Star Trek: Voyager: "GOODBYE I SHALL SEE YOU SOON."
    • In "Partuition", he notes that he's now seeing a lot of what inspired Ronald D. Moore's Battlestar Galactica reboot as he worked on both shows. This is doubly funny, as A. Moore's time on Voyager was very brief due to his getting fed up with how little any of the other writers seemed to care about making a quality show, and B. the most famous inspiration to BSG from Trek was Moore making sure nothing like the Badass Decay the Borg suffered on Voyager ever happened to the Cylons.
    • On B'Elanna and Vorik's pon farr fight in "Blood Fever": "I feel a lot better about this than Tom and B'Elanna having sex. That seems terrible." Towards the end of the show, they get married and even have a kid.
    • After recognizing Jeri Ryan in "Scorpion": "I didn't know she was a guest on this show!"
    • In "Friendship One", just one week before he started Enterprise, he notes how little the franchise has explored the early years of Starfleet.
  • While Felicity from Arrow is still just Oliver's occasional Locked Out of the Loop tech support: "I want her to become a bigger character. She seems so interesting."
    • His first impression of Roy Harper: "A giant asshole."
    • As Oliver discusses not wanting to start a movement, with Mark still apparently unaware of the larger Arrowverse: "Could you start a movement, so we could get multiple superheroes? Wouldn't that be cool?"
  • In the first episode of Steven Universe he gives an awestruck "This show understands me!" to Steven's obsession with Cookie Cats, sounding very much like Peridot over her toy alien.
    • His initial idea on what the deal is with the Gems: "Whatever the gems are, they are clearly meant for saving the world."
    • Upon meeting Uncle Grandpa, "Is he everyone's gay uncle?" This is before Mark had any idea that his show existed, let alone its concept that he's the uncle and grandpa of everyone in the world.
    • Very shortly after he met Ruby and Sapphire, the latter's actress guest starred on Arrow (another show he's watching for Patreon requests) where she was on the receiving end of a Curb-Stomp Battle quite visually similar to to one Garnet gives Jasper in the same episode.
    • His first reaction to what's later revealed to be a corrupted Jasper is that it's cute and he wants one.
  • Early in Star Trek: Enterprise he says he'll be furious if Porthos dies. He survives the episode where he gets sick, but then in the 2009 film...
    • He reached Seth MacFarlane's cameo shortly after the premiere of his Trek-inspired series The Orville.
  • Back when he read through American Gods, Mark commented that he now pictured Shadow as attractive since Neil Gaiman said he imagined him as looking like Dwayne Johnson. Now there's a live action version of American Gods, Shadow's played by Ricky Whittle, who Mark also raved about the attractiveness of throughout The 100.
  • In the first episode of The Good Place, he immediately declares it's actually the Bad Place at seeing the clown paintings.
  • After the pilot movie of Babylon 5, he says he figures Sinclair is staying around for a while. Crosses into Harsher when you consider why Michael O'Hare left the show.
    • With just one episode of Ivanova and Talia, he announces he's already shipping them. And then just casually says he wants to write some "AU" fics about them, clearly having no expectation at all that a show from the '90s could possibly make a lesbian relationship canon.
    • Early in Season 1 he wonders if the opening credits might change later, when the show is one of the first to completely overhaul its opening sequence in every season, or indeed change enough from season to season to warrant it.
    • He reached Bruce Boxleitner's entrance into the show in the very same week that he started appearing on Supergirl in a role bearing a striking resemblance to President Clark.
  • In Jane the Virgin he quickly starts shipping Jane and Petra, while saying he's absolutely certain it'll never happen. Well, not with that Jane, at least...
    • He reached the episode where Alba imagines a picture of Donald Trump changing to Barack Obama in the very same week that Trump was defeated by Obama's former Vice President Joe Biden.
• Ho Yay: It naturally comes up a lot, but reached particularly epic levels in Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood with the meeting of the Armstrongs and Curtises. He declared Alex and Sig's flex-off "the gayest thing I've ever seen."
  • Supplanted by the new "gayest thing ever" in the first episode of Revolutionary Girl Utena: the opening credits.
  • It naturally didn't take him long to pick up on the legendary epic levels of it in Star Trek: The Original Series.
  • Steven Universe predictably provided a new gayest thing ever with the "Stronger Than You" sequence.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • ROSE LOVED DRUGS.
  • I THINK HE'S FEELING JUST A LITTLE BIT DOWN.
  • Did you know Zhao was voiced by Jason Issacs? Because he also played Lucius Malfoy!
  • He decided to write about The Princess Bride as if the metafictional S. Morgenstern story was actually true. Inevitably, some people didn't get the joke, resulting in every single chapter getting comments telling him that it wasn't real.
  • During The Sandman (1989), his inexplicable (even to himself) habit of calling the Endless "the Eternals."
  • After branching into video games, he quickly picked up a new one with his references to GLaDOS as "they."
  • Did you know Song of the Lioness feels so rushed because Tamora Pierce had to conform to maximum page limits of the time?
  • Calling rear attacks in Dragon Age "butt stabbing."
  • "I am not a villain created by Disney." Originally said by someone who got into an argument with Mark before being banned, and constantly parodied thereafter. From October 24 to Halloween, Mark and several long-term commenters changed their icons and usernames to those of Disney villains. Mark's was "Killer of Bambi's Mom" and had no picture.
  • "Jet is a cop?" Referring to how he managed to miss and/or forget the several references to this in Cowboy Bebop until Jet's past was explicitly part of the story.
  • Mixing up "buffet" (a self-served meal, where the "t" is silent) and "buffet" (to hit something, where it's not).
  • His complete inability to remember if the word "fief" is pronounced "feef" or "fife" (it's the first one).
  • The proposed alternate title for Supernatural: "Misty-Eyed Boy Talk."
  • Commenter Psyched180 popularized the nickname "Toast" for Duncan Kane, referring to how bland he is.
  • His incredulous reaction to a major character death in the season 2 finale of Supernatural: "He's on other boxes!" (referring to the DVD covers)
  • Calling the four main characters of Circle of Magic "the Goats," which is now even noted as a Fan Nickname on its page here.
  • His pronunciation of Captain Janeway's name as "Jane-a-way." Especially whenever he says "Janeway for president."
• Narm Charm: He naturally finds a ton of it in Star Trek: The Original Series. Perhaps best exemplified by his reaction to the hand puppet plant in the very first episode: "That's so obviously a hand, I love it!"
  • It's out in full force during The Terminator, where he revels in the film's various bits of '80s cheese.
• Nausea Fuel: Before watching the Hannibal episode "Tome-wan," he notes that he was warned not to eat anything before watching it. And he does indeed gag a bit during the scene in question.
• Never Live It Down: He managed to completely avoid meeting Leliana in his first time playing Dragon Age: Origins. Many commenters now love to bring up how awesome she is just to taunt him.
  • Mentioned himself while reading Deep Secret, where he mispronounces "rags" as...a certain word that rhymes with it.
  • Also noted while asking about Christian Grey "Does he collect sex people?"
  • Taking the Big Bad's attempt to foist suspicion onto Vetinari completely at face value in "Guards! Guards!", after passing the big clue that he was lying. This resulted in a quite serious discussion about how the fans could let him know if he still hadn't caught on by the end of the book so he wouldn't spend the rest of the series viewing Vetinari as a Karma Houdini. Luckily, he did.
  • During the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "Is There in Truth No Beauty?" he's convinced through the first few minutes of the episode that the ambassador is the box shown. After they make it clear that he's IN the box, even Mark is able to laugh at his mistake.
  • Filtering all the Welsh language jokes in "Soul Music" through his own background, so that he spent the first few sections convinced they were actually about Spanish.
  • His persistent and entirely unintentional misgendering of Rem from Death Note thanks to some improperly done subtitles. After making a big deal about other people doing this for years, it's quite jarring to see him fall right into it himself.
  • In an especially bizarre case given how he usually jumps on anything that can remotely be taken as Ho Yay, he saw Pearl's love for Rose in Steven Universe as nothing more than hero worship when it was introduced in "Rose's Scabbard." This naturally led to some jokes about just how much longer this famously homoerotic show would take to break through to him, including wondering if he'd misgender the tomboyish Ruby in her romance with Sapphire. Luckily, that reveal was where he caught on. From the same series, his tendency to use the pronoun "they" on the slightest case of Ambiguous Gender really bites him in the ass, as it makes him come perilously close to the Fandom-Enraging Misconception of insisting that the Gems being an agendered race means there's no gay subtext between them.
  • Similarly to the Pearl and Rose one, with his adoration of Feminist Fantasy the fans had a lot of fun, and hair-pulling frustration, with his apparent inability to comprehend that the Anthropomorphic Personification of Time in Discworld is a woman.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • In his review of the Doctor Who episode "Listen", he tells an incredibly creepy story about how he was haunted by nighttime visions of a floating woman in a white dress in his childhood, and years later discovered his brother saw the woman too. They both still have no idea what it was.
  • When reviewing the Voyager episode "Critical Care", he shares a few stories of what it's like to live with minimal insurance. For one, he had to have his wisdom teeth removed with only a local anesthetic, and while it was numbed he could still feel it.
• Portmanteau Couple Name: Mark uses Katpee for Katniss/Peeta. The alternative was Peeniss.
  • The Princess Tutu reviews brought out the Ahiru/Fakir shippers in force. You'd expect that they'd call themselves Team Fakiru, but thanks to the fact that Ahiru is called "Duck" (a literal translation of her name) in the dub, they called themselves Team Fuck instead.
• Ron the Death Eater: Some Supernatural fans have taken serious issue with his regularly siding with Sam over Dean whenever they're at odds, including saying Dean was wrong to beat Sam up after Sam let him get turned into a vampire. And then there's the time he called Dean the most likely to shoot someone, in a group that includes a guy who willingly fed his grandchildren to ghouls. And his completely letting Sam off the hook for not trying at all to save Dean and Kevin between seasons 7 and 8, and calling Dean a hypocrite for also leaving the life between seasons 5 and 6 in a completely different situation. For that last one he even argued in the comments with a few people over their interpretation, something that usually only happens when someone is being racist, sexist, or such. Then it gets just plain weird in "#Thinman" when he' unfazed by one of the Ghostfacers using the word "bitch," but when Dean shoots it back, that's when he scowls.
• So Bad, It's Good: His opinion of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode, "I Robot, You Jane": This is not the worst episode of Buffy. It's so awful that it loops around to becoming an abstract art piece about the archaic nature of human interaction. It's so awful that it's as if the people made it specifically to appear on Mystery Science Theater 3000. It's so awful that...well, it's a waste of time and energy to spend one second hating it.
  • His opinion about The Room (2003). Its especially good if you're surrounded by thirty drunk friends while watching it.
• Spoil at Your Own Risk: Mark's spoiler rules are very simple; if he's going to review it, and hasn't seen it yet, do not mention it. His fury shall be hard and swift.
  • Look at the number of comments on the Mockingjay chapters: They go down and down and down (or just say 'Can't talk or spoilers will fall out')... until the last two chapters, when people can finally talk about what happened.
  • This led to a new meme around the Mark Watches Avatar posts: THERE ARE NO SPOILERS IN MARK SING SE
  • Mark calls River Song his soulmate because of their similar attitudes toward spoilers.
  • It's now become general practice to write spoilery comments in rot13, as it's easy to just paste them into rot13.com and do it again if you want to read them.
  • There's also a Spoil Blog which acts as a "Place To Contain Yourself" if you want to discuss stuff. Also filled with lots of fan art and discussion related to the stuff Mark's reviewing.
  • This came back to bite him big time when he was commissioned for a video on the Band of Brothers episode "Why We Fight," featuring a horrifically realistic look at a concentration camp, with the person making the request afraid to give him any kind of warning thanks to how strict his spoiler policy is.
  • Particularly weird was when an episode of Supernatural spoiled him for the plot of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. He took it pretty calmly, actually, and was mostly just amused at how he had no idea how time travel and whales go together.
  • Apparently, at a con somebody maliciously tried to spoil him for the fact that The Legend of Korra ends with Korra and Asami as the Official Couple. The entire room started throwing objects at the person in question, forcing them to shut up.
  • During a Discworld convention, he met a fan cosplaying as a clacks tower, when he hadn't yet reached their creation in the series. After talking a while, he described her as suddenly getting a horrified expression, shouting "I'm wearing a spoiler!" and running away. Of course, he couldn't really understand the specifics himself and it was left to another commenter who was there to explain it to everyone else.
• Tear Jerker: During one of his Veronica Mars recaps, Mark told the readers about the times when he was raped. It's sickening, horrifying and incredibly sad.
  • In the same combination, any time he brings up being abused as a child.
  • As a straight-up Tear Jerker, the impromptu memorials for Leonard Nimoy and Terry Pratchett in the comments sections of "Where No One Has Gone Before" and "Eric Part 3". Terry Pratchett even got a new site banner.
  • His written review of "Sarek", where he compares Sarek's aging to his own experience with his father's death. It's pure heartbreak.
  • The reveal in 2016 that Sunil Patel, a moderator on the sites and frequent commentator known as "Spectralbovine," had a long history of harassing and gaslighting women. Mark and many fans were suddenly hit with some major Fridge Horror as at the same time that he'd frequently viciously spoken out against this kind of stuff, they were all friendly with this guy for years without having any idea of his darker side.
  • The absolutely shocking passing of Mark's former boyfriend Baize at age 28. He was actually driven to go on an indefinite hiatus from all his online work, when he'd been able to push through several bouts of depression before.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • Largely his view of Divergent, that a promising story is shackled by world-building that makes no sense and a generic evil villain who it's impossible to care about. He does find that book 2 improved on this, though at the same time very much turned him off with the world record of Bury Your Gays.
  • Rather surprisingly, he also kind of feels this way about Fifty Shades of Grey, finding that he identifies quite well with Anastasia's insecurity about her appearance and her comparatively late in life first romance, and wishes that got more focus than the creepy S&M stuff. Plus, with just a few minor changes it could be a quite effective horror story.
• Values Dissonance:
  • He first ran into it with Song of the Lioness and its central romantic plot which is quite cringe-worthy today. His reaction actually got the author to seriously reevaluate the story, and admit that she now very much would like to go back and change it. Star Trek: The Original Series is also naturally a target with its infamous '60s view of women, with his coming down especially hard on "The Enemy Within", "Who Mourns for Adonais?", "Metamorphosis" and "Elaan of Troyius".
  • One that he was especially fascinated by (not least because of his own childhood experience) was coming across the word "sissy" in Discworld, and discovering that while the word still has the same meaning in England, it's considered on the level of a harmless playground insult rather than the offensive slur it is in America.
  • Steins;Gate lets everyone dig a lot into the differing views of transgender issues in Japan and some other countries, including that the Japanese language lacks gender-specific pronouns, meaning that it's completely up to other countries' translation teams how to handle that in the script.
• Values Resonance: He finds the episode "M.I.A." from Gargoyles surprisingly relevant even though it was aired twenty years ago and set in Britain rather than America, explicitly showing skinheads racially abusing a non-white person in the name of "purity" and showing the use of force to defend yourself or another person as heroic.
• The Woobie: He'll occasionally go off on a tangent about his early life if a scene in something he's reviewing hits close to home. From all evidence, his first 20 years or so were ridiculously depressing.

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