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YMMV / Markiplier

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  • Alternative Character Interpretation:
    • In Eleusis, Mark joked that his character is actually a homicidal maniac hunting for a blacksmith and dirt. He further jokes the antagonists and villagers are just trying to stop his reign of terror and are innocent townsfolk. He also has this assumption for most of the protagonists he play as who has a mysterious past/past they can't remember. Sometimes he's correct, and sometimes he isn't.
    • In the beginning, when Wilford Warfstache interviewed Slender Man, was he a hard-hitting junior reporter seeking the truth from an evil monster, or a scheming muckraker who sought to profit off of a celebrity's misfortune?
    • Is Warfstache a complete psychopath, or was he genuinely sorry that he murdered an entire family after he was caught having an affair? According to Word of God, Warfstache was once the Colonel from Who Killed Markiplier?, and the events of that series convinced him that people dying is just a joke, and that they'll come back.
    • Mark interprets Forrest Byrnes in Firewatch as a demonic fire loving god, despite him being a wooden cutout.
    • More out of context like but it's often believed at the reason Mark is so playful and happy to always give Lixian more emphasis in videos is arguably his way to show his associates more appreciation and thankfulness for their work than how it happened with Ryan and Matt of SuperMega, who left Mark's channel due to feeling that Mark was treating them less like friends and more like workers.
  • Archive Panic: Mark has made over five and a half thousand videos, so watching them all would take an incredibly long time.
  • Awesome Ego: Mark's ego is just too funny to be found annoying. Mainly because he's usually immediately proven wrong with his boasts.
  • Awesome Music:
  • Big-Lipped Alligator Moment:
    • The time when Mark's channel got hacked by a channel called Ourmine, which caused the fanbase to get quite a bit riled up. Strangely however, Mark never mentioned anything about the group of hackers after getting the channel back, and simply continued to make more videos immediately afterward.
    • In “Try Not To Laugh 7,” he’s exposed to Xavier: Renegade Angel, which is basically a Big Lipped Alligator Show, with no prior knowledge and has no clue what the hell just happened.
    • Some of Mark's non-gameplay videos certainly give off this vibe when compared to the rest of his channel. For instance, things like "rar", "RÖKNING FÖRBJUDEN", the aptly-named "Stupid Video", "boat dog", "MEOW", and "Pretzels".
  • Broken Base: Has its own page.
  • Cargo Ship:
  • Die for Our Ship: Mark has certain fans who pretty much violently attack any woman who so much as comes near him for the sake of the Septiplier ship.
  • Draco in Leather Pants: Many of the characters that Mark has come up with repeatedly get this treatment from fans.
    • Darkiplier was romanticized by the fans so much that Mark stopped adding him to his videos for a while. When he reintroduced Darkiplier in “A Date With Markiplier", Mark went out of his way to make him manipulative and creepy. That hasn’t stopped fans from wanting to date him and making him out to be nicer than he actually is.
      • The reveal of his backstory in “Who Killed Markiplier” has only increased the amount of people who romanticize him. Though his backstory is tragic, Mark once again has made it clear that the entity that is Darkiplier is evil and has no good left in him... which some fans have opted to ignore.
    • In “Markiplier TV” it’s implied that Wilford Warfstache doesn’t have a full grasp on why people keep dying around him. This has lead to a some fans depicting Wilford as a victim in his own right. Though there may be some validity to this, especially after the events of WKM, it also comes at the cost of downplaying the fact that Wilford is a serial killer.
      • Speaking of Wilford and Darkiplier, thanks to Dark’s comment about how he “always respected” Wilford and referring to him as “Will”, people have begun to see them as best friends... despite the fact that Darkiplier is a master manipulator and is most likely speaking in friendly terms just to use Wilford. And now that it has been revealed that Darkiplier was created from Celine (Wilford's lover) and Damien (Wilford’s friend), some fans believe that a relationship- romantic or platonic- is still ongoing between them. But if that is true, nothing good could come from it considering that Dark is evil and manipulative and has no more goodness left in him. But again, that’s something fans opt to ignore.
    • The reveal that The Host and The Author are the same person has lead to a popular fan theory that Darkiplier is somehow responsible for The Host’s missing/injured eyes, and that he has The Host trapped under his thumb. Though this fan theory highlights Darkiplier’s brutality and manipulation, it also serves as woobification for The Host, since it puts the attention toward his supposed “victimhood" and away from the fact that he has done horrible things in the past and is still supposed to be a sinister figure.
      • It's quite common in some fandom circles to only acknowledge Darkiplier's villainous nature in order to woobify other characters who may be just as bad as him.
  • Ensemble Dark Horse:
    • Following the fallout between Ryan and Matt, Ethan and Tyler became this hard within the fanbase, with many saying that Ethan and Tyler have more flow with Mark's eccentric personalities. Some could even call them another versions of Bob and Wade.
    • One of Markiplier's editors, Lixian, gets a lot of attention due to his amusing edits, his adorable avatar, and the ways he and Markiplier have indirect back-and-forths in videos. He's even animated some of Markiplier's videos, and Mark has even played a game of his!
  • Fandom Rivalry:
    • According to YouTubers, you're either a Markiplier fan, or a PewDiePie fan. Weirdly enough, they've thrown CaptainSparklez into the mix as well, for reasons that are not entirely clear. That said however, all three do get along with each other and all three wish that they would stop these petty arguments.
    • After GradeAUnderA made a video where he mocked Markiplier's appearance and mannerisms and called him a "fucking retard", members of Mark's fandom haven't been quite so kind with Grade's.
    • Due to the debacle between Mark's reveal on what happened between him and Ryan and Matt, there's a small division of SuperMega and Mark. Mark's fanbase at best tries to respect Ryan and Matt, however do feel the two have given up most of their talents of editing/skit videos for the sake of let's plays (taking a book from Game Grumps due to the work with Arin Hanson) while SuperMega fans will berate and put down Mark and enforce heaviness on how he "changed" and that Ryan and Matt were good to quit working with him. Others enjoy both channels and only wish for the two to collab once more.
    • While not explicitly a fandom, Mark's fans found themselves in opposition to a subreddit called r/Dogfree, a subreddit related to people who dislike or hate dogs. Mark, being a dog lover and owner of dogs himself, made a video called "This Subreddit HATES DOGS" essentially mocking the subreddit and calling out some of the posts as mean-spirited and deliberately antagonizing. Despite him stating in the video that he does believe in essentially free speech on the internet, his fans saw the subreddit's existence as a blight on the planet, and descended en masse to raid the subreddit. While almost no posts from Markiplier fans attacking the subreddit exist (save for the occasional post or comment apology), many upset posts and comments from, the redditors of Dogfree still do, and it's clear the subreddit has never forgiven Mark for even bringing them up, and Mark's fans have never forgiven r/Dogfree for existing in the first place.
  • Fanon:
  • Friendly Fandoms: Practically anyone Mark collaborates with has their fanbases on friendly terms. Chief among them are Bob, Wade, Ethan, Jacksepticeye, Pewdiepie, and The Game Grumps.
  • Harsher in Hindsight:
    • "The crazed butt stabber" became a running gag for Mark. A few months after he started doing so, a man was found guilty of being a serial butt stabber.
    • All the shipping jokes between Mark and Yamimash are a bit harder to laugh at after the latter was accused of being a pedophile due to flirting with a younger fan online, despite having a girlfriend at the time. Since that incident transpired, Mark has ceased doing collaborations with Yami. Neither has brought the other up since, leaving their videos a fun historical point for their channels, but ultimately confusing for someone until they go down the rabbit hole and learn why.
    • Mark singing about how he misses his cat in Exoptable Money is one of the funniest moments in the video. Until you find out that Madame Sinclair found the cat, killed him, and made him sell the cat's fur for money.
    • The video sketches Mark did with Cyndago where Warstache shoots Daniel twice in two separate videos ("The Warstache Affair" and "The NED Affair") becomes harder to watch when you learn Daniel passed away from suicide attempt.
    • The entirety of Drunk Minecraft became this after Mark revealed that he had a heart attack caused by drinking alcohol, which lead to his doctor telling him to never touch a drop of it again. It's the entire reason why the series is discontinued.
      • Similarly in the beginning of a video for Killings in Altstadt, he talked about the comments related to him being drunk in the previous video. He attempted to alleviate people's concerns of him drinking. Three years later, he was sent to the hospital because his drinking caused a heart attack.
    • In the "Markiplier Reacts to MEAN COMMENTS!" video, one of the comments was "You will never be a Grump". First time? Funny but still pretty hurtful. After Ryan and Matt, who broke off their friendship with Mark over an implied petty grudge, ended up joining the "Game Grumps" and potentially souring Mark's relationship with them as well? Ouch. Although Matt would post how he and Mark made amends and he and Ryan would leave Game Grumps afterwards.
    • In his Bad Guys At School video, Bob picks his character (An elderly female teacher) because of her resemblance to Ruth Bader Ginsburg. At one points Bob mentions how he wants to go to "the afterlife" (Aka glitch under the map like Mark and Wade), and the video ends with the trio abusing a glitch to ascend to heaven, going through the skybox and eventually becoming one with the universe. The real Ruth then passed away just a few weeks later, giving the innocent line and their hilarious glitch-wiggling ascension a much darker tone.
    • Mark reviewed dozens of Pop-Tart flavors in late November 2020, constantly bemoaning throughout the video that buying $500 worth of them was a terrible idea due to their general unhealthiness, having to deal with them for six months and almost becoming addicted to them nonetheless, and joking that his personal trainer was going to unleash hell on him for screwing up his diet. December 2nd of that year - a mere several days later - would see him hospitalised for a bowel obstruction.
    • Mark's interactions with Audrey in the first few minutes of HuniePop Episode 5 could be considered far less humorous if one recalls how Mark was once in an abusive relationship. Although Mark himself seems to have fun with her.
    • One of the videos prior to his hiatus was part 13 of Until Dawn, in which he breaks down after getting Ashley murdered because he forgot an important detail and resolves to play the game over just to avoid that happening. Later, Mark would go on hiatus due to losing someone close to him in real life.
    • As an addendum to the above, Jacks' video here while playing Prop Hunt with Mark, Bob, and Wade had him saying that Mark's sad and depressed. What makes it worse is that the video was uploaded 3 days before the incident. Kind of makes it harder to watch now.
    • Mark's playthrough of Blank Dream, a game about a girl's suicide and wishing she had never existed, also becomes this in light of the incident. The timing of the game's theme and the tragedy that struck was rather eerie. Perhaps fittingly, Mark wouldn't finish the game until almost a year later.
    • Daniel briefly appears in part five of Mark's playthrough of The Witch's House, looks right down the camera and says this: 'I'm actually dead, though. I'm a ghost. I'm a ghost; I'm dead.' At the time? Moderately funny joke. Now? Utterly heartbreaking.
    • Mark's video "YouTube Has Changed" about YouTube drama becomes harder to stomach considering YouTube animator and ranter GradeAUnderA would later on call out Mark, Felix, and Matthew Santoro over their videos regarding YouTube drama and blame their fans for attacking him, resulting with GAUA insulting Mark's decisions to dye his hair (not noting that Mark dyed his hair as a charity event and a tribute to his deceased friend Daniel of Cyndago) and start another YouTube drama.
    • Mark's friendly moments with Ryan and Matt became heavily depressing after Ryan and Matt randomly moved out of the home they shared together. While this at first could have been credited as the two going on to do new things (The two did go form SUPERMega), it became a lot more depressing when Mark confirmed the two moved out due to Mark becoming controlling and demanding, resulting with the two cutting ties with him. Makes it worse that Ryan and Matt ended up becoming members of the Game Grumps (which one knows Mark is a big fan of, even implying he wanted to become a Grump himself, or at least a Honorary Grump similar to Jack), which put more strain with the Grumps with Mark. Although this would later on die off as Mark and Matt made amends back in 2016, all three boys said they didn't have any bad blood with each other, and even the boys would leave Game Grumps to focus on Super Mega full time.
    • Mark's initial Let's Play of Undertale and his genuine happiness during the first two parts becomes this as the fandom's more infamous members would later on ruin Mark's enjoyment of the game, resulting in Mark pulling a Mangaminx and cancelling his let's play of the game, only begrudgingly playing the game again through streams squarely out of obligation, treating it as a chore and making his displeasure at what the fanbase did very clear. Although unlike Minx, Mark didn't throw excessive pot shots at the game nor the fanbase, simply moving on from it and the fanbase using it as a cautionary tale in regards to let's plays for the game.
    • During an SCP – Containment Breach livestream in April 2017, Mark replied to a fan question with, "Honestly, who knows what's gonna happen in 2020?" The year in question turned out be quite eventful, and not in a good way.
    • In one video in which he receives fan mail, Mark is sent a gift by Randy Stair. Yes, that Randy Stairnote .
  • Heartwarming in Hindsight: During the LATIN'S WRATH episode of Drunk Minecraft, Mark points out that Bob and Wade have a girlfriend and a wife, respectively, while he has no one. Years later, Mark would find a girlfriend in Amy.
  • He Panned It, Now He Sucks!: While he does praise the gameplay for the most part, Mark's run of Doom Eternal saw some serious blowback due to his seeming complete disregard for the game's lore. Initially, he stated he didn't care about the lore and just wanted to kill demons, which is fair enough. But starting from Part 6 on, and especially after the reveal that the Slayer is in fact Doomguy himself from the original trilogy, Mark's vocal dislike of how the lore played out - specifically, he thought the the running WMG from Doom (2016) that the Slayer was the Betrayer (it turned out he wasn't) would have been better narratively than him turning out to be Doomguy - had the comments section ripping him apart, this time with almost no one defending him as some had in the past. Some even accused him of attacking the lore specifically because it doesn't match with the narrative he'd built in his head since the last game. Many viewers, especially after Part 6, commented that Mark was entirely missing the point of the story and that his criticisms were from both misunderstanding the lore and not paying attention to detail.
  • He Really Can Act: A Date With Markiplier, Who Killed Markiplier?, DAMIEN, and A Heist with Markiplier are where Mark's acting talents are brought to the forefront, and he does not disappoint. Many have commented that Mark should become a voice actor due to how well he portrays his characters.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight:
    • In the "King of Five Nights at Freddy's" animation, the animator Lixian draws a design of a thinner, sexier Chica... and it's almost spot-on to the Toy Chica design revealed a month later.
    • In one of his photobooth videos, he joked that "he knew the president one day". Six weeks later, he actually got to meet the president...
    • While he was playing the "Take Cake to the Children" minigame in Five Nights at Freddy's 2, he initially mistook the Purple Man for Bonnie. The third game reveals that the Purple Man was killed when he hid inside an animatronic-costume hybrid suit of Bonnie that malfunctioned.
    • In his BWAK Let's Play, he comments about how there aren't many chicken-themed horror games. This was before Five Nights at Freddy's brought us Chica.
    • The hilarious "Where's The Blacksmith?" meme below. He finally finds it years later and it turns out to be him.
    • While playing the Among the Sleep DLC, he sees something that he says looks like Freddy Fazbear, and makes a comment about the game being a prequel to Five Nights at Freddy's where the child protagonist becomes a victim of the Purple Man later in life. Five Nights at Freddy's 4 shares some similarities to it, particularly a protagonist who's a young child, a teddy bear Imaginary Friend, and a family member being an antagonist.
    • At one point in the Yandere Simulator let's play, he stands in the middle of the group of girls gossiping and yells "I am a normal girl! Look at me! Look at me! LOOK AT ME!". At another, as he has Yandere-chan go around complimenting students, he pretends to be a robot. It's even funnier when an update after he uploaded his videos reveals that Yandere-chan was an Empty Shell prior to the game, with Word of God confirmation that she simply acted normal to not raise suspicion.
    • Throughout his playthroughs of the Five Nights at Freddy's games he repeatedly calls the Puppet "the baby" ("because you don't want to wake the baby"). Five Nights at Freddy's: Sister Location later has a character actually named "Baby."
    • Crossing over with Heartwarming in Hindsight: in Drunk Minecraft #9, after Mark and Bob insult Wade, he asks in the in-game chat "Who would want to marry me?" Another player named Foxtrot4T4 responds "Who wouldn't want to marry you?" and flirts with him a little. She ended up taking him up on the offer — Foxtrot is Molly, Wade's girlfriend and later wife.
    • In Episode One of Mark's Undertale playthrough, he plays the game with Tyler. At one point, Tyler makes a seemingly random statement, not realizing he's just figured out the game's big reveal.
      Tyler: This makes me think like, uh... Flowey is like... the actual child of the goat lady.
    • This Happy Wheels highlight video features a level titled "Kill or be Killed". A year later, and guess what Flowey's famous line is?
    • At one point in the Cry of Fear playthrough he kills a monster with a single punching attack and comments with an angry tone "One punch, that's all it took?!"
    • During his playthrough of Case Animatronics, he yells at a deactivated animatronic to "have fun, staying on the ground forever, and NOT getting up, and shoving his entire self inside [him]." Come Five Nights at Freddy's: Sister Location: one animatronic proceeds to get up, and shove its entire self inside "Eggs Benedict's" body.
    • While playing Act One of Doki Doki Literature Club!, he ends up making a ton of comments that accidentally predict large sections of the plot. In particular, when he first meets Monika he suspects she'll be the first to die, before deciding that she's untrustworthy a moment later. The second is correct. Later, he makes this joke:
      Mark (as Monika): Yuri, that was really good! Don't you dare upstage me ever again, I will kill you. Thank you for sharing.
    • At the end of the video where he gets slapped by both PewDiePie and Jacksepticeye, Mark jokingly said that Pewds desperately needed more subscribers. Fast-forward to late-2018, and Pewds actually needed more subscribers to stay ahead of his closest competition, T-Series.
    • In his first FNAF video, Mark talks about how, "This would be like, terrifying if you... Controlled the cameras with like an Oculus Rift or something..." Five years later...
    • After Mark made his Smash Or Pass: Pokemon video, Game Theory decided to try and make "Markiplier's perfect Pokemon", which ended up being an Egyptian Cat Girl. Just a few days later, Mark would make the third episode of his Sucker for Love playthrough, and Nyanlathotep just so happens to fit that description.
  • Ho Yay:
  • I Am Not Shazam: Whilst Mark does call the Slender Man by his actual name, he often shortens it to just "Slender", which is the name of a popular game starring him, but also happens to be a Fandom-Enraging Misconception.
  • Memetic Badass: After he declared himself the "King of Five Nights at Freddy's", he very quickly became one.
  • Memetic Mutation: Here.
  • Narm:
  • Never Live It Down: On a more comedic note, ever since Will You Press the Button, nobody will let him forget that he blew up the city of Detroit for a piece of cake.
  • Nightmare Retardant:
    • Like with other horror Lets Players, his reactions and personality can help mitigate the scares for some viewers. He has been known to add his own every now and again however.
    • For Mark himself, Fake Difficulty is pretty much guaranteed to erase any fear he has of a game. Some notable examples:
      • Vanish is the Running Gag of this, which Mark had to play through numerous times, both on and off camera, before finally beating it, and he explicitly says that the game is so unfairly difficult that after so long its tense atmosphere becomes frustrating rather than scary.
      • By the time Mark was done with Five Nights at Freddy's he was responding to the animatronics coming at him with frustration and anger rather than fear, mostly due to the game becoming a Luck-Based Mission by that point. In fairness to the game, though, he had deliberately taken it to Harder Than Hard by going on a Custom Night and cranking all of the A.I.s up to their maximum setting (to illustrate how deep into Schmuck Bait that is, even the developer himself was surprised upon learning that beating it this way was even possible).
      • Though Mark ultimately had other reasons for not finding Evil frightening in the least (to the point that he laughed at the game's twist ending), his initial praises for the game abruptly ended when he was faced with a pointless and horribly implemented platforming puzzle.
      • Same goes for the Oculus Rift game Bleached Eyeballs. The going-back-and-forth-pressing-random-buttons puzzle became so monotonous and irritating to him that any subsequent jumpscares didn't faze him anymore. He eventually ragequit when he was presented with another puzzle just when he thought the game had reached its end.
  • No Yay:
    • Some of Mark's subscribers vehemently dislike the Fangirls who ship him with other YouTubers. Given that Mark has had an abusive relationship in the past, and that his current girlfriend, Amy, is appearing in his videos, people aren't so keen to force imagined relationships upon him.
    • Darkiplier/audience in "A Date with Markiplier", especially since he's in full Yandere mode. Likely intentional, considering Mark didn't like his leather pants status and wanted to bring him back to his horror roots.
  • One-Scene Wonder: Triggerhappy1337 from Mark's fifth playthrough of Rust. The comments for the video are absolutely bloated about Mark's fans adoring him and saying how awesome he is. And with good reason, since he gave Mark and Bob a bunch of supplies just for the hell of it.
  • Paranoia Fuel:
  • Player Punch:
    • In his play-through of Penumbra, he immediately hated Clarence for making him kill Dr. Swanson, the only person with a cure for the disease in the game.
    • Mark was also deeply upset over the whole concept of Calm Time, in which he played a serial killer who was forced to kill everyone in the game. Including a young child and his teenage babysitter. Imagine the white phosphorous incident from Spec Ops: The Line and you'll understand why Mark got so upset. Not only that, he had played it right after a session of Drunk Minecraft.
    • OFF already started to wear him when he learns that "purifying" a Zone leaves it drained of color and life, but he really gets creeped out by The Reveal in Zone 3 and by the Critic Burnt, so much so that instead of his normal outro he uses a negatively-colored clip of the Critic Burnt crying for help with no other sound. It is then later topped by the "battle" against Hugo, which was received by a pure "No. Just… No" Reaction and repeatedly (and uselessly) pounding any option but the ones he was supposed to.
    • He also seems extremely upset when he learns the true extent of suffering Misao had to endure before her demise, with good reason. At first, he had joked around with the exaggerated voices during the flashbacks of Misao's torment and abuse, but when it started to get to the darker stuff such as enforced rape, he became more silent and only watched with a look of disgust and sadness.
    • He played a little game called "Presentable Liberty" that started cute, but by the end of the hour-long video he's hit Sanity Slippage hard. Mark is hysterical and seems to be on the verge of tears.
    • While not as brutal as above, Mark is clearly devastated when he finds out that Madame Sinclair murdered his cat in Exoptable Money.
    • Another more minor one is his playthrough of Can Your Pet?. Rest in pieces, Cheeper.note 
    • The reveal about the protagonist getting his head chomped in in his fifth video for Five Nights at Freddy's 4 leaves him in stunned silence, gaping like a fish.
    • When he accidentally gets Ashley killed because he forgot that wendigos can copy voices in Until Dawn, he walks off screen to give a series of Rapid-Fire "No!". When he comes back, he vents about the stupid decision he made and decides to have another playthrough just to avoid that outcome.
  • Seasonal Rot: Though debatable, a vocal part of Mark's fans have expressed that his content isn't as good as it used to be, citing that it's either much less genuine or very same-y. Although Mark's usage of sketch comedy can be considered an Author's Saving Throw for this.
  • They Copied It, So It Sucks!: Though otherwise well received, some fans think the Darkiplier parts of A Date With Markiplier feels like Mark emulating what Jacksepticeye did with the AntiSepticEye videos throughout October 2016, just in a short film style instead of across many longer-form videos. Although this could be mediated by the fact Mark's change of Darkiplier was done less out of "copying ANTI" and more of "I want this character to be scary and not something fan girls adore", which this later on made better following Dark's origin in Who Killed Markiplier?.
  • Win Back the Crowd: While he kept a steady flow of videos, people were bothered by the fact the channel was just usual let's plays, being the same or too uninteresting. Then his foray in sketch videos happened and especially with the inclusions of A Date With Markiplier, Who Killed Markiplier?, and A Heist with Markiplier came in and it's become agreed Mark's on top once more.

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