YMMV / MasterChef Australia

• Adorkable: Jock, Andy and Melissa — who replaced Gary, Matt and George as judges from the 2020 season onwards — are more likely to get excited and/or emotional over what their contestants are doing compared to their predecessors, leading to moments such as them holding hands in happy anticipation as they watch Reynold blow sugar bubbles, or Jock giddily telling his colleagues about Emelia's beautifully cooked compressed choux like a child telling his mates about a shiny new toy he just got. Jock also has the tendency to make So Unfunny, It's Funny jokes, causing the other two to call him "dad".
• Base-Breaking Character:
  • Contestants who excel in one type of dish but then proceed to do it for majority of their run in the competition tend to fall into this category. On one hand, many consider showing diversity in cooking is important if someone wants to be called a "Master Chef" thus those who go far without doing much of that are considered unworthy of the title. Meanwhile, some others considered playing through one's strength to advance in the competition is playing smart and the joke the community use when they count the "panna cotta" or "ice cream" of the year hasn't gotten old yet.
  • Georgia from season 7. Some fans love her for being a really talented and well-rounded cook, others see her as a drama queen who gets too much attention/favoritism from the judges, and being constantly being shoehorned in the scenes, when viewers would rather see other contestants.
  • Chloe from Season 8 has a divisive base for similar reasons. She is considered one of the top contenders of the show, but the fact that she gets named as the Top 3 multiple times (and almost winning 2 immunity pins) cause a lot of viewers to accuse the judges of favoritism.
• Elimination Houdini: Rose from Season 7 is considered one of the weakest cooks in the entire competition. She doesn't have a single memorable dish and has almost consistently placed in the bottom 3 during Invention tests. However, she always manage to survive the elimination challenges since some other contestants would somehow perform worse than her when the pressure gets way into their heads. She eventually got eliminated, after reaching the top 10 and surviving a total of 7 pressure tests (4 individual, 3 team) before getting eliminated on her 8th (and 5th individual pressure test).
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Poh, who is the runner-up of Season 1, is still widely considered as one of the series' greatest legends, even after 12 years. She's definitely a lot more memorable than the season's winner.
  • Despite only winning 4th place, Reynold Poernomo is by far the most popular contestant from Season 7 (if not the most popular contestant in the show's entire history). He's a very talented dessert king who had plated up some of the most memorable dishes in the show that are original, highly techical, and taste as delicious as they are amazing to look at. His good-looks and calm personality also helps. To emphasize how popular he's become, he's been invited to return as a guest judge almost every season after his own, and videos of his dishes tend to have a lot more views than any other contestants'.
  • Season 7 contestant and winner Billie McKay is also very popular; probably coming second next to Reynold as the most popular contestant from her season.
  • Jess Liemantara from Season 10 has gained a lot of love as well for her exceedingly sweet and bubbly personality, despite her formidability as a chef. She's also very nice and willing to support other contestants in the middle of her own cook, which won even more people's hearts. It also helps that she's sometimes regarded as Reynold's Distaff Counterpart, being the Dessert Queen to his Dessert King.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Masterchef Australia has a lot of fans from UK and US who thinks that it is better than their own country's version of Masterchef (even Gordon Ramsay, who guest-starred in Australia's 10th season claims to be a fan). Probably because they managed to balance both the merit value of the winner and the contestant (which the US version lack in favor of loud personality), the entertainment value (lacking from the UK version) and all the judges and contestants managed to be likable (which cannot be said for the US version). So, their popularity is based on the lack of No Such Thing as Bad Publicity.
• Harsher in Hindsight: One of the Funny Moments in Season 12 has Jock poke fun at the sexual Visual Innuendo on one of Ben Ungermann's dishes. This becomes a bit uncomfortable when Ben is later made to leave the competition over allegations of sexual assault.
• Ho Yay:
  • Season 4 winner Andy Allen is really close with Ben, to the point that many viewers suspected something going on between them. The fact that they went to work together after the show is over certainly did not help.
  • During the first day of the Heston Week in Season 8, the contestants were asked to set up a space-themed pop-up restaurant in the Melbourne Star, where the judges and the guests were served in the Ferris wheel pods. During one of the judging session, George got so carried away by the atmosphere and the food, that he asks Heston to "hold hands". Viewers were quick to point out George's "failed attempt at a bromance", and jokingly compared this situation to The Bachelor.
• The Scrappy:
  • While they don't exactly hate her, viewers of Season 7 would like to see Rose go away, as they feel that she lacked both the talent and the ability to handle pressure to stay in the competition. Whenever she lands herself in elimination (which is quite frequent), commenters on Facebook would always wish her the worst, and get disappointed/outraged when other, more talented chefs did the worse performance and got eliminated instead of her.
  • Season 7 also has John, who received a lot of hate from viewers for constantly screwing up team challenges due to his selfishness and apparent inability to consider his teammates when making decisions. The first instance of this could be observed in the Relay challenge, when he destroyed his team's "mussel broth with coconut and saffron" by adding in 10 or so ingredients to the dish to create something completely different. His failure to relay his new recipe caused a lot of confusion and stress for the other members coming after him, and his mistake brought the blue team into elimination, which costed team leader Jarrod his place in the competition. The second mess up happened during the Power Apron week, where he volunteered himself to be his team's captain and once again overcomplicates things by having his team try to serve six dishes and pressured Georgia to handle two of them. The ensuing chaos in the kitchen produced disastrous desserts, which once again brought his team an elimination that saw him leave the competition.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The Twist Week introduced in Season 12. As its name suggests, this theme introduced outlandish twists to add extra challenges for the contestants in the middle of their cook, such as: forcing teams to switch kitchens during a service challenge, taking away the recipe in the middle of a Pressure Test, throwing in extra ingredients that the contestant must use during a mystery box challenge, etc. This causes a lot of stress and drama in the kitchen as the chefs flail and scramble to adjust to these curveballs—many are even forced to completely redo their dishes with half the time left—and make mistakes that they otherwise wouldn't have due to the shock. Many viewers find these "twists" unnecessarily mean-spirited (particularly the Pressure Test twist, where the cooks are pretty much forced to memorize an incredibly complex recipe of an unfamiliar dish that was only introduced to them at the start of the episode), and hope that the "Twist Week" would never show up again.
  • Season 14, Fans & Favorites already has an alienating premise: not only are the newbies pitted against favorites who already have some culinary experience in and out of the show, 3 of the favorites are already winners of their season ^note Season 1's Julie Godwin, Season 7's Billie McKay & Season 10's Sashi Cheliah. Viewers are already expected that barring any surprise, the newbies will be decimated this season.
• Shocking Elimination:
  • Season 8 has Jimmy Wong. He got off with a very good start, as the first dish he made after entering the competition received flattering comments like, "You're cooking like this in the first week, where would you go next?" and is generally considered to be a much stronger cook than his sister Theresa. Unfortunately, he landed in a Pressure Test by week 4, and, being more of an intuitive-based chef, he struggled with following recipes, and was the 6th person to be eliminated.
  • In Season 10, Brendan was eliminated in Episode 24 for undercooking his steak in a challenge involving butchering and cooking with beef cuts. However, many thought Chloe, who missed the instruction completely by putting the meat into the meat grinder without butchering the meat and ignoring the judges' subtle warn about it, should have been the one sent home despite making a good dish that night.
• Take That, Scrappy!: Of all the returnees in Fans & Favourites, Season 7's John stood out as someone who was definitely not a favourite. Both the judges and the contestants made frequent references to his infamous white veloute that singlehandedly torpedoed his team's relay challenge, and he also ended up being the first returning contestant eliminated in the season.
• Tearjerker:
  • Also counting as a Shocking Elimination: In Season 10, Loki's elimination during Gordon Ramsay Week. The week prior, he had won the immunity pin. However, he landed into the Pressure Test with the rest of his team when they lost the team challenge, and decided not to use the pin to save himself. Unfortunately, he struggled all throughout, and while Sarah's and Chloe's replications had one issue, his had too many, and he was sent home, becoming the first contestant to be eliminated while still holding the pin. All of the contestants were absolutely devastated upon hearing it, and came to embrace him.
  • In Season 12, Jess Liemantara was the first contestant to be eliminated after the COVID-19 protocols were set in place, which means that the judges and other contestants couldn't hug her goodbye when she walks out of the kitchen. The way she breaks down to tears in the middle of the kitchen after being told by the judges that she's going home, while her friends just awkwardly stand and watch, looking equally torn up by her loss but unable to do anything to give her comfort is just devastating, especially when one considers what a Cuddle Bug she usually is.
  • The sudden passing of Jock, just one day before the new season premiere has made the 15th season tough for many viewers to watch. Special mention goes to the tributes before and after the first episode. The first, appearing at the top of the episode was a simple message to acknowledge Jock’s passing and urge fans to consider the season a celebration of his work◊. The second, at the end was a heartfelt message from the MasterChef production team◊.
• Theme Pairing: A few viewers of season 12 have taken to shipping Reynold and Jess due to their respective titles as the Dessert King and Queen of the series, despite the fact that their on-screen interactions are fairly minimal.
• They Copied It, So It Sucks!: Season 5 was not very well received, due to it's "themed" week format and it's greater emphasis on the contestant's personalities rather than cooking skills being labelled as a desperate attempt to copy the formula its more successful rival, My Kitchen Rules. It completely backfired, Masterchef's ratings sank down instead(in fact the finale for that season was watched by under a million people) and made the executives decided to cancel all their spin-offs (Professionals, Junior and All-Stars) to refocus on their original series.
• The Woobie:
  • Season 6's Brent may have won the competition that year, but his path to victory was far from being easy. Not only did he end up in all but two Pressure Tests throughout the entire season, it took him eight weeks before he was able to stay out of one for the first time. The first two times he came out in the top three during a Mystery Box Challenge or Invention Test, he wound up bombing the next challenge and winding up in the subsequent elimination cookoff.
  • Georgia from Season 7 may qualify. She is a great cook, but had the terrible luck of being placed in not-so-good teams. She's been sent to elimination in almost every team challenge because the team she was in kept on performing the worst in the challenges. This hit its apex when John screwed over the entire blue team during Marco Week by attempting to change the dish they were preparing and completely ruining it, forcing Georgia to prepare a dish on her own in five minutes, forcing the team into elimination.