The Cynical Brit / YMMV

Awesome Music: His ending theme "The Total Biscuit Ballad" has some of the most awesome guitar riffs you'll hear to pump you up for the next "WTF Is..."
Broken Base:
- His insistence on picking apart the options menu in many games had split the audience between those who were as insistent on the matter as he was, and those who only wanted to see gameplay. In videos that went on longer than a half an hour, he would usually provide an annotation to skip right to gameplay.
- His hatred of 30 FPS, particularly among console gamers, where 30 FPS is the norm. For console gamers, he'd rant about something that's entirely a non-issue at best, or indirectly say (possibly unintentionally) that consoles sucked simply for using a lower framerate at worst.
Creator Worship:
- He held CD Projekt RED in high regard, due to them developing great games, not using any DRM, and even add a ton of more content in patches that'd usually be paid DLC nowadays. That was on top of their M.O. for GOG (i.e., making it so classic titles that can't run on modern systems can).
- He also held PlatinumGames in high regard, due to consistently making great, well polished, complex titles that would make anyone feel like complete and total badasses (as well as making the PC release of Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance actually pretty decent).
- To a lesser extent, the various excellent PC ports of their various published IPs made him a fan of Square Enix's western publishing division.
Discredited Meme:
- The Cynical Fleet, especially when nearly naming his empire in Stardrive exactly that.
- He HATED the arrow-to-the-knee meme with a passion, but used other memes from time to time.
- During his TORk podcast with his wife Genna Bain and OMFGcata, he ended it with the following quote, and was promptly called out on it by his wife.
TB: You know what? I never asked for this.
Don't Shoot the Message: His acerbicness was hugely divisive. While his willingness to not mince words when soapboxing is part of the appeal for some, quite a lot of people who would have otherwise agreed with him on many issues found him too sanctimonious, tactless, or offputtingly rude.
Ensemble Dark Horse: According to a few comments on this Terraria video, "Mark."
Fandom Rivalry:
- He and the Yogscast appeared to be this way after formerly being thick as thieves, although there was a large degree of overlap and many have compared it to parents divorcing.
- He didn't appear to get along with PewDiePie's fandom that much, although TB stated he felt Felix got undue hate as YouTube's Hate Sink.
- His fans and Keemstar's are not on good terms, in no small part because of Keemstar's rant in which he claimed he was looking forward to covering TB's death... in response to a few minor insults.
Friendly Fandoms:
- With Press Heart To Continue and Jesse Cox, as they all hosted a podcast together.
- Fans of the Yogscast and TB used to mostly get along well, but they do occasionally have the odd dispute. Many fans still like both regardless and have compared it to parents fighting. After Simon made some inappropriate comments (including calling TB a "crying pissbabby" [sic]) TB officially cut off ties with them as a group; this hasn't stopped overlap, however, mostly due to fans siding with TB over Simon.
- While TB has cut ties with the Yogscast as a whole, his fanbase seems to absolutely adore Sips, if the reddit announcement of Sips being on the podcast is any indication. There's also a fair degree of overlap between fans of Strippin (who has since left) and TB, as well as B-Lister PyrionFlax due to their interactions. TB clarifying that he doesn't hate the Yogscast as a whole has helped to ease the divide somewhat, as has having InTheLittleWood on the shared podcast.
- Due to the pro-disclosure and pro-consumer nature of his fandom, Hat Films have a notable number of TB fans due to being very up-front with disclosure. It helps that their conduct is widely seen as very professional.
- He has quite an overlap with fans of Rooster Teeth, thanks to TB admitting that he's a fan and Burnie giving him a few mentions. When it was announced that TB had cancer, the post at /r/roosterteeth concerning his condition had well over two thousand upvotes.
- His fandom has some overlap with Dan Bull.
Harsher in Hindsight:
- In his research stream for Guise of the Wolf, TB remarked that he would find it hilarious if the developers went the route of Day One: Garry's Incident and filed a fraudulent DMCA claim against him. As it turns out, that's exactly what ended up happening. Though this could arguably be more Hilarious in Hindsight considering how badly the company came off looking and were forced to back down.
- While a guest on Gaming Garbage with Lowtax, where they both play an awful Nightmare on Elm Street web game and remark on it's awfulness, TB says: "This game is so bad it gave me cancer!"
- In a harsher incident, a product that TB sold through Rodeo Arcade was a shirt and poster combination parodying Breaking Bad, making him out as Walter White with the slogan "I am the one who mocks." A pretty good parody until he was later diagnosed with colon cancer.
- His infamous "get cancer and die" tweets from earlier on in his career were fairly bad in the first place (to the point that TB apologised for them and considers them an Old Shame), but have become outright tragic in light of his death on May 24, 2018.
- During an interview with H 3 H 3 Productions in regards to living with Stage 4 cancer, John mentioned that one of the things that made him optimistic was that his next-door neighbor, herself a Stage 4 cancer survivor, had survived for 20 years and counting following her diagnosis. Tragically, in May 2018, TB would announce that she had sadly passed away while he was in hospital following a surgery, and he himself passed away only five days later.
- In his last appearance on The Co-Optional Podcast, Totalbiscuit mentioned towards the end of the recording that he was looking forward to playing Detroit: Become Human like his co-hosts once it came out on May 25th, 2018. As luck would have had it, he passed away on the 24th, one day earlier.
- At the end of his 2016 Arbitrary Video Game Awards, TB noted how long the video ended up being, and mentioned that he hoped that the next year's would be shorter. Sadly, this ended up being the final iteration of the award show, as he was forced to cancel the one in 2017 due to his failing health, before passing away a few months later.
- His "more YouTube money than God!" Running Gag is much less amusing in light of how a combination of the medical fees for his (and later Genna's) cancer treatment and bad legal and financial advice on the part of his accountant left his family in dire financial straits after his passing, to the point where most of the money donated to his family after his death went straight to paying the IRS.
He Panned It, Now He Sucks!:
- A lot of people who watched him mainly for the coverage of the Catalysm beta quit watching him entirely when he quit WoW.
- When people asked him for his opinion on Diablo III and he criticised certain aspects of the game like the memetically infamous "Error 37" of the servers and the fact that it wouldn't have happened if the game had offline capability, he was loudly called out on it.
- He actually dared to say bad things about certain Indie games with Immunity To Criticism - And naturally if you look at the comments, you'll see a lot of this.
- After Total Biscuit made Tweets about how he got a video removed due to using Pokemon footage that seemed to be ripped from Nintendo's official sources, he then linked to a news post on a Nintendo fansite where a few comments were from people disagreeing with his opinions on the matter, and insulting the people who disagreed with him by calling them "children." This caused non-fans of his to start to see him in a rather negative light, especially since said comments were actually in the minority on said fansite, as most were actually agreeing with Biscuit on the matter. The post in question can be found here.
Hilarious in Hindsight:
- In one of the Terraria episodes with him and Jesse, Jesse tells TB that some people write Slash Fic of them, which TB's reaction is that he doesn't want to live anymore. Come his WTF Is...Super Awesome Wagon Adventure video, where he names his wagon crew based on them, has a event where his character and Jesse falls in love and have sex.
- In his Content Patch video on the Nintendo Content ID fiasco, he addresses the futility of comparing video games to other forms of media by saying that in a game like chess, one can adjust the rules without the constraints of an engine by moving the pieces wrong, and said that video games don't usually do that. Fast-forward around a year later, and along comes Tabletop Simulator, a game that features exactly that kind of rulebending as one of its most prominent features.
- During his "Modern Military Shooters in a Nutshell" video, he questions why series like Call of Duty and Medal of Honor didn't simply release without single-player campaigns in order to focus on what he saw as the obvious main draw of the Military Shooter genre, the multiplayer modes. Over five years later, Treyarch would announce that Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 would release without a single-player mode, instead focusing entirely on multiplayer.
- While discussing the potential future of standalone DLC expansions in his video on Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, one idea that he comes up with is "a prehistoric version of Dishonored". While Dishonored is yet to go that route, Far Cry itself did just that three years later with the release of Far Cry Primal (albeit as a full game instead of as an expansion).
Memetic Mutation:
- TotalBiscuit would often start videos for new games by going through the options menu, checking for a field of view (FOV) slider, much to the amusement (and also exasperation) of his viewers. ^note
- "I don't know who this total space biscuit is, but he sounds like an asshole" ^note
Never Live It Down: His "Go get cancer and die" tweets became this after his own cancer diagnoses came to light.
Older Than They Think: Some fans have asked if his logo of a hat is inspired by, or stolen from, Hat Films. TB politely but firmly pointed out that he'd been around for longer than the trio.
Periphery Demographic: There are people who primarily game on consoles subscribed to his PC-centric channel.
Pop-Culture Isolation: Discussed in his look at the Hidden Object Game, House of 1000 Doors - Family Secrets. Despite the genre being incredibly popular among a certain demographic, he never plays them, nor has interacted with anyone who plays them.
So Bad, It's Good:
Stoic Woobie:
- Had begun to gravitate toward this since Mailbox 133, where he tells the story of how he had been separated from his wife and stepson for four years and had been attempting to make ends meet for them with his YouTube career since.
- It became even more apparent in early 2014, when he deleted his reddit account and stopped posting on the Cynicalbrit subreddit due to the stress coming from interacting with his viewerbase making him concerned for his mental and physical health. Then he got the early signs of bowel cancer. His solution? Keep going, and encourage plenty of potential victims to seek help.
- In October 2015 the cancer came back and became inoperable. He vowed simply to go back to chemo, last as long as possible and to up the average lifespan of a cancer victim.

YMMV / The Cynical Brit

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