- Actor Shipping: Lindsay/Nella is quite popular, mostly for people who want unabashedly fluffy Les Yay instead of abuse and fucked-upness. And even though they're both married to other people, Lindsay/Doug is also popular. The reason is basically the same - fluff and cuteness. And both of these are just for fun.
- Adorkable:
- The Chick herself falls into this on certain occasions, such as when she's dancing badly or is actually able to let the fangirl in her appear.
- Nella's glee when breaking out her My Little Pony figures is practically infectious, and that's just one of many instances.
- All Animation Is Disney: She has to keep saying during the Anastasia review that it wasn't Disney-made. Although she says later in her Thumbelina review that she can't blame the thought:Chick: This was Don Bluth throwing in the towel. This was him saying - all right, Disney, you win. With your princesses, and your musicals, and your Coming Of Age stories with sweeping, snarky romances... you win. If you can't beat them, join them. Copy the Disney formula and marketing strategy, and you will make money.
- Alternative Character Interpretation: Is the Chick a hypocritical Know-Nothing Know-It-All who abuses people constantly to make herself feel better and is just as messed up as the Critic, or an intelligent, calm Closer to Earth feminist? There are enough people who believe either choice.
- Arc Fatigue: To some fans, "The Dark Nella Saga" just kept going and going and going... But the problem was probably less the length of the arc itself - seven episodes, probably edging on three hours, all told - and more how an arc that seemed like it would be played out over a few weeks took two and a half months to release.
- Awesome Music:
- The "Candle in the Wind" parody Lindsay sang after Nella's "death."
- Nella's "Ballad of Nomi Malone," running down the plot of Showgirls.
- Lindsay leading her friends in a performance of Newsies' "Seize the Day."
- Lindsay, JewWario, Allison Pregler, Elisa, Nella, Critic, Linkara, Todd in the Shadows, Paw Dugan, Oancitizen and Phelous singing "One Day More" is genuinely chilling.
- Elisa, Pushing Up Roses, MarzGurl, Allison, and the Chick all show that they have lovely voices in their rendition of "Part of Your World."
- Despite her love for Soundtrack Dissonance, she's also pretty good for choosing song lyrics that go well with the situation. "How can he tell her he loves her [-] he would give his heart gladly" when Critic Cannot Spit It Out, "baby come back, you can blame it all on me" when they've both left, Nella (who wants to be left how she is) is shut up by the Makeover Fairy when she tries to sing the start of Mein Herr from Cabaret and the end of The Lorax (2012) has a self-loathing tribute to alcohol.
- Chick and Critic's battle of the sexes "Reviewer on the Internet" song in the review of The Chipmunk Adventure.
- Base-Breaking Character: Check the comments for many videos Nella appears in and you'll find plenty that lament her getting screen time. Fans of The Renaissance Age of Animation tend to hate her.
- Big-Lipped Alligator Moment:
- Between a long drought of videos, Lindsay posted one in the Summer of 2010... aboard the New York City V subway train with a rowdy crowd of college students celebrating its last trip before MTA killed that train line! Most viewers were perplexed, to say the least. It didn't help that, yes, she never spoke of it again.
- Her Driven to Madness Heroic BSoD over how pathetic reviewing makes her was never brought up again.
- Broken Base: There are those who prefer her current material (that is, popular culture analysis and history with a few pepper shakes of snark) and those who prefer her older stuff, which were less focused on the analysis itself and more about throwing in a few gags at the expense of old movies.
- Character Rerailment: Political issues aside, a lot of people felt like Chick was overly nasty in Charlie's Angels (2000), forcing Nella and Elisa to do her things her way and generally acting like a bitter old bigot. Cutthroat Island had her return to lovable bitch territory.
- Comedy Ghetto: Everyone on the site gets it to some degree, but Lindsay is really the only contributor to push back against the trope. Her view is that the "silly little review shows" still have an awful lot of effort put into them and they've also helped fans get through depression, so they shouldn't be dismissed as worthless.
- Crosses the Line Twice:
- Nearly all the "Christmas Songs" video qualifies. She gets roofied by Brian the Sex Predator, makes her face look like a skeleton at one point and does a pretty good imitation of The Joker when she's mocking the "Christmas Shoes" glurge. The video that accompanies "Please, Daddy, Don't Get Drunk This Christmas" goes from disturbing to hilarious when the realistic domestic abuse gives way to stop-hitting-yourself's and noogies. It was also her first Black Comedy video, which set the standard for the following episodes.
- The Creepy Uncle joke in her "Enchanted Christmas" review.
- Gleefully hip-thrusting when the Mulan villain says they should get a missing doll back to a little girl. And playing the bouncy "I Love Little Girls" over his segment in the "Top Ten Nostalgic Villains" list.
- Spoony said in his commentary that "Spooning With Spoony" was her creation, not his.
- Her response to the guy in Showgirls saying his girlfriend is having a baby: "Why not just shove her down the stairs and hope for the best?"
- To make fun of the convention, Dark Nella literally stuffs Chick into the fridge. First time it's scary with Chick's screams, second time it's funny.
- Designated Monkey: Nella, "Dance, monkey!"
- Ensemble Dark Horse: Nella. Check the comments for any video which she appears in and you'll find plenty that gush about how awesome she is. Lindsay seems to have noticed, given how Nella seems to have started appearing in almost every video after mid-2009.
- P-Cash was pretty much the only thing in the infamous "Rape Rap" video that got a consistently positive reaction.
- The Sex Bot went away for a long time, but was loved and had a longtime stint in the Chez Apocalypse logo.
- If the Nella & Elisa double-act keeps getting bigger, they could be a Spotlight-Stealing Squad.
- Elisa has actually gotten her own show: Maven of the Eventide. She's come a long way from the Makeover Fairy.
- Her former roommate, Dan Roth, has been making more and funnier appearances, including a crossover with Music Movies.
- Fan Nickname: Japanese fans nicknamed her "Nosko."
- Fandom-Enraging Misconception: Ignoring Lindsay's own talk of how she's meant to be educational but mostly funny, and acting like she's just dry and boring, is a good way to get Chick fans hating you.
- Fans Prefer the New Her: The garish 80s makeover Lindsey, Elisa and Nella get in the Jem review. Looks actually pretty nice on them in a Narm Charm sort of way. Lindsey and Nella are naturally repulsed by it.
- Fountain of Memes
- Girl-Show Ghetto: Despite all evidence to the contrary, people assume her job is to be a feminist mouthpiece for the site. As mentioned in Misaimed Fandom, this really pisses Lindsay off.
- Growing the Beard: She began to develop more of her own review style starting roughly around the time of her Armageddon (1998) review, after which her friend Nella became a regular on the show. Around this point is when her reviews took on a more trope based look with a lot more Sketch Comedy. Then again, see Broken Base above. And arguably, her "Top 10 Disturbing and Inescapable Christmas Songs" list proved that dark, disturbing humor is what she's really good at.
- The Chick as a character really cemented finally at "Playing God", when she got her Sex Bot.
- Harsher in Hindsight:
- Not an example from within the same work, but The Running Gag of her Hocus Pocus review centers on the film's hang-ups with virgins, leading her to say "I mean, why do virgins even exist? Why don't they just lose it straight out of the womb...screaming and bleeding?" What would've been a bit of Black Comedy and Crosses the Line Twice moment becomes awful after the creation of A Serbian Film, which several of the other TGWTG contributors have reviewed.
- Any video where Chick fights Critic about her role in the site, knowing now that Lindsay really didn't like the Distaff Counterpart idea to begin with and hates how she went about it. She contributed a lot to the "Not So Awesome" document that listed many grievances with Channel Awesome, including issues with Doug being ignorant and not speaking out against poor treatment by the higher-ups.
- She took quite a bit of heat for her Schedule Slip during 2009-10. Which is pretty painful after the news came out that she was a little busy getting an abortion, and then making a documentary about it for her master's thesis. She should be respected for still being around and making funny videos for the internet even while that was happening.
- In her weight-issues-discussing "Thanks For The Feedback", she mentions that people judge her appearance far more than they do the Critic's. The playing field is leveling out a bit more now, with comments about the "cellulite" on his legs in Suburban Knights, how he would look much better if he lost a few stone and how he should stop raiding his fridge more than five times a day.
- In the performance of "One Day More" that ends her Les Miserables video, Javert's part is sung by JewWario, who four years after committing suicide, would posthumously be revealed as a sexual predator, which might make that whole "pursuit" aspect of Javert's character pretty uncomfortable to imagine.
- The ending of "Top Ten Worst Disney Sequels" ends with a rant against careless audiences buying into Disney's regurgitation of their properties through their Direct to Video sequels, ending with a silver lining that the trend has since ended. Years later, Disney has fallen into their old habits with their live-action remakes, something Lindsay has been especially outspoken in her criticism.
- The appearances of Mara Wilson, given that Mara has implied Lindsay played gatekeeper on her coming out as bi, which Lindsay later regretfully admitted to, and that the two's friendship ended for other reasons afterward.
- The incident with the "Rape Rap" video became even harsher when Ellis revealed that she made the video as a coping mechanism for her own sexual assault and that the video was uploaded without her consent.
- The Cutthroat Island episode, the first episode of the show after To Boldly Flee, shows the Nostalgia Critic passing his baton over to the Chick as his successor. This ended up not becoming the case as two months later, the Nostalgia Critic returned, then Lindsay Ellis left Channel Awesome not too long after. One factor in her departure was that she felt pigeonholed into being Doug's Distaff Counterpart
- The Black Comedy Rape jokes about Chick, such as her having been abused by a Creepy Uncle, are much harder to watch after Lindsay came forward about having experienced sexual assault.
- Heartwarming in Hindsight:
- In the first "Thanks For The Feedback", the Critic breaks down and shout-asks her if she even cares about him. She doesn't have time to answer before he storms off, but various episodes later on show pretty clearly that he's one of the very few people she does give a shit about.
- Her warm praise for Return Of Jafar-era!Iago trying to become a good guy but still keeping his basic nastiness intact. After To Boldly Flee, she's going through the same thing.
- While discussing her Best Films of 2013 list, she reveals that she was in film school with Ryan Coogler, who was a tremendously nice guy who she hopes will be able to leverage his work on Fruitvale Station into a successful career. Over the next few years, Coogler had a breathtakingly meteoric rise up the ranks of Hollywood's prestige directors, rivaling that of Steven Spielberg. Lindsay's reaction to this was quite amazed
. - In her "Female Superheroes" video (originally released in 2012), she expressed a major desire that the Wonder Woman movie (which had been in Development Hell for ages) would finally break the streak of bad superheroine movies (and that Hollywood would be wise to make it a Period Piece a la Captain America: The First Avenger). Based on the critical and commercial success of Wonder Woman (2017), it appears she got her wish.
- Hilarious in Hindsight:
- This video, which Lindsay originally made while in high school, involves (among other things) a giant stuffed bear with AIDS having an affair with a teenager. In other words, Pedobear.
- In her early reviews, she liked making fun of Belligerent Sexual Tension between characters and how people seemed to think that was entertaining. She has a Masochism Tango/Dating Catwoman thing with the Critic that's incredibly enjoyable for both us and them.
- In the My Little Pony review, her main beef was that the characters were deathly boring and had no real conflicts to face. Then My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic came out to rave reveiws for having nuanced individual characters facing different conflicts, be it personal problems or saving the world from terrible evils.
- "And besides, who's going to be interested in a female character who's pretty shamelessly a knock-off of her already popular male counterpart?" Seeing how fricking huge the character sheet is, evidently quite a lot of people.
- She introduced a character named "Lord MacGuffin". In Pixar's Brave...
- Her first episode related to the music industry was released about the same time her future IRL boyfriend came onto the site.
- In "Top 10 Worst Disney Sequels", when commenting that George Carlin is voicing a character in Tarzan 2, she puts a clip of him saying this line:
"I'm getting really sick of guys named Todd!"- In October of 2011, Elisa creates the vampire-obsessed, Perky Goth Maven of the Eventide. Then, in September of 2012, Columbia Pictures releases to theatres Hotel Transylvania with a young vampire, Perky Goth named Mavis, which Maven reviews in a Vlog.And if any of you start calling me Mavie-Wavie, I will find out where you sleep and make you regret it!"[Beat][cheerful] Bye!
- Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated: The Lovecraft Expy has to compete with Dusk, a Twilight Expy. He does so by writing a Young Adult romance novel, with his Eldritch Abomination characters. Now comes Fifty Shades of Green.
- Dark Nella's outfit includes a black trenchcoat and a black shirt with a Starfleet emblem. Come 2013...
- In Les Misérables cover by the site's reviewers, Todd sings Eponine's lines (both were in love triangles), Elisa has Cosette's parts and Paw (although he still shares them with Allison) is Marius, both of them would end up dating some time later.
- Her "Disney Needs More Gay" video about the relationship between Disney and the gay community came out in March of 2013. The Disney movie of the year Frozen came out in November and rapidly gained a large LGBT Fanbase.
- In her review of Newsies, she calls out Jack becoming a scab as being naked Padding, and suggests that if they really wanted to include this development, he could at least learn a lesson about how important he is to the strike. In the musical adaptation, that's exactly what happens.
- In her Cruel Intentions review she points out that Amy Adams played Sarah Michelle Gellar's character in the direct to video prequel and says she's the only actress who would fail harder at playing a villain. In 2012 Amy Adams was in Paul Thomas Andersons's The Master where she played an extremely dark character who, in context of the story, could easily be considered a villain. She garnered critical praise and even an Oscar nomination for the performance and it's considered one of the best of her career.
- In the Ferngully review, she and the Critic discuss how annoying Batty Koda is. Yet at the end of the "Top Ten Hottest Animated Guys" video, it's revealed that she likes him!
- At the end of her "Top 10 Boy Bands of the '90s" episode, upon finding out about the existence of The Wanted, she immediately deems them as better than One Direction. Not what the teenage girl demographic decided...
- In her "Top 11 Villainesses" the only Disney villains that made it were Ursula, Cruella De Ville and Maleficent. Fast forward to season 4 of Once Upon a Time where those three villainesses team up and call themselves the Queens of Darkness.
- She sings to Critic in the crossover review of The Chipmunk Adventure, "I live on average two years longer than you!" While he did return before she left, Nostalgia Critic died in late 2012, and the Nostalgia Chick identity ended in early 2015, approximately a two year difference.
- The end of the What Women Want review has a Gender Flip on the movie's story where Chick starts hearing the (very repetitive) thoughts of her male colleagues. A gender-bent version of the movie, aptly called What Men Want, came out in 2019.
- In Kate & Leopold, there's a scene where a man offers Kate some edamame, complete with a gratuitous Scare Chord. Lindsay reacts with a confused "Real men don't eat soy? What was the point of that shot?" In the late 2010's, there are right wing circles who genuinely believe that soy is feminizing and have come up with the insult "soy boy."
- In her list on "Female Superheroes", she directly compares Tank Girl to Deadpool, "but not the Ryan Reynolds Deadpool." She was specifically referring to the infamous In Name Only version from X-Men Origins: Wolverine, but given how her video was made in 2012, she had no idea of what was about to come a few years later.
- This video
- Hollywood Homely: Nella, especially in the Grease review. Many missed the point and treated her like a woobie, not listening to the fact that Nella wrote that sideplot herself and is perfectly happy with her appearance.
- Hype Backlash: How some would feel about Rape Rap. Those who managed to find it for the sake of Bile Fascination discovered that it wasn't near as offensive as it could have been, and felt it was either trying too hard, or not trying enough. That being said, it's still another reason to forget about it: it's just that forgettable.
- I Knew It!: A few fics guessed correctly that she would rape Spoony to get revenge on him for hurting her, and in "Rejected Ideas For 'Spooning With Spoony'", she seems to do it.
- Jerkass Woobie: The Chick is horrible to Nella, has an abused Sex Bot and tried to overthrow the Critic for her own gain in Kickassia, but she has terrible self-esteem, has a heart of... not gold exactly but bronze, had a bad childhood that she still has issues over and broke down in "Spooning With Spoony".
- Her crush on Todd, who ignores her no matter how hard she tries because of his continual obsession with Lupa (Allison). It's pathetic, kinda scary (a parody of Misery was even cut for too much creepiness) and established as not love, but like his own pathetic obsession, she's so fucked up about it that you kinda have to feel bad for her.
- The Makeover Fairy is a horrible, shrill Alpha Bitch with far too high standards of beauty, but she's a Nervous Wreck who genuinely believes she's doing the right thing and cling-hugs to Nella and Todd when they take the blame themselves for their horrible makeovers.
- Just Here for Godzilla: In her Bratz episode, more people were interested in her dynamic with the Critic than in her actual review.
- Memetic Badass: Most fanfic fandoms aren't usually fond of women. Not so here. There's even been a trend for the Chick to be portrayed as the kind of goddess that takes sacrifices.
- Memetic Molester: The TGWTG Kink Meme usually paints the Chick as a dommy sociopath who likes to pick up guys (and girls) through the use of chloroform.
- Memetic Mutation: Animated GIFs of Lindsay being◊ hit in the face by a shower of hotdogs (from her review of Freddy Got Fingered) have spread to areas of the internet who have no idea who she is, but like the image. It was used in the movie Isn't It Romantic.
- Misaimed Fandom: In the Chick/Todd/Lupa Triangle Of Rejection, the only one you're meant to feel properly sorry and root for is Lupa. Chick and Todd are only sympathetic because they're so pitiful and for either of them to get what they want (when the object of their affections really doesn't return the feelings) would be creepy as hell.
- She still gets complaints that her reviews aren't even close to being passionate and that she sounds bored, when it should have been made clear from the X-Men review and all of her Not So Above It All moments that she thinks she's "too good" for that kinda thing. And really, that complaint already is a high YMMV.
- To Lindsay's irritation, the character is seen sometimes as a feminist role model, and even gets bashed for not being one. While she says plenty of valid things, she's at heart an abusive, judgmental, stalking, over-exaggerated comedy character not to be taken seriously.
- It might help that she's so dominating and can ignore being in trouble pretty well, but she's really not meant to be a badass taking names. She's just a broken little girl who firmly believes in Don't You Dare Pity Me!.
- There's also the people who demand that she be serious 24/7, despite Lindsay stating that she's primarily a comedic reviewer looking to give the audience a fun twenty minutes. Looking at it that way, it's "women can't be funny" all over again.
- Moe: Nella for being an abused but still upbeat Womanchild, and Maven for being a pretentious but lovable Perky Goth fangirl who has her vampire fantasies knocked down when she interacts with anyone else.
- Narm Charm: The last half of the "Kirk vs. Picard video", where Chick and Nella meet to do battle, is gloriously cheesy.
- Nausea Fuel:
- During her review of Mulan, Lindsey and Nella wonder about the Chinese practice of footbinding, then later show us some horrifying pictures of bound feet (*shudder*). "Say what you want about Communism, but at least they put a stop to that shit!"
- The Freddy Got Fingered review in all its entirety. Aside from the content of the movie itself, we have the Chick, Nella, and Oancitizen being driven to madness by the movie. It involves sausage among other things.
- Never Live It Down:
- Her Refuge in Audacity "worse than seven holocausts" comment seems to be getting there.
- The on-going backlash towards her review of Dune (1984).
- God, you chloroform one guy in a sexualized, enjoying-yourself-immensely way and suddenly you're the chloroform queen. (This is a lighter example than the rest, obviously.)
- In an also lighter sense and around Twitter, being an "obsessive compulsive stickler for pitch" and autotuning the majority of people in the musical numbers. Even though mostly by one or two notes.
- Nightmare Fuel: Here.
- Older Than They Think:
- Fred The Bear predates 4chan itself and therefore Pedobear by at least four years.
- In the commentary for the "Top Ten Worst Disney Sequels", Lindsay and Todd remind the people who think she steals everything from Plinkett that the "crazed stalker" thing wasn't started by him.
- Paranoia Fuel: She seems to know exactly when Todd is miserable and is willing to make him feel even worse so he can do what she wants. For anyone who's been stalked, it'll hit too close to home even though it's Played for Laughs.
- Reviews Are the Gospel: Tends to be the case for her male viewers when she trashes a girly film.
- Ron the Death Eater: While fangirls love her (they really do), in fanfic she tends to be less the Distaff Counterpart of the Critic and more the female version of Ask That Guy with the Glasses.
- She Panned It, Now She Sucks:
- She pissed off quite a few people with her negative review of Dune (1984). She has since said that while she still doesn't think the film is good, a lot of the criticisms were spot-on and she made mistakes in her review, misunderstanding plot elements and the like.
- Her review of the Transformers franchise. In a self-parody, The Nostalgia Critic bitched at her for that one too.
- Inevitably, fans of the The Little Mermaid (1989) weren't too keen on her hate for it.
- Apparently Disney fangirls can be just as savage as fanboys, because they got their claws out when she reviewed (not panned, we might add) Mulan and slammed Hercules. Notably, Lindsay's actual opinion of Hercules sums up to "It was flawed, but I DO enjoy it." She also said she "enjoyed the hell out of this movie" during her Mulan review.
- People who liked Dragonheart for more than just the "fucking dragon", bitched heavily after her review of it too.
- Not everyone agrees with her view that Shrek was a hate-filled Take That! at Disney.
- Early on, Gargoyles fans weren't exactly happy when she acted like two well-established Tear Jerker moments in the show were unintentionally hilarious instead.
- As you can tell from this page alone, she made her rage at Beauty and the Beast: The Enchanted Christmas abundantly clear. The movie was actually received quite well, so at the very least people were confused by her calling it worse than "seven holocausts".
- During her review of The Man in the Iron Mask she said the only reason the movie did well was because of squeeing Leonardo DiCaprio fangirls. People who liked the movie as a movie were not pleased.
- The Fifth Element. Many people think she really misrepresented this film, especially when she didn't show Leeloo kicking ass so she could complain about her being passive.
- Really, the Chick is subject to this far more often than the Critic, since she tends to review films that are usually rather well-liked, such as... Well, Mulan, Hercules and The Little Mermaid (1989), while the Critic reviews, well... This. She explains this in the Worst Witch review, as people tend to be more forgiving towards the popular films rather than the obscure.
- Many fans of Jem were very angry at Lindsey for her panning the series, the biggest complaint came from her not even bothering to watch the series entirely before she reviewed it.
- Although she didn't actually REVIEW it, she put a small Take That! to Lilo & Stitch as "Slapped together garbage" that "didn't have as much passion put into it" as The Lion King in her review of The Lion King.
- Lindsay outright said she hated Wreck-It Ralph. She was going to explain why in a "Worst Movies of 2012" review, but she never got around to making it. In her "Worst of 2013" review, she briefly mentioned that she would never do the "Worst of 2012" video while the onscreen text said, "And you will never know why I hate Wreck-It Ralph (STOP GUESSING YOU'RE ALL WRONG)", thereby confirming backlash from WIR fans is the biggest concern for her regarding the "Worst of 2012" list.
- Seasonal Rot: Aside from a few gems (Showgirls, Enchanted Christmas, The Smurfette Principle), even Lindsay admits that she was mostly half-assing it in the period from The Last Unicorn to Ever After, mostly because school and real life were kicking her in the behind.
- She Really Can Act: Nella in the Dark Nella Saga. Funny, genuinely scary and able to go to between "a quasi-demonic force of evil" and her usual fangirly self.
- Strawman Has a Point: Well, maybe Todd could stand to wear something brighter...
- Tear Jerker: Here.
- They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Seriously, who else thinks that Nella's pony melodrama deserved more attention? As it happens, Kyle Kallgren did. One of his earliest contributions to the site was a dissertation on Nella's pony story.
- Unintentionally Sympathetic: Much like Doug and Critic, Chick probably wouldn't considered a still likable Jerkass Woobie if it weren't for the adorkable Lindsay playing her.
- Vocal Minority: Like how Critic fangirls don't actually want him Bound and Gagged in their basement, most Chick fanboys are respectful people who think she's great fun to watch (so not just something pretty to look at) and don't insult other contributors when praising her.
- What Do You Mean, It's Not Didactic?: Chick actually gets pretty in-depth into her viewing of All Dogs Go to Heaven as a Christian allegory... only to lead up to, what else, Big-Lipped Alligator Moment!
- The Woobie:
- The Sex Bot. "I was not God's will!" How could you not feel bad for it? The other characters manage, as its complaints are completely ignored.
- Elisa looking increasingly heartbroken as she's passed over for every part in the reenactments and gets stuck playing Kyle McLachlan in the Showgirls review.
- Nella went right into this in the second part of the "Dreamworks Vs. Disney" episode, where she forgoes the Dance Party Ending to go into a ball and cry.
