YMMV / Total Drama: Brains VS Brawns

• Angst Dissonance: After a while, Harmony's "falling into a pit" situation can get a bit stale.
• Base-Breaking Character:
  • To most readers, Tyrian is either one of the best characters for his straight-man deadpan snark, or one of the worst for how rude he is to his teammates.
  • Earl's starting to become this after he became allies with Sarge. Fans either hate him for knowingly keeping a violent sexual predator in the game or love him for being the only one to have the foresight to keep said psychopath on his good side.
  • Rai. Some find her incredibly sympathetic due to her mental state bringing nothing but negativity into her life, while others find her to be incredibly hypocritical since she and the other characters ostracized Sarge for his mental state yet give Rai tons of sympathy for hers.
  • SARA. Some find her Deadpan Snarker attitude to be funny, especially when it's directed at Chris. Others find her to be annoying, forced comic relief and kind of a Jerkass.
  • From the new Cliques VS Cliques cast, there's Peach, whom a lot of readers like for being a cute and fun addition to the cast, or dislike for being annoying and/or ungrateful of her comfy lifestyle.
• Broken Base: Ohhhh yes. Most of the characters are either loved or hated, as are many of the plot points, and then there's the issue of whether or not Rai should be held to the same standards as Sarge.
• Captain Obvious Reveal:
  • Sarge being the psychopath wasn't that hard to figure out, considering that there were few suspects, to begin with, and his increasingly unnerving behavior didn't exactly help.
  • Most people had figured out that Fosley was the Cloaked Shadow during the premerge.
• Creepy Awesome: Cy's pretty perverted and has a strange speech pattern, but his strategic game is on point.
• Crosses the Line Twice: Tyrian and Sarge both tend to do this.
• Designated Hero: Rai, at least in the merge. She acts like a self-centered jerk to everyone other than Moe, and yet we're still expected to root for her simply because the story says so.
• Designated Villain:
  • Tyrian is treated as a bad guy for disliking and wanting to get rid of Bianca and Wittney. It wouldn't be so bad if they weren't genuinely as annoying as he claimed they were. Him feeding Liv, a recovering drug addict a hallucinogenic mushroom was a dick move, but he didn't know about Liv's former addiction and only thought she hated mushrooms for no reason.
  • Boris is more or less portrayed as the bad guy in Episode 5, likely due to that being his elimination episode, even though Wishami was no more in the right than he was regarding their conflict.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Moe for being among the very few genuinely nice characters in the story and his occasionally hilarious antics.
  • Arthur, who was one of the first boots and meant to be a Decoy Protagonist, garnered quite a fan base during his short run due to his personality, mysterious past, and unfair elimination.
• Hollywood Pudgy: Wittney. Looking at her official artwork, nobody would think she was any bigger than the other females in the cast.
• Moe: Bianca, Diamond, Rai, Wishami, and even Wittney after a while.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • After Sarge reveals himself, any of the scenes with him could be considered this, but... in his second act of nature after he's exposed as the Psychopath, he coaxes Rai to an open field, and with her thinking he's Moe, he tackles her to the ground, gropes her, grabs her depression meds, and crams them all down her throat. And she isn't found by Wishami and Moe until the next morning...
  • Arguably, when Brody, Rai's ex-boyfriend, wants to get back together with her and swims across the ocean to see her after being shot down by Rai beforehand and after he cheated on her, Rai, rather than explaining why she broke up with him and why she doesn't want to get back together with him again, proceeds to act like a smug, condescending bitch to him and allows him to get arrested. Our hero, everyone.
• Narm: The saboteur of the Brains not only had the genius idea to give themselves a name, but that their moniker should be "The Cloaked Shadow". Kinda hard to take the guy/gal seriously after learning that.
  • After revealing themselves to be the psychopath, Sarge goes from a potentially-threatening villain to a cartoonishly-evil rapist.
• Never Live It Down: Tyrian, whose only hobby seems to be studying mushrooms, once said that mushrooms were plants, and fans and haters of his alike will never pass on a chance to bring it up.
• Portmanteau Couple Name:
  • Treyanca for Trey/Bianca
  • Cyamond for Cy/Diamond
  • Olliv for Ollie/Liv
  • Diearl for the Diamond/Earl ship that passes in the night.
• The Scrappy: Patsy, for being an arrogant, whiny Jerkass that continuously makes dumb decisions despite supposedly being among the smarter characters. Not helped that she eliminated fan-favorite Liv under flimsy circumstances. Delves into Base-Breaking Character status once the story stops portraying her in a protagonistic light.
  • Take Patsy, keep the smugness and turn it up to eleven and get rid of 90% of the screentime and you get Fosley.
  • Goldie for being a Flat Character who copies Sanjay's strategy, and for acting like she's superior to all of her teammates despite these things.
• Shocking Elimination:
  • Liv seemed like they'd be around to at least the merge, but ended up getting cut at the halfway point.
  • Nobody expected Arthur to be taken out in the first round of Cliques vs. Cliques.
• Spotlight-Stealing Squad: The Phoenix Island subplot just seemed to be an excuse to give Harmony, Trey and Bianca even more screentime, at the cost of everyone else involved getting shoved into their plots as sidekicks or minor rivals, if they're not forgotten altogether.
• Stoic Woobie: Ruth, after the psycho reveals themselves to her.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • The build-up to the psychopath storyline was well-written, even if it was a bit obvious as to who it was. Unfortunately, once they ( Sarge) are found out, they lose everything that made them interesting and become a cartoonishly-evil would-be rapist that wouldn't be out of place from an SVU episode.
  • Same goes for the Cloaked Shadow plot, the end of which the author actually made terrible on purpose for the sake of deconstruction.
• Ugly Cute: Ruth is supposedly unattractive in-universe, but that doesn't stop her Adorkable moments.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: When you take the time to think about it, Sarge can be quite the tragic villain. He has no idea that he's doing anything wrong, and when he's called out on it, he cannot comprehend why it's wrong. In his point of view, everyone else is ostracizing and bullying him for no legitimate reason. And really, nobody enjoys feeling like that, even people like Sarge. This is later lampshaded by Moe, with mixed reaction both in-universe and by readers.
• Wangst:
  • Wittney's self-esteem issues would be more sad if she didn't get angry over the slightest negative remark.
  • Patsy's main character trait seems to be complaining, be it about not being able to cheat at the game like she wanted, that her allies aren't as smart as she is, or that there's a physical challenge.