YMMV / Unraveled

• Awesome Music: The Perfect Pokérap, a 9-minute long gesamtkunstwerk that combines triplet rap, educational rap, traditional Broadway, performative dance, and a ballad to Brian's lost Tangela, Terry. The whole of which Brian performed live at PAX East 2019.
• Fountain of Memes: Brian David Gilbert himself has quickly caught on as one due to his chaotic and theatrical persona and the increasingly obscure (or otherwise bizarrely executed) topics he chooses to cover.
• Genius Bonus: A subtle one from Kirby Unraveled. One of the metaphors that Brian tries but fails to ascribe to Kirby is "Loving Sleds," which he states is a bullshit metaphor. This works on multiple levels, even aside from being a reference to Citizen Kane.
  • The first level works when you realise that he is deliberately misinterpreting the symbolism, which parallels his inability to figure out what Kirby represents by thinking too literally.
  • The actual symbolism is that Rosebud, Kane's sled, was the last remnant of a simpler time in his life when he was young and the world was uncomplicated. Brian's final conclusion is that entertainment made for kids is allowed to be simple and that you don't need to find a deeper meaning where none exist.
• Growing the Beard: Initially it seemed season two might fall into a Sophomore Slump—The first two episodes were back-to-back episodes where the humour came from plotting serious fantasy characters on an x-y graph using a comically mundane point of reference for the humourous juxtoposition ^note  "Dark Souls & Office Management" and "Mortal Kombat & Kuddling" . Combined with the jarring transition to Brian's new look and the long hiatus between seasons 1 & 2 made the episodes feel samey. It wasn't until "How to make a perfect E3 press conference (or drinking game)" and the many iconic moments it provided that season 2 started picking up steam.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Brian mourning his loss of Terry at the end of the Perfect Pokérap is this after it was revealed that a large number of Pokémon catchable in previous games cannot be transferred to Pokémon Sword and Shield, Tangela included. ^However...Tangela is among the first Pokémon to be added back into the game via the Isle of Armor DLC, softening the blow a bit.
    Why catch them all if you can't keep the ones that you love?
  • The much loved quote "God has cursed me for my hubris, and my work is never finished" becomes this after the Pokemon Edibility episode, which ended up being the final episode of the series and was uploaded on Brian's last day at Polygon. Though it can cross over with Heartwarming in Hindsight since this means that Brian is finally free to pursue the projects that he wants to make, deep in his heart.
  • The parody E3 "Unraveled Games" showcase ends with a vague trailer promoting an Unraveled episode on Pokémon edibility (parodying the tendency of conferences to vaguely promote a game that's purely Pandering to the Base, but said game ends up in Development Hell or never coming out at all), before revealing that "Unraveled Games" shut down and said episode was cancelled. After this, many fans wanted Brian to make an actual Unraveled on the topic of eating Pokémon, which he eventually did...as his Grand Finale before ending Unraveled and leaving Polygon. The video explains how Brian hates the topic and he calls out the fans who actually wanted it to be real.
  • At one point in his episode about reading every single Halo novel, he takes a look at the (at the time upcoming) TV series and goes off on a tangent-in-a-tangent demanding that he gets to write for the show. If the comments in his video are of any indication, fans of Halo are clearly not pleased with what they got for the TV series, and wished Brian did wrote the show instead.
• Heartwarming Moments:
  • The conclusion of the Kirby episode. After hitting the Despair Event Horizon and reverting to a primal life in nature, Brian realizes that Kirby neither has nor needs "a dark backstory or a logical rationale." He then repeats the Kirby's Adventure opening, having accepted that there is no explanation.
  • His video on using the Sims to improve his apartment starts out as a tearjerker, every single one of his virtual Brian Sims dying within days of sadness and/or boredom. The real Brian himself comes close to a Despair Event Horizon when he tries to create all the paintings of clowns, fruits and jazz musicians needed to complete his project and realizing he will NOT succeed on his own. So he calls his friends and asks for help. They all say yes and join in to help. The rest of the video becomes a joyful celebration of friendship and turns his apartment into a monument to the fact that You Are Not Alone, love and help are only a phone call away.
  • His "Pokemon Edibility" episode and finale of the series is a love letter to the fandom and to fan theorists of all kinds, with Brian saying even though the things he researched seem small and niche and unimportant, the very act of researching and caring for it imbues them with meaning, both for him and those he shared them with.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • "Solving the Zelda Timeline in 15 Minutes" sees BDG pitch a theory that Hyrule Warriors — while existing outside of Nintendo's established canon timelines — is in fact the lynchpin that results in there being a "Time Break" that allows The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild to exist. Cue Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity, which is itself canonically an Alternate Timeline to Breath of the Wild with its own "time break" where it averts the events of the game that it's ostensibly a prequel to.
  • During "Which Dark Souls boss is the best manager?", BDG makes a joke comparing The Nameless King putting his wounded drake out of its misery to how he expects his boss at Polygon, Tara Long, to put him out of his misery when he stops being useful. Thanks to Tara's appearance in the "Pokemon Edibility" video where she declares it the final Unraveled episode, this turns into a very unintentional Brick Joke^note The main reason this avoids being Harsher in Hindsight is that by all accounts, BDG's departure and the show's end were actually voluntary.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "What the fuck. Hey Todd? What the fuck?"^note Commonly used as a reaction, sometimes with "Todd" replaced by the name of whoever the speaker is referring to.
  • "Why do X have Y in it?"^note A snowclone of "Why do Piranha Plant have bone in it?"
  • "God has cursed me for my hubris, and my work is never finished."^note Typically used to refer to passion projects and hyperfixations.
  • "If you're not attracted to this, you're wrong."^note A still from his Castlevania video, where the image he's holding up is replaced with one of something else.
  • "And I honestly do not have time to unpack this bullshit."^note A quote from his Fire Emblem video, used in a similar, albeit more disdainful, way to John Mulaney's "Now we don't have time to unpack all that."
  • "THERE'S NOTHING HERE." ^note From his Kirby video, used to point out the absence of something expected.
  • "Why the fuck is he a top?" ^note Originally in reference to Top Man, created to seek out life on other planets, which raises the question of why such a robot would be based on a spinning top toy. Fandom quickly repurposed this as a gag to ask why particular characters would be written as a sexual "top".
  • "Kairi will continue to not matter." ^note  Adopted by the Kingdom Hearts fandom as a self-aware meme that despite being positioned several times as if she will take on a bigger role in the series, Kairi usually ends up sidelined in each successive entry.
• Nausea Fuel:
  • The 4th trial in the stamina episode involves Brian eating and drinking nothing but Well-done steaks and Monster Energy Drink all day for every meal, resulting in him getting so sick that he crashes for hours straight. It makes the fact that he's wearing cardboard wrapped in tin foil seem tame.
  • Some of the recipes from the The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild episode appear pretty nasty, given the limited ingredients (none of the foods could even be seasoned). The egg pudding is said to "coat [their] mouths in tiny curds," and they give it a negative six flavor rating.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The failed Trial #4 speech from "I used The Sims to perfect my apartment" qualifies as both a Tearjerker and a dosage of this trope:
    Brian: In an effort to expedite the death sequence, I accidentally hit ultra-fast speed, and for some reason... this killed Death. I waited, hoping the reaper would respawn, but no. So I rushed through the days, waiting for someone to find my collapsed body in the weird corner of my creepy hallway, but the only people who noticed my "death" were the utility companies. I used this moment to look around my neighborhood. Most houses were far nicer. I was alone, in a little box, surrounded by neighbors who had forgotten me - or perhaps never knew I existed. Even Death had forgotten me. I watched my slumped body linger in limbo, as nothing changed. After a week, I resigned myself to quitting. [Beat] ...And then in Trial 5, I peed myself! A lot!
  • While Brian's Sanity Slippage is pretty much a regular occurence even in "I made a '90s dimension to fully understand Crash Bandicoot", there's the really unsettling thing about Brian contemplating locking himself in temporal stasis in his "David Brian Gilbert" persona just because of how badly he wants to relive the experience of playing the original Crash Bandicoot trilogy over and over again as a 90's kid. Especially when his Anachronistic Box shows footage of Activision's emails in his phones asking him about the status of his video, meaning Brian was even neglecting his current responsibilities. Good thing Crash Bandicoot (or rather, Pat in a crappy costume of him) came to save the day.
• Tear Jerker:
  • When Mario Can Retire, while humorous, is at the end of the day a showcase about how the world is now no longer designed to allow people to retire when they're too old for work.
  • The third part of I read every Halo novel deals with the crippling loneliness of being the only one of his friends who gives a shit about the Halo novels, with not even with nerdy-ass friends bothering to care.