YMMV / Up On The Shelf

• Fridge Brilliance:
  • While Shelf referring to John Lasseter as "some nobody" in her Mickey's Christmas Carol review is a take that at his unruly conduct, when he was working on Carol he was just another animator who was just getting his feet wet with this short. He really was "some nobody" back then!
  • It's been pointed out that there's not a single reference to Wicked in The Wizard of Oz review - yet there's a subtle nod to Hamilton'', and it's right at the end of Shelf's praise for Margaret ''Hamilton''!
• Genius Bonus: The confrontation between Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire in the Singin' in the Rain review is full of this if you know anything about them and their respective careers.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Early reviews would sometimes have Shelf mention her boyfriend, who got her deeper into nerd culture like the Marvel Universe and The Lord of the Rings and whom Shelf adored. Then, less than a year after she started the blog, they broke up. Shelf later opened up about how emotionally abusive and controlling he was and regrets referencing him as often as she did.
  • Same goes for her friend Brian, who was also occasionally mentioned and later did the artwork for her avatar, until they had a falling out and Shelf got a new artist.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Has a tendency to reference movies that later wind up being reviewed.
  • In her Wreck-It Ralph review, Shelf spies a couple of 16-bit characters in Tapper's that she desperately wants to believe are cameos from Sora and Riku ^note  actually a couple of cowboys because she's so desperate for new Kingdom Hearts content thanks to how faraway Kingdom Hearts III seems. A few years later Square Enix finally released Kingdom Hearts III, where Ralph is a summon character and there are various mini-games in the style of old Tiger electronic video games.
    • From the same review: as various Disney characters are offering Ralph advice to win the audience's sympathy, Anastasia appears but Anna shoos her out saying that she's not one of them. Cue Disney buying up Fox and now Anastasia is (technically) a Disney princess!
    • The moment with the Disney characters also plays out similarly to Vanellope's introduction to the princesses in the sequel.
  • The Corrupt Corporate Executive character uses "Does the Academy loathe streaming services?" as a "yes" answer to a question posed in the Snow White review. Cut to the 2019 Oscars where Roma, a movie which premiered on Netflix, was tied with The Favourite for the most nominations and won three awards - Best Director, Cinematography, and Foreign Film.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap:
  • Cynicism, the personification of Shelf's darker side represented by a knockoff Gollum with hair from the girl from The Ring photoshopped on, which Shelf lampshades in her very first appearance. Now she only occasionally comes in to point out an touchy or problematic element, make a joke that might seem too mean-spirited or bizarre for Shelf to do it herself, or do some exposition. She also helps Shelf take back the blog after Bill Cipher's hostile takeover.
  • Shelf reveals that the original draft of The Black Cauldron did this to her regarding the character of Fflewder Flam. She laments that the moments cementing him as the wise, caring mentor figure who held the group together were axed in favor of playing him up as a Butt-Monkey.

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