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Web Video / Pyrocynical

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https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/pyrotcheadicon.png
complete slop Click here for his face
“How's it going everyone? [random thing] here.”

Niall "Pyrocynical" Murphy (born May 19, 1997) is a former montage parodist turned YouTube commentator known for the various videos he reacts to, and his self-deprecating, cringeworthy, and occasionally flat out offensive humor resulting from both him and the content he covers.

Lately, he has begun doing long-form reviews and video essays, where he takes an extensive look and deep dive at the the covered subject with some of his trademark humor spread through the video, starting with his Petscop analysis in 2017.

As of November 2021, Pyro now operates a second channel called PyroLIVE from which he livestreams in addition to posting gameplay highlights and commentary videos akin to his older output, as he has since geared his main channel towards long-form analysis content.

Pyro also did the voice of Pirate Foxy in Foxy Gets Hooked.

    Media that Pyro has analysed in videos 

Tropes:

  • Angrish: Does this frequently.
  • Apologizes a Lot: A downplayed example, but when he notices that he’s been doing something a lot he will apologize to the audience. It’s more present in his gameplay videos than his commentary videos.
  • Audience Participation: The artistic fans of Pyrocynical send in their drawing of his channel avatar. He includes them in his videos.
  • Author Appeal: Expect Pyro to sprinkle references to media and memes he enjoys, especially videogames and television shows. Notable examples include Breaking Bad, Fallout: New Vegas, and his general Vaporwave aesthetic.
  • All Just a Dream: He has a habit of making in-depth reviews on games with this type of plot twist, to the point that "It Was All In Le Head" became a meme in his community and he generally has to defend himself at the beginning of his reviews now swearing to his audience that The Reveal is not going to be " It's all in le head".
  • Berserk Button:
    • Minecraft Let's Play channels — especially the younger ones that like to shriek in their microphones.
    • The royalty-free music that YouTube gives their users so that they don't violate copyright law, which appears in many vlog videos.
    • Whenever he finds a meme making fun of him, particularly the ones with the "250.000 subscribers" meme.
    • On a more serious note, he reacts with extreme disgust to Youtube channels that attempt to make money off of tasteless topics like actual Youtuber deaths and "rumors" about them having cancer.
  • Big Brother Is Watching You: Played for Laughs, anyone who comments anything negative on Pyro's channel is named and shamed. Then Pyro likes to search their YouTube page to see whether their criticism was valid. Many of them often have zero or no more than three videos, and they are usually amateurishly-filmed.
    • And also when he talks about sponsoring his channel:
      Pyro: [...] When you become a member, you get a badge next to your name. So when you comment down below bullying me, there's a higher chance I'll see it.
  • *Bleep*-dammit!: On some videos, various bleeps or other soundbytes are used to censor profanity to avoid demonetization. It even got lampshaded in one video.
    • "DESPACITO MEMES" combines this with Sensory Abuse, opting for a bass boost in place of a traditional bleep.
  • Broken Pedestal: While he and Keemstar of DramaAlert were never friends, Pyro at least respected the man... up until Keemstar did his video about the Tobuscus scandal, despite it simply being allegations. One video of Pyro criticizing Keem for blowing things up later (after he spent a good deal of time praising the man and his work at that), Keemstar started a massive Flame War attacking Pyro, and the fallout resulting from this led to Pyro essentially severing any ties he had to Keem. See Pyro's own video on the experience here.
  • Brutal Honesty: Implied when Pyro comes to talking about YouTube video comments. He has often commented negatively about them, such as pointing out that the average YouTube channel doesn't read their comments, and that the most-voted comments on a video is often some "witty bullshit".
  • Butt-Monkey: Seems to be this case with his fanbase; he gets bullied a lot by his own fans with his older videos and remarks, particularly with MLG Teletubbies and his 250K subscribers Milestone Celebration. It goes so far that when Pyro intentionally asks for the latter memes, he got sent Thanos memes instead.
    • In "THIS GAME IS NOT FOR KIDS (18+)", which is a Stick Fight montage against Hyojin, Dolan Dark, and Ramsker, Hyojin remarked how Pyro has only won three of the matches so far. He's also shown to die more often than the other three, even when the round has just started.
  • Call-Back: Often, phrases of a video Pyro's previously reviewed reappear in another video, such as "What is this??!!" from the Sam Pepper's Killing My Best Friend Prank.
    • In "THE WORST MUSICALLY YOUTUBERS" and "YOUTUBE REWIND 2018", he brought up "Lele Pons has hit a new low" when he referenced Pons, in response of her claiming all the revenue from said video.
  • Couch Gag: His introductions to his video often change who's supposedly talking, ranging from an internet personality to a popular celebrity.
  • Deadpan Snarker: Pyro might as well be the king of snark.
  • Dude Looks Like a Lady: His initial face reveal elected this reaction from his fans, calling him a "lesbian" and everything. It got even worse for him in one of his videos, where his hair managed to grow long enough, that people just drew Rule 63 fanart of Niall.
  • Formula-Breaking Episode:
    • Pyro occasionally breaks away from short commentaries to making long-form videos, first concerning Petscop and Cuphead, the former being an analysis video and the latter a review/critique. It became a somewhat more regular thing by his videos on Condemned: Criminal Origins and Cry of Fear.
    • "Super Salty Smash Bros. Ultimate" is presented in the format of skits between commentary, a Pastiche of JonTron's reviews. "The Ace Family Must Be Stopped", despite being a commentary video, also begins with a skit, decipting Pyro as a detective.
    • "E3 2019" is, well, Niall covering what happened in said event, audio commentary only. This video also doesn't have an outro, instead ending with him complimenting Keanu Reeves' appearance in E3 before stopping right there.
    • "The worst sequel you haven't seen" reviews invokedCult Classic film Cube and its ill-received sequel Cube 2: Hypercube, again mainly presenting it with audio commentary. Before that, he reviewed a movie called Airplane Mode in which Logan Paul starred, in "Logan Paul's movie is worse than you can imagine", following the same format.
    • To its extreme in "The best (and worst) show you haven't seen", which is a nearly eight hour long analysis of British drama Utopia, explaining what made it such a modern classic and moreover why its American remake is such a dumpster fire in comparison.
    • The Iron Lung video also counts, as the usual game analysis is occasionally interrupted by sequences of illustrated stills by Pyro's girlfriend SecretCorgi paired with voice acting from Pyro, Jschlatt, Colossal is Crazy, Jack Manifold and Ramskerr, meant to help explain the lore of the game's Crapsack World. To his credit, Pyro's acting chops have come a decent way since Hunt Down the Freeman.
    • The My House analysis, meanwhile, features multiple animated intermissions courtesy of Palmetto recounting the contents of the developer's journal, with CDawgVA narrating.
  • Fun with Subtitles: A minor running joke in his commentaries or even in the actual closed captions of his ideos.
  • Gratuitous French: He has a habit of substituting the word "the" with "le" to make something seem dumber or more ironic in the vein of late-2000s Rage Comics' use of the word.
  • Harsher in Hindsight: invoked Discussed in many of the media Pyro's reviewing, when it comes to prank videos. Most of the pranks that are being filmed are from the result of worldwide events. (For example, two London prankers decide to pretend that they're terrorists that have broken into their friend's house a few weeks after the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, and Joey Salads uploading a Radical Islam vs Radical Christianity hours after the Orlando nightclub shootings in June 2016) Pyro lampshades this.
  • Hero Killer: Probably one of the single events he's most well known for is for being one of the cornerstone people in the attack against Keemstar and his channel, Drama Alert.
  • Hypocritical Humor: Quite a lot of his jokes tend to be a form of this.
    Pyro: So the kid that's calling me cringe, the kid with 'swag' scribbled the wrong way round on his face, the kid who's put cat whiskers on his face, the kid who's wearing a Freddy Krueger sweater, the kid who puts fucking Monster energy drink in his cereal is calling me cringe.
  • Mad Libs Catchphrase: "How's it going everyone, X here" See Couch Gag above
    • "A bit of that X, a bit of that Y"
  • Meaningful Name: Claims that his username stemmed from how he used to main Pyro on the Xbox 360 version of Team Fortress 2, and how he became increasingly cynical about the lack of updates to that version of the game.
  • Never Say "Die": Starting from "FORTNITE SHORT FILM CRINGE," he starts using the term "game-end" in place of words associated with death and murder, out of fear of getting demonetized.
  • Nice Guy: In his more serious videos he’s more calm, reasonable and empathetic to every side in a situation.
  • Once per Episode: His outro would show his internet persona taking off his computer head, revealing either a meme related to the topic of the video or Foxy's head.
  • Rewind, Replay, Repeat: If Pyro finds a moment of personal narm in one of the videos he's reviewing, it will be replayed a few times, and then slowed down in case you hadn't heard it the first time.
  • Running Gag: Has quite a lot of them.
    • Tends to say "Epic Games, where games are epicness" whenever Fortnite is mentioned as mockery.
    • Quoting the BullyHunters' "And that's what this is all about!" every occasion.
    • Stock sound effects (particularly the screaming and sarcastic clapping ones) and audio distortion.
    • Playing snippets of music over a clip, particularly Kira's theme or the music that plays during Kaz Miller's "Why are we still here?" speech.
    • "My father's in prison." and bringing up YouTuber Shoenice to allude with the joke. In fact, Shoenice has been a running joke in Pyro's channel, the latter's channel banner is a just widened close-up of the former's face in a Marge makeup.
    • His reactions to memes referencing his older works.
    • "My wife left me."
    • Referencing or making analogies related to Minecraft. It's done so much Pyro himself lampshades this.
    • Mentioning Petscop 2, or his fans pestering him about Petscop 2.
    • Replacing copyrighted songs with music from Spongebob Squarepants to avoid copyright claims.
    • Plugging his merch.
    • During his in-depth game reviews, he will sometimes describe the game's mechanics as "something [popular game] would shamelessly rip off X years later".
  • Sarcasm Mode: A lot — especially when it comes to the prank videos.
    • During the famous Sam Pepper prank in which the YouTuber pretended to be a kidnapper shooting a Vine personality's friend, Pyro comments on the background music being solemn and emotive.
      Pyro: So the lesson we've learnt today is that when someone kills your friend, you'll feel sad. [Sarcastic Clapping] Oh, wow! Such psychology!
    • Cheap-looking videos made by other users are "assumed" to have had budgets of millions of dollars.
  • Sensory Abuse: Another running joke in his videos.
  • Shout-Out: Probably another cornerstone of his humor.
250,000 sub count
LOL - who cares
  • Sitcom Arch-Nemesis: PewDiePie. Pyro primarily accuses him for "stealing" his content, and is the butt of many jokes he made. Taken even further with Felix himself when he collaborated with Pyro.
    "I love Pyro's content! It's like watching my videos, just... slightly different."
    • And also fellow commentary YouTuber Memeulous, with him mostly making fun of his height.
      Pyro: [...] And Memeulous is four foot tall, and is too much of a pussy to show his face! Think about it!
    • Russian YouTuber NFKRZ also became a butt of many jokes Pyro made, especially comparing him to a pig.
  • Self-Deprecation: Finding a video after the montage parodies where he doesn't make a joke against himself is as easy as finding Jesus. He lampshades it, stating that it's practically required for any YouTube star who wants to make it.
  • Sincerity Mode: While he's often dry witted and sarcastic, every now and then he'll make videos where he's serious, especially when he's talking about mental health and depression.
    • He made a video on how fellow YouTuber CreepsMcPasta got robbed while he was going to a convention in Britain, spreading the message and urging viewers to help the donation effort.
    • "let etika rest" is a serious video concerning YouTubers exploiting Desmond Amofah's passing for views. While there are a few jokes thrown in to the video (like Niall claiming ImJayStation looks like Lucas Baker), it's mostly Niall calling out the shitty practices for the sake of views and sends condolences to Etika's friends and family.
      Pyro: YouTube has proven to me that you can't even die right, and that is fucking terrifying.
  • The Stinger: Also a common Once an Episode occurrence in his videos, ending with an edit or reference.
  • Take That, Audience!:
    • He tends to reference how much his fanbase has pestered him over releasing a sequel to his Petscop video essay.
    • On his Condemned review, Pyro briefly mocks what he sees as the inevitable complaining about him not talking about another more popular horror games like Doki Doki Literature Club!.
    • In his earlier days he had a tendency to mock ''Minecraft but that has since died down due to the game's resurgence in popularity. With Pyro himself having played the game in a few videos either as a background footage or have gameplay videos dedicated to it, with most of the latter showing him having a good time uniroincally. Even a few of his videos has him holding and playing around with a diamond pickaxe (that can also turn into a diamond sword).
  • Tempting Fate: Quite a few times, mostly when it comes to prank videos or other controversial ones. For example, when a Minecraft animation tells the story of a school shooting, Pyro tells the audience how uncomfortable and touchy the subject is because that it is what happens in real life, and then says that it was similar to making a video about ISIS terrorists. A Gilligan Cut shows a thumbnail of a Minecraft YouTube video of a terrorist reenactment.
  • Vaporwave: His choice of aesthetic, with an avatar using shades of violet, hot pink and blue. His theme used to be "Beach Walk" by vaporwave artists of Whitewoods, later getting a remix of it by artist "zen." for his outro. When it landed him into copyright-related troubles with Sony, he replaced it with an original composition by Levi Niha.
  • Vitriolic Best Buds: He tends to have this relationship with most of his friends and fellow commentary channels.
  • Vocal Dissonance: Viewers have commented (or assumed) that Pyro is a middle-aged man, but Pyro has mentioned many times that he's a teenager at the time of the video upload, and sure enough...◊
  • You Are Better Than You Think You Are: Pyro namedrops this trope nearly word-for-word in his Black Mesa playthrough, in Episode 8 specifically. He discovers some furnaces and directly tells the audience not to make that joke.
    Pyro: "What's down here? Ah, furnaces. [a second of silence while a loading screen happens] . Don't make that joke. I know what joke you're gonna make in the comments, I see you with your YouTube profile as Adolf Hitler. Don't do it. You're better than that."
"She pushed her feet across the boardwaaaaaaaaalk"

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