YMMV / Bob Chipman

• Audience-Alienating Era: Bob's tenure at geek.com, a now defunct media aggregator that was attempting a big overhaul in 2016. Not only did the site's fate hinge Bob doing all the heavy lifting to keep them alive, but he had to do a lot of blatant corporate, target audience, and demographic pandering for the sponsors. His attempts at Chinese were particularly cringe-worthy. Not helping matters were Bob's attempts at online activism during that era, which ranged from "just" bizarre to outright hostile (and bizarre). All of this quite significantly affected the perception of both his material and Bob himself.
• Base-Breaking Character: The Game Antithinker definitely qualifies. He's either a nice comedic divergence, or another annoying and pointless Take That! to Moviebob's opinion of "hardcore gamers" in general, and fellow Youtuber The Rageaholic in particular.
• Broken Base:
  • Bob's views on "Retake Mass Effect". Some feel that this was a welcome rebuttal to the more vocal elements of the gamer community, while others feel that he is missing the point as to why people didn't like the ending to Mass Effect 3, and many flat-out rejected his opinion due to him saying he hadn't played the games before, and didn't even look at the endings until his very last video.
  • Bob's Plothole Surfers video. Depending on who you ask, it’s either a righteous takedown of a style of criticism that's inherently wrong and even damaging to films and film discussion, or Bob simply dismissing a style of criticism because it's different than his own, while peppering in some rather unfair accusations towards people because of how they critique movies.
  • "REALLY THAT BAD": Is it really a deep critique of a BvS? Or is it a long-winded rant in a long line of rants that spends more time complaining about his own personal distaste than anything else?
• Critical Dissonance: His Mulan (2020) review, where he was singing high praises to the movie and how culturally sensitive it is, concluding the review with bumping up his final rating. Just about everyone, including his own fandom, called him out on both the blatantly sugar-coated review itself and how Bob self-censored on anything even remotely bad or controversial attached to the film, including how it was filmed near Chinese prisons for political dissidents which Bob on Twitter dismissed the reaction to as "fake outrage".
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Ivan, the intern. By far, the most popular supporting character of The Game Overthinker. When Bob announced that the show was going to change its format because he wasn't able to maintain it after Blip removed the show from their site, many fans asked him to please keep the little guy around. Fortunately for them, Bob affirmed that Ivan wasn't going anywhere, nor anyone from the supporting cast, for that matter.
• Fandom Rivalry: Shares a rather ugly one with Every Frame a Pause and their affiliates, with both parties indulging every opportunity to attack the other due to their differing styles of criticism.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • This quote from a post from his old blog promoting the fifth episode of The Game Overthinker about Patriot Games, considering how infamously political Bob would get later in his carrer:
  ...but I've been hesitant to jump into politics too early. This is meant to be about the culture surrounding a hobby, not a political machine, and if you get into politics before establishing a broader identity you risk getting pigeonholed as "a liberal commentator" or "right-wing game rant guy" which can turn off a lot of people unnecessarily.
  • Bob said after the first episode of the revived Roseanne aired that it would be too bad if the actions of Roseanne Barr ended up getting the show thrown off the air, because he knew a number of people who'd been excited for it. Several months later, that's exactly what happened.
  • A Big Picture episode he did in 2017 on how to "fix" the troubled DC Extended Universe had him recommending, among other things, a brief, minute-long scene where The Flash travels to an Alternate Universe inhabited by Christopher Reeve's Superman, Adam West and Burt Ward's Batman and Robin, and Lynda Carter's Wonder Woman as the Justice League, enabled through Forrest Gump-style CGI to recreate Reeve and West and de-age Ward and Carter and inserted into the movie without any prior announcement, hype, or hints at its existence. He predicted that "people would go nuts" at such a scene. Cut to 2023, and The Flash wound up having a very similar scene which people did go "nuts" over, but because it was handled in a tasteless manner that infuriated fans and moviegoers.
  <Losing Horns> I feel like I could at least salvage some credit for my recognizing that doing something close to what they actually end up doing would be much, much worse than anything I'd positing in this...
• He Panned It, Now He Sucks!
  • Not that he didn't like The Amazing Spider-Man or the sequel, but that years later he will hate on those movies whenever he has the chance, specifically on Andrew Garfield's portrayal of the character. Even in his Logan review he took time to bash ASM as the inferior to Tobey Maguire.
  • Well anticipated in his So Okay, It's Average review of Spider-Man: Homecoming, which ends with a timid "Don't shoot the messenger." The issue here is that one can't help to shake the feeling that it's at least in part due to his admiration to the first two Sam Raimi films, since he's gone out of his way to say he actively tries to judge the new Spidey out of their shadow, but a significant amount of people put into question his ability to do so. Ironically, Bob leveraged this in his review of Spider-Man: Far From Home, saying that given his status as the guy who didn't care for the movie's predecessor, the fact that he gave it a positive review and a healthy recommendation was all the more notable.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • In his movie review of G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, he makes the suggestion that the film would achieve a gigantic level of metaphysical self-awareness if it revealed that it was all a kid playing with his toys. Fast-forward to 2014, and he is heaping praise on The Lego Movie, a film with an eerily similar reveal.
  • Two circumstances arise - one, Bob says that the mission statement of Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) is to see if a mainstream hit can be gleaned from stacking obscure Marvel references together. Two, he remarks about wanting to get a reboot of a certain Marvel character in an episode of The Big Picture. And then, in the post-credits sequence of Guardians of the Galaxy, that very character shows up as one of The Collector's possessions. That character? Howard the Duck!
  • In one of his Transformers reviews he complains about Michael Bay's fetishistic approach to inserting the US military into everything. He posits a a scenario where Batman gets interrupted while interrogating the Joker and gets told to chill which the military cleans up Gotham for him, just to show how annoying it is. Not long after, the military do show up in The Dark Knight Rises, but they don't turn out quite as effective...
  • In his very first Game Overthinker video (where he complains at length about how colourful creative protagonists have been phased out in favour of making every game hero an interchangeable grizzled white guy) he ended the video by asking developers to, the next time they're creating a game hero, consider if he could possibly be...a monkey (illustrated with an image of Nathan Spencer with the head of a silverback gorilla photoshopped over his)? Fast forward eight years and Blizzard release a bright, colourful action game where one of the most prominent characters is a large gorilla in powered armour...
  • A semi-serious article Bob wrote for The Escapist had him making suggestions for what Sony could do with Spider Man to come out better than with the Amazing films. One of the suggestions was to have Miles Morales as the protagonist. This was several years before Sony did exactly that. To make that funnier, Bob caught back then a lot of flak for even suggesting that Peter Parker should die in the opening of that story and make room for Miles as the new Spider-Man - which is exactly how that film opens.
  • In this episode of The Big Picture he makes an off-hand comment to the DCEU not being a part of the Crisis on Infinite Earths crossover due to Movie and TV universes generally being seperate (and on the very real assumption that it'd be too expensive to get, say, Gal Gadot, onto the series). Six months later, this becamean unintentional prediction as Ezra Miller makes a Cameo as their version of The Flash, who meets in Grant Gustin's Flash.
  • Bob spent a large part of his Tomb Raider (2018) review to joke about how the movie is tailor-made to be dumped in the Chinese market thanks to extensive pandering. Not only did the film avoided the status of a bomb thanks to the mainland China box office, but soon after, Bob got mandated to pander to that market, too.
• Humor Dissonance: His Really That Good episode focusing on the original National Lampoon's Vacation is entirely predicated on how funny it is. After making this statement, Bob cuts to a montage of Orphaned Punchlines from the movie which is completely unfunny. This is especially odd given that half the video is him explaining just how specific to its intended audience the movie is.
• Memetic Mutation: "COMICS. ARE. WEIRD."^Explanation Bob's Catchphrase for whenever he dedicates an episode of The Big Picture to explaining something strange and/or obscure in comic-book lore. Has become a Mad Libs Catch Phrase over the years, with movies and TV both subbing in for comics as necessary.
• Narm: His Super Mario Bros. 3 novel contains a lot of hyperbolic statements about the console wars, like considering it "His own personal Vietnam" and also how the reveal of the game in The Wizard was the equivalent of JFK's assassination or 9/11. It is very hard to take seriously.
• Older Than They Think: Some Escapist viewers who know him mainly for "Escape to the Movies" and "The Big Picture" were surprised to hear about his previous series "The Game Overthinker".
• Opinion Myopia: If he really doesn't like it, anyone who says they do like it is lying or stupid. If he really does like it, anyone who doesn't is either lying, stupid, or morally deficient. He's not subtle about this, and frequently says it flat-out.
• The Problem with Licensed Games: Discussed in Episode 16 of "The Game Overthinker," as advice to non-gamer gift-giver.
• Seasonal Rot:
  • The Channel Hop to ScrewAttack has resulted in some weaker videos in some people's eyes.
  • Bob second coming to The Escapist in 2019. Up to his contract not being renewed a year later, since he wasn't bringing up big enough numbers.
• Shallow Parody: The Antithinker is this to Razörfist, as the latter eventually called out.
• Win Back the Crowd: Really That Good, which many people consider to be his best series yet. Since he's focused on positivity, most people agree that it allows him to show his best and most constructive side.

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