YMMV / Sarah Z

• Crosses the Line Twice: In the TJLC video, Sarah compares the controversial final season of Sherlock and the fallout and ensuing conspiracy theories to that following the deaths of Archduke Ferdinand and John F. Kennedy. She says it with such a straight face that it's impossible not to laugh.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Sarah's co-writer Lady Emily, who's shown up in voice form on the channel several times, and now also runs her own fairly successful channel with a similar analytical style.
• Fandom Rivalry: With Lily Orchard, after Sarah's "Bad Media Criticism" video which was in part aimed at Lily's criticisms of Steven Universe. It got more severe after Lily released a response video to Sarah.
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • With those of Lindsay Ellis, thanks to Sarah speaking about being a fan of Lindsay too and expressing a desire to collaborate in the future.
  • With fellow video essayist Izzzyzzz, who does similar deep dives into internet scandals and fandom history. The two have referenced each other's channels before, encouraging their viewers to check the other out, so naturally, there's a pretty big overlap between the two audiences.
  • With Lady Emily, another video essayist who is also Sarah's co-writer and close friend.
  • With the Dungeons & Dragons podcast Trials & Trebuchets, as Sarah is one of the players and she introduced it to many of her viewers.
• Growing the Beard: Once she stopped making nitpicky complaining videos about the likes of Heathers (2018), 13 Reasons Why, Riverdale etc - though those did contain some thoughtful critiques - her content became much more thorough, not to mention the better filming quality! Lady Emily joining her as co-writer also added a welcome (and still witty) second point of view to future videos.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Her video "JK Rowling and Authorial Intent" was neutral towards JK Rowling's behavior at the time of recording. Fast forward to 2020, and Sarah made the follow-up video "Does JK Rowling's Transphobia Ruin Harry Potter?" She even says she wishes she hadn't been as charitable to her in the previous video.
  • In her Homestuck video, when discussing Hiveswap's Kickstarter controversy and Development Hell, she remarks that she's going to stay as neutral as possible because she doesn't want to get sued. Shortly after she published the video, What Pumpkin threatened her with legal action for talking about the controversy.
• He Panned It, Now He Sucks!:
  • She didn't win herself any favors among Harry Potter fans by criticizing the series in JK Rowling and Authorial Intent - specifically her Take That! by saying A Very Potter Musical was "better than your whole book series". Although she was at least neutral towards J. K. Rowling herself.
  • When she announced she was making a video about "The Johnlock Conspiracy", several people who are still involved with TJLC assumed it would be a mean-spirited video mocking them, and responded accordingly. The actual video is generally very evenhanded and never mocks the shippers themselves, and Sarah outright says the Johnlock ship and the conspiracy didn't come out of nowhere, laying a majority of the blame at the feet of the Sherlock showrunners, and a few specific Tumblr users who even most TJLC-ers agree were toxic and bad for the fandom. Didn't stop the video from getting backlash, especially from people who refused to watch it.
  • Similarly, there was some backlash for the Destielgate episode from people who were more familiar with the show, complaining about her lack of covering this, that, or the other element, even though both the various developments of the controversy still evolving and her focus was specifically on a quick synopsis of the portrayal of Destiel, with even her condensed explanation of the situation being 2 hours long.
  • Her video on Homestuck got backlash the second she announced it, with people speculating that she hadn't read the comic thoroughly and declaring her not fit to talk about the fandom due to not having been active in it for a few years. The released video got more people angry that she included criticisms of the franchise and its fandom, especially since she cited controversial fandom figures when discussing Hiveswap's Development Hell (though she admitted in the video that the information was not all confirmed and refrained from blaming anyone exclusively, stating that she thinks things were probably handled badly on both sides but there's no way to be sure) and didn't get to talk directly to the members of the modern Homestuck team. Not helping was the fact that someone from the Homestuck team threatened her with legal action over the video, prompting a follow up video about that two months later.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • After she specifically used Destiel as an example of a queer-baited ship that will never happen in her Johnlock video, that week's episode of Supernatural confirmed it, at least on Castiel's end^note She commented about this in the comments to the Johnlock video and noted that while the episode did confirm that Castiel had feelings for Dean, it is ambiguous in the episode itself if Dean actually feels the same way and she will only rescind her comments about Destiel if Dean confesses his own love for Cas in the finale, which he didn't.
  • In her video about her legal battle with What Pumpkin and Andrew Hussie over her Homestuck video, during a section where Andrew Hussie sends her a particularly waffling email that repeatedly uses the word "know", she overlays the section with a video of Donald Rumsfeld (who notoriously orchestrated the invasion of Iraq during The War on Terror) making his infamous "There are known knowns" speech. Donald Rumsfeld's death happened to be announced on the exact same day the video was released (although he had actually died the day prior). Sarah responded appropriately:
    Sarah: People are informing me that this video may have killed Rumsfeld by means of psychic energy. I can confirm this to be true.
  • In "The Rise and Fall of Teen Dystopias", Sarah mentions she'll refrain from discussing her opinions on The Handmaid's Tale because she doesn't want to invoke legal threats from the Church of Scientology after the Homestuck debacle. Colleague Todd in the Shadows picked up the joke when he ended up making a video on Edgar Winter and L. Ron Hubbard's Mission Earth album, saying he has to tread carefully about the record so he doesn't have to make a video called "Scientology Sued Me, and Then it Got Worse" (mirroring the title of Sarah's second Homestuck video).
  • In "I Was Wrong About Queerbaiting", Sarah posits that a cis man expressing himself in a gender nonconforming way (including crossdressing) can still be argued as doing something queer and uses well-known Wholesome Crossdresser Twitch streamer F1NN5TER as an example. Later, in 2024, F1NN5TER came out as not being cis, though as of this writing has admitted he's not sure if he'd put a label on his gender just yet beyond still preferring he/him pronouns (arguing that the closest he could think of is genderfluid).
• Memetic Mutation: Fans took the image of her with a glass of wine instead of her usual mug of tea for "Does JK Rowling's Transphobia Ruin Harry Potter?" to be a sign of the apocalypse.
• Misblamed: A lot of Homestuck fans (and writers!) went after Sarah for the comments on trans representation in the franchise, despite the video pointing out multiple times that the segment was written entirely by Emily (herself a trans woman). Bizarrely, several of them accused Sarah of "hiding behind" Emily when this was pointed out to them and still held her and ONLY her responsible for Emily's opinion, as if Emily had no agency whatsoever. Both women were understandably insulted by this, and inserted a direct comment about it in a later video.
• Misaimed Fandom: After Sarah's video on "pro-shippers" and "anti-shippers" came out, people from both sides began claiming that Sarah to be a member of one or the other and that the video clearly supports a side. The video is actually meant to be a neutral look at the general controversy, and Sarah makes a point to not identify as "pro" or "anti" — instead referring to herself as a "tax-paying adult woman" and dismissing the fandom labels as meaningless.
• Offending the Creator's Own:
  • As Sarah stated in her "Homestuck Sent Me a Legal Threat" video, when they announced the Homestuck video, a writer affiliated with Homestuck told Sarah and Emily to "die" because they planned to speak about the franchise's trans representation. While Sarah is cis, Emily is a trans woman, and Sarah repeats frequently in her Homestuck video that the section on trans representation was entirely written by Emily.
  • Her video on "pro-shippers and anti-shippers" received backlash claiming that she was contributing to hatred towards queer fans. Sarah is openly bisexual and her cowriter is a trans woman.
• Tear Jerker: While rather amusing in the sheer, bizarre complexity of it all, The Prayer Warriors' sock puppet pileup can also be interpreted as an act of "digital Self-Harm," a phenomenon where a person creates alternate, anonymous internet identities to say abusive things about themselves. While it's not confirmed that the author is struggling with psychological issues, Sarah notes in her video on the subject that it would have been less painful for him to sincerely process his feelings through writing instead of manufacturing drama surrounding his own troll fic.

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