YMMV / StephenPlays

• Archive Panic: With over 3000 videos spread over two channels and more added each day, you're going to be here a while. For specific series examples...
  • Stephen's Skyrim series is over 270 videos long and the videos are generally between 20 and 30 minutes each.
  • He later one-upped himself with his Fallout 4 playthrough. It is still 270 videos long, but each video is now about 40 to 50 minutes long.
  • Between Super Mario Maker and its sequel, he has well over a thousand videos in his Morning Mario series.
• Crosses the Line Twice: Usually anything involving Elmo. A lot of the stuff involving him ends up being darkly humorous.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Fargothix, the protagonist of Endless Ocean, at least Stephen and Mal's version, and he only appears in two, rather long, First 20s, but for the short amount of time he has spent time in this world, people still love him so much.
  • Barry, their bastardized version of Mario in Super Mario 3D World is said constantly and is mentioned a LOT in the comment section of the videos, with character development and all, but has only appeared in a single Lp to date, at least in his true Barry form.
  • Fargothix's name gets reused a number of times in Extra Life (as well as his daughter, Fargothia) at fan demand; meanwhile Alex defies the trope by refusing to play as Mario when he and Hayley play Mario Party 1 with Stephen and Mal (and Stephen notes the fans won't be happy).
  • Snaby, the Babysitting Mama baby in a Whelk costume made by Hayley, quickly became the subject of much of Extra Life 2022's fanart.
  • Stephen, Mal, Alex, Hayley and the fanartists all become more attached to the hat from The Quarry than any of the characters.
• First Installment Wins: Stephen's Skyrim LP remains his most popular project and his similar Fallout 4 playthrough didn't attract the same consistent fanbase. There remains a persistent subsection of fans who want him to play more Skyrim, despite the fact that he 100%ed the game and there is nothing left to see.
  • Although when the 10th Anniversary edition came out with extra content, he did spend a few solo streams exploring the new content while Mal was recovering from surgery.
• Harsher in Hindsight: All the jokes regarding Stephen's forgetfulness and general inability to remember things after seeing/hearing about them minutes before are significantly less funny in retrospect after Stephen revealed that he had experienced Transient Global Amnesia at least twice during the early 2020s (though Stephen made it very clear that he still wants the memory jokes to continue).
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Stephen never let Mal drive when they participated in The Runaway Guys' Mario Kart: Double Dash!! tournament as a team. When they do a series of duel matches on Stephen's own channel, the reason for this becomes clear: Stephen says he thought he was better than Mal at Double Dash. As the videos go on, he learns he was mistaken.
  • In Shadow of the Colossus, Stephen compares one of the colossi, Phalanx, to Rayquaza from Pokémon, after which he almost accidentally calls Phalanx a Pokémon. Pokémon Sword and Shield later introduced Falinks as a Pokémon, with a similarly pronounced name derived from the word "phalanx".
  • In the first Pikmin LP, Stephen has a Never Live It Down moment where he accidentally drowns several yellow Pikmin while trying to obtain the Repair-Type Bolt in the Distant Spring. ProtonJon ends up making the exact same mistake while playing through the game on The Runaway Guys for the first time. Though unlike in Stephen's case, Jon only managed to save one single Pikmin from dying.
  • When playing through Pikmin 3 Deluxe with Mal, Stephen speculates that Louie will end up being a boss in the game, and that they will have to kill him to proceed. Though he's obviously wrong here, parts of his idea idea do end up coming to life in Pikmin 4, where not only does Louie end up becoming the final boss of the game, but he has to actually be subdued to be able to take him home.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "Internet Grandpa (and Grandma)". ^explanation The titles taken by Stephen and Mal respectively, due to Stephen's forgetfulness and trouble with technology causing his friends and viewers to jokingly call him "grandpa", meaning Mal would be the grandma by default due to being married to him. This effectively extends to them being the grandparents of everyone on the internet.
  • "Thermodynamics". ^explanation For a while, Stephen had incredible trouble pronouncing the word "thermodynamics", which became the subject of ridicule. Nowadays he's gotten better at it but can still be caught off guard, and it gets brought up usually at least once a stream.
    • "Super Bowl Oil Pies". ^explanation Another thing he had trouble pronouncing, though in his defense this one is a bit of a tongue twister.
  • Viewers asking Stephen to replay Skyrim or play more of it, after he finished a 100% playthrough of it years ago. (Notably, while Stephen and co will make jokes about this, actually asking him to do it tends to result in annoyance at best.)
    • It's cropped up again for Fallout 4 in the same vein, though again, it's recommended against bothering Stephen with this.
  • "That's so sad, and I hate that story." ^explanation When doing a livestream of RPG Maker MZ to create a game with chat input, Stephen inserted this as a line of dialogue from the protagonist in response to a Non Sequitur sad story from an NPC. Fans have taken to using it as a comedic response to (supposedly) sad things, in the same vein as "press F to pay respects".
• Older Than They Think: The swap per-episode thing in Pikmin 2 was also done when Stephen and Mal covered the original Pikmin.

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