YMMV / Vs. Dave and Bambi

• Abandon Shipping: Dave x Expunged was a rather popular ship for the contrasting personalities of the two until the 3.0 update came out, but once lore updates revealed that Expunged was created from Dave's powers, thereby making the two technically related, the ship was almost immediately abandoned.
• Adaptation Displacement: Very few people recognize Dave as being from a Game Mod of Baldi's Basics in Education and Learning called Dave's Fun Algebra Class. This changed after the release of the Golden Apple Edition.
• Awesome Art: Dave and Bambi has a very unique art-style that instantly sets it apart from other popular FNF mods, and the 3.0 update allows the artists to show off this style at its absolute best. Even excluding the Paint 3D models that have become a unique staple of the fandom, one of the areas this evolution can best be seen is with Bambi; the character that began as a sloppy joke doodle ended up becoming one of the most expressive characters in the modding scene with satisfyingly bouncy animation and a surprising amount of attention to detail to match.
• Cargo Ship: Some people like to ship Bambi with his phones, mostly as a joke.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Despite only being present in a handful of anti-cheat songs, Expunged is an incredibly popular character within the fandom for its role as an all-powerful Eldritch Abomination with a sadistic disposition and shapeshifting ability shown with the Bambi-esque form it takes within its songs. He tends to have a lot more significance to the plots of various fan-mods, notably having a Small Role, Big Impact in the Golden Apple Edition's canon.
  • Tristan didn't even have any songs in previous versions of the mod and was initially added as a bonus reskin for Boyfriend, but he ended up gaining popularity on a similar scale to the two main characters thanks to his interesting, adorable design. He eventually became popular enough to start appearing in cutscenes in the 2.5 update, as well as a few songs for him being added in the 3.0 version.
• Fandom-Enraging Misconception:
  • "3D Bambi". While its identity had originally not been discussed, nowadays the entity in question is known to be a powerful eldritch being who takes the form of Bambi and is referred to as Expunged, so calling it Bambi or a variation thereof will invoke cries from the fandom.
  • A good amount of the mod's haters will often post clips of songs featuring off-tune vocals and note-spam on a level so intense it becomes humanly impossible to play and unbearable to listen to... not realizing that these kinds of songs don't come from Dave and Bambi itself, but rather its numerous fanmade mods that are low-quality. The only official songs that come near this level are Expunged's songs, which still remain at a density that can be feasibly beaten, and assuming these low-quality hyper-spam songs encompass all of Dave and Bambi (or even all fan-made songs) will guarantee the ire of the mod's fans.
• Fandom-Specific Plot: The concept that the 3D realm Dave accidentally invokes and which Expunged inhabits is its own flipside reality populated by dozens if not hundreds of other people that also take after Bambi, dubbed "Bambisonas." Usually, these characters will also be somewhat eccentric, but lacking in malicious intent. First codified in the Golden Apple Edition, the concept has since spawned numerous other recursive mods featuring their own characters.
• Friendly Fandoms: Many fans of Dave and Bambi are also part of many Object Show fandoms, as many tend to have the similar qualities of simplistic surface-level designs with surprisingly deep lore within.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Tristan was the first case of an FNF mod character with hair represented by the word "hair", but it wouldn't be the last.
  • In earlier versions of the mod, Dave turning 3D in "Furiosity" was a more hostile Turns Red moment before later updates changed it to a case of Power Incontinence. Later in the fanmade Golden Apple mod, Dave experiences the opposite development due to gaining control of his 3D form.
• Memetic Mutation: There's a LOT of them.
  • Careful Bambi! ^Explanation A short fan animation, where Dave repeats "Careful Bambi!" while Bambi is trying to cut some corn, much to the latter's frustration.
    • I WANT YOU TO LOOK AT ME! Look at fucking me, look at me, ALLISON, STOP! ^Explanation Bambi says this after getting frustrated with Dave constantly telling him to be careful.
  • Brobgonal in a canoe. ^Explanation Originates from this animation, where Brobgonal, as a reward for behaving well, is allowed to sit in a canoe for an hour.
  • DO YOU WANT DO YOU WANT PHONE PHONE PHONE PHONE ADDAUDHCAOSDAADA ^Explanation An out of context snippet of Cheating, usually played over an image of Spongebob yelling at Squidward to get a job.
  • "Hello everybody, welcome back to another video of escaping from Bambi." ^Explanation A snippet of the beginning of this video, where the player, while trying to do the intro, gets interrupted by a nextbot of Bambi knocking down the wall in front of them and killing them.
  • This is so Screwed!^Explanation Bambi's angry face seen in the scrapped "Screwed" has become a popular Non Sequitur response to various things (primarily posts hating on the mod or FNF in general), combined with the aforementioned phrase.
• Most Wonderful Sound: The piano at the end of "Unfairness" is a delightfully calming and victorious sound. Really satisfying, considering how hard "Unfairness" is.
• Nightmare Fuel: An image in AadstaPinwheel's Google Drive relating to Recurser describes the effects of prolonged exposure to the dimension where it resides, and it gets into some rather gruesome Body Horror. The image details the process of losing color in non-flesh things on your body, followed by slowly reaching a point where every movement and sound you make repeats itself over and over again (hence 'recursed'). By the time the transformation is complete, the mind has entered a 'less-than-vegetative state' trying to process thousands of simultaneous stimuli, and the body has become warped and mismatched trying to follow every single one at once. Thankfully there aren't any complex visuals to accompany this (merely a small icon going through a glitch-esque effect), but even that arguably makes it worse.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Bambi has spent a while as one of FNF's most infamous characters for his offbeat personality and untuned vocals that were seen as grating due to poor usage in his original set of songs. However, he's slowly beginning to gain more fans as his unusual vocals are experimented with in fan songs that prove their ability to sound good with the right placement. This, combined with Moldy's vast improvement as a composer, culminated in the teasers for two official songs in the 3.0 update, "Shredder" and the "Corn Theft" remake, which have been much more warmly received and show promise for Bambi to grow past his roots.
• Shocking Moments: Halfway through "Exploitation", Expunged breaks out of the game's window and continues fighting Boyfriend from the desktop. While it had been demonstrated to be possible before in one-off programming challenges, this marks the mechanic's first usage in a full mod.
• That One Level:
  • Out of all of the non-bonus songs featured in the mod, "Interdimensional" has easily taken the cake as the most infamous for its difficulty. This is primarily thanks to a mechanic introduced in "Polygonized"; 3D notes that the player has to hold the Spacebar to be able to hit. It's tough enough on its own to play a chart while one finger is preoccupied holding the key, but the song itself is also very fast-paced, and the inability to hit regular notes while holding Space makes it almost guaranteed that the player will miss several notes.
  • "Unfairness", appropriate to its role as an anti-cheat maneuver, is a ridiculously difficult punishment to attempt to beat. Not only is the song even more spam-happy than its already-tough predecessor "Cheating", but it also coats itself in a thick layer of deadly mechanics, from the notes spinning in a circle around the center of the screen to every arrow having a different scroll speed to automatically disabling ghost tapping (meaning the player will take damage for pressing an incorrect note). The fact that people have managed to even beat it is frankly a miracle.
  • Thought "Unfairness" was hard? "Exploitation" takes it a step even further; while Boyfriend's side isn't quite as spam-happy as previous Expunged songs, it's still a very difficult chart on its own merits, and the Interface Screw is cranked up even further then ever before. With notes flying to and from every end of the screen, the same lack of ghost tapping, and the window itself being shrunken down and moved around halfway in, Expunged has every right to say you won't survive.
• Unexpected Character: Let's be honest, who was expecting Bob and Ron to show up in Splitathon 2?

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