Web Video / DougDoug

"This is the way TV Tropes was meant to be played!"

"Hey, this is DougDoug, where we solve problems that no one has."

Doug is a sentient bell pepper who was hired by the FBI to crack gaming challenges and also talk about things with food...

DougDoug is the name of a YouTube channel run by Doug Wreden. Initially named Gloudas and focusing on Hearthstone-based content, the channel was eventually renamed to DougDoug and the focus shifted to more general content involving other games such as Skyrim, Grand Theft Auto V, Super Mario 64, Red Dead Redemption II, and Peggle Deluxe.

Most videos involve Doug tackling ridiculous gaming challenges, such as controlling games with voice commands, completing a task while making things way harder with mods, or allowing his Twitch chat^note Chat for short to control the game. No matter the video, things usually tend to go off the rails, sometimes with Doug describing things with food analogies.

Doug also has a Twitch channel where he regularly streams, and from which much of his content is sourced. He also has three other channels, DougDougDoug (for lower effort content and long update videos), DougDougDougDoug (for full video archives of entire Twitch streams and the occasional shitpost video), and DougDoug Clips (for short edited clips from his videos and Twitch streams).

In 2022, Doug began the series DougDoug A.I. Invasion, which has its own set of tropes.

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"Listing these tropes is doable. I just have to play the best TV Tropes of my life..."

#-L

• 11th-Hour Ranger: Right at the tail end of "Can I eat 10 Drive-Thru meals ordered by strangers? (WORLD RECORD)", right as morale is all but gone when the final meal winds up being a large bucket meal from KFC (sides and all), Doug decides to call in help from Eddie, who shows up to tackle the bucket.
• 0% Approval Rating: In “Cities Skylines 2, but I elected an AI as mayor”, the PETA mayor is the only mayor who was called for impeachment immediately after the election. Though Doug manages to convince Chat to wait another two and a half minutes, their opinion of her doesn’t seem to rise, with ninety percent of Chat voting for her to be removed.
• Adapted Out: In his Skyrim 1 HP stream, after having Faendal executed, he resurrected Faendal and managed to marry him before having him killed off again by a frost troll. This wasn't present in the video as it skips to Lydia's recruitment.
• All for Nothing: The imprecision of voice commands and the anarchy of Twitch Chat sometimes lead an attempt at a challenge to make it all the way to the very end before throwing it all away with a last-second fumble.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: Out of all the unprocessed, raw, and plain inedible ingredient combos that he takes big wolf bites out of for the Zelda Blue Apron ad, the one he calls out as gross after trying it is the Baked Apple, the only half-logical dish in the whole video^note In fairness, he made it by holding a whole apple on a stick over a gas heater, so he was likely tasting the propane.
• The Artifact: Doug's channel avatar (a bell pepper with googly eyes) is a holdover from his "[X], But Explained with Food" series, which he hasn't made a video for in over five years due to transitioning to being a Twitch streamer who does insane challenges with his chat.^note Though his food-based branding remains in a small capacity, he currently employs a loose academic theme in his content.
• Artificial Stupidity:
  • His voice program used in challenges where if he speaks a word it does something (spawns enemies or kills him), often hears stuff that Doug never said on account of the voice program's interpretation the word, or due to his mic picking up tiny bits of the game's audio and thus assuming Doug had said it. Sometimes Doug even flat out says the word, only for the program to not detect it.
  • When his A.I.s tried to beat Mario Maker levels, they invariably got stuck in front of doors on account of needing specific commands to enter, which Doug forgets is a thing. Doug lampshades the problem regarding Chris Snack by mentioning that "AI" is a bit of a strong word, and is closer to just an "A".
  • NovelAI, used in "I used an AI to make video game characters fight to the death" repeatedly fails at its job; from the Mario Vs. Master Chief fight starting with both of them jumping into the lava and forcing Doug to redo the start, to it taking 30 minutes for the Ghandi Vs. Doomguy fight to actually get around to them fighting due to them having arguments, to the combatants often joining forces against a greater evil that appears out of nowhere, to Master Chief repeatedly reappearing despite his round 1 knockout (including a mysterious incarnation known as Master Chief 2.0). It cumulates in the final round when Kirby is being declared the winner, despite Link puzzledly watching him claim the victory, followed by Master Chief 2.0 winning the thug finals despite the previous line of dialogue being "Link and Kirby savagely defeat Master Chief by beating him with his own armor."
  • In “I forced an Ai to play a kids adventure game”, based on the Pajama Sam series, Doug tries to beat the first game in the series by using an A.I. to have it decide what to do, but the A.I. often tries to do random things that don't make sense with the information provided (such as trying to make some kind of chemical to cross water) and inevitably spirals into complete incoherence after enough inputs, forcing Doug to essentially "kill" it and redo it to fix it, which doesn't solve it long term. The stream itself is one of his longest because of that.
  • ChatGPT roleplaying Napoleon vs Chat in a game of chess in I created the ultimate Chess Ai (it can cheat) is another instance of its incompetence - Napoleon is given near-freedom to cheat and move any of his chess pieces^exceptNapoleon is not allowed to move himself into check, Napoleon must prioritize escaping check above anything else and has to play normally to capture the opposing king., meaning Napoleon effectively has an army of Queens while Chat has to follow the normal rules of chess. However, while Napoleon is good at revenge-killing Chat's pieces, he otherwise makes completely irrelevant and wasteful moves, such as directly putting pieces in the line of fire, resulting in Chat managing to beat him^note Funnily enough, the overall premise of giving Napoleon freedom to cheat in chess comes from a (currently unreleased) episode of the AI invasion series, where Napoleon and Chat had to take a break from the main battle due to NovelAI breaking down mid-way, and play an ordinary game of chess. Napoleon constantly attempted illegal moves partially due to this trope, and Doug giving him false information.
  • AI Bjorn from "Peggle Speedrun, but an AI Robot threatens me with trivia" usually averts this, doing a good job of staying in character and even accepting requests to change how he talks, but a few of the questions still manage to confuse it. Notably, Bjorn gets a fact about his own game incorrect, rambles off a nonsensical string of numbers and letters trying to describe a chess board, marks some of Doug's answers as correct or incorrect when they shouldn't be, and got into an argument with Davey Wreden himself over a non-existent audio easter egg in The Stanley Parable, who is one of the creators of the game.
  • The Shuffler from Shufflemania seems to be one at first, not knowing what game is being played next (usually declaring it to be Super Mario 64) and often pulling up different personality modules and glitching throughout the stream. It gets more sentient-seeming as the event goes on, and at the end it is revealed that it was never an AI and was in fact Jerma985 hidden under the set the whole time. In typical DougDoug fashion, he and Jerma then challenge the winners of Shufflemania to a round of tennis with Parkzer as the ref.
  DougDoug: Shuffler, who was the fourth president of the United States?
  The Shuffler: William Howard Taft^note  William Howard Taft was the 27th US President, James Madison was the actual 4th president .
  • In "I forced ChatGPT to make a sequel to Snake", Doug attempts to create a version of Snake with new features solely by asking ChatGPT. While the chatbot is able to make a basic version of Snake, it often forgets crucial features and overwrites previously added ones, at several points creating a program that simply doesn't work.
• Artistic License: Hearty Radishes are red radishes, but the designer of the Zelda Blue Apron menu made the choice to break from the source material and use white radishes instead.
• Attack Pattern Alpha: Someone in Chat suggests making A.I. Napoleon make up a name for all his chess moves, resulting in maneuvers like the Parisian Guillotine, the Lyon Lion's Roar and the Cannes Crush.
• Audience Participation: A regular feature of his streams is allowing his Twitch chat to submit game inputs, one at a time, to either beat a game, or prevent him from beating it. In the Alphabet Crew challenges, his chat plays against itself.
• Badass Boast: Right after Porky gets disarmed of the staff after setting Walmart on fire in the climax of "I forced Twitch Chat to play my unethical D&D campaign", the Wizard proceeds to shove her nailgun into his head executioner-style and gets him to surrender with the following:
  Wizard: (angry) we have your staff. you're covered in milk. the walmart is burning. give up.
• Badass Santa: Mentioned in the video where he plays Skyrim while ten wheels of cheese spawn every second, which has a Christmas theme for some reason. Due to historical evidence suggesting that Saint Nick had, on at least one occasion, just straight decked a dude in the face, that means that the most fitting Skyrim build for Santa Claus would be an unarmed one. Indeed, he ends the video by delivering a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown to Nazeem.
• Bad Date: His Elden Ring stream is depicted as one with an exasperated Melina. During it, he becomes obsessed with clubs, takes her to a (closed) laundromat instead of a restaraunt, steals her dress, tries to kill a blind woman, and only brings breadsticks for himself.
• The Bad Guy Wins: Doug plays the role of what is effectively an antagonistic gameshow host in "If my viewers break my secret rule, I ban them", and his final rule has him turning on the Twitch Chat eliminator on the entirety of Twitch Chat where the secret rule was saying anything, and for once, he gets away scotch free.^note He even left it on for hours after the stream ended (and baited people into talking into offline Chat in his Discord)
• Bait-and-Switch: In any video where he's trying to beat a game (like Smash or Skyrim) without saying certain words, chat and donations will inevitably try to trip him up. After Doug quickly learns the obvious ones, the next evolution of donation messages will insert an obviously suspect word to hide the real trick.
  Doug: (reading) 'Holy crap there's a Giant Spider'? Spider doesn't connect-
  Script voice: Spawning Giants
  Doug: NO! You got me, that was good.
• Bears Are Bad News: There's a good chance that bears will show up in any Skyrim video.
  • In a tournament to determine the strongest Skyrim creature, Snow Bears dominated the competition, only coming in second to Mammoths, and even then the fight was very close.
  • "Bears." Just a regular nature documentary about the wildlife of Skyrim. Then the bears show up...
  • One video was dedicated to seeing which Skyrim city could kill the most bears before everyone was killed off... then how many bears Ulfric Stormcloak could kill... then how many bears Sovngarde could kill. The result? Riften wins, with a total of 58 bears. Write that down.
  • Another video had Doug trying to play Skyrim while a bear spawned every ten seconds. He did about as well as you would expect.
  • In his first speedrun stream of Skyrim where each door is randomized, one door drops him outside of a cave where a Bear is waiting, and kills him so quickly that he barely has time to even realize that he was being attacked. In his second attempt, he specifically makes a point about avoiding that spot at all costs.
• Belligerent Sexual Tension: Bard and Wizard's entire dynamic in "I forced Twitch Chat to play my unethical D&D campaign" is this personified. The two spend a lot of time poking fun at each other, yet they also flirt with each other at several points.
• Berserk Button: The A.I. Bjorn in "Peggle Speedrun, but an AI Robot threatens me with trivia" goes into insulting, swear-laden rants whenever Doug gets one of his questions wrong or when members of Chat call him various animals other than a unicorn.
  Bjorn: What the FUCK did you just call me, you bald little virgin?—a zebra? I am a majestic unicorn, not some common stripey horse! Get your optical faculties checked, why don't you? *deep unicorn breaths*
• Big Eater:
  • Invoked in one video on the DougDougDoug channel. Doug spawns a hundred cheese wheels in Skyrim, then eats a quarter cup of cheese, and the process repeats until either the game crashes or Doug gives up. The game crashed first.
  • Doug got his friends to drive around California to ten drive-ins, ordering whatever the person before them ordered without any foreknowledge of what they got. They then had to eat everything before heading to the next drive-in. Between the four of them and last-minute arrival Eddie, they ate 20,435 calories, two times the daily recommended calorie intake for each of them.
• Blatant Lies: The entirety of "Can I beat Mario before Twitch Chat beats ONE level?", Doug keeps saying that he wants this episode to be a quick 2-hour stream where he doesn't get sidetracked trying to code some wacky bullshit because Chat told him to for five hours straight. That is exactly what ends up happening, with Dough spending five hours coding OBS so that both his and Chat's Mario gameplay bounces around the screen DVD screensaver-style and loudly announces when one of them perfectly hits the corner. Even as he is coding this, Doug is still desperately insisting it's a quick 2-hour stream.
• *Bleep*-dammit!: In "Can you beat Mario 64's Slide Levels with ONLY your voice?", Doug sets a curse word to be the voice command to slow down, vowing to bleep the word out throughout the rest of the video in order to keep it family-friendly... during a clip of him writing the word onscreen, uncensored, in big letters. There are also moments where the bleeps are timed incorrectly, censoring an innocuous word or only bleeping one of two consecutive swear words.
• Boke and Tsukkomi Routine:
  • At virtually every opportunity, Chat loves to become the Boke in this scenario, deliberately pretending to be extremely Literal-Minded clueless Ditzes. Unusually for a Tsukkomi, Doug doesn't (usually) become enraged by Chat's idiocy and instead frantically tries to get the conversation back on track or meekly protests Chat dogpiling on him with dumb comment after dumb comment.
  A Youtube comment: Doug's streams are like a large-scale roleplay where chat pretends to lack critical thinking and basic knowledge, while Doug pretends to believe they're all that dumb
  • The Donkey Kong Country 2 video for Doctors Without Borders becomes this, as chat continually misunderstands the point of the organization, starting with someone who says "Let's get those poor doctors some borders," then devolving into others thinking the name refers to doctors without Borders the book store or doctors who play primarily in fullscreen, and Doug corrects them each time.
  • Any video that includes Parkzer will inevitably become this as Doug goofs around and continually asks absurd questions while Parkzer treats everything with full seriousness and get confused at Doug's antics.
• Brick Joke: At the beginning of "I used a Randomizer to make Zelda way, WAY harder", Doug sets himself an extremely ear piercing alarm to remind himself to go do a load of laundry. About a minute later^note For the viewer anyway; for Doug it was roughly an hour, the alarm goes off, scaring Doug so bad he throws his headphones off.
• Broken Base: In-universe. While Faendal's conviction of manslaughter was the clear majority opinion, his sentencing was extremely contentious. The vote on whether or not to have him executed was a nearly 50/50 split leaning slightly towards death, and the issue is still a subject of debate long after the stream happened and the video came out. Even Doug's legal counsel isn't convinced by the sentence after the fact.
  Jack the Lawyer: You did not tell me that Faendal shot you in the back, while you were murdering another man.
• Broken Record:
  InferKit writing Doug's LinkedIn profile: I'm not going to lie to you, I'm a pretty good player. I've been playing Hearthstone for almost a year now, and I've made a lot of progress. I'm not the best, but I'm pretty close.

  I'm not going to lie to you, I'm a pretty good player. I've been playing Hearthstone for almost a year now, and I've made a lot of progress. I'm not the best, but I'm pretty close.

  But I'm not going to lie to you, I'm not the best.

  I'm not going to lie to you, I'm not the best.

  I'm not going to lie
• Butt-Monkey:
  • Doug. He constantly has to play the straight man to Chat's antics, from them nagging him to buy nonsensical stuff, them constantly heckling or opposing everything he says, embarrassing himself in front of them by wearing a maid outfit or a bunny suit, and dealing with bad luck during the AI conquest while Chat keeps dominating through their insane prompts.
  • Porky is constantly harassed by his teammates for simply existing, and Barbarian eventually takes up using him as a weapon. It later turns out not too unfounded, as Porky ends up betraying the party after Walter is defeated because he was planning to take Walter's staff the whole time.
• Call-Back: While Twitch Chat tried to fly a plane and survive, one of the strategies they tried was to land in Soft Water, but they never managed it. The newly-united Team Alphabet succeeds where they failed, lasting exactly long enough to complete their objective and win the wager Doug made.
  Doug: You know we tried to do that, and it never worked, and then when we bring the "A" Crew and "Z" Crew together it happens.
• Calvinball: A.I. Napoleon tried to defeat Chat in chess, and lost. A.I. Napoleon came back for a rematch, only this time he can make illegal moves while Chat needs to follow the rules. He loses again. A.I. Napoleon comes back for Round 3 and 4^note Found here and here respectively except he's now playing Calvinchess, and (other than a few specific limitations) can do whatever he wants as much as he wants, while Chat still has to play by the normal rules. Even with chess nigh-omnipotence, he loses again, out-right throwing the game by giving Chat their pieces back in Round 3 and killing his own king in Round 4.
• Captain Obvious: Whenever a timer is used, whether as the amount of time left to beat a level or a speedrun timer, Chat loves to point it out repeatedly. That being said, sometimes this trope is subverted, as Doug will still fail to pay attention to it, making their.... concern justified.
  DOUG THE TIMER
• Catchphrase:
  • Doug:
    • "Hey, this is DougDoug, where we solve problems that no one has."
    • "I just have to play the best X of my life."
    • “It’s crazy… but just crazy enough to work.”
    • "This is the way X was meant to be played!"
    • "Write that down."
    • "We're fuckin' in there, let's go!"
    • "And it was beautiful!"
    • "Mods, take 'em out back" (followed by an "o7" from chat)
  • Chat (aside from all the emojis used by other chats):
    • "RIGGED"
    • "PLANNED"
    • "D:"
    • "Hey Doug." is the usual way donations start. Lampshaded in "I challenged a Youtuber to the most chaotic Zelda race ever".
    Squared__Ink: hey, Doug. Is it weird that all donations start with "hey, Doug?" To you?
    • "GOTTEM"
  • For the AI Sams: "Babagaboosh!"
  • From his friend Parkzer: "Hello, Douglas Douglas."
• Cats Are Mean: One video has him embark on a diplomatic mission across Skyrim to improve his people's relations with the nation... complicated by the fact that he's playing a khajiit, and it's in his nature as a cat that if he looks at something, he must destroy it.
• Censored for Comedy: Doug tries beating the Slides in Mario 64 with voice commands, and the chat tells him to make the command for backwards on the control stick the word "shit". As his channel is supposed to be family-friendly, he mentions that he'll be bleeping out that command. What actually ends up happening is that he bleeps some of that command, sometimes he bleeps before or after that command, sometimes he bleeps other words at random, he bleeps some other curse words but not all, and the video's outro gets gradually more censored until it's just bleeps with word fragments in between.
• Chekhov's Skill: Early in the Skyrim run where 10 cheese wheels spawn per second, Doug finds himself in a confined space for too long and the cheese starts to build up. When he tries to move, the mountain of cheese wheels cause him to clip through the floor into the house's basement. This 'cheese clip' lets him escape from jail after he's arrested later in the run.
• Chicken Joke: Doug wants to finally find out why the chicken crossed the road. But he doesn't have enough information to discern its possible motive, so he decides to have Twitch Chat take control of a chicken and try to cross a road in GTA V, to see if he can glean anything from a simulation. When that doesn't reveal a hint of possible motive, he escalates his experiments. In the end, the chicken has stolen a military jet and crashed it into the Cluckin' Bell restaurant, so it maybe crossed the road to go do that, but that's still just conjecture.
• Child Eater: Played for Laughs from the Planet Coaster disaster video with 'Johnitor' and his predecessor, who eat children visiting their park, eating so many children that their skeletons were mistaken as Halloween decorations.
  "Bob the Janitor"^*hey_its_macs: hey Doug, Bob the janitor here. Appreciated that brief bonus. By the way, why did all the training videos end with you saying "now get out there and don't eat children?"
• Clothes Make the Superman: Santa Claus loses his power of Christmas cheer if he isn't wearing his red and white jacket and hat. Unfortunately, he gets caught crossing the border into Skyrim and his suit is confiscated, eventually ending up in the possession of Nazeem. Santa can't save Christmas from Nazeem until he can get his clothes back, among other things.
• Cluster Bleep-Bomb: In "Can you beat Mario 64's Slide Levels with ONLY your voice?", Doug's cursing is bleeped out like normal (albeit badly)... until it eventually devolves into this at the end...
  "And with that, the world record for Mario 64 slides with voice commands is now just two hours and [bleep] nine minutes. Thanks for watching and be sure to li-[bleep], co-[bleep], and subsc-[bleep] and I'll be f-[bleep] in a bathtub full of your mom's [bleep] all sorts [bleep] family friendly a-[bleep]"
• Comically Missing the Point: The main obstacle of the Skyrim 1 HP Run isn't your minimal life meter, the enemies, the hazards, or even the random punishments that you must endure whenever you take damage and die. It's the fact that whenever your Follower kills you, you must spend time dealing with them legally, since by doing so they've possibly committed murder. You know, because properly investigating and prosecuting killings is so important in Skyrim.
  Doug: Is she in contempt of court for not dying?
• The Comically Serious:
  • In some of his videos with voiceover narration recorded after the fact, he speaks seriously and clinically without an ounce of humor, ignoring the farcical or vulgar nature of what he's describing or saying.
  • He actually calls an old roommate of his, Jack, a real lawyer, for legal advice... so he can figure out what to do with his Skyrim Follower after being killed by them in one hit. Said lawyer friend just rolls with it, giving a general overview of the relevant crimes they might be charged with.
  • The text-to-speech voices could also qualify as this, as no matter how outrageous what they're saying is, it always comes out in the same monotone way.
  • Parkzer, his friend and old roommate qualifies, as he insists that he is not a lawyer or a cop, is confused by media, and whenever he appears, typically points out the absurdities on-screen or tries to apply real-world logic and rational thinking to it. Funnily enough, Chat loves him for it.
• Complexity Addiction: A.I. Napoleon's biggest weakness when he plays chess while cheating is that he doesn't do something quick and simple, like "I snipe all of Twitch Chat's pieces and then move my pieces to checkmate their defenseless king", which by the letter of the non-rules he can do. Instead he does things like reviving all captured pieces into random squares on the board, rotating the board 90 degrees, or converting all of Chat's pawns to his own mermaids but never using them afterwards. Moves like these are both complicated enough that the A.I. can't keep track of their ramifications, and so inefficient that he can't checkmate Chat before he does something stupid and seals his own defeat.
• Continuity Nod: Doug keeps the various Skyrim mods installed after their relevant videos (such as Sonic the Hedgehog in Riverwood and the Santa outfit Fine Clothes), so occasionally they will cameo in a later video.
• Creator Cameo: In "I created the ultimate chess AI (it can cheat)" chat plays chess against AI Napoleon, with the board being a photoshop file of the Chess.com board. At one point, a chatter notices a small blue dot on the board, which causes chat to panic, including the official Chess.com Twitch account.
• Crippling Overspecialization: Both of Doug's programs for him and chat to play fall under this:
  • For Doug, he uses a voice-to-text program to register his inputs into whatever game he's playing. This seems like it allows him to be precise in his movement, until you realize it's a strict downgrade to playing the game normally, and only allows him to excel at tasks that don't require fast reflexes or button-pressing sequences.
  • For Chat, they can move and respond much faster than Doug, but at the cost of any form of coordination, as either Chat types in an input much more than they need to, or one troll in the chat is all is needed to sabotage everything, to say nothing of latency between chat and Doug's game not allowing them to adapt in time.
• Crossdresser: The barbarian is this during "I forced Twitch Chat to play my unethical D&D campaign", wearing a dress once the party reaches the second floor of the Walmart.
• Cruel Twist Ending:
  • After Sam 25 completes the game and befriends Darkness, Doug asks him if he has something to say to his deceased brothers. 25 states that he will investigate their deaths, leading Doug to off him before he can begin.
  • During the episode where Doug tries to play Skyrim while bears spawn every ten seconds, he sets a goal for himself to reach the end of Bleak Falls Barrow, where he will be alone at the top of a narrow cliff face, seemingly a safe space from bears. At the end, when he reaches this area, he realises he has trapped himself in a small area with no supplies and a growing horde of bears at the bottom blocking his exit.
• Cut His Heart Out with a Spoon: At one point in "Peggle Speedrun, but an Ai Robot threatens me with trivia", AI-Bjorn asks Doug a question about The Stanley Parable^note specifically, about a non-existent "Easter egg" hidden in the soundtrack, which he has no idea how to answer. But, since he knows the game's creator, he opts to just call Davey up to help with the question. And when AI-Bjorn says Doug was wrong, Doug allows Davey to speak to him directly to argue in favor of Doug graduating from 10th Grade... and it eventually gets to the point where Davey openly threatens the AI:
  Davey: You pass Doug in this fucking class, or I will come over there, and I will change every song on The Stanley Parable's soundtrack to be the sound of you getting your ass beat.
• Dancing Bear: Discussed by Doug as he explains why he hates Jake from State Farm:
  Doug: Like the original commercial was like, a funny thing, because it was just a goofy interaction. And State Farm for some reason was like, "You know what people love about that commercial? Not the fact that it was like, a funny kind of tonally weird joke; it's the concept of a man named Jake. And so we're gonna remove all the humor from the commercial that people liked, and just make a guy named Jake!" [...] The whole pitch now is, "This guy's name is Jake!" What is the point of that? Nobody gives a shit about a person named Jake!
• Dark Horse Victory: The title of all-time strongest video game character goes to... Master Chief, who was eliminated in the first bracket of the tournament but kept inexplicably popping up in later fights (ostensibly due to a technicality in which he was knocked out instead of killed), culminating in him crashing the final match after it's seemingly over and being somehow (the narration is just as confused) awarded the victory.
• Denser and Wackier: To say that Doug's videos and streams have gotten more absurd as they've gone on would be a massive understatement - before, Doug's streams were unique challenges, yet still grounded and focused mostly on the challenge. Nowadays, it is not uncommon for a stream to get derailed by a random TTS donation (or for the donations to capitalize beautifully on something funny), with both Doug and Chat rolling with it. Tellingly, this pattern came into prominence the more Chat got involved as the main character.
• Determinator: Both Doug and Twitch Chat. No matter what challenge they take on, they will eventually succeed... after hours of constant failed attempts. Doug especially is known to deny failure even when he's already lost, this case depicting him in a more pathetic light, such as the Poob vs. Ploob debate or the Zoo Invasion.
• Didn't Think This Through: In his "Putting Twitch Chat on trial for unethical behavior" stream, Doug has the judge end a "case" by saying "Case Dismissed" as a catchy catchphrase, but when Parkzer makes him change it because "Case Dismissed" means that the trial was thrown out instead of a verdict being reached, Doug realizes this means the previously "killed" chatters were not technically guilty, and thus were "executed" when they shouldn't have. This leads to both Doug and the mods being put on trial and found guilty by the judge.
• Disney Villain Death: Faendal, having been convicted of manslaughter, is executed by way of being launched through the air over a cliff, dying when he hits the ground hundreds of feet away. Lydia goes the same way after her own death sentence... except somehow she survives the fall.
• Disproportionate Retribution: In "GTA 5's most chaotic mod, but if I break the law I explode", the price of committing a normal crime is a simple run restart, but when Parkzer asks if he stepped on a bug from an endangered species while walking away from the Vinewood sign, he ends up (allegedly) going to a bug prison and is forced to give the channel over to Parkzer, who only reads from the California penal code.
• Distinction Without a Difference: In "I forced an Ai to play a kids adventure game," a donation message calls out Doug for killing three six-year-olds in rapid succession. Doug clarifies that they were actually seven.
• Divine Intervention:
  • Doug cites this trope in "I challenged a Youtuber to the most chaotic Zelda race ever" to be the only thing to get him to wear a bunny suit, in the form of a hurricane hitting Sacramento.
  • Zigzagged in "GTA 5's most chaotic mod, but if I break the law I explode": Doug cites many of the disasters that happen to force majeure^note "greater force" to avoid getting penalized by the law. He extends this to its more abstract concept of God Himself actively interfering, but God claims to have had nothing to do with it.
    God^*through the body of CasperThePalestGhost: Hey Doug. This is God. Don't blame me for acts of myself. You're on your own down there, criminal.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: During Can I beat Mario before Twitch Chat beats ONE level?, Doug and Chat get extremely distracted between runs by making the screen bounce around like a DVD screensaver. One session gets so heated, Chat begins laying into the addiction undertones.
  lunchbox: is competitive edging against TOS
  sergnr: Oh God! I'm about to corner...
  i_love_toilet_water: doug, i cant last much longer. im gonna corner soon!
• Downer Beginning: The start of "The Great Battle of Twitch Chat vs Youtube Chat" has Doug showing off his accomplishment of winning "League of Their Own" in the 2023 Streamer Awards, and being challenged to a gaming competition by one of the nominees Ludwig Ahgren... and getting completely shit-stomped, and being forced to give away his award as a result. This is the set-up for the rest of the video: For Twitch Chat to beat Ludwig's Youtube Chat and avenge Doug's honor.
• Dramatic Irony: As their chess game against Chat is nearing the end, the Napoleon AI announces their plan to decisively win the game: the "Napoleon Ultra Paradox". As they list out each step of the maneuver, crowing that this will immediately defeat Chat, Doug loudly and repeatedly points out that the move immediately would put Napoleon in checkmate.^note To explain, the first step involves moving the king into the worst place on the board in that moment, causing it to be surrounded by Twitch chat's bishop, rook, and king, automatically putting it into check. Napoleon then would have all of his remaining pawns surround his king; while the AI says this would take out Twitch chat's king, in reality, it would prevent Napoleon's from moving, causing an instant checkmate.
• Early-Installment Weirdness:
  • The channel's earliest videos were entirely Hearthstone-based. After the channel was renamed, Hearthstone is rarely, if ever, mentioned in videos.
  • The early videos made after the channel renaming used original footage. Nowadays, most of Doug's videos use mostly reworked and re-edited footage from his Twitch streams.
• Eldritch Abomination: In one Skyrim video, Doug ends up accidentally creating one of these when he turns a horse into a floating head, then proceeds to make the head gigantic. The result is a giant floating head that both refuses to die and proceeds to screw with the game, to the point that it prevents Doug from using console commands.
• Epic Fail:
  • On more than one occasion, Napoleon manages to snag defeat from the jaws of victory because despite the anything goes nature of his ability to cheat, manages to do something leads to his defeat, whether it's flipping the board directly putting his king in checkmate, or having a bishop make an illegal move that results in it team killing the king.
  • During I forced Coney to take the worst quizzes of all time, Coney rolls a Sporcle quiz that asks him to name a secret element from the periodic table. As he struggles to name another element, Doug offhandedly lists off potassium as a joke. It turns out to be the secret element in question, giving Coney a 100% score and allowing him to easily secure a point for that round.
  • In If viewers break my secret rule I ban them, one of the rules is revealed to be that each message must contain the sender’s username, and Doug requests that a viewer sends in a legal message to show this off. Matttslime steps up to the plate, but ends up getting banned anyway because he misspelled his own username.
• Episode on a Plane: One video has Twitch chat trying to fly a plane in Grand Theft Auto V.
• Et Tu, Brute?: Doug takes being killed by Faendal and Lydia very badly.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: In "I forced Twitch Chat to play my unethical D&D campaign", when the Mop gets a Natural 20 attacking the Bard, Doug narrates it as the Mop, who thought the Bard was trying to hurt his best friend the Fridge with his bumbling attempts to fix him, gets enraged and whacks the Bard so hard it knocks him on his ass. In response, the Bard uses his Vicious Mockery ability on the Mop to convince him that his interference cost the Fridge his life, which depresses the Mop so much it kills him.
• Evil All Along: In "I forced Twitch Chat to play my unethical D&D campaign", Porky betrays the party near the end. While this might have initially seemed to be a case of Mistreatment-Induced Betrayal given all the verbal and physical abuse the party had heaped on him throughout the dungeon, it turns out he was the owner of Walgreens and was planning on stealing the staff from the start. Doug states this in the original, unedited stream.
• Evil Counterpart: The Appliance Department in "I forced Twitch Chat to play my unethical D&D campaign" has a rough analog with each of the players, minus the Microwave (who dies right off the bat). The Roomba is a big, physically powerful idiot like the Barbarian, the Mop and Fridge have a pre-existing close relationship with each other like the Wizard and Bard, and the Washing Machine can only order the others around but is otherwise useless in a fight like Porky.
• Extreme Omnivore:
  • In some streams and videos, Doug will end up eating things such as quarter-cups of cheese, crab legs (still in the shell), powdered pancake mix, shots of tartar sauce or ranch dressing, and a cardboard cutout of Danny DeVito.
  • In Doug's real life, he's mentioned that due to the diet he's on he will sometimes drink several shots of pure olive oil just to give his body calories.
  • During "Can I eat 10 Drive-Thru meals ordered by strangers? (WORLD RECORD)", Doug splits a fortune cookie between Berry and Perry, and eats the paper inside with no hesitation.
  Perry: Didn't even read it.
• Fake-Out Twist: The "twist" of Shufflemania was that the Shuffler was not actually an AI, but rather Jerma985. Due to the interactions between the Shuffler and the players, it would have been easy to figure out that there was a real person behind it the whole time. However, this was intended to hide the real objective of Shufflemania, which was to find tennis partners for Doug and Jerma, complete with an improptu tennis match.
• Fantastic Drug: Horse tilting of all things becomes this during Doug's Dark Brotherhood speedrun with random weapons. By the end he's doing it just to get down short corridors.
  shattuckl: Is this where horse tilt anonymous meets?
  Doug: Look, I can quit horse tilt any time, I don't have a problem. If you have a problem, that's on you.
• Foregone Conclusion: "Adult Man gets punished after each death in Donkey Kong Country" initially seems like a normal challenge, where upon death Doug has to give an increasing amount of gift subs. However, around three minutes into setting up the challenge, he decides on his punishment for bailing, which is to apologise to all of his Twitch subscribers individually in a maid costume. From there, it becomes obvious what most of the video's two-hour runtime will be dedicated to.^note To his credit, he manages to make it to about three hours on the first game, but by that point the deaths are already too expensive.
• Foreshadowing:
  • In "Can you bike down GTA's Mountain using ONLY your voice?", Doug drops several Star Wars references before the video eventually devolves into Doug holding a trial over the name of a one-shot character from Ewoks.
  • Early on in "Can I eat 10 Drive-Thru meals ordered by strangers? (WORLD RECORD)", when the possibility of going to KFC is discussed, a chat message is brought to Doug's attention:
    atomicpenguinator08: KFC's buckets will ruin you guys
    • From the same video, as Doug is pitching going to Starbucks, if you pay attention to the chat, they're talking about Eddie stream-sniping him.
• Formula-Breaking Episode: Most of Doug's videos were about video games, only for him to start making more general-based content, to the point where non-videogame streams are just as common as gaming ones.
  • "Walmart ends the violent video game crisis". While still related to video games, it's instead Doug making fun of Walmart for removing violent video games from their stores (while still selling guns at those same stores).
  • "Skyrim, but 10 cheese wheels spawn every second". A Christmas Episode where Doug speaks in rhymes and plays as Santa spreading cheer with cheese wheels and Good Old Fisticuffs.
  • "The Founding of the Fartocracy" does not feature any gameplay whatsoever, and instead follows Doug as he attempts to create a government based entirely around farts.
  • "I used Ai to determine the Safest Job in America" is exactly what it sounds like. In this case, it's pitting selected jobs in a fight-to-the-death tournament using ChatGPT set up as "Bob the local fight analyst". It ends with teachers winning the tournament. However, Doug then pits them up against Master Chief, and it's determined that being Master Chief is the safest job.
  • Another video that has completely nothing to do with video games was his first-ever stream done outside his usual setup. There, the premise was that he and his friends had to drive up to a fast food restaurant, order what the person in front of them ordered, split the entire order within the group, and repeat it 9 more times.
• Full-Name Basis: Parodied by Parkzer, who generally speaks very measured and formal, to the point of even answering calls from Doug on stream with the unabbreviated version of his channel name as if it was his real one.
  Parkzer: Hello, Douglas Douglas.
• Funny Background Event: Since most of Doug's videos are taken from his Twitch streams, the chat remains on screen. Whenever he does something crazy, expect Chat to go wild in response.
• Gainax Ending: The final match of Shuffle-Mania has Ludwig Ahgren and Squeex of Team Orange beating Alpharad and Rubber Ross of Team Blue after a grueling comeback, and Doug announces the secret of the Shuffler: its true identity was Jerma985, who then alongside Doug gives Team Orange their prize: an abrupt game of tennis (much to Chat's delight), complete with Parkzer as the referee.
• The Gambling Addict: Chat has a serious itch for gambling away Twitch channel points for anything, from whether Doug will complete the challenge to small things such as coin flips.
• Giant Enemy Crab: A Skyrim mod adds giant boss versions of normal creatures, including the humble mudcrab. Killing the thing is surprisingly tough, because when the tiny mudcrab enemy is scaled up to mammoth size and given boss stats, the result is a Lightning Bruiser with ludicrous Hitbox Dissonance that can pinch you to death in three hits from thirty feet away, and runs faster than you can. A whole video is dedicated to strategies for overcoming such a terrifying foe.
• The Grinch: Because Doug modded Skyrim's Fine Clothes into a Santa outfit for the Christmas theme of one video, and Nazeem is the first NPC you're likely to find wearing them, the logical conclusion is that Nazeem stole Christmas and must be stopped. He also paid off guards to arrest Santa when it seemed like Santa was coming close to saving Christmas.
• Golden Ending: In effect, this is how "I forced Twitch Chat to play my unethical D&D campaign" ends. The evil warlock gets defeated, Walmart (while also being made sentient) burns down and crushes Porky in the process, and the party decides to destroy the warlock's staff after everything is all said and done. Also, they made it out with the limited edition Let's Go Pikachu Switch, the wizard and bard appear to have fixed their relationship (for once in a DougDoug video), and (via a Nat 20) the Walmart employee Bert is confirmed to have survived, and is Wal Town's new mayor. And the party gets rewarded with a giant Let's Go Eevee Switch on top of it all.
• Go Mad from the Revelation: Sam 17 during Doug's playthrough of Pajama Sam. While discussing Sam's code, Doug accidentally presses the button to let him listen in, and upon registering the discussion Sam 17 promptly dies. The implication Doug and Chat take from this is that he realized he was an AI and broke from the revelation.
• Gone Horribly Wrong: Or Gone Horribly Right depending how you look at it. In I made an Ai Secretary to answer my actual emails Doug and Twitch Chat work together to make an AI secretary to answer emails for Doug, with chat making nonsensical suggestions for personality traits. One of the two A.I.s hired by Chat was Diarrhea Doug, despite Doug's strong objections. However, when he was tasked to respond to an email from a couple that was getting married, Chat immediately tried to undo their decision upon realizing that the AI was being used to respond to actual emails.
  Doug: This couple is going to be horrified. And that blood's on your hands!
• Gilligan Cut: During a Totally Accurate Battle Simulator stream, he promises not to be biased to one country, despite being American. Cut to him saluting with a USA cap and shirt while a kazoo cover of the national anthem plays.
• Greater-Scope Villain: The AI Pajama Sams, starting from 4, start to talk about a mysterious villain seemingly greater in threat than Darkness (although thanks to Doug's description of the scenario, they prioritize capturing Darkness) named High Demon Elgrim. He can apparently be summoned to the corporeal realm by sacrificing 18 children, which Doug did.
  KamesaruOG: Doug, I just found out that Elgrim the demon-lord can't be summoned unless you sacrifice 18 children. Luckily no one could be so callous. Wait, what are you doing?
  Doug: We're gonna be fine, as long as we don't sacrifice another one.
• Hand Wave: The premise of Doug's D&D campaign (where a member of Twitch Chat is able to control one of the three characters for a limited period of time) is explained in-universe as the result of a curse placed upon the characters which renders only one of their brain cells active at a time.
• He Knows Too Much: Sam 25 was executed by Doug to prevent him from finding out the truth about his brothers.
• Hoist by His Own Petard:
  • Happens twice in Peggle Speedrun, but an AI Robot threatens me with trivia:
    • In the first instance, Doug asks Chat to give AI Bjorn broader questions pertaining to topics he actually knows, such as history, computer science, and 2D platformers. A Chat member then put in a request for all of the above, resulting in Bjorn asking Doug to name a fantasy-themed, historical, geographical exploration-based 2D platformer game, developed using Python. The kicker is that it turns out to be a trick question with no actual answer.
    • Later, AI Bjorn asks a question about Zorbeez, which Doug answers by reciting the entire ad from memory. Even though the AI commends Doug for his performance, it fails his answer anyways. Due to an earlier rule stating that Bjorn's judgement was the deciding factor in whether an answer was "correct", Doug is forced to reset the current level.
    Doug: See, normally this is where I would say, "Well I got the correct answer, so I should just get to roll with it", right? I was clearly correct. Unfortunately, earlier on, I said a wrong answer and he gave it to me and I said that we're gonna go off his decision, which means I fucked myself and I have to reset!
• Honor Before Reason:
  • Both "A" Crew and "Z" Crew throw away their rightful victories in the Twitch Alphabet tournament in favor of winner-takes-all final rounds. Doug commends both of them for following this trope.
  • Doug could easily survive and complete his objective when playing Skyrim with enemies spawning based on his voice, if he would just not talk. But that's lame, unsportsmanlike, and not at all interesting to watch, so he keeps commentating and engaging with Twitch Chat, actively avoiding their tricks rather than passively.
  • Twitch Chat would rather lose than give up their ability to take screenshots. During "I built an AI Family to beat my Twitch Chat in Mario Maker", Doug offers to let Twitch Chat skip a level in exchange for being able to take screenshots, which 75% of chat votes against. Doug initially mocks it but comes to respect the dedication.
  • PointCrow in I ran unethical social experiments on Twitch Chat is the only chatter to not even remotely consider selling out his ideals in thinking Doug is bad at 2D-Platformers, despite the stakes at hand, and is punished by having his messages reversed as a result. When Doug does so, he points out he could simply type in reverse to get his messages read as normal, but chooses not to after doing so and remains dedicated to the bit the rest of his time on the experiment.
• Hulk Speak: Doug devolved into this in desperation a few hours into his attempts to beat Super Smash Bros. Ultimate without saying the names of any Smash characters. After restarting dozens of times due to using "like" unconsciously (as it contains Ike), he tried using sentences so simple that he couldn't possibly use it. Unfortunately, this didn't quite work.
• Hurricane of Puns: Chat devolves into this during "GTA 5 Speedrun, but everything's launched every 10 seconds", spamming puns as Doug tries to complete the challenge. Doug gets increasingly confused and frustrated that Chat is just randomly obsessed with puns for no reason.
• I Am Not Weasel: Bjorn hates being called anything other than a majestic unicorn, and constantly flips his lid when chat starts calling him increasingly unrelated animals such as a beaver and a raccoon.
• I Can't Believe It's Not Heroin!: Horse tilting, of all things. Doug gradually becomes more obsessed with using it as his Dark Brotherhood speedrun continues, and it quickly becomes a bigger detriment to the run's speed than a help.
  Doug: I don't have a problem, I can stop any time I want. But sometimes it just feels really good to just get one- like a little horse tilt in, you know? Helps me get through a stream or a mission.
• Incoming Ham: Doug's alarm for when Twitch Chat takes control of Spelunky 2 is hilariously over-the-top, with it making sound like Chat is some sort of horrifying world-ending disaster. ^note  The song used is the Moebius battle theme, from Xenoblade Chronicles 3.
  TWITCH CHAT IS COMING
• Incredibly Lame Fun: Doug's kart ride from his Planet Coaster challenge, which is nothing more than a circle with a rise-then-drop, surrounded by trees and a rock. The visitors at best ignore it and sometimes even throw trash at it, with Chat joining in and making fun of it. As soon as Chat got to play with Clickmaps, they made a successful effort to delete it and then put a superior ride where it used to be, much to Doug's despair.
  hey_its_macs: Have you ever heard of a sensory deprivation tank? Basically they block all sound and light in an effort to take away all stimuli. Anyways, I remembered that because I went on your ride and felt nothing.
• Insane Troll Logic:
  • Doug wants to answer the age-old question "Why did the chicken cross the road?" His solution? Give Twitch chat control of a chicken in Grand Theft Auto V and have them complete increasingly ridiculous tasks.
  • One video has Doug letting an artificial intelligence program rewrite his LinkedIn profile, resulting in passages that are this trope incarnate.
• Instantly Proven Wrong: A Running Gag on his channel, mainly during challenge runs where he either can die easily, or has to watch what he is saying to avoid spawning stuff, is his habit of saying something to the effect of "This is the run!", only to almost right away be stopped and forced to reset because he got cocky or did exactly what he assumed wouldn't happen.
• Interface Screw:
  • Mario Speedrun, but every 5 minutes the HUD gets worse, where every 5 minutes, Doug bolts another random UI element to the view, clogging up visibility.
  • An unusual variant that crosses over with a (surprisingly mild) Hostile Show Takeover: Doug sometimes has a channel point reward where there is a 10% chance that Billy Mays's Zorbeez ad will play fullscreen over whatever Doug's doing, blocking not only Chat from seeing what's happening but also Doug.
  • Mario Maker, but random images cover every level has Doug place an image chosen by pinwheel on top of his Mario Maker 2 gameplay, with either periods of transparency or Doug has to make use of any free space available. Images vary from Doug's nipple with Kirby's face, to an alternating pattern of Dougs, Twitch Chat themselves and most importantly, the Nintendogs assist trophy.
• Irony: Despite a large amount of his content being themed around food and cooking (if only for analogies), Doug himself actually hates cooking. He hates it so much that he'd rather down shots of pure olive oil to meet his daily calorie needs than go through the trouble of making himself real food more often than he absolutely has to.^note He's also doing keto, and finding a snack food that has calories for fuel but isn't a carb is basically impossible.
• It's All About Me: Considering it's his channel, Doug adamantly refuses to let his chat be rendered more relevant than him, going into a furious fit of denial when Chat's Disney Character personality test comes out with Mike Wazowski while he gets Princess Jasmine, claiming that Mike is just a side character who could easily be removed from the story while the entire story of Aladdin revolves around Jasmine and that she's a main character.
• Just Eat Gilligan: Discussed and Justified during the "GTA 5's most chaotic mod, but if I break the law I explode" video. Parkzer very often points out that Doug could probably just win the challenge if he just avoided all the stuff thrown his way and focuses on not breaking the law, but due to Twitch Chat constantly causing different effects that Doug can't control, Doug isn't able to simply avoid breaking the law in most cases.
• Kansas City Shuffle: After Doug gets wise to regular bamboozles, Twitch Chat uses this as a strategy to trip him up in challenges where things happen based on Doug's voice. They'll put an obvious trick in their message that Doug will definitely notice, and he will intentionally dance around saying it, but he'll fail to notice another, subtler trick in the same message and confidently say it (like one saying that their pet bearded dragon named bandit died, where he caught the latter two but fell for the first).
• Kill Us Both: Barbarian invokes this when he gets impersonated by shapeshifting mannequins in "I forced Twitch Chat to play my unethical D&D campaign", though it's more because he also forgot which one was the real him. He goes so far as to try and punch both the mannequin and himself.
• Knight Templar Big Brother: Played for Laughs during Peggle Speedrun, but an AI robot threatens me with trivia, when Doug calls his brother Davey for help with a Stanley Parable-related question, leading to Davey attempting to intimidate AI Bjorn into passing Doug.
  Davey: You pass Doug in this fucking class, or I will come over there and I will change every song on The Stanley Parable soundtrack to be the sound of you getting your ass beat, alright?
• Laser-Guided Karma: Throughout Mario Maker, but random images cover every level, after being convinced they're unimportant to the Youtube audience and that their donations don't matter, Chat has been striking by spamming, and instead of listening to their demands, Doug doubles down and at times even puts up a pre-recorded Chat for cheap labor. It backfires on him when Chat happens to be blocking the screen of his challenge later on, and suddenly they're the ones with the power, meaning Doug has to listen to their demands for them to use emotes only and end the strike. To add insult to injury, it's a donation and a couple of helpful chatters that get him through the rest of the challenge.
  horror_vortex: Get the Youtube people to help you since they're more important
  yasmine_cutie: Chat carried you in those last two levels, you're welcome
• Leitmotif: Blue Line (Instrumental) from Gran Turismo 2, for generally heartwarming moments, but mostly whenever "A" Crew and "Z" Crew form Team Alphabet and prove The Power of Friendship.
• Like Is, Like, a Comma: He unconsciously uses the word "like" a lot in casual conversation, which he becomes keenly aware of in his run of Classic Mode in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate where he has to restart every time he says the name of a character in the roster. Since "like" contains "Ike," this causes him no shortage of grief; unlike most of his voice command challenges, the word "like" gets him far more than the chat does in that one. And unlike other characters (aside from Ken), he has a little extra something to emphasize how easily he screwed up.
  "You just said Ike. Dumbass."

M-Y

• Manipulative Bastard: After Chat proving he was bad at 2D-Platformers twice in a row in "Can I beat Mario before Twitch Chat beats ONE level?", Doug decides to take advantage of their gambling addiction to beat them in a round by opening a Twitch prediction, banking on the people voting on Chat losing to him to sabotage their performance.
• Masochist's Meal: In "Can I eat 10 Drive-Thru meals ordered by strangers? (WORLD RECORD)", Doug and three of his friends (Parkzer included) drive around what they claim is Madison, Illinois (which clearly has palm trees visible in the background) and try to eat an exact copy of what the person in line in front of them ordered from 10 different drive-thru fast food restaurants. By the end they are visibly and audibly in extreme discomfort after eating nine different meals, including some very unpleasant Del Taco quesadillas, when they are forced to eat an entire bucket of KFC with sides as their final challenge.
• Mood-Swinger: In "Peggle Speedrun, but an AI Robot threatens me with trivia", A.I. Bjorn quickly goes from acting like a happy, somewhat doting teacher to furiously shouting about how stupid Doug is the moment he gets a question wrong.
• Mundane Made Awesome:
  • To try and get a chaotic Twitch Chat through various Event Matches in Melee, the video's narration describes the process by citing passages from The Art of War (Sun Tzu).
  • Doug manages to tell a genuinely exciting and heartwarming story through the media of video games and Twitch Chat, where the dramatis personae are Guy Fieri, Gordon Ramsay, and the letters of the alphabet.
  • One video is about Doug trying to simply take a bath in Red Dead Redemption 2... while Twitch chat has control over the mods and is trying to prevent him in any way possible.
  • The first line of the Twitch Chat Peggle video is "Peggle is a cruel and bloodthirsty god..." which pretty much sets the tone for the whole video.
• Mundane Object Amazement:
  • During "Can I eat 10 Drive-Thru meals ordered by strangers? (WORLD RECORD)", Parkzer becomes ecstatic at the sight of a baked potato in the group's Wendy's order. Funnily enough, Doug hates potatoes, but Parkzer was not aware of this at the time and simply jumped at the opportunity to eat something healthy for once.
• My Master, Right or Wrong: Basically the premise of "City Skylines, but I elected Twitch Chat as Mayor", where Doug follows the orders of a random person from Twitch Chat for 5 minutes, regardless of whether it helps Parkzerville or completely annihilates it. He also feigns offense whenever people try to speak out against the mayor, though when Parkzer says it wouldn't be the mayor's fault for the city's really bad condition, Doug's quick to say it was all on the mayor and that he was Just Following Orders, only for Parkzer to bring up a critical point of Exact Words:
  Doug: Well, I think I come from a society where you obey your higher-ups, okay? Where if the mayor tells you to go make a giant A and not get water to the farmland, you go make a giant A.
  Parkzer: Did the mayor explicitly say "do not connect the water?"
  Doug: ...Parkzer, I think you're maybe, you're not admiring the A enough.
• Never My Fault: Napoleon rarely worries about his failures, but when he does he blames his generals (Doug) despite him making the moves directly. He says as much when Doug alerts him to the uselessness of the Napoleon Ultra Paradox. Ironically enough, Chat can be seen agreeing with Napoleon in the background.
• Nice to the Waiter: Played for Laughs - During "Twitch Chat and I ranked the greatest Fidget Toys", Chat randomly starts donating with the intention of it going to Doug's editors, with Doug finding it hilarious (and post-production, Doug's editor Berry is seen being slowly bombarded with money).
  Rapoagg^note Donating $157: Give your Editor a Kiss from me
  Doug: No. He can't invoice me for a kiss.
  Berry (editor): Dammit.
• Nintendo Hard: His Grand Theft Auto V challenge: get to five specific points on the map, but a mod makes the player's car an One Hitpoint Wonder and makes everyone else's car unpredictably launch forward or backwards every couple of seconds. It took him nine hours of consecutive play to beat this.
• Non Sequitur: Midway through "I threatened my viewers with a Discussion Robot", the video gets derailed by the inclusion of an entire Zorbeez commercial.
• Number of the Beast: In "I made Twitch Chat invest $10,000 in the stock market", Doug held a friendly competition with Parkzer to see whose stock portfolio would make more money after a year. Though both sides ended up not turning a profit, Doug lost to Parkzer by exactly $666.66.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Parkzer usually takes Doug's suggestions as straight faced as possible, but one of the very few times he legitimately gets heated is in Doug's "Putting Twitch Chat on trial for unethical behavior" stream, as Doug revealing he made the Judge say "Case dismissed" makes him so confused and (comically) annoyed that he forces Doug to change it, because "Case dismissed" means the case was thrown out instead of a guilty verdict.
• Obvious Rule Patch: Doug's challenges regularly include somewhat obvious or strange rules meant to address very specific things that are core to the challenge. For some examples:
  • In any voice-based challenge runs, Doug always puts a self-imposed rule that he has to be engaging with Chat consistently over staying silent. This is because it would be easy to just not say anything in response, which defeats the point of the challenge being that Doug has to avoid saying specific things.
  • Due to the blatant and intentional unfairness of AI Napoleon being able to cheat in chess, Doug's only consistent rule he gives Napoleon is that he cannot just outright say he Wins by Doing Absolutely Nothing, and will undo turns if Napoleon does anything that verges on not giving Chat a chance to play. So if Napoleon does something like clear half of Chat's pieces, he'll allow it, but if Napoleon says he clears their pieces and automatically wins, Doug will force Napoleon to redo his turn.
• Offing the Offspring: In "I forced an Ai to play a kids adventure game" the Sam AI kept devolving into speaking for too long and barely considering the direct situation Doug gives him. As such, he had to put him down over and over to reset his code from the start, which he renders as killing them by taking them out back and shooting them in the head. Inflating his Sam Murder score, whenever he messed up with the AI himself, he had to kill it before it could even speak. When the final Sam announces his intent to investigate his brothers' deaths, Doug kills him as well to keep him from snooping.
• One-Hit-Point Wonder: The "Skyrim with 1 Hit Point" streams and videos, which are more or less Exactly What It Says on the Tin, but with the added caveat that, if Doug dies in the game, he has to spin a punishment wheel and suffer whatever punishment is chosen. Also, essential NPC characters are no longer invincible, meaning Doug can't abuse their invincibility to make fights easier. He can't even step over random bones because Wreaking Havok can cause Collision Damage.
• The Paranoiac: Doug can be this in an "X, but if I say "Y" then Z" challenge, being suspicious that every TTS message has a hidden word in it to activate the mod, even suspecting innocent messages of gratification.
• Paying for Air: In "I challenged a Youtuber to the most chaotic Zelda race ever", in order to preserve the channel point economy, Doug starts charging Chat channel points to convert them into oxygen. After Chat crashes the oxygen banks in a desperate attempt to put oxygen on the table, Doug cuts off the oxygen supply to prevent the next Great Depression. To add insult to injury, he breathes in what he 'earned' right in front of Chat while bragging about being the 1%.
  zeonino: oxygen is too big to fail
  
  tjay032: Doug. We the people demand nationalised doug-care, to provide cheap oxygen for all citizens amids this crisis
• Pet the Dog: While Chat often makes fun of Doug and yells "RIGGED" whenever he succeeds when they feel like he shouldn't have, during "Peggle Speedrun, but an Ai Robot threatens me with trivia", when Bjorn asks Doug for a Billy Mays question, not only are they excited as Doug recites the entirety of the Zorbeez ad as his answer but for once, can be seen yelling "RIGGED" for Doug when Bjorn shuts down his answer as wrong.
• Physical God: A few videos involve Doug giving Twitch chat the ability to control his in-game mods, which he has described as giving them god-like powers.
• Plot Detour: His "walkthrough" of how to beat Skyrim with one health starts off as described, but halfway through Bleak Falls Barrow he is seemingly killed by his follower Faendal. The second half of the video deals with investigating the death, determining which crime Faendal might be charged with, an impromptu Twitch Chat jury trial, Faendal's execution by console command, and finally the funeral. As for the "walkthrough" part, after Faendal is properly mourned Doug just sums up the rest of the run as "and then beat the rest of the game without taking any damage".
• Pokémon Speak: In "I forced Twitch Chat to play my unethical D&D campaign", the giant Roomba and the Walmart can only say their names, unlike the other animated products.
• Poor Communication Kills: Doug recounts a story during his time as a producer for the 2016 Hearthstone World Championship, where he instructed the competing players, Pavel and DrHippi, to hold the trophy in the air if they won to make for a good photo. However, due to both players having a rudimentary understanding of English^note Pavel is Russian, DrHippi is Ukranian and being socially awkward in general, when Pavel won the Championship and received his trophy, he proceeded to hold it up above his head for three whole minutes.
  Doug: It could have been worse, but I still felt bad, because I'm sure in his brain he was like, "I don't want to do this, but that weird guy said I should hold it above my head."
• The Problem with Pen Island: Invoked by Doug's Twitch chat in several "X, but if I say "Y" then Z" videos, with the chat attempting to trick Doug into accidentally saying stuff to spawn enemies or different objects, or just to eliminate him in general with phrases such as "drag in" (Dragon), "banned it" (Bandit), "copy" (Cop), and various other phrases depending on the game and word line-up. The "Pen Island" part comes in when the Text to Speech detector marks something he says as one of the banned words, as simply containing the word (such as with the aforementioned "Copy" and "Cop") can get him nailed by the bot. Even spelling it will cause the bot to register the letters as the word!
• Properly Paranoid: In two Skyrim videos, Doug starts doubting whether or not his Twitch viewers are being sincere in their donation messages, especially if it's a rather heartfelt message. Of course, considering his viewers have been trying to get him to say certain words and spawn enemies in the game... It's all summed up in "GTA 5, but if I say "cop" then the cops try to kill me":
  Doug: Dude, last time there were so many messages, that were super nice and caring, that were definitely still tricks!
• Psychic-Assisted Suicide: In "I forced Twitch Chat to play my unethical D&D campaign", the Bard takes out one of the Mannequins with Vicious Mockery by telling him he can't afford clothes despite living in a clothing aisle. The magic of his words depresses the mannequin so much he drops himself off the platform down onto the bottom floor, smashing himself on the ground.
• Punch-Clock Villain: In "I forced Twitch Chat to play my unethical D&D campaign", Bert the beleaguered Orc clothing department employee puts very little effort into stopping the adventurers, only doing what Walter tells him to do when getting yelled at over the comm system and otherwise just reads his magazine. It turns out he was the former mayor of Wal Town, whom Walter had kidnapped, and gets reinstated after escaping. In thanks for rescuing him, he rewards the players with a giant Let's Go Eevee Switch.
• Pyrrhic Victory:
  • By using a pair of giants to fight a Skyrim mod's Giant Enemy Crab instead of fighting it himself, healing the giants to keep them alive, he's able to find one of several ways to kill it. The problem is he's now in the middle of a giant camp with two pissed-off giants, who are still hostile, and who immediately walk up and kill him too.
  • Doug and Chat get in a wager with Parkzer over whose stock market investments will fare better for the 2022 year. Parkzer wins the wager, but the issue is the entire stock market took a bloody beating for that entire year and both sides ended up losing a ton of money, Parkzer just lost less money.
  • invokedThis is how Doug and Chat's zoo adventure ends. Doug and Chat succeed in their goal in getting Parkzer to visit their zoo, with Parkzer even finding the human exhibit of protestors incredibly funny, and the believers even win the bet for once. However, Parkzer says he would only visit the zoo on account of it being So Bad, It's Good, all the animals (including the beloved otters) are either dead or stuck in boxes, and Doug is $1 million in debt.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: In "Peggle Speedrun, but an Ai Robot threatens me with trivia", every time Doug gets a question wrong, Bjorn flies off the handle and starts bombarding him with insults and f-bombs.
• Ridiculous Future Sequelisation: Well, not the future, but in Mario Speedrun, but every 5 minutes the HUD gets worse, as the speedrun goes on, Chat starts naming the agglomeration of UIs on top of the game of Super Mario Odyssey based off whatever UIs were currently on-screen. The names evolve as the speedrun continues, and by the end of the video, Doug has beaten "The Lego Legend of Oldschool Final Grand Elder Star World of Zelda Warcraft Kingdom Call of Dark Half Breath Raid of Animal Shadow Life Risk Scrolls of Skyrim Wars Legends Crossing the Metal Duke New Super Red Hearts Wild Duty Banjo Nukazooie Super Fantasy Fallout Horizons Team Dead Mario Souls Donkey Kong Sims Theft Gear Runescape Redemption Fortress Solid Rayman Witcher Mario Autosona Tetris Undertale Odyssey Halo Fortnite Rain 53252V2310644642333".
  richard_smash: Okay these Kingdom Hearts titles are getting unreasonable
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: Doug discovers in his Twitch Chat alphabet tournament that the first and second halves of the alphabet ("A" Crew and "Z" Crew) are these. "A" Crew prefers flashy, audacious plays that are more interesting to watch, while "Z" Crew generally sticks to simple and more foolproof strategies with higher theoretical chance of success.
• Remember the New Guy?: In the context of the Youtube videos: during I ran unethical social experiments on Twitch Chat, a couple of remaining chatters have to make an AI of Doug himself make the loudest noise possible. AI Doug hadn't been introduced or focused on in a main channel video (or even on DougDougDoug for that matter) up to that point and is abruptly introduced with no fanfare.
• The Rival:
  • "A" and "Z" Crew became bitter rivals ever since Doug pitted them against each other, and are prone to in-fighting and trash-talking each other.
  • invoked The entirety of Twitch Chat found a new enemy: after Doug got stomped by Ludwig Ahgren, who streams on YouTube - so Doug had Twitch Chat take on Ludwig's Youtube Chat, creating a Fandom Rivalry between the two parties. Twitch Chat was able to avenge Doug's honor, and managed to defeat Youtube Chat after an uneasy start. This eventually spiraled into Twitch Chat declaring the entirety of Doug's Youtube audience as their enemy, starting from when Doug prioritized the latter's watching experience over their channel point rewards.
  • Though it has not been shown in an edited video (as of December 2023), a new rival to Twitch Chat emerged in the form of Doug's YouTube Chat, following changes to Twitch rules that allow streaming simultaneously on both platforms. Compared to Twitch Chat, YouTube Chat is (outwardly) friendlier to Doug, is apparently happily married, and live in the attic instead of the basement. To say the two chats dislike each other is an understatement.
• Ron the Death Eater: Invoked: Claude, from Peggle, is just as nice and polite as all of the other Peggle Masters and still helps the player with his power, Flippers. But Doug and Chat treat him like the Final Boss of Peggle in the stream where Twitch chat beats Peggle, something that seems to have Ascended in Peggle Nights, where he's a city-destroying Kaiju. His reputation as a villain is one of the few things Doug and Chat don't argue over.
• Rule of Three:
  • Without even intending it in this video, completely naturally. First, his engine goes out. As soon as he comments on it, his tire bursts. As soon as he comments on that, his entire car finally explodes.
  • In "Can you kill a Lynel with Chickens?", Doug's initial plan is only three steps... then he starts adding more and more steps as he keeps finding issues with the plan.
• Running Gag:
  • In general:
    • Expect Chat to spam "RIGGED" whenever they lose something/something doesn't go their way/they feel like it, or "PLANNED" whenever they win something.
    • Doug referring to his brother Davey as "the creator of The Stanley Parable, who I am good friends with".
    • For months, Chat referencing and spamming the game Barn Finders was this, until Doug eventually caved and finally played the game on stream.
    • Doug's olive oil consumption as part of his keto diet, since he dislikes taking the time to cook.
    • Most donations will start with, "Hey Doug".
    • Chat claiming that they're trapped in Doug's basement, and begging to be let free.
    • The constant use of food analogies.
    • Chat going through divorces or being divorced started on a whim and has become a recurring donation message or theme across his videos. Expect to hear a message along the lines of; "My wife left me" in relation to the topic, such as people saying they were divorced over Doug refusing to do something.
    • In any video that involves A.I. writing stories based on text prompts, it keeps on veering off into stupid tangents and getting lost, and Doug has to keep inserting lines in the middle trying to force it back on task. It's only somewhat successful.
    • Doug's Chair being hailed as the best part of each stream whenever Doug has to temporarily leave the stream. This gag reached a logical conclusion when Chat reached a donation threshold for Rosa the otter's 24th birthday, giving birth to the Chair Stream.
    • Trying to figure out situations, stupid or legal, where Parkzer would shoot Doug with his gun.
    • Whenever Doug is perceived to be cheating in some way, besides the usual "RIGGED", Chat will also call him "Diablo the Cheater", from "I let an AI rewrite my LinkedIn profile (and forced spammers to read it)".
    • For about a year, Doug being pestered about wearing a bunny suit became this in "If I can't beat 10 Expert levels, Twitch Chat takes control.", where a fellow Peggle speedrunner stated he wanted to see Doug in a bunny suit, and it took donating $25,000 to Rosa the otter's 23rd birthday for Doug to finally wear one.
    • Chat's love for screenshots whenever they're in control of the game of the stream constantly shows up.
    • Chat's gambling obsession whenever a channel point prediction is thrown up - expect the believers to almost never win, and lament their losses.
    • Doug and Chat arguing over who's the main character of the DougDoug Cinematic Universe, calling the other a side character in their attempts to prove it.
    • Chat calling Doug bald, and Doug protesting against this claim.
    • Billy Mays occasionally showing up, whether it be Chat referencing him, or the 10% chance of him straight-up hijacking the stream thanks to the channel point reward.
    • A donation usually claiming the donator is afraid of something specific to whatever Doug is streaming, or some kind of negative event that similarly is applied to what Doug is playing, such as claiming to be afraid of platformers during a platformer stream, and then innocently asking what's happening.
  cloudyskyzero^note during "I created the ultimate Chess Ai (it can cheat)": hey Doug. I just got treatment for my crippling fear of 19th century French leaders. Anway what are we doing today?
  • From "I speedrun Peggle, but Twitch Chat shoots half my shots":
    • Doug being passed from sports team to sports team, culminating in him being disgracefully fired from Applebees.
    • Chat popping off for 'Magic Hat' (the rabbit), despite Doug claiming him to have the worst powerup in the game, and nagging him to buy a real-life magic hat once he lost a bet that Chat would one-shot a level. Conversely, the 'Aim-bot Owl' was pretty much booed despite being declared the best powerup by Doug.
    • 'Sexy Mommy Squid', where the squid Peggle Master was the Ms. Fanservice for Chat.
  • From "I challenged a Youtuber to the most chaotic Zelda race ever":
    • Doug side-hustling oxygen with Chat's channel points, with Doug cutting off their supply when they would mass-purchase and crash the banks (and stream).
    • After Doug claimed only an act of God would get him to wear the aforementioned bunny suit, God started speaking through the bodies of Chatters and attempted to send a hurricane to Sacramento.
  God^*through the body of ClosetHipste: Doug, this is God, if you do not wear the Bunny suit, I shall send a Hurricane to Sacramento.

  TheHurricane: Hey Doug, My wife took the car in the divorce so I'm having trouble getting to Sacramento, but when I get there I'm gonna need that Bunny suit.
• The Runt at the End: In a video where Doug played Skyrim while a random enemy spawned every ten seconds...
  "... including things like a Troll, or a Sabrecat, or a Giant, or a Dragon, or even the most deadly enemy: Nazeem."
• Saw Star Wars 27 Times: In part due to his Zorbeez ad channel point award (see Interface Screw), Doug is capable of reciting the entire ad from memory, even matching Billy Mays' cadence and pitch with near-perfect accuracy.
• Screw the Money, I Have Rules!: After AI Bjorn fails Davey for lying about the secret unlisted song in The Stanley Parable, Davey asks if he can make a deal, having Bjorn as the narrator for The Stanley Parable 2 and giving him a boat (bought with Doug's money) in exchange for making it a pass. While it's as tempting as "a pile of unicorn treats," Bjorn refuses since he doesn't actually like The Stanley Parable that much.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: "Cities Skylines, but I elected Twitch Chat as Mayor" has two separate instances of this during the gaunlet of running the city:
  • Following the term of Steeldragon8tv, whose literal first action was to destroy the city's police stations with an earthquake, Sadikmclovin gets elected. Their first action?
    Sadikmclovin: i resign
  • Almost immediately after Randomhumann gets "elected", they have Doug run a poll, with the options being "utter chaos" and "fix the city". Because the former won, the mayor immediately requests five of each natural disaster. And when Doug tries to defend their actions to Twitch Chat, the mayor immediately fires him, causing Doug to leave the room in a huff for the rest of the term.
• Selective Obliviousness: In order to proposition Jasmine as being more of a main character than Mike Wazowski, Doug finds information stating that Disney thought about making a spinoff movie centering on Jasmine, then claims that they didn't do the same for Mike. He didn't get a spinoff movie, but he was the central character of the sequel. When he finds out and reads the plot synopsis, he stops reading as soon as Mike meets Sulley, assuming that the movie's focus then moves onto the latter from then on, "confirmed" by Sulley being the only one accepted into the Scaring Program at Monsters Incorporated by the end of the movie.
• Self-Imposed Challenge: invoked He'll often have complications activate if he says certain words, which can be tricky to avoid while also talking to the chat.
• Sensory Abuse:
  • Surprisingly common, as Doug lets Chat play sounds on-stream, such as a window of time where Chat can spam fart sounds, a message that congratulates Doug (which is more often than not used to mock him), and even sea shanties. This means that Chat can in theory spam these sounds all together. And of course, there's Doug's infamous laundry alert, giving Doug himself a taste of this trope.
  • In Doug's Zelda randomizer run video, after complaining that he died because Chat didn't warn him about the danger, he applies a number of different alert sounds as channel point rewards for Chat to use, one of which is just him shouting "Wee woo, WEE WOO WEE WOO" in increasingly high volume, so that Chat can warn him of danger before it's too late. Cue Chat spamming all of them at once any time they see anything slightly dangerous.
• Share Phrase: Whenever anything bad happens to their team, every single member of Twitch Chat will unanimously explode with "RIGGED".
• Shout-Out:
  • The channel dedicated to full video archives of Doug's Twitch streams was formerly called the DougDoug Culinary Universe.
  • Upon learning that the ruler of Walmart is named Walter, Chat started spouting "waltuh... put your dick away, waltuh" memes.
  • The song "Coffee" by Supersister has shown up in a couple of 2023 videos, namely the endings of Rosa's 2023 birthday and Shufflemania ^note The usage of the song originates from a stream where Doug was grinding Only Up!, and decided to play copyrighted music onstream, including Coffee, which he described as the worst song ever (naturally, meaning Chat latched onto the song). Eventually, he bought the rights to be able to use it onstream and in videos.
• Sitcom Arch-Nemesis:
  • invoked Nazeem to Doug. In his home game, he is a harmless (if annoying) noble of Whiterun. In Doug's videos? He's the stealer of Christmas and quite possibly an evil Physical God.
  • During Rosa's 2023 Birthday Party, Chat became (partially) obsessed with donating more to Rosa than Google, treating it like a competition and overtaking their spot on the donation board at Monterey Bay Aquarium.
• Skewed Priorities:
  • For the D&D video, when Barbarian moves over onto a platform to get a dress, his brother activates the defense systems of floor 2, sending a squad of five sentient mannequins to attack. Barbarian uses his turn to get a dress from the rack, while Wizard is so focused on the mannequins lacking legs that she uses magic to create illusory legs on them.
  • Cities Skylines, but I elected Twitch Chat as Mayor has Chat behind the wheel of the construction of their new city. Naturally, they fluctuate between trying to appeal to Parkzer's superficial side a little too hard (with Mayor Ipootedinpotty building statues of Parkzer and multiple universities before anything else), getting sidetracked by their own interests (Mayor Magmomiller2 and Mayor Shortdogee focusing on big trains tracks and Mayor Cassiacat and Mayor Timothygnome trying to create animal paradise) to flat-out going with the most destructive methods (Mayor Randomhumann spamming 5 of each disaster and Mayor Benfarikfan nuking the city for an A-shaped road). The only exceptions were Mayor Moonchildqc1, who stands out for giving the city a solid foundation (and was unfortunate enough to have been elected early on in the stream, having their hard work undone) and to a lesser extent, Mayor Saybeatoe.
  • Due to their prompts, all the AI mayors in Cities Skylines 2, but I elected an Ai as the Mayor lean hard into their gimmick, and instead of providing reliable homes, water supplies and/or electricity, they focus much more on making sure that their city has their superficial aesthetic, such as the Caveman creating oh-oh holes to hide in, the PETA activist placing landfills at the sides of the roads for earthworms, and the Hollywood producer demolishing residential areas for his actors to reside in. It comes to the point that the mayors often spend more time undoing what the previous ones did, than making any actual improvements of their own. Luckily for them, they were competing with Chat's meteor-bombed city, and by comparison, their city had actual places to live, meaning Parkzer was more receptive to their city.
• Small Name, Big Ego: Doug loves claiming to be really good at 2D platforming games, despite his track-record showing he is not good at it. When chat gave suggestions for him to play to see if he was good or not, Doug consistently failed in some way almost every game he played.
• Small Role, Big Impact: In general, a lot of Running Gags can be attributed to a lone viewer making one joke and everyone else jumping on it.
  • One donation came through in a GTA V stream, where they claimed to have donated the last of their divorce money. This donation would spawn countless donations of viewers lamenting their recent divorces for the rest of the stream, as well as the occasional message in future streams.
  • The entire "Poob versus Ploob" debate and Running Gag never would have happened if it weren't for one Twitch user suggesting "Poob" as a voice command.
• Sophisticated as Hell:
  • In instances where a video's narration is played straight, there will sometimes be lines where that suddenly goes out the window.
  Narrator: This meal is some Ratatouille-ass shit.
  • A.I. Bjorn from "Peggle Speedrun, but an Ai Robot threatens me with trivia" normally speaks very eloquently and professionally, but he's also perfectly willing to ask questions about less sophisticated topics such as video game lore or DougDoug's own channel, obliges whenever a chatter asks him to speak in a silly manner, and goes on swear-filled tirades any time he gets angry.
• Sore Loser: Chat usually unanimously shouts "RIGGED" when something goes wrong. For this among other reasons, Doug actually says they cannot be a Logician together as the Logician has an ability to detect lies with ease.
  • Napoleon Bonaparte from "I created the ultimate Chess AI (it can cheat)" is also quite the sore loser, blaming his general (Doug) whenever his terrible chess moves inevitably go awry.
• Spotlight-Stealing Squad: Invoked and discussed by Doug who claims during the 2022 Dougies Award Show that he wants his streams to eventually be taken over by Parkzer.
  Doug: Ideally at some point, [Parkzer] becomes more and more involved and then at some point four or five years from now, you guys are like, "Wait, do you guys remember when Doug used to, like be on this stream sometimes?" It'll just be completely normal for Parkzer to show up and do taxes or whatever.
• Stealth Pun: The main tactic used by Twitch Chat in any of Doug's voice command challenge runs became. Knowing that Doug would not simply say any of the trigger words to spawn things to get in his way (willingly mind you), chat did their best to come up with puns or odd word phrasing to get Doug to say something that his voice program would detect as being close enough to one of the triggers. For example: getting him to say "strainers" so that it would summon Thomas the tank engine (aka a dragon) because the trigger phrase was "trains", or baiting him into saying "Uber" over "Cab", causing it to spawn bears.
• Straight Man: Normally, Doug is this to Chat, as Chat is pure Id and prone to overreacting over the weirdest/littlest things, is incredibly stubborn, and will blame anybody else when things go awry for them, while Doug is usually more mature. However, he's not without his quirks either and occasionally says things that catch even Chat off-guard or even enables their shenanigans; as such, he has his own Straight Man in the form of Parkzer, who reacts to things much more sensibly than both of them.
• Suddenly Shouting: The Pajama Sams that Doug utilizes during the Pajama Sam stream tend to do this a lot. The tone of their voices can change on a dime, and they go in and out of shouting at points. Sometimes they end their sentences with full on screeches.
• Super-Speed:
  • In an attempt to outrun the fast travel menu in Skyrim, Doug uses console commands to increase his character's running speed. Very quickly he becomes Too Fast to Stop, which causes problems with Falling Damage over the uneven terrain.
  • In another attempt to outrun the fast travel feature this time by train in Red Dead Redemption 2, Doug installed a telekinesis mod that flings Arthur with 1000% move speed in a challenge to go from Saint Denis to Valentine to start its first mission there. As expected, he is also Too Fast to Stop as Arthur flinging back and forth at the mission location (Valentine's saloon) causes the patrons to leave the place, preventing Doug from actually starting the mission.
  • He runs into a similar issue trying to super-sprint across Grand Theft Auto V.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
  • As can be expected, the way cooking is presented in Breath of the Wild is not remotely realistic. Literally tossing whole unprocessed ingredients into a wok filled with water for a handful of seconds doesn't give you meat skewers, carrot cake, or anything except slightly warmer and wetter ingredients, a huge mess to clean up, potential scald injuries, and probably a fire risk.
  • Doug tries to play Grand Theft Auto V with gravity going in random directions, asking if its possible to play as normal. Turns out nope, you can't do anything if gravity goes from down to up, and he fails all but buying a mask.
• Take That!:
  • The video on Twitch Chat flying a plane in GTA V is narrated like an in-flight announcement, and takes pot-shots at the air travel industry. American, Delta, and United Airlines each get unflattering shout-outs.
  • When Doug "butters" himself up for a run across Grand Theft Auto V...
  "Of course, I recommend Challenge Butter for this, not that Land O'Lakes shit."
  • One of the punishments in the "Skyrim with 1 Hit Point" streams is "Do a Tik Tok dance", which Doug singled out as the punishment he dreaded the most.
  • In "Using a Battle Simulator to prove USA is better than EU", many shots are taken at the American healthcare system.
  The0ddestPrime: Europeans, be nice when defeating those americans. They can't afford the health care when they get hurt.
  
  netherf0x: europeans should get a free healer every turn.
  Doug: Look, we have the freedom to not have adequate health coverage, ok? You're just jealous.
  
  (after the American Hobbits lose against the European Hobbits by a noticeable amount)
  Doug: HOW? It is the exact same army!
  Doug (reading chat): "the european ones were healthier duh"

• The Tape Knew You Would Say That: Invoked via a donation from a Twitch viewer during "Skyrim, but if I say "dragon" then 10 dragons spawn", which also spawns other things for other words the AI thinks is said:
  SlinkyDolphinClock: What sound does a dog make again? I can't remember.
  Doug: Bark?
  SlinkyDolphinClock: (in the same donation message) No not bark, the other one.
  Doug: Woof?
  TTS: Spawning wolves.
• Take a Third Option: Whenever Doug gets Chat to vote on something via Clickmaps, a small portion of the audience will just click on Doug himself. Taken to its logical conclusion in "I ran unethical social experiments on Twitch Chat", where the final vote on which of the contestants to eliminate results in 56% of the vote going to Doug.
• Taking You with Me: Near the end of "I forced Twitch Chat to play my unethical D&D campaign", the Barbarian animates the Walmart as it's burning down, and as it's dying, he orders it to fall down on Porky. The Walmart, aware enough to realize that Porky was the one who set it on fire, obliges with its last act.
• Team Killer: In "I forced Twitch Chat to play my unethical D&D campaign", the giant animated Roomba accidentally eats the animated Microwave. Based on the dialog from the Washing Machine, this isn't the first time he's done something like this.
• They Killed Kenny Again: The AI Sams that Doug tasks to play Pajama Sam in No Need to Hide When It's Dark Outside are "killed" whenever they stop being useful or something goes wrong behind the scenes, but a supposed clone of it takes its place before it's killed.
• Technician Versus Performer: Doug notices this trope during the "Can Twitch Chat beat ITSELF in a Videogame Tournament" stream. A crew is the Performer, preferring to do elaborate strategies and plans like taunting in Super Smash Bros. 64, or making strange block combos in Tetris. Z crew is the Technician, preferring to play carefully and slowly rather then flashy. This results in A crew dominating the tournament early on, but Z crew pulling some quick plays that gave them the win later.
• Theme Music Power-Up:
  • Invoked in "How fast can you RUN across GTA 5?", where Doug recommends playing a theme song to help you while running.
  • By his own admission, Doug says he literally cannot lose at anything while "Storyteller" is playing. Indeed, it gives him the strength necessary to finish off the gigantic tub of gravy and similarly large tub of coleslaw that came with the KFC bucket in "Can I Eat 10 Drive-Thru Meals Ordered By Strangers?(WORLD RECORD)"
  • Also Invoked in "Can you cross ALL of Tears of the Kingdom in a straight line?", as Doug announces that he'll play "We Are As One" from Bayonetta 3 on loop in the very final stretches of the challenge until it's completed.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Well, more like a "The Reason Your City Sucks" Speech, courtesy of Parkzer's reaction to Parkzerville as he dissects the issues with the city and Doug's "mayor-following" setup, with the below conversation summing it up succinctly.
  Parkzer: On the basis of what I see right now, the fact that you even let it get like, 8% as bad as this, is a critical problem to the city management.
  Doug: That's my FUCKING mayor!
  Parkzer: No, probably not the mayor's fault, this is not a mayor issue, this is like a city issue.
  Doug: It's the mayor's fault, it's the mayor's fault!
• Third-Person Person: A weird variant pops up in "I let an A.I. decide my next GTA 5 video". The last title the A.I. pops out is "GTA V But If I Talk About Myself, I Die". Doug eventually takes to calling himself "the man in the chair" and referring to himself as "he" to avoid getting blown up.
• This Is Gonna Suck:
  • The titular challenge in "How I beat the Hardest (and Dumbest) GTA 5 Challenge Ever Made" involves a GTA 5 mod that Doug made with two effects: every 10 seconds, the pedestrian's cars are boosted in a random direction, and taking any damage makes your car instantly blow up. The challenge is to hit five points across Los Angles in the fastest time possible. Doug, after his 20th failure, asks the people in chat who'd already completed how many attempts they had to put into it:
    Doug: You had like 500 attempts? Uh oh.
  • Finding out the final meal that Doug and his team have to eat in the drive-thru challenge is a KFC family meal.
    Doug: Chat? We have just ordered a bucket.
• Toilet Humor:
  • Half of the narration in his attempt to outrun Skyrim's fast travel is just a setup so that he can make an acronym out of the word "poostain".
  • The Fart Gates revolves around this - anytime anyone spends channel points/dollary-doos to 'open the fart gates', the amount of time they are open is recorded until someone (namely, the rich Fart Barons) closes the gates. For the amount of time the gates are open, Chat can then spam cheap fart noises until time runs out.
• Token Trio: The Dungeons & Dragons session that Twitch Chat played has a party consisting of a male orc barbarian, a human male bard, and a female wizard that is seemingly an elf.
• Too Dumb to Live:
  • At one point during the AI Pajama Sam stream, Sam finds himself taking part in a quiz show, with the first topic he picks being about Ancient Egypt. Upon being asked who the basis for the Sphinx was, Sam answers "King Tut", while also bragging that he hopes the rest of the questions weren't as "easy" as this one, "else, we would be out of a show!" This was the wrong answer.^note It's King Khafre.
  • Napoleon's final ploy to win the chess game is the Napoleon Ultra Paradox: Putting his king right next to the enemy king and surrounding his king with pawns. Ignoring the rook and bishop right in position to take the king, the enemy king could very easily take his own due to placing it right next to it and the pawns not being able to protect the king from a piece right next to it. In other words, he checkmated himself. Doug reverts the move to keep the game going, urging Napoleon to make a different move, Le Havre Hammer: Moving a single pawn one space up.
• Too Many Cooks Spoil the Soup: A running theme whenever Doug makes Twitch chat play, whose chaotic inputs make it difficult to do anything with some level of precision.
  • Can Twitch Chat beat ITSELF in a Videogame Tournament? divides chat into two groups by username starting letter, with each group taking turns at controlling a video game and competing to see who can spoil the soup the least.
  • I'm trying to take a bath, but Twitch Chat keeps assassinating me, where chat's chaotic control of Red Dead Redemption II's cheat menu makes them lethal.
  • In Twitch Chat thought they could beat an AI in Mario Maker, Doug has chat compete against an AI named "Chris Snack", which spams buttons at almost complete random, with a preference to move to the right as that's where the goal usually is. The winner was Chat, proving that this trope is at least superior to Monkeys on a Typewriter. And they successfully defended their title once Doug got multiple specialized AIs, to fit into situations that the original Chris Snack would utterly fail in.
• Training from Hell: "Can you bike to the top of GTA 5, with ONLY your voice?" is framed as a workout training video... where you bike up Mount Chiliad using only your voice while trying to avoid crashing airplanes.
• Treacherous Quest Giver: Porky from "I forced Twitch Chat to play my unethical D&D campaign" reveals himself to be after Walter's magical staff after sending the main party to take down the Walmart warlock.
• Two Lines, No Waiting: While some of Doug's videos are straight forward with their situation, others tend to have a random theme that comes up thanks to Chat.
  • Can you bike down GTA's Mountain using ONLY your voice?, originally focused on the title subject, slowly started to spark a debate between viewers on whether or not a one-shot character from the Ewoks TV series was named Poob or Ploob, that both Doug and the viewers would work on trying to solve while also trying to run the challenge as well. By the end of the video Doug completing the challenge is just a minor note as the focus has shifted entirely to the Poob/Ploob debate.
  • Can you drive across GTA 5 if you can't see the car?, thanks to a viewer saying they got a divorce, ended up having a theme around getting over a divorce, with plenty of others chiming in that they're also dealing with a divorce, and Doug trying to work some impromptu-marriage counseling into his challenge.
  • Random Enemy Spawns EVERY TIME I'M HIT (Skyrim) begins as a normal challenge run, but near the halfway mark, a bit donation jokes about Doug having to drink skunk milk, causing the conversation to be split between Doug trying to complete the rest of the quests, and him debating with chat about the ethics of making cheese from other animals. The compilations video semi-lampshades this by having narrator Doug trying to explain the mission and becoming more passive aggressive in explaining it, while cutting back to Doug from the stream as he debates the topic.
  • Mario Maker, but random images cover every level starts off with Doug brainstorming with Chat ideas for images that would block the screen. One chatter brings the Nintendogs animation up and later requests it for a channel point reward, only for Doug to refuse since it would make the edited Youtube videos unwatchable, with it escalating into Chat thinking that Doug considers them less important than his Youtube audience since they're (alledgely) 99% of his audience, and that their donations mean nothing. As a result, throughout the rest of the video, Chat then goes on strike by spamming ...., with Doug mocking the effort and even replacing them with a pre-recorded fake Chat at times. The two lines finally intersect when it's Chat's turn to block the screen, and they realize that striking makes it impossible for Doug to complete the level, proving their importance and forcing Doug to give into their demands.
• Uncertified Expert: Despite his many videos on Skyrim, Doug quickly points out that his game knowledge is not the most comprehensive in Skyrim Speedrun, but I randomized all the doors, as shown by his lack of familiarity with the Dragonborn DLC.
  Doug: By the way, I am not like a Skyrim expert, okay? I don't really know what I'm doing. I've played the Skyrim intro like 1800 times on stream, and not the rest of the game.
• Understatement: In Can an Uber Driver survive Flying Traffic?:
  DougDoug: "The traffic, here in Los Angeles..."
  [Cut to video of flying cars flinging themselves all over the screen, horrible crashing, and sceaming]
  DougDoug: "...is really bad. [...] So today, we'll find out, can you survive an Uber trip during really, really bad Los Angeles traffic?"
• Unfortunate Names: Faendal already qualifies (as mentioned in his entry in Skyrim's character page), but Doug keeps mispronouncing it different ways. The one he eventually settles on is "Fondle".
• Unusual Euphemism: Tends to use the word "pork" if something is getting fucked. Case in point:
  (As Chris Snack is going on a rampage) Oh shit, he's porking our moms, chat!
• Violence is the Only Option: Doug wants to find the safest job, but he has no idea what field is safest. How does he figure it out? Have an A.I. pit armies of these jobs against each other until one job comes out on top.
• Vocal Dissonance: There are two points in Doug's Pajama Sam stream where Sam's AI voice suddenly gets very deep. Doug and chat both call it "rapid puberty."
• We Can Rule Together: In "I forced Twitch Chat to play my unethical D&D campaign", the evil warlock of Walmart offers the party the chance to join him. The Wizard does, and the others, tempted by promises of employment and employee discounts, follow suit.^note But it's a ruse.
• We Hardly Knew Ye: While there were 25 Pajama Sam ChatGPT brothers, only 8 of them are actually involved in beating the game. This is because of a combination of unfortunate tech issues and Doug's own incompetence in updating context to the brothers/saving the file, forcing him to put down the rest of the brothers immediately before they even get onto the field or say anything.
  Doug (reading chat): "SAM 14 WAS LIKE A BROTHER SISTER TO ME"
  Doug: He barely existed! All he did was learn about his past very briefly and then died.
• Wham Line:
  • While Doug is showing Parkzer the "finished" Parkzerville that he and Twitch Chat built in Cities: Skylines, meteors suddenly show up, heavily damaging the city, as well as blowing up the building Parkzer was supposed to stay in too. But in the end as Doug's listing off funds for the project...
  Parkzer: You spent 39 quadrillion dollars?
  Doug: Meteors are not cheap, Parkzer.
  Parkzer: You bought the meteors to crash into the city?!
  • Doug is in the middle of a challenge in Mario Maker, but random images cover every level where Chat is blocking a level, whilst Chat has been unhappy and protesting throughout the video. Then a very important TTS message comes through which forces Doug to give into their demands and make them into the real winners of the stream...
  recycled_dirt: chat if we strike now the level will be literally impossible, and that's funny
• What Happened to the Mouse?: One that almost slipped by in "I forced Twitch Chat to play my unethical D&D campaign" After the adventurers have been victorious, escaped the burning Walmart and been hailed as heroes, someone in the chat asks what happened to Bert, the beleaguered orc employee from the clothing department. Doug says, "Uh-oh," and rolls to see if Bert is safe. He rolls a natural 20 and Bert becomes the new mayor.
• Whole-Plot Reference:
  • Doug's strategy for the team of Twitch Chat and A.I. "Chris Smash" to defeat progressively stronger Smash Bros. computer opponents is to invoke Dragon Ball Z. Doug has not seen Dragon Ball Z and only knows the most basic things about it. So to come up with a plan he reads the episode synopses for the first story arc (baffled by all the information established in the original Dragon Ball that he has no context for). By the end, Chat and the A.I. win the challenge by doing their best to reenact the Saiyan Saga.
  • In "Can you cross GTA 5 with ONLY Psychic Powers?", not only does Doug eventually go to start claiming this will be his pitch for The Fast and the Furious 10, but also tries to invoke instances from the series too, in particular picking a car Dom uses and making his character look like Dom (albeit thin with the moniker "Thin Diesel"), the themeing of family with by spawning in tons of copies of Michael's son Jimmy, and referencing the climax of Fast Five with "every corrupt cop in the city" chasing after him.
• Wins by Doing Absolutely Nothing:
  • Twitch Chat finally defeats the Big Yoshi event match in Melee with the following strategy: pick Ganondorf, causing Big Yoshi to fumble himself off the stage in less than a second. Not only did they beat the stage, but as one of the comments points out, Twitch Chat achieved a time ranked 11th in the whole world (at the time the video came out) at 650 milliseconds^note At the time of this writing, if the clip had been submitted for a run, Chat would've been sitting at 19th place, still in the Top 20.
  • How Z crew nearly wins the entire "Can Twitch Chat beat ITSELF in a Videogame Tournament". In the Grand Theft Auto V contests, they basically get themselves into situations where they simply wait out the clock and beat A crew by doing nothing, much to A crew's annoyance.
  • In the A.I. generated Game Character Tournament, Senator Armstrong wins his bout with Trevor by apparently just sending bad vibes towards his opponent, causing Trevor to go insane and kill himself.
• Word-Salad Humor:
  • Some of the messages Inspirobot provides in Can you beat two Mario games with ONE controller? fall under this, partly due to Artificial Stupidity.
  Your testicles are now synchronized with your physical self.
  Keep repeating this to yourself: "I'm very masculine, I'm very masculine, I'm very masculine".
  Your menstrual cycle is now floating above gravity.
  Become that man who orders other men to feel pregnant.
  Focus on how your sphincter is obliterating your physical self.
  • This is what the ChatGPT Pajama Sam Brothers descend into if left to live too long, using completely nonsensical and unprompted solutions for their problems.
  Sam 1 (after being asked how to get Otto the boat in the water): Oh asterisk come on, asterisk. This is going quite contrary to what I thought. It's understandable why he [Otto] doesn't want to go near the water. I myself have a fear of the dark. But for a superspeed snorkler like myself this going to crash like real bad. Maybe I could mix gas and oil then somehow use that combination to fashion a makeshift floatation device capable of operating invulnerability around my hands and feet (breathes) Asterisk, grins, asterisk, would be cool, like a galactic squirrel. Yeah, that sounds good and should work. Other than that, let's see. Huh. Wait, no. While I'm decent in many things, I don't think that I am quite aieiet knowledgeable enough to gain nuggets of pure gold at bio-engineering level of mixing, one texture with another.
  • Enforced by Doug in Beating 25 Mario levels in 1 life, but banning all words; at first, he decides to ban a word from Chat for every level he plays in Mario Maker 2, forcing Chat to come up with alternatives to communicate and sounding less and less coherent. Things then get worse when Doug decides to compound this by banning one half of the alphabet^note Initially it was just going to be just the letter A vs Z, only for someone to note that Z is a very niche letter., decided by a competition between A Crew and Z Crew where the loser has their half of the alphabet taken away, with A crew coming out on top, resulting in many a Flowery Insult being flung at Doug.
  MINE DOUBLOONS BE GONE!
  Hami: Man who digs in past tense make me unpoggeth
  (after the second half of the alphabet gets banned)
  BALD CABBAGE HEAD
  Ayubus741: FICKLEHEADED, FIDDLEDEEDEE, CABBAGEHEADED, ILLEFFACEABLE, HIGGLEHAGGLED, GIBBLEGABBLED
  MGoBacon: Fecal face
  Doug: These are truly some of the weirdest names and insults I've been called.
• Wrong Genre Savvy: Because the ChatGPT version of Sam wasn't fully aware of the fact that he was in a point-and-click adventure game, he keeps trying to do actions that aren't allowed (eg. trying to literally murder trees with terrorism) or aren't the actual solution (eg. trying to walk across the river with the plank of wood^note when in reality, all that happens is that Otto is shown that wood floats, so he can float too), go off on non-existent quest chains (eg. trying to do a favor for the friendly tree he encounters after losing his items, when the tree isn't game important), and try and defeat High Demon Elgrim.
• Yin-Yang Bomb: "A" Crew's audacious style and "Z" Crew's calm strategy combined when the two Crews became Team Alphabet, letting them perfectly complete the challenge that Doug posed to them instead of the expected disastrous fumble.
  barf314: A crew styled and Z crew kept us alive. Harmony

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"But NOW it's time for the real test! How many bears does it take to kill TV Tropes?"

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