Web Video / Internet Historian

Your friendly internet professor.

Internet Historian is a YouTuber who creates informative videos on internet trends or events that have gone down in infamy throughout the web. There's little telling as to which topic will be covered and when - topics he's covered include the rise and fall of the "planking" meme, the breakup of a friendship between two random guys in Pakistan that became a meme when one of the two announced it on Facebook, an analysis of Y2K and why everyone was so worried twenty years ago, the disastrous launches of games like No Man's Sky and Fallout 76, and tragedies like the crash of the Costa Concordia and the death of Floyd Collins.

All videos are narrated with a calm, soothing and sophisticated tone through and through, a comedic contrast with the bizarre facts and trends that are covered and the deliberately janky editing.

He also has a second channel, titled "Incognito Mode", which hosts In The Field, Sundance Rejects, and supplementary Q&As for main channel videos, as well as a third channel titled "Storymode", where he "expleens" the plot of a piece of media in his own way. He's also been frequently streaming on Twitch, which also has his usual Stylistic Suck.

The Gentleman Pirate, the longest video on either channel at an hour and sixteen minutes, has its own page.

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Tropes invoked by the Internet Historian:

Tropes A-L

• Action Politician: Giglio's Deputy Mayor Mario Pellegrini quickly took initiative during the Costa Concordia disaster: as soon as he arrived at the scene and saw the situation, he took one of the lifeboats to go aboard the ship to talk to whoever's in charge. When he failed to find anyone and gave up, he helped passengers abandon ship.
• Actually Pretty Funny:
  • Kendall Jenner visibly collapses into laughter when paparazzi asks her about the Fyre Festival, which she was previously on board to promote.
  • The guy trolling Dashcon asked a cosplayer dressed as a demon why he dressed as the Prime Minister of Israel. You can see the guy smiling and laughing before replying, without missing a beat, "I say dress for the job you want."
  • It seems that even members of the Church found the rapture memes to be fun since one of those participating in Operation Rapture appears to be a priest.
• Adaptation Distillation: The portion of My Immortal involving time travel was completely dropped from the Dramatic Reading, primarily for being too convoluted.
• After the End:
  • Parodied in his video for the Y2K crisis, where the Internet Historian apparently spent 18 years in a fallout shelter only to find that pretty much nothing bad happened at all (at most a weather site or two accidentally displayed the date as January 1st, 1900).
  • Used as the framing device for the videos on the COVID-19 Pandemic, with them being set years after the virus has laid waste to Earth with humanity having outright abandoned it to colonize Mars under Elon Musk.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Tay AI, a learning artificial intelligence chat bot that would give responses to users based on what was said to it. Within a matter of 24 hours, The Internet had turned it into a genocidal Hitler-loving, sexual favour-asking, anti-feminist, pot-smoking maniac, which many users quickly fell in love with. Many other chat bots have suffered the same fate.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: Discussed In-Universe; the IH has a tendency to give a different take on one or more parties involved in the subject of his videos than the one usually accepted for them. You've gotta give him credit for almost always giving multiple sides to a story and giving widely accused parties fair trials. On the other hand, there are also some cases where he's simply making a joke.
  • Applied to the Dashcon organizers and discussed by the Historian in both the video itself and the relevant Q&A. Were they running a big scam and stealing money from five hundred people, or just genuinely incompetent about managing their budget? The Historian takes a third option; they are incompetent, but also opportunistically stole all the money meant to be used to pay for all the promised cool stuff, and furthermore lied about the amount of money they had to the attendees, in order to pocket even more money from the generous donations from Tumblr users who bought into their "the Renaissance Convention Center is charging Dashcon more than previously agreed because they're homophobic/racist bigots" narrative.
  • Partially due to lacking the information that would later become unearthed by documentaries like Fyre and Fyre Fraud, he portrays Billy McFarland as a well-meaning but extremely incompetent wannabe entrepreneur who was way in over his head when it came to pulling off an event like the Fyre Festival, instead of the fraudulent conman the aforementioned films would portray him as. That said, the Historian does entertain the idea of the Festival being a scam, but with the information he had, he found it hard to believe it was a genuine con due to how poorly-managed it was.
  • After the disastrous launch of No Man's Sky, several accusations of Sean Murray being a liar began popping up, with Youtube compilations of him blatantly lying in interviews and failing to hide it being a norm for a time. The Historian presents his own two cents on this: Sean isn't nervous because he was obviously lying and making promises he couldn't keep, but because he was a highly introverted technical guy of a very small indie studio with no PR department taking it upon himself to endure all the press to protect a team of even more highly-introverted technical guys. The amount of cameras and eyes on him for the first time in his life did no favors to calm him down and his obvious stage fright made his awkward, if well-meaning demeanor far too easy to interpret as suspicious and dishonest. As for the lying, the Historian makes a case that the ambition to make No Man's Sky made Sean and the gang fail to realize that plans would be constantly in flux during the three years they had in development, and anything they said in interviews could be (and was) misconstrued as set-in-stone promises rather than just possibilities, which was what Sean was trying to get at. So while things Sean half-heartedly confirmed didn't end up in the initial release, it was only because Sean didn't know at the time if they would work with what they had or not.
  • In an age where the Balloon Boy incident is indisputably seen as a hoax, with even the Internet Historian himself admitting he was going into the investigation expecting it to be a quick in-and-out about an obvious hoax, his video on the subject argues Richard Heene was telling the truth about the event not being a hoax, citing, among other things, the physics of the balloon, the fact that they were oddly prepared and willing to sacrifice a lot of expensive equipment if it was just a hoax, and the fact that the main reason people started suspecting it was a hoax in the first place came from the words of a sleep-deprived 6-year-old who was barely if at all listening to the question. By extension, he paints the law enforcement involved in a negative light, trying to get back at Heene for his negative view of one of their own and using the case against him to deflect attention away from embezzlement and other unsavory things.
  • In Pool's Closed, the Historian paints the online Trolls who blocked access to the Habbo Hotel pools (and later some real-life pools through phone scams and fake warning signs) as a heroic La Résistance trying to keep the world safe from an outbreak of AIDS.^note Although the real-life instances of people getting pools closed have a text disclaimer telling people not to do things like that.
  • In The Fall of 76, when Bethesda's customer service responds to queries about the promised duffel bags actually being nylon with "we're sorry you aren't happy with the bag" and "we aren't planning to do anything about it", the IH presents it as said customer service being absolutely over it, considering the deluge of complaints they've already had to deal with regarding the game itself, and not even trying to hide their absolute contempt for the customers anymore.
  • The several "brilliant ideas" for helping free up police resources in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic were so horribly ineffective at stopping crime - if anything, he points out they actually made crime de-facto legal - that he jokingly presents the whole thing as several mayors getting together in an intentional attempt to raise crime rates and scare people away from the big cities most of these shenanigans took place in.
• Anachronism Stew: As lampshaded by Berlioz in "I am become Fancy: Theatre", he got a phone call from Rome despite phones not existing yet.
• Anal Probing: Brought up in "In the field: weapons" where he openly wonders why aliens would bother with such experiments when they would probably have sufficient technology to do any sort of biological analysis in a far less invasive way; he comes to the conclusion that the aliens are testing grossness of human assholes and literally nothing else.
  IH!Alien: "Another one!"
  Ordinary Things!Alien: "They're all gross!"
• And Then What?:
  • "9gag's Meme Rock | #SmashTheStone" echoes the work done from the "He Will Not Divide Us" series with 4chan successful in managing to locate the digging site of the limestone monument before it could be buried. There's just one catch; it's in the middle of the desert in Almeria, Spain, making it very out-of-reach for the predominantly English-speaking community. Even if people tried, the Historian snarks about the effort needed to make at least one person fly out to a desolate location for the sake of digging it up... just before noting how reactive limestone tends to be with vinegar and linking to cheap flights to the place.
    Historian: What were they going to do? Use their NEETbucks to fly out to Spain, drive out into the desert, and then dig out a 24-ton stone slab?
  • While the art thieves in The Swedish Job were able to successfully steal three valuable paintings in their heist, they had no idea what to do once they actually had them. Finding a buyer after the fact was next to impossible as they were so expensive and obviously stolen, so after scoping out auction houses with no luck, they tried to ransom the paintings back to the museum, which only ended up getting them arrested.
    Historian: Essentially, they had $30 million... in unsellable goods.
• Anime Opening Parody: In "mythology.", the ad for NordVPN resembles an anime opening, complete with an original Word Salad Lyrics song.
• Arc Words: "No progress had been made." These words are used frequently throughout the "Man in Cave" episode to show how every Hope Spot was ultimately met with failure in trying to free Floyd Collins from being stuck in the Sand Cave.
• Artistic License – History:
  • When talking about Kurt Eichenwald showing his kids hentai, the IH uses a photoshopped stock picture of a family with young children to visualize Kurt's claims. A disclaimer subtitle clarifies that Kurt's children were already fully grown adults by the time of the incident. It's just funnier to imagine it this way.
  • Jason Russell claims during his Ted Talk that he personally witnessed an attack by the Lord's Resistance Army led by Joseph Kony when he visited Uganda. The Historian fact checks this and reveals in a footnote that while the attack happened and at the place Russell claims, he wasn't actually there to witness it; it had happened earlier in the day.
  • While Dr. Harry Thomas did turn the corpse of Floyd Collins into an exhibit, said exhibit was placed in the nearby Crystal Cave that Floyd also discovered, not back in the Sand Cave he was trapped in. But that level of dramatic irony was just too good to pass up.
• Art-Style Dissonance: IH's Sundance Rejects style was developed to tell ridiculous stories like dramatic readings of bad internet classics. However, when IH began making more serious documentary-style films, he retained the Stylistic Suck of the Sundance Rejects which came before.
• Ass Shove: Mary Bateman managed to predict the Rapture thanks to her hen laying eggs marked with "Christ is Coming." However, it soon transpired that these eggs were already laid, with the message written on them by Mary herself before she shoved them back into the hen so they could come out again, only in public this time. At the very least, God thinks it's funny.
• Asshole Victim: A brief line of text from Man In Cave reveals that Lt. Gov Henry Denhardt shot his girlfriend to death and was later murdered in that exact same manner by his girlfriend's brothers, who were acquitted of any wrongdoing.
• Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!:
  • In his In the Field videos, he and his Special Guest often get sidetracked on whatever topic they're researching/discussing. For example, while researching YouTube Poops, EmperorLemon randomly brings up and they watch the infamous Domino's App Feat Hatsune Miku ad, and then bring it around full circle by watching a YouTube Poop of said ad.
  • In "Exploring the Japanese Kitkat Forest", he and Sumito get bored of looking at candy, and start looking around Japan using Google Maps's Streetview. Upon seeing a man wearing an umbrella hat they start looking up images of umbrella hats, then start talking about high fashion like Gucci, discussing Drake's "$1,000,000 outfit" — the bulk of which was his $750,000 watch — discussing why expensive watches are impractical, wondering what more fulfilling things they could do with $100,000, then wondering what you could do with $100,000 of paper cups.
    Historian: (7 minutes after seeing umbrella hat) Where were we? Oh, right, umbrella hats.
• Attention Whore: The Historian implies that Domnica Cemortan is this, eating up all the attention the Costa Concordia sinking brought her and making outlandish claims to spice up the story and renew media attention, like how the ship was transporting drugs or how a helicopter was coming to spirit Francesco Schettino away. After the criminal trials, Cemortan's taken to "activism" and is portrayed in the video as doing it, once again, for attention.
• Bait-and-Switch:
  • The Historian talks about #MeetTheFarmers, a marketing campaign by McDonald's driven by earning sympathy by "showing" the farmers who provide the restaurant with its ingredients. Nothing went wrong and besides some detractors it was a mostly successful venture. #McDStories on the other hand...
  • After the success of Joe Danger, Hello Games decided to be more ambitious and, as Sean Murray suggests, "reach for the stars"...and so the company made Joe Danger 2.
  • "I am become Fancy: Theatre" makes extensive use of this:
    • Twice in the story about Berlioz, he stares at music notes saying he knows what to do, implying he'll write a symphony, and then does something else: the first time he cooks up a murder plot, the second time he just smokes more opium and then writes a symphony.
    • After discussing several cases of people being injured or dying on-stage, he cuts to an Intermission, which is suddenly and immediately interrupted by him dressed as The Phantom of the Opera to discuss the next topic of the video.
    • Several times in his backstory he uses Exact Words. First he says he was raised in the orphanage... which his parents rented. He was sent to boarding school, as in a school that studies boards. He tried to escape, was caught, and they threw the book at him - a book he did not dodge in time. Then he spent years in a coma, that is, in the town of Acoma. There they taught him to read, and he spent his days buried in books, learning as much as he could about the arts, until someone finally rescued him from under all those books.
• Bait the Dog:
  • Fyre Festival acknowledged their mistakes and incompetency and offered to provide everyone with a full refund... then suggested the alternative where customers "let it ride" for tickets to 2018's Fyre Festival.
  • When the duffle bag controversy was reaching its peak, Bethesda decided to finally make the canvas bags for the angry customers... which would take 6 months, only to accidentally dox everyone who then tried to order the bags, exposing all their personal information and payment methods to anyone who accessed the website.
• Bathos:
  • After the Sudden Downer Ending of "Going Camping at the End of the World," the Historian decides to liven things up by showing funny Renaissance paintings.
  • Attempted by the Dashcon organizers when they revealed that Welcome to Night Vale quit. While they got most of the attendees to join in on a collective disappointed sigh, one guy yelled for his money back.
  • In "The Cost of Concordia", the Costa Concordia crashing into the rocks, a massive real-life disaster, is portrayed in dramatic Slow Motion with sad music... and stereotypical Italian things like glasses of wine, plates of pasta, and accordions being flung through the cabin by the impact.
• Batman Gambit: The Historian portrays Prime Minister John Key's Totally Radical killing of Planking as an intentional strategy to stop kids from killing themselves doing the meme.
• Be Careful What You Wish For:
  • Harold Camping is shown saying "God has countless ways to get me out of this," only for the camera to zoom out and reveal that God is watching him on his computer and is considering smiting him. He suffered a stroke not long after that particular interview.
  • Floyd Collins wanted his cave to be a tourist attraction. It became one at the expense of his suffering and life.
• Believing Their Own Lies:
  • The Historian believes Harold Camping was totally convinced that the world was going to end and wasn't just trying to cause a stir. Unfortunately, this prediction wound up ruining some people's lives, possibly beyond repair.
  • At least a few of the Area 51 raiders genuinely seemed to think that an army of people were going to show up to storm the gates. Once the day of the raid actually came, out of two million people who said they were going in the group's Facebook page, only two hundred showed up (or 0.01% of them). One person at the raid itself asked "where are the million people?" as if he was legitimately confused.
• Big Damn Heroes: The Area 51 raiders were almost defeated... until their leader supplied an airdrop of Monster energy drinks, activating their Sharingan and giving them the strength to push past the military and get into the base.
• Biting-the-Hand Humor: His sponsorship ads are almost guaranteed to include jabs at the product and sponsors themselves, in conjunction with some of his sales pitches.
  • CuriosityStream is a streaming service that asked him to boast about their content. Cue an extremely sarcastic and low-effort promo where the IH obnoxiously winks at the viewer when he mentions you can cancel your free trial at any time.
  • His ad for Honey in Jeff the Killer starts with a hilariously over-the-top scenario where a man is denied life-saving medicine for his future-president daughter because he is one cent short. He then legitimately describes Honey's benefits, even if he does crack up every now and again while doing so.
  • His NordVPN ad in architecture started off explaining that the sponsor is easygoing, making it difficult to lose them as a sponsor, then shows an email from the marketing team asking the IH to just stick to the script rather than do a Shadowman-esque ad. Cue the IH making a Speedrun of losing a sponsorship and starting the ad off with "hurr durr, it's me, NordVPNMan!", and continuing from there.
  • The NordVPN ad in "The Swedish Job" portrays NordVPNMan attempting to sell the product as foreplay with his friend, desperate to make things romantic. Every time he tries to shill NordVPN and explain its benefits, she's less and less inclined to stay with him and eventually gets in her car to try to flee his awkward flirting.
  • To a lesser extent, his patrons (who are providing him with a source of his income) barely get any respect in the closing credits acknowledging them.
• Bittersweet Ending: How he sees the resolution of the events surrounding KONY 2012. Invisible Children succeeded in their goal of raising awareness of Joseph Kony but in the process humiliated themselves, accidentally encouraged vandalism, and caused the film's director to suffer a well publicized Creator Breakdown.
• Black Comedy:
  • "The Cost of Concordia" was about the largest cruise ship disaster since the infamous RMS Titanic sinking, and the Historian even respectfully acknowledges the casualties of the disaster. This doesn't at all stop him from filling the second half of the video with memes about the Costa Concordia crashing into stuff.
  • In "I am become Fancy: Theatre" the falls in the orchestra pits gradually become a Death Montage while remaining satirical.
• Blatant Lies:
  • The Dashcon organizers are seemingly compulsive liars, making ridiculous claims such as being "in a room containing 5000 people" (at most a few hundred in a festival that only attracted, at most generous, about one thousand people) and that they were "containing a riot" (cut to the room singing cheerfully while donating their money to the con), to say nothing that they needed those donations because they'd not managed their money well and instead claimed that the hotel charged more than they'd agreed on.
  • Billy McFarland (a conman) and his responses to the widespread media mockery of Fyre Festival's events, paraphrased by the Historian as "a big storm came in the night before and turned all of the marketing into lies". While the Fyre Festival did get hit with a storm that utterly destroyed what little progress the organizers had all made in building the festival, the thing was practically doomed from the start for various reasons.
  • The Historian himself in a couple of Played for Laughs examples. The first was when he claims that he was left behind on the Great Exuma island because he was "rescuing someone... lost in the woods" (he's shown chasing a frisbee into said woods as the plane left). Another is where the Historian says that he needs his sponsor money because he bought a lifetime supply of toilet paper and lost it all because the rain (and crows) got to it and now he's back to square one.
  • Kurt Eichenwald is a prolific liar, claiming to be epileptic while fully capable of doing things real epileptics are not capable of doing (such as driving or editing flashy music videos); he also came up with an amazing excuse for why hentai was on his internet browsing tabs. He apparently was trying to show his kids how easy it was to find tentacle porn on the internet; despite the fact the hentai he was looking at had nothing to do with tentacles. Kurt then backpedals and then claims that said category of porn is too difficult to find, and the IH proves him wrong by literally doing a two-word Google search and 2 clicks to find many examples of that pornography in question.
    IH: Yep, every one of them is an affront to God.
  • Kurt Eichenwald's lawyer claims it took several weeks until he was even capable of speaking properly after his seizure, despite Eichenwald responding to the tweet that gave him that seizure the very next day and appearing on Newsweek in perfect health just three days after the incident.
  • The company that manufactured Fallout 76 Nuka Dark Rum, Silver Screen Bottling Company, faced controversy when their Nuka Dark Rum was just a plastic shell around an industry-standard bottle rather than a unique glass bottle. Their defense: Making the plastic one was more than twice as expensive as making the glass one would have been.
    IH: Then what the fu-?
  • Francesco Schettino, captain of the Costa Concordia, noticeably lied many times over the course of the incident. At first, he was trying to downplay the damage or assuming it wasn't too bad from not knowing the full scope of it. But even as it became clear the ship was going down and evacuation needed to begin, Schettino continued insisting things weren't that bad. Once he was finally convinced otherwise, Schettino snuck off the ship in a lifeboat, claiming he tripped into it and didn't have time to get out, so he might as well take it to safety. He ignored the fact he could have easily taken the lifeboat back once it let off its current evacuees (in fact, that's what he was outright told to do by the Coast Guard), plus he took the time to change out of his captain's uniform into a business suit beforehand, as if intending to slip away in the confusion. Finally, Schettino gave an interview with a local news crew in which he claimed he was one of the last people to leave the ship, all while rescue efforts were still underway and several dozen people had died.
  • The Concordia Q&A discusses the whole media circus surrounding the disaster, with the Historian taking the time to correct some of the misinformation that made it to the press. One example he singles out for being especially blatant is an interview with one of the ship's cooks who claimed Captain Schettino visited one of the restaurants for a meal in the middle of the crash... despite the publicly-available VDR recordings showing that between the point of impact and the order to abandon ship, Schettino never left the bridge.
  • In "I am become Fancy: Theatre", the trip from Southwark to Canterbury in The Canterbury Tales is described as the longest journey ever taken at the time, about 83 kilometers or 52 miles, with a footnote saying "this is not true".
• Boob-Based Gag: The "big tiddy goth alien gf" rescued from Area 51 is a generic grey alien 3D model with four massive bouncing spheres half-assedly stuck to its chest and rear. It's as gloriously silly as it sounds.
• Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs: "Pool's Closed" recounts the infamous Habbo Hotel raid where pools were blocked off due to AIDS... then stingrays... and then stingrays with AIDS, since they were in the pool.
• Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick:
  • "Promoting desserts, are we? Brad's wife used to love desserts! New item on the menu? Brad's wife would've made it twice as good! Today we remember 9/11? Brad's wife used to love 9-"
  • Among the businesses offering Brad's wife a job were KFC, a gym, a donut shop, and a strip club.
  • From The Failure of Dashcon: "By the evening, the unthinkable happens — the ball pit starts to deflate. And someone pisses in it."
• Breather Episode: The comical "That Zone Between Area 50 and 52" is sandwiched between the dramatic "The Cost of Concordia" and the intensely bleak "Man in Cave".
• Brick Joke:
  • The Historian claims that Sean Murray saw a visage of Neil DeGrasse Tyson in his mirror which inspired him to make No Man's Sky. Tyson is portrayed as an insane Cloudcuckoolander engaging in Word-Salad Humor, at one point asking Sean how much microwaves are coursing through his body. Later, when shit goes down and the game gets thrashed, a player screaming "DISAPPOINTED!" is wearing a microwave as a space helmet.
  • During the "Costa Concordia" video, he mentions that one of the looters during the salvage operations made off with the Concordia's bell from the bridge of the ship. The IH breaks script and wonders "Who steals a big fuck-off bell?" Apparently, he did, as the video ends with him sending it back to the ocean like the end of Titanic (1997).
  • In "I am become Fancy: Theatre", the Historian recounts Hector Berlioz's crazy plan to murder-suicide the love of his life (who eloped with another man) by disguising himself as a maid and sneaking into their house carrying poison and guns, represented as Berlioz's head pasted onto Akiba Maid War clips. Later on, long after giving up on his plan and marrying another woman, it turns out he went on to cheat on her with the housemaid... which naturally immediately brings up Berlioz as a maid again before the Historian notes "not that one".
• Buffy Speak:
  • "Scientists at the...s-science lab...did their...analysis!"
  • And his description of Sailor Vince, a real navigation officer in the Canadian Coast Guard who reviewed Cost of Concordia for accuracy:
    '''Also, gotta mention. This guy reviewed our video, he's a nautical expert water man!
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: The people at 4chan, between their typical tomfoolery and shitposting, were collectively smart enough to locate the "He Will Not Divide Us" flag in the U.S. by using knowledge of time zones, airline traffic, and astronomy to get its coordinates within two days, all in order to screw with Shia LaBeouf by taking down his flag. Once the fifth iteration of the project went live, they outdid themselves after finding the new location of London in just under four hours, with even fewer clues, and it could have potentially been anywhere in the world. Thanks to their efforts, the movement was all but disarmed by the end, with Shia resorting to placing the flag in a locked room in another country entirely so no one could get to it; the IH points out that this essentially defeated the purpose of the project (to publicly protest the Presidential election of Donald Trump), so even though the flag was now intact and unmolested, it was now out of the public's gaze in both the U.S. and Britain, and presented in such a way that it was no better than simply posting a jpeg and declaring victory — as he described it, it's now behind a wall so to speak.
• The Bus Came Back:
  • The "Brilliant Idea" marketing guy from "Any Poll's a Goal" returns in "Very Serious Business" representing the hapless marketing department of various businesses that underestimated the trolling potential of social media. In particular, he excitedly suggests doing another poll for a condom delivery service, much to the IH's chagrin.
    Historian: Oh, for fuck's sake--
  • He comes back again for "TheVarus Strakes Buck", leading a Zoom call full of celebrities to brainstorm ideas for keeping the general public's spirits up, but quickly becomes exasperated by their disconnect from said public and the fact that they're taking the lockdowns (and the resulting lack of attention) even worse than the general public is, and ends up leaving.
• Butch Lesbian: During his Storymode video for Gone Home, he immediately and correctly deduces that Samantha Greenbriar is gay due to her wearing flannel in an otherwise formal family portrait, having short hair, and going by a traditionally masculine nickname (Sam).
• Call-Back:
  • When listing other social media platforms as suspects for the thievery of r/dankmemes content, 9gag is represented by its CEO from the Meme Rock announcement video.
  • One of the shown responses to Rainfurrest staff's report to congoers about shenanigans at the hotel pool is "Pool's Closed."
  • The Bikelock Fugitive reappears with his bike lock when the Historian talks about how Fyre Festival's security was such garbage that guests were expected to bring their own locks for their lockers. When the festival is forcibly shut down by the Bahaman government, then-PM Perry Christie shows up in sunglasses and an MS Paint afro to declare "Fyre's Closed".
  • When discussing "Rapture pet care" in "Going Camping at the End of the World," the pet in question is a furry in dalmatian spandex.
  • In "Sonic Highschool," the "My Immortal" outfit description music returns when the narration is devoting an unusual amount of time describing Amy's outfit.
  • The title of "Liverpool's Closed | He Will Not Divide Us" is a direct one right back to "Pool's Closed," complete with the meme itself adapted to the circumstances.
  • While listing a lot of the first day bugs of No Man's Sky, the Historian uses the exact same music and tone of voice as when he did the same for Fallout 76 back in "The Fall of 76."
  • The Foundation update for No Man's Sky comes in a West-Tek Canvas Bag.
  • The Historian notes that "our old pal" Billy McFarland was among the famous criminals who were denied bail amidst the COVID-19 pandemic.
  • The Phoenicians are called "very progressive, especially for those days!" as they are ancient Lebanese, a joke calling back to "Gone Home Expleened" where IH started using "Lebanese" instead of "lesbian".
• Caught Up in the Rapture: "Going Camping at the End of the World" deals with the scandal involving Harold Camping predicting that the Rapture would take place in 2011 and using math to discern it would be on May 21. Particular focus is given to Camping's followers, who racked up debt and sold their worldly possessions under the expectation that they would soon be going to heaven.
• Cerebus Syndrome: His early videos could best be described as "4chan Behind the Meme", being quick rundowns of funny events on the internet (usually 4chan trolling campaigns) with loads of wacky editing. However, as the channel went on, videos started getting longer and moving to more serious or at the very least nuanced topics. By 2018-19, videos alternated between goofy topics that had jokes throughout ("Very Serious Business", "The Fall of 76") and more serious topics that alternated jokes with straightforward storytelling ("Going Camping at the End of the World", "The Endgoodening of No Man's Sky"). "The Cost of Concordia" was notable for covering a far more serious topic than discussed before, namely the tragedy of the Costa Concordia, which was still mostly funny, but also often made clear numerous times how serious and tragic the event was. Following the more old-school Area 51 video, the IH made the video that truly cemented the syndrome in "Man in Cave", a video about the real-life rescue of Floyd Collins, an obscure historical tragedy that is treated almost completely seriously. Its subject and subdued writing made it feel more like a Frederick Knudsen video with amusing editing, a far cry from the IH's origins.
• The Character Died with Him: A pastiche of Queen Elizabeth II was a frequent cohost in Storymode but the avatar was retired shortly after the death of her real-life counterpart.
• Circular Reasoning: When the Historian asks about the homosexual implications of Bangladeshi men walking around holding hands, (since there is no visual difference between "straight hand holding" and "gay hand holding") Sumito responds by stating no gay men would ever be seen holding hands because no gay men would be seen holding hands.
• Cold Ham: The Historian rarely raises his voice, but still provides an eloquent level of snark, jokes, and over-the-top descriptions of the things he's talking about.
• Colon Cancer: Conversed in In The Field video "food.". The Internet Historian claims that the more colons a (debut) work has, the more likely it is to fail.
• Comically Small Bribe: When Bethesda was called out for falsely advertising the $200 collector's edition of Fallout 76 (having promised a branded carrybag made of canvas, only to deliver one made of cheap nylon), they attempted to placate their angry customers with a handout of 500 Atoms, the game's premium currency. Unfortunately, 500 Atoms is worth only $5 of real money, and isn't enough to buy anything more valuable than an alternate floor texture (in fact, it's just short of the 700 Atoms needed to buy the Postal Uniform, which comes with an in-game canvas bag on the character model).
• Comic-Book Fantasy Casting: Played for Laughs for his Dramatic Readings. For instance, Jeff the Killer is represented by pictures of Mark Zuckerberg and his brother Liu is represented by Fredrik Knudsen from Down the Rabbit Hole.
• Cool Old Guy: The IH uses pictures of the famous stock photography model András Arató to represent himself in his videos; AKA "Hide The Pain Harold", a bearded old man with a smile that contradicts his sad eyes, and has been subject to a lot of Memetic Mutation.
• Could Say It, But...: Two-fold: after explaining how 4chan ultimately couldn't do anything else about 9gag's limestone meme rock due to it being in Almeria, Spain, the video seemingly ends there... before transitioning into Bill Nye!IH showing how limestone reacts to vinegar, and telling the audience not to get "any ideas". He then concludes with a word from their sponsor: The Español Board De Tourisimo.
  • To hammer the point home, the video description states "It's just satire, I swear." before immediately linking both a Cheapflights page for discounted flights to Almeria, and an Amazon listing for 30% pure vinegar.
• "Could Have Avoided This!" Plot: The Historian points out numerous measures^note Running a feeding tube (for sustenance), rigging up a phone line (for communication between Floyd and rescuers outside the cave), setting up a tarpaulin (so he wouldn't die of exposure), and setting up an AM radio feed (so he could listen to programs and hear messages of support from the outside world) the rescue effort in "Man in Cave" could have taken which would have either saved Floyd or at least alleviated his suffering.
• Creator Thumbprint: The Internet Historian's videos usually include scenes composed of stock photos to act out the narration. In some cases, the pictures he uses are of affiliated YouTubers. Usually, the awkward way the photos are edited is Played for Laughs.
  • In some Sundance Rejects, he incorporates text-to-speech to voice certain (usually minor) characters.
• Creepy Cave: "Man in Cave", a retelling of the fate of Floyd Collins, emphasizes the horror of the dark claustrophobic space of Sand Cave by encouraging viewers to dim their screens. The IH presents the cave as Malevolent Architecture with a will of its own, positing that the cave itself actively refused to let Floyd go. This lasted even after death, when his coffin was relocated to the cave as a tourist attraction after the family sold the land. The IH prefaces after Floyd's death by saying "the cave was not done with its victim yet".
• Cringe Comedy: The Internet's history is a melting pot of outdated memes and people getting their dignity assassinated by dumb misguided actions. The Historian doesn't really need to do much to show that what's he's covering is embarrassing for almost all parties involved.
• Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: While "moron" is a bit of a stretch, Jacob Rusli Bin, from "The Cost of Concordia", despite originally being a painter and cleaner who was hired on the cheap by Costa Crucia to serve as the Concordia's helmsman, and who was involved in the ship's crashing thanks to his unfamiliarity with any language other than his own, was still able to successfully avoid giving his witness testimony by fleeing Italy entirely, then fleeing Jakarta when the authorities finally tracked him down there a year later, with his whereabouts after that point still unknown to this day.
• Curb Stomp Cushion: Companies are consistently unable to engage directly with participants on the Internet, because trolls will inevitably hijack and derail the arrangement in hilarious and/or offensive ways, and usually the only defense is to shut it down entirely. In "Any Poll's a Goal" though, the IH talks about one occasion where trolls targeted a company poll: the contest to send Pitbull to a Walmart within the United States. After the trolls did their work to clinch victory for the most remote and dangerous Walmart in the country (the one in Kodiak, Alaska), Pitbull and Walmart just went with it, and a good time was had by all involved. General consensus is that this is one of the only times that a corporation has won this kind of exchange with the Internet.
• Darker and Edgier: "Man in Cave" is by far the Internet Historian's bleakest episode, with a very dark premise, as it tells the story of Floyd Collins and his entrapment in the Sand Cave, along with a loss of sanity from being stuck underground in the dark, and a slow death by exposure. The video has a really moody atmosphere, and very few jokes in between a recap of Floyd's life and story.
• Dated History:
  • Happens a few times in the video on the Fyre Festival. Some of his facts ended up being proven incorrect after the video was posted. However, this is only because more evidence surfaced that eventually proved the IH wrong thanks to documentaries with larger budgets that could dig deeper; most of what the Historian got wrong were educated guesses using what info he had at the time.
    • The IH said that Ja Rule was a financier who wasn't involved at all in the event's planning, as all publicly available evidence at the time pointed to this conclusion. However, the 2019 Netflix documentary used new footage and interviews revealing that Ja Rule was indeed heavily involved in Fyre Media. One of these videos showed him assisting Billy McFarland in scouting out and being part of a conference call where Ja Rule refused to admit the festival was fraudulent and encouraged the Fyre staff to "spin" the negative publicity into something good. Even to this day, Ja Rule still refuses to admit that Fyre Festival was a scam, even attempting to start up a second Fyre Festival in the failed event's aftermath.
    • The IH does not portray Fyre Festival as a scam at all, though he does mention Billy McFarland's fraudulent company. There simply wasn't enough evidence at the time to definitively call Fyre Festival a scam rather than just massive incompetence.^note When asked on the subject later, the IH claimed he couldn't believe Fyre Fest was a scam from the very beginning (rather than an incidental one like Dashcon) because it was such a poorly-executed one with no hopes of it not blowing up and attracting media attention and legal action.
  • Crops up during the "Instagrabbing of R Dank Memes." The IH mentions how Redditors petitioned Instagram to shut down the meme theft accounts. It then makes a joke about how this didn't work, but, after the controversy died down, Instagram actually did ban the meme theft accounts.
• Dead Guy on Display: At the end of "Man in Cave", Homer Collins funded a successful effort to have his brother Floyd's body recovered from the depths of Sand Cave and laid to rest in their family cemetery... for about two years before their father sold the land and everything on it to a man named Dr. Harry B. Thomas, who had Floyd's body exhumed and placed back into the cave where he died as a morbid tourist attraction, where he remained for 62 years before finally being properly re-buried.
• Deadpan Snarker: The Internet Historian's reporting style is deadpan and very subtle snarking.
• Didn't Think This Through:
  • The IH gives his opinion in the Q&A video on Dashcon that the organizers were far too ambitious with their con, and that's assuming it wasn't an outright scam. The organizers failed to dedicate their focus on a more narrow topic, thus making it unclear what Dashcon was about. They overestimated the amount of people willing to spend 65 dollars on a ticket to a brand new convention — only about five hundred people were willing to give it a chance instead of the projected seven thousand. They underestimated the budget required to fulfill all the promises they made in the advertisements (thus the infamous lone ballpit in a vast hall). And for the special guests, the organizers either didn't get their guests' prior approval, or never got in contact with them at all. When added up, this all led to an unfocused dumpster fire of a convention with a myriad of empty spaces where all the promised fun and special guests were supposed to be.
  • Jason Russell and crew meant well when promoting "Cover The Night," an ad campaign where people went out during nighttime to cover their cities/towns with posters of KONY 2012 to spread awareness. Unfortunately, a couple of bad apples took advantage of the event to do some actual vandalism while using the campaign as a sort of scapegoat.
  • "Very Serious Business" is all about various businesses completely failing to realize that allowing the consumer to take part in your online marketing will inevitably cause some ridiculous things to happen.
    • After the success of #MeetTheFarmers, McDonald's decided to create a new hashtag called #McDStories for those interested to share nice experiences they had at their restaurants. Apparently it didn't occur to the marketing guys that plenty of bad stuff happens at their locations and Twitter had a field day telling horror stories about things like finding a fingernail in their food, getting solicited for sex by a prostitute in the drive-thru in exchange for McNuggets (Historian pauses to note that this actually happened), a Ronald McDonald flashing people, and rats getting into the food supplies (he stops again to show that this too also actually happened). Soon, after some actual true stories, the trolls went to work to make up even more absurd things they "encountered" during their time at a Mickey D's.
    • After #McDStories crashed and burned, the marketing team then decided it was a good idea to give the internet free rein with creating their own sandwiches with whatever available ingredients used at Mcdonald's restaurants, with promises of popular entries becoming official menu items. Sure enough, sandwiches like "Bag of Lettuce", "Toddler Body Bag" (by one Hugecoc K.), "Pepe", and "Mein Kampf" began popping up until McDonald's decided to kill the website hosting the sandwich creator.
      Historian: You knew where this was gonna go. I knew where this was gonna go. How did McDonald's not?
    • Durex started a condom delivery service that promised to send their products wherever they're needed, with full discretion guaranteed thanks to their deliverymen's disguises. Aside from the obvious legality issues of having your deliverymen disguise themselves as cops, an attempted delivery in Dubai resulted in the government very quickly shutting it down due to its promotion of promiscuity. Durex then decided to use an online poll to decide where the app should open next, with the most votes being counted for the conservative Muslim city of Batman, Turkey.
    • #WhyIStayed was a very serious hashtag on Twitter encouraging victims of Domestic Abuse to come clean about why they stayed with their abusive partners... then someone from DiGiorno Pizza saw the hashtag, didn't bother spending 10 seconds to find out its actual context, and then decided to post "#WhyIStayed You had pizza." The DiGiorno account spent the next few days apologizing incessantly to all the backlash.
  • A reason that the Historian concludes was what unfortunately helped overhype No Man's Sky. Sean Murray took it upon himself to be the spokesperson of Hello Games, but his dorky and introverted demeanor was too easy to interpret as suspicious and dishonest (the poor guy was absolutely not ready for taking the spotlight in spite of being the boss of Hello Games because, in the grand scheme of things, Sean was ultimately just a technical guy). Sean had also hoped that the interviews he conducted would help alleviate the pressure by convincing journalists to make it clear to everyone that even though there was a lot of anticipation for the game, Hello Games was still a very small indie studio. But as the Historian says, "that's not how journalism works" and every answer Sean gave to interview questions ended up being misinterpreted as confirmation for promised features the studio couldn't ever hope to actually develop with the time they were given. Furthermore, the Historian points out that Sean failed to realize that plans change within the three years Hello Games was given to complete the game and his half-hearted confirmations for at the very least the possibility of said features might not pan out during development.
  • The "Snitching Hotlines" in "TheVarus Strakes Buck" clearly didn't think that people would not be pleased at the idea of being ratted out to any sort of governmental authority. As a result, the servers were swarmed with prank calls, vulgar memes, and nude photos. And as for the "anonymous" snitches? Turns out state "sunshine laws" ensure that their details are actually on public record, and can be viewed by anyone who knows where to look.
  • New York City and Los Angeles experimented with setting bail as low as literally $0, making $1000 worth of stolen goods the minimum for a police response, and allowing prisoners with nonviolent charges and short sentences to go free. What resulted was a predictable Vicious Cycle of unimpeded shoplifting and criminals getting out of jail as quickly as they got thrown in and vice versa.
  • The 4chan - Tumblr wars was a massive instance of this on Tumblr's part. Tumblr users decided to spam 4chan with posts to get them to give up their edginess. Turns out performing a raid on a website already well-known for vicious raids at the time is the definition of a bad idea. 4chan in turn started spamming Tumblr with porn, gore, and offensive memes for two days straight. There were also double-instances of this where Tumblr attempted to turn back the 4chan hordes by, for instance, spamming selfies, which just gave 4chan more ammunition to troll with.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: Did you know that NordVPN is so good at hiding your internet history that Jesus Christ and God himself are unable to see the history of what you're looking up online?
  God: (looking at a blocked screen of your depraved history) All looks wholesome to me...
• Digital Piracy Is Okay:
  • He and Adam from YourMovieSucks.org try to find a pirated full version of Black Panther online without paying. They ultimately don't get it, but only because they gave up trying.
  • He doesn't seem to be nearly as tolerant of the for-profit meme thievery by Instagram. However, he seems satisfied with the conclusion after it was revealed that Reddit was also stealing memes from Instagram. So online piracy is okay, as long you yourself produce content for others to steal.
• Digging Yourself Deeper: Kurt Eichenwald posts a screenshot of his browser window where he had the URL to a hentai site visible in another tab. Rather than come clean about it (or say he was researching it for a think piece or angry tweet decrying its evils like most people would), Eichenwald says he was showing his family how easy it was to find tentacle porn on the internet. Tucker Carlson and the IH both point out how much worse this excuse is. Then Fox News and IH refute it by pointing out that the work in question does not actually contain any tentacle porn. Eichenwald then contradicts himself by saying that he was demonstrating how hard it was to find tentacle porn on the internet, at which point Tucker just gives up, but the IH easily proves just how wrong Eichenwald's statement was. At the end of the day, Eichenwald went from being a known hentai enthusiast (embarrassing but his reputation could have recovered), to a lying idiot of a hentai enthusiast who thinks it's okay to show porn to your family (which is much, much worse).
• Dirty Coward: From "The Cost of Concordia", Francesco Schettino, captain of the Costa Concordia, jumped in a lifeboat in disguise and abandoned the ship as it was sinking, a sinking that he had a good deal of blame in. When confronted, he claimed that he had tripped into the lifeboat and didn't have time to get back out. And yet when the disgusted Coast Guard Captain Gregorio De Falco sees right through him and tells him to "get back on board, for fuck's sake", he ignores it and shuts off his radio, and ignores Falco's angered calls to his cell as well. This blatant desertion was a major factor in him being found guilty and sentenced to 16 years in prison in 2017.
• Disaster Dominoes: "The Cost of Concordia" notes that, like many major disasters that make the news, small mistakes and oversights piled up until every single point of failure needed to cause a full-on capsize was achieved, particularly with language barriers and incompetence on the bridge. The captain ordered a sail-by horn honk, not uncommon of cruise liners. Then, the helmsman (who spoke little English or Italian) got the directions wrong. Then, the helmsman steered the wrong direction when he tried to correct. Then, water flooded the main engine room, causing everything to shut off. Then one of the watertight doors jammed, letting water flow in continuously. Then the captain tried to save his own ass by telling everyone that things weren't that bad. Then the ship began dangerously listing to one side. Despite the efforts the crew (save the captain, who is portrayed as a Dirty Coward who cared only about saving himself), 32 people ended up dying as a result of all of these mistakes.
• Discredited Meme: A Discussed Trope in multiple videos.invoked
  • "9gag's Meme Rock" goes over the kinds of memes being put on a giant stone tablet to be buried, intended to serve as a freeze-frame of internet culture (or at least 9gag's culture) as it was in 2017. A lot of what was put on it were memes that were either far too generic or had quickly gone stale even during their time, which was close to a decade before the rock was etched.
  • "Planking | A Historical Footnote" details the meteoric rise and abrupt fall of a specific meme from the early 2010s.
  • In "Very Serious Business." The Historian notes how many marketing people try to be "hip" and "#relatable" by using memes, but only a few did it with any success. Soon, every brand was jumping on the meme bandwagon, to the point that a meme (Laser Spider/"silence, brand") was created just to mock brands for doing it.
• The Disease That Shall Not Be Named: To get around calling COVID-19 by its name and variants on Youtube, the Historian insistently calls it "TheVarus(™)", as evident in the titles of the subject and associated memes and events in "Tales From TheVarus" and "TheVarus Strake Buck".
• Distaff Counterpart: On occasion, an Internet Herstorian shows up, heavily implied to be the Historian's wife or girlfriend. She's usually represented by the old woman "Hide-The-Pain Harold" is often accompanied by in stock photos featuring him.
• Don't Try This at Home: Frequently urges this with regards to widescale pranks he documents, but especially anything 4chan does, which ranges from distasteful to illegal.
• Double Take: When talking about what happened to Mary Bateman after she was hanged, he had this reaction verbally.
  IH: Strips of skin from her corpse were tanned and sold as magic charms to ward off evil spirits- what the fuck am I reading?
• Downer Ending: In "Man in Cave", after spending over four hundred hours stuck in the cave, Floyd Collins tragically died inside the Squeeze, alone and in the dark. On top of that, his body was made into a tourist attraction inside the very cave he died in. It wouldn't be until 1989 that his body would finally be removed from the cave and properly laid to rest.
• Dramatic Reading: The Sundance Rejects videos are this for infamous internet stories, complete with crude animation. So far, he did My Immortal, Jeff the Killer and Sonic High School.
• Dude, Not Funny!:
  • Well, he thought it was a little funny, but the Historian didn't think sending pizza to the house where the fifth version of "He Will Not Divide Us" was being held was cool.
  • The Historian displays genuine disapproval at how /b/ abused Agile's hashtag to publicly display disgusting and offensive memes.
• Dying Alone: What Floyd Collins fears will happen to him in "Man in Cave", even going so far as to attempt to trap a miner with him when the cave collapses just so he wouldn't die by himself. Unfortunately, Floyd would die days before his body was rescued, succumbing to his worst fear.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: The Engoodening of No Man's Sky follows the development of No Man's Sky and how Sean Murray and Hello Games managed to turn it around from a crappy, buggy mess into a beautifully made video game through months of updates, patches and nonstop hard work.
• The End of the World as We Know It: "The Y2K Apocalypse" and "Going Camping at the End of the World" both deal with promised world-ending apocalypses that end up never happening.
• Euphemistic Names: In "I am become Fancy: Theatre", dirty internet humor and old french names turn out to... not mesh particularly well.
  IH: Moving on to the Impressionist musicians. Now that's Claude De-the what now? Claude Dewhat? You know what, we'd better go to ad time.
• Even the Subtitler Is Stumped: Asif of "Friendship Ended" was approached to do an ad for a local beauty parlor, which the IH plays a clip from. The subtitles say, "I don't speak Urdu so I have no idea what they're saying."
• Everybody Has Standards:
  • Bikelock Guy is portrayed as a rogue who seriously injured a man trying to keep things under control with a deadly weapon. In spite of this, the IH adhered to his disclaimers and made sure to censor all instances of the man's real name and social media handles in the footage.
  • The Historian will joke about the crash of the Costa Concordia and the incompetence of its bridge crew until the cows come home. But he's clearly in no mood to make fun of the passengers whose lives were inconvenienced or outright taken by the incident.
• Everything Is Racist: Xzibit attempted to stop Planking by claiming it's based on how slaves were arranged on slave ships. Nobody bought it.
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin: The Internet Historian's channel is literally him discussing and analyzing the best known internet events in a professional, deadpan, but very calm way.
• Exact Words: "Every Poll's a Goal" has 4chan and other trolls exploit internet polls to make the result as miserable as possible while still remaining within the poll's rules. Vote to send Justin Bieber on a tour anywhere in the world? Send him to North Korea. Sending Pitbull to any Walmart in the United States? Send him to the most remote one, in Kodiak, Alaska. Taylor Swift can only go to an American school? The Horace Mann School... for the Deaf. For understandable reasons, only the second of these was honored.
• The Face:
  • Jason Russell was the director of KONY 2012 and the one doing interviews, so he ended up being Invisible Children's face. This also meant that any criticism meant for the organization in general ended up being directed at him for good measure, which all but killed the movement's credibility when he cracked under the stress and ran out into a street in San Diego, naked and ranting at anyone who passed by.
  • Todd Howard is basically portrayed as the personification of Bethesda itself, with many of the company's decisions - especially those that result in the regular employees being overworked and the playerbase being majorly inconvenienced - being portrayed by the Historian as having come from him and only him.
  • As the boss of a small indie studio that had no PR department, Sean Murray took it upon himself to represent Hello Games in promotions, and as such ended up being the person to receive the brunt of the criticisms towards No Man's Sky.
• Face Palm:
  • One of the Special Forces soldiers involved in the theoretical honeytrap plot to capture Joseph Kony pulls off one of these, most likely because of how dumb the idea was in the first place.
  • One of these is in the video on Harold Camping. After May 21, 2011 came and went with no Rapture (and after an early reveal that he'd already tried and failed to predict the Rapture in 1994), Camping made yet another Rapture prediction on the first show after the failed prediction. Cue the mass facepalm clip from The Naked Gun.
  • The thieves in the 2000 Swedish Nationalmuseum robbery avoided the police, left no identifiable evidence at the scene, and got away successfully with three paintings worth millions. Everything would've gone perfectly for them... if only they didn't use their real phone number when renting out their getaway motorboat (which they left on the banks of the waterway).
• Fake Action Prologue: "That Zone Between Area 50 and 52" features an anime-style war between the raiders and the American military that makes it appear as if the raiders not only stormed the place, but defeated the military and freed an alien from captivity. When it's over, the Historian admits that "it wasn't quite like that", and reveals what really happened. On the day of the Area 51 raid, only two hundred people showed up (out of two million who said they were interested online), most of them just took things like rocks as souvenirs, and the worst thing that happened was that one woman who ducked under the gate got charged with trespassing and was fined a thousand dollars.
• Filler: Discussed in "That Zone Between Area 50 and 52". After covering the multiple different Alienstock festivals that took place all at the same time, the Historian says that the video is getting too long, and fast-forwards through the rest of the details to get to the day of the actual raid on Area 51.
• Flat Joy: The emotion he expresses while talking about Fallout 76's December 2018 patches, as the "fixes" Bethesda made to the game were fairly inconsequential and irrelevant or just straight up made the game worse and grindier, represented by Bethesda Senior VP of Marketing Pete Hines blowing on a party horn.
• Flat "What": After he reveals the date of the end of the world as being May 21, 2011, he can only say "Wait what?", as he'd been building it up like it would have been the more wildly known date of 2012.
• Foreshadowing:
  • The IH turns the ocean in an ad for Fyre Festival into a giant ballpit, foreshadowing how the festival would become a giant disaster not unlike a certain other event (coughDashconcough) that made similar promises in its promotional material.
  • In "The Engoodening of No Man's Sky", the IH reaches the point of the game's sudden delay before its release, reporting how founder/director Sean Murray was sent death threats for it, "although he didn't take them seriously or go to the police... yet."
    Professor Evan Gottlieb: Sometimes, foreshadowing is relatively obvious!
  • In "The Swedish Job", one of the culprits is inexplicably wearing a "#1 Dad" beanie. This is because his son (who in turn is wearing a "#1 Son" beanie) would eventually be a major player in the ensuing events.
• Framing Device:
  • invokedThe "He Will Not Divide Us" series is shown framed in various forms:
    • "Capture the Flag" is framed around an infiltration mission à la Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain.
    • "Liverpool's Closed", aside from the Call-Back to "Pool's Closed", is framed à la a mission from Watch_Dogs.
    • "The Walking Divided" is shown as if the final iteration of the project was a season of a TV show that should have ended seasons ago.
  • "The Great iPhone Massacre" is the IH as Steve Jobs having risen from his "cold, dark grave" to announce a new product. And also apparently the whole presentation is a call on your iPhone.
  • "Friendship Ended." is presented as a Film Noir interrogation of Mudasir by the IH dressed as a detective about the death of Asif's pet goat.
  • "The Failure of Fyre Festival" is the Historian stuck on Norman's Cay Cast Away-style as someone who was unlucky enough to buy tickets to the event and then miss the plane back home.
  • In a downplayed example, "The Fall of 76" is presented as an audio log found in the ruins of Bethesda's offices from Fallout 3. It's downplayed in that this is never brought up again after the opening scene.
  • "Very Serious Business" is apparently a power point presentation the Historian is giving at a seminar. And at the end, the Historian uses footage from András Arató's (the stock photography model that inspired the "Hide-The-Pain Harold" meme) TED talk.
  • "Tales From TheVarus" is set up à la an After the End scenario from Fallout with the viewer coming out of cyro to be informed of what happened during the COVID-19 outbreak by a robot. Then the Gainax Ending hits.
  • "TheVarus Strakes Buck" is set continuing off said ending, with President Elon Musk celebrating the unveiling of his new "cyber-rocket" and his plans to recolonize Earth from Mars while discussing "the mistakes of the past." It ends with him coughing up blood, revealing he's infected and the virus has somehow arrived on Mars.
  • "The Cost of Concordia" presents the IH on a cruise ship reminiscing about the Costa Concordia, with most of the video being a flashback about being a passenger on its disastrous voyage. The video ends by showing that he's on his journey to return Concordia's bell back to where the ship originally sunk after he stole it.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus:
  • In "The Engoodening of No Man's Sky", when talking about the flood that hit Hello Game's offices, some text appears very briefly at the bottom of the screen, which explains that Sean actually views it as a blessing in disguise, because at the time, the team was beginning to split due to office politics issues, and the flood pushed them all to overcome those issues and band together to press on. And, sure enough, the text ends with "Was it worth it pausing the video just to read this?"
  • In "The Cost of Concordia" when the crew decides to lie to the passengers to prevent a panic a poster reading "L.I.V.E." is shown with the "L" saying to do just that. The other three letters are blurry but can be read. "I" stands for "Interfere with rescue", "V" is for "Vindicate self" and "E" means "Evacuate first".
• Frivolous Lawsuitinvoked: In "The Engoodening of No Man's Sky", among the many listed troubles Hello Games faced during production was the threat of several lawsuits for unlikely reasons: one by Danish mathematician Johan Gielis, accusing them of stealing his patented "Superformula" algorithm, and another by Sky TV for infringing on their trademark for the word "sky".
• From Bad to Worse:
  • The release of Fallout 76. The fact that it was a broken, buggy, boring mess of an MMO at launch ended up being the LEAST of publisher Bethesda's problems. Terrible reviews, an even worse response from the company to all the negative criticism, and their attempts to stop players from exploiting the game's glitches for their own benefit by banning scores of players, even innocent ones because they themselves had no idea how to differentiate between cheaters and those who just played a lot. "The Duffle Kerfuffle" and their accidental releasing of gamers' confidential information when they attempted to address that problem. The Nuka Cola Dark rum bottle controversy, two class-action lawsuits... even at the end of the 25 minute video, the Historian notes that he could go further and cover the latest (at that time) glitches and controversies, but wouldn't since the video was already too long for his tastes.
  • At Rainfurest 2015, someone loosened the bolt on one of the toilets, so when someone flushed it, water flooded everywhere. Before emergency plumbers could arrive, the water leaked through the floor and onto the basement servers.
• Fun with Subtitles: Some videos feature subtitles with additional jokes about the content covered.
• Gag Censor: How does the IH censor some of the NSFW imagery used to hijack the Agile Alliance 2013 conference? By using black boxes with deadpan captions that explain what they are using Unusual Euphemisms.
  two gentlemen lovers in sweet embrace.
  man eating a hotdog. except there's no bun and no hotdog.
  the less said the better.
• Gainax Ending: The ending to "Tales From TheVarus". Our point of view character is not on a post-apocalyptic Earth ravaged by the coronavirus, but on a Mars colony founded by Elon Musk. The character is also revealed to be Musk's child X Æ A-13, who in turn is revealed to be Barack Obama. Also, it's directed by M. Night Shyamalan.
• Genre Blindness: Marketing executives and major brands seem to have no understanding of the Internet's love of mean-spiritedness, crass humor, memes, and sending the best laid plans Off the Rails, no matter how many times it happens. From public polls that allow celebrities to be sent to dangerous or absurd locales, to giving Twitter users an excuse to share disgusting stories about a restaurant chain, it's so common that two whole episodes are dedicated just to this phenomena. It comes to a head when the Historian reveals McDonald's' brilliant idea to not only allow random internet strangers to design and name their own burgers, but even vote for one of them to become an official menu item.
  You knew where this was gonna go, I knew where this was gonna go, how did McDonald's not?
• Genre Shift: The In The Field series began as the Internet Historian and an accomplice messing about on the internet. It wasn't until "art." when the series began to shift into the heavily edited, one-word topic format it currently is.
• Going Down with the Ship: Defied by Captain Schettino in "The Cost of Concordia". After the actions of Schettino and his bridge crew cause the cruise ship Concordia to begin sinking, he changes out of his captain's uniform and then (according to him) he "accidentally tripped" and fell into one of the life boats, and he didn't have enough time to get off of the boat before it left. He refused all orders to return to the ship until everyone was safely evacuated, and this blatant cowardice was a major factor in his conviction in court later on.
• Gone Horribly Right:
  • In the coverage of Kony 2012, it becomes abundantly clear that the project was a victim of its own success. It had only ever been intended as an awareness campaign to make the public aware of Kony and the kinds of atrocities he commits, but when the video becomes entire magnitudes more popular than expected (Jason mentions that the number of views they had expected to get over the entire year had been accrued over the first three hours), it also drew amounts of criticism that probably weren't expected, along with ire from other charities that they were drawing attention from. Adding that to the ridiculous number of interviews that Jason was accepting throughout the United States and the apparent impression by many that he and Invisible Children intended to put a stop to Kony personally, it's no wonder that the pressure got to him. There was some excellent foreshadowing in that Invisible Children's website had to be briefly taken down shortly after the film was first posted due to the amount of traffic that it was getting, perfectly displaying how Jason and Invisible Children weren't even remotely prepared for the amount of exposure (no pun intended) that they would soon receive.
  • The "Send Pitbull to any Walmart in America" online poll. Trolls manipulated the results to send him to the most remote Walmart location they could find in Kodiak, Alaska. But Pitbull honoured the results and went to Kodiak, and it ended up being a great show and excellent PR, which was the whole point of the campaign.
• Gratuitous French: In the beginning of "I am become Fancy: Theatre" he calls himself "Moi" then condescendingly says he doesn't expect the viewer to know French.
• Gratuitous German: He takes a moment in the Fyre Festival video to point out that Ja Rule's name, translated from German, means "Yes Rule".
• Gratuitous Japanese: To go with all the "Naruto running" and Animesque tone of it all, the re-enactment of the Area 51 raid is "dubbed" in Japanese and subtitled. As in, the entire "dub" is a big mess of voice clips taken from various anime that hardly ever match what's supposed to be said beyond tone of voice.
• HA HA HA—No: r/dankmemes attempted to petition Instagram to take down the meme theft accounts. The Historian portrays presumably everyone's reaction to this with one of these from Mark Zuckerberg.
• Hate Sink:
  • Francesco Schettino, the captain of the Costa Concordia, is practically the only figure the Historian never attempts to paint in a somewhat sympathetic or at least understandable light. Over the course of the video, he's shown to be wildly incompetent, a complete sleaze, a chronic liar, a Dirty Coward, a shameless Glory Hound, and guilty of getting dozens of people killed through gross negligence and a refusal to acknowledge that things had gone wrong (with it being only sheer luck that the casualty count wasn't higher) and displaying no remorse over it. The Historian lampshades how loathsome the man is in the latter half of the video, when he says the audience are all waiting to see him be arrested. However, come the Q&A video, the Historian also makes it clear that Schettino was not the only person responsible for the ship crashing. He points out that the staff weren't following procedure and the helmsman went in the wrong direction multiple times. The ship had engineering problems and was doomed from the moment it hit the rocks; there was nothing Schettino could have done to save it. It's alleged that Schettino's trial was more of a "PR trial", handwaving those points away and admitting false statements as evidence, and focusing on Schettino and Domnica's affair when it had nothing to do with the crash. His conviction was also practically guaranteed since all of the other staff got plea deals while Schettino was the only one who went to trial, and the cruise liner's parent company only had to pay a small fine, all while all the blame was being directed towards just Schettino himself, ensuring he had virtually no chance of walking free.
  • Dr. Harry Thomas only shows up at the end of the Floyd Collins video, but is treated as the worst of the many people who acted selfishly throughout the ordeal. Two years after Homer Collins successfully got his brother's body out of the cave and buried by their house, Thomas took advantage of their father's senility to buy not just the property (which the government was likely about to buy at a better price due to wanting to turn the entire cave network into a national park) but everything on it - including Floyd's corpse, which he put on display in a glass coffin back in the cave. To the bewilderment of the IH, Thomas succeeded in not only getting loads of tourists, but successfully won litigation filed against him by the Collins family. He eventually secured Floyd's corpse in a coffin so locked up the IH said he was even more stuck under Thomas than he was in his final days, and Thomas got away with everything, either dying with the cave still open for tourists or selling the cave to the government in 1961 - it's unclear whether or not he died before that year.
• Head Desk: In "Forspoken Expleened", the hosts directly bet that Frey (who's been established as obnoxiously snarky to the point of speaking near-exclusively in one-liners) is going to say "well, looks like we just leveled up" as soon as she gets her first power upgrade. When this exact scenario happens, a "Live Branson Reaction Cam" appears, revealing him to be faceplanting into the table.
• Hope Spot:
  • Apple Wave was a false ad for the iPhone that fooled people into thinking they could actually charge their phones by microwaving them. The IH at first points out that while news of these idiots falling for the prank was widespread, it was claimed that not that many people actually tried it. Cue the Historian showing a montage of dozens upon dozens of Apple forum questions about what to do if you microwaved your phone.
    I'm stupid please help
  • Right from the beginning, Dashcon ended up being a disappointing disaster but most of the guests stuck around for the hope of seeing the promised live reading of Welcome to Night Vale. More than a full hour after it was supposed to start, the organizers reveal Night Vale quit.
  • At the critical moment when the Costa Concordia is attempting to swing around Skull Rock to avoid collision, the IH notes they just might achieve a near-miss if everything goes well. However, helmsman Jacob Rusli Bin screws up at the worst possible moment due to both panic and language barrier by turning the rudder starboard instead of port. In the eight seconds it takes him to realize his mistake and correct, he ends up undoing the swing maneuver and the ship's bow barely clears the rock before they take a direct hit to their stern that guts the ship and causes the massive flooding that disables the engines and causes the blackout. The annotation note that simulations show if the maneuver had been successful, they would have missed the rocks by a mere 10 meters, or at least only caused flooding in one compartment, which would have been manageable since the ship was rated to handle flooding in two compartments.
  • This is a recurring theme in "Man in Cave". Multiple times throughout the video, Floyd looks like he'll be saved, only for something to go wrong. People braved through the struggles and dangers because they believed that hope was the key to saving Floyd's life. Unfortunately, despite everybody's efforts, Floyd died before his body could be recovered.
• How We Got Here: The IH begins the Fyre Festival video with him being stranded on an island, and tells the viewer they might be wondering how... he got his tan.
• Humans Are the Real Monsters: In "Tales from TheVarus", while pointing out the positive environmental effects of the lockdown, the IH has a joking realization:
  Are we the virus?
  [cut to clip of Agent Smith talking about how "human beings are a disease"]
  That is profound. [gasp] Maybe we were the real Corona all along.
• Hypocritical Humor:
  • Mocked in Kony 2012 and covered further in the relevant discussion video. The media, comedians, and the internet mocked Jason Russell and those who participated in the event as "slacktivists" trying to feel better about themselves by doing the bare minimum of effort they could to "help" Africa. Annotations that pop up at this point out that this was coming from people doing literally nothing about a real problem, and undermining genuine efforts to help Africa.
  • Discussing the looting of the Concordia, the Historian laughingly wonders who would bother stealing the ship's bell. The ending of the video reveals that he himself was the culprit.
• Idiot Ball:
  • The horror story version of this is liberally reconstructed in Sumito in a Horror Movie where the titular Sumito is put in the role of a typical male father protagonist of the genre and finds himself going through the motions despite being Genre Savvy due to various valid in-universe justifications. Busted lightbulb in the creepy basement? Someone needs to fix it eventually if the space is to be used. Withholding the information of supernatural happenings from his family? He has children and doesn't want to scare them until he has actual proof. Potentially just ditching the house? He'd be homeless until he finds a way to sell it. As the video goes on, and more and more no-win situations pile up, Sumito gets increasingly more stressed and desperate, resulting in actions and decisions that an audience member may unfairly misconstrue as him being Too Dumb to Live.
  • Internet Historian's The Fall of 76 video is basically just Bethesda repeatedly dropping Idiot Balls with their bad decisions.
• Incompetence, Inc.: Bethesda Softworks is presented as cartoonishly incompetent in "The Fall of 76" in how they've handled Fallout 76. It starts with launching a barely-functional product, then attempting to deal with cheaters by making them write an essay, failing to repeatedly deliver promised collector's items and even having a website that accidentally leaked people's personal infos to the public.
• I Need a Freaking Drink: Apparently, alcohol is a cure for the Coronavirus.
• Imagine Spot: In "The Fall of 76," the Historian shows Bethesda executives watching as people happily accept their gift of 500 Atoms for getting screwed on the Collector's Edition of the game. It's then revealed to just be what the executives hoped would happen; when the Atoms offer went out, people in real life just got even angrier.
• Ink-Suit Actor: In "The Swedish Job", all the main characters (save for the law enforcement, who are all Cole Phelps) are represented by the real-life faces of their voice actors.^note Except for Stefan Nordstrom at the beginning, who is voiced by the Internet Historian, but is later voiced by Fredrik Knudsen.
• Insane Troll Logic: Sometimes the Historian has a habit of exaggerating the Internet's collective thought process, but sometimes it actually manifests in real life.
  • Pitbull's genius lyrical skills of rhyming Kodak with Kodak led to his concert being rigged by 4chan to be in Kodiak, Alaska. This was not because they just happen to sound alike, but because of the following chain of logic: Kodak is a brand of cameras, cameras have shutters, shutters are blinds, blinds shut out blinding light, blinding light can be caused by the Aurora Borealis... and the only place within the U.S. that you can find the Aurora Borealis and a Walmart is Kodiak, Alaska!
  • Harold Camping based his entire Rapture prophecy on, for all intents and purposes, randomly smashing together numbers derived from various parts of the Bible and then adding 2011 as the year to the sum for reasons known only to him, which just so happened to make a date in the upcoming year. After his first prediction didn't happen, Camping desperately tried to re-calculate the Rapture by adding the number of fish caught by Christ's disciples in the Book of John as extra days to his original sum, thereby "proving" how much time was left until the Rapture would actually happen. Thankfully though, he did come to his senses before the second predicted date came along.
• Intrepid Reporter: William Miller, from "Man In Cave", is a reporter for a local newspaper, and when he goes over to get the story, he crawls all the way down to Floyd to get an interview with him, becoming the second person to be brave enough to do so, only after Floyd's own brother. His reporting during Floyd's ordeal would later earn him a Pulitzer.
• Irony:
  • It's pointed out that Bikelock Guy, who attacked a bystander trying to stop violence from breaking out, was a teacher's assistant specializing in Ethics and Moral Philosophy at the time of the incident.
  • To compensate players angry about the Duffel Kerfuffle, Bethesda attempted to reward them with the barest minimum amount of in-game currency (500 atoms). The irony comes from the fact that not only does the promised canvas bag exist in-game as a cosmetic item, but its cost (700 atoms) was just short of the compensation Bethesda gave out.
  • Camping's prophesizing of the end of the world goes against Christian scripture, which outright states that no one can know when the Rapture is coming; someone who says otherwise can be punished with excommunication. Which is more or less what ended up happening when Camping was Unpersoned by Family Radio.
  • The only bugs that weren't in No Man's Sky? The butterflies in the demo.
• It Amused Me: After 4chan tricked the stupid masses into things like drowning, microwaving, and bending their iPhones, the last "feature" to bother customers was a small seam in their phones that pulled out hair. It wasn't 4chan this time, but IH!Steve Jobs who intentionally included it.
  IH!Steve Jobs: I made that design decision. I thought it was funny.
• It's All About Me: He says as much about Mary Alice Altorfer in "Pool's Closed", noting that "she knew how to make it all about her", as aptly demonstrated by the simple fact that a 50-year-old white grandma looked at pictures of 20-something black guys in suits with comically-huge afros and somehow came to the conclusion that they were personally insulting her.
• It's Personal: The majority of the Historian's videos are presented through snarky but otherwise objective eyes, as the worst his mood usually gets is when calling out news media for needless and misinformed slander or just plain stupidity on their part. For "The Fall of 76" however, it's clear that everything about the disastrous launch of Fallout 76 infuriated him on a personal level, with the video being one of his longest and most passionate. The video almost ends on what amounts to a No Ending, with the IH admitting he's not only failed to get to some more controversial stuff, but he's stopping because the video was already getting too long for his tastes.^note And while he hasn't said it outright, he seems to be a huge Fallout fan (or at least of Bethesda games) based on how much he's used clips and screenshots from the games in other videos. "The Fall of 76" even features a pinned comment from the IH himself saying, "Won't lie, I'm probably still gonna preorder Starfield."
• Just Here for Godzilla: invoked As said in Hope Spot, most of Dashcon's attendees put up with a lot of the con's incompetence and disappointing turnout on the basis that they would get to watch a live reading of Welcome to Night Vale. Then it didn't happen.
• Kangaroo Court: In the Jeff the killer Dramatic Reading, the two cops (who apparently act as Judge, Jury, and Executioner) decide to send a child to prison for a year with only an obviously self inflicted scratch on his arm as evidence.
  Cop: Son, you're coming with me.
  Kid: Do I need a lawyer?
  Cop: Nah don't worry about it.
• Karma Houdini:
  • "The Bikelock Fugitive of Berkley" covers a dedicated attempt to avert this trope. After a protester struck some bystander trying to keep things under control with a bikelock, /pol/ decided to find out the identity of the man. They used photos and videos of the event to find a picture of the guy without a mask, found out who the guy was, and then notified his parents, his place of work, and the police. Unfortunately, all the bike lock attacker got at the end of his court proceedings was three years of probation (which is a pretty light sentence, considering one of his crimes was attempted murder).
  • Whoever killed Rainfurrest by tossing diapers on cars and sending detailed letters to other hotels in Seattle telling them not to host the convention got away with it. The identity of the con killer has never been revealed. It's implied that it's someone the organizers knew personally, but didn't have enough evidence to actually legally accuse whoever did it.
  • Zigzagged with the Dashcon organizers. Yes, they scammed people out of money and didn't get sued because the stolen sums weren't big enough to be worth a legal battle. They didn't get away cleanly though, as their names are now permanently attached to the hilarious failure and scam that was Dashcon. In his Q&A, the IH notes that the amount of money they walked away with isn't worth the difficulty they will have finding jobs in the future.
  • Also zigzagged with the guy who trashed a Gamestop for denying him a refund for Fallout 76; the fact that he was never arrested for property damage leads the Historian to theorize that the video of him trashing the place was actually staged.
  • After discussing how two American entrepreneurs were punished for illegal price gouging and forced to effectively give away their stored up supplies in "TheVarus Strakes Buck", IH then mentions how China managed to get away with this on a global scale via buying up protective equipment worldwide, selling it and their own products back to a now exhausted world market, and then recalling the defective Chinese products with no refunds (and jokingly putting a disclaimer up for his viewers to not let them rule his imminent death in the future as a suicide for talking about it).
  • "The Cost of Concordia" features several such examples:
    • Jacob Rusli Bin, the helmsman who steered the ship onto the rocks, escaped having to give witness testimony and serving his reduced sentence by fleeing Italy. He was tracked down to Jakarta after a year but escaped again, and hasn't been seen in seven years since as of the Historian posting the video.
    • A group of scammers from Budapest tried to profit off of the disaster by contacting Peter Ronai, an attorney representing several Concordia survivors, with claims that one of them had died in the crash along with her daughter. Ronai, looking into their story, found it to be full of holes and exposed them as frauds in front of the police. Despite this, they were able to escape any legal repercussions.^note According to a quote from Ronai, this was because Hungary didn't have any laws in the books against insurance fraud. In the Q+A, the Historian does note he's not sure whether or not this was true, and that even if it was, there were plenty of other charges the courts could have convicted them for. But the fact remains that the scammers got off scot-free in the end.
    • Zigzagged for the company responsible for the Costa Concordia, Costa Crucia. While they dodged all criminal liability for the disaster, their stock prices dropped by 23% and as of 2020, their parent company “Carnival” has been struggling due to the COVID-19 pandemic and had a net loss of $1.9 billion.
• Kavorka Man: The Historian is in complete disbelief over the numerous women who have apparently had affairs with the rather doughy looking Francesco Schettino. The Historian even wonders what the hell kind of charisma Schettino has to make this happen multiple times (Domnica Cemortan claims to have genuinely found the man sexy). Oh, and he's married, too.
  Jesse Pinkman: He can't keep getting away with it!
• Kicked Upstairs: "The Cost of Concordia" notes that Frigate Captain Gregorio de Falco was unceremoniously taken off of active duty and transferred to an administrative role in the coastguard in 2014. This caused a public outcry, as his actions during the Concordia rescue efforts had made him a national hero in the eyes of many Italians, and led to speculation that this was all an effort to sabotage his career by a vindictive superior officer. de Falco in particular didn't take kindly to this treatment, and retired from the Navy several years later to become a senator for Livorno.
• Kick the Dog:
  • The IH says that one can look at the Silver Screen Bottling Company's explanation of their choice to use the plastic shelled bottles in one of two ways. However, both of these ways make them out to be total assholes. The bottle controversy boils down to the Bottling Company being either complete dicks or incompetent fools, for no apparent gain in either case apart from making lots of people angry just because they could.
    • Option one: The company was flat-out lying about the design of the plastic-shelled bottle being more expensive than a glass version. This would mean the company believed its customers were morons willing to spend money on anything, and took advantage of this by charging more for a product that was cheaper to make. This shows contempt for customers who put down a lot of money — the drink was very expensive at eighty dollars a bottle — and were very patient in waiting through delays for it.
    • Option two: The company was telling the truth about the design of the plastic-shelled bottle being more expensive than a glass version. This means that the company went out of their way to spend more time and more money for the purpose of selling a worse product, without realizing their mistake until the products were out the door. This could be seen as even more embarrassing for the Bottling Company, as the IH mentions that the company was perfectly capable of making a similar glass bottle properly with much less effort.
  • Also, the canvas bag controversy. The "Duffle Kerfuffle" (as the IH dryly puts it) had no logical reason to happen, either. Bethesda made total tits of themselves by advertising canvas bags in the Power Armor Edition and then including nylon ones instead, blundering through every attempt to calm the angry customers down by continually making the worst possible decisions, from outright claiming they had no plans to do anything about it then offering the smallest amount of compensation they possibly could, before finally deciding to make the bags they'd originally advertised (and accidentally doxxing everyone who put in their info to get one). What makes this incredibly petty is that they previously demonstrated that they were perfectly capable of making commemorative canvas bags, as seen with the previous New Vegas bags and those influencers that received an actual canvas bag for promoting Fallout 76. For some reason, Bethesda just made things worse for themselves at every turn.
• Large Ham: What else would you expect from inviting Mumkey Jones to voice act the main bully in Jeff The Killer?
• Latin Lover: In a "post-credits scene" at the end of "weapons." IH declares, "Uh oh, now the Spanish version of the same video has started playing!"
  IH: [in a thick, exaggerated Spanish accent, wearing a matador outfit] Ah, welcome to the Spanish version. It is exactly the same content, instead it is a lot sexier! Ah, a beautiful weather woman has entered the room! And we shall make sweet music together. [they begin playing the guitar and maracas very badly]
• Letting the Air out of the Band: In "2 Fancy 2 Furious: Wine", he starts listing the most famous wine-making regions of the world to the tune of Yakko's World, but the music starts deflating as he realizes 90% of them are in France and right next to each other.
• Like Is, Like, a Comma: His "quick summary" of the apology panel in "The Failure of Dashcon" is a supercut of every use of the word "like" used in this manner during the panel, since the people speaking at the panel said a lot of them.
• Literal-Minded: How the Historian lists some of the major acts that were initially tapped to perform at Fyre Festival: Major Lazer is shown blasting a laser beam and blink-182 is shown attempting to blink one hundred and eighty two times.
• Long List:
  • In both "The Fall of 76" and "The Engoodening of No Man's Sky", listing all the extensive bugs both games had on release. Both done in almost the exact same tone and manner.
  • There's also one for all the promises that never made it into No Man's Sky initially.
  • All the joke burgers people made with the McDonald’s “Create Your Taste” website, with the added bonus of the Historian making the highlights of the list into a poem.
  • The list of placebos that could supposedly cure or help immunize you from COVID-19 gets so long and ridiculous, ranging from "fruits that look like the virus" to water, that the Historian just gives up and declares that everything is apparently a cure for the virus.
• Loop Hole Abuse: During "TheVarus Strakes Buck", multiple brilliant ideas in New York and Los Angeles from the powers that be were taken advantage of by criminals all over both cities, due to them making crime effectively legal while they were active:
  • The first idea was to set bail to no cost. Cue criminals being able to be released as soon as they get arrested without even seeing the inside of a holding cell, some walking out and getting re-arrested within half an hour.
  • The second idea was to announce that any crime that didn't involve at least one thousand dollars' worth of cash or goods being stolen would not provoke the police into showing up to emergency calls, presumably with the idea that this would free up police resources and criminals would be arrested after they were identified; unfortunately, it also became law to wear a mask while entering any business establishment... cue petty criminals stealing up to (or just under) one thousand dollars' worth of goods in plain view of everyone and getting away scot-free, in spite of surveillance footage and witness testimony, because the police wouldn't enforce the law and they were legally required to wear masks and conceal their identities.
  • The third brilliant idea was to set a law that would allow early release for convicts who were serving time for non-violent crimes, serving less than a year (even for violent crimes) or only had around a month left to serve (for any type of crime). This law also applied to people who were just entering custody, so naturally this resulted in criminals being released from prison as soon as they get arrested (assuming they get arrested in the first place due to the previous great ideas). The IH notes that crimes of all types skyrocketed during this whole debacle.
• Lopsided Dichotomy: In the opening of "The Fall of 76", the Historian claims that the reason the Bethesda office is deserted is either because everyone is dead, or that they're just working at a different office.

Tropes M-Z

• Media Scaremongering: "Tales from TheVarus" mentions this as one of the reasons that things got so bad. While "TheVarus" was absolutely a real threat and should have been treated as such, the things that the media chose to focus on weren't helping. For instance, IH recounts the shortage on toilet paper as being partly the media's fault for either playing up the shortage or getting their facts wrong (such as that most of Australia's toilet paper is imported, when it's almost always made locally due to the inherent shipping costs making toilet paper too expensive to ship internationally). IH also notes that, a few weeks after toilet paper supplies went back to normal, they moved onto something else.
• The Millstone: Captain Schettino is portrayed this way during "The Cost of Concordia". First, he tells his helmsman to get closer to shore than they ever have for a sail-by salute. Then, when the ship hits a rock, he gives incorrect information to the crew, the harbormaster, and the Coast Guard. When Schettino finally gives the order to abandon ship, he changes into a suit and sneaks into a lifeboat, likely intending to slip away in the confusion. The Coast Guard, the local police, and the harbormaster all keep yelling at Schettino to get back on board to coordinate rescue efforts, but he refuses each time. Instead, Schettino sits on the rocks of the shoreline for half an hour, watching the rescue efforts of everyone else, doing nothing to help.^note In the ensuing Q&A video, the Historian speculates that this behavior by Schettino was a combination of guilt over what he had done, wondering how he was possibly going to get himself out of this, and a lingering thought of throwing himself off the cliff to his death. The Historian notes that the police chief assumed Schettino was contemplating killing himself, which the Historian suspects is a strong possibility.
• Mis-blamedinvoked: Brought up a lot during "The Engoodening of No Man's Sky", with the IH going through all the bad press Hello Games received for invokedthe reviled initial version of the game, then revealing all the circumstances out of their control that actually caused it, from Sony rushing the project for a set release date to how journalists (and by extension, audiences) interpreted their early proposals for potential concepts as actual guaranteed promises for the final product, building up false expectations.
• Moe Anthropomorphism: The Historian almost falls for TheVarus's deadly temptation when he sees it as Corona-chan and admits to thinking it's actually kind of cute.
• Mood Whiplash: In the Costa Concordia Q&A video, the Historian morbidly points out that there is speculation that the reason the captain refused to return to the ship was because he was considering throwing himself at the rocks below, something that the Historian thinks is understandable given the situation. Cue a short clip of a car being driven off a cliffside with an image of Schettino over it while "White Flag" plays in the background.
  • Man in Cave opens with Floyd Collins getting trapped 60 feet below ground in Sand Cave. The rest of his rather serious story only plays out after a farcical World of Tanks plug by the Internet Historian.
• Mundane Made Awesome: These are internet and internet-related phenomena given the gravitas they most definitely don't deserve. Special mention goes to "Friendship Ended," which is about the friendship struggles of three guys in Pakistan that's treated like a noir murder mystery because a goat died during its events.
• My God, What Have I Done?:
  • After the May 21st 2011 Rapture debacle, Harold Camping rescinded his second Rapture prophecy shortly after making it and expressed genuine regret and guilt over ruining many people's lives with his prediction.
  • DiGiorno Pizza had the brilliant idea of contributing to the #WhyIStayed hashtag on Twitter with "You had pizza"... without bothering to see that the hashtag was a very serious sort of confessional online forum for Domestic Abuse victims to come clean about why they stayed with abusive partners. While they very quickly apologized, the media coverage pushed them to incessantly apologize to almost everyone who felt offended by their ignorant post.
• Never My Fault:
  • The Dashcon organizers, shown in the The Failure of Dashcon video and then explored further in the followup Q&A video. They falsely promised several acts and panels that never agreed to attend Dashcon — some weren't even aware of the event that they were supposedly appearing at until congoers asked them on social media why they weren't at Dashcon, and others had professionally canceled far ahead of time. The organizers then took the money that their customers paid for the advertised performances and presentations, and then told their congoers that the promised acts had walked "at the last minute". They managed their money poorly and ended up with not enough cash on hand to pay for the venue, so the Dashcon organizers dragged as many congoers into a hall as they could and then said to the crowd that the hotel was being racist/misogynistic/homophobic and had increased the price at the last minute to deflect the blame. Even during their apology to the remaining congoers, they never fully took responsibility for how things turned out.
    Chloe: Gotta blame somebody, otherwise it's all my fault. Fuck that.
  • In 2011, Harold Camping made national headlines claiming the Rapture was coming in May, and then later in October. He suffered a stroke, which God claims responsibility for in hopes that he learned a lesson. In 2013, he passed away at the age of 92 from a stair-related accident in his home. God tries to pass the blame that he had nothing to do with it.
    • Downplayed with Camping himself, who initially dodged responsibility for the damage his Rapture message might've caused and tried to change things about his claims after the fact. What downplays this is the fact that not too long before his second predicted date, he rescinded the new prophecy and expressed genuine regret and guilt for what he had done.
• No-Sell: During 'In the field: Travel', Pyrocynical tries to take over medieval Britain with the use of a modern gun and an interpreter. The IH then shows in detail why this wouldn't work:
  • The first task Pyro is given is to gain access to a castle. Attempting to threaten the guard at the gate obviously doesn't work because said guard has no idea what his modern pistol even is, much less why it should frighten him.
  • Then Pyro attempts to threaten his own interpreter, but the guard has no idea who she is (and she looks kind of French) so he doesn't care if she dies.
  • Then the guard's mate shows up and Pyro has the great idea to shoot him; this immediately prompts every guard in the castle to rush to the scene after the surviving guard raises the alarm, including several archers.
  • Pyro desperately attempts to shoot the archers but the IH points out that even if Pyro managed to get one guy, the rest would immediately realize what he can do, simply take cover and start shooting anyway. As Pyro is one man with a modern gun standing in what's likely to be an open field with no cover, he's likely going to get killed via an arrow.
    IH: You're never going to be king at this rate!
• Non-Indicative Name: You'd probably never guess that Dashcon was a convention based around Tumblr. Nor that the name was based on the site's dashboard.
• Not Even Bothering with the Accent: The IH doesn't bother with talking without his New Zealand accent when voicing characters clearly not from New Zealand.
• Not Helping Your Case:
  • Planking had become so dangerous that various police departments were forced to intervene and declare it an offense. What didn't help was some of the cops also joining in on the Planking fun.
  • While he defends him, the Historian agrees that Sean Murray's awkward, nervous, clearly uncomfortable body language definitely helped fuel accusations of him being a liar.
• "Not Making This Up" Disclaimer:
  • Most of his videos are pretty much him summarizing the ridiculous things the internet has done and how it sometimes spills into Real Life.
  • He prefaces his summarization of the United Nations' plan to capture Joseph Kony with one of these over a title card saying "This shit is too dumb to make up." When he describes their second plan, he lets out a completely un-professional reaction.
    IH: ...Wuhat!?
  • He also feels the need to note that the dance routine Jason Russell put together to get the word out on Kony's atrocities before the infamous Kony 2012 campaign is a real thing that happened.
  • In The Failure of Dashcon, at the part where the convention goers perform the Hunger Games sign as a protest, the subtitles read "This shit actually happened".
  • In "Going Camping at the End of the World", he assures the viewer that "this is not just a bit" (i.e. not a joke on his part) before explaining the math Camping used to calculate the date of the Rapture.
  • When claiming that Gregorio de Falco told Francesco Schettino to "Get back on board, for fuck's sake" in "The Cost of Concordia", the Historian plays an actual audio clip from de Falco saying just that.
    de Falco: Vada a bordo, cazzo!
  • He notes in "That Zone Between Area 50 and 52" that, in the lead-up to the Area 51 raid in 2019, the U.S. Air Force actually went over "Naruto running" and had a live demonstration of it. He stresses the images taken of this are real.
• Not So Above It All:
  • Turns out that the Historian is one of the unlucky fools to have bought a ticket to Fyre Festival.
  • Similarly, when asked if he'd attend Rainfurrest (or any Furry convention) he says yes with absolute zero hesitation, admitting that while he'd mostly do it to get material for a new video he'd also probably have a blast at such an event.
• Not So Stoic: The IH audibly gets increasingly annoyed and angry over the debacle that was the Nuka Dark Rum. He shows a rare bit of audible anger when he finds out that there was a Nuka Dark Rum bottle made of glass that is available on Bethesda's own online store, but it wasn't used for the actual Nuka Dark Rum production for whatever reason.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: The Internet Poll businessman, one of the few instances of a recurring character in the Historian's videos (outside of sponsorship ads, at least), is a personification of all the times marketing departments are idiots for giving the good people of the Internet any amount of say in their ad campaigns. "Very Serious Business" however adds an extra wrinkle by revealing that (in the Historian's narrative) he's the one who alerted /b/ to Agile's public Twitter displays, implying that he may not be doing these stupid things out of genuine ignorance after all.
• Obsessive Spokesperson: The sponsorships tend to include over the top scenarios and really obsessive spokespeople.
  • There's Shadow Man, a man dedicated to making sure people know about Raid: Shadow Legends, going as far as to cause car accidents and plane crashes for it. In one ad, he gifts Raid: Shadow Legends to his children on Christmas (instead of telling them their mother died, and this in spite of that the game is free to play), and they respond with delight.
  • There's NordVPN Man, who once tried to coerce a woman into letting him use NordVPN, and also once stalked and harassed a different woman to "prove" how easy it is for hackers to collect data.
  • There's Raycon Man, who is on a personal quest to replace all wires with Raycon earbuds. On his journey, he cuts the wrong wire to a bomb, causing untold amounts of injury, cuts an astronaut's oxygen line, leaving him to die in space, and cuts power to major cities along the American east coast. He also proposes to a woman with Raycon earbuds and, apparently, has a proclivity for putting the earbuds in places other than his ears.
• Occam's Razor: During his Liverpool's Closed | He Will Not Divide Us video where /pol/ was once again organizing to steal Shia LaBeouf's flag, he mentions how their first plan to get to the roof and steal it was to quite literally just walk in the front door and take the elevator - the video even literally calls this plan "Operation: Occam's Razor". Naturally, Shia had thought of this: the third and fourth floor had been disabled in the elevator, and guards were on 30 minute rotations checking the halls and emergency exits. On the other hand, while everybody else on /pol/ were organizing several backup plans revolving around fake press passes, attempts to get Shia to distrust his own security, or sending up drones to cut the flag, torch it, or drop paint on the camera watching it, three dudes with no planning or preparation just climbed the outside of the building, immediately having to give up because they didn't have scissors to cut the zip-ties the flag mechanism was secured with but still making enough of a scene that Shia called off this iteration of the project after only 25 hours.
• Oh, Crap!: Captain Francesco Schettino, when it finally dawned on him that the Costa Concordia was, in fact, sinking:
  IH: With three compartments flooded, the captain finally realises that things are really bad, and they are not going to improve.
• Oh, No... Not Again!: Domnica Cemortan was suspected by numerous people to have been partially responsible for distracting Francesco Schettino from running his ship due to inexplicably being on the bridge at the time of the Costa Concordia incident. After reporting on her life in the aftermath of the legal and media frenzy that followed, the Historian decides to look up her Instagram to see what she's been up to lately... and is horrified to see a picture of her in a plane cockpit.
• Only Sane Man:
  • During the whole Dashcon debacle, at least three people were the only ones who recognized something fishy was going on when the organizers asked for donations to pay the venue bill and called them out for extortion.
    Disgruntled con guest: What if they want more money?!
  • In the Rainfurrest video, one congoer is shown to be telling his fellow attendees "put your pants on and stop breaking shit!" No one listened to him, and kept trashing everything they could get their hands on.
  • Multiple sane men (and women) in "The Cost of Concordia", most notably Gregorio de Falco of the Italian Coastguard, who radioed the deserting captain to tell him to "Get back on board, for fuck's sake!", an order which was disobeyed.
• Only Six Faces: In "The Swedish Job", every single character in law enforcement is "played" by Cole Phelps.
• Overly Specific Afterlife: The episode "Going Camping at the End of the World" features a paid sponsorship for NordVPN cyber security where-in Jesus shows up at a gamer's door and tells him that after seeing his internet search history, he's no longer eligible to get into Heaven, or the more exclusive Super Heaven, which features a delicious seafood buffet.
• Pædo Hunt: In "Pool's Closed", Channel 4 News accuses Habbo Hotel of being infested by pedophiles, causing investors to pull out and the playerbase to drop. Naturally, the trolls decide to use the opportunity to reunite and raid Habbo once more.
• Perspective Flip: The first half of "The Engoodening of No Man's Sky" plays off as very similar to "The Fall of 76", detailing the disastrous launch and damning responses from developers after the release of a particular hyped game. The second half then flips it on its head as the Historian then tells the story of the game's development from the dev's point of view, along with highlighting the hardships and risks indie studios have to go through in order to pump out a project.
• The Peter Principle: In a bizarre and unexplained real-life example, the "Cost of Concordia" video shows that the Concordia's captain, Francesco Schettino, was originally a security guard that rose through the ranks of the Costa corporation to become a Chief Security Officer. He was somehow horizontally promoted to the position of Captain in a couple of years, in spite of his security background giving absolutely no experience in sailing ships. He did have some experience on the bridge of a ship from acting as a navigation officer on ferries before joining Costa - he simply wouldn't have been allowed to make Captain otherwise - but it evidently wasn't nearly enough to be competent at it for cruise liners, given he had apparently crashed two previous cruise ships in the years before the Concordia first set sail.
• Pet the Dog: Credit where it's due, the Internet Historian shows a surprising amount of fairness towards people and parties already Convicted by Public Opinion and tries to set the record straight.
  • When discussing the Balloon Boy story, he gets on the side of Richard Heene, who was Convicted by Public Opinion and points out that he was screwed over by a combination of media bias and judicial corruption. He even admitted at the end of the video, coming into it he was expecting to just report on another hoax and be done with it, only for all his research to bring him to the conclusion that the Heenes were the good guys in the situation. Heene would later watch the video and send the IH a video explaining his side of the story, which the latter posted on his other channel.
  • During "Seize the Day," he elects not to show the video with the flashing lights that triggered the first half of the saga. In fact, besides to de-empathize Kurt Eichenwald and provide some context, the only reason that the "I have epilepsy" claim is discussed in the video is because the Historian is disgusted someone would fake and/or grossly exaggerate having epilepsy, especially for such a petty reason.
  • He doesn't mock those who fell for Fyre Festival's scam, and goes as far as to point out that social media's merciless mockery of them was misinformed since a lot of guests were not snobby rich kids who all paid several thousands of dollars for their tickets like many thought thanks to misreporting. The regular ticket prices were genuinely low enough (at most about $1,200, with some "early bird" offers going as low as $500) for regular middle class people to be able to afford an all-expenses paid vacation to the Bahamas, which would have been otherwise impossible for said middle class people to afford at normal prices.
  • He sets it straight that Jason Russell was never masturbating in public, citing that there's absolutely no credible eyewitness accounts proving it, and candidly states that "it's just a very distressed man having a mental episode." In fact throughout the video, he doesn't really mock or attack Jason Russell (aside from being simultaneously amused by his "Uganda Musical Dance" from a few years before Kony 2012 and amazed that it was a real thing that happened) like how the media did, with the IH making it clear as misguided as he was, Jason truly did want to help Uganda against Kony's predations.
  • He gives the inexperienced development team behind Fallout 76 his sympathy for having very little time on their hands and being given such a massive project to complete with tools that really weren't designed for it. By the end of the video, he also confesses to holding out hope that the game improves, also throwing a bone to No Man's Sky as another disastrous launch that eventually corrected itself into a good game.
  • In the Rainfurrest, Dashcon, and Fyre Fest videos, attendees who take an accurate stock of the situation are shown. For example, a fur-suited furry tells his fellow attendees to put their pants on and stop breaking everything, and some Dashcon attendees figure out it's a scam pretty quick. It goes to show that relatively normal/innocent people got involved in this stuff, instead of them all being freaks or gullible people like most sources on these subjects would have you believe.
  • The IH admits that the first few iterations of Shia LeBouf's "He Will Not Divide Us" campaign were genuinely inspired, did attract a lot of attention, and created a lot of discussion, even saying of the project "it was arguably the greatest reality TV show over the last decade". It might not have been famous in the way Shia wanted, but people were going to tune out eventually even if everything went right. It's then subverted when he points out the fifth iteration of "He Will Not Divide Us" was boring and nobody was watching it even if it was not being disrupted. He did tell people at the time that it was wrong to prank the house or do anything illegal though.
  • Four separate instances occur in "Going Camping at the End of the World."
    • The first is the Historian advising against lumping all of Christianity in with the people who believed Harold Camping and pointing out to the uninformed that several Christian sects vocally denounced Camping for predicting the Rapture, which itself is considered a sin. The Historian also explicitly shows that The Bible says that no one can know the date of the Rapture, and that anyone who says otherwise is trying to trick you.
    • The second is that the Historian points out just how Camping amassed such a following (from decades of a well-managed and popular evangelical radio program), and how Camping was effectively given control over the company when the other two chairmen became too old and too sick to do anything or rein him in like they had previously done. This gave Camping a listener base that many radio stations would kill for, with nobody in the company to second-guess or rein him in. Accordingly, all the people involved in the massive ad campaign weren't just morons looking for the end of days.
    • The third is the Historian mentioning all the lives Camping inadvertently ruined by convincing them they were going to die soon, including several families who gave up everything they had so they could spend their final moments together and happy.
    • Finally, the Historian gives Camping some points for actually owning up to his mistakes. In the end, the Historian sees Camping as a man who truly believed what he was saying, but flew too close to the sun by creating such a massive campaign. When the campaign failed, the backlash and outrage were more than what Camping could handle. Not only that, but the campaign's failure effectively destroyed his life's work, as his reputation and the radio company he hosted collapsed due to dwindling viewership and donations after the Rapture didn't happen. While not dropping his sense of humor, the Historian portrays all of this as a pitiable outcome.
  • "The Engoodening of No Man's Sky" starts off as a sort of Spiritual Successor to "The Fall of 76" as a look at another overhyped game that had a disastrous launch. However, the Historian pulls a Perspective Flip halfway through the video and portrays Hello Games as a small indie game studio that were forced into a limelight they were not ready for, with an ambitiously huge game that they had no time to complete by the given deadline, and a staff member count so minuscule that it made your average triple A game studio look like a small town.
• Police Are Useless: During the COVID-19 pandemic, brilliant ideas from the New York and Los Angeles police departments resulted in criminals getting out of jail just as quickly as they got thrown in thanks to $0 bail and new criteria for stolen items resulting in nobody doing anything to stop shoplifters from strolling out the door with bags full of stuff.
  Shop owner: Sometimes when I call 911, nobody answers.
• Polish the Turd: From the Nuka Dark Rum part of "The Fall of 76". Silver Screen Bottling Company, attempting to defend the cheap plastic shell surrounding an industry-standard bottle (instead of using the black frosted glass bottle shown in the marketing), on top of constant delays and the $80USD price, claims that the plastic shell mold costs over double the amount compared to the glass one, and that they spent over 100 hours coding the plastic shell design (once more, 3D modelling does not require coding). Later on, the design they defended is revealed to be actually very flawed, with the oversized lip of the shell and the not liquid-tight fitting makes pouring the rum out of its bottle and into a glass very difficult.
  Historian: Convincing stuff.
• Poor Communication Kills:
  • In "The Engoodening of No Man's Sky", he posits that the backlash for the game's state on initial release wouldn't have been as violent had there been better communication from both Hello Games and the press alike. On the side of Hello Games (and mainly Sean Murray), they could've been more open about distinguishing between what they were planning at the moment for the game and what they were sure they could feasibly implement. On the other hand, this was also a responsibility of the press, and the widespread acceptance of Hello Game's proposals as outright promises only ensured that there would be monolithic expectations they'd never realistically reach in time. The IH overall expresses more sympathy for Hello Games in this regard, as they were being put up on a pedestal but didn't have the resources, skill, or experience to handle the PR in a better way. Ironically enough, once the ensuing Internet Counterattack occurred with criticisms and accusations coming from every angle, Hello Games decided to go radio silent with zero communication, focusing on their work and allowing it to speak for them when it was ready, which ended up being vital to giving them the resolve to fix their game.
  • In "The Cost of Concordia", this is the main cause of the ship's crash. Concordia's bridge crew constantly misheard Captain Schettino's course corrections, the Captain misheard their reports, they're constantly countermanding each other, and the accordingly-confused helmsman Jacob Bin (due to barely knowing how to speak English or Italian) misunderstood commands from anyone at critical points. Their inability to coordinate causes the Concordia to drift far too close to the shoreline, and causes the ship to hit Skull Rock and rip open three of its compartments. In this case, this eventually kills 32 of the ship's occupants (passengers and crew). A former navigator notes that this kind of hiring is very common among major shipping companies due to cutting costs, even citing a case where two ships colliding with one another both had helmsmen with language barriers.
• Production Foreshadowing: Stede Bonnet from The Gentleman Pirate appears 5 months prior in "monsters." as the boat captain the Internet Historian and Ordinary Things speak to before they embark on their journey to kill all the whales. It's an extremely brief clip and was initially brushed off as an ordinary gag.
• Pungeon Master: The IH can't help himself at times.
  • In the Bikelock Fugitive video: "This guy should be... locked up! (cue CSI: Miami music)", which he immediately apologizes for.
  • In the Rainfurrest episode: "They (the furries) were behaving like... animals". Wink.
  • Many of the made-up #McDStories tweets were pretty bad and gross and would make anyone Grimace...[Curb Your Enthusiasm credits roll]
  • When talking about the pile-on of the critical backlash around No Man's Sky, the Historian uses a picture of a pylon as a visual representation.
• Purple Prose: Australian energy drink Mother is very guilty of this.
  "Under the stars of the Southern Cross we live life our way. Life is in perpetual motion and to slow down is to be left in the dust.
  "The infinite bounds of sunburnt land and barreling blue swells are limited only by your imagination. Kick out the sand, pump up the tunes, and rip into some Mother. Crisp and cool with a kaleidoscope blend of flavours. It'll keep the fast times spinning morning, noon, and night.
  "Mother is calling. Pursue your dreams. Search for adventure. Get out there and let the good times flow."
  • And:
  "Since 2006 Mother has been the trusted brand to give the people of our country the energy to explore, create, have fun and live life to the fullest. From sunrise to sunset, city to surf, next door to the great outdoors, rooftops to the underground… what you can experience is only limited by your imagination. Rip open a Mother and keep the good times coming morning, noon and night."
• Pyrrhic Victory:
  • The IH's take on the final result of Shia LeBouf's "He Will Not Divide Us" art piece (the last one the IH himself covered). The first iteration was incredibly interesting because it caused Americans across the political spectrum to converge upon the project and start talking with people they normally wouldn't interact with, all on live broadcast. Then 4chan caught word of the project, so trolling ensued. Shia decided to shut it down due to the ongoing hijinks (and because he got arrested on-camera for harassing, then assaulting one of the protesters), turning the project into a stream of a flag with the project's eponymous phrase on it in an undisclosed location within the United States. After two more failed attempts on Shia's part to keep his project unmolested, the fifth iteration was another live stream of the flag... in a plain white room, quickly located by 4chan inside a private residence of one of Shia's friends within London. At this point, the flag was now an entire ocean away from where its message was politically relevant (and had been since the fourth iteration, which was on the roof of the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology in Liverpool), and nobody could interact with the project in any meaningful fashion without breaking the law. The IH then asked if Shia really "won", because the only people watching the stream at that point were a few trolls who only used it as a strange sort of Ouija board when the odd fly landed on it. The point of the project (to protest Donald Trump's election) was defeated once the project was removed from the public space of its home country, and Shia was made to look like a bad sport during the process. Even with the Historian being as neutral as possible and focusing on the 4channers' efforts to troll the project mostly because it was funny, he noted that it would have been the more dignified thing to do to just end the project by that point; by the final iteration that lasted to the end of Trump's term, it was barely any better than posting a static jpeg and declaring victory.
  • In a Q&A video on Dashcon, the Historian says he feels this way about the organizers of the con. While they may have pulled off a scam and gotten away with a good deal of cash in the immediate short term, their names are now permanently attached to its failure, and the short-term gains weren't worth the long-term impact to their reputations.
• Reality Is Unrealistic: The whole "day/night cycle based on a planet's orbit around the sun" thing was in No Man's Sky, but it kept being reported as a bug due to natural environment differences between various parts of a day confusing players and was eventually just outright removed.
• Rewatch Bonus: Each answer Sean Murray gave in interviews about No Man's Sky helped to raise expectations. After hearing the Historian point out that game journalists consistently misunderstood/announced Sean's half-hearted consideration of features as deadlocked promises and then rewatching "The Engoodening of No Man's Sky," you'll notice that a lot of Sean's answers are indeed vague and clearly based on yet-unrealized concepts and work-in-progress developments, and he never actually confirmed most of their questions.
  Jeff Cork: Can you land on a comet?
  Sean Murray: Yeah, at the moment you can land on asteroids.
• Rule of Three: Used with an added dose of irony in Pool's Closed
  Mary Alice Altorfer: A joke is when two people laugh. I'm not laughing.
  Newscaster: She's not laughing.
  Internet Historian: She was not laughing.
• Running Gag:
  • The Historian is never gonna let the ballpit from Dashcon fade into obscurity, as he uses the ballpit as a symbol for incompetent management.
  • "X had a brilliant idea."
  • The marketing guy who's constantly suggesting utilizing online polls for promotion events, no matter how many times internet shitposters ruin them. Was mostly just a fixture of the "Any Poll's a Goal" video, but makes a return for the "Serious Business" episode.
  • Whenever the playerbase is demanding answers from Hello Games and Sean Murray in "The Engoodening of No Man's Sky," cue Ethan Mars screaming "SSHAAAAAUUUUN!!!"
  • All instances of people who represent players of No Man's Sky are wearing space helmets.
  • Internet petitions being made and then immediately accomplishing nothing is a frequent occurrence across videos.
  • One in In The Field involves Rayquaza and Siren Head. It began in "monsters." where the Internet Historian incorrectly calls Trevor Henderson's Siren Head an SCP and Ordinary Things incorrectly calls Rayquaza a new Pokemon despite first appearing in 2002. The mistakes were called out by the comment section. Now, whenever the series mentions the comment section acting as Insufferable Geniuses, the incident is alluded to as a Take That, Audience!.
  • "Man in Cave" has the IH show something morally ambiguous or outright cruel done after what happened to Floyd Collins becomes public knowledge. The IH then adds "It was a hundred years ago, he's dead now, let's call it even" before moving on with the story.
• Salvage Pirates: Show up en masse when the Costa Concordia sank; despite being under tight security with 24 hour patrols surrounding it, the ship was practically picked clean of pretty much anything valuable. It turns out the IH is the thief who stole the famous bell, making him one as well.
• Screwed by the Lawyers: An invoked case with the Dashcon event. The IH explains that Dashcon was originally called "Tumblrcon." But the legal issues that inevitably arose from a small independent group attempting to use the site's trademarked name without prior permission led to the Non-Indicative Name of "Dashcon", after the site's "dashboard", to avoid legal trouble.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: During the ending segment of "weapons.", Ordinary Things is tasked with killing the Historian, which gives us this bizarre scenario:
  Ordinary Things: I kick the door in with my muscles!
  IH: I heard that, now I've run up to my panic room! I'm on the phone with the police.
  Ordinary Things: Don't worry, the police are in my pocket!
  IH: Bribed the entire police?
  Ordinary Things: It was easy!
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here:
  • In "The Cost of Concordia", when Schettino and five of the titular ship's crew face criminal charges. Everyone but Schettino's plea bargains are accepted, and the key condition for their lighter sentences is to provide witness testimony against Schettino in his own trial. For reasons as yet unknown to anyone but him, helmsman Jacob Bin fled the country when his turn for testimony came up (in spite of his much lighter sentence), avoiding Italian authorities for a year until they tracked him down in Jakarta. When they demanded he come back and give his testimony, he fled again and has apparently not been found since. The Q&A follow-up reveals that the IH did manage to find him halfway through production of the original video, but decided to keep the generic models to prevent online harassment, which was proven right with Domnica Cemortan's Instagram being spammed with hate comments shortly after release.
  • "Man in Cave" reveals that the area that Floyd Collins got himself stuck in was known to cave divers as The Squeeze, since it was a tunnel that was only nine inches high, floor to ceiling. Prefacing the Squeeze is what's known as The Turnaround Room, where cave divers had all decided that they were not going to go any further into the Squeeze out of fear for their own safety. After Floyd was trapped, a few people who went down to rescue Floyd saw the circumstances of his entrapment, said "Nope", and turned around.
• Self-Deprecation:
  • The Historian occasionally portrays himself making some pretty stupid mistakes, like leaving a lifetime supply of toilet paper out in the rain, or missing the last flight home from Fyre Festival because he chased a frisbee into the woods and got lost.
  • While discussing the scope of No Man's Sky, he shows an article stating that the universe would take over 584 billion years to explore.
    It's so vast, that by the time you finish exploring it all, I would have two new videos published.
• Sequel Hook: While discussing the evolution of brand social media in "Very Serious Business," the Historian teases that he'll be making a video on this subject soon.
• Serious Business:
  • The Historian mocks how out of hand the outrage over Fallout 76's canvas bag got, pointing out that a lot of the reactions were pretty over the top and ridiculous. However, it's played more straight when the Historian is shown to be just as annoyed by the Nuka Cola Rum controversy as everyone else.
  • "2 Fancy 2 Furious: Wine" points out that a lot of sommelier speak is extremely subjective and hobbyists can be a bit over-the-top in how fancy they treat their drink... but also that really, there's nothing wrong with that, and as long as nobody's being an ass, it's not any sillier than being a coffee enthusiast or building model kits.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story:
  • "9gag's Meme Rock" starts off with 4chan elaborately tracking down the exact location of the buried stone based upon scant clues, similarly to the events of "He Will Not Divide Us". However, the entire effort is abruptly dropped when it's discovered that the meme rock is buried in the middle of a desert in Spain, well beyond the practical reach of the (predominantly English-speaking) 4chan community.
  • As part of his framing device for the "Failure of Fyre Festival" video. The Historian bought a ticket for Fyre Festival, fooled by promises of a luxurious vacation and party. Besides the already known disastrous things about the Festival, the Historian failed to leave with the other attendees due to chasing a frisbee into the woods and somehow got lost enough on the small island to be trapped on Norman's Cay a la Cast Away. He eventually decides to finally go home via a makeshift raft after finally burying Fyre Festival... only to end up drowning within two hours.
  • The "Going Camping at the End of The World" video is a mix of this and Sudden Downer Ending. Sure, for the rest of the world it was an outright Happy Ending, with the end of the world prediction turning out to be wrong. But for Camping and his followers, it was all for naught. The followers who sold all their valuables, quit their jobs, and abandoned their education are completely lost and had nowhere to go, besides trying to rebuild their broken lives. Camping himself is genuinely taken by surprise after his prediction turned out to be wrong, and ends up leaving Family Radio where his program was broadcasted, now with a tarnished reputation among both his followers and the rest of the world. Oh, and he died two years later from a fall in his home.
  • In Man in Cave, after over two weeks of nationwide media attention and numerous attempts to save him, Floyd Collins finally succumbs to exposure after a cave-in seperates him from his rescuers for several days. By the time they dig through and reach him again, an endeavour of eleven days with shovels and pickaxes, he's been dead for approximately three days.
• Shipper on Deck: While reenacting the meeting between Billy MacFarlane and Ja Rule, the IH can't help himself but to make the two start making out.
• Shoddy Shindig: The Historian has covered three so far.
  • The first is Dashcon, which was a weekend-long event planned by Tumblr users for Tumblr users that ended terribly due to poor management. The Historian is among the many who speculate that it was a scam.
  • Second is Rainfurrest, which was another weekend-long event planned by furries for furries that ended terribly due to the attendees running wild and poor management.^note At least in the sense of reining in troublemakers. While the organizers of Rainfurrest weren't scamming anyone and had previously held successful events, the fact they were far too lenient with rule-breaking (any offender, no matter how severe, was basically free to come back to the next Rainfurrest, meaning attendees had no repercussions for bad behavior) leads to their convention's demise. The Historian notes Rainfurrest and Dashcon as the Spiritual Antithesis of the other.
  • The third is the Fyre Festival, which was planned to be a two-week-long summer vacation in the Bahamas, planned by a con man for millennials, and the festival ended terribly due to poor management.
• Shout-Out:
  • For "Going Camping at the End of the World," the IH makes some obligatory references to Left Behind.
  • "The Failure of Fyre Festival" uses clips and images from Cast Away.
  • "Friendship Ended" is framed as, and largely uses footage from, an L.A. Noire murder case. The sole exception is the scene showing the IH's interrogation of Mutasir being watched by two men and a woman ("It's no good, he ain't givin' nothin'." "He's giving attitude."), which is a stillshot of a scene from Agent Carter (the people in question being Agent Sousa, Chief Dooley, and Peggy Carter).
  • Footage from several games with stealth elements are used to represent people tracking and taking down the flags in later seasons of "He Will Not Divide Us", such as Watch_Dogs for "Liverpool's Closed".
  • The Historian claims that, in the aftermath of No Man's Sky's disastrous launch, Sean had effectively become "Punished Sean", complete with an eyepatch and scars to show for it.
  • The NordVPN ad in "The Cost of Concordia" is framed In the Style of a Film Noir, complete with it beginning with NordVPNMan in a detective's office being approached by a woman, who has the face of Lauren Bacall.
  • Floyd's Dream Sequence from "Man in Cave" is nearly identical to James Bond's from the opening of Skyfall.
  • Guiseppe Tartini's dream in "I am become Fancy: Threatre" is described using lines from Tribute rewritten to fit the time period, with IH namedropping Tenacious D afterwards.
  • Berlioz's Murder-Suicide plan in "I am become Fancy: Theatre" is described using clips from Akiba Maid War with Berlioz's head pasted over that of Ranko from the show.
  • An actor going through the wall trapdoor in "I am become Fancy: Theatre" is accompanied by arrows and the The X-Files theme.
  • The Trojan Horse construction in "I am become Fancy: Theatre" is styled to resemble building things in the LEGO Adaptation Games.
  • "F3ncy: Oddities" features the start and finish of the mummy segment, set to the theme song from the Yu-Gi-Oh! English dub done by 4Kids Entertainment.
• Shown Their Work: Some Pakistani viewers commented that the Historian did a good job with his research on the living conditions in Pakistan for "Friendship Ended."
• Sincerity Mode: In "Going Camping at the End of the World," the IH says he truly believes that Harold Camping believed the Rapture was going to happen on May 21, 2011. The IH also shows sympathy to Camping for owning up to his mistake and admitting that he sinned in trying to predict the Rapture in the first place. And while he offsets this by using footage of Shrek is Love Shrek is Life to visualize it, the IH sounds genuinely horrified at how many people's lives were near-irreparably ruined by believing Camping's claims, such as several families who left behind everything they had to go out happy and together.
• Skewed Priorities: In the beginning skit of the hand sanitizer part of "TheVarus Strakes Buck", a man is focused on people touching things with their bare hands or fingers, one of them belonging to a robber breaking in through his window. What is he thinking about at that moment? That he needs hand sanitizer.
• The Snack Is More Interesting: The Internet Historian and Sorrow TV can be heard stuffing their faces (most likely eating crisps) during the Ikea Erotica segments of the final part of the My Immortal Dramatic Reading.
• Social Media Before Reason: In "Seize the Day" the IH claims that as her husband was convulsing from his triggered epilepsy, Kurt Eichenwald's wife made sure to take the time to tweet out that he was having a seizure, check her Instagram, then her Tinder, then call an ambulance.
• Sophisticated as Hell: He sounds like a documentary narrator along the lines of Richard Attenborough but oftentimes will add a Precision F-Strike here or there along with the occasional meme.
• Soundtrack Dissonance: The part where guests pool together donations for Dashcon is scored with inspirational music. But it also includes some people in the crowd yelling about how this was extortion.
• Space Whale Aesop: His sponsored ads are pretty far-fetched scenarios that highlight the benefits of their promoted subjects.
  • If you don't sign up for CuriosityStream, then you will die a virgin with people knowing how dumb you really are in the event that a meteor is on course to impact with the Earth.
  • Medicine is overpriced (by one cent) and likely kills future president daughters due to how expensive they can be, which they don't have to be thanks to Honey's coupon-searching, money-saving benefits.
  • The following happens to those who don't have NordVPN:
    • You will be barred from ever getting into Heaven because when the Rapture comes, Jesus will see your search history and be disgusted by your depravity.
    • You'll be the ideal candidate for President and get elected, but then get denied on the spot and banished to the Virgin Islands when the judge sees your history, handing the Presidency to your opponent, luvs2smokecrak666. Also, getting NordVPN will make you 75% more handsome and stop your parents from divorcing.
    • You will be stalked, tracked via unprotected internet browsing, and harassed by NordVPNMan all across the world until you accidentally fall into a snake pit and die.
      NordVPNMan: (in an awful Japanese accent that even the Historian can't help but cringe-laugh at) This wouldn't have happened if you had used NordVPN!
• Spiritual Antithesis:
  • The IH describes Rainfurrest and Dashcon as this to each other. Dashcon was a brand-new event turned into a Shoddy Shindig by the sheer incompetence of its organizers, their mismanagement of their budget, and their murky sales revenue. They left their guests to suffer the consequences, and the event has been speculated by many, including the Historian, to be an outright scam. On the other hand, Rainfurrest was a legitimate convention with competent organizers who were able to turn in the required payment, make certain they were well-insured for any damages, and weren't trying to scam anyone out of their money. The reason it went badly was because of its degenerate guests "acting like animals."^note In the relevant Q&A, the Historian points out that Rainfurrest also had its share of incompetent management. While they could balance a budget, they were far too lenient with rule breakers. Years of absolutely no discipline attracted more and more degenerates, until things finally got wildly out of hand in the 2015 event. At this point, when they wanted to switch venues and clean up the convention, enough hotel chains had talked amongst themselves that they were barred from essentially every hotel chain in the west side of the state - and one of those degenerates did their level best to destroy the con's chance for redemption when they finally started making headway with another chain further out.
  • No Man's Sky is portrayed as this to Fallout 76. Both are Triple A games that were hyped to hell and had disastrous launches due to the fact that both were handled by teams that were relatively new to the types of games they were, so neither was actually finished or refined by release. The difference is that Bethesda is an industry juggernaut with a well established fanbase that had no real excuse to put out a product this broken while Hello Games was a small indie studio that was simply out of its depth when it came to a project like No Man's Sky. The contrast is further noted in the ending of "The Engoodening of No Man's Sky"; Hello Games got their act together to finish/fix their game and then some (with little to no profit motivation, especially if one considers their decimated reputation following the launch) while Fallout 76 had still yet to actually fix game-breaking issues that were present since the beginning in favor of pay-to-win mechanics that made the game worse.
• Stating the Simple Solution: The iPhone 6 was built with a cheaper and thus slightly more flimsy build that made it very easy to bend, requiring Apple to request that customers be more delicate with their phones. The IH points out you can just buy a case.
• Stealth Insult: If you pay attention, you'll notice that the Historian's highlight of things that hyped up Fallout 76 all say nothing about the quality of the gameplay and instead only focused on how big the game was graphics and content-wise. Sure enough, literally the first problem encountered after getting the game was the Day One Patch of 50 GB.
• Stealth Parody: His ad for Raid: Shadow Legends presents him as a persistent freak who scares everyone to play the game, and the only positive reviews are random cut clips of speech not even talking about the game, making it clear he's only doing it for sponsor money and not recommending the game.
  Shadowman: Sponsored by that game that everyone loves.
• Stop Being Stereotypical:
  • In the Rainfurrest coverage, a clip is shown from a furry YouTuber telling off the more lewd furries in attendance to "put your pants on" and behave themselves, while some of the social media posts used to portray the ongoings can be briefly seen expressing their own disapproval. No one listened to them, though.
  • The belief in the Rapture espoused by Harold Camping in "Going Camping at the End of the World" is not an universal one in Christianity with mainstream denominations like Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, several Protestants and Quakers pointing out that trying to decipher when it happens goes against the scriptures. In fact, some Catholics and Protestant groups mobilized to protest against this campaign. Unfortunately, it had little effect as Camping had denounced mainstream churches as corrupt anyways and he persisted on his folly.
• Streisand Effect: Discussed in a few videos.
  • Planking went from being a viral fad that was already on the way out to a practical epidemic after the media, multiple governments, police, and places of employment started to condemn it (after somebody died doing it). It spread and spread, prompting more and more backlash, which of course caused it to be more and more popular. Appropriately (take note people who want to stop things from spreading), it died to what is essentially the opposite effect: the Prime Minister of New Zealand uploaded a picture of himself with his son planking in the foreground, immediately killing the fad through official approval.invoked
  • Shia LaBeouf's "He Will Not Divide Us" project both benefited yet also suffered from this - it caught much more widespread attention than it probably would have if 4chan hadn't taken notice of it, but it also quickly became a lightning rod for trolling because 4chan thought the whole idea was an easy target, and Shia's attempts to preclude trolling in further iterations of the project just drew more and greater efforts from 4chan until it reached the point where he made the project too boring to continue messing with.
  • CNN intimidated someone who made a meme against them by threatening to reveal his personal info unless he deleted the meme, which quickly angered the rest of the Internet into not only making more anti-CNN memes, but even making efforts to harm CNN directly, like rating their mobile app one-star and lowering their ratings by using universal remotes to change public TVs tuned into CNN to different channels. The Historian compares it to a hive of bees retaliating after one gets smashed.
  • Bethesda Softworks' attempts to silence player criticism of Fallout 76's disastrous launch simply caused players to flood anywhere else they could find to complain about the game.
• Stupid Crooks: Double Subverted by the art thieves in The Swedish Job. Despite being a group of small-time criminals trying to pull off such a large-scale heist, their plan went off without a hitch and they got away with the paintings. It didn't take long before the cops realised they were dealing with no criminal geniuses, however, as they had used their actual phone number to purchase the getaway boat they abandoned downriver from the scene of the crime, and the original owner was more than happy to hand it over for the investigation. Following this lead, the cops apprehended one of the ringleaders, who was carrying a bag filled with photographs of the paintings covered in his partner's fingerprints, then raided their hideout and found a journal with a detailed plan for the heist and the names of everyone who was involved. And on top of everything else, the criminals had never planned beyond actually stealing the paintings, which - being famous artwork - couldn't simply be fenced as no fence in their right mind would take such material.
• Stylistic Suck:
  • His editing style, using a combination of slick editing and poorly imposed stock images for comedy.
  • Ads tend to be mocked relentlessly in this manner, with over the top scenarios or informing viewers how to take advantage of the free trials for the sponsors.
  • His Sundance Rejects videos utilize Limited Animation and various stock images crudely edited and photoshopped to serve as characters. In particular, "Redoing the Game of Thrones Finale" is barely even edited at all, and instead shows the Historian and friends directly messing around with the pictures in Photoshop.
  • The Jeff the Killer Dramatic Reading, in which everybody other than Mumkey Jones is reading their lines in such a flat and uninteresting tone. This is a jab at the source material for how poorly written it is.
• Subterranean Sanity Failure: In "Man In Cave," Floyd Collins is depicted gradually breaking down over the course of his time trapped in Sand Cave, to the point that exposure leaves him delirious and incoherent at least twice, his ongoing psychological collapse dramatized via a horrific nightmare sequence involving Floyd being dragged underwater by a subterranean Eldritch Abomination. This comes to a head when, after five days underground, Floyd begins making nonsensical pleas of two potential rescuers in a desperate attempt to keep them from leaving as the cave is about to collapse, because he doesn't want to be left alone in the darkness.
• Sudden Downer Ending: Going Camping at the End of the World has a surprisingly depressing ending, especially for an Internet Historian video. Dozens of people who bought in to the doomsday prediction had their lives ruined, be it through selling all their valuables, digging themselves into debt, or quitting their jobs/education. The doomsday forecaster Harold Camping leaves Family Radio (the Christian network he broadcast his predictions on) after realizing his mistake, only to die after a fall just under two years later... but not before leaving the network with a severely soiled reputation that caused vital donations to dry up. As a result, the once-respected Christian global media empire was forced to downsize greatly, and they got rid of archives of Camping's forum to distance themselves from his legacy. However, the IH does try to end the video on a high note by displaying pictures of bizarre Renaissance-era paintings.
• Super Zeroes: Product as Superhero Raycon Man, a masked vigilante out to replace all wires with wireless Raycon earbuds after he tragically (somehow) beheaded his own father with wired earbuds. Sounds dumb but harmless, until he starts getting actively dangerous, cutting cables on power poles, time bombs, and even spacesuit air tubes. (The other sponsor characters, like Nord Man and Shadow Man, don't really count: despite their names, they don't even pretend to be superheroes and instead are just a bunch of weirdos in masks.)
• Surprisingly Happy Ending:
  • Yes, the internet had fun voting for Pitbull to go to the most remote Wal-Mart in all of the United States. But ultimately, Pitbull managed to turn the whole thing into a great time for everyone in attendance and give Kodiak, Alaska a big Colbert Bump with his presence.
  • As much of a meme the whole Brad's Wife thing was, it surprisingly leads to various food chains opening up positions for her and one of them eventually hired her, with the meme often being credited for getting their attention.
  • "Friendship Ended." is the story of two Indian friends who had a very bitter falling out. And as memey as it was, the internet came together to push for the two to reconcile. Not only did they make up while also keeping newcomer Salman as a friend, but Asif, the guy who announced the friendship end, was promoted to moderator of r/indianpeoplefacebook where the story got its infamy.
  • While the Kony 2012 movement ultimately fell apart and the founder, Jason Russell, had a well-publicised mental breakdown, it succeeded in its goal of making Joseph Kony a household name, Russell was quickly able to make a full recovery, and not only have Kony’s forces and power since dwindled to almost nothing, the Q&A video revealed that he will likely die soon from type 2 diabetes.
  • A very triumphant one in "The Engoodening of No Man's Sky." This was the story of a highly anticipated triple A game by an indie studio that didn't have enough time to finish it, and as a result of their failure to meet the deadline (even with the release date being pushed back), took one of the most infamous beatings from the internet in its history. No Man's Sky has seemingly crashed and burned and Hello Games appears to have taken the money and ran, going completely quiet and refusing to respond to community or press inquiries. After months of disconcerting silence, Hello Games suddenly came back swinging with significant patches, improvements, and new features that saved No Man's Sky's reputation and their own. The game and the studio won various awards and Hello Games is now seen as one of the few studios who listened to their customers, fixed the problems, and refused to simply take the money and move on because they were genuinely passionate about giving people a good game.
    Historian: It's the underdog story, and after doing all this research, I couldn't help but come to the conclusion that they were the good guys.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: The opening and ending scenes from "The Cost of Concordia" parodying Titanic (1997) use a custom piece of music that sounds a lot like but is legally distinct from "My Heart Will Go On". It's clearly deliberate, especially considering the name of the track is "My Myocardium Will Continue".
• Take That, Audience!: At the end of most videos, he lists patrons from his Patreon but always does something to distract from them or make them scroll too fast to be read.
  • Except for the Rainfurrest video, it scrolls by in sync with video clips of the different furries at the con, as if those people were the patrons.
  • And the Bikelock fugitive video, where he claims that he and the list of patrons are trying to join Antifa to assault people themselves.
  • On a more serious note, his normal disclaimer ends with a note that his videos are not a license to harass anyone based on the subjects he covers, ending with "Please behave yourselves" as the final message. It's as if the IH is fully aware of how many memelords could be frequent viewers and what kind of hateful trolling they are capable of.
• Take That!:
  • While for the most part sounding very sophisticated and his sarcasm mostly subtle, the iPhone Massacre video ends with him getting very fed up with idiots falling for 4chan's fake ads and he unveils a new iPhone that allows them to do pretty much everything said ads said they can do... because it's basically already broken.
  • He disclaims his research into what happened to the money that went into Dashcon as merely speculation on his part, but it's very clear that he's calling out the event organizers for opportunistically stealing money.
  • He also throws some shade towards Tumblr's infamous reputation as a political correctness gone mad community, portraying the organizers as SJWs who blame anything that goes wrong on anyone but themselves, or accuses anybody who criticizes them of being misogynist, racist, homophobic, etc. (which as it turns out wasn't too far from the truth, as the organizers actually did accuse the hotel hosting Dashcon of homophobia and racism when things turned sour). He also expresses plenty of disdain towards the death threats sent to the gay Hispanic panelist Mark Oshiro (creator of Mark Does Stuff), who was accused by Tumblr users of being a straight white man pretending to be gay for profit.
  • He has nothing but contempt for the 9gag Meme Rock and after pointing out how there's not much anyone can do due to it being 24 tons of rock that'll take days to dig up, he goes on a "tangent" about how limestone, which the rock happened to be made of, can be eroded quickly by vinegar. The video then ends with a flash of the rock's coordinates.
  • He advises his viewers to wear hazmat suits when journeying to r/dankmemes and warns them not to touch anything or else they'll "become retarded, too."
  • The video for Fallout 76 is laden with the IH's scorn for the rampant incompetence of almost every part of the game's launch and Bethesda's inept responses to its many controversies, with only the beleaguered development team, who got saddled with actually making the game despite having no experience with either always-online or Fallout games, getting any sympathy.
  • The IH does not seem to be fond of Jimmy Fallon. Fallon is shown laughing at/doing unfunny memes when they are discussed and he is shown in a box of tools during My Immortal.
  • He gives out a small What the Hell, Hero? to the Ugandan government for only starting to pay attention to Joseph Kony's crimes after what the Prime Minister contemptuously refers to as "a slick video on Youtube" goes viral.
  • During his Alliance: Heroes Of The Spire add, he lists that EA was not involved in the production as a bonus.
  • "The Walking Divided" makes it clear why he's making so many The Walking Dead references - because he thinks that the "He Will Not Divide Us" saga is, like that show, "the series that should've ended seasons ago".
  • The "impure" shown in "Going Camping at the End of the World" are shown to be Minecraft Youtubers.
  • He never has nice things to say about Internet petitions, such as noting in "Brad's Wife" that "as always, a petition is started and goes nowhere".
  • During the ad break in "Very Serious Business" he makes a lighthearted jab at Twitch streamer Shroud, who regularly watches his videos in his streams, for always skipping his ads.
  • During the credits for "Tales from TheVarus", the Historian thanks Neil Druckmann for The Last of Us Part II, which he calls "the worst sequel since World War II."
  • An incredibly lazy "animation" of someone walking into the FACT Museum in "Liverpool's Closed" has a disclaimer on the top-left corner of the screen stating "walking animation brought to you by Mass Effect: Andromeda".
  • In "TheVarus Strakes Buck", after discussing how many high-profile criminals were being denied bail during the pandemic, he segues into talking about people who should be in jail: Celebrities, and covering their various failed attempts to "relate" to their fans and normal people on social media that only show how out of touch they really are when they're not doing their jobs.
  • The second Warframe ad that plays during the Storymode of Outlast is structured similarly to (and uses actual footage and audio clips from) Anheuser-Busch's infamous "The Shared Spirit" video ad that was criticized as an attempt to change gears after the severe boycotts relating to Budweiser's collaboration with Dylan Mulvaney started to actually affect sales in a big way.
  • The NordVPN Man segment in "I am become Fancy: Theatre" parodies several archetypes of streamers, including those who try to copy Asmongold, stream in a bath, or leave during a reaction stream, and referencing outside Jacksfilms's house as one of his possible VPN locations.
• Tempting Fate: The Costa Concordia disaster is portrayed as the result of this in "The Cost of Concordia". How else could you describe the management sailing a ship where:
  • The champagne bottle did not break upon hitting the ship (considered a sign of bad luck among sailors).
  • The trip was to begin on January, Friday the 13th 2012, on the 100th anniversary of the Titanic.
  • The ship was only rated to handle two compartments flooding^note Incidentally, this is also the same amount of compartments that the Titanic was rated for.
  • The captain, Francesco Schettino, mysteriously reached his rank very quickly, and was responsible for two collisions before helming the Concordia.
• This Means War!: As the Internet Historian has showcased, the internet and its factions have had their fair share of wars.
  • Tumblr has gone to war with 4chan's /b/ board, and the provoked 4chan then goes to war with Tumblr (though there is a theory that it was actually started by /pol/ who riled up the Tumblr users in the first place to watch the fireworks). 4chan decisively wins.
  • Reddit has gone to war with Instagram users over meme thievery. Reddit loses interest not long after, at about the same time people started noting the hypocrisy of complaining about Instagram stealing memes from Reddit when Reddit does the same thing to Instagram and Twitter, to say nothing about how meme thievery is just "business as usual" on the Internet, and starting a war with itself about whether the Upvote button is orange or red with the resulting surge of memes.
  • Reddit and 4chan joined forces in their war against CNN for meme freedom. A week long campaign which did severe damage to the latter.
  • 4chan began assaulting Shia LaBeouf's "He Will Not Divide Us" art project because they thought it was stupid, and Shia naturally opposed them. 4chan conclusively won the war on all counts until Shia's attempts to preclude their meddling (reducing the project to just barely above posting a jpeg and declaring victory) made the project too boring to mess with.
  • Boomers supporting Brad's wife have been at war with Cracker Barrel for their injustice against Nanette, and continue to fight long after the war stopped being funny to anyone else.
  • After /b/ began trolling Agile's Twitter, the event's organizers attempted to get the trolls reported for spam. This resulted in /b/ declaring war and posting even more offensive memes in their hashtag, with several being photoshops of an organizer as Adolf Hitler and doing sexual acts.
• Throw the Dog a Bone: After spending the whole of "The Cost of Concordia" and much of the subsequent Q&A tearing Francesco Schettino a new one for his mismanagement of the ship's evacuation, his lies, his cowardice and his attempts to avoid responsibility, and while he fully believes that Schettino deserves to be in jail...Historian also points out in the Q&A that he wasn't the only person responsible for the crash by a long shot, and once the ship actually hit the rocks there was nothing he could have done to save it. Plus it's pretty unfair that all the other officers got plea deals in exchange for testifying against Schettino and he was the only one put on what was very much a show trial, with his guilt already decided (plus the trial focused extensively on his affair with Domnica Cemortan which had absolutely nothing to do with the crash); Costa Cruises got off with basically a slap on the wrist; and Jacob Rusli Bin, the helmsman who actually steered the ship into the rocks, managed to flee the country and was never brought to account.
• Tiger by the Tail:
  • Compared to later documentaries on Fyre Festival, the Historian gives a little benefit of the doubt to Billy McFarland, suggesting that he wasn't necessarily out to scam people from the start and may have realized that Fyre Festival would crash and burn, but he'd already taken out short-term loans just to fund organizing the event up to that point, and he was caught in a choice between 1) cancelling, refunding the ticket sales and being left with no money to pay those back, and 2) going ahead, hoping to get enough revenue to stay afloat and praying the millions of things they hadn't had time to get right would go right anyway. He chose option 2, but the consequences ended up being worse for him than he was betting on.
  • This is his opinion of the No Man's Sky fiasco after the dust had settled. Far from the justifiably angry reactions from the community when the game launched that the whole thing was a grift, the Historian comes to the conclusion that the disaster was the result of an ambitious but inexperienced team biting off more than they could chew, but not realizing the position they'd put themselves in with their mistakes until it was too late. By the time it was clear the game would not be ready for the deadline, they had very few options and all of them had massive downsides, it was just a matter of which parties they would be pissing off and what consequences they were most comfortable dealing with. As history would show, the route they chose was to sell the game to customers under pretenses they knew were false, silently accept blame for the backlash instead of pointing the finger at other parties and thus burn bridges in the industry, and spend the following years working to make it right and earn the trust back that they'd lost.
• Too Dumb to Live:
  • At least implied, as Kurt Eichenwald (who is supposedly epileptic) willingly clicked on a video that literally read "you deserve a seizure for your post".
  • Those who decided to take planking to (sometimes literally) new heights, upon which they fell and either required surgery, went into a coma, or straight up died.
  • Luis Moreno Ocampo's amazing plan to capture Joseph Kony (a plan that relied on using Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie as bait to lure him to a fake dinner) relied on him being this - naturally, he wasn't.
  • The art thieves in "The Swedish Job". To make a long story short, they used their real phone number to buy an escape vehicle, conspicuously attended various art auctions, didn't realize that you needed to already have a buyer to sell stolen art, sent a lawyer as their liaison who could be (and was) easily followed, and literally wrote every bit of detail and step of the heist in a journal, allowing the police to implicate them and make various arrests of anybody involved.
• Took the Bad Film Seriously:invoked 4chan rigged a poll to send pop star Pitbull to the most remote Wal-Mart they could find in Kodiak, Alaska. However, Pitbull kept up his end of the bargain in spite of that, and it actually turned out well for everyone involved. Pitbull and the townsfolk had a lot of fun, and Kodiak got a Colbert Bump from the exposure, so everybody won.
• Totally Radical: What the IH determines as the death of planking: the Prime Minister of New Zealand posting a "slightly ominous" picture of himself with his son planking. By having such a high-profile figure take part in the meme, it wasn't cool anymore.
  Historian: And... you did it. You killed the meme. It's done.invoked
• Trash the Set: This quite literally happened during Rainfurrest, as the convention's infamously lax treatment of troublemakers meant they had free reign to destroy numerous aspects of the venue's infrastructure, from jamming the plumbing with diapers in the bathrooms and allegedly drilling glory holes, to vandalising the pool and breaking its filter system, to breaking fire alarms to allow drug taking... the list goes on and on throughout the episode. This, coupled with outside forces sending letters to other venues to warn them, meant that any and all subsequent attempts at hosting the convention again have only ended in failure.
• Tsundere: Played for Laughs. The Historian clearly has a lot of genuine sympathetic and congratulatory affection for Hello Games, especially after researching their harrowing journey to getting No Man's Sky done and back in the good graces of the gaming community, but he does everything in his power to play it out as outlandishly as possible, even going as far as ending "The Engoodening of No Man's Sky" with an explicit erotic fanfic about them.
• Two Decades Behind: Beyond the crime of being Totally Radical, this is the IH's criticism of the 9gag Meme Rock. The rock is intended to be a time-capsule of internet culture in 2017, but the Historian points out that most of the memes voted to be carved onto its surface (including Socially Awkward Penguin, Philosoraptor and Keyboard Cat, among others) actually date back to 2008.
• Uncertain Audience: Discussed in the Dashcon Q&A video, as the IH expresses his belief that this trope was one of the reasons why the event was dead on arrival. Instead of the convention focusing on a singular or even a blanket topic (for instance, the TV shows the site's userbase was known to enjoy at the time) that would attract a dedicated audience and clearly provide appeal to the new convention, the organizers' attempt to cover all of Tumblr's incredibly wide and vast range of interests (most prominently its focus on LGBTQ issues) made it very unclear what Dashcon was even about, which meant only those who were interested in a lot of subjects would bother to go in the first place. invoked
• Unreadable Disclaimer: All of the Historian's videos start with a disclaimer about his videos' fair use and satirical and journalistic nature and usually ends with a condemnation of any viewer who interprets them as permission to harass any of the people discussed. However, they always go by fast enough to almost be Freeze Frame Bonuses. But considering they're on Youtube where you can pause easily and even go frame by frame, it's somewhat downplayed.
• Very Special Episode: The video about the "Balloon Boy" is actually mostly serious, and deals with evidence the the IH found in Richard Heene's favor. It also deals with media and police corruption.
• Virtual YouTuber:
  • In one Raid: Shadow Legends Twitch stream, Shadow Man becomes a VTuber played by the Internet Historian.
  • It's parodied on the Storymode channel, where the hosts are indeed using avatars to roleplay as their characters... but instead of fictional characters, said avatars are pictures of billionaires. The Historian himself usually appears as Mark Zuckerberg, while his cohosts have included Jeff Bezos, Queen Elizabeth (later replaced by King Charles after the queen's death, though she did spend all of "Family Mysteries Expleened" as a ghost) and Richard Branson.
• Visual Pun:
  • "The Failure of Fyre Festival" starts off with footage of a literal dumpster fire.
  • Jimmy Fallon being in the box of tools in the My Immortal Dramatic Reading.
• Vitriolic Best Buds: With Fredrik Knudsen, who he always finds a way to mock by using his likeness to represent certain people in his videos.
• Vocal Dissonance: His voice and tone are sophisticated. What he covers is anything but. And while he remains The Faceless, people joke that his arms are surprisingly young for someone with a voice like his.
• Waking Up Elsewhere: It's become a bit of pet peeve on the Storymode channel after Turok (2008) used it so many times that they started wondering if the writers knew any other way to progress the plot other than knocking out Turok and have him get dragged around in his sleep.
• Warts and All: While the Historian takes Hello Games' side, "The Engoodening of No Man's Sky" doesn't sugar coat the fact that Sean indeed lied about the game being multiplayer during release and that there were still plenty of stuff on the to-do spreadsheet that haven't been addressed yet. In the end though, their integrity when it came to fixing their game outweighed the sins of the past, and the Historian feels they deserved their happy ending after all the shit they had to go through before, during, and after the making of No Man's Sky.
• Win Back the Crowdinvoked: The subject of "The Engoodening of No Man's Sky", beginning by documenting the catastrophic launch of the game and seemingly irreparable fallout from it, then exploring the game's eventual redemption in both integrity and widespread reception after months and months of improvements.
• Wham Line: In "Pool's Closed", just as it seems that there will be no further raids of Habbo, the site is hit with an explosive allegation that serves as a casus belli for the trolls reuniting and raiding once more:
  Jonathan Snow: Now Channel 4 News can reveal that the children's online gaming site Habbo Hotel is inhabited by pedophiles.
• "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue:
  • He gives one for the main players of KONY 2012: Jason Russell continues his activism and has thankfully been free of breakdowns; Invisible Children has been reduced to small-scale operations but overall has ceased their activities; Joseph Kony's forces are scattered and slowly disbanding, with the man himself effectively in hibernation.^note In the relevant Q&A, the IH further notes that Kony has reportedly been diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes, which, given his lack of access to proper medical care, means he probably won't live much longer anyway.
  • Another one shows up in "Camping at the End of the World". Camping himself retired in shame and died about two years after all the infamy. Family Radio sold off major stations to pay for the massive doomsday ad campaign, and had to sell off more when donations dried up following the backlash. They had to distance themselves as far as they could from Camping, even removing the archives of his work from their website. Finally, they filled the program slots with media produced by more mainstream sects of Christianity, the sort of churches that Camping spent a lifetime denouncing as corrupt. The IH points out what a downer the whole situation is, and tried to lighten the mood with a few weird Renaissance paintings.
  • For Hello Games in "The Engoodening of No Man's Sky": No Man's Sky, having gone through its significant repairs and improvements, has since then won multiple awards in technical achievements. Sean Murray and the gang, sticking to their indie roots, opened up Hello Labs to help small development groups like they once were, in order to help get their projects off the ground. Two of Hello Games' employees began working on another game called The Last Campfire. For the foreseeable future as of the video, Hello Games seems to be satisfied with staying in the No Man's Sky wheelhouse to keep it up and running as well as adding cool new stuff whenever possible or necessary, all while the game became a commercial juggarnaut and regained a lot of lost sale value.
• Xanatos Gambit: The Area 51 raid was all orchestrated by an unknown, robed figure, right down to the invader army rebounding from failure at the last minute with a supply drop of Monster energy drinks.
• You No Take Candle:
  IH: Big boys at Dashlane make video happen.

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