Web Video / Tasteful, Understated Nerdrage

"Some men are born great and others have greatness thrust upon them. And some men, while we might necessarily be "great", it's not as though we are terrible or anything; I mean, there are definitely worse things on YouTube, right? I think we can agree at that much. And who asked you anyway? If you're so god-damn smart, why don't you go make your own videos, huh? Yeah, that's what I thought! My name is Bobby the Tongue, and without exaggerating at all; I'm basically the Pelé of complaining about video games. Meaning, not only am I staggeringly productive, (when I'm not taking an unannounced break), I execute with such skill and elegancy that it will take your breath away."

—MrBtongue, "Introducing Me"

Tasteful, Understated Nerdrage is a series of what can best be described as a series of video essays detailing tropics relating to the video game industry with an educational intent and a twist of humor. Admitting upfront to draw a lot of inspiration from RedLetterMedia's Plinkett Reviews, the videos are made by Bob "MrBtongue" Case and hosted on his YouTube channel.

Discussing tropics ranging the from current state of gaming journalism and MMORPGs, over the use of classic storytelling techniques in video games, to selected video games, the videos combines academic discussion with copious amounts of sardonical humor and Self-Deprecation to achieve TUN's mission-statement: "To change the world for the better through strategic complaining."

Sometimes, MrBtongue also likes to do what he calls "reverse complaining", for that he uses the Spin-Off series Creepy, Obsessive Nerdlove wherein he takes a more positive look at certain titles, both films and video games.

For a while, his most frequent activity was contributing to the Shamus Young's Twenty Sided blog, most notably with a lengthy dissection of everything wrong with Game of Thrones a bit ahead of the curve on the rest of the Internet souring on the show and a lengthy retrospective about the Baldur's Gate series of games and the ways in which the CRPG genre generally has changed. His content stopped abruptly with Young's death and his current status is unknown.

Works discussed:

• Baldur's Gate, leading up to but never quite reaching the new release of the third game.
• Blade Runner
• Dark Souls
• Diablo III
• Django Unchained
• Dragon Age II
  • Dragon Age: Inquisition
• The Elder Scrolls, specifically Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim
• Fallout 3
• Fallout: New Vegas
• Game of Thrones and how it compares to its source material, A Song of Ice and Fire.
• L.A. Noire
• Mass Effect
• Planescape: Torment
• Shadowrun
• Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
• The Witcher and its sequel

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Tropes:

• Accentuate the Negative: Parodied. He's so used to complaining that he can't conceive of what the opposite of complaining would be so he just calls it "reverse complaining."
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: His parody sad ending for Mass Effect 3 featured Liara getting mocked mercilessly for the rest of her life by Javik, a Salarian scientist dropping a test tube and accidentally unleashing the genophage again, and Ashley Williams changing her hair back to the way it was in the first game.
• Buffy Speak: Combined with Sophisticated as Hell, especially when he coins the terms "reverse complaining" and "talky and techy sci-fi".
• Instructional Dialogue: His Baldur's Gate series analysis is written as a Socratic dialogue between "Achilles," a young modern CRPG fan from the console era eager to revisit the classics, and "The Grognard," a bitter but vaguely hopeful old-fashioned CRPG fan disillusioned with modern trends in the genre. Unusually, it avoids Right Way/Wrong Way Pair; both Achilles and the Grognard are generally allowed to make good points about the ways in which the genre and the way people think about it evolved from these beginnings and whether or not they were ultimately artistically successful or not.
• Insufferable Genius: Played for Laughs.
• Prolonged Prologue: Made almost into a Running Gag, as seen in "The Shandification of Fallout 3":
  "Part Three: Okay, we get it. You like Tristram Shandy. What does this have to do with Fallout?"
• Self-Deprecation: MrBtongue frequently lampshades his Schedule Slips.
• Small Name, Big Ego: Played for Laughs. MrBtongue often make deliberately overly grandiose claims about his own importance for the video game industry, such as styling himself a major investor in Shadowrun Returns and Torment: Tides of Numenera because he backed their Kickstarters.

Tropes discussed:

• Cyberpunk: In "Cyberpunk is back".
• Tragic Hero: Describes Mordin as this in his "Literature vs. Genre" video. He also goes on to describe Wrex as an elegiac hero.
• Worldbuilding: The entire point of "The Shandification of Fallout."
  I'll demonstrate what I mean by asking an obnoxious and repetitive question, a question I often ask when exploring fictional worlds. That question is this; "What do they eat?"

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