YMMV / Crash Thompson

• Base-Breaking Character: Lil D.Va, a little cartoon version of the Overwatch character of the same name. Some find her perfectly over-the-top and funny, while others found her obnoxious and a distraction. After the especially strong response to her getting the first five and a half minutes of Green Day Retrospective #2 essentially all to herself in the form of a parody of Filthy Frank, Crash announced on Twitter that Episode 3 of the Retrospective will be D.Va's final appearance, after which the character will be retired. Crash further explained it by saying that D.va takes too long to animate. Despite this, she still makes appearances here and there, most notably in Crash's April Fools prank video.
• Broken Base:
  • Game & Crash. At least, the reveal of it. Some people felt that Crash put too much mystery into something as relatively simple as a gaming channel. Others will point to poor foreshadowing in the One Hot Minute review as he kept on making video game references and promptly lampshading it, despite the fact that he had been no stranger to them before. Another group will point to the fact that G&C is responsible for Lil D.Va, a Base-Breaking Character. He later on did retire the Game & Crash channel due to Youtube's new rules about a channel needing to have a certain amount of watch time to be eligible for monetization, with the Game & Crash stuff now planned to appear on the main channel.
  • Him putting Megadeth's "Dystopia" on his "Worst Albums of 2016" list in spite of giving it a 3.5/5 in his review of it due to the off-putting lyrics, some said he was right to do so, others said he was being unfair to the album just because Mustaine's personal political views happen to contradict his own.
  • As...polarizing as it is, many fans have gotten tired of Crash's constant shove-ins with political discourse as well as his own left-leaning ideologies coming into his reviews. Some feel it's fine as Crash as a right to do whatever he pleases with his channel, but some feel said topics tend to distract from what the videos are about (something that fellow associated reviewers such as Luke Spencer or Mark Grondin also tend to do).
  • The Bin has become this for some. While some do agree that it's understandable Crash should be allowed to not discuss artists that have controversial views and the like, some feel it's unfair for Crash to limit himself in such a way (especially considering his entire rebranding was to not be limited) and could also be seen as an Ass Pull just so he doesn't have to review an artist he hates. It doesn't help that the artists he does "bin' tend to be for petty reasons, especially if it's simply because a band has political views he doesn't agree with or because he's given up with a band (like the concern fans had with believing he would bin Weezer because he was infuriated with Rivers pushing out more music he viewed as mediocre).
  • Some fans were disappointed in Crash's style change after dropping the "Rock Critic" moniker. While a lot of fans were happy to see Crash tackling other music genres outside of rock and metal, the discontinuation of "Quickies" was a real letdown to a lot of fans, as was Crash later discontinuing solo album reviews altogether and only talking about albums through FIMIs and year-end lists, with longer gaps between videos.
    • And, to an even greater extent, when he retired both the Quickies and the FIMIs after the extreme Creator Breakdown he experienced in 2021, many fans who were relying on him for new music recommendations were upset to hear how he'd no longer be sharing his thoughts on new albums on his channel until the end of the year. This ended up changing when Crash brought back solo album reviews as a regular fixture in 2022 along with the surprise return of FIMI (albeit minus viewer requests).
• Fan Nickname: Twice in How To Get Into tool, Crash shows up dressed in a loud outfit, brandishing the pimp cup, being showered in money and laughing maniacally while "Hooker With A Penis" plays in the background. Fans have taken to naming this gag, "Cash Thompson".
• Friendly Fandoms: With Luke Spencer, Jon Compton, and Mark Grondin to the point where they've done several "Rock Coliseum" videos together.
• Growing the Beard: At times literally: Depending on how you ask, Crash's content became a lot more established either around the Make Believe/Raditude reviews of the The Rise and Fall of Weezer series, the Red Hot Chili Peppers' One Hot Minute review, or Bad Religion's Into the Unknown review.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Number 17 on Crash's Best Albums of 2018 video was devoted to You Say I'm Too Much, I Say You're Not Enough by Welsh alternative rock band Estrons, and ends with Crash saying that they hope their career is long and fruitful, as well as saying, "Estrons - remember that name, because you could very well be seeing it again in the future". Almost a month later, Estrons announced that they had disbanded.
  • Crash's remark when placing Misery by The Amity Affliction as an honorable mention on his Worst of 2018 list, which reads, "A lot of people have actually been aching for me to talk about them for a long time now...in the same way that a lot of people want to see what Tony Stark is going to do to Thanos' face at the end of Endgame". This quote was inevitably going to fall under this trope, especially considering that not only does Tony sit out the initial confrontation with present-Thanos with Thor dealing the killing blow, but by the end of the movie, Tony does deal what is effectively the killing blow to past-Thanos at the cost of his own life.
  • An example that Crash himself owned up to was the line in one of his Rise and Fall of Weezer videos that said, "It's like saying eating an entire bowl of powdered chalk is better than, say...sex with Kesha. While technically true, I wouldn't wanna end up doing either". Crash devotes the first minute or so of his High Road review to how tasteless that line sounds now that the awful situation between Kesha and her management is public knowledge.
  • This applies any time Crash has praised a band that has gone on to be involved in some sort of controversy, such as McCafferty, Vektor and Brand New (for reasons too numerous to list here, to put it nicely). Particular mention goes to Brand New, since Science Fiction ended up getting denied a spot on Crash's yearly best-of list that year for such a reason.
  • The playful jokes of the "Garden Road" Guy and how he hates Neil Peart for being "overrated" became this when Neil passed away in 2020 due to brain cancer.
  • Brought up in his review of Fever 333's Strength in Numb333rs:
    Present Crash: Those who have been watching my show for a long time may remember me mentioning a little band called Letlive. In fact, you may remember this little clip from my Best of 2016 list:
    Past Crash: And these guys are sure as hell going to be a voice to be paying attention to over the next few years.
    Present Crash: Yeah, and then the fuckers went and broke up! GAAAAHHHH!
  • Crash's scathing review of Linkin Park's 2017 album One More Light had a new light cast upon it after the suicidal death of the band's frontman Chester Bennington. Crash went on to pay his respects to Bennington both on social media and in video form, and has said while he stands by the review as far as his opinion on the album goes, he holds no true ill will towards Bennington or the members of the band and has said on Twitter that he would take the review down if its presence made too many people uncomfortable. The review was still up until he ultimately made it private. While it was still available, he added this to the video's description:
    NOTE (7/21/17): This video was made around the time of the original release date of this album. Several weeks before the tragic suicide of Chester Bennington.
    While I stand by my original thoughts on the album here—it was honestly how I felt about it with the information we had available at the time—Chester's passing was an absolute tragedy. I wish nothing but the best for his fans, friends, family and band mates during this dark time.
    RIP Chester. We'll miss you.
  • Crash's snarky comments about Donald Trump becoming president in the late 2016 videos became this when Trump won the presidency in 2016.
  • Crash's scathing jabs at Andy Gill in both the FIMI and Dishonorable mention for Happy Now sting much harder, knowing how the latter set of jabs went public exactly a month before Andy Gill passed away.
  • The jab Crash threw towards the band Frightened Rabbit in an episode of Bad Album Covers (when making fun of indie folk bands hipsters like) eerily becomes this considering Frightened Rabbit ended in 2018 after front man Scott Hutchinson disappeared and was later on found dead.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • When he named the self-titled album by Antemasque as one of his favourite albums of that year, he suggested it as a means of making the most of things, since a reunion of At the Drive-In seemed like it was never going to happen. Fast-forward much later, and Inter Alia drops, with Crash making a Call-Back to that exact moment during his review of the album.
  • His Quickie video for "The BEST and Worst Albums of 2016" has this. Before getting into the top 10 worst albums, he says that "If we never hold them to a gold standard, they suck and suck and suck." He says this while pictures surface of a woman sucking on a banana and Nickelback come on screen. And then comes a Quickie for Feed The Machine.
    "Why the hell do I like this album so much?"
  • His remark in Top 10 Nu-Metal Bands about the signature sound of "Down With The Sickness" supposedly coming from a monkey cage is amusing knowing that the video went up a mere three months before David Draiman refuted the claim elsewhere.
  • Crash is bewildered by how the lead single from ¡Uno! was the album's closing track and says that while releasing closing tracks as singles is nothing new, he finds it odd that the first single would be a closing track and wonders if any other bands did it. Just over a year after that video, "Cyboogie" by King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard would be an example of exactly that, and 8 years later, "Ohms" by Deftones would be another example of that.
  • One of Crash's remarks when reviewing Judas was that for a band that had a wrestler as its lead singer, it didn't really seem to have any references to wrestling. Fast-forward a year or two later, and the title track for the album did end up becoming Chris Jericho's entrance theme for AEW, finally giving the album an explicit connection to wrestling.
  • A minor but somewhat polarizing one: Crash was rather brutal when calling out Todd Phillips in regards to his infamous Dear Negative Reader tirade about how he left comedy due to Political Overcorrectness and it being the reason he went off to direct Joker (2019). Cue the movie not only being a critical success with movie-goers, but it making a big Box Office hit of billions. Suprisingly enough, Crash never made a comment about Joker or Phillips afterwards aside from a retweet here and there.
  • The ending of the One Hot Minute review has him snark about how Josh Klingoffer really isn't "getting any better" in the Red Hot Chili Peppers following the meh reception of with I'm with You and The Getaway. Cue 2019 revealing that Josh had left the band and John Frusciante had once again returned, much to everyone (including Crash)'s rejoice. Though, this could be a combination of Harsher in Hindsight and Alas, Poor Scrappy when you read about what happened.
  • Similar to the Red Hot Chili Peppers example, Crash's entry on his Worst of 2017 list discussing Prophets of Rage concludes with him asking for a reunion of Rage Against the Machine. Two years later, it was announced that such a reunion was happening for 2020.
  • Him putting Tegan And Sara's Love You To Death on his honorable mentions for 2016 instead of the list proper because 'they're not rock, they're pop' became irrelevant 3 years later when he dropped the Rock Critic persona and reviewed more pop on the show.
  • Crosses over with Heartwarming in Hindsight with regards to Crash's remarks at the expense of Pitchfork's infamous 0.0 review of Liz Phair's Self-Titled Album, given that Crash's Pitchfork countdown came out not long before the person behind the review, Matt LeMay, openly admitted regret for writing the review. Pitchfork themselves would later re-score the album in 2021, giving it a 6.0.
  • In the final Game and Crash video, Crash laments the number of games missing from the Sega Genesis Classics collection, and mentioned Castlevania: Bloodlines as one of them, annoyed at how that one never seemed to get much love on the rerelease front. Two years later, it indeed was given the rerelease treatment as part of the Castlevania Anniversary Collection.
  • On the upside to the Harsher in Hindsight example from Bad Album Covers involving Frightened Rabbit, his jab at Fleet Foxes becomes this considering Crash would become a fan of the Foxes's former drummer Josh Tillman, otherwise known as Father John Misty.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Any time he gets incredibly angry, whether the comedic Super Saiyan mode or actual anger is is pretty disturbing. A pretty big example was in his Top Best/Worst Albums of 2016 video where he goes into a very, very Tranquil Fury rant about how much he despised King 810's La Petite Mort or a Conversation with God due to the fact the band leader wants to be known for infamy than content.
  • The brutal rant of how meh and boring ¡Uno!, ¡Dos! and ¡Tré! are and the sheer vitriol and fury he releases and mocking of those who'd probably give him hell for hating the albums. Unlike times where Crash's mocking of the haters comes off as funny, here it comes off as unnerving and encapsulates his disappointment and disgust towards the trilogy when he praises Raditude.
• Vindicated by History: His review for Alice in Chains's The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here received negative reactions since Crash stated the album is EXTREMLY slow and dull. By the time the band followed it up with Rainier Fog, everyone agreed that TDPDH was a step down from their previous albums.

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