YMMV / Dorkly Originals

• Alternative Joke Interpretation: In "There Are Too Many Spider-Men!" JJJ has become so exasperated by the influx of Spider-Men and Women that he'd actually pay for photos not featuring Spider-Man. Peter Parker tries scouring his phone for something, but comes up empty. Either his entire photo gallery is filled with spider-people doing photo-bombs, or he uses the camera on his phone for selfies.
• Base-Breaking Character:
  • The Video Game Agent. Many find his character hilarious and in desperate need of a comeback, while others think he's too much of a jerkass to really consider all that amusing.
  • Kevin the Assistant. Like the above, many find his videos funny, where he calls out villains for their Stupid Evil. Others, however, consider his videos to be extremely formulaic and often pick on the typical low hanging fruit videogame jokes.
• Catharsis Factor: The Surprisingly Happy Ending to What Would Happen If Peach Got Regular-Kidnapped. Mario doesn't suffer any undeserved abuse or get written as a jerk, kills the kidnapper and saves Peach (who sincerely thanks him).
• Cliché Storm: A common criticism of the videos, they rely heavily on generic jokes poking fun at video game conventions, as well as obvious forms of Black Comedy.
• Crosses the Line Twice: Robotnik's Dissonant Serenity in "If Videogames Were 11% More Realistic", when faced with Sonic dying in a hospital.
  Robotnik: Huh, neat. Guess I win!
  Tails: [screaming]
• Designated Hero: Peach in the "Peach's Revenge" videos. While she is trying to avenge Mario's death, it's pretty hard to forgive her for murdering all of Bowser's children when they were begging for mercy.
• Designated Monkey: Mario has become this for some. While he's often a big Jerkass and sometimes deserves some of the humiliation, a lot of the abuse he gets border on Disproportionate Retribution^note  Such as: "Yoshi Isn't Allowed In The Castle and more often than not, unjustified^note Such as: "Mario vs. Minecraft" and "If Mario had a Hostage Negotiator".
• Foe Yay Shipping: Magneto towards the X-Men in X-Men Disappoint Magneto. He apparently sets up his entire Evil Plan just to make the X-Men fight him, or at least wants them to think he's cool, and breaks down into tears when only Dazzler shows up.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Amiibo Story ends with a joke portraying the then Nintendo president Satoru Iwata as an inept and angry boss. A Nintendo employee reports on Amiibo's skyrocketing demand and he responds with ordering more copies of Nintendo Land as well as slapping the employee and storming out of the room angrily when he mentioned a proposed Pokémon console game. The real-life Iwata passed away just four days after the video was uploaded.
  • "TMNT Argue Over Pizza" has Leo sarcastically call Donnie Billy Mitchell when the latter says he has the most points. This line can hit differently when years later, it was discovered Billy Mitchell had cheated at his high scores for Donkey Kong and Pac-Man.
  • If Videogames Were 22% More Realistic ends on a self-deprecating gag about how Dorkly overused the "huh, neat" punchline and that it wasn't special anymore. This ended up being their second-last video (not including a compilation video of their 2019 content) before nearly the entire staff of Dorkly (as well as their sister channels CollegeHumor and Drawfee) were abruptly laid off without warning in January 2020 after they were sold off by their parent company.
  • Mario Responds to PETA features Mario addressing and debunking the claim that he uses real fur suits, which is played for Hypocritical Humour because of all the animals (Monty Moles, Cheep-cheeps, Yoshi, etc) that he does casually slaughter while talking about how he'd never harm an animal as endangered and defenseless as a tanooki. Nine years later, the video Mario Meets a Real Tanooki ends with him causally murdering the tanooki he had been bonding with for its fur.
  • Luke Won't Forgive Anakin portrays Luke and Leia refusing to accept Anakin's redemption. The new canon Expanded Universe novel, Bloodline, shows that while Luke might have redeemed Anakin, Leia still sees him as Darth Vader and despises him for it. It's also clear in The Force Awakens that Vader's atrocities have a left an impact on the galaxy even 30 years after his death.
• He Panned It, Now He Sucks!: The video Mario Paint Torture received a bit of backlash from several Nickelback fans.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: There are enough of these to warrant its own page.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "Huh, neat".
  • Christ, what an asshole.
  • "Why did you say that like it was a completely normal sentence?"
• Misaimed Fandom: Mario Vs Minecraft is meant to show Mario as a Jerkass by the end, but many fans sided with him anyways because Steve came off as an egotistical jerk who brags about how superior Minecraft is to Mario's games.
• Most Wonderful Sound: If Bowser Was a Disney Fan was honestly just an excuse to get more British Bowser voice acting. Per the comments, many people share the same sentiment. Sure enough, the next video has more British Bowser.
• Retroactive Recognition: Adam Conover provided voice work for a number of videos a few years before his own show debuted on TruTV.
• Shallow Parody:
  • If Nintendo Owned Sonic has Sonic dreaming about how if Nintendo owned him, he wouldn't suffer from his games having bloated casts. This ignores that Mario as a franchise DOES have a huge cast of its own, just a small core of recurring ones, and Sonic had been the focus of his games for the past six years, with his supporting cast barely getting any focus (or at least not as much they did when they were first introduced).
    • In addition, the first one mentioned, Nack the Weasel (who hadn’t appeared outside of print since 1996 prior to Sonic Mania) is in fact an enemy of Sonic’s, but was mentioned as being “one of our lame friends”.
    • The joke also creates some Fridge Logic because Tails mentions that the Nintendo-owned Sonic has a few beloved spin-off series such as Sonic Kart and Sonic Party. Even if we assume Amy and Knuckles exist in this dream (since Sonic is never shown mentioning them in his Long List), how either of these series would last long without having a lot of secondary characters to work with goes unexplained.
  • 5 Things About Dragon Ball Z That Make No Sense makes the typical "Goku makes dumb decisions" argument by pointing out the time he teleported Cell to King Kai's planet right when he self-destructed, arguing that he should have teleported Cell somewhere that wouldn't put innocent lives in danger. It's pointed out in-series that Goku can only teleport to places where he can sense life, so he had no choice but to trade 4 lives (his own, King Kai's, Bubbles' & Gregory's) for billions.
    • Within the same video, Goku is criticized as a bad father for making Gohan fight in the Saiyan Saga. Except Goku did no such thing, Piccolo did, Goku was dead at the time and when he did arrive, he told Gohan to stay out of the fight. Gohan got involved in the fight with Vegeta of his own free will.
  • If Paramount Made Detective Pikachu was an attempt to make another jab at Sega as it was originally titled If Sega Made Detective Pikachu, and it poked fun of all the things that were wrong with Sonic the Hedgehog (2020). As noted, the sequence describes the film being made by Sega, even though the film is actually made by Paramount. In the same regard, the toon also says that the actual Pokémon Detective Pikachu and Super Mario Bros. (1993) were films made by Nintendo. The Mario movie was made by Lightmotive while Detective Pikachu was made by Warner Bros. Neither video game company had involvement in either film's development. Dorkly admitted this mistake in the comments.
  • Princess Zelda's Press Conference has a Princess Zelda holding a press conference after being rescued from being kidnapped by Ganon, which is presented as something that has happened eight times before, as a transparent cover for Zelda and Ganondorf's secret relationship. In the actual games, most incarnations of Zelda have been kidnapped or otherwise endangered twice at most, some not even involving Ganon. Several commenters pointed out that it feels like an awkwardly copy-pasted Peach/Bowser sketch, which doesn't work for Zelda/Ganondorf at all.
• Squick: Old Man Sonic purposely relies on this as a Take That! towards disturbing Sonic fanart. Specific examples include the character M-Preg Greg giving birth and beating Sonic with the baby, that is still attached to the umbilical cord, in the first episode, Tails revealing that he apparently has two penises, which he uses to fly the same way he would with his tails, in the second episode, and the sentient Sonic urinal from the third episode.
• Take That, Scrappy!:
  • The dog from Duck Hunt is often victimized in almost all of his appearances.
  • A Lesser known example is the Yeti from SkiFree. He utterly fails to catch and kill the skier, and the Yeti's final attempt ends up injuring himself.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Batman's voice often changes with each new video he appears in, which sometimes sparks this from several viewers.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • A bit of a minor one, but in the short The Pokémon Most Disappointed With Their Evolutions they show Abra/Kadabra/Alakazam disappointed and upset that not one but both of his evolutions include cutlery for some reason. As many fans posted in the comments afterward, they missed a perfect opportunity to point out that Alakazam's Mega Evolution increases his spoon count even further.
  • How the Fantastic Four Would ACTUALLY React to Their Powers is about the Fantastic Four freaking out about how their powers would affect their genitals. Yet later on, the Silver Surfer, a nude Chrome Champion with no privates at all shows up, and they don't react to this at all.
  • Some felt that an opportunity was missed to make a Digimon joke in The Truth About Pokémon PCs, considering that the Pokémon were inside what they called the "Digital World".
  • The "Game Character" Meets With His Agent videos had a lot of potential to be a long runner series due to the number of game characters out there that Dorkly could have played around with. However, they pretty much decided to drop the series completely after the Agent's voice actor moved on from the company.
• Tough Act to Follow: A few of Dorkly's newer videos haven't been as well received than their older videos, with most of the criticisms being directed at the reliance on Black Comedy, satire, and gags that have been rather overdone.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic:
  • Mario often ends up this way with how frequent a Butt-Monkey he is. Arguably the worst examples are "Mario vs. Minecraft" and "If Mario had a Hostage Negotiator". In the latter, Mario comes off as Only Sane Man while arguing with an ignorant Cloudcuckoolander, and gets pepper sprayed in the eyes when he was trying to save Peach. In the former he's meant to come off as an arrogant jerk getting his just deserts when Steve points out why Minecraft has outsold any Mario game, but most viewers couldn't help but sympathize with him because how much of a smug Jerkass Steve was, as well as embodying an attitude that represents why Minecraft's fandom has such a poor reputation.
  • More than a few people believe Link should be allowed to wish for a pizza dinosaur if he wants to in "Link's Wish", considering he was the one to do all the work saving Hyrule.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: Despite their videos mostly focusing on video games like Sonic and Mario, they contain a lot of swearing and dark themes.
• The Woobie:
  • Smoke in Smoke's Not Doing Well begs Liu Kang to kill him to free him from the pain of his literal smoking.
  • Guiseppe in Regular Guiseppe, The Third Mario Brother gets no respect from his brothers, who ditch him to go on exciting adventures while he stays at the apartment doing all the chores. It gets even worse in the conclusion of "Peach's Revenge" when it's revealed that it was Giuseppe, not Mario, who had been killed by Bowser, and that Mario set Giuseppe up in order to fake his own death.

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