YMMV / Duke Nukem

• Awesome Ego: Duke is a self-centered, politically incorrect chauvinist bastard. And the fans love him for it, both in and out of universe. Duke Nukem II explicitly says that he's so vain that he likes to collect his own memorabilia (which is a primary source of points in the game.)
• Can't Un-Hear It: It's hard not to read Duke's lines in the voice of Jon St. John, who voiced the Dukester since 3D.
  • Or Gianni Matragrano, thanks to his many online shitposts done with a very convincing impression of the former.
• Fandom Rivalry: With Serious Sam. Said character started out as a homage/parody of Duke. Both game series have had cameos of each other's protagonists being humiliated/killed. Fortunately, this rivalry is more memetic than openly hostile, and is more about which protagonist is cooler than which games are better.
• Jerkass Dissonance: Again, Duke Nukem has a lot of fans even though a real person with his kind of personality would be incredibly unlikable and too forward with his sexual feelings about women to the point that one can easily mistake him as sexist to boot.
• Memetic Badass: An intentional example. The character is supposed to be seen as one.
  • This is the reason Duke Nukem Forever was in Development Hell for a good 12 or so years. The devs had to keep on scrapping the project because they knew that the chickenscratch they kept coming up with wouldn't do him any justice. When you bet on the Duke, you do it right.
  • Land of the Babes leads to him repopulating the entire world by himself. This means that afterward, Duke became the father of every living man in existence!
• Memetic Mutation: The Duke Nukem voice is often used as a medium for saying incredibly silly, dumb, or generally clueless phrases, since it's really funny to hear or imagine his baritone voice saying those things. The Duke Nukem 3D main theme, Grabbag, is also often used as part of the punchline.
• Values Dissonance: Whilst Duke Nukem Does the Internet is well known for its Values Resonance, Duke mentions anarchists and druggies alongside Nazis, racists, homophobes and other unsavory types. With more people knowing more about Anarchism and the backlash to the War on Drugs, Duke mentioning those two groups alongside Nazis, racists, and homophobes seems like a case of Godwin's Law, or at the very least reactionary.
• Values Resonance: Duke Nukem Does the Internet is an instructional book released in 1996, in which Duke Nukem himself helps the reader set up an internet connection and teaches them how to safely browse the net. Although most of the advice in the book is obviously outdated, one notable passage has him warn the reader that Usenet's accessibility led to some parts of it becoming a haven for Nazis, racists, homophobes, and other unsavory types. While modern internet users might be left scratching their heads about what the hell Usenet even is, many other modern-day social media platforms are commonly used by bigots, so the message about avoiding parts of these sites where these groups congregate and watching out for trolls who share their hateful rhetoric in unrelated spaces is even more important nowadays than it was in The '90s.
  • Though this is downplayed in that Duke's respect towards people of different skin colors and ethnicities, respect towards people who are women (even though he is a little too forward when it comes to flirting with the opposite sex), and also respect for people of different sexual orientations is surprisingly progressive for the 1990's.

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