The TV Show
- Audience-Alienating Premise: A sketch 'comedy' with very little in the way of actual comedy, trippy, unsettling sounds and visuals, and Nightmare Fuel aplenty is likely to cause this reaction.
- Fetish Retardant - The eccentric doctor and his phone sex line.My cock's just gone off like a spunky firework.
- Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: Jam has no likable characters to offer. All of them being morally bankrupt jerk-asses, depraved perverts and mentally deranged people with no redeeming qualities, and each sketch deals with them doing something strange or morally reprehensible.
The unrelated novel:
- Diagnosed by the Audience: There's something going on with Travis. He's extremely slow on the uptake, tends to get irrationally fixated on the last thing he was told was important, and even before the disaster had a habit of calling his roommate at work in panicked indecision every time there was a knock on the door.
- Fridge Logic: The reveal that Angela's camera ran out of power after day one doesn't quite add up. Travis saw her reviewing footage well after that, and she used the night vision to navigate in the dark a few times.
- She's clearly just pretending, as when she uses the night vision, she trips over things and thinks Travis is Tim.
- Sophomore Slump: Mogworld was generally well received, though with some criticisms that it had many hallmarks of being someone's first novel, and both Will Save the Galaxy for Food and Differently Morphous were spun off into successful series, each with there own small fandom. Jam, by comparison, has been mostly forgotten about by Yahtzee's fans, and is generally the least well liked of his novels for several reasons, including the sluggish pacing, borderline Random Events Plot, and Pinball Protagonist.
- Tear Jerker: The pointless death of Angela right in front of Travis.Travis: ...I couldn't find a stick...
- The Woobie: Travis. He has a naturally submissive personality, and Tim and Don both abuse him for it. And everybody around him keeps either dying or trying to murder him.
- Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: X and Y. They didn't mean to cause the jampocalypse after all.
- Jerkass Woobie:
- Don counts as this. Yes, the man can be described as 'rude at best', but he's lost his job, all his friends are dead, he has to hang out with a group of utter idiots and the only other survivor of the event leaves him. Can you blame him for being an utter twat?
- X can count as well. The revelation that she worked for a benign organization that was ultimately trying to help humanity, not destroy it means that her extreme measures of trying to keep her cover which included both withholding information on the jam and directly trying to murder Travis were only selfish attempts to save her own skin, not any actual organizational secrecy.
