YMMV / ProtonJon

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• Annoying Video Game Helper: "Carmen Sandiego", aka Helper #3 in the Deal Or No Deal LP. Jon and Kelekin continually poke fun at 'her' dumb advice.
  "You can't go lower, Carmen, You CAN'T GO LOWER!!"
  "You are useless, Carmen!"
• Base-Breaking Character: RosaJon, and by extension most AltJons, have started to become this more and more. While most of Jon's viewers see them as harmless, select people are starting to see them as being overly repetitive and not serving much of a creative purpose beyond turning on the chat's horny switch. A poll revealed that the fandom is about halfway split on the lewd depictions of art, leading to Jon promising new rule enforcements to make things feel more accessible. Jon has gone on record that RosaJon should have run her course, but he can't drop her because a lot of his viewers love her.
• Broken Base:
  • Among Jon's livestreaming audience, Kermit the Frog jokes. One camp believes that they've grown far past stale after over a year's worth of them showing up again and again, while another camp finds them to still be as funny as they were the first time. Not helping is the second camp's tendency to spam the protonSub emote (a pixel art illustration of Kermit holding a submarine sandwich) in both Twitch chat and Discord, which while being in good fun is perceived by the first camp as annoyingly disruptive.
  • Hard Time, which largely caused a split in viewers and fans between those who enjoyed the game for its So Bad, It's Good nature (mainly thanks to Joel's streams of it from a few years prior, which primarily centered around abusing the shoddy gameplay for all it's worth) and those who despised it for blatantly ableist and homophobic lines in its writing.
• Crosses the Line Twice: A Running Gag in the stream "Game Clearing: Mario Party 5 (Part 2/Finale) & Something Else" has Jon and his co-comms act out as mothers who encourage their kids to be bloodthirsty and to maim the other kids. The delivery in a maternal falsetto voice is what makes it funny.
• Discredited Meme:
  • Most of the memes revolving around Jon's earlier videos seem to have become this, especially in light of Jon's own Creator Backlash against them ("Move Faster Pokey" being a particularly infamous offender). Nowadays, these memes are only brought up ironically, or as a way to illustrate examples of memes that have aged poorly over the years.
  • The Party Cruise Rap seems to be rapidly entering this territory as of late, with general reaction from Jon and chat devolving from bemused "goddammit"s to outright exasperation. One egg video that poorly mashes up the song with the Space Jam theme seems to have been the final straw for the meme, with Jon explicitly stating in response that the meme had outlived its humor.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Laura from the Mario Kart Wii videos is becoming very popular with viewers; a lot of people really like the sound of her voice.
  • Some people from Jon's streams, such as DanTheEnigma, are well-liked in the chat due to gaming skill (or lack thereof) and frequently join Jon in games and calls.
  • From his Bomberman Act:Zero: Dan (See above), Jewker, A Girlbreast, and Draw. The last of these is worth mention, as Draw isn't a physical player, but the actual condition of everyone else losing, resulting in a tie.
• Fandom Rivalry: Fans of Jon's YouTube content who are also fans of his Twitch streams are rather few and far between, and as such, those who are still loyal to just his YouTube content feel high and dry, as well as blaming Jon's Twitch users for "stealing" his content away. It doesn't help that his YouTube fans who don't watch his streams are Locked Out of the Loop for content like the Jonaverse.
• Fan Nickname: Some like calling him PapaJon after adopting little Bagel. Likewise Lucahjin is nicknamed MamaJin.
• Fountain of Memes: He's been responsible for more than a few memes in his day.
  • His picture from when he was 18 has attributed to this trope. For which Jon is forever haunted.
  • Sometime around the start of 2018, Jon let a friend take a picture of him smiling while holding two hotdogs at a hockey game. He has since grown to hate this decision, as it is arguably even MORE popular then his 18-year-old picture.
  • 2019 sees two targets of fanmade gags thanks to Jon's streams.
    • Goldman gets a couple after Jon streamed Typing of the Dead: the ending in which he plummets himself off (or alternatively, rockets up or bungees back), and his introduction to The Emperor.
    • Asura's Skyward Scream sees some audio substitutions by viewers after Jon completed the game for Game Clearing.
  • RosaJon, a fusion of Rosalina and Jon... who is also incredibly busty.
  • "Shit! Just play your fucking music!"^Explanation From House of the Dead: OVERKILL, the scene where Isaac and G are arguing about the latter's music choice mutated into substituting the generic country tune he plays with other songs that are generally considered to not be good. Occasionally, this is mutated further into Isaac deciding the music choice was actually good, and bobbing his head as he does to his own choice in the actual game.
  • "Hi, why am I here?"^Explanation On one stream, Jon tried to load an Xsplit layout for DS games, but forgot that he also had his webcam on that layout, thus surprising him when he switched to the layout and discovered that not only was the game not there, but his face was. He then said this line. Mutated into fans submitting videos inserting that clip into various scenes, occasionally combining with other memes.
• Fridge Brilliance: In Jon's Donkey Kong Country LP, after revealing that the entire second episode was a bootleg, he fast-forwards to the real game... on the Game Boy Color. Had it been the original game, it would make more sense to rewind, since the bootleg, of course, came out after the original. The GBC version, however, came out in 2000, three years after the bootleg's 1997 release, so of course he fast-forwarded to it.

• Good Bad Bugs: Jon has a tendency to make games he plays on both his stream and his channel to glitch on him in hilarious ways. It happens so often and such ridiculous ways that it's hard to keep track of them all.
  • The Superman 64 let's play is based almost completely around breaking the game into itty bitty glitch pieces. Some are intentional, some are not, but it's all endlessly amusing.
  • His crowning achievement is widely considered the time he broke Wheel of Fortune of all things by causing the countdown timer to count up.
• Growing the Beard: Jon has gone through the trope at least twice in his LP career. In the beginning, Jon did lets plays of Nintendo Hard games by adding his own snark and witty commentary. It wasn't until Jon started to do lets plays of various Super Mario World ROM hacks (including Kaizo Mario) that his popularity soared while many memes from Jon were born. After getting tired of doing nothing but ROM hacks, Jon quit them altogether and focused on playing games he likes while giving the viewers an educational background behind the games.
• Harsher in Hindsight: In episode 2 of his LP of Notte Luminosa, he finds a minigame corner with a hilarious disclaimer. The disclaimer states that the minigame corner can not be held responsible for side effects such as alcoholism, crossdressing, gender confusion, and... cancer. Why is Jon playing the game? To fulfill the dying wish of the game's creator, who has cancer. It turned out that the creator was faking his cancer, making this joke a little more lighthearted.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • All the times Jon complained about "football players" (i.e. the Charging Chuck enemy) in Super Mario World romhacks. Then came Resident Evil 5...
  • New Super Luigi U gives players a scant 100 seconds for every level, making Jon's infamous quote a lot more applicable. Of course, Chuggaaconroy Lampshades this in The Runaway Guys' LP of that game.
  • Combined with Heartwarming in Hindsight, kind of: Jon's astonished joy in the first Bomberman: Act Zero stream when after some minutes prodding his chat for volunteers, 'actually managed to get a full room' of 8 people to play the notoriously unpopular game. A few weeks later, he had popularised the game on Twitch to the point that any game room he starts fills up in a second or two.
  • During Jon's livestream of Dance Dance Revolution Mario Mix one of his co-commentators sarcastically quipped, "You know, this is the worst episode of Dancing with the Stars I've ever seen." (It's at the 38-minute mark of the archived highlight.) One week after the livestream, Mark Ballas and Sadie Robertson did a freestyle dance based on Super Mario Bros..
  • Jon starts one of his 2015 Fortune Cookie streams with an updated yet still incomplete version of Jumpjet Rex. One of the updates is an actual plot snippet, revealing that the dinosaurs are trying to kill the ice age.
  • Way back in the first part of the Battletoads four-player race, when it was mentioned that Jon may have to carry the commentary himself as everyone else was getting to Turbo Tunnel, Jon replied "I don't want to talk to myself! That's weird!" Cue more recent videos, where a relatively frequent occurrence is Jon talking to "Future Jon" and vice versa.
  • Jon's let's plays of Mario Romhacks become hilarious when Nintendo themselves decided to take on romhacks themselves.
  • During the Four Job Fiesta, Jon ends up saying nearly verbatim the idea of the "Captain Falcon Roulette" from The Runaway Guys Colosseum. When this is pointed out to him, he lost his mind laughing because he had legitimately forgotten about it and not a bit of that was based on the conversation.
  • During a TRG recording trip in May 2019, Jon jokingly revealed that Chuggaaconroy's next LP would be Hamtaro: Ham-Hams Unite!. Several weeks later, Jon would end up doing that exact game for Game Clearing.
  • In a very old video of an online match in Super Smash Bros. Brawl, Jon asks one of the other players (who has been laughing for two minutes straight) if he's going to be okay. Immediately one of the other players chimes in with "Buster Wolf!" Eleven years later, Terry Bogard would become playable in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.
• Ho Yay:
  • Played for laughs when he and Chuggaaconroy sing "A Whole New World" together during The Speed Gamers marathon, at the request of fellow LPer CanisSkye.
  • Also with Slowbeef during the Milky Way Wishes segments of his Kirby Super Star LP, wherein their characters proceed to make out with each other after picking up food.
  • Plus with Super Jeenius during Resident Evil 5.
• Memetic Badass: Ashley turns Clint from Crash n' The Boys as one. CLIIIIINT!
  • Captain Falcon and Chris Redfield also get this to some extent.
• Memetic Mutation: "MOVE FASTER POKEY!" is probably the most famous meme associated with him. There's also "DEATH WATER" and "NOW I'LL SHOW YOU!".
• Never Live It Down: Many examples.
  • He's complained about "MOVE FASTER POKEY" many, many times. He only ever said it once, not that you'd know, given its ubiquity (including here on TV Tropes). He even wrote this in his guest bio for one Fan Convention:
  "One day, Jon recorded a video of himself playing a video game and yelled at a cartoon cactus to move faster in it. He's been paying for that decision ever since."
  • Ironically, in his early romhack videos, he quotes "100 SECONDS?!" as the line everyone remembers from Kaizo; "MOVE FASTER POKEY" didn't really take off until people started doing Sparta remixes.
  • "Don't Eat The Mushroom" also gets this a lot. The phrase showed up in, of all places, one of the romhacks he was LPing, and his fan and fellow LPer, Chuggaaconroy, absolutely relished saying it to him when the opportunity finally arose. (Though later on, Jon managed to turn it against him).
  • "DEATH WATER" and "NOW I'LL SHOW YOU" are a bit more deserving of their status; even though they each appeared in just one video, Jon repeated them over and over again. He even lampooned "DEATH WATER" himself with "CHERRY KOOL-AID".
  • His Super Mario TKO LP, where he encouraged his viewers to play along, record, and upload their own videos. This resulted in a surge of terrible LP videos, and was probably the key factor in the decision to Retsupurae him — note that their primary criticism is his Follow the Leader status. He's since co-commented on a few Wrongpuraes, and commented on the video riffing him, taking it in good taste.
  • Slowbeef seems determined to make the Notte Luminosa incident one of these; though he was very sympathetic about it on the Retsupurae podcast, he's still cracking jokes every time he thinks of it in the videos Jon guests in.
  • "... but it's still anyone's game!" became one after its overuse in Bomberman: Act Zero.
  • His Superman 64 LP is probably the crowning example. It was absolutely plagued by issues, technical or otherwise, that caused notoriously long delays and stretched the LP out across the better part of a decade. As a result, Jon's viewers hounded him over it to such a relentless degree that any mention of it, even as a joke, became a massive Berserk Button for him. He even acknowledged during a March 2017 stream that, whether he actually finished the LP or not, people would never let it go.
• Newer Than They Think: Jon's association with eggs (and Albert Wesker) only dates from his Resident Evil 5 co-op with Super Jeenius in 2013 when he talked about the rotten egg challenge (play the game using only rotten eggs as weapons) and Wesker's Large Ham "You will give me an egg!" voice clip. He then decided to use an egg as a subscriber symbol when he began Twitch streaming and use the voice clip when a new subscriber joined. To say these have become so strongly associated with Jon, they only came about six years into his career of being a Let's Player.
• Nightmare Fuel: In one of Jon's update videos, Jon reveals one of the reasons he's been so inactive was because when he needed to purchase a new Capture Card, the person who sold it to him died.
• Nostalgia Goggles: Defied. He mentions starting his Yoshi's Island LP mainly because he played Yoshi's New Island and absolutely hated it and wanted to see if the original game was as good as he remembered. After playing through it, he ultimately decides that the game held up excellently (even if striving for 100% Completion is immensely frustrating) and New Island really was just that bad. This is reinforced by playing Yoshi's Island DS for the first time during the LP, which he found so mediocre that he couldn't even form a strong opinion about it.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: His Superman 64 Let's Play is notorious for having extremely long hiatuses between episodes. This has completely overshadowed the actual content of this series. Jon has acknowledged this in livestreams.
• So Bad, It's Good:
  • This is his opinion of Superman 64, in the sense that the game is so poorly designed and programmed that it actually becomes fun to discover different ways to break it.
  • He also considers Bomberman Act:Zero pretty fun if you can get people to play it with you online.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: He notes that the level music for Stage 8 of Superman for the Game Boy sounds a lot like the theme from Mission: Impossible.
• Viewer Name Confusion: As of late an increasing number of people call him John.

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