YMMV / Terrible Writing Advice

• Aluminum Christmas Trees: "Writer's Block" features a Funny Background Event of a letter saying "We do not accept dinosaur erotica, but we have sent a restraining order. Please go away." Rather disturbingly, dinosaur erotica is a real thing.
• Anvilicious:
  • His "Taking Criticism" video drops two related anvils for writers when it comes to criticism. Writers need to learn to be able to accept criticism and use it to improve their skills, rather than get defensive and blame the readers for reading it wrong. The second aesop challenges the other extreme, when a writer tries to please everyone. This is exemplified in the video with two different people making contradictory demands, with one wanting more action scenes, and the other wanting less action scenes. People have different tastes and it's impossible to write something that will please everyone.
  • Just as importantly, however, "Giving Criticism" shows that critics shouldn't make things a personal crusade in what they believe to save pop culture by putting down writers for small transgressions and their own Bias Steamroller, and how the Caustic Critic doesn't really apply to real life. It can go both ways though, don't try to be blind to a story's flaws.
  • His "Cosmic Horror" video points out that Lovecraft had some serious racism problems, and invoking them is a good way to ruin your career; even in-character, he doesn't try to defend them.
• Fan Nickname: Some fans refer to TWA JP as "Ego JP", due to the fact that he (or a version of him) was called this in the "Finishing a Story" video.
• Fridge Brilliance: One of the running themes shown throughout his videos are honest notes or sarcastic takes which are intended to help writers use these ideas and run with them. The Isekai episode itself, as an example, has J.P. list out over a dozen possible alternate ways to approach the Isekai genre, but dismisses them all as terrible in-character. Beaubien admits that he does this to both help aspiring writers think of alternate ways to see a situation, and to also give writing prompts as he doesn't mind if anyone uses any writing ideas from his videos to develop a story.
• Friendly Fandoms: This series' fans tend to get along very well with fans of Overly Sarcastic Productions, to the point where multiple people have suggested a crossover between the two.
• Genius Bonus:
  • "Dark Lords" ends with the Dark Lord saying he should try making a MacGuffin out of enchanted tungsten. Tungsten has an extremely high melting point.
  • "Cosmic Horror" has a scene where a nerd is writing a cliché-filled romance scene involving Cthulhu and a character named "Idh-ya". It looks like some random Cthulhu Mythos joke lying on the Punctuation Shaker nature of Lovecraft's deities names, but it refers to an actual Cthulhu Mythos deity^note created by Lovecraft's continuator Lin Carter, albeit the correct spelling is "Idh-yaa", who was Cthulhu's mate and gave him five children.
• Heartwarming Moments:
  • Beaubien going into Sincerity Mode when discussing Tropes Are Tools, especially since the video was made in response to novice writers worrying about how their writing might be perceived as bad due to similarities to those featured in the videos.
  • In J.P.'s video on Isekai, when listing all the ways you could end up in a fantasy world other than being hit by a car, he adds a disclaimer at the bottom that yes you can use these ideas, that's why he does these videos.
• I Knew It!: A few fans figured out the identity of Project IG before it was revealed.
• Memetic Mutation: "There is some significant element missing... a Love Triangle!"
• Spiritual Adaptation: The show is basically Even a Monkey Can Draw Manga: The Anime
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: JP's Inner Critic was introduced as a character to who could give good writing advice in-character. But his arrogance was Flanderized in Traditional vs Self-Publishing, presumably out of a need to have a second writer character to show all the pitfalls of traditional publishing, making him just another moron in the cast, and his name and appearance an Artifact Title. Word of God was that this was intentional to show how people's real inner critic can be wrong by being too critical or valuing originality too much, but most of the dumb things I.C. says in said episode seem more born of arrogance (that J.P. already has in spades) than originality, and this characterization can cause jokes based on the inner critic being useful (like J.P. killing him or blocking him out with alcohol) to fall flat.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • Much of the Isekai episode is spent criticizing tropes more related to general Harem anime than the Isekai genre itself (what would a class president or the protagonist's older non-related sister be doing in the magical world?) The criticisms given are still perfectly valid, but this takes time away from harping on real problems and cliches of the genre, and JP will be unable to do a video about actual harem anime without retreading many of the same points.
  • This was part of the reason he made a second video on Urban Fantasy, as most of the original video was too focused in Twilight -style romantic fantasy and didn't cover the rest of the genre.