YMMV / Watcher

The Website

• And You Thought It Would Fail: They all admit in Making Watcher that they had no business experience and were scared it'd fall flat. It hasn't! Shane apparently double for Puppet History, as he had a middle point where he was sure he couldn't pull the whole thing off. The Professor is almost universally adored by fandom, and he kinda prefers puppeteering to being onscreen.
• Cargo Ship: Shane/The Mailbox in the second season of "Too Many Spirits."
• Ensemble Dark Horse: John Nese from Galco’s Soda Pop Shop and Tonya Kay from The Independent Shakespeare Company were instantly loved for clearly enjoying the boys’ chaotic energy. Tyler from Go Karts as well, for being a Deadpan Snarker in reaction to them acting like toddlers.
• Fanon: The Quarantine Games comment sections are full of wondering if Steve is Ricky Goldsworth.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The Russian Spy postmortem in Unsolved had them self deprecating what they were like in high school, with Shane being nerdy teacher’s pet and Ryan being the jock. Weird Wonderful World has more adult versions of those vibes, with Shane wanting to learn/be invested and Ryan just enjoying being along for the ride.
  • Ryan and Shane mention in ww 7 that their chaos level is “two zany guys at a party”, while Steven looks innocent, he’s even weirder than they are. A few months later, the fandom finds out this is true, as Steven drops that he’s pissed on a friend’s clothes.
• Ho Yay: Steve (played by Ryan) and Stephanos (played by Steven) in The Quarantine Games. Stephanos always has heart eyes for Steve, even when Steve is acting like an asshole, and Steve is appreciative of Stephanos' "banging bod".
• Jerkass Woobie: Steve is a bloodthirsty asshole with a sadistic streak and can be a jerk to everyone, but he does look genuinely heartbroken when Stephanos decides he’s had a crush on Qezza the whole campaign.
• LGBT Fanbase: Coming over from Unsolved and Worth It. There’s plenty of fanart with the Professor and pride flags, and helps that both the guys and production crew are nonbinary-inclusive.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Steven’s repeated assertions to the fandom that they’re not a cult.
  • Shane’s wish to be small. From the Top 5 Pixar Movies:
  Ryan: HT doing this beautiful verbal essay on Ratatouille and then there’s Shane…
  Shane: I want to be a rat!
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Are You Scared is filled with it. While Shane's and Ryan's banter reduce the spooky atmosphere a little, the art that is shown in the video certainly doesn't and many on the comments have said that the art is at least half the reason for any fear the videos provoke. Of special note are "Are You Scared of Being Home Alone?" and "Are You Scared of Being Hunted?" as they both prey on the very Primal Fear of someone invading your home with the intent to harm you.^*For "Home Alone", seemingly strung out on drugs and violent. In Being Hunted, a stalker with seemingly untoward intent. And the worst part is these are both allegedly true stories.
  • The third episode of AYS, "Are You Scared Of Being Home Alone?", was promoted as the one that scared Shane.
  • In the case of "Being Hunted", the viewpoint character's boyfriend Jason suddenly gets a call from his partner about an image he didn't send. Not soon after he gets a frightened call begging for help and is completely helpless to do anything but call the cops and try to keep on the line with his boyfriend.
  • The Stalker from "Being Hunted" He's just a generic pizza guy who was seemingly either imitating a Dominos delivery guy to find his victims or was using his job to hunt for victims and if the story really was true, he's a real person.
• Nightmare Retardant: Many commenters noted that "Are You Afraid Of The Russian Sleep Experiment?" went way overboard with the gore and shock, to the point where the sheer absurdity of the mutilations became more darkly comedic than frightening.
• Spiritual Successor: The Ghost Files is a pretty clear one to BuzzFeed Unsolved, being a ghost hunter show featuring Ryan and Shane in their skeptic vs. believer antics, with the premiere episode even featuring Waverly Hills Sanatorium, one of the more noteworthy locations on the original show. Aside from cosmetic changes (such as the title), the only major difference is how much higher the production values are this time around.
• Tear Jerker:
  • While it turned out okay, there was Ryan's anxiety in Making Watcher that nobody is going to care about the new channel.
    • While Steven shows off his optimist side saying even if they fail it was a blessed opportunity, both Ryan and Shane admit real fear in the beginning that they didn’t know what they were doing, and Shane had to make himself feel nothing to deal with it.
  • Steven admitting in HWYD 15 that he fears being abandoned, completely throwing Ryan off who’d been making jokes about why Steven would fear getting attached to a therapist. Plus Shane again talking about mostly just being lonely and sad in college.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • People were livid about them announcing in April 2024 that they were shifting from a free YouTube channel to a $6/month subscription service. The backlash was so big that they swiftly made an apology for the announcement and further adjusted their plans, releasing videos a month early on the subscription service before they go up on YouTube.
  • One increasing criticism developing over the years (which proved relevant to the shift-to-subscription model) is, oddly enough, the increasingly professional production values of the content of the years, which many argue goes against the down-to-earth social nature of what made Shane and Ryan's earliest content so entertaining. With the reasoning behind the initial plan to move away from YouTube being claims of financial instability, many felt that the increasing Conspicuous Consumption within the videos themselves had stepped from "kind of distracting" to "actively detrimental", with one of the biggest calls following them partly backing out from their plans being to simply cut down the excess for the sake of looking "professional."
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: "John," the titular roommate from "Are You Scared of Your Roommate?". Viewer consensus is that he was suffering from some sort of mental illness and/or drug addiction, making his behavior in the episode tragic rather than frightening.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: The narrator of "Are You Scared of Your Roommate?" As commenters were quick to point out, all of the signs that led the narrator to conclude that something was possessing or impersonating his friend "John" (a filthy house full of moldy food, a strange hole in the floor, John's bizarre appearance and behavior that culminated in him staring silently at the narrator for hours in the middle of the night) are also consistent with severe mental illness or drug addiction. Consequently, he comes across to many viewers as an insensitive Jerkass who didn't get his friend the help he clearly needed, and if the story really is true, John's disappearance at the end could mean he died as a result. However, this is somewhat mitigated by the fact that the narrator was only 18 at the time and the story took place in 2009, so he likely didn't have much awareness of what mental illness looked like.

The film

• Complete Monster: Daniel Weber, aka the Spider, is a Serial Killer who loves to stalk and murder women. When heroine Julia begins to realize something is amiss in Bucharest, the Spider has claimed five victims, taking their heads as trophies with one victim having escaped him. Steadily stalking Julia to drive her insane and paint himself as the victim, the Spider murders her friend Irina before ambushing her to murder her as well and gleefully savor her final moments.
• Narrowed It Down to the Guy I Recognize: Even after the film's Red Herring attempts, it's obvious that Burn Gorman — fairly well-known to western audiences from the likes of Pacific Rim and Torchwood and the only other non-Romanian actor — is the real killer.