Mark Does Stuff/YMMV

"...I refuse to be judged for projecting my big ol’ gay life all over you Willow. I don’t even care that you’re straight, you are my big ol’ gay best friend and this is all I want from you..."
 * And the Fandom Rejoiced: pretty much the fan's reactions to his announcement of reviewing certain series, Firefly, Doctor Who and Avatar: The Last Airbender in particular.
 * Applicability: Everything seems to map to class struggle and/or Mark's personal experiences.
 * "Angel wanted to escape his horrific past, so why shouldn’t he get to decide how to portray himself to others? It reminded me of my first year of college."
 * Big Name Fan: The site was brought to Neil Gaiman's attention while Mark was reviewing American Gods, and Gaiman read through a few pages and loved them.
 * To quote Mr. Gaiman, "I enjoyed your American Gods read so much. It was like getting to look through a reader's eyes & find out what worked."
 * And then he warned Mark on Twitter that he didn't think The Sandman really got good until volume 2.
 * J. August Richards Tweeted that of course Gunn would marry him.
 * Broken Base / Hypocritical Humor: Some of Mark's discussions about social justice can cause heated debates in the comments of the posts. Often, these end up being along the lines of Person A (who doesn't understand the social justice concept and is being a bigot/hater) being smacked down by Peoples B (who do understand said concepts and are justifiably defensive about them). Other times look more like Person A (who doesn't understand a social justice concept like "privilege" or why the word "crazy" is bad) asking for clarification and being mocked and insulted by Persons B (who are justifiably tired of having to constantly explain why they have certain viewpoints). It can get ugly.
 * Or perhaps Person A simply disagreeing with Mark and/or feeling like he overuses the class struggle/bigotry card, and Person B defending him.
 * YOU DON'T UNDERSTAAAAAAND
 * Harsher in Hindsight: While reviewing the Buffy episode "Blood Ties," he says that with as depressing as the show is at that point, at least Joyce is still alive. He quickly posted in the comments that he'd already seen "The Body," and rereading the review before posting it made him cry all over again.
 * Hilarious in Hindsight: Many of the comments Mark's make during his reviews will be quite amusing to him upon later viewing, due to it inadvertently predicting or being ironic about something which will happen in the future of said book/show. Of course, to readers who know the work, it's funny in the present.
 * From his first reading of Harry Potter, his early comments in Philosopher's Stone about spiders and his readers' amusement about them became clear with the reveal of Aragog in the next book.
 * Also during Harry Potter, Mark frequently requested that certain characters he disliked "DIE IN ALL THE FIRES". This was quite funny in light of Crabbe's eventual fate.
 * In The Hunger Games review, Mark wonders whether Suzanne Collins will be able to kill off a character, especially children; he then read her kill off about half of her cast of characters in a single chapter.
 * Another common wish for particularly vile characters is that the earth would open up and swallow them. This paid off with the fates of Lord Asriel and Mrs. Coulter in His Dark Materials.
 * From his review of the last chapter of The Hobbit: "Would you let me walk into a volcano if you knew a certain path led straight into it?" Even better, the review is actually a Real Person Fic of Tolkien reading the book to his son Christopher, so you can easily read it as how he got a certain idea.
 * Plus, Tolkien insisting there are no ghosts in Middle Earth.
 * From Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the timehe wrote an entire paragraph all about how Willow was straight but he still wanted to be big gay friends with her. For bonus irony, this all happened one episode before Tara was introduced.


 * "Hush" was the one episode whose title had been spoiled for him as one of the most popular episodes, so he posted the notes he took while watching it, preceded by an introduction written before he saw it, where he worried that there wouldn't be any interesting dialogue to make the approach worthwhile. One of those notes is "WHY DID I SAY THAT? I REGRET EVERYTHING I'VE EVER DONE."
 * Memetic Mutation: ROSE LOVED DRUGS.
 * I THINK HE'S FEELING JUST A LITTLE BIT DOWN.
 * Did you know Zhao was voiced by Jason Issacs? Because he also played Lucious Malfoy!
 * He decided to write about The Princess Bride as if the metafictional S. Morgenstern story was actually true. Inevitably, some people didn't get the joke, resulting in every single chapter getting comments telling him that it wasn't real.
 * Portmanteau Couple Name: Mark uses Katpee for Katniss/Peeta. The alternative was Peenis.
 * Real Women Never Wear Dresses: Mark hates this trope. Really, really hates it. He loves to deconstruct it.
 * So Bad Its Good: His opinion of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode, "I Robot, You Jane": This is not the worst episode of Buffy. It’s so awful that it loops around to becoming an abstract art piece about the archaic nature of human interaction. It’s so awful that it’s as if the people made it specifically to appear on Mystery Science Theater 3000. It’s so awful that…well, it’s a waste of time and energy to spend one second hating it.
 * Spoil At Your Own Risk: Mark's spoiler rules are very simple; if he's reviewing it, and hasn't seen it yet, do not mention it. His fury shall be hard and swift.
 * Look at the number of comments on the Mockingjay chapters: They go down and down and down (or just say 'Can't talk or spoilers will fall out')... until the last two chapters, when people can finally talk about what happened.
 * This led to a new meme around the Mark Watches Avatar posts: THERE ARE NO SPOILERS IN MARK SING SE
 * Mark calls River Song his soulmate because of their similar attitudes toward spoilers.
 * It's now become general practice to write spoilery comments in rot13, as it's easy to just paste them into rot13.com and do it again if you want to read them.
 * There's also a Spoil Blog which acts as a "Place To Contain Yourself" if you want to discuss stuff. Also filled with lots of fan art and discussion related to the stuff Mark's reviewing.
 * The Woobie: He'll occasionally go off on a tangent about his early life if a scene in something he's reviewing hits close to home. From all evidence, his first 20 years or so were ridiculously depressing.