JonTron

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Man... I do love a good Video Game.

—Jon

Jon Jafari is JonTron, a Video Game and film critic on the now-defunct normalboots.com. Using a cheerful, energetic style and plenty of cutaway gags and visual puns, he talked about certain elements of video games, good and bad, and occasionally reviews specific titles. His sidekick was a green parrot named Jacques, who spoke in a vaguely robotic voice, had glowing red eyes, and offered stoic commentary to contrast Jon's boundless energy.

Although Jon sometimes critiqued bad video games and bashed them a lot (at times rather harshly), he was not a Caustic Critic. He used a lot less profanity than most others in his profession, and reacted to bad games with exaggerated confusion (and sometimes sadness or disappointment, or less often, outrage). His initial reaction to the nonsense and weirdness in the games he plays was chilled out and accepting... until he finally snapped, often with hilarious results. Jon's most famous video is Waterproofing My Life With Flex Tape, which caught the attention of Flex Seal and their promoter Phil Swift, which resulted in a sequel called Flex Tape II: The Flexening.

He is also known for being Not-So-Grump on Game Grumps, a Let's Play channel that became very popular on YouTube, until June 2013.

He claims to have been inspired mainly by The Angry Video Game Nerd and Spoony.

Jon was a member of Blistered Thumbs, the video games section of That Guy With The Glasses, until it shut down.

Jon has been married to Charlotte Claw since 2019.

Works Discussed:
JonTron provides examples of the following tropes:
  • Achievements in Ignorance: Jon is somehow able to play Minecraft with a Gamecube controller by putting a Metal Gear Solid box in a Super Nintendo. Eventually lampshaded near the start of his video on the Bubsy series.

Jon (Trying to appease Jacques): Jon, that doesn't go there, you silly BITCH!

  • Angrish: Expect him to fall into this when something particularly stupid happens in a game/movie he's reviewing.
  • Arc Words: God has come to reap the sinners. The past handful of episodes have also gone out of their way to mention milk that has gone bad.
  • Bleep, Dammit!: In "Boating Made (TOO) Easy", Jon is wondering if he can swear on the NASBLA website which is a long bleep with "cunt" uncensored.
  • The Cameo: Makes frequent appearances in Peanut Butter Gamer's show. In PBG's Cursed Mountain review, he appeared in a flashback as an old mountain guru.
    • Also, Egoraptor as Natalia in Malkovich's Gaming Game Show.
  • Candid Camera Prank: The second 'Gaming in Public' episode. To prove that people would exaggerate the (alleged) harmfulness of video games, Jon created a bogus petition claiming the Nintendo 3DS caused blindness in children (featuring, among other things, the phrase "Heil Hitler") and asked random passersby to sign it for him. All of them signed without reading... and one of them signed even after having read it. Jon, naturally, crowned him King.
  • Caption Humor
  • Catch Phrase: "I quit" whenever he finds something so incredibly stupid he has no other words to describe it.
  • Cloudcuckoolander: Every single episode will have you wondering if Jon is cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.
  • Cluster F-Bomb: When Malkovich offered to take calls from viewers on Malkovich's Gaming Guilty Pleasures, all but one of the callers replied with a simple "Fuck you." The one who didn't asked if his mother had a penis.
  • Creator Backlash: 'Top 10 Overrated Games'. A really solid episode, actually, but Jon probably couldn't handle the bad press. He's taken it off his site (the link once directing to it now leads to a sad song on YouTube), and the episode description reads something like, "This is an episode I made that I hate. It's now in its rightful place--Hell!"
  • Cutaway Gag
  • Deadpan Snarker: Jacques
  • Deep-Immersion Gaming: Parodied; Jon is seemingly sucked into his Joe & Mac cartridge, only to reappear in his house a moment later. Jacques asks how he managed to escape.

Jon: I just left.

    • Brick Joke: Turns out the characters from the game can " just leave" too. The episode ends with a dinosaur boss walking into Jon's living room.
  • Faux Horrific: When trying to play Final Fantasy XIII, it turned out that "The game's playing itself, Jon. The game's playing itself, Jon!"
  • Four Point Scale: Invoked Trope and Played for Laughs. Jon devised a meaningless ratings system wherein it's actually impossible for a game to receive bad marks, no matter how much he bashed it in his review. Sonic Colors and Donkey Kong Country Returns received an "A/5" and a "Six Golden Bananas+/Shigeru Miyamoto" respectively; even though Jon spent the whole video mocking them (though it's pretty clear he enjoyed both). Nimbus, described as "A game you will maybe forget", got a B/5.
  • Funny Foreigner: Malkovich
  • Genius Ditz: Despite his frenetic and slightly spastic persona, Jon has a very good understanding of game theory and will sometimes take a moment to explain exactly why a particularly bad fault is so fatal. For instance, his comments on being able to ignore the complex combo system inAquaman and win reliably by mashing the A button leads to an explanation of "Dominant Strategy", and the blatant Breaking the Fourth Wall in Bubsy 3D prompts him to elaborate on Willing Suspension of Disbelief and how such forced self-reference damages it. Since he tends to slow down when explaining these concepts to allow the audience to comprehend what he's saying, he usually lampshades them by shierking GAME THEORY TIME!! and/or splicing in a The More You Know type clip.
  • Go Mad from the Revelation: Reading 3 to 4 YouTube comments caused this to (briefly) happen to him.
    • In the Stairfax Tempratures review, his reaction to the Bamfodad.
  • Hypocritical Humor: When Hitalia reveals herself as a Randor in Malkovich's Gaming Game Show, she begins speaking in a made-up language with the occasional made-up word (namely "Malkovich" and "Quarksia") left in English, despite Jon criticizing this exact thing a mere month earlier in his Star Fox Adventures review. Knowing Jon, this was almost undoubtedly intended.
  • Keet: Jon himself, though lately he's been becoming less like this and more of a "scream a lot to bash the thing being reviewed" reviewer.
  • Large Ham: Jon
  • Malaproper: Jon does this constantly as part of his character. Sometimes he makes up for it by adding subtitles... which are also full of malapropisms.
  • Metaphorgotten: Jon has given us such beautiful similes as claiming that Christopher Belmont "climbs like frickin' Beach Boys on a hot summer Sunday" and describing a certain enemy in Monster Party as starched white pants "walking around like J. Edgar Hoover on a Tuesday afternoon." To say nothing of his analogy for the resilience of the human spirit in his Stairfax Temperatures review:

Jon: Here I am, a whole year later, still trucking along like a sack of potatoes on a long open road, wishing I'd stopped for gas at the last rest stop, and then on the Interstate 12, he gets hijacked and murdered by a bunch of Quaker ghosts!

  • The Most Dangerous Video Game: Hilariously invoked and parodied in his Final Fantasy XIII review.
  • NameTron: Far from seriously, of course.
  • Non-Human Sidekick: Jacques
  • Old Shame: In spite of it being among his best videos, Jon hates 'Top 10 Overrated Games', and has even taken it off his site.
    • For some reason he doesn't seem to like his 'Gaming In Public' videos either, and took those off his YouTube Channel.
  • Ridiculously Cute Critter: Jacques is often seen nuzzling or nibbling Jon, especially when Jon is acting emotional.
  • Robot Buddy: It isn't clear whether Jacques is a robot or just a very peculiar parrot. Out of universe though, he's just a parrot made to seem like a robot in editing.
  • Scenery Porn: His opening.
  • Schedule Slip: Initially he uploaded his videos weekly. However, the gap between new videos has gotten bigger and bigger to the point where the series updates monthly these days. However, he's been picking up the pace as of late; the Star Fox Adventures and Top 10 Video Game Commercials episodes were released within a week of each other.
  • Shout-Out: His avatar (see above) shows him wearing the yellow shorts, blue backpack, and shark's-tooth necklace of a certain anthropomorphic bear.
  • Show Within a Show: Malkovich's Gaming Guilty Pleasures
  • Something Completely Different: Jon did an episode reviewing The Lost World, this would be the first episode to have nothing to do with video games.
  • Spinning Newspaper: In reaction to Bubsy having damage dealt by falling too far without gliding.

JONTRON QUITS
"Falling damage in a platformer? There are some things no man should have to see. Nice tits btw" says a melancholy JonTron

Jon (casually): Oh hey, Jacques. I thought you died.

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