The Nostalgia Chick/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


These things about The Nostalgia Chick are subjective - not everyone will agree with all of them.

  • Actor Shipping: Lindsay/Nella is quite popular, mostly for people who want unabashedly fluffy Les Yay instead of abuse and fucked-upness.
    • Even though he's engaged and she's dating Todd, Lindsay/Doug is also popular. The reason is basically the same - fluff and cuteness. And both of these are just for fun.
  • Alternative Character Interpretation: Is the Chick a hypocritical Know-Nothing Know-It-All who abuses people constantly to make herself feel better and is just as messed up as the Critic, or an intelligent, calm Closer to Earth feminist? There are enough people who believe either choice.
  • Arc Fatigue: To some fans (that being why it's on this page) "The Dark Nella Saga" just kept going and going and going... (Well, it is a saga.) But the problem was probably less the length of the arc itself - seven episodes, probably edging on three hours, all told - and more how an arc that seemed like it would be played out over a few weeks took two and a half months to release.
  • Awesome Music:
  • Base Breaker: See Ensemble Darkhorse below. Check the comments for many videos Nella appears in and you'll find plenty that lament her getting screen time.
  • Non Sequitur Scene: Between a long drought of videos, Lindsay posted one in the Summer of 2010... aboard the New York City V subway train with a rowdy crowd of college students celebrating its last trip before MTA killed that train line! Most viewers were perplexed, to say the least. It didn't help that, yes, she never spoke of it again.
  • Broken Base: Usually between those who prefer the style of her newer reviews - i.e. the ones featuring the supporting cast and based more around analysing tropes - and those who liked the linear reviews she originally put out.
  • Chick the Death Eater: While fangirls love her (they really do), in Fanfic she tends to be less the Distaff Counterpart of the Critic and more the female version of Ask That Guy With The Glasses.
  • Complaining About Shows You Don't Watch: The people who think of her as a militantly feminist, unfunny hippie lovechild. The Politically Incorrect Hero-ism and the Black Comedy aren't that hard to spot.
  • Crosses the Line Twice:
    • Nearly all the "Christmas Songs" video qualifies. She gets roofied by Brian the Sex Predator, makes her face look like a skeleton at one point and does a pretty good imitation of The Joker when she's mocking the "Christmas Shoes" Glurge. The video that accompanies "Please, Daddy, Don't Get Drunk This Christmas" goes from disturbing to hilarious when the realistic domestic abuse gives way to stop-hitting-yourself's and noogies. It was also her first Black Comedy video, which set the standard for the following episodes.
    • The Creepy Uncle joke in her "Enchanted Christmas" review.
    • Gleefully hip-thrusting when the Mulan villain says they should get a missing doll back to a little girl. And playing the bouncy "I Love Little Girls" over his segment in the "Top Ten Nostalgic Villains" list.
    • Spoony said in his commentary that "Spooning With Spoony" was her creation, not his.
    • Her response to the guy in Showgirls saying his girlfriend is having a baby: "Why not just shove her down the stairs and hope for the best?"
  • Discredited Meme: In her Villainesses countdown, the One Hundred and One Dalmatians have to stare at her sadly before she gives in and yells her "PUPPIES!" catchphrase. The Running Gag was put to death after that.
  • Dude, Not Funny: In her second "Thanks For The Feedback" video, she made a music video featuring a rap song about rape. The video was almost universally reviled as being in poor taste, and has since been taken down. Although not for that reason; Word of God says that she wasn't happy with the edit and didn't want it to be put up anyway.
    • Yes, okay, Interquels are pretty bad... but was it really necessary to compare the Enchanted Christmas movie to multiple holocausts?
    • While the backlash was much bigger when the Critic made his joke, her comment about "autistic temper tantrums" got people rather angry.
    • While the majority loved both episodes for Refuge in Audacity, there was a certain section of the fanbase that hated her for coming up with the idea of the first "Spooning With Spoony".
    • On her blog, she talked about a mother in the comment sections being offended when she used the word "retarded" in a video.
    • The "Haha, Lindsay stuffed a pillow under her shirt and is now fat and a slob" jokes were probably mined for laughs more often than was necessary.
  • Ensemble Darkhorse: Nella. Check the comments for any video which she appears in and you'll find plenty that gush about how awesome she is. Lindsay seems to have noticed, given how Nella seems to have started appearing in almost every video after mid-2009.
    • P-Cash was pretty much the only thing in the infamous "Rape Rap" video that got a consistently positive reaction.
    • The Sex Bot went away for a long time, but was loved and now is in a lot more episodes.
    • If the Nella & Elisa double-act keeps getting bigger, they could be a Spotlight-Stealing Squad.
    • Elisa has actually gotten her own show: Maven of the Eventide. She's come a long way from the Makeover Fairy.
  • Evil Is Sexy: The Chick's Slasher Smile when she's being evil is both adorable and utterly terrifying.
    • It seems to be unanimous amongst fangirls and fanboys alike; Dark Nella is hot.
    • We also have Dr. Tease, The Makeover Fairy and even Brian The Sexual Predator has his fans when he wears a leather jacket.
  • Fan Dumb: Her fans can be extremely clingy at times. On the forums, the personal nature of her FAQ thread drove her away and it took a while before they got that she wasn't coming back to answer any more questions.
    • In her appearance on Transmission Awesome, Rollo T noted that the questions in the FAQ thread in her forum tended to get a bit inappropriate. Leading Paw to quip, "I may not know your middle name, but I know your taste in porn!"
    • She's also complained a few times about how the Critic can swear as much as he wants to and nobody cares, while her swearing either gets perved over or bitched at.
    • Her more... protective fans bashed the Fern Gully review for "woman abuse", despite the fact that she gave as good as she got and she actually started the fight when he provoked her.
    • They also have this tendency to act like her reviews are the only intelligent, well-thought-out ones on the site, while all the others (especially the Critic's) are just shouting "herp derp, this shit sucks!" constantly.
      • This is a genuine comment on her Facebook page: "Compared to Lindsay's brand of humor, Doug is like a monkey throwing feces at a sad zoo-going child eating a tarnished ice cream cone." Uh, a touch unfair, don't you think?
    • Even though she made fun of this attitude herself in Kickassia, they also seem to think that she has the very worst Hate Dumb and she only gets criticized because she's female. While the shit-stirring trolls do go for sexism with her, everyone on TGWTG gets threats and creepiness and other nasty things. It just shows that they think she's a woman to be protected first and a person (who can so clearly look after herself) second.
    • She gets very angry when Critic fanboys tell her she needs to stay in her territory and not review "boy stuff" like the X-Men cartoon.
    • Many goths weren't amused by the jokes in her review of The Craft, forgetting the fact that A) She's comedian first and foremost, telling jokes is her job, and B) She was less making fun of actual goth culture than the silliness of the movie.
    • She's made two abortion jokes, one in Grease about coat hangers and the other in Showgirls about pushing the pregnant woman down the stairs. Even though she can joke about whatever the hell she wants, people didn't like these because of her own abortion about half a year prior.
    • There are some who yell at Todd in the Shadows because they have no idea why he'd reject her. As hypocritical and assy as he is, she's a (hilarious) Stalker with a Crush who can't take a hint and if he doesn't want her, then he doesn't want her. Simplez, yes?
  • Fountain of Memes
  • Funny Aneurysm Moment: Not an example from within the same work, but The Running Gag of her Hocus Pocus review centres on the film's hang-ups with virgins, leading her to say "I mean, why do virgins even exist? Why don't they just lose it straight out of the womb...screaming and bleeding?" What would've been a bit of Dead Baby Comedy / Crosses the Line Twice moment becomes awful after the creation of A Serbian Film, which several of the other TGWTG comntributors have reviewed.
  • Growing the Beard: She began to develop more of her own review style starting roughly around the time of her Armageddon review, after which her BFF Nella became a regular on the show. Around this point is when her reviews took on a more trope based look with a lot more Sketch Comedy. Then again, see Broken Base above. And arguably, her "Top 10 Disturbing and Inescapable Christmas Songs" list proved that dark, disturbing humor is what she's really good at.
    • The Chick as a character really cemented finally at "Playing God", when she got her Sex Bot.
  • Harsher in Hindsight: She took quite a bit of heat for her Schedule Slip during 2009-10. Which is pretty painful after the news came out that she was a little busy getting an abortion, and then making a documentary about it for her master's thesis. She should be respected for still being around and making funny videos for the internet even while that was happening.
    • In her weight-issues-discussing "Thanks For The Feedback", she mentions that people judge her appearance far more than they do the Critic's. The playing field is leveling out a bit more now, with comments about the "cellulite" on his legs in Suburban Knights, how he would look much better if he lost a few stone and how he should stop raiding his fridge more than five times a day.
  • Hate Dumb: In her "Disaster Movies of Roland Emmerich" review, she got quite a grilling for using the destruction of the Hometree in Avatar as a counter-argument. It Makes Sense in Context, but suffice to say, it's not so much that her argument was bad, it's seems to be because... she used Avatar.
    • You get people willfully ignoring that Chick is a very different persona from Lindsay and calling the latter a snobby fandom-hater when she's clearly not.
  • Heartwarming in Hindsight: In the first "Thanks For The Feedback", the Critic breaks down and shout-asks her if she even cares about him. She doesn't have time to answer before he storms off, but various episodes later on show pretty clearly that he's one of the very few people she does give a shit about.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: This video, which Lindsay originally made while in high school, involves (among other things) a giant stuffed bear with AIDS having an affair with a teenager. In other words, Pedobear.
    • In her early reviews, she liked making fun of Belligerent Sexual Tension between characters and how people seemed to think that was entertaining. She has a Masochism Tango/Dating Catwoman thing with the Critic that's incredibly enjoyable for both us and them.
    • In the My Little Pony review, her main beef was that the characters were deathly boring and had no conflict. The new show has had each of the mane cast break down at least once.
    • "And besides, who's going to be interested in a female character who's pretty shamelessly a knock-off of her already popular male counterpart?" Seeing how fricking huge the character sheet is, evidently quite a lot of people.
    • She introduced a character named "Lord MacGuffin". In Pixar's Brave...
    • Her first episode related to the music industry was released about the same time her future IRL boyfriend came onto the site.
  • Hollywood Homely: Nella, especially in the Grease review. Many Comically Missed the Point and treated her like a woobie, not listening to the fact that Nella wrote that sideplot herself and is perfectly happy with her appearance.
  • Ho Yay: Actually a Les Yay with BFF Nella:

Nella: [Suggesting the Chick dates the Critic] I think you should go out ... of this apartment ... Away from me ... People are starting to talk. The shirts don't help.

[The shirts read "Mr. Owl, how many licks does it take?" on Nella and "I (heart) my ("kitten") on the Chick.]

  • I Knew It!: A few fics guessed correctly that she would rape Spoony to get revenge on him for hurting her, and in "Rejected Ideas For 'Spooning With Spoony'", she seems to do it.
  • Jerkass Woobie: The Chick is horrible to Nella, has an abused Sex Bot and tried to overthrow the Critic for her own gain in Kickassia, but she has terrible self-esteem, has a heart of... not gold exactly but bronze, had an bad childhood that she still has issues over and totally broke down in "Spooning With Spoony".
    • And now we have her crush on Todd, who ignores her entirely no matter how hard she tries because of his continual obsession with Lupa. It's pathetic, kinda scary (a parody of Misery was even cut for too much creepiness) and established as not love, but like his own pathetic obsession, she's so fucked up about it that you kinda have to feel bad for her.
    • The Makeover Fairy is a horrible, shrill Alpha Bitch with far too high standards of beauty, but she's a Nervous Wreck who genuinely believes she's doing the right thing and cling-hugs to Nella and Todd when they take the blame themselves for their horrible makeovers.
  • Just Here for Godzilla: In her Bratz episode, more people were interested in her dynamic with the Critic than in her actual review.
  • Memetic Badass: Most fanfic fandoms aren't usually fond of women. Not so here. There's even been a trend for the Chick to be portrayed as the kind of Goddess that takes sacrifices.
  • Memetic Molester: The TGWTG Kink Meme usually paints the Chick as a dommy sociopath who likes to pick up guys (and girls) with chloroform.
  • Misaimed Fandom: In the Chick/Todd/Lupa Triangle Of Rejection, the only one you're meant to feel properly sorry and root for is Lupa. Chick and Todd are only sympathetic because they're so pitiful and for either of them to get what they want (when the object of their affections really doesn't return the feelings) would be creepy as hell.
    • She still gets complaints that her reviews aren't even close to being passionate and that she sounds bored, when it should have been made clear from the X-Men review and all of her Not So Above It All moments that she thinks she's "too good" for that kinda thing. And really, that complaint already is a high YMMV.
    • To Lindsay's irritation, the character is seen sometimes as a feminist role model, and even gets bashed for not being one. While she says plenty of valid things, she's at heart an abusive, judgmental, stalking, over-exaggerated comedy character not to be taken seriously.
    • It might help that she's so dominating and can ignore being in trouble pretty well, but she's really not meant to be a badass taking names. She's just a broken little girl who firmly believes in Don't You Dare Pity Me!.
  • Moe: Nella for being an abused Woman Child and Maven for being a pretentious but lovable Perky Goth fangirl.
  • Narm Charm: The last half of the "Kirk vs. Picard video", where Chick and Nella meet to do battle, is gloriously cheesy.
  • Nausea Fuel: During her review of Mulan, Lindsey and Nella wonder about the Chinese practice of footbinding, then later show us some horrifying pictures of bound feet (*shudder*). "Say what you want about Communism, but at least they put a stop to that shit!"
  • Never Live It Down: Even though it was taken off the site quickly, the "Rapping About Rape" video and all the drama surrounding it.
    • Her Refuge in Audacity "worse than seven holocausts" comment seems to be getting there too.
    • Those two examples are nothing compared to the on-going backlash towards her review of Dune.
    • God, you chloroform one guy in a sexualized, enjoying-yourself-immensely way and suddenly you're the chloroform queen. (This is a lighter example than the rest, obviously.)
    • In an also lighter sense and around twitter, being an "obsessive compulsive stickler for pitch" and autotuning the majority of people in the musical numbers. Even though mostly by one or two notes.
  • Nightmare Fuel: Here.
  • Older Than They Think: Fred The Bear predates 4chan itself and therefore Pedobear by at least four years.
  • Paranoia Fuel: She seems to know exactly when Todd is miserable and is willing to make him feel even worse so he can do what she wants. For anyone who's been stalked, it'll hit too close to home even though it's Played for Laughs.
  • Reviews Are the Gospel: Tends to be the case for her male viewers when she trashes a girly film.
  • Rewatch Bonus: You'll be surprised to see just how many moments in the earlier reviews that seemed like a prototype of the messed up, trying-to-be-sane-but-failing Psychopathic Womanchild character we have today.
  • She Panned It, Now She Sucks: She pissed off quite a few people with her negative review of Dune.
    • So did her review of the Transformers franchise. In a self-parody, The Nostalgia Critic bitched at her for that one too.
    • Inevitably, fans of the The Little Mermaid weren't too keen on her hate for it.
    • Apparently Disney fangirls can be just as savage as fanboys, because they got their claws out when she reviewed (not panned, we might add) Mulan and slammed Hercules
      • Notably, Lindsay's actual opinion of Hercules sums up to "It was flawed, but I DO enjoy it."
    • People who liked Dragonheart for more than just the "fucking dragon", bitched heavily after her review of it too.
    • Not everyone agrees with her view that Shrek was a hate-filled Take That at Disney.
    • Early on, Gargoyles fans weren't exactly happy when she acted like two well-established Tear Jerker moments in the show were unintentionally hilarious instead.
    • As you can tell from this page alone, she made her rage at Beauty and the Beast: The Enchanted Christmas abundantly clear. The movie was actually received quite well, so at the very least people were confused by her calling it worse than "seven holocausts".
    • During her review of The Man in the Iron Mask she said the only reason the movie did well was because of squeeing Leonardo DiCaprio fangirls. People who liked the movie as a movie were not pleased.
    • The Fifth Element. Many people think she really misrepresented this film, especially when she didn't show Leeloo kicking ass so she could complain about her being The Chick.
    • Really, the Chick is subject to this far more often than the Critic, since she tends to review films that are usually rather well-liked, such as... Well, Mulan, Hercules and The Little Mermaid, while the Critic reviews, well... This. She explains this in the Worst Witch review, as people tend to be more forgiving towards the popular films rather the obscure.
    • Many fans of Jem were very angry at Lindsy for her panning the series, the biggest complaint came from her not even bothering to watch the series entirely before she reviewed it.
    • Although she didn't actually REVIEW it, she put a small Take That to Liloand Stitch as "Slapped together garbage" that "didn't have as much passion put into it" as The Lion King in her review of The Lion King.
  • She Really Can Act: Nella in the Dark Nella Saga. Funny, genuinely scary and able to go to between "a quasi-demonic force of evil" and her usual fangirly self.
  • Spotlight-Stealing Squad: Nella and Elisa have gained more prominence in her newer reviews.
  • Straw Man Has a Point: Well, maybe Todd in the Shadows could stand to wear something brighter...
  • Tear Jerker: Here.
  • Unpopular Popular Character: Nella, oh so much.
  • Vocal Minority: Like how Critic fangirls don't actually want him Bound and Gagged in their basement, most Chick fanboys are respectful people who think she's great fun to watch (so not just something pretty to look at) and don't insult other contributors when praising her.
  • The Woobie: The Sex Bot. "I was not God's will!" How could you not feel bad for it? The other characters manage, as its complaints are completely ignored.
    • Elisa looking increasingly heartbroken as she's passed over for every part in the reenactments and gets stuck playing Kyle McLachlan in the Showgirls review.
    • Nella went right into this in the second part of the "Dreamworks Vs. Disney" episode, where she forgoes the Dance Party Ending to go into a ball and cry.
  • Yoko Oh No: While the majority of Critic fangirls love her, there are a crazy few with either a Double Standard regarding skits and humor or just like talking about how they'd enjoy beating the shit out of her while calling him adorable. The fact that Doug seems to love Lindsay like a little sister doesn't seem to enter into their heads.
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