Kingdom of Loathing/YMMV


 * Acceptable Targets: Hippies, frat boys, snooty artists, furries, Canadians, Goths... this game makes fun of everyone.
 * Alternative Character Interpretation: The Council of Loathing. Are they just the simple standins for the king who give you your quests or an evil group of individuals in league with the Naughty Sorceress. They start off simply getting you to do some of their dirty work (What do they use that mosquito larva for?) and as you get stronger try to send you to your death. (I mean come on go and start and finish a war all by yourself, bonus points if you kill both sides.) And when your finally defeat the Sorceress and free the King they pretty much outright tell you to go kill yourself, as soon as you oblige the Sorceress suspiciously comes back and steals the King again.
 * Actually, the "evil" interpretation seems to be canon. See The History of the Penguin Mafia, where the Mafia at one point actually looked like the preferable alternative. At the very least, if they aren't evil, they're incredibly incompetent.
 * Complacent Gaming Syndrome: One has to feel sorry for Jick and Skullhead. They put so much time and effort into designing the Bugbear Invasion path, and the response from most of the playerbase? "It's not Boris 2.0? Screw it."
 * Crowning Moment of Awesome: The ultimate enemy for 100% boredom in Crimbo 2010? The Best Game Ever
 * Also, acquiring the Order of the Silver Wossname. The adventure in which you get it is made of win, despite the Guide Dang It involved.
 * The final battle with
 * Everyone's pretty much in agreement that The Bone Star was a CMOA both for the event it was a part of and especially for Jick's art. They even made shirts with the picture.
 * Game Breaker: Arguably, the Hodgman's imaginary hamster familiar. It raises all your attributes by 20 and converts Hobo power to more Meat drops, item drops and HP/MP regeneration. You get it from beating Hodgman, The Hoboverlord, but only if Hobopolis (a clan-only dungeon) was cleared in a single day using no more than 1100 adventures (and even then only if your clan leader feels like giving it to you), making it a bit of an Infinity+1 Sword as well.
 * Goddamned Bats: The Irritating Series of Random Encounters are a homage to the annoying bats of yore, as can be told by their name, and their annoyingness. Not to mention the irritating adventuring you have to do in lower-level regions to find an adventure or item you missed or didn't know of earlier.
 * Also, played literally in an early area of the game, the Bat Hole. As you may guess the place is full of the annoying beasts, in any flavor and shape.
 * Ho Yay: It's extremely easy to interpret Boris and his minstrel Clancy as being in a relationship.
 * Memetic Mutation: In the game's forums, "X makes hardcore easier" was a meme regarding the Mr. Store familiars. This was, of course, before the addition of a "Bad Moon" option which prevented the use of such items.
 * Also, killing the hermit. For the record, it's impossible, despite many rumours. Nowadays, "killing the hermit" is a euphemism among players of the game for masturbation.
 * Nightmare Fuel: The basis of Spooky damage.
 * Everything about the Guy Made of Bees.
 * Scrappy Mechanic: The one they may yet remove is delay (which deliberately makes it take longer for you to get quest items). The one they'll probably never remove is Ronin (which cuts off any outside support for 1,000 turns in Normal ascension runs).
 * Serious Business: The Mall of Loathing is one of the ways players can interact, buying and selling items to each other via the easier difficulty modes. Millions are made and lost via the market. Many people are very vehement that the mall should not be Serious Business ("the mall is not the game" is a common catchphrase in the forums). That just clinches it.
 * Don't forget the Money Making Game. That's real Serious Business.
 * Sidetracked by the Gold Saucer: Money Making Game. Also any kind of one-time special content (such as the Crimbo events), partly because everyone wants to grind as much of the limited-issue items as possible before they are gone forever.
 * The introduction of the Rogue Program familiar, and the Game Grid Arcade, added even more mini-games that are even more time-consuming. Essentially added turn-based versions of Sinistar, Metroid, Street Fighter, Gauntlet, and Star Control II. Partially averted as you can just turn your tokens into tickets for prizes at a steady rate that doesn't take much time... but you don't get nearly as many tickets that way.
 * Squick: The basis of Sleaze damage.
 * "Stop Having Fun!" Guys: Lord help us, but even this comedy-based MMORPG has developed a core of hardcore speed/powerrunners who have all the traits of the SHFG. You can recognize them by their use of the word "optimal" and their hatred of anything they view as frivolous, even though frivolity is the point of the game. Jick doesn't seem to mind them, but Mr. Skullhead fucking hates these guys, to the point the O.A.F. familiar was made to give them the finger.
 * That One Boss: The Enraged Cow requires you to use a barbed-wire fence, which rarely and randomly drops at the Shore vacation. This was thankfully patched to make it guaranteed to drop.
 * That One Level:
 * The Orc Chasm quest. Just about every step ranges from Guide Dang It to Insane Troll Logic. The quest itself isn't hard to do if you know WHAT to do, but for someone trying to figure it out on their own, it's crazy. Most notably, to complete the quest you need to find a way across the Orc Chasm, your only hint being that the pirates might be able to help you somehow (As a sidenote, you might not actually have access to the Obligatory Pirate Cove, and the game offers no hint on how to get there.)
 * And how do you get access to the Pirate Cove? The one that no one tells you about? You must
 * The Quest for the Holy MacGuffin. An exceptionally long quest made up of five mini-quests. As a reward, you get
 * The portion is extra-nasty. You have to play a Luck-Based Mission to change the contents of the lower floors, so that you can get a token, buy a bomb with the token, and blow up a pile of rocks with the bomb. If you go to the bottom area at the wrong time, rats will steal your token before you get to use it, or the bomb will be wasted on the wrong rubble pile. Once you finally blow up the correct rock pile, you can fight the boss....
 * That One Puzzle: The lava maze during the Nemesis quest, a deliberate, lampshaded example. Fail it (losing HP in the process) enough times and you get the option to skip it at the cost of 10 adventures and a lessened reward.
 * That One Sidequest:
 * Building the Misshapen Animal Skeleton. It's not so much that it's long, but that the only way to get all the bones for it without spending meat is to quest for a long time in an area where the monsters drop weak items and are so weak themselves that you get almost no XP for beating them. The item that you get the bones from frequently gives you nothing.
 * The Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot familiar. It needs a pineal gland! They don't even drop anymore. The only way to get one is to spend hundreds of thousands in the mall.
 * Or getting the Silver Wossname. To get it, you have to kill exactly 999 hippies and 999 frat boys during the Hippy vs. Frat Boy war until there's only one warrior of each side left. And use an item that drops in a different area entirely in the ensuing boss fight. Which is inaccessible during the war. The process has its own strategy guide. Yes, there are side-sidequests to kill more warriors per adventure, but if you do that wrong...
 * Let us not forget the ever-dreaded "Kittycore" mode, a run where the player must use the Black Cat familiar (which, as opposed to helping out in some way like most familiars, will instead hinder you at nearly every opportunity) for almost the entire run. The point of this is to allow you to do a Bad Moon run whenever you want (ordinarily, you need to have not used a single ten leaf clover in the previous run to do a BM run). Fight a single battle without the cat at your side, and you can kiss your reward goodbye. To make this worse, there are a few points in the game where you NEED to use another familiar to proceed with the game (namely, finding the Black Market, and 2 spots in the Sorceress' Lair). There are horror stories of players switching to the necessary familiar, only to forget to switch BACK to the cat before they engage a monster, thereby ruining their entire run (especially vexing because aforementioned points in the lair are immediately before the Final Boss herself).
 * The aforementioned dwarven factory puzzle. Dear God.
 * Hobopolis. If you want a shot at "beating" it, you'll need to join a clan, and some clans additionally require you to donate meat and items just to get access to their basement. Then, you have to spend large amounts of meat to get the practically necessary adventure turn increasers and optimal gear, and unless you have permed several skills really well-suited for that purpose or levelled up a lot, healing items and buff potions. If you somehow manage to do all this, you'll likely still have to organize several other players to assist, approve said request with a clan leader and (if you're going for Hodgman's best loot) coordinate your actions with near-pinpoint accuracy. Mess it up? You're be out millions for the cost of reflooding the area. All of the prior steps don't even take into account the fact that you need to collect "hobo glyphs" (special signs) over several ascensions just to read the signs in the zone.
 * Ugly Cute: The Pet Cheezling, a disgustingly adorable grinning blob of cheese, which makes disgustingly adorable burbly noises, and heals you by melting your enemies and pumping you full of an unknown substance, which is pretty disgustingly... disgusting.