#oneaday Day 801: Infuriating Patterns

My wife watches a lot more "mainstream" YouTubers than I do — the most mainstream I go are LGR, ProJared and Game Grumps and with the possible exception of the latter, all of those are a fraction of the size of some of the channels she watches. And yet I like them all a lot better than the big, successful ones because they don't do things that drive me nuts.

I've been thinking about precisely why a lot of those bigger YouTubers drive me nuts and I've come to the conclusion that it essentially comes down to patterns. As someone with Asperger Syndrome, I am naturally predisposed to spot patterns, and sometimes they can be comforting, but at other times they can be absolutely infuriating.

For some reason, patterns that relate in any way to something "social" — be that the way people behave on social media, the way people interact with one another in reality or the way people put themselves across on video — are the things that consistently drive me the most nuts whereas, say, let me spot patterns in video games and I'll be happy until the end of time.

With that in mind, here is a non-comprehensive list of things that big YouTubers do consistently that drive me absolutely bonkers because I can spot the patterns of when they do them — and thus am able to predict with a near-100% success rate when they're going to use them.

• Kevin McCloud's "Local Forecast". The most overused piece of royalty-free music of all time. Any time a YouTuber wants to suggest that they are going shopping, or doing something mundane, or waiting for something to happen, they will use this piece. And I fucking hate it every time I hear it because it's just such a lazy shorthand.

• The X-Files theme. The X-Files was a genuinely awesome show in the '90s, but now its theme song is, once again, lazy YouTuber shorthand — this time for something "mysterious" or "unexplained" happening, even when that "mysterious" or "unexplained" happening is completely mundane and incredibly dull. Which it usually is.

• Spongebob timecards. The Internet's inexplicable obsession with Spongebob Squarepants is best exemplified by the sheer number of YouTubers who relentlessly use these — and nothing but these — to indicate the passage of time.

• The Metal Gear Solid "!" noise. You're surprised, or there's something surprising that you've just revealed. It doesn't need a sound effect. Or if it does, please pick another one. Please.

• Jumpcuts. Just breathe. It's okay. Everyone breathes. You don't need to cut out every time you take a breath. It feels more natural if you leave them in. If you take the scissors so ruthlessly to your own footage that you make your entire 20-minute video into one never-ending run-on sentence, that's a problem.

• Use of Nintendo sound effects to indicate "safe nerdiness". We get it, you're nerdy, geeky and lol so random, but in a completely non-threatening way. I don't need to hear a Mario coin sound every time you put something down on the table, or the Wii Shop theme every time you open your fridge. Also the Wii is two console generations old.

• White girls trying desperately to sound like black girls. One of the YouTubers my wife watches has a painful habit of yelling "IN THE TRAYUSH" like a stereotypical sassy black woman any time she doesn't like something, and it just makes me cringe every time. Particularly because said YouTuber is one of those ones who doesn't seem to like anything, so pretty much everything goes IN THE TRAYUSH.

• Pitch-shifting or fucking with audio levels to emphasise points or take the piss. This is pretty self-explanatory. There's one YouTuber in particular that my wife watches who deliberately clips the mic any time she's making some sort of "aside" and it always makes me want to take that microphone and jam it somewhere unpleasant. Double negative points if pitch-shifting and/or audio clipping is combined with a cheap, poor-quality "fisheye lens" video effect.

I mean… there must be a reason all these things (and plenty more that I've doubtless forgotten about) are used so consistently and relentlessly by not just one YouTuber, but so many of them. And, as noted above, I fully recognise the fact that the reason I find these things so upsetting and frustrating is likely because of my Asperger's. But at the same time, I can't help but feel these people with millions of subscribers should also really probably be showing a bit more in the way of creativity rather than using the same old stock music, sound effects and production trickery than everyone else.

Or perhaps those YouTubers' audiences genuinely like the predictable side of things; perhaps they're eagerly awaiting the next IN THE TRAYUSH, clipped mic moment or Spongebob timecard. In which case I should probably just acknowledge the fact that I'm not the target audience for most of these things, go on my way and continue doing things the way I like to do them.

It's just fun to complain sometimes, so long as you don't make too much of a habit of it!