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ProtonJon
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https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/pjon15.png
Moving faster than Pokey since 2007.
"Best bug tester you never paid for."
— from her Twitter/X bio

Proton Jon (preferred name: Claire Wheeler) is a Canadian Let's Player, game collector, and Twitch streamer, part of the original group of Video Let's Players from Something Awful. Like most of them, she created a YouTube account to host the videos she made. One day, she posted a two part LP of a level from Kaizo Mario World. It became a huge hit, and one of the seminal LP videos on YouTube, eventually leading to her becoming a YouTube Partner on October 18, 2010.

Many LPers, some of whom have become quite popular in their own right, list her as an inspiration. Depending on both when a video she's done was made and whatever's happening in the game she's playing, her commentary style can alternate between wry, witty commentary and hysterical, profane, and incomprehensible rambling, sometimes in the same sentence. Many of her unique turns of phrase have gone viral, sometimes to her chagrin.

Her most popular videos are her Super Mario World romhack LPs and her posts of Super Smash Bros. Brawl matches with her friends, both of which are on indefinite hiatus, especially the former, due to having become burned out on Mario World romhacks as a whole. She is perhaps more infamously known for her long-running Let's Play of Superman 64, a playthrough that, between the quality of the game in question, the significant amount of research and editing that goes into each episode, and real-life events surrounding the LP itself, such as a person Claire was trying to buy equipment from straight-up dying...yeah, it's no wonder Claire herself considers this LP cursed. Although still incomplete after 10 years, Claire does still plan to finish it... eventually.

In addition to her Let's Plays, she also did an occasional brief review series called "You Should Play/Avoid This", starting with Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons.

As of the mid-2010s, Claire has made streaming on her Twitch page her main source of content, with Let's Plays and other YouTube videos on the side. Signature among the varying types of streams she does are "Game Clearing" streams, where she attempts to beat as many of the unfinished games in her MASSIVE collection as she can, and various types of "Fortune Cookie" streams, where Claire rolls a set number of randomly-selected games (usually 5, with additional options added by whomever is commentating with her), and then puts up a poll to see which one the stream audience wants to see her play.

These streams have led to some...interesting in-jokes, such as a full-blown multiverse of "Alt-Claires" and other miscellaneous characters large enough to warrant a dedicated fanwiki, which can be found here. Also affiliated with the stream is an Image Booru for stream fan-art, which can be perused here. You can also view a spreadsheet of most, if not all, of the games Claire has streamed here, and the many, many games in Claire's game collection here.

Since Twitch automatically deletes archived streams after two months, Claire created a second YouTube channel, where all of her streams will (eventually) be uploaded. Currently, barring any issues on Claire's end, newer streams are generally uploaded to this channel roughly a day after they initially went live.

Along with Chuggaaconroy and NintendoCapriSun, she is also part of a collaborative LP group known as The Runaway Guys. Claire occasionally did dedicated streams with the Guys (and the occasional guest) on her Twitch whenever the trio met up to record footage, and through 2024, the group hosted an annual live charity marathon on Claire's Twitch called The Runaway Guys Colosseum (Thrown Controllers Colosseum in 2024). Tropes related to these streams generally belong on the Guys' page.

In May 2021, Claire became a member of the re-refreshed NormalBoots collective, joining longtime friends and collaborators The Completionist, PeanutButterGamer, and DidYouKnowGaming? creator Shane Gill, as well as fellow newcomers Chadtronic and Lady Pelvic. She has since left the group.

Finally, alongside her regular Twitch streams, Claire currently co-hosts a weekly gaming podcast called Top Down Perspective (work page here). She also co-created and co-hosted The Disc Only Podcast (work page here), an inside joke taken way too far that generally aired live via Claire's Twitch page the first Tuesday of each month, in which Claire, Tom Fawkes, Stephen Georg, and The 8-Bit Drummer discussed everything from things that happened in their personal lives to the South of the Border tourist trap; the show ended its run in December of 2024.

As of 2018, she's married to Lucahjin; the two have also done a few Let's Plays together for her channel, stretching back to around when the two were dating- see Lucah's page for tropes related to those.

As of March 2021, Claire has SIX LPs completely recorded and are planned to be released on a regular schedule. More details here.

In April 2025, she came out as a transgender woman and revealed that her preferred name is Claire, though she will still answer to Jon if called that to prevent confusion.

When it's done:

Current Let's Plays:

  • Jet Set Radio Futurenote 

Previous Let's Plays:

Upcoming Let's Plays:

  • Star Fox 2 note 

Status unknown:

Games played on stream:

Her Let's Plays and other videos provide examples of:

    open/close all folders 

    A-D 
  • Accidental Misnaming: A stream in August 2016 featured the first appearance of Claire's friend Brian on co-commentary. During the stream, it was revealed that his name is actually Ryan and Claire had been calling him the wrong name for months, and apparently Ryan never noticed until then. To make matters worse, Claire claims that when they first met, she actually got Ryan's name right, but then someone else called him Brian and he responded to it, so Claire figured Ryan was the wrong name.
  • Actually Pretty Funny:
  • Adaptation Distillation: Claire condenses the entire plot of Tri Force Heroes into a single paragraph.
    Claire: The entire game takes place in the kingdom of Hytopia. Princess Styla is the princess there. She's not very smart. She opened a gift that was vibrating. She got cursed. Now she's dressed like she's at an anime convention or a hockey game. Her father spends the entire game going like this: (cue Big "NO!"). Her father put out a call for heroes. For some reason, you're the Link from A Link Between Worlds because Nintendo said so. Madame Couture gives you magical costumes that give you superpowers. Every other NPC is pretty much useless. (cue Big "NO!")
  • Age-Gap Romance: Married to Lucahjin, who is nine years older than her.
  • Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • And That's Terrible: The original quote, given a Shout-Out in Superman 64 part 4.
  • Angrish: When he gets really frustrated, she sometimes lapses into this. The entire second half of Kaizo Special Stage 2 is basically one long string of it.
  • Appropriated Appellation: According to an interview she gave, the name "ProtonJon" started out as a mildly insulting high school nickname based on the weak connection that Claire was a fan of Proto Man from Mega Man (Classic) and they were studying protons in physics.
  • April Fools' Day:
    • If the day a regular stream airs happens to fall on April Fools' Day, Claire usually does a Misfortune Cookie stream, a Fortune Cookie stream in which a bunch of crazy, chaotic rules replace the usual ones.
    • April Fools' Day in 2021 instead fell on a Thursday- the day Claire, following her return to making YouTube videos, set for uploads of whatever the main LP was at the time. So, when viewers went to check Claire's YouTube channel that afternoon, expecting Episode 4 of Blaster Master Zero... they instead got the long-awaited tenth episode of Superman 64. Not a Bait-and-Switch, either- the actual thing.
  • Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: From the end of Super Kaizo World Part 1:
    Claire: Oh fu-hu-hu-hu-hu-huck, I didn't imagine that! Oh, what the hell! I have to do all that over again... rewind! (Beat) ...I'M OUT OF REWINDS! AAARRRGH, I gotta do all that over again! ...and the phone's ringing!
  • The Artifact: Her "Door Gods" Twitch emote, which stems from a Running Gag specific to her Dead Space streams with Patty from years ago. She repeatedly talked about replacing it with something else, but her Twitch channel ended up becoming so popular that she was given more emote slots faster than she could think of emotes to put in them, so it's still around to this day and fans occasionally find ways to revive the joke at unexpected moments in other games.
    • Her Bomb emote was also originally a reference to her Bomberman Act:Zero matches, but since those faded from being a regular event, fans have repurposed it to refer to sub bombs (when a viewer gifts a large number of Twitch subs to chat members).
  • Artifact Title: The name ProtonJon itself, after Claire came out. She decided to keep it as she had been using the screen name for almost two decades before coming out, feeling it won't make sense to rebrand after using it for such a long time.
  • Ascended Fanboy:
    • Several of Claire's recurring Co Comms on her livestreams started off as fans of her before becoming a major part of her streams. These inlude Jewker, who was originally just someone following Claire's cookie streams who sniped his way into a (semi-)private match between Claire and her friend John (gamertag: GermanFatass). He's since gone on to become a chat favorite and something of a Foil/Rival to Dan (who coincidentally enough ALSO falls under this trope), and eventually became one of his most well known co comms. There's also Myohelo, who gained Claire's attention with his video "One Wesker Angel", which Claire loved so much that she modded him.
    • Claire herself counts as one with her involvement with Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night Kickstarter. She herself sarcastically describes her reaction to being asked to help as being "not at all fanboy".
      Gmail message: OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GOD
      Caption: Actual response I sent.
  • Ascended Meme: Claire's monthly podcast "Disc Only" started in July 2020 is based on a joke segment for an earlier The Runaway Guys Colosseum stream where the cast loaded up the Game Boy Player's boot screen without a cartridge in the device and talked over it for an hour.
  • Astonishingly Appropriate Interruption: "There's actually a FUCKING HELL!"
  • Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!: A rather literal example in Resident Evil 5. Both Claire and especially Jake have a tendency to, if they think they see the telltale glint of a treasure, forget everything they're doing and focus on getting the treasure. Including when they're in the middle of a boss battle. Made even more literal when Claire revealed that she had been diagnosed with adult ADHD.
  • Author Appeal: Claire has several favorite pop culture figures she will sometimes structure projects around, including Batman, Captain Falcon, Robocop and the Ninja Turtles.
  • Author Vocabulary Calendar: Claire really likes the word "sassy". More recently (2014/15) she has also started using "sweet" and "sick" a lot as all-purpose intensifiers, especially in a Mundane Made Awesome way.
    • She also really likes the phrase 'a hot minute'.
  • Back-to-Back Badasses: At the end of Episode 6 of Aria of Sorrow, Claire moves Soma behind Genya so they stand like this, then has Soma strike a pose. Much to Claire's dismay, Genya doesn't return Soma's supposed fistbump.
  • Battle Cry:
  • Be Careful What You Wish For: In this video, Claire says she approves of the romhack level made by one "Xanaboy", and recommends that he make more. Xanaboy does indeed make more, as can be seen in this video.
  • Berserk Button:
    • Invisible Blocks. These things are the bane of her existence. She got so fed up with them, she made an entire level full of them in Lunar Magic and had two of her friends play through them.
      Claire: Stop it with the invisible coin blocks. They're not fu— shit.
    • Claire heavily dislikes people that send her ROM hacks with level designs that have a Game-Breaking Bug that prevents her from progressing, forcing her to edit the level herself to fix it. She also gets upset when people copy and paste the original Super Mario World level designs into their ROM hacks, citing this as lazy.
    • People demanding new uploads for the Superman 64 LP also triggers this. While people have made cracks at Claire for her upload schedule for a while, Superman 64 has run into several snags and some time ago Claire ran into technical issues that have prevented new videos from happening. She's made a Facebook post about it, has mentioned it in the description of every video she's put out since the problem came up and brings it up often in her livestreams, but people keep asking her. In one of her streams, she talked at length at her frustration about the comments and the situation in general.
    • In Yoshi's Island, the Red Coin Fly Guys anger her to no end, as they only appear for a few seconds before flying away and never coming back, forcing Claire to restart the stage (or commit suicide to return to a mid-stage checkpoint) for another chance at grabbing the Coin and getting 100% Completion.
      • From the same LP, Bandits. Especially the ones hidden in the background.
    • As of mid-2017, backseat gaming has become a huge one on her livestreams, primarily due to the large amounts of hostility backseaters tend to display, to the point where it could easily qualify as cyberbullying. She's cut games short more than once because of excessive backseaters, and has even considered banning multiple legitimately good games simply because of the amount of backseating she's gotten while playing them.
  • Beware the Nice Ones: Reading the page, it should be obvious which LP this came up in.
    Claire: FUCK YOU, SHPECHSEAL STAGE! FUCK YOU! DERE I GOT FUKIN PISSED, CHA HAPPEH?!
  • Big "WHAT?!": Often. Whenever she plays a game blind, you're guaranteed to hear lots of these.
    • "My calling card: saying the word 'what' in a very high pitch!"
    • Claire reacts this way when she hears that Bomberman Act:Zero is the 15th most-played game on Twitch.
    • Her reaction to getting stuck behind a Chomp Rock in 5-Extra of Yoshi's Island where she's normally supposed to ski right over it.
      Claire: WHAT. WHAT. WHAT. That can happen!?
  • Big "YES!": During a stream when to respond to a friend on a chat apparently.
  • Boob-Based Gag: A Running Gag on her streams is her fans drawing versions of her with ridiculously oversized boobs, including some the size of the universe itself.
  • Born Unlucky: Though not as prominently as in her Runaway Guys co-ops, her misfortune still shows up in her solo work enough that she has the "protonLuck" Twitch emote for such occasions, which depicts a four-leaf clover on fire.
    • In any Yoshi's Island minigame with an automatic fail condition, Claire ends up getting it almost every time.
    • Inverted in Aria of Sorrow, where within the span of the first episode, she picks up several different Souls from a variety of enemies right from the get-go, and even a couple duplicates.note  Even Claire herself was surprised, although less so since she made a point of investing in her Luck stat from the start of the game.
    • The trope frequently shows up in his real life as well, especially when airports are involved. There was also the time she attempted to buy a new capture device, only to get an email some weeks/months later notifying her that the seller died before they could ship it to her. After buying another one from another seller, she found that it didn't even fix the problem he thought buying a new capture device would solve, and her old one was actually working fine.
  • Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs:
    Claire: Is it a secret? Is it pizza? Is it secret pizza?
  • Brief Accent Imitation: Claire always pronounces "Bubble Bobble" in a Brooklyn-like accent.
  • Broke the Rating Scale: As mentioned on the page itself, Claire will occasionally give out Type 2s:
  • Buffy Speak: In episode 19 of ''Yoshi's Island'':
    Claire: Please don't be anything in this thing. Don't be the thing in the thing with the thing... please don't.
  • But Thou Must!: In one Super Mario World ROM hack, there's a level that is called "Don't go here". Claire decides to ignore it and go there anyway, only to fall into a bottomless pit as soon as the level, causing her to say "Fine, I won't go there!" When Claire played a custom Knytt Stories level called "Don't Eat the Mushroom", she decided to listen to the title, only for the game to suddenly finish for doing so. The former had her go with logic and listen while the latter reverses the trend.
  • By "No", I Mean "Yes": Getting damaged by a flying Cheep-Cheep in Mario's Wacky World:
    Claire:That did not help! ...Maybe it did.
  • Call-Back:
    • At the end of the first episode of Wario Land, a Red Coin Fly Guy appears, followed by Wario with his Jet hat gleefully chasing it.
    • The final episode of Super Adventure Island 2 has a part where Claire comments on how she's had to deal with the consequences of not keeping her mouth shut. This is immediately followed by a gag called "Consequences of Jon opening his mouth:" that scrolls a Long List of various memes and Running Gags from both her Let's Plays and streams that she inadvertently created (including a Foreshadowing line saying "You doing the gambling minigame for this LP" despite her insistence that she would not be doing it).
  • The Cameo: In The Stinger for Part 18 of Yoshi's Island, Mega Baby Bowser is seen zooming up to the camera with his mouth open... then the Attack Kitty from Aria of Sorrow appears in his mouth, which is then chased off by Yoshi while accompanied by a sound byte of Claire shouting "You're not even in this game!".
  • Casual Danger Dialogue: In part 26 of Resident Evil 5, overlapping a bit with Dull Surprise:
    Claire: (after the giant Uroboros boss forms itself) Jake?
    Jake: Yo.
    Claire: Run.
    Jake: Okay. Right when it lets me. (Beat) Jon?
    Claire: What?
    Jake: Run.
    Claire: I can't, I'm on the ground.
  • Catch-22 Dilemma: What Claire considers the infamous Superman 64 let's play to be. She believes that even if she finished and released the rest of the series in one shot, she will still never get people to stop giving her shit over it due to its memetic status.
  • Cats Are Mean: Bagel clearly has no tolerance for those horrible "video game" things that cause Claire to pay attention to something that's not him for any length of time, and will chew through any cords he can get his teeth on, including the cord to a very expensive and difficult to replace Steel Battalion controller. Multiple streams have been cut short due to Bagel destroying something crucial, such as Claire's headset. He also likes to lie in front of the TV, blocking Claire's view while she's playing a game; and lie on top of Claire's laptop keyboard during streams, preventing her from accessing the stream controls and usually opening every recently closed tab in Claire's browser history at once. Of course, the fans find Claire's frustration hilarious, just like always.
  • Celebrity Resemblance: The first time Claire streamed Wheel of Fortune, she and her co-commentators decided that her player avatar looked like slowbeef in a red suit and and referred to her as such for the rest of the stream.
  • Chaotic Neutral: invoked Claire has described her own morality alignment as this, with her being an enabler of chaos who always strives to do what's morally sound as opposed to lawfully sound, but also knows when to hold back lest things fall into complete, uncontrollable disarray.
  • Charlie and the Chocolate Parody: Batman and the Chocolate Factory, courtesy of Pcull44444.
  • Chekhov's Gun: At the beginning of 6-Bonus in the GBA version of Yoshi's Island, Claire hops over a ground pound stump thirty seconds in due to the speed of the autoscrolling. At the very end, Claire realizes that she's missing one Red Coin. When she replays the stage to check, she ground pounds that stump she missed, which does indeed dispense a Red Coin. Claire proceeds to flip out.
  • Chewbacca Defense:
    • Claire will often comment on something illogical in a game with "Because...video games" in a Dull Surprise tone.
    • In Resident Evil 5, Claire and Jake explain away any unrealistically badass feats of their characters with "because football" and "I'm Little Red Riding Hood!" respectively.
  • Chewing the Scenery: Whenever she feels like it.
  • Clock King: HyperCole64 has gained this reputation, from Claire's astonished reactions to how he somehow perfectly times live donation alerts as punchlines to the egg videos he makes when Claire plays them on stream.
  • Cluster F-Bomb: She will lapse into this whenever sufficiently pissed off, the Kaizo traps in Kaizo Mario World and Mario's Wacky World being two shining examples.
    • Everyone (save for NintendoCapriSun, but even he swears at times) in Battletoads. Especially Super Jeenius.
    • By the time she's done the skiing portion of 5-Extra: Kamek's Revenge in Yoshi's Island for about ten minutes or so, half of her commentary devolves into stuffing "fuck" into every other sentence.
    • The summary of her reaction to missing 100% Completion in the very last stage of her Yoshi's Island Let's Play as the result of passing a stump that showed up for a handful of seconds at the very beginning of the stage.
      Claire: Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you! Are you fucking serious?! Should've fucking known!
  • Comically Missing the Point: From her 2010-2011 holiday special:
    Claire: ♪We wish you a merry Christmashanukkahkwanzaafestivusholidayseason, we wish you a merry Christmashanukkahkwanzaafestivusholidayseason...♪ Uh, no. Hmm, maybe if I say Kwanzaa first...
  • Composite Character: Two major recurring ones. One is a combination of Robocop and Waluigi with an inconsistent name, the other a combination of Claire herself and Rosalina, called Rosajon.
  • Contrived Coincidence: A minor Running Gag on his Fortune Cookie streams is that Claire will start the stream playing a game of her own choosing, then bring up the Fortune Cookie - only for one of the five games it offers (sometimes the first one!) to be another game in the same franchise (which has happened with the Metal Gear series and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles among others).
  • Cool Big Sis: Has admitted feeling like an older sister for Emile. It can sometimes be heard in the TRG videos, but there she's more like a big sister who wants her younger brother to behave properly. It can however be heard very well in Emile's Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon LP. Where even though they tease each other sometimes, one can hear that they wish each other well and they actually work very well as a team.
  • Cosmetic Award: Given out like candy on Halloween in the Battletoads LP.
  • Cosplay Otaku Girl: Used to cosplay until her mother found out and apparently yelled at her. She hasn't cosplayed since but misses it sometimes.
  • Couch Gag: Her playthroughs of Yoshi's Island, Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow, and Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 have these. Most of them depict what was featured in the video.
  • Crack Fic:
  • Crass Canuck: Claire has garnered a reputation for herself of not only being a Canadian content creator, as Chuggaaconroy loves to point out over on TRG, but also for having a very noticeable Hair-Trigger Temper over how unlucky she gets.
  • Crazy Enough to Work: Averted often; many of the plans she comes up with backfire quite a lot (such as the time she tried to fire a homing pigeon in midair, only for it to blow her up, or when she tried to use a Chargin' Chuck as a springboard to help clear a gap, only to fail over and over again).
  • Culturally Religious: Mentions it in a Runaway Guys video. Even though she's not Christian anymore, she appreciates the values it gave her.
  • Cursed with Awesome:
    • Happens in one match of Bomberman: Act Zero when agumegaru123 runs into a Good Bad Bug. invoked Thanks to a connection glitch, the player character becomes unable to drop bombs, pick up items...or get hurt by explosions, which allows agumegaru123 to win the match without even trying.
    • Claire herself. The continual glitches she experiences are clearly frustrating and are very much still a thing in her streaming career but she herself admits her Walking Techbane habits have become a hallmark of her that brings fans no end of amusement.
  • Cuteness Proximity: Seeing a cat in a game makes Claire squeal "Kitty!"
  • Deadpan Snarker: When she isn't raising her voice, she usually talks in this mode, along with the occasional helping of Self-Deprecation.
    • When discussing Xanaboy's romhack, she makes the following quote:
    Claire: I'm sorry if this is news to you, but 111 is more than 84. I may have blown your mind. I'm sorry.
    • "Future Claire" mixes this trope with Lemony Narrator during the Resident Evil 5 run.
    • It often seems like Claire just can't take Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow seriously. Half the time during cutscenes, if she isn't laughing her ass off, she's in full-on snarker mode.
    • It's been noted she has an uncharacteristic tendency to [[Corpsing lose her cool laughing]] when co-comming with StephenPlays, perhaps because Stephen is one of the few people in the TRG community who can out-deadpan Claire herself.
  • Decided by One Vote: A literal example in one of Claire's streams, when she sets up a poll for whether to play more Bomberman Act Zero or do something else, and the incredibly narrow result is decided by one vote out of over 200 cast.
  • Denser and Wackier: Her Donkey Kong Country LP is by far the most ridiculous series she's ever done (intentionally), as very little of the LP consists of actually playing the original game and is for the most part an Overly Long Gag as an LP.
  • Department of Redundancy Department:
    Claire: Ridiculous? That's ridiculous! Nothing can be as ridiculous as ridiculousness! ...How ridiculous are you?
  • Didn't Think This Through: Claire's reaction to a certain broken puzzle by Xanaboy1.
    Claire: You didn't think this through at all!
  • Disappointed in You: She expresses in the finale of the Notte Luminosa LP where it was revealed that the creator behind the ROM hack lied about himself having leukemia. Later averted when the guy apologized and Claire being proud of him for owning up to his screw up.
  • Divide by Zero: A minor Running Gag of her streams is her accidentally creating an 'infinite void' on her Fortune Cookie screen due to the window recursively showing an image of itself.
  • Documentary: Her Superman 64 LP is like this.
  • Does Not Like Spam: Mentions a few times during her Pepsiman stream that she doesn't like "pop" anymore.
  • Does This Remind You of Anything?: Her Let's Play of Mario's Early Years with Kelekin had the two of them rolling in a fit of laughter when the game's fill in the blank displays "The Princess has a big _____"
  • Double Take: Claire has this reaction in Bomberman Act:Zero Round 4 when she finds out she technically won despite A Girlbreast taking her out with a line bomb.
  • Dude, Not Funny!: Invoked.
    • One episode of her Superman 64 LP introduced the "random asshole comment count".
    • Her overall reaction to Yanama during the final part of her Notte Luminosa Let's Play.

    E-P 
  • Early-Installment Weirdness: Claire has a particularly bad case of this when she plays the GBA version of Yoshi's Island. Particularly about the camera scrolling up or down.
    • Her earlier streams have a few oddities compared to her more recent ones.
      • Fortune Cookie Streams were originally called "random game night" streams.
      • The intermission screen didn't have the wall of gifs.
      • She didn't use straw polls, which made it difficult to tell which game actually won.
      • The "now loading" screen featured regular Robocop instead of Robo Waluigi.
  • Ear Worm: Claire confessed in the Fortune Cookie stream on April 24, 2021 that the Power Pellet melody from Pac-In-Time got stuck in her head when she was young, and it still does to this day.
  • Edutainment: She and her roommate Kelekin tackled a pair of Super NES preschool games called Mario's Early Years.
  • Embarrassing Middle Name: Formerly "Carlton", as revealed in a stream. Fresh Prince jokes instantly flooded the chat. Claire justified it as being her father's name.
  • Everyone Has Standards:
    • One Fortune Cookie stream in 2018 has Claire remove a game after it was chosen and played. While she is willing to play games with varying levels of quality, the game in question, which revolves around a Driven to Suicide Funny Animal and has gameplay where the object is to die in each level, didn't sit well with her or the co-comms. Justified, as she lost friends to suicide, as revealed in that stream.
    • Claire contemplated on putting Senran Kagura: Peach Ball on the Fortune Cookie ban list after playing it as a Mystery Gift. While she doesn't mind fanservice (if the Rule 63 art of her pre-transition is any indication), she expresses great concern about the game's premise, and how it involves smacking a girl's assets to restore her from a Phlebotinum-induced transformation.
    • While she has notoriously bad games on Fortune Cookie, one game that Claire bars from it is Orb 3D after Claire's experience from clearing it for Game Clearing 2018, as its controls were too frustrating for her.
  • Family Theme Naming: She revealed in a livestream that her older sister's name is Jen ("the 'Proton' and everything").
  • Feed It with Fire:
    Claire: Now, Mother Brain is blue, so we have to warm her up WITH MISSILES.
  • First-Name Basis: Claire will almost always refer to Lucahjin by her real first name, Reese, when talking about her.
  • Fission Mailed: After Lucahjin, MasaeAnela and Pcull44444 all distracted Claire from gameplay in a stream with their teasing, she tried making them leave the stream by pretending to Rage Quit and putting up the end-of-stream screen. Lucah sees through the ploy immediately.
  • Foregone Conclusion: There are some games which are practically guaranteed to win the popular vote during Fortune Cookie.
    • Any game based on a game show. This is probably due to a combination of The Runaway Guys' meme-tastic LP of Wheel of Fortune for the Wii U (even though it's usually Chugga, not Claire, responsible for said memes), and Claire usually roping the co-comms into the game with her for multiplayer shenanigans.
    • Any game from The Jackbox Party Pack series, because it's a game everyone, including everyone in chat, can play together.
    • Any game strongly associated with either Claire or Lucah. If the latter, the chat will usually encourage Claire to get Lucah downstairs to join in on the fun.
  • Four Is Death: During Misfortune Cookienote  rounds where the chat does not know what games they are voting for, only voting on "Option 1", "Option 2", etc; almost everyone votes for Option 4 for this reason (because let's be honest here, most of the people who watch Claire on a regular basis just want to see her torture herself playing terrible and/or extremely difficult games). In the first Misfortune Cookie stream they were usually right, too. In subsequent ones, Claire expected this to happen and made sure every Option 4 of the night was a good game that she would enjoy playing.
  • Freeze-Frame Bonus: In stage 8 of Superman 64, she considers the fact that the stage has three floors is important, and will be on the test. She isn't going to write it though, so she encourages people to write the test and submit it to other people, e-mailing it to an address that flies quickly across the top of the screen and reads [email protected]
  • Friend to All Children: Her friends notes that she's good with kids.
  • Gainax Ending: Her Donkey Kong Country Let's Play ends with all of the Claires finishing all three ports of the game while at the same time turning out to be an LP of a bootleg game that goes through time and space given to him by RosaJon with a vague warning about something happening. In The Stinger, we see a purple Lavos with Funky's head on it rising from DK Isle. Did we mention that this LP was inspired by Sonic the Hedgehog 2: Special Edition?
  • Gambler's Fallacy: In her Wario Land LP, she does the coin betting minigamenote  pretty much every stage, resulting in truly convoluted theories about which patterns "repeat," eventually calling it "Gambler's Fallacy: The Game."
  • Gender Bender: Her fans have a habit of drawing her as a female prior to her transitioning, often times with an overly exaggerated bossom.
  • Genre Savvy: Becomes this in response to her repeated exposure to Kaizo Traps. In this video, she sniffs one out like a pro.
    Claire: You guys aren't going to get me with that trap any more, you have to understand that.
    • Elsewhere, she says that if you ever want to play Mario professionally, just play a bunch of romhacks because you'll be forced to learn all the tricks.
    • A weird case when playing America's Next Top Model with Lucahjin, Smefanye gets allergic to some of the makeup. One of the NPCs "wakes her up" and says that she has allergies, which surprises Claire that she would know about such a thing. Later when they talk to the other NPCs does none of the other rivals know what it is, proving her point.
  • Good Bad Bugs: In-Universe, she encounters one in 5-Castle of Yoshi's Island, where sprite limitations causes various sprites to freak and vanish. This includes the pinball doors that were between her and the Flower within the room she was innote , which allowed her to toss an Egg at the Flower and snag it with zero issues.
  • Griefer: Patty is this to Claire in their co-op streams of Dead Rising 3: always testing out new weapons on Claire before anyone else (which doesn't do any damage to Claire but does stun her a bit), harassing Claire while she's occupied in the menus (usually by pushing her off her safe perch into the crowd of zombies below), and more, all purely for his own amusement.
  • Growing Up Sucks:
    • Toyed with. Prior to the release of Superman 64 part 2, Claire wrote a message saying she'd stop LPing due to how he will inevitably mature... until it was revealed to be a fake letter.
    • Discussed on a serious level while playing 5-Extra in Yoshi's Island, where she notes that now that she's grown up, she doesn't have the time to marathon games like her younger self was able to.
  • Guest-Star Party Member: Becomes this for "The Completionist" in the Gunstar Heroes review.
  • Guide Dang It!: A good chunk of the Sticker Star stream is Chugga and Claire discussing the unimaginably high amount of atrocious design choices used in the game, which include the number of times the game really does not want to tell you how to make progress when it really should.
  • HA HA HA—No: A variation in part 4 of Resident Evil 5:
    Jake: *points his gun at a rat, then walks past it* I thought that was a thing, but it was only a rat.
    Claire: Only a rat?
    Jake: *warily* Are rats something I need to be worried about too?
    Claire: Dun dun du- no.
  • Heads or Tails?: According to her comment on Chugga and Masae's Mario Party 2 Filler Let's Play, she decides who to side with when the two are having an argument by doing this. Although it could have been a joke.
    "Someday you'll realize who I'll side with by flipping a coin."
  • Heads, Tails, Edge: In her Furious Mario LP, she tried to decide what path to take by flipping a game cartridge:
    Claire: It landed on its corner.
  • Hollywood Tourette's: Mentioned in part 5 of the Battletoads race.
  • Hostile Show Takeover: Did this to Chuggaaconroy's channel for a video, She even Bound and Gagged Chugga before the video begins.
  • The Hyena: Sometimes. Usually when some weird/OOC stuff happens.
  • I Broke a Nail: Claire paused her livestream of Pepsiman due to breaking the nail on her middle finger.
  • Iconic Outfit: Her "classy hobo" hoodie and toque hat.
  • Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: Beginning with his LP of Blaster Master Zero, Claire has had a naming theme for each of her videos in an LP.
    • Blaster Master Zero: Via Fun with Acronyms, the first letters of each episode title spell out "FROGFINDER".
    • Super Adventure Island II: The first letters of each episode title spell out "HIGGINS".
    • Donkey Kong Country: The episode titles go in alphabetical order (episode 1's title begins with "A", 2 with "B", etc.).
  • Idiosyncratic Wipes:
    • Her Superman 64 LP parodies the well-known Adam West Batman version with the zoomed-in-and-out logo and spinning background, except with the Superman logo instead. This is used whenever she has to reset the game and start again due to showing off a Game-Breaking Bug (or coming across one accidentally).
    • A similar one is used in her Donkey Kong (1994) LP, but with an 8-bit Mario sprite zooming in and out accompanied by the sound effect from collecting a coin in Super Mario Bros.. This is used whenever her Super Game Boy crashes and she has to restart. Which is often.
    • In an interesting take, her Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 Let's Play has Wario throw the footage out of the screen, revealing the next scene.
    • As of mid-2019, these are used on the stream as well, for instance, a cascade of fortune cookies when transitioning to the fortune cookie and a large version of the "art" emote for transitioning in and out of art block.
  • I Hate Past Me: "Future Claire", a.k.a. the text that Claire adds when editing the videos, is prone to making snarky comments about her past self playing the game.
  • I Have Many Names: Claire's stream mascot (a combination of Waluigi, Robocop and later also Weird Al as Rambo from UHF in the raid video) called "RoboWaluigi", "Robertcop", "Waluigi Cop", "ProtonCop", "ProtonRaid", etc. etc.? Nobody knows. Even Claire herself has been known to switch from one name to another in the same sentence when talking about him.
  • I Need a Freaking Drink: Battletoads has the "Alcoholic in Training" achievement: "This game stops sobriety." Of course, they're all just drinking water/soda pop, but the trope is clearly invoked.
  • Inferiority Superiority Complex: You'd think her Large Ham would mean a Big Ego, but being complimented makes her shy and embarrassed, and then she mutes their audio.
  • Inferred Holocaust: invokedClaire points out that should Pepsiman succeed at giving Pepsi to the people stranded in the middle of the desert in Level 3, it would only cause them to die of dehydration even faster than if he had just left them alone.
  • Innocuously Important Episode: Her early stream "Random Game Night - The Fortune Cookie Strikes Back With A Vengeance", from August 2013, ended up introducing many things that would become regular staples of her streaming career for the next five years - her intermission gif wall, Bomberman Act Zero, and the Robocop Stream Over endslate. Particularly noticeable as the first two happened organically during the stream rather than being planned.
  • Insane Troll Logic: In Tri Force Heroes, both she and Josh immediately break into laughter when Tom chooses the Goron Garb for an ice level on grounds of being too heavy to slide around.
  • In-Series Nickname: In a glitched runthrough of Super Mario Bros. 3, she and the others refer to Rotodiscs as "disco waffles".
  • Insistent Terminology: In Resident Evil 5, Claire refers to the Majini as "not-zombies", "zambies", or occasionally "not-zambies"
  • Irony: During the Borderlands 3 Gameplay Reveal Demo stream, Claire notes that the streamer next to her is experiencing technical difficulties with the demo while her own demo appears to be functioning correctly, contrary to her "habit" of finding arbitrary glitches despite playing normally while most others experience the game as intended. This fact doesn't go unnoticed by neither Claire nor the viewers.
  • Kaizo Trap: Her reaction to the Trope Namer made them famous.
    • And in another project:
      Claire: What's up here? Is it a secret? Is it pizza? Is it secret pizza? It's... A KAIZO TRAP! You sadistic son of a bitch. I didn't fall for that.
  • Kindhearted Cat Lover: Loves cats and has one named Bagel with her wife.
  • Kubrick Stare: Her banner on YouTube is of Ryu from Ninja Gaiden doing a particularly epic one of these.
  • Lampshade Hanging:
    • This video has Claire talking about her ancient, somewhat malfunctioning NES, when she says this line:
      Claire: My NES is somewhat like my update schedule, it only works every six months.
    • During her Superman 64 LP, after completing the 1st level of the Gameboy game: "Thanks for hanging around for the first stage. See you again in 2 months when we do stage two."
  • Large Ham: From her rage from her earlier Mario Rom Hacks to her yelling "FOOTBALL!"
  • Leap of Faith: She's made her fair share of these. It even became one of her catchphrases.
  • Lemony Narrator: In the 4-player Battletoads race, the achievements start doing this, especially in the later stages:
    • After Jakenote  gets stuck on Karnath's Lair for an entire video, Claire remembers an easier way to beat the stage and tells Jake, who berates Claire for not telling her sooner. This earns Claire the achievement "My Bad...: Should've said that sooner".
    • Late in the race, Jake turns out to have been ignorant of the fact that Battletoads has a 2-player mode. This earns him the achievement "That Other Health Bar?: Totally there for looks".
    • In Level 12, Patricknote  is killed over and over by a cloud enemy. Claire proceeds to kill it on her first try and brag about it, earning her the achievement "Wow: This guy sounds like a dick".
    • Also, when SuperJeenius is ranting about how the sprint always kills him, he proceeds to say it's the one thing that always gets him. The achievement that follows is "I Thought It Was Snakes?: You were thinking it too".
  • Line-of-Sight Name: In a 2019 Fortune Cookie stream, Claire was playing The Legend of Zelda Oracle of Ages. As she reaches the name screen, a special donation notification involving yodelling plays, so in order to find the stream file easier, she names the file "Yodel".
  • Literal-Minded: A Running Gag in his Wheel of Fortune streams is when someone wins a foreign trip as a prize, Claire interprets the illustrative picture or video overly literally. (Video of the Pyramids) "You won the Pyramids!" (Picture of a deckchair on an idyllic beach in Cancun) "You won A CHAIR!"
  • Load-Bearing Boss: Mentioned by name during her LP of Super Mario TKO.
  • Logging onto the Fourth Wall: In Wario Land part 3, Claire makes a joke about "ducksforcash.com" and say "Don't go there. It's not a site. I hope it's not, anyway." It is now. It links to that part in the YouTube video.
  • LOL, 69: Claire completes a stream for Dust: An Elysian Tail for Game Clearing with a 69% clear rate and a time of 8:00:08. She lampshades this by copying the save file to slots 6 and 9.
  • Machine Monotone: Played for Laughs in Tri Force Heroes, when he dons the Robowear for the Cove of Transition.
  • Madlibs Catchphrase:
    • "I know how to X", where X is a grammatically imprecise reference to what she's about to do in a game, e.g. (playing a racing game) "I know how to CAR!"
    • "Because...X" as an 'explanation' for It Runs on Nonsensoleum events, most usually "Because...Videogames".
    • After using the vanilla version for a while, she now typically uses fan-made edited versions of the Wesker "YOU WILL GIVE ME AN EGG!" clip as her stream new subscriber sound, with 'egg' replaced by something related to whatever game she's streaming.
    • When asked by a game to choose which character to play as, there is pretty much always an exchange like this:
    Claire: CHOOSE YOUR CHARACTER! Who are we playing as? (lists characters)
    Co-comms: Uh-
    Claire (ignoring them): Let's be real, we're playing as (fan favourite character / Claire's memetic favourite character)
  • Manchild: In Part 2 of Let's Play Donkey Kong (1994), Claire calls herself this after saying that the crocodile creatures from Donkey Kong Jr. resembled the alligators from Gator Golf.
    "Well, at least she realizes it..."
  • Man of a Thousand Voices: If you need to laugh at Waluigi, Big the Cat, or even Batman, she's your woman. She makes other funny voices too.
  • Mascot: She has Robo-Waluigi (a cross between RoboCop and Waluigi) for her streams. Occasionally Albert Wesker is used as a substitute as well. Later streams would add RosaJon, a fusion of her and Rosalina, with ample breasts, and Beefuru, a cow version of Bub from Bubble Bobble.
  • Mass "Oh, Crap!": Claire, Tom, and Josh all receive one at the end of Episode 11 of Tri Force Heroes, when the statue that the boss dropped before dying unbalances the platform, nearly sending them all plummeting to their doom when they don't have enough health to survive. Luckily, Claire barely survives, so they don't have to do the boss fight over again.
  • Memetic Molester: In-Universe, she and her friends finds the child holding Robocop from the Gameboy RoboCop 2 game really creepy.
  • Mind Screw:
    • While recording a Let's Play episode with small time Let's Player AriZonia there was an exchange between the two because Ari had used terminology from the N64 era without ever playing the system or it's games:
    Ari: Well, I'm finally at Baby Bowser- er. Bowser Jr. actually.
    Claire: You know what, I always call him Baby Bowser all the time even though I know he's Jr. It's just this weird thing, you're so used to from the older games.
    Ari: That's the thing. I've never played them.
    Claire: *Beat* wait what?
    *Ari laughs*
    • Happens again on 12-16-14 during a poker night stream with SuperJeenius. AriZonia was let into the call to play a round as one of the random chat participants. She had been extremely nervous and when Claire tried to reassure her by confirming she had played poker before, she was quite surprised when she admitted she never played before in her life.
    • And yet again during that same stream the two times Ari manages to win a hand when the odds were stacked against her and she had been running low on chips. Especially since both times the other person had been confident they were going to win.
    • The Donkey Kong Country LP starts off normal but slowly descends into increasingly bizarre and weird territory, to the point where the final episode involves Claire having to deal with a multiverse of Donkey Kong Country LPs created by alternate versions of her playing different versions of the same game.
  • Mondegreen Gag: Claire misheard one of Bub's lines in Puzzle Bobble 4/Bust-a-Move 4 as "Beefuru!", and decided it was Bub's way of saying he wanted beef. Eventually, Beefuru became the name of an alternate character: a cross between Bub and a cow.
  • Mood Whiplash:
  • Mundane Made Awesome:
  • Mushroom Samba: "What Is Love?"
    Claire: Do mushrooms actually do this to people? I gotta start taking drugs to check this. If I took a hit of acid, and suddenly saw the Burger King on fire, singing What Is Love?, I'd be amazed.
  • My God, What Have I Done?: A non-angst filled example, she does however regret inspiring people to go out and get their hands on Superman 64.
  • Mystery Box: Her Fortune Cookie streams would sometimes include a mystery option, which entailed her picking a game of her choice from a specific pile of games she had set aside for this purpose, usually games that friends or fans had given her. The chat proved unable to resist the allure of such a mystery, and every single time it was an option on the cookie, it utterly destroyed the competition, causing Claire to eventually scrap the option completely because it made the cookie too predictable.
  • Mythology Gag: The Fortune Cookie gag in the final episode of the Donkey Kong Country LP has Claire opening her virtual Fortune Cookie to determine what game she LPs next. The game that shows up is Jet Set Radio Future, alluding to the then-unreleased "Project: Sweet Bike" LP. Sure enough, the next main LP immediately following DKC was, in fact, JSRF.
  • New Game Plus: A self-imposed one in Tri Force Heroes; since she's already beat the game and is replaying it, she has the advantage of being able to choose from outfits Josh and Tom don't have access to, as they haven't finished the game yet.
  • Nice Guy: The real-life Claire is very kind and laid-back, and is closer to this persona in her own Let's Plays than in the Runaway Guy videos.
    • The stream she held 10th of December 2016 had a fan apologizing for unsubbing to save money. Claire almost started crying (or actually did), telling the fan that they were there was way more important to her than any money and they had nothing to feel sorry about.
  • Nintendo Hard: Her NES LPs.
  • Nipple and Dimed: Parodied in her second stream onwards for Guacamelee! for Game Clearing 2019. Claire is given a mod that adds RobertCop as a costume with censor bars on her pecs. The mod's creator wanted to give off equal-opportunity censorship for the fun of it.
  • "No. Just… No" Reaction: During Resident Evil 5 when SuperJeenius starts fantasizing over Chun-Li.
  • No New Fashions in the Future: Lampshaded numerous times by Claire in Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow, especially in regards to Soma's... interesting outfit.
    Claire: Everyone really likes wearing suits in this game!note  Except for... good old pimp coat Sora.
  • Nostalgia Filter: Invoked, discussed, and ultimately defied in her Let's Play of the original Yoshi's Island. She mentions starting the Yoshi's Island LP mainly because she played Yoshi's New Island and absolutely hated it and wanted to see if the original game was as good as she remembered. After playing through it, she ultimately decides that the game held up excellently and New Island really was just that bad, but also admits striving for 100% Completion is immensely frustrating. This is reinforced by playing Yoshi's Island DS for the first time during the LP, which she found so mediocre that she couldn't even form a strong opinion about it.
  • "Not Making This Up" Disclaimer: During a stream where she was discussing fanbases, a Twitch user pointed out how Claire was calling Chuggaaconroy's fanbase "kids" as an overgeneralization. Claire then proceeds to explain that she's not overgeneralizing; statistically, Chugga's fanbase is primarily pre-adolescents according to YouTube.
  • Not Quite Dead: When Claire played Aliens: Infestation for Game Clearing 2020, she loses Lucky in the low-gravity segment, but Lucky's profile did not register that death. Jokes implying this trope ensued.
  • Oh, No... Not Again!: She encounters glitches so much without seeking them that she can only quote this trope. The PokemonPuzzleLeague one she got on the 10th of December 2016 completely broke her, reducing her to a partially laughing, partially crying mess just wondering why things like that keeps on happening to her.
    • She even runs into a few during multiplayer races, such as her four player Mario 64 race with the Versus crew and Tim.
  • O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Her reaction to Yanama revealing that he faked having terminal Leukemia just to get Claire to play Notte Luminosa.
  • Older Than They Think: Invoked. In her Let's Play of Donkey Kong (1994), he demonstrates that many game mechanics thought to have been introduced elsewhere later on appeared here first. Including Donkey Kong's tie (introduced five months before Donkey Kong Country)!
  • Once an Episode: Claire lampshades the use of "You lift me up~/Lift me high~" whenever she, Tom, and Josh go into a totem in Tri Force Heroes.
    Claire: I swear we've done that at least once every episode.
  • Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping: Happens in one livestream, due to the combined Trolling efforts of Lucahjin and MasaeAnela making her frustrated enough. She doesn't lapse into a Newfoundland accent (or at least not a very thick one), but she does start using Newfoundland terminology, which just makes Lucah and Masae mock her further.
  • Our Dragons Are Different: Discussed in a September 2018 livestream highlighting The Messenger. As the shopkeep tells a story involving two worst primal fears—fire and reptiles—combining into dragons, a co-commentator notes that he finds bears more terrifying then reptiles. Cue talk about bear-like dragons.
  • Overused Running Gag:
    • Bomberman Act:Zero works "It's still anyone's game" to death and back.
    • This is Claire and the mods' opinion of the Muppets Party Cruise rap as of mid-2018, but they have yet to convince the fans to stop sending in edits of and references to it.
  • Parody Commercial: On stream, a donation is for a mock-up ad for the Glitchen Gun, based on the Kitchen Gun. The possible games that could be displayed are games that have glitched on stream. Apparently, the device can cause glitches in games.
  • Percussive Therapy:
    • Claire hammering the save state key in frustration whilst playing Kaizo Mario.
    Claire: STATE SAVED!....STATE SAVED!....STATE SAVED!...
    • And again while repeatedly loading a save state in Kaizo Mario.
    Claire: FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK!
  • Pet-Peeve Trope:
    • invoked Camera Screw. It is one of Claire's biggest turn-offs when it comes to her enjoying a video game, even if the game is otherwise great. When she played through Pikmin with The Runaway Guys, she talked about how camera control can make or break a game for her, most notably Super Mario 64 and Pikmin.
    • Oh, how Claire hates invisible coin blocks. She considers them Fake Difficulty, as most of the time they're used for traps that can't be avoided unless Claire already falls into them. Yet, she keeps seeing this on a regular basis.
    • She mentions in several videos that she really can't stand Slippy-Slidey Ice World levels, becoming palpably dismayed every time she has to play through one. She explains that she regards the slippery controls as a form of Fake Difficulty that erodes the player's sense of control over their own gameplay. The "slippery shoes" mechanic being omnipresent in New Super Luigi U is stated (frequently) as being part of the reason she spends most of the LP in a fit of rage. She also revealed in his LP of Donkey Kong (1994) that she hates ice physics for forcing the player to relearn how to play the game.
  • Platform Hell: Kaizo, of course. Many of the other romhacks she plays also try for this, with varying degrees of success.
  • Player Tic: Invoked; during her play through of the Ninja Gaiden series on the NES, she climbs a wall to the top and constantly jumps up from it after killing a boss as her way of doing a victory pose.
  • Proud to Be a Geek: A classical example. She's still a huge fan of shows from the late '80s and the '90s, and bought DVDs. She is as we know a gamer, and an Occidental Otaku. Her intermission gifs feature several fandoms like Doctor Who, RoboCop, and many more. She seems to enjoy reading as well but has a hard time finding time for it.

    Q-Z 
  • A Rare Sentence:
    • In the first part of Superman 64's Stage 6: "Oh no, I pushed him through the wrong part of the floor! ...Never thought I'd say THAT."
    • In the second part of the above video: "Is that forklift humping that robot?!" Which cues a "Never Thought I'd Say That" counter.
    • During the Battletoads race:
    Claire: *gets killed by...* Rubber duck, nooo!
    Pcull: Not very often you hear that statement.
  • Recurring Character: Thanks to them living in the same house, and now being engaged, Lucahjin shows up every so often to Claire's streams. She has a habit of stealing her Fortune Cookie votes.
  • Red Oni, Blue Oni: In the 4-player Battletoads race, Claire and NintendoCapriSun are the blue oni to Super Jeenius and Pcull 44444's red oni.
  • Relationship Upgrade: Lucahjin was formerly just a fellow Let's Player. She and Claire would eventually start dating, then she moved in with her. As of September 2, 2017, the two are engaged.
  • Renaissance Man: Of gaming. Her Fortune Cookie streams have revealed that there are very, very few game genres that Claire isn't at least fairly skilled at, and there are many (often unconnected) genres of games she is exceptional at.
  • Ridiculously Cute Critter: Introduced in Claire's January 2021 streams is Beefuru (created by Rhyme, one of the viewers), a small adorable bovine modelled after Bub from Bubble Bobble.
  • Running Gag:
    • Sort of. Any time Leet Lingo happens, Claire reads it as if she doesn't understand it.
    • Invisible coin blocks.
    • An occasional one is Claire reacting with exaggerated shock when a character 'dies' in game, especially if it's in a very cartoonish fashion that you wouldn't expect to take seriously. Also shows up in The Runaway Guys.
    • Chris Redfield in Resident Evil 5 supposedly being an (American) football star.
    • Claire is notorious for encountering glitches in games on-stream, and it's almost always on accident. The protonGlitch emote, a glitchy Wesker Egg, was created as a reference to this.
    • People say #Proton______ with the blank being something relevant to the current stream.
      • In the same vein, people will often subscribe to Claire's Twitch channel with joke usernames based on whatever stupid/hilarious thing just happened/is happening in the stream, because Claire has to thank them by name and give them an egg. Also, the vast majority of these are done by the same guy. Since subscribing to Claire costs $5, they must have spent hundreds by now.
    • During the streams, whenever the fortune cookie results in some odd choices for games being played (such as a Kim Possible game, or Claire herself picking the infamously terrible Bubsy 3D), someone in the chat will always point out how said game is in the Top 20 or so most viewed games on Twitch.
    • People Photoshopping 18-year-old Claire's face onto people/characters/things. For extra weirdness, sometimes present-day Claire's face is Photoshopped onto someone/something else in the same picture.
    • Attack kittens appearing in end slates for her Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow playthrough.
    • From the streams, the chat more or less "raiding" itself due to chat having a tendency to spam the same word whenever something happens.
    • Really for the streams, anything that appears on the bingo card could be considered one of these.
    • In The Legend of Zelda: Tri Force Heroes, JoshJepson constantly receiving rare items from end-of-stage chests.
    • In Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3, referring to treasures she glitches through the floor as "broken" or "used".
    • An occasional one from her streams is that whenever a Mario game shows up on Fortune Cookie, she and the co-comms refer to it as an 'obscure indie title' and act as though they have to explain the concepts of the game to the audience.
    • The Incredible Hulk (1977)'s "The Lonely Man" gets thrown in on occasion in livestreams, usually via fan submissions. This is typically coupled with fading to greyscale, a zoom-in, and a picture of a sad Captain Falcon fading in. This gag got worked into a donation alert.
    • After The Muppets Party Cruise was played on stream, a lot of fan submissions play with the line "One door's red, the other's blue." from the game's theme, even months later. Fans even apply this to other things aside from doors.
    • On streams, whenever Claire is given access to a character creator (usually in wrestling games or Tony Hawk skateboarding ones), she will always manage to produce some sort of terrifying technicolour monstrosity.
    • One stream gag has Claire being asked if she wants to perform certain acts for $2.9 million.
  • Running Gagged: Claire has noted that the year 2020 seemed to see a lot of longstanding jokes coming to a spectacular culmination:
    • Tom Fawkes' demands to see Claire play Halo Reach finally being satisfied in the TRG Colosseum Chaos Fortune Cookie stream.
    • The 'Game Boy Player, Disc Only' joke Claire unleashed on StephenPlays at Extra Life 2018 returning and becoming a podcast starring both Stephen and Claire (as well as Tom Fawkes and Jerod 'the 8-bit Drummer' Collins).
    • After almost a decade of constant Albert Wesker and 'You will give me an egg' themed references, Claire got to collaborate with D.C. Douglas himself on streams! Of Resident Evil 5, a game where Douglas' character Wesker appears, no less.
  • Sarcastic Confession: In her coming out stream, Claire noted doing this a few times with the Twitch chat in the leadup to it, when her mods all knew. For example, one stream has Claire select "OK" in character creation without choosing a gender, which defaults to girl. Her co-commentator congratulates her on being a girl, to which she replied "It took a lot of work and a lot of HRT but I'm a girl". Her usual Deadpan Snarker style of humor masked the fact that statement was entirely sincere.
  • Save Scumming: Justified, as many of the romhacks in which she does this are designed to be nigh-impossible to beat without gratuitous use of savestates.
  • Schmuck Bait:
    • During the "Bad Place Mario" romhack, one of the levels is labelled "Don't Go Here." She immediately goes there. It sends her instantly tumbling into the pit, making her lose a life.
      Claire: Fine. I won't go there.
    • In the "Don't Eat the Mushroom" level for Knytt Stories, Claire proceeds to listen to the level's title and avoids picking up the mushroom. This results in the game ending extremely quickly after only playing for 2 minutes.
  • Screw This, I'm Outta Here!: About a third of the way through Act 5 of Ninja Gaiden 2, Claire quits for a few minutes, and Ryu replaces her with Arnold Schwarzenegger.
  • Self-Deprecation:
    • "My NES is like my update schedule; it only works once every six months."
      • A lot of Stage 7 of her Superman 64 Let's Play was spent apologizing about her release schedule.
    • After singing something:
      Claire: I'm pretty sure I'm about to be arrested by the SPCA for killing cats.
    • Before The Runaway Guys' Thrown Controllers panel at PAX: "Welcome to the biggest trainwreck in history."note 
    • At the end of episode 20 of Resident Evil 5:
      Claire: We're going to use this week's "What We Missed" to cover... how you're actually supposed to play the game, because if I've learned anything from watching back this footage and editing it together... it's that we don't play this game right at all.
    • A Running Gag in race streams is Claire saying how she's not experienced with a game/hasn't practiced it and expects to be steamrollered by the other challengers, only to almost invariably then either win or at least place a close second.
  • Self-Immolation: Since Bomberman Act:Zero lacks a spectator mode, each round of any multiplayer match Claire hosts but doesn't intend to compete in herself commences with the "ceremonial lighting of ProtonJon on fire," i.e. dropping bombs on her own location as rapidly as possible to eliminate herself from the round.
  • Self-Imposed Challenge: In-Universe
    • Defeating Wesker in Resident Evil 5 only using rotten eggs.
    • In 2017, Claire set a goal to clear 52 games that she hadn't beaten before on stream, which she codenamed the "52 in 52". She manages to reach the goalnote , even going one over for good measure.
      • The target's been raised to 64 games in 2018, with specific goals for different consoles. Time will tell how this turns out.
  • Shout-Out:
    • Each Superman 64 ring stage clip ends with a screen tallying up the rings Superman has flown through, with the Sonic the Hedgehog theme playing as a Take That!.
    • The insert of the 24 counter.
    • "This is hurting my throat like crap. Metal Gear?!"
    • "Screw the rules, I have money!"
      • "My voice gives me inner strength!* ...But why?"
    • "Go for broke!"
    • "Samus Is a Girl WHAT"
    • "Now we're thinking with portals" She says it again at 5:12.
    • "I'm Ron Burgundy."
    • On seeing levels styled after roguelikes in Don't Eat The Mushroom, she asked, confused, "Dwarf Fortress?"
    • She plays with the Paint options in Tekken Tag Tournament 2, colouring Raven's entire body white except for his sunglasses, and declares "It's the Stig!"
    • Upon getting the Cagnazzo soul in Aria of Sorrow and giving it a test run, she declares "it's the JoJo one!"
    • Whenever Claire has to do a raspy voice for a character, it rapidly deteriorates into Strong Bad, which she then lampshades by adding a reference to checking emails into the dialogue.
  • Shown Their Work: Her Superman 64 LP has much more sophisticated editing than usual, not to mention the detailed trivia and history sections throughout each video. Case-in-point: episode 5. To top it off, her e-mail interview with Eric Caen (the game's producer) became cited as a source for the game's Wikipedia article.
  • Sidetracked By The Golden Saucer: invoked During Game Clearing 2021, a Running Gag occurs during a visually modded Sonic Mania playthrough in which Claire stops what she's doing ingame in favor of the orbnote  challenges.
  • Sizeshifter: Parodied with Rosa Claire, one of Claire's depictions, who has this power applied to her breasts. As she has been consistently depicted with varying cup sizes in fanart, lore eventually dictates that they can change their size, as shown in a donation alert featuring her.
  • So Proud of You: Fighting Ridley with super bombs:
    Claire: MOAR EXPLOSIONS! Michael Bay would be proud of me!
  • Sound Defect: Claire usually plays the "you will give me an egg" soundbite from Resident Evil 5 for new subscribers, but several times has played the wrong sound clip by accident.
  • Soundtrack Dissonance: During Yoshi's Island part 9, Claire enters Naval Piranha's Castle, which begins outdoors with the game's quirky/smiley art, but still plays the castle music. She comments on it:
    Claire: You're going to solve a mystery... while being smiled at by every piece of architecture in the world!
  • Space Whale Aesop: From the end of Episode 6 of Aria of Sorrow:
    Claire: Folks, let this be a lesson: If you do a sweet pose after a friend of yours has been stabbed, respond to the fist bump.
  • Spinning Paper: Done with the Daily Planet as the opening of the supervillain intros in Superman 64, with "pictures" from Superman: The Animated Series.
  • Springtime for Hitler: Claire starts her Runaway Guys stream by making Chugga play Wheel of Fortune, both to troll Chugga and because the fans enjoy watching Chugga screw up in a funny way, as he invariably does. Chugga proceeds to win the game.
  • Squee: Claire could barely contain her excitement when he found out she could battle Waluigi in a dance-off during her Dance Dance Revolution: Mario Mix live stream.
  • Stealth Hi/Bye: Superman 64 Stage 8 has Claire confused by Jimmy Olsen appearing, giving Superman advice, and vanishing completely. Usually by walking off camera and simply not being there when Claire turns around.
  • Stealth Pun: Comes with these rather than Chugga's obvious and at times lame ones, and Tim's more clever ones. One good example is then both she and a friend jokes that he keeps on looking at the player A Girlbreast in one of the Bomberman Act:Zero streams.
  • Stereotype Reaction Gag: In the second episode of Mission Mode in Chuggaaconroy's LP of Pikmin 3, Claire, Chugga's guest player for the episode, introduces herself as Chugga. Chugga, conversely, introduces himself as ProtonJon, using the most over-the-top, stereotypical Canadian accent he can come up with. Claire is completely and hilariously offended.
  • Straight Man: In both her streams, Let's Plays/Streams with others, and in The Runaway Guys. This also means that she can sneak jokes people find uncharacteristic for her, like puns, Toilet Humour, and even dirty jokes, without as many noticing when she does it, making her seem stern when she's just as silly as everyone else.
  • "Stuck at the Airport" Plot: Oh boy, does Claire have some stories; ranging from simple chain reactions of the hilariously awful kind to straight up almost being barred from the US at one point. Fans and Claire's friends love to joke that the only thing worse than Claire's luck with video games is her luck with air travel.
  • Sturgeon's Law: Ultimately the reason Claire stopped doing playthroughs of Super Mario World ROM Hacks. More than often the hacks she was sent had very little thought put into them and often were only designed to deliberately piss her off with pixel perfect jumps or other unseeable bullshit. While Claire has does some Super Mario Maker levels on her Twitch on occasion, she has a much, much stricter threshold of what she's willing to play and put up with.
  • Subverted Catchphrase: Claire normally does a spiel to describe how Fortune Cookie works for new viewers, but this trope happens when something unexpected happens, such as parts of her tech breaking down (which is often).
    Claire: If you are new here, to Fortune Cookie streams, here's how this works...everything breaks and I get upset. That's...actually pretty standard around here.
  • Sudden Downer Ending: Parodied at the ending of Tri Force Heroes.
    (All three of them cheer with cries of "We did it!")
    Claire: Unfortunately, I am the Fierce Deity, so unfortunately, everyone died, like, a minute later.
  • Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors: In one of Superman 64's many, many glitches, she demonstrates that an innocent bystander seems to be completely impervious to Superman's attacks, including when she throws an exploding crate at her, but immediately keels over if she's even grazed by a Dark Shadow attack.
  • Take a Third Option:
    • In streams, Claire always has a "1% Rule" in place that states that if two leading choices for the Fortune Cookie are within 1% of each other, she just plays both games, one after the other. After this rule caused a few issues, she introduced the "0% Rule" as a joke, which states that if the two leading choices are tied, she ignores both of them and plays the game in last place instead. The 1% Rule has since been modified afterwards to just include the second place game on the next Cookie (which carries over between streams if applicable).
      • During a fortune cookie round on Claire's March 31, 2018 stream, Crazy Taxi 2 and Digimon All-Star Rumble tied for first place and Claire decided to play them both at the same time. It was very dumb.
    • In his Superman 64 LP, Claire wanted to have the ring stages sped up or cut completely since they showed nothing new and she wouldn't have much to say during those stages. She asked her fans on what she should do and it was nearly split between "keep the ring stages" and "cut the stages out". Claire rolls both options into one by showing the ring stage in one corner of the screen while using the other corner to show off other stuff such as other Superman games or random trivia related to the franchise.
  • Take That!: In response to all the ROM hacks she received that heavily relied on invisible blocks, Claire created a level that was filled with over 300 invisible blocks, just to show people how bad levels would get if people didn't stop relying on the gimmick. Claire also had two of her friends play the level so that they could get extremely pissed off at the level design, which would drive the point home. In short, the level was a big middle finger to everyone that relied on invisible blocks, which at the time was a lot.
  • Taking You with Me: In her Bomberman Act Zero livestream matches, ACFan120 (the guy who does the cartoon head logos at the end of Runaway Guys videos) AND Dan The Enigma (though not to the level of ACFan120) keep trying to do this to Claire.
  • The Tape Knew You Would Say That: Lampshaded.
    Claire: Oh, hi! I didn't see you come in. Probably because this is pre-recorded.
    • Claire also attempts this on her second Yoshi's Island video by trying to guess what the comments on the first video would be like, but doesn't do particularly well. This is lampshaded by the "Future Claire" annotations.
  • Tempting Fate: Happens all the time in a Five-Second Foreshadowing way in her videos and streams, but perhaps the best example might be her original Superman 64 test video from 2007, in which she comments that she actually enjoys playing the terrible game and intends to LP it even though all her colleagues from SomethingAwful are warning her she'll regret it.
  • That Came Out Wrong: In episode 4 of her Donkey Kong (1994) LP, she refers to a British Challenge Gamer website called "Cyberscore" and describes using it as "Cyberscoring". After a moment she realizes how much this sounds like an Unusual Euphemism...
  • Third-Person Person: Claire does this when she commentates a Bomberman Act:Zero multiplayer stream she's playing in.
  • This Is Gonna Suck:
    • During her stream of Pepsiman, she says this word for word when she sees an extremely narrow level full of conveyor belts.
    • Says it at least twice during her encounter with 5-Extra in Yoshi's Island.
    • Never said outright, but Claire's non-stop complaining and hyping up of Balore in Episode 7 of Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow carries a definite flavor of this trope. For good reason, though.
  • Thousand-Yard Stare: In world 3 in her Yoshi's Island LP, Claire comments that a monkey she finds looks particularly traumatized in this way.
  • Time Travel: Sometimes referenced with respect to "Future Claire", especially in the finale of Yoshi's Island in which Claire plays the final boss level earlier but reorders it to the end of the video, and then halfway through it pauses to insert later-recorded footage of alternate paths. While trying to keep consistent commentary throughout when it's recorded at three different times.
  • Tournament Arc: On February 11th 2014, Claire held a 32-man Bomberman Act:Zero one on her Twitch channel which was won by Dan The Enigma.
  • Two Lines, No Waiting: During Stage 5 of Superman 64, she essentially interrupted the game (though you could still see her playing it in the picture-in-picture) to do a full LP of the Game Boy version of Superman, returning afterwards to show all the glitches she missed.
  • Undesirable Prize: Claire and her roommate created a custom prize list for their Deal or No Deal PC game. Nearly everything on the list was an Undesirable Prize— top contenders are "Hepatitis A-G", "Wet Cardboard Box", and "A Golden Shower from R. Kelly". Other gems include a year's supply of calendar, Howie Mandel's haircut, and "1337 5P34K 13550N5".
  • Un-person: In an "Un-game" example, there was a period when whenever her Fortune Cookie chose Battletoads as an option (which was surprisingly often), Claire acted as though nothing had happened and went to another option.
  • Unwanted Assistance: During an on stream game of Among Us, Claire needs to use sabotages to allow her to attack and kill someone, only for her imposter partner, MasterTimeThief, to use other sabotages that don't help her much.
  • Verbal Tic: She calls these "word of the week", because they change over time. In the specific LP where she mentions this, the tics are "boogie" and "EXTREEEME!", as she herself points out.
  • Very False Advertising:
    Claire: This means today is the SAMUS ARAN BOMBING POWER HOUR. ...Even though it's only 10 minutes.
  • Video Game Cruelty Potential: She normally doesn't indulge in this sort of thing, but the absolutely hilarious results of crashing on a water slide caused her to dedicate part of her Dead or Alive Xtreme 2 playthrough to causing Tina to crash as much as possible.
  • Visual Innuendo: In "Mario's Early Years," she and Kelekin notice that one stage puts a "Box" in a... very inopportune location on Princess Peach's body. They fall apart laughing.
  • Walking Techbane: Considering how much she glitches games and has technical issues in general, she certainly counts as one.
  • Wasn't That Fun?: After the end of Kaizo World Special Stage 2:
    Claire: THERE! I GOT PISSED! YA HAPPY?! ...Well, that was fun. I wonder what the next stage is like?
  • Waxing Lyrical:
  • Weaksauce Weakness: "Apparently he's found my one weakness: simple jumps."
  • What the Hell Is That Accent?: In Epic Fail proportions. When she tried to make a fake Swedish accent people mistook it for her trying to sound like a sexy girl, while she actually tried to ask if there was any sexy girls in the audience/chat. Given that she was dating Lucah who's of Swedish descent and can speak some of it, she was probably trying a pick-up line and failing hilariously.
  • What Would X Do?: While battling the Masked Devil in Ninja Gaiden (NES):
    Claire: There was a really good strategy someone showed me once. ..It was so good I forgot it.
  • Wholesome Crossdresser: With Lucahjin's assistance, she got a RosaJon cosplay in time for The Runaway Guys Colosseum 2021, and she looks quite attractive in it.
  • Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: Is afraid of dogs due to being attacked by one in her childhood. But she does not hate them and gave heartfelt condolences to a fan who had just lost their dog, and got upset when said fan tried joking about it to get over it. She later has overcome this fear and is willing to adopt a dog should Lucah want one too.
  • With Lyrics:
    • Seen here in the Kaizo LP: "This is the castle... A FUCKING HARD ONE..."
    • In Resident Evil 5 she briefly sings "Point-blank sniping, I am running now!" to the tune of the Transformers theme.
  • Word Salad Lyrics: Her (surprisingly catchy) improvised lyrics to "Reptilia" by The Strokes:
    ♪ Come on, come on, now / Let's keep moving now / Why is this so slow / Don't make me fast-forward / Because it really sucks / Can I jump over here / No I prob'ly can't / Goodbye Yoshi, I hate you / AH I GOTTA RUN / Didn't make it in time / Rewind space-time ♪
    ♪ Wish these lyrics would be on the screen so I'd know them / I - hate - make-ing - up - stuff / because my voice goes outta tune ♪
  • Writing Around Trademarks: When revealing a T-shirt design featuring Death Water, she uses the line from the LP, "featuring Led Zeppelin as Death Water's son", but replaced the band's name with "Steel Blimpin".

 
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ProtonJon Kills Piranha Plants

During a musical level of Super Mario Bros Wonder, Piranha Plants on Parade, ProtonJon (as Toadette) ends up killing Piranha Plants while they're singing the first part of the level.

Example of:
Video Game Cruelty Potential

Jon Loses 2 Sta...

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ProtonJon Kills Piranha Plants

During a musical level of Super Mario Bros Wonder, Piranha Plants on Parade, ProtonJon (as Toadette) ends up killing Piranha Plants while they're singing the first part of the level.

How well does it match the trope?

3.4 (10 votes)

Example of:

Main / VideoGameCrueltyPotential

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ProtonJon Kills...

Jon Loses 2 Sta...

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