The Middle Ground

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

Jon Jafari is Jon Tron, a (somewhat caustic) Video Game critic on normalboots.com. Using a cheerful, energetic style and plenty of Cutaway Gags and Visual Puns, he talks about certain elements of video games, good and bad, and occasionally reviews specific titles. His sidekick is a green parrot named Jacques, who talks in a vaguely robotic voice, has glowing red eyes, and offers stoic commentary to contrast Jon's boundless energy.

He claims to have been inspired mainly by The Angry Video Game Nerd and Spoony. Then he photoshopped them making out.

Jon has been inducted into That Guy With The Glasses, specifically Blistered Thumbs (naturally).

Games Discussed:
Tropes used in The Middle Ground include:
  • The Cameo - Makes frequent appearances in Peanut Butter Gamer's show. In PBG's Cursed Mountain review, he appeared in a flashback as an old mountain guru.
  • Candid Camera Prank - The second 'Gaming in Public' episode. To prove that people would exaggerate the (alleged) harmfulness of video games, Jon created a bogus petition claiming the Nintendo 3DS caused blindness in children (featuring, among other things, the phrase "Heil Hitler") and asked random passersby to sign it for him. All of them signed without reading... and one of them signed even after having read it. Jon, naturally, crowned him King.
  • Caption Humor
  • Cluster F-Bomb - When Malkovich offered to take calls from viewers on Malkovich's Gaming Guilty Pleasures, all but one of the callers replied with a simple "Fuck you." The one who didn't asked if his mother had a penis.
  • Creator Backlash - 'Top 10 Overrated Games'. A really solid episode, actually, but Jon probably couldn't handle the bad press. He's taken it off his site (the link once directing to it now leads to a sad song on YouTube), and the episode description reads something like, "This is an episode I made that I hate. It's now in its rightful place--Hell!"
  • Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: Malkovich.
  • Cutaway Gag
  • Deadpan Snarker - Jacques
  • Deep-Immersion Gaming - Parodied; Jon is seemingly sucked into his Joe & Mac cartridge, only to reappear in his house a moment later. Jacques asks how he managed to escape.

Jon: I just left.

    • Brick Joke: Turns out the characters from the game can " just leave" too. The episode ends with a dinosaur boss walking into Jon's living room.
  • Faux Horrific: When trying to play Final Fantasy XIII, it turned out that "The game's playing itself, Jon. The game's playing itself, Jon!"
  • Four Point Scale - Invoked and Played for Laughs. Jon devised a meaningless ratings system wherein it's actually impossible for a game to receive bad marks, no matter how much he bashed it in his review. Sonic Colors and Donkey Kong Country Returns received an "A/5" and a "Six Golden Bananas+/Shigeru Miyamoto" respectively; even though Jon spent the whole video mocking them (though it's pretty clear he enjoyed both). Nimbus, described as "A game you will maybe forget", got a B/5.
  • Funny Foreigner - Malkovich
  • Ho Yay - The aforementioned photoshop.
  • Keet - Jon himself
  • Large Ham - Jon
  • Malaproper - Jon does this constantly as part of his character. Sometimes he makes up for it by adding subtitles... which are also full of malapropisms.
  • The Most Dangerous Video Game - Hilariously invoked and parodied in his Final Fantasy XIII review.
  • Non-Human Sidekick - Jacques
  • Old Shame - In spite of it being among his best videos, Jon hates 'Top 10 Overrated Games', and has even taken it off his site.
  • Robot Buddy - It isn't clear whether Jacques is a robot or just a very peculiar parrot.
  • Schedule Slip - Initially he uploaded his videos weekly. However, the gap between new videos has gotten bigger and bigger to the point where the series updates monthly these days.
    • He's been picking up the pace as of late; the Star Fox Adventures and Top 10 Video Game Commercials episodes were released within a week of each other.
  • Shout-Out - His avatar (see above) shows him wearing the yellow shorts, blue backpack, and shark's-tooth necklace of a certain anthropomorphic bear.
  • Show Within a Show - Malkovich's Gaming Guilty Pleasures
  • Something Completely Different - Jon did an episode reviewing The Lost World, this would be the first episode to have nothing to do with video games.
  • Take That - In his review of Sonic Colors (even though he ultimately gave the game a score of "A/5"), he mentions that a crucial matter in determining whether or not the game will be good is that the Wii may not have enough Blast Processing to run it. For those without context, "Blast Processing" is an utterly meaningless term invented by Sega in the early nineties to promote the Sega Genesis and Sonic the Hedgehog, claiming technical superiority over the Super Nintendo. Jon takes cracks at Sonic Team regularly, but seemingly all in good fun.
  • Unexplained Recovery - In the Star Fox Adventures episode, Jacques dies in a fiery, bloody explosion. A few minutes later, he's back to normal, as if nothing had happened.

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

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