"Let's say you're me and you're in math class..."
Vi Hart is a "recreational mathemusician" with a site
and a Youtube channel. She really gained her fame when John Green discovered her as part of The Station Is Watching You, and has since gotten herself over a million subscribers on Youtube. As you could guess from her "job title," her videos center around math and a little music, as well as doodling.
Vi Hart provides examples of:
- Author Tract: A fair chunk of "Twelve Tones" consists of her expressing frustration at the state of copyright law, most notably her Take That! piece against Disney's lobbying to increase the amount of copyrighted works.
- Brick Joke: Every single of her "Doodling in Math Class" videos, where she notes what the math teacher is talking about, and later comes at the exact same topic with her doodling.
- Call-Back: In The Gauss Chrismath Special.
- "Maybe he also liked to escape via the window..."
- Catchphrase: As previously mentioned, "Let's say/Pretend you're me and you're in math class..."
- Subversion:"...Actually, never mind, I'm sick, so I'm staying home today; please pretend you're Stanislaw Ulam instead."
- Subversion:
- Chekhov's Gun: Zig-zagged in the Sick Number Games video. At the beginning, Vi has her infamous white paper, but when she says "pretend you're Stanislaw Ulam", she gets rid of her white paper, and replaces it with yellow paper. Said yellow paper is used by Vi for most of the video, but then she says "you could also be Blaise Pascal", and the white paper comes back, with it being used for pretty much the rest of the video.
- Christmas Special: The Gauss Christmath Special
- Cool Teacher: Fans want her to be theirs. And since she's one of the minds behind Khan Academy, she sort of can be.
- The Faceless: Most of the time in her videos, she only appears as a pair of hands. Unlike CGP Grey, though, she is not maintaining a secret identity, instead wanting to show her notebook in detail, and will gladly appear uncovered in other people's videos.
- Food Porn: Her Thanksgiving mathematical food videos, with the capper being a Turduckenailail-enailail-duckenailail-enailail, a turkey stuffed with two ducks, each stuffed with two hens, each stuffed with two quail eggs. Also her "hex mex" hexaflexagon burrito.
- Holding Both Sides of the Conversation: Wind and Mr. Ug are actually the same guy, except mirrored, due to the way a Möbius strip works. As such, Wind is writing to herself, but, reading mirrored versions of her words and buildings, she believes a different guy is there with her.
- Motor Mouth: Without any doubt, she has one.
- Mundane Made Awesome: The number 1 is turned into Wau, of which many unusual properties are listed.
- Purely Aesthetic Gender: She sees gender in real life as this, and refuses to accept any gender identity (even agender).
- Running Gag: Many of her videos have some form of this, including Beans for "What was up with Pythagoras?" and Angry Birds in Connecting Dots.
- Second-Person Narration
- Self-Insert: Arguably, Wind from Wind and Mr. Ug, seeing as Vi depicts both herself and Wind as triangles, while other people are stretched-out stickmen.
- Shout-Out: She's done plenty.
- You can see a boa constrictor digesting an elephant in Snakes + Graphs.
- Later in the same video, on a silly band:"It's actually the splash a dolphin makes as it leaves this world because it's about to be destroyed by aliens. Or maybe it's just inside out? It's obviously Cthulhu. Or upside down. I guess it's a hippogriff?"
- A lot of her shout outs are things she's drawn in the background of her main doodles: the deathly hallows, the Aperture Science logo, among others.
- In Doodling in Math Class: Snakes & Graphs, one of the snakes in her mini-rant regarding language is speaking parsletongue.
- In Doodling in Math Class: DRAGONS, she decides that one of the dragons she created is a Hungarian Hornail.
- You can see a boa constrictor digesting an elephant in Snakes + Graphs
