The Inverse Law of Fandom Levity

Everyone loves a good joke, but there are some times where they seem to appear out of an otherwise dreary and cynical world. When consuming a dark and depressing piece of media, it can be utterly refreshing to relieve oneself with some good old-fashioned silliness. Or when consuming a comical, lighthearted work, it can be an interesting experiment to reinterpret it in a darker light.

Hence comes the Inverse Law of Fandom Levity: "The overall silliness of a work's fandom is inversely proportional to how mortifyingly dark and hard to watch it is".

Thus, shows where people get gruesomely murdered on the regular will have fans constantly making quips about that time a character got locked in the bathroom; literature detailing man's inhumanity to man will have communities full of wacky nonserious Crack Pairings, and works which deconstruct the very idea of violence itself and show its horrific consequences will have every character within them given a goofy Fan Nickname. Meanwhile, children's shows and Slice of Life shows get boatloads of Dark Fics putting the characters in dreary situations, examining Fridge Horror in more detail, or replacing the humor with a more Black Comedy approach.

In dark works with silly fandoms, this phenomenon can potentially be explained as a fandom-wide attempt to give themselves a Breather Episode, a brief recompense from the terror and malaise of the work itself. Observing this law in action will show you that the second anyone starts doing some serious analysis of the work, all the silliness will stop and people will fully acknowledge the gravity of the events detailed, showing why said fandom is so silly to begin with. In the reverse case, it can be seen as a serious attempt to see what a breezy series would look like if juxtaposed with grimness, or just an attempt at shock value. Either way, it's a way of interpreting and analyzing a work's depth beyond just what it is on the surface.

Can sometimes be the result of Too Bleak, Stopped Caring if fans give up on rooting for anyone in the work and decide to start taking the piss out of it. See also Memetic Mutation, which is heavily related and intertwined with this, and Bathos, which comedy sourced from this is greatly drawn out of.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Berserk is an incredibly bleak and serious work, set in a Crapsack World with themes such as trauma, betrayal, mass slaughter and rape, all depicted in a very graphic way. On the other hand, this doesn't stop the community from making lots of jokes and memes.
• Death Note is a deadly serious supernatural crime drama with very few humorous moments and a whole lot of pain, suffering and Gambit Pileups. The fandom is obsessed not only with shipping Light and L with one another, but with generally making flanderized memes where L makes some kind of Bat Deduction that easily gets Light to confess that he's Kira.
• Hetalia: Axis Powers generally engages with world history and culture with a lighthearted tone through parodies of National Stereotypes. By contrast, the fandom has produced works such as the creepypasta Axis Powers Hetalia Episode 23.5 and the horror fangame HetaOni, not to mention the countless works based on "historical Hetalia", a common fandom premise addressing historical events through their Hetalia personifications, often reflecting on the Fridge Horror of the series through how dark and depressing history can actually get.
• Neon Genesis Evangelion is a series noted for torturing its viewers with ever-growing levels of torment of their favorite characters, mind-screwing plots, and a depressing ending. It has also spawned a great number of WAFFy shipping fanfics and doujins featuring Shinji and whoever he's being paired with (typically Asuka) just being cute together with no giant monsters or conspiracies in sight, as well as goofier crackfics, memes about Shinji crankin' dat Soulja Boy or doing the Thug Shaker, and a scene in AMV Hell 3 where Shinji is hit in the nuts by a football.

Comic Strips

• Garfield is a pretty light-hearted comic about a talking cat and his owner. However that doesn't stop fans from reinterpreting him as an Eldritch Abomination who causes endless pain and suffering for Jon.

Film — Live-Action

• For all of Spidey's quips, The Amazing Spider-Man Series is easily the darkest and most serious of all the official live-action Spider-Man films, with an emphasis on thriller aspects and heavy character drama, even moreso than Raimi's interpretation. The fandom on the other hand is a shitpost loving joyous group of people who constantly have the characters saying the most bizarre things ever.
• Anatomy of a Fall is a serious courtroom drama and character study about a woman who may or may not have killed her husband, something that's deliberately kept ambiguous and up to viewer interpretation. The fandom, however, is significantly more lighthearted, doing things like joking about how the steel drum instrumental cover of 50 Cent's "P.I.M.P." is the go-to song for jumping out of a window, making fancams of every character (especially Vincent), and heaping massive amounts of adoration towards Daniel's dog Snoop, who quickly became one of the film's most popular characters.
• Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice depicts its titular leads in a somber light. Superman is worn down from dealing with mistrust thanks to his alien heritage and Batman has untreated PTSD stemming from witnessing his parent's murder, with his mother's name (Martha) being a trigger. When Superman's mother (also called Martha) is held hostage and Batman has him at his mercy, Superman begs Batman to save a woman named "Martha". Batman gets triggered by the name, at which point Lois rushes in and confirms that "Martha" is the name of Superman's mother. As all of this context is shown rather than told, it's easy to dumb down the ensuing teamup as "Batman likes Superman just because their mothers have the same name" (keep in mind Batman didn't know that Superman had a human mother).
• Downfall (2004) is an incredibly grim movie about the final days of the Führerbunker which casts the Nazis as Tragic Villains who nevertheless deserve their fate, but fans of the film are notorious for using clips from the film to create Hitler Rants parodies which are generally lighthearted Sitcom hijinks featuring Hitler ranting about current events and getting into mishaps with his generals and Fegelein, heavily contrasting the film's depressing, dour visuals.
• Morbius (2022): Critical and commercial flop aside, the movie is supposed to be a dark and gritty tale about a vampiric Anti-Hero, that is forced to fight against his own Horror Hunger and childhood's best friend, with a lot of tragedy and drama going on. In spite of that, the movie ended up gaining an ironic fandom best know for making extremely goofy memes like "It's Morbin' Time", "Morbillion dollars" and "Have Sex".
• Oppenheimer is just as grim of a biopic as you would expect a film about the man who spearheaded the development of the atomic bomb to be and features many a complex, nuanced character who makes decisions that can be immediately concluded to be good or bad. It also had the providence of not only being released in the age of the internet but also was caught up in the "Barbenheimer" meme fad, which resulted in fans of the film spawning a ton of ludicrous jokes (such as the "Oppenheimer style" trailer as well as the common fandom characterization of Oppenheimer as a brooding and ridiculously naive loser) and the word "Oppenheimer" entering into the internet's greater lexicon of Inherently Funny Words.
• Revenge of the Sith might be the darkest main Star Wars film in which Palpatine succeeds in turning Anakin to his side and converting the Galactic Republic into The Empire, but the fandom just can't stop memeing this movie. Most of the jokes that aren't directly based on movie quotes (most of which are entirely sincere in-context) are of the Black Comedy variant, especially since prequel memers collectively decided that the "Master Skywalker, there are too many of them, what are we going to do?" (aka the scene where Anakin slaughters a bunch of younglings in cold blood, which is explicitly portrayed as his final step towards the Dark Side) scene to be the funniest in the movie.

Literature

• American Psycho: The book is a bleak yet darkly comedic story about Patrick Bateman, a narcissistic man who lives a luxurious yet empty and unfulfilling life, and spends several of its chapters killing people^note However, Bateman's status as Unreliable Narrator makes it ambiguous if he's actually a serial killer or if he's a delusional fantasist as a means of livening up his dull, humdrum life. The movie is similar though it does tone down the overall violence by omitting some of the more brutal scenes from the book. Misaimed Fandom aside^note Much like Arthur Fleck, he's considered a poster boy of the "Sigma Male" grindset and is idolized by the Manosphere despite the book/movie portraying Bateman as a shallow, narcissistic loser, Patrick is often portrayed as far sillier than in canon, being associated with the meme song It's Hip to Fuck Bees which is often used as a replacement during the scene where he monologues about Huey Lewis and the News before hacking his coworker Paul Allen to death with an axe. In addition, he's often portrayed as being outshined by Paul Allen who always has a better version of what Bateman has or is portrayed as even more of a pathetic loser than in canon.
• Narminess aside, Jeff the Killer is meant to be a genuinely terrifying, serious, and tragic story about a young boy who succumbs to sociopathy and becomes a dreaded Serial Killer. The fandom however, treats it like a high school teen dramedy and Coming of Age Story where the titular Jeff is a misunderstood soft boy.
• Land of Oz is a whimsical fantasy series L. Frank Baum wrote for children, set in a fairyland that is supposed to be utopian, yet many people see enough disturbing implications that Darker and Edgier homages bringing attention to them are a trope on its own. And that's not even getting into all the more mature and serious What Do You Mean, It's Not Didactic? analysis that the books' adult Periphery Demographic likes to apply to them.

Live-Action TV

• Better Call Saul: Due to having more or less the same fanbase as Breaking Bad, the same things apply to the equally grim and gritty Prequel's fandom as well, with them making up insanely goofy jokes about Huell eating Kim, Saul being a Memetic Badass lawyer who can Chewbacca Defense his way through any trial, turning Chuck's poignant "Chicanery" speech into a memetic copypasta, etc.
• The Boys (2019), albeit its strong Black Comedy factor, is a cynical Deconstruction of the Superhero genre as whole, with a shady corporation in control of various aspects of society, the Super"heroes" only interested in their own fame, and the protagonists being very flawed individuals as well. This doesn't stop the fans from making jokes and memes on every character of the show.
• Breaking Bad is regarded as one of the best gritty crime dramas of all time, but you wouldn't know it from the fans, who are obsessed with making dadaistic shitposts that barely connect to the show at all, such as the famous "kid named Finger" meme which despite using a picture of Mike Ehrmantraut is entirely divorced from anything which happens in the show. This wasn't quite odd during the first season as the show did start out as having plenty of Black Comedy elements, but as the series went on and got more serious, the fandom's hilarity only grew.

Music

• Most of Depeche Mode's songs are downright terrifying with a morally gray message courtesy of whoever's writing the song at the time, but most of the fandom jokes about those songs on a frequent basis or attempts to twist them into something sexual or comedic regardless of the original message.
• King Crimson create infamously bizarre and terrifying compositions that can be off-putting to even a lot of prog rock fans. Despite this, Crimson's fanbase is very jovial and goofy.
• Pink Floyd: While not without their goofy and lighthearted moments, especially during the Syd Barrett era, Floyd as a whole are known for being a very dark band, tackling horrifying subject matters like war, depression, cynicism, and existentialism. The fandom, on the other hand, loves to joke around and absolutely embrace meme culture.

Tabletop Games

• Warhammer 40,000 is an unflinchingly bleak, horrible setting where the Imperium of Man is besieged on all sides by aliens, demons, and other monstrous entities that seek its destruction. There are countless examples of people dying by the trillions, horrible gore and bloodshed, and the setting is inherently a Hopeless Forever War where there is no end to the suffering. Hell, the game even coined the term "grimdark" to describe unendingly nightmarish works with seemingly no hope in sight. Now, look at the fandom, and you'll find a bunch of good-natured hooligans that have fun amassing armies of models, paint, and engaging in pretend wars with their friends. Many memes are made about both the sheer darkness of the setting, the various factions going at each other's throats (especially the Orks, being A Lighter Shade of Black as they're basically a massive football riot of a race), and all the instances of the Imperium's incessant need to stamp out "heresy", even if that means clenching the Idiot Ball tightly.

Video Games

• The Batman: Arkham Series is a dark, gothic video game series showcasing Batman going through hell as he faces off against his evil Rogues Gallery. The fandom, especially those on r/BatmanArkham, are incredibly goofy using over-the-top memes like Man and Jonkler to refer to Batman and Joker respectively as well as creating deliberately nonsensical nitpicks using phrases like "Is he stupid?".
• The Binding of Isaac is a gross, visceral game full of Religious Horror which takes place entirely inside the Dying Dream of a terrified, suffocating child. The fanbase almost exclusively focuses on the more humorous gameplay-related aspects, such as the plethora of silly items and many multitudes of ways to break the game wide open, and have created quite a variety of memes and shitposts.
• The Dark Souls series is about an incredibly bleak Crapsack World where almost anything is trying to kill you, doomed by an unending cycle that is slowly consuming everything, all in a Nintendo Hard format of games. Looking past the more rabid hardcore gamers, the fanbase is famous for forming its own collection of silly and goofy jokes and icons as well as not really taking the darker aspects of the story all that seriously (e.g. calling Gwyndolin a "femboy" because he was forcefully raised as a girl and making fun of Pinwheel for being a pitifully easy boss despite his horrific backstory). The same can be applied to any other Souls Like RPGs made by FromSoftware in the informal greater "Souls" series, including Bloodborne and Elden Ring.
• The Doom series is about a Space Marine's eternal struggle against the Legions of Hell in defense of humanity, with lots of blood and gory violence and, later on, a very convoluted lore. The fanbase is famous for making silly memes and jokes like "DOOT" and "Pogodemon", making cute and wholesome crossovers with other franchises like Animal Crossing, and making Doomguy himself an over-the-top Memetic Badass.
• Dwarf Fortress is a game featuring mutilations, child kidnapping, and discussions about farming mermaids for their bones. Fandom frequently use terms such as "happy fun surprise" for their assassination of annoying nobles and "circus" for "Hell."
• Elden Ring: Due to basically 1-to-1 inheriting the Dark Souls fanbase, this was only to be expected. Looking past even the veritable mountain of memes and jokes taking the piss out of the rather morose story and world, fans in general are very fond of making jokes about the Big, Screwed-Up Family that are Marika's children and love to portray them getting in petty domestic disputes with each other or imagining what they must have been like as bickering children. The characters also frequently get flanderized for the sake of comedy by the fandom (e.g Morgott having no identity out of hating Tarnished and Omens, Mohg's entire personality revolving around his lust for Miquella, etc.).
• Both Fear & Hunger and its sequel Fear & Hunger: Termina are fairly dead serious games revolving around a Suicide Mission and a Deadly Game respectively, and are filled with disturbing content such as Prison Rape, Body Horror and Sanity Slippage. The fanbase is contrastingly prone to putting the characters in far more light-hearted situations, or failing that using the bleak subject matter for Black Comedy.
• Five Nights at Freddy's is the Trope Codifier for Mascot Horror, with the story being a grim and tragic tale about the loss of innocence through the murder of children by series Big Bad William Afton. While many of the fandom are dedicated to learning about the actual story, just as many are dedicated to making memes about the convoluted lore, Afton being Bri'ish and his Joker Immunity, Buff Helpy, Glamrock Freddy talking to Gregory about Among Us, etc.
• Half-Life 2 is a bleak game about a scientist stuck in a Dystopia where aliens have taken over Earth and are squeezing every resource they can out of it. But Garry's Mod and the torrent of animations it's created would have you believe it's about funny faces and wacky flailing ragdolls.
• Even though Hollow Knight has a lot of Video Game Caring Potential and various lighthearted moments, the game is still a dark and gothic tale about a dead kingdom devastated by a Mystical Plague; with its bleak landscape, depressing atmosphere, and incredulous amount of ambiguity and fear that wouldn't be too out of place from a Soulsborne game. On the other hand, the fanbase has a great affinity for cute fanarts of the various characters and silly memes on stuff like Hornet telling you to "Git Gud", Pale King having a sawblade fetish and Zote the Mighty in general.
• Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance has Laughably Evil villains and a balls-to-the-wall plot, but otherwise is as serious a geopolitical techno-thriller you would expect a game set in the Metal Gear universe to be, with plenty of long diatribes on ethics, morality, the illusion of free will, mass media, etc. That doesn't stop the game from having a billion Interrupting Memes alone, let alone the dozens of other memes created from every aspect of the game and the generally wacky stuff the fandom likes to attach to it.
• The New Order Last Days Of Europe is a Hearts of Iron IV mod about a Nazi victory, including a cold war involving Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, Himmler ruling a state under fundamentalist National Socialism and nuclear war being an actual possibility in several paths, with a generally oppressive and hateful atmosphere. As such, the fandom has memes such as "Gamer moves" to describe racist or dystopian policies, "funny clock man" to describe a delusional madman, and printing Speer shorts.
• OMORI, despite its outward silliness and sense of humor, is a disguised and surprisingly sad and depressing game that grapples with heavy topics like loss, grief, self-harm, etc. Despite this, fans are constantly making out-there shitposts like Kel being obsessed with burgers.
• One Shot, while not as dark or bleak as other examples on the list, is still about a small, defenseless child separated from home who is forced to explore a mysterious, dying world to heal it, with metafictional elements, fourth wall breaking and lots of Tear Jerker moments. The fandom, while aware of all of this, is still very fond of cute fanarts of the characters, fanfics and the like that downplay the drama, and goofy shitposts like these ones.
• Patapon is a colorful, cheery kids' game that also happens to make use of the War Has Never Been So Much Fun trope, but is otherwise the E-rated game it's advertised as with obvious Black-and-White Morality where the Patapons are the good guys and their enemies are the bad guys^note Though they occasionally have more complex motivations, and defeating them usually means gaining them as an ally. In spite of this, older players love to flanderize the Almighty and the Patapons into a General Ripper and their army of unrepentant war criminals who Rape, Pillage, and Burn their way across the three games in the series and habitually commit remorseless genocide of other tribes in search of IT.
• The Pokémon franchise is overall lighthearted and family-friendly, set in colorful worlds where you can collect cutesy creatures and take care of them. But at the same time, the fanbase is famous for making various Dark Fics, Creepypastas and discussions on the Fridge Horror of the games.
• Rain World is a game about being a small and vulnerable creature existing as part of an ecosystem that will continue on with or without your participation, where death is both common and unexpected, tinged with an atmosphere or existential horror, more mundane terrors, and meddling in the affairs of crushingly depressed godlike beings. You wouldn't get this assumption by watching the various goofy music videos, meme dubs, and even more unhinged content produced by this fandom.
• SIGNALIS is a dark, depressing Survival Horror game that features a plot exploring concepts like free will, morality, and artificial life, but the fans are absolutely smitten with joking about the Kolibris being horny lesbians, which is only tentatively a thing in-game.
• In spite of a few darker moments in certain games, the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise is a lighthearted, family-friendly videogame series about colorful Funny Animals stopping a goofy and cartoony scientist and his mischiefs, with a few other threats as well. The fanbase, on the other hand, is focused a lot on said darker moments, with various discussions about it. Also worthy of mention the various Dark Fics (such as Sonic.exe) and adult parodies about the games and the fandom (such as Sonic Dreams Collection) as well.
• Super Mario Bros. is a very lighthearted and family-friendly franchise about a goofy plumber and his brother saving the princess from a fire-breathing turtle, and yet the fanbase has created various creepypastas and darker fangames related to the franchise (enough to gain its own page on This Very Wiki). Also worthy of mention adult parodies such as Racist Mario.
• ULTRAKILL is a game with an extremely nihilistic plot about a Killer Robot traveling through Hell and killing every living thing in existence just to stay alive a little longer using their blood as sustenance. Despite this, the fandom is one of the most non-serious modern gaming communities, primarily concerning themselves with making jokes about shipping V1 and Gabriel, giving every single enemy in the game ridiculous-sounding mundane names and generally being silly. Even the official ULTRAKILL fan wiki has completely non-serious jokes mixed in with the actual information on almost every page.
• Undertale is an odd example, as the game is a mixture of quirky, silly and lighthearted moments with a rounded and interesting cast of characters, and Nightmare Fuel inducing scenes with themes such as genocide and unethical experiments with a large quantity of fourth wall breaking (especially in the infamous No Mercy Route). The fandom will either focus on the former or the latter.
• X-COM: The franchise is about a shady military organization that has the duty of protecting Earth and the human race from an Alien Invasion, where the survival of humanity is always on the razor's edge. The fanbase is famous for goofy Fan Nicknames like "Ayy Lmaos", "Thin Ments", and "Snek Tits", making jokes on how their attacks always fail (that's XCOM, baby) and a few Mondegreen Gags. And let's not forget about Bradford's sweater and those ADVENT Burgers.

Visual Novels

• Doki Doki Literature Club! is the a particularly memorable Disguised Horror Story, as despite seemingly being a cute Dating Sim, it turns out to be a fourth-wall shattering Psychological Horror that deals with subjects like depression, abuse, and existentialism. Despite this, the overwhelming majority of fan works play up the cuteness factor instead. For example, despite having a rather extensive modding community, very few of the mods retain the horror aspect, with some of the most popular being ones that turn the game into a normal dating sim, and other mods, fan videos, and mockup screenshots are comedy-focused, and fanfics mainly focuses on shipping, whether it be pairing up the MC with one of the girls or the girls with each other. That said, even the more horrifying aspects of the game have been memed from time to time (such as Sayori's suicide).

Web Animation

• While The Amazing Digital Circus has the aesthetic of a Zany Cartoon and has plenty of slapstick and comedy, it's at the end of the day a very disturbing existential Psychological Horror story about individuals trapped in a digital world as they slowly start questioning their predicament. The fandom on the other hand, almost always leaves the existential horror out in favor of treating it like a purely wacky Slice of Life comedy about the characters just hanging around.
• Happy Tree Friends is a Subverted Kids' Show, where cute woodland animals are subjected to some of the goriest deaths ever imagined. It's all entirely Played for Laughs and there's admittedly not much else much to this concept, but the fandom still like to create their own spins on the characters (it helps that the cast is a Dysfunction Junction). For the most part, fans prefer ignoring the gore aspects completely in favor of treating the series as a Slice of Life Sugar Bowl, albeit with some added lore every now and then, but there are others who take the gore and twist the show into a full-on horror-drama.
• RWBY is a fantastical show that carries a lingering air of optimism, but a large section of the fanbase seems to focus in on the sociopolitical aspect of it. While such topics are given a fair amount of focus in Volumes 5, 7, and 8, the rest of the show mostly devotes itself to high-octane action and encouraging morals, but the sociopolitical underbelly influences a large amount of fan discussion, especially concerning the ideologies and actions of individual characters such as the controversial General Ironwood.

Web Videos

• Stampy Long Head: Regarding Lighter and Softer Stampy only, as the time he targeted adults fits the majority of his current audience better. Despite Stampy portraying himself as someone who wants to create a Sugar Bowl with his brand, and is trying to seem as innocent as possible, for the sake of fun, much of his audience consists of extremely edgy, immature people who don't fit into this, mostly being rather entitled and focusing entirely on "meme culture" than what his videos depict. Not all of the audience, but some of it. As a result, it does not portray Stampy with the image he wants to give himself, thanks to his audience completely contradicting it.

Western Animation

• Amphibia: Despite being a relatively lighthearted show featuring talking frogs, fans almost exclusively focus on the three main human characters, Anne Boonchuy, Sasha Waybright, and Marcy Wu, and the drama surrounding their troubled relationship to the point where it's easy to ignore characters like the Plantar family.
• Hazbin Hotel is an equal mix of nightmare-inducing imagery, bone-shaking, triggering drama, risque Black Comedy and whimsical, lighthearted, and heartwarming moments. The fandom however, either cranks the darkest aspects of the show up to eleven, turning it into a truly disturbing horror drama, or entirely downplay the horror and drama in favor of turning it into a wholesome Slice of Life story that's almost kid friendly.
• Much like the comic book it was based on, Invincible is famous for its over-the-top Gorn and high-stakes action. While many fans acknowledge this, it's also very easy to make memes about the series, particularly featuring Omni-Man, like "THINK MARK THINK!" for example.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic is a show aimed at, ostensibly, a younger demographic, with pastel-colored ponies offering up heartwarming lessons about friendship and being a better individual. But you wouldn't know that from looking at what the fandom has produced:
  • Early on, the fans spawned some of the darkest fanfiction imaginable, from the infamous Cupcakes (Sergeant Sprinkles), (which imagines Pinkie Pie as a sadistic serial killer) to Rainbow Factory (where Rainbow Dash is complicit in child murder on an industrial scale) and their various imitators. Name any main character, and there's at least one fanfic portraying them as a serial killer or psychological abuser, with their crimes depicted in disturbing detail. There is so much Dark Fic in the series that it has its own page on the wiki, and it is far from comprehensive.
  • The series has also spawned a fair amount of fangames that seem to be innocent only to become horror games, like the Luna Game series or Story of the Blanks.
  • Possibly the fandom's single most popular fanfic (so much so that it inspired a heap of fanfics of its own) is Fallout: Equestria — which starts with the premise that the entire cast of the show died in a nuclear war. It follows a new group of ponies who struggle to survive and attempt to rebuild society, in the lawless wasteland that used to be Equestria.
  • The pony Abridged Series scene is dominated by two Black Comedies, My Little Pony: The Mentally Advanced Series and Friendship is Witchcraft. Thanks to their influence, most pony abridgings derive their humor from some combination of making the main six ponies all hate each other, turning one or more of the protagonists into complete sociopaths, making Princess Celestia a tyrant, portraying Equestria as a Crapsaccharine World rife with Fantastic Racism, and abusing Spike.
• The Loud House: The show itself is a fairly lighthearted and simple show, yet the fandom has created multiple Dark Fics centered around darker and more serious topics and settings.
• The Owl House: Much like its sister series Amphibia, the show has a balance of goofy humor and serious drama, with fans either leaning towards one or the other.
• South Park codified the Animated Shock Comedy and has a crass, cynical, Equal-Opportunity Offender attitude; even its more serious moments are punctuated with edgy humor. It has a dedicated shipping-heavy fandom on sites like DeviantArt and Tumblr dedicated to depicting the characters in wholesome Slice of Life situations, heartfelt narratives taking the Black Comedy more seriously (often involving Hurt/Comfort Fic), and far more earnest depictions of LGBT people and minorities. The show itself even parodied Yaoi Fangirls in Season 19's "Tweek x Craig," with the titular boys being shocked at in-universe fangirls drawing out-of-character romantic and sexual art of them. Ironically, this kickstarts the two being an unironic Official Couple whose relationship is a bit more in line with their fandom portrayals.
• SpongeBob SquarePants is meant to be this cute, cheery show about the wacky escapades of talking kitchen utensils under the sea, but by looking at its fandom, you'd swear that it's actually a Subverted Kids' Show akin to South Park. Nearly every character is a Memetic Psychopath, it's surprisingly prone to Dark Fics, and there is often YouTube Poop of the show with lots of murder and rape (It's Black Comedy, but still). Granted, the show has gone through some Seasonal Rot where the characters have become a bit meaner due to Flanderization, but it's still nowhere near as bad as the fandom portrays them.

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