As with Wildbow's other works, Twig readers love memes, almost as much as Helen loves cake.
- Helen × Cake OTP! Explanation Helen, being a raised-from-scratch non-human experiment, has a value system which differentiates from the human one in many ways. One of the few things that humans and Helen both agree on being good is food. Cake is her favorite.
- She just wants to give him a hug! Explanation Helen frequently desires to hug people. A lot. To death. With her altered physiology, she can actually crush people to death. With her altered psychology, she enjoys it.
- 'Devastatingly' intelligent. Explanation Sy was described like this in a wanted poster, and thought it was the coolest thing ever. He starts using the word all the time, even if his shoddy memory means he has to keep asking Jamie which word it was. The fans have picked up the habit as well.
- Fans getting characters' names wrong. Explanation After Sy stops being able to get high-quality Wyvern formula, his memory gets worse, and he constantly gets the names of the people he meets wrong. Readers then intentionally misname everyone in the Wordpress comments.
- Everyone has a mancrush on Mauer. Explanation Mauer (aka The Shepherd) has a talent for leadership and social manipulation that rivals or exceeds Sy's ability. Sy admires him so much that his commentary reads like someone praising their crush.
- What innuendo? Explanation Despite being extremely socially astute, Sy's psychological development has been somewhat altered by the Wyvern formula. Sometimes he displays an incredible obliviousness to obviously sexual situations and phrasings, especially when they're directed at him. Jamie makes jokes about this at Sy's expense frequently, and Sy seems to realize there's a joke, but doesn't get it. It later turns out that Sy had intentionally disabled his libido in order to avoid dealing with Jamie's feelings towards him.
- Sy × Misery. Explanation People, both in-story and among the readers, frequently noticed a self-destructive trend in Sylvester's behaviour: whatever he does, he ends up cold, dirty, wounded and in pain, loses pieces of his clothing (probably because he'd used them as impromptu bandages), and so on. Jamie, to whom it can't be more obvious, speculated that Sy has an unconscious complusion to get as miserable as humanly possible.
- Fray the Godzilla Threshold. Explanation Fray, the most influential Chessmaster of the story, is prone to directly escalate the story's plot by her actions. So far, she is responsible for starting the civil war, giving the Academy's biotechnological knowledge to the common people, and creating a plan which involved the creation of primordial life (which makes her indirectly responsible for the Red Plague as well). People joked that if you see her, that probably means you're passing yet another Godzilla Threshold
- Mary threw the knife first. Explanation During Sylvester's defection, one step of his plan involved shooting an unsuspecting Mary in the knee when her back was turned. However, Mary noticed oddities in his behaviour beforehand, and was quick enough to turn around and throw a knife at him before he pressed the trigger.
- When you try to backstab Mary, Mary stabs you.
- Poor Duncan. Explanation Duncan, a latter addition to the Lambs, found himself in a unique position of being the Chew Toy both In-Universe and for the readers. Coined by Helen.
- The Engineer was called The Engineer Explanation The Engineer was referred to as 'the Machinist' several times during their first appearance. Wildbow then fixed those errors, and then proceed to alter every instance of 'Machinist' in the comments going forward, including editing coded or indirect references, to refer to 'the Engineer' instead.
- Goddamn Birds. Explanation One of Sylvester's and the Lambs' most difficult types of enemy to defeat are anything that flies because they can't easily use the terrain to trip them up and control them like they do to regular, earthbound creatures or people. The setting being what it is, this usually means some sort of aggressive, bird-based mad science experiment. It has happened often enough that Sy has noticed what a pain they are to him: "Lords-suckling mother-cunting birds!"