Beluga
is an American YouTube channel primarily centred around Discord-themed video skits. It is the younger sister channel of Explore Lucid Dreaming, ran by the same creator, which centres around exploration of lucid dreaming states, as the name indicates. With its rapid growth in popularity, Beluga has seemingly become a (much) More Popular Spin Off to Explore Lucid Dreaming.
Taking place almost entirely within the Discord app, most Beluga videos feature no audible dialogue as the characters only communicate through onscreen text. The main ongoing series stars the naïve, cat-avatar'd titular protagonist navigating his way through Discord servers, finding innovative ways to irritate and undermine the moderators as he goes. The series has accumulated a memorable cast of recurring characters based on stereotypical Discord users who occasionally take centre stage in their own sketches. Has a WIP character page.
Has nothing to do with beluga whales or beluga sturgeons.
Beluga contains examples of:
- All Men Are Perverts: Parodied. Pablo, Eugene and Lester will instantly become agreeable with anyone who sports an avatar of a young/cute anime girl, or puts "female" as their gender, no matter how abrupt or unconvincing this is.
- Ambiguously Gay: It's implied Eugene might be gay for Beluga in the Wifi episode.
- Anachronism Stew: Lester's server has apparently been around since at least 1983, and some of Beluga's direct messages date back to as early as 2007, long before Discord (and in Lester's case, the internet itself) even existed.
- Beat Them at Their Own Game: Beluga sometimes uses an offending person's strategies against them:
- Beter constantly preaches and implores Beluga to use Discord's Light Mode, and Beluga uses his tactic to get him to try the laptop-destroying Yellow Mode.
- RoboKiller constantly puts Beluga through huge amounts of anti-Bot tests, and Beluga fails all of them. Beluga then gives RoboKiller his own anti-Bot test, which turns out to be a hidden Rick Roll. This, of course, immediately gets Beluga booted.
- Beneath Suspicion: In the Among Us episode, Beluga acts as an investigator between Skittle and Pablo as the latter two accuse each other of being the Impostor, so as to cleverly draw suspicion away from himself, the actual Impostor.
- Berserk Button: Eugene gets very annoyed if you call or compare him to an egg due to his egg-shaped head. He also (at first) didn't take kindly to Beluga insulting Fortnite in the argument video.
- Breakout Character: A number of the side characters like Skittle-Chan and especially Hecker eventually got Youtube Channels with their own similar-styled videos.
- Bright Is Not Good: Discord Light Mode is treated as an unholy, eye-searing aberration that Beter constantly preaches about. And then there's the even worse Yellow Mode, which was so bad it made Beter's laptop catch fire.
- Brown Note:
- Discord Light Mode is depicted as an eye-destroying horror that Beter preaches about. Beluga can't even stand a minute of it. The Yellow Mode is even worse, being so bad that it causes Beter's laptop to combust.
- The Belupacito song supposedly has a beat drop dangerous enough to destroy the universe. Beluga keeps ignoring the warnings of Hecker and Dr. Meow, only to find out that it really does destroy the universe.
- Bullying a Dragon: Trying to antagonize Hecker by using an electronically-activated chute pit was a very dumb idea by Ralph, thanks to Hecker's Hollywood Hacking abilities. It ends with the hacked chute system exploding, taking his entire house out (and perhaps along with the kidnapped Skittle-Chan too).
- Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Despite being a complete idiot, Hecker's mad Hollywood Hacking skills are highly sought after.
- Eugene pays the price for underestimating Becky, as it turns out she's an online Vigilante Man able to easily uncover his home address through a hidden IP tracker file in one of her Minion memes.
- Catchphrase: Most characters have one.
- Beluga's calling card is spamming "E" in the general chat when things go south.
- Lester calls everyone "sweetie".
- Pablo calls everyone "sussy boy" or "sussy baka".
- The Comically Serious: Most of the admins and moderators take their roles way, way too seriously. Pablo bans anyone foolish enough to post a meme in the General chat.
- Conservation of Ninjutsu: The server raid episode has Pablo easily defending against and banning or muting the mass raiders in the first few waves. The final wave consists of a single raider who manages to hack in admin rights and undo all the mutes/bans that Pablo tried to achieve, allowing the rest of the raiders to run free again.
- Crazy-Prepared: An episode has Beluga delete their entire consciousness in a ploy by Lester. Hecker fortunately had an entire backup of Beluga's consciousness in a .zip file... and also Skittle's, who wasn't seen again after Lester kidnapped them.
- Disguised in Drag: The most effective ploy used by Beluga and Skittle is to simply change their names and avatars to feminine alter-egos, which is treated as a Dangerous Forbidden Technique as it immediately makes the mods accept their every demand... But tends to attract unwanted attention. It tends to be less effective against newer antagonists, however.
- Evil Knockoff: In one episode, Pablo's Discord server is raided by dozens of identical fake accounts called 'begula', which use a slightly different cat image to that of Beluga.
- Fat Bastard: Most of the 'villainous' characters are morbidly obese.
- Pablo is a fat and extremely tyrannical mod; initially serving as a villain who wants to get Beluga banned, he became more of a mere frenemy jerk with occasional Pet the Dog moments later on.
- Lester is morbidly obese and a Rules Lawyer Jerkass who, after kidnapping Skittle, became the closest thing the series has to a villain until his decay set in.
- Eugene is similarly fat like Pablo, can't take a joke, and is equally ban-happy.
- Foil: In contrast to the ban-happy Pablo, Lester doesn't believe in banning anyone for any reason and instead traps everyone in his server indefinitely. He's still just as much of a creepy weirdo as Pablo, in any case. Beluga, naturally, sees it as a challenge to annoy Lester until he breaks that vow.
- Geek Physiques: All admins and mods in the series are portrayed as pale, grotesque-looking geeks, judging by their profile pictures. They can usually be expected to be some combination of fat, speccy, neckbeardy, bald, ugly, etc.
- Grammar Nazi: Both Howard and Sbeve are shown to be these crossed with Insane Troll Logic in the "Internet Arguments" episode, declaring themselves the victor of an argument because Beluga made a single spelling error.
- Halloween Episode: "Halloween in 2021 Be Like..." focuses on Ralph giving out candy to passing trick-or-treaters. Soon however, his Jerkass behavior begins to kick in; he begins unfairly dropping Beluga down a chute for his bad costumes, and then kidnaps Skittle-chan when she drops by for candy. But when he tries to antagonize Hecker by using his electronic chute, the tables get swiftly turned.
- Heel–Face Revolving Door: Depending on the episode, Hecker can either be an ally to Beluga, or a shady person who's trying to get into their account.
- Heel–Face Turn: Pablo becomes a protagonist that doesn't antagonize Beluga when the server gets hit by raiders all named "begula". He does manage to keep all the raiders at bay until one of them manages to hack in admin rights.
- Hoist by His Own Petard: In the Phone Batteries episode, the Russian phone battery example has Vladimir drain Beluga's phone Battery, since as a Communist Russian, he declares that it's our battery. Beluga then reminds him that since it's Russia, you don't charge phones, but phones charge you. Cue Vladimir's house exploding from power overload.
- Dave manages to obtain Beluga's Youtube Checkmark and amasses tons of views to take over the world... and attracts the attention of Snowie on his Youtube channel, who finds and presumably kills him, or at the very least, hurts him badly.
- Hollywood Hacking: Hecker is capable of impossible feats of hacking prowess, including the abilities to inflate a person's bank account into the billions and design a downloadable file that generates unlimited battery power to a person's phone. By far one of his most impressive feats is somehow having backup files of both Beluga's and Skittle's minds.
- Hypocrite: RoboKiller is a bot who puts those who join his chat through a rigorous anti-bot test.
- Love Makes You Dumb: Put on a girl avatar and/or tell the mods you're female, and they'll be very eager to cave into whatever request you got. Pablo in particular is a frequent victim of this.
- Obfuscating Stupidity:
- Becky acts like a ditzy middle-aged bimbo with no knowledge of modern technology to hide her true intentions. Those being to dox Eugene by tracking his home address for undisclosed purposes.
- After much denial towards Sbeve, Pablo eventually relents to, understands, and adopts the flat earther's belief so as to trick Sbeve into getting Rickrolled.
- Pyrrhic Victory: In the first Squid Game-based episode, Beluga wins the $37000000, but had to kill Snowie in the final round, and it turns out that the money was in Belubucks... which has a conversion rate of one Belubuck to 0.000031 USD (so worth a whopping 1147 USD in total).
- Scare Chord: The arrival of the mods in a discussion is usually accompanied by a low, ominous "dunnnn" sound effect.
- So Last Season: A good number of "newer" antagonists aren't swayed by cute anime girl avatars, which normally instantly turned initial villains Pablo, Lester, or Eugene agreeable.
- Surreal Humor: They're not overly so, but don't expect the videos to make much sense... Which of course helps to make them funnier.
- Unpleasant Animal Counterpart: The protagonist Beluga's avatar is that of a polite-looking housecat, while the much more shady Hecker's is that of a wild Caracal.
- Villain Decay: For a while the creepy Lester serves as the 'villain' of the series, somehow managing to find and kidnap Skittle, Hecker and Beluga, but after Hecker finds Skittle's 'backup', Lester along with the other mods, is subject to Flanderization, making them almost interchangeable.
- Wild Card: Hecker can be a help or hindrance to Beluga at the flip of a coin. Although, even when he tries to do good, the results are usually less than desirable.
- Wrong Genre Savvy: Pablo attempts to mute Skittle using Discord commands after the latter disrespects him... while on the Among Us in-game chat. Naturally, it doesn't work, and Beluga points out to him that "this isn't Discord".
