Follow TV Tropes

Following

Wham Episode / Web Animation

Go To


  • Broken Saints: Chapter 22 Act 2. On top of being freaky as hell, it is also the point where all obscurity is thrown aside, and the conflict is finally given a clear focus.
  • Dead Fantasy — Part V shows us that characters are not in fact invincible and that these are life or dead fights and not some extreme battle exercises as many people thought.
  • The Final Fantasy crossover series Final Fighting Fantasy really starts to kick the plot into gear around chapter six, Epic. But emotionally, some would say the Wham Episode is chapter three, Gaiden, which was a considerable boost in storytelling style from the first two.
  • The "Double Whammy" two-parter from Happy Tree Friends subverts this. Flippy decides to get therapy for his Split Personality, which eventually leads to an all-out episode-wide battle between his good and evil self, ending with good Flippy killing his evil counterpart, apparently curing himself. Too bad the show's Negative Continuity meant this change didn't stick.
  • Homestar Runner, despite being mostly a Gag Series, still manages to throw some twists in.
    • Email gimmicks, the Tandy 400 explodes, and Email invisibility, Strong Bad replaces "him" with the Compy 386.
    • Email virus, the Compy gets a virus, destroys the universe, and Bubs kills it to restore order.
    • Email cliffhangers, the Lappy 486 is kidnapped, starting a month-long arc leading up to Tandy and Compy being the kidnappers, then being killed for good.
    • Email the paper, The Paper dies of old age, and is replaced with a designated Replacement Scrappy, New Paper.
    • Email email thunder, it turns out Homestar had been masterminding the series all along for his own email show, which got its own spin off for a few months. The Paper comes back to life and defeats New Paper, only to immediately die again.
    • Hremail 3184, Strong Bad takes the series back and destroys the Lappy, which he replaces with the Compé in Compy Catalog. New Paper is killed in the crossfire.
    • A Decemberween Mackerel ends with the implication that Homsar dies. The fact that the website went on hiatus shortly after the cartoon didn't help.
    • I Killed Pom Pom, Homestar mistakes a deflated inflatable pumpkin for a dead Pom Pom and attempts to cover up his "murder". Strong Bad uses this as a chance to mess with Homestar and get some free pastries. This is all good fun until Strong Bad decides to mess with Homestar by having Pom Pom pretend to "rise from the dead" and freak out Homestar. Instead of freaking out, Homestar decides to "fight murder with murder" and use a piece of Strong Bad's costume to kill Pom Pom for real. On the plus side, Homsar turns out to have survived.
    • "Sbemail 206", the Compe is supposedly compressed by dust into the Lappier.
  • In If the Emperor Had a Text-to-Speech Device, episode 18 radically alters the scene of events. First off, the Inquisitors who have been menacing (more like annoying) the heroes for the last 14 episodes are gone, sent to the Warp. This would seem like a good change, until we learn that Fulgrim and Abaddon are setting up another Black Crusade, apparently caused by Magnus' disappearance. And those two are going to be menacing.
  • The LeBrons has an episode called "Big Game", in which Kid LeBron loses in a big basketball game because there's seconds left for it.
  • Meta Runner: The final 7 minutes of Season 2 finale, “Fatal Error”, manages to pack three major twists that turns the plot of the series on its head:
    • Tari is revealed to be a hybrid of Dr. Sheridan’s Turbo Artificial Rapid Intelligence (T.A.R.I.) AI and part of Lucinia’s mind, placed into a mysterious artificial body; likewise Lucinia is still technically alive, but needs both parts of her mind to be completely revived, which would remove Tari’s sentience.
    • Lucks, the show’s Big Bad up to that point, gets Killed Off for Real when Masa’s arm gets hijacked and is used to shoot Lucks point blank in the head, which ends up creating a new problem for MD-5 after all the effort they put into taking Lucks down and forces them to split up once again. Not only that, but Lucks seemed perfectly content with his incoming death, as he uses his last words to congratulate the one controlling Masa’s arm...
    • ... who is revealed to be the also still-alive Dr. Sheridan, the scientist who was involved with the Project Blue experiments that gave birth to Tari and set the events of the series into motion. And he seems to have no problem getting his own creation roped in with the murder of Lucks, and he’s seemingly willing to help Evelyn get her revenge on Tari by offering her the same abilities as her.
  • The Most Popular Girls in School:
    • Episode 31/Season 3, Episode 1. Jenna Darabond reveals that she's been playing everyone for saps for the last two seasons.
    • Episode 58/Season 3, Episode 28. Mackenzie has Jenna Darabond arrested and reveals she set everything up to have Cameron Van Buren break up Jenna's family by blowing up Brittnay's car so Brittnay would punch Jenna in the face and they'd have to go to a parent-teacher conference. The football team wins the game, Brittnay has decided she's DONE with Mackenzie, and TANYA BERKOWITZ STABS JENNA DARABOND TO DEATH for burning down the Atchison Mall.
  • Red vs. Blue: Season 6's Reconstruction is the storyline that transforms the show from a lighthearted, plot-light comedy, bringing together random events, one-off jokes and Running Gags to invent a serious, heavy storyline and overarching metaplot that is fully revealed by Agent Washington in Chapter 16. It also transforms the story role and true nature of one character, something they and audience learn from Agent Washington together.
  • RWBY: Fall. Remnant's history of fairy tales are discussed, and it's revealed that some of them are actually true stories that were deliberately disguised as fairy tales to protect humanity from panic and chaos. There are four Maidens who represent the four Seasons. They were gifted with incredible, magical power by an old man who possessed incredible, magical power of his own. Cinder has attacked the Fall Maiden and stolen half her power. The Fall Maiden's protectors want Pyrrha to inherit her remaining power. Confirmed in livestream interviews with the creators that the Maidens were invented between the end of Volume 2 and the beginning of Volume 3, resulting in the original plot needing to be rewritten and no foreshadowing for them having occurred. The Maidens turn out to be the key to everything that is happening in the plot, having been created by Ozpin, who is the old man of the fairy tale and who possesses this magical power because his and Salem's Secret War hides an Awful Truth about the history of Remnant that humanity doesn't know.
  • Toon Train seems at first to be a simple collection of humorous and bizarre short animations, which have several re-occurring elements. But if you watch it at midnight (or change your system clock), you get an Easter Egg where a detective is called to his office in the middle of the night, and you have three minutes to examine some evidence regarding the "Fitzgeraldson case" (the main menu states that the character Buttglove's real name is Lance Fitzgeraldson, but this seems like pointless trivia at first). The evidence reveals that Lance was actually a professional boxer who had his career ruined after he was defeated by a newcomer (symbolized by the cow that appears several times). Lance then joined the Navy, and ended up finding the love of his life (symbolized by the sea lion in "Seal") and having a child. The challenges of fatherhood took a toll on Lance's performance in the Navy, and this resulted in the ship he was on colliding with a mine and being destroyed. Lance's wife died, but he survived and took care of his son, while slipping into insanity. His son later gave him tickets to the circus, where he was murdered with a hammer (which also appears several times in the collab). After being apprehended, Lance claimed that "the radio made him do it", and a psychiatric analysis revealed that he heard messages in song lyrics commanding him to kill his son. Try finding the shorts funny after that.

Top