YMMV / Hatchetfield

• Actor Shipping:
  • People who've been squeeing over speculation that Joey Richter and Lauren Lopez were dating since the A Very Potter Musical days were rewarded by Joey and Lauren having their first ever significant scene together in a show since "Granger Danger" in Black Friday, with a very Does This Remind You of Anything? scene with Uncle Wiley "seducing" Linda Monroe into Wiggly's service. (They then had their shipping validated by Lauren and Joey officially announcing their engagement in 2020, followed by them performing their first duet together since "Granger Danger" in Episode Two of Nightmare Time, "Peanuts!")
  • Robert Manion, prior to being booted from the series, was a fan-favorite target for Actor Shipping, being the resident younger Pretty Boy and having a large Estrogen Brigade. There was a lot of Mariah/Robert shipping — ironic, since up until "Forever & Always" they'd never appeared as a couple or even significantly interacted in a show, and is based mostly on social media banter and the two of them doing a killer cover of "Seventeen" from Heathers. (They would have played a couple in Black Friday but Mariah had to bow out of playing Lex Foster due to being cast in Mean Girls, which led to Robert and Mariah having a tongue-in-cheek "falling out" online.) That said, Robert and Angela had strong enough chemistry in their brief time together as Lex and Ethan in Black Friday that they got shipping goggles directed at them too.
  • Curt Mega and Kim Whalen have been together since they were teenagers and married since 2010, so the "shipping" is less intense, but a lot of their fans were very excited to see them both officially join the cast of Black Friday. They have played couples twice, as Duke and Miss Holloway in Nightmare Time and Karen and Mark Chasity in Nerdy Prudes Must Die.
  • There's a fair amount of Ho Yay shipping too, mostly tongue-in-cheek jokes about Jon Matteson and Jeff Blim, which they've happily exploited for jokes on Jeff's Rim Tim Timmy Fun Time Hour podcast about Jeff's incessant Yandere bullying and dominating Jon.
  • People also pointed out Ho Yay of a more wholesome nature with Robert and Jon's relationship as roommates, especially after the COVID-19 Pandemic quarantine started, with their goofy married-couple bickering and domesticity (especially after they started streaming Animal Crossing: New Horizons together). That said, Ho Yay shipping and jokes about Robert receded a lot, ironically, after he actually did come out as bisexual on social media and did so with an accompanying emotional story about how being in the closet cost him a possible relationship with a dear friend he was secretly in love with in the past.
• Aluminum Christmas Trees: The word "sniggle" is a real word, referring to a form of fishing for eels (or the hooks used for this kind of fishing), based on the obsolete word "snigs" to mean eels. The Tickle-Me Wiggly jingle refers to Wiggly as a snig, and though he's not especially eel-like, the commercial does present him as having an aquatic theme and Uncle Wiley as a fisherman, so this may well have been fully intentional.
• Broken Base: One that was inevitable with the major change in direction for Team Starkid away from goofy pop-culture parody musicals and toward an original Horror Comedy series — and one that Nick Lang has said may be regrettable but was necessary, since he thinks of the former genre as a fad of The New '10s that was rapidly running out of steam.
• Crack Ship: The extremely shipping-happy Starkid fandom has led to some of these in Hatchetfield's history:
  • Notably, in the early stages of The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals' Kickstarter campaign, Les Yay shippers shipped Emma and Charlotte together just based on their character descriptions (the spunky Tsundere barista and the Shrinking Violet Dandere office worker), possibly just because of the punny Portmanteau Couple Name "Emmalotte" (i.e. "omelette"). This led to a minor Why Fandom Can't Have Nice Things moment when a minority of fans accused Nick Lang of being homophobic for directly rejecting this ship when asked about it — since the Paul/Emma pairing and Charlotte/Ted/Sam Love Triangle is central to the plot — which pretty much completely died down once the actual story of the musical was revealed, including the canon gay ship between Alice/Deb. That said, of course, the Emma/Charlotte ship still exists (because nothing in fandom truly dies), even though it now requires fans to extrapolate a lot from Emma and Charlotte's minimal interactions in TGWDLM. (They have one conversation, in which Emma has difficulty even remembering Charlotte's name.)
  • From the same show came the "Tedgens" (Ted/Prof. Hidgens) ship, which is based solely on Joey Richter's highly committed acting in the "Showstoppin' Number" scene, where despite the direness of the situation Ted can't seem to help Eating the Eye Candy and sincerely appreciating the drama of Prof. Hidgens' pitch for Workin' Boys. Hilariously, this one Starkid actually followed up on: "The Hatchetfield Ape-Man" shows Prof. Hidgens and Ted in an Alternate Timeline as friends and partners-in-crime, and "Time Bastard" has a significant scene of Ted and Hidgens Drowning Their Sorrows together.
  • Then there's the tongue-in-cheek Crack Ship between two Eldritch Abominations, with people deciding that Blinky from "Watcher World" being so similar to Wiggly from Black Friday meant they had to be "boyfriends". This was, hilariously, instantly sunk with a fandom-wide Abandon Shipping announcement once "The Witch in the Web" established that the Lords in Black are all "brothers" to each other. (Metaphorical siblinghood or not, the fandom is against Incest Yay Shipping.)
• Fan Nickname: The recurring background nerd portrayed by Robert Manion in The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals and Black Friday was known by the fans as "Hot Chocolate Boy", due to having ordered a hot chocolate at Beanie's and having no other official name (as his name in the script of TGWDLM, "Obnoxious Teen", was later transferred to the character originating in Black Friday who took over his Recurring Extra role). "Abstinence Camp" revealed the character to be Ted's younger brother, Peter Spankoffski.
• Fanon: There's a lot of it floating around, some of it more serious, some of it less.
  • On the less-serious side are goofy memes about various Unexpected Characters being the "real latte hotté", i.e. someone unexpected Ted has a crush on (because Ted is headcanoned as pansexual), which as Memetic Mutation has ended up encompassing every Hatchetfield character that exists and every actor in the Team Starkid orbit.
  • There's similar jokes that have really harshly been Jossed by later canon, like the Homeless Man never actually being possessed by the evil force and "just vibin'" (with any Homeless Man jokes becoming a Harsher in Hindsight after "Time Bastard").
  • Also, there's been a ton of lore that's spun out from the Lords in Black reveal, like trying to associate the five Lords in Black with the five senses (Pokotho = Hearing, Blinky = Sight, Tinky = Smell, Nibbly = Taste, Wiggly = Touch) or with Entities from The Magnus Archives.
  • There's some bits of Fanon that have been more-or-less confirmed by Word of God to be true at this point — one of which is the Grandfather Paradox of the Homeless Man continuing to exist in timelines where "Time Bastard" doesn't happen being explained by the timelines not splitting until Hannah Foster is born in 2005, another of which being that Pokotho, the blue Lord in Black, is the Hive Mind from The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals who sent the Meteor. Also, the fandom has pretty much figured out from copious hints on social media that the "Hot Chocolate Boy" from The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals, rumored to play a major character in Nerdy Prudes Must Die!, must be Ted Spankoffski's "nerdy younger brother" mentioned in "Watcher World".
    • Confirmed with the introduction of Peter Spankoffski, played by Nick Lang in Nightmare Time's "Abstinence Camp" and Joey Richter in Nerdy Prudes Must Die.
  • One bit of Fanon that's stuck due to the various paradoxes of Colorblind Casting: We know it's unlikely that someone who looks like Corey Dorris (who is black) would have a biological daughter who looks like Mariah Rose Faith Casillas (who is white, and very fair-skinned) in Real Life, and since they've only appeared in a stage show or staged readings we're free to imagine them any way we want — but fans doing Fan Art have pretty quickly come to a consensus that the "real" Bill looks just like Corey while the "real" Alice is mixed-race or black (possibly with bleached blonde hair).
  • Similarly, when it comes to Fan Art, fans have had brief interactions with Nick Lang on social media talking about how they imagine Lauren Lopez's characters — the consensus between both Fanon and Word of God is that Emma Perkins looks pretty much exactly like Lauren, while her other characters diverge from her in various ways. Fans, for instance, are pretty likely to imagine Linda Monroe as having blue eyes as opposed to Lauren's brown, in keeping with Linda's weird implied Aryan-supremacist gloating over her "four beautiful blond boys".
  • Re: disability/mental illness representation, it's nearly a universal consensus among fans that Hannah Foster is autistic, and that Paul Matthews shares autistic traits.
• Genius Bonus:
  • "Bliklotep" is a name that, like the Cthulhu Mythos' "Nyarlathotep", is a made-up word attached to the Egyptian suffix "-hotep" meaning "peace", often used in Real Life as the name of a Pharaoh when attached to the name of an Egyptian deity (Rahotep, Amenhotep, Sobekhotep, etc.) The Genius Bonus comes in when you remember that one of the ubiquitous symbols used by the Pharaohs was the wadjet eye.
  • In "The Hatchetfield Ape-Man", Professor Hidgens asks Lucy for $30 million to fund Workin' Boys. While this sounds like a reasonable budget for a film, it would be the third most expensive Broadway show of all time. Add on Word of God's confirmation that Workin' Boys is a Real Time plot in which seven guys mill around on a football field reminiscing for three hours, and it's a pretty brilliant joke about just how delusional Hidgens is about this show.
• Growing the Beard: Although a lot of older fans may have resisted the new direction Starkid took with The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals, there's just as many fans who love the new, more mature Starkid and even say that in comparison to the Hatchetfield shows it's hard to rewatch the old shows in the same light, especially since a lot of the immature humor has aged poorly.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • In November 2020, a movie called Black Friday was announced — a Horror Comedy with very similar plot elements not only to the Hatchetfield play of the same title, but with a little bit of The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals thrown in too! StarKid fans were outraged, but Nick Lang took it rather well, sure it's a coincidence and eager to see the film when it comes out. The end of the "feud" on social media was director Casey Patrick Tebo saying he'd watched Starkid's Black Friday, liked it a lot and would love to put a Wiggly doll in the movie as an Easter Egg. It is currently unclear is this has happened.
  • Before that, a Christmas movie called Jingle Jangle was released shortly after Black Friday, seemingly right in the vein of Hatchetfield's Christmas movie parody Santa Claus Is Goin' To High School.
• Idiosyncratic Ship Naming: Grace/Max gets this a lot, with "Holy Ghost," "Holyghost," and "Ghostsoup" being the most common.
• Jerkass Woobie:
  • Ted is an absolute asshole and spends most of his stagetime being utterly insufferable. Then came "Time Bastard," in which we find out he Used to Be a Sweet Kid before having his heart broken, and his ultimate fate of being driven to madness before eventually being murdered and having his soul trapped in the Bastard's Box for all eternity is so horrible, practically no one really deserves it.
  • Lex is more a Jerk with a Heart of Gold, but she's still very prickly and deeply cynical. However, given what sort of person her mother is, and the fact that she's been Promoted to Parent for her beloved little sister with almost zero help from the adults in their lives, she's kind of earned the right to it.
• Memetic Mutation: Fuck Clivesdale!^Explanation Hatchetfield has a Small Town Rivalry with their neighbors Clivesdale-even residents who hate Hatchetfield hate Clivesdale even more. Naturally, the Share Phrase "Fuck Clivesdale!" has caught in in the fandom, almost to the level of a Verbal Tic that pops up any time Clivesdale is mentioned, even in passing.
• Portmanteau Couple Name:
  • Paulkins = Paul Matthews / Emma Perkins
  • Lexthan = Lex Foster / Ethan Green
  • Barneston = Becky Barnes / Tom Houston
  • Barnroe = Becky Barnes / Linda Monroe
  • Perkston = Jane Perkins / Tom Houston
  • Emmlette = Emma Perkins / Charlotte Sweetly
  • Charted = Charlotte Sweetly / Ted Spankoffski
  • Holloduke = Miss Holloway / Duke Keane
  • Tedgens = Ted Spankoffski / Henry Hidgens
  • A borderline example, with "Droid23" being used for Emma 2 and Paul 23. "Falsekins" has also been used.
  • Stephgrace = Stephanie Lauter / Grace Chasity
  • Jagertitty or Gracemax = Max Jägerman / Grace Chasity
  • Lautski = Stephanie Lauter / Peter Spankoffski
• Sophomore Slump:
  • The second installment, Black Friday, is the most polarizing piece of Hatchetfield media. Compared to its smash-hit predecessor The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals, its well-received successor Nerdy Prudes Must Die, and the welcome and tantalizing lore of Nightmare Time, the show that first introduced the concept of this being a series has tended to fade into the background.
  • To a lesser extent, Nightmare Time 2 seemingly received less hype than the first season, to the point that Nick Lang worries that concluding the story with Nightmare Time 3, as he desires to, won't be worth the trouble.
• Spiritual Successor: Despite the massive difference in tone and style, the Hatchetfield series has been said to be one for The Trail to Oregon! — the Lang Brothers describe the decision to do The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals as driven by the desire to reunite the same Production Posse who did TTO in 2014, saying it was the most fun and the easiest experience they'd had doing a show in the past and wanted to keep this same team going in the future. The Hatchetfield series has the same songwriter as The Trail to Oregon, Jeff Blim, and a similar Mood Whiplash-based comedic sensibility. There's even a explicit Call-Back to a concept from TTO with Blinky's title "The Watcher with a Thousand Eyes", referencing the "horror" sequence in TTO leading into the song "Dysentery World".
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: There's been some pushback from fans who don't think a Darker and Edgier tone and big, complex storytelling is really playing to Team Starkid's strengths, especially from many older fans who gave lukewarm reviews to Black Friday, where the Hatchetfield series really ramped up the Cerebus Syndrome.
• The Woobie:
  • Charlotte Sweetly is a Love Martyr towards her philandering, dismissive husband Sam. She makes a genuine effort to fix things, attending counselling and trying to spend time with Sam, but he blows her off in favor of screwing around with his younger girlfriend. And while she does have an affair of her own, it's with Ted... who does seem to have genuine affection for her, but he Cannot Spit It Out, and she won't leave Sam anyway.
  • Becky Barnes has only just got out of a marriage to an abusive monster and is surrounded by malicious gossip from the townsfolk who blame her for not leaving him, since everyone thinks he ran off with another woman. To make matters worse, Linda gleefully makes it clear that everyone knew what was happening to Becky, but did any of them try and help? Nope. She also carries a lot of guilt for stabbing her husband and possibly killing him, and lives in fear of him either coming back for revenge, or his body being discovered. It gets worse in the plot of "Jane's a Car", where she gets to witness her new boyfriend Tom go through rapid Sanity Slippage and then, as far as she knows, sees him betray and attempt to murder her.
  • Hannah Foster has an abusive, neglectful mother who couldn't care less about her, and her ambiguous disorder and psychic powers mean she can't really connect with other people. Her older sister Lex adores her, but there's only so much she can do, and in at least one story, they've been seperated, leaving Hannah on her own. To make matters worse, her powers make her very interesting to the various Eldritch Abominations running around.

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