Adaptation Displacement: One of the most successful Web Originals started out as a children's dead-tree picture book, which was only given out to friends. References to that book appear in some animations.
Alternative Character Interpretation: As of "Marzipan's Answering Machine #4", Marzipan knows that Strong Bad has been leaving prank messages on her machine. Does Strong Bad still do this to keep her entertained, or is it because he has a pipe dream that she'll eventually fall for one?
Archive Binge: Necessary to get all the in-jokes and references. A lot of the cartoons make little to no sense otherwise.
Archive Panic: The website has been operating since late 1999, and the official wiki has been unable to confirm certain details of the site before 2003.
Continuity Lockout: It's not really a continuity cartoon, but half of the gags will make no dang sense if you don't start at the beginning and work your way forward. Because everything's broken into separate series, there's no way to be sure you're watching it all in the right order, either. They've even referenced cartoons that had already been removed from the site. Thank goodness there's a fan wiki.
Crosses the Line Twice: A lot of Strong Bad's abusive behavior would be horrifying in just about any other context, but it often ends up being so ridiculously over-the-top or childish/ineffective that it becomes hilarious rather than disturbing.
There is also this joke from "Career Day":
Narrator: Kids, have you ever wondered who that mysterious man in the picture your mother hides under her pillow is? [laughing] No, it's not your real father! [Space Captainface walks in and pushes the boy aside] Why, it's SBASAF's First Lieuteneral Space Captainface!
Evil Is Cool: Strong Bad was originally the antagonist in Homestar Runner, but he was loved by so many fans that he pretty much became the main character.
Fanworks featuring the unused characters Homeschool Winner and Champeen almost always make them related to Homestar, often either his siblings or cousins. (The "Quickstart Overview" rap for the Trogdor board game makes a sly reference to this: when Strong Bad raps "You can play it by yourself or with your stepmom's kids", Homeschool Winner is seen representing "stepmom's kids".)
Most fanart (especially on Tumblr) decipt Strong Bad (or in some cases, Strong Sad) with top surgery scars, implying that he's a trans male.
Friendly Fandoms: Thanks to their numerous collaborations, many fans of Homestar either are or have become fans of They Might Be Giants as well.
At the show's height, the Fanstuff Wiki was filled with crossovers with fellow flash animated series Bonus Stage, to the point where it seemed to be just as much a Bonus Stage fanfic wiki as a Homestar Runner one. Wilson was a fan of the Chaps' creation and would sometimes sneak references to it in his work, culminating in a Strong Bad cameo in one episode.
Genius Bonus: Especially true with the Halloween cartoons, where the characters' costumes includes extremely specific pop culture references.
"sick day" is a short entirely focused around the House of Brothers Strong (and Homestar) falling too ill to do their regular duties, including checking email. It has a darker context in light of the COVID-19 Pandemic, particularly Strong Bad's comment that he can't smell anything anymore, a common symptom of Long COVID.
Near the end of "Fall Float Parade", a giant Marshie Balloon feebly controlled by The Cheat rams into the platform where Marzipan and Coach Z are reporting. At the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade three days later, a balloon accidentally slammed into a streetlight and injured two people.
And in a similar vein, Marzipan is very uncomfortable on-air for co-anchor Coach Z's "inapprapriate comments." Cut to 2017, when NBC's Matt Lauer, who co-hosted the Macy's Parade coverage, was fired for sexual harassment.
"Best Caper Ever", which is about Homestar floating on an ice floe through the Arctic as Strong Bad and The Cheat try to remember what happened, came out February 9, 2009, one day after 134 people were rescued from a freeflowing sheet of ice that broke off into Lake Erie. Because of this, the page title of the cartoon was "Total Coincidence! Not Intentional!"
In "Sbemailiarized Entertainment", Mike Chapman says he "can't wait to stop working– start working. On them." Not long after, the franchise would enter a lengthy hiatus.
In the commentary (published early 2001) for The King of Town, Strong Bad complains about not having his own cartoon. The following August, the first Strong Bad Email was put on the site, and Internet history was made.
"Attention Holiday Shoppers! Bubs Friday starts Thursday!" The last item in a "not Football TV" montage back on Thanksgiving 2007. Four yearslater...
In the 2008 Halloween cartoon "Most In The Graveyard", Coach Z dresses up as DJ Lance Rock from Yo Gabba Gabba!. Matt Chapman has since become a writer for said show.
"A Jorb Well Done" became this after South Park's "Goobacks" had its own mispronunciations of "job".
In an interview, the Brothers Chaps were asked if they would ever get rid of any characters and they jokingly answered that they have considered killing off Pom Pom. Much later in Halloween 2014 we get I Killed Pom Pom, which, as the title implies, centers around Pom Pom being killed.
Even before that. Completing the Homestar Talker and the Strong Bad talker allows you to access Strong Bad's room where he has a poster of a unicorn.
The fact that they're obsessing over a film called Pony Fights when the alluded-to series got a well-known fangame about just that, as well as its successor broadening the scope to Ungulate Fights.
"Later That Night…", the 2016 Halloween special, features Bubs dressing up as Billy Mitchell, a famous gamer known for his achievements in scores and speedruns. In 2018, Mitchell was caught in a massive cheating scandal that resulted in almost all of his high scores and times being invalidated, perfectly fitting Bubs' persona as a con artist.
Often invoked in Homestar and Strong Bad's interactions, as sometimes he'll talk to Strong Bad with a very loving voice — to the latter's horror.
In the Homestar Talker game, the code phrase for unlocking the Strong Bad talker was eventually changed from "Making! Out! With! Marzipan! Is! Totally! Awesome!" to "Pom Pom! And! Stwong Bad! Awe! Totally! Going! Out!"
Homestar: Strong Bad, your costume is making me feel (suggestively) loosey-goosey!
Strong Bad: Shut your face pile right now, or I'm gonna start feeling a little punchy-wunchy.
In the 2005 fan costume commentary, Strong Bad is making fun of Halloween costumes when one of a girl dressed up as Homestar Runner appears, which leads to conflicting feelings on the subject ("Hot Homestar?! My brain is splitting in half!"). Then Homestar pops up and starts calling Strong Bad 'sweetie.'
Homestar alleges that the Goblin and the Rocoulm (from the Horrible Painting) got married in "Later that Night...".
In the DVD commentary for "Decemberween in July", Strong Bad gets defensive when Mike teases him about watching Decemberween specials at Homestar's house.
TROGDOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOR!! An (almost) unkillable dragon who burninates the countryside.
Mr. Poofers, a cloud-shaped dog that the characters realize is impossible to kill in a story and is worshiped as their dark overlord.
The Troghammer, one the more dangerous enemies in the Trogdor board game and is one of the few beings who is portrayed as a sincere threat to Trogdor.
Memetic Mutation: Quite a lot and for a while, Homestar Runner is behind many of the earliest memes of the Internet.
TROGDOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOR!
Homsar himself is memetic thanks to his goofy design, hilarious voices, and endless nonsensical speech.
"With Marzipan's radish, we gonna win da comp-a-tee-shun!" explanationA line from "The Reddest Radish"; Strong Bad's bizarre way of pronouncing "competition" is frequently used in reference to the series' crudely made early days.
"Is this 2002 (2003/.../2006)?"explanationThe official YouTube channel started to become more active in the latter half of 2017, with more new videos and higher-quality copies of old Strong Bad Emails coming out, so it isn't uncommon for people to joke that "This is just like 2004" or "WE 2006 BOIIIIIS".
"Coach Z, you JERK!"
Homestar Runner will irrevocably alter your vocabularyexplanationThe writing in the series has an extremely distinct and identifiable voice, and many fans of the series note that they end up latching onto some of the series' quotes and odder turns of phrase and incorporating them into their normal speech. A common activity among fans is to make lists or compilation videos of their favorite and "most-used" quotes, often titled things like "Homestar quotes that permanently altered my vocabulary/I can't stop saying/live rent-free in my head/etc."
Mexicans Love Speedy Gonzales: Strong Sad is a combined caricature of people with depression, nerds, and hipsters. Guess which groups of people list him as their favorite character? (It helps that Strong Sad's depression is surprisingly relatable, and that his nerdy and hipster-y elements are an Affectionate Parody of actual hipsters and nerds)
Homestar is also very Moe, especially with the voice he had in the older cartoons.
Strong Sad is oddly huggable.
Nausea Fuel: Main Page 7 is as graphically disgusting as the art style allows. Zombie Homestar's exposed, pulsating brain squirts blood and gets partly eaten by a crow, and worms crawl out of his mouth.
Despite being a mostly secular franchise, the website has a substantial number of Christian fans. Notably, Christian hip-hop artist KJ-52 has expressed a love for the website and name-dropped it in his track "Things I Like", and ApologetiX have made several references to the website and it's characters.
The franchise was popular with children in its heyday, owing to the artstyle being cute and bubbly, and the content being almost entirely family-friendly (the worst language the characters use is either PG-rated swears like "crap" or unusual euphemisms like "sweet genius!") in comparison to many of its fellow web cartoons. A lot of parents who watched the series when they were younger have also introduced it to their kids.
Thanks to the frequent references and name drops to the Brothers Chaps' favorite bands and artists, it gained a following among indie rock fans and musicians. It especially helps that the Chapmans have connections to several indie rock legends. note Aside from the aforementioned collaborations with They Might Be Giants, the Chapmans created the music video for "Heimsdalgate Like A Promethean Curse" by of Montreal, Strong Bad made an apperance in puppet form at an Atlanta concert by The Aquabats!, and in 2016 the duo formed a band called Air-Sea Dolphin with Robert Schneider, best known for leading The Apples in Stereo and producing the famous Neutral Milk Hotel album In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
Play-Along Meme: "Mr. Poofers Must Die!" introduces Mr. Poofers, an Adorable Abomination of a dog who cannot be killed or harmed in any story—anyone who tries to speak of harm befalling Mr. Poofers is instead compelled to talk about nice things happening to him. Naturally, fans love to try to kill off Mr. Poofers in their own stories, only for him to suddenly and miraculously escape harm at the last minute.
Fans have done this to Decemberween, celebrating it alongside or in place of Christmas on December 25.
Thanks to "Happy Trogday" canonizing the celebration, fans make tribute to Trogdor on January 13, the anniversary of his email debut.
Labor Day is a real holiday, but is given extra special attention by Homestar fans, who tend to announce it with "Todaybor Day is Labor Day!" or call it "Labor Dabor," along with singing Homestar's Labor Day song.
In 2021, Strong Bad on his Twitter coined March 21st as Marzi (Mar 21) Day, in somewhat of a jab towards Mario Day. The following year's Marzi Day marked the release of Marzipan Beef Reverser.
Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: The King of Town was formerly regarded as a dull, one-trick pony and as such, was far and away the least popular character on the site. A combination of Flanderization and his own amusingly pitiful attempts to boost his status gradually endeared him to fans.
The Scrappy: Crack Stuntman, outside of his funny voice and being a satire of pretentious and prima donna actors, most fans view his toons as less memorable. He especially gets a lot of flack from fans who thought he was becoming a spotlight-stealing character from the Cheat Commandos shorts.
Shallow Parody: The Stinkoman series, at least at first. The Brothers Chaps aren't really all that up on anime, and it shows; at least in the site's earlier years, most of the parodied tropes were primarily from video games, particularly Mega Man (Classic) and Mega Man X. This can be partially, though not entirely, blamed on Strong Bad in-universe, since he created Stinkoman based on his hazy memory of a single "Japanese cartoon". He's later quoted as saying "Anime? It's called Japanimation! Least it was last time I checked... which was 1987." In later episodes, this has been downplayed and Stinkoman has shifted into being a more accurate parody of the Stock Shōnen Hero.
Spiritual Antithesis: The Yonder Website universe is a more positive version of the Trauncles segments from Two More Eggs, The Brothers Chaps' shorts series. While both have simply drawn characters and a calm, interactive narrator, the Trauncles narrator is much more sarcastic and can occasionally be sadistic to the cast, while the Yonder Website narrator is laid-back and encourages the Characters.
Sweet Dreams Fuel: The "Homestar vs. Little Girl" series of puppet shorts are pure Sesame Street-style silliness and cuteness, with the Brothers Chaps' various nieces/kids.
That One Level: The original Level 27 of the TROGDOR flash game. Due to the positioning of the cottages, Trogdor was boxed into a fairly small space that rendered most of the spawned peasants inaccessible for stomping (and their escape would mean reducing the Burninator meter), and which gave him little room to maneuver around knights and archers. It was such a massive Difficulty Spike that it was actually changed in an update (listed on the site's FAQ) to position the cottages farther apart.
Ugly Cute: Strong Bad and Strong Mad definitely count because of how simplistic the art style is.
The site got a lot of mileage from parodying the various web design, Flash animation, and online culture tropes of the time — as time passes, most if not all of these trends have fallen by the wayside or been completely forgotten. Most of the humor in April Fools' Day pranks like "Under Construction" and "HomestarRunner.com PAY PLUS!", as well as episodes like "Virus" will likely fly over the heads of many who watch it today.
The website design itself is noticeably obsolete — it is in a tiny box on an otherwise completely black webpage.(The small size was a problem even during the site's heyday — and on a modern monitor, it looks like this.◊) While using the zoom feature on a browser can alleviate this, the site also suffers from poor audio quality due to Flash's compression (the Podcast Runner and YouTube versions are noticeably better, however), there's no way to pause, rewind, or fast-forward (outside of unofficial add-ons, the most extensive being this one), and even prior to Flash Player's December 2020 shutdown, had frequent compatibility problems on certain devices. The newer toons frequently invoke Self-Deprecation to lampshade the dated website.
Coach Z. While most of the main characters besides Bubs and Homestar have difficulty putting up with his awkwardness, some fans find the same hilarious awkwardness endearing.
Strong Sad is considered depressing and annoying by many of the other characters, and is frequently bullied by Strong Bad, but fans consider him an adorable woobie. It helps that, in later years, Strong Sad stared taking on many traits associated with stereotypical internet fandoms (like writing fanfic and attending con).
The King of Town is a strange case where, in the early days of the site, he genuinely was an unpopular character, since he had only one real joke (being a Big Eater). Because of this, he was retooled to make his real-world lack of popularity into an in-universe trait, with him becoming something of The Eeyore and regularly making bizarre, unsuccessful attempts to become more well-liked in the community. This worked out fairly well in the fanbase.
Viewer Gender Confusion: One of Strong Bad's many alter egos is a female ghost hunter named Sharpdene. However, given that the only indictor that she's female is that Strong Bad starts wearing a red, long-haired wig on the coat rack strapped to his back, it's easy to mistake her for male—she's played by the male Strong Bad, he doesn't really pitch his voice up for her the way he does for the Teen Girl Squad (likely meant to be a contralto), and it's easy to interpret her name as the masculine name Dean instead of a pun on the feminine "Charlene." She's referred to as female in her first appearance, but none of her subsequent ones bring it up.
What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: An unusual example. The content is mostly child appropriate, looks kiddy, and the creators themselves have remarked they purposely seek to keep the website family friendly. Nonetheless the website has a humor style that often appeals to mid-teen to adult audience and often uses pop-cultural references. Plus, Strong Bad commonly uses language that would be rated TV-PG (e.g. "crap" is a common word in his vocabulary and is probably his harshest word).
