YMMV / Little White Lie

• Alternate Character Interpretation: Many fans believe that Tanya is the real hero as she persecutes Sami for mostly unselfish reasons, whereas Sami is only concerned with her own goals and keeping the truth hidden.
• Awesome Music: "It's Over Now."
• Cult Classic: The series was created in hopes of attracting industry attention and serving as a pilot for a full-length cable TV series — a plan that, bluntly, failed miserably. Even the backup plan of securing sponsorship for another season as a short-form web series failed. When A Very Potter Musical was a surprise hit, Eric Kahn Gale describes begging Matt and Nick Lang to rerelease Little White Lie on their channel just so someone would see it and it wouldn't be All for Nothing. Lo and behold, the show has acquired a dedicated following among hardcore Starkid fans, with the cast expressing awe that there's now Little White Lie fanfiction and huge cheers for the Little White Lie medley at live shows. Gale describes LWL's second life as tremendously gratifying, even if his response to requests for a Season 2 is "It's over now".
• Designated Hero: Sami, who despite being the protagonist, continuously lies and takes credit for Kevin's work.
• Designated Villain: Despite being incredibly cruel to those around her, Tanya honestly cares about Kevin's welfare, is raising money to pay for his hospital bills and her only real "evil" acts are trying to uncover the truth that Sami stole Kevin's music. Granted, her main reason for caring about Kevin is because of guilt over hitting him with her car and putting him in the hospital in the first place, but she does feel genuine remorse.
• Fridge Brilliance: The S2 synopsis reveals that all of Kevin's songs were inspired by his hopeless crush on Sami. In that light, the lyrics of "It's Over Now", his most recent song and the one Little White Lie steals to be their Breakthrough Hit, is a song about giving up on chasing Sami and striking out for success on his own terms. He was likely just about to get up the courage to release his music publicly, if not for Sami's audition poster convincing him to try to get close to her one last time. And then a freak car accident changed everything...
• Funny Moments: The "Duder the spy" song.
  Duder's a spyyyyyyyyy, Duder's a spyyyyyyyyy (Duder! Duder! Duder!)
• Harsher in Hindsight: The co-composer of the music on the show, Grant Anderson, was involved in a near-fatal car accident during filming, and ended up in a coma and suffering serious brain damage. Eric Kahn Gale describes being nearly floored by the irony of how the real-life situation mirrored the plot he'd written for the show.
  • Tear Jerker: Anderson recuperated enough to attend the premiere of the show in a wheelchair, but his memory was damaged enough that he didn't actually remember any of the work he did on it. (This also mirrors the planned plot for Season 2, where Kevin initially suffers from amnesia before hearing his music jogs his memory.)
• Heartwarming Moments:
  • Say what you will about the band-obsessed student body, but they're certainly not transphobic. When Tanya starts a rumor that Sami is a trans man who's soon going in for affirmation surgery, what's the response of every single person who hears it? Whole-hearted support. By the time the rumor has spread to the whole Wild Teen Party, Tanya is the only one who finds the notion at all funny, and Sami is publicly congratulated. When Sami is nonetheless humiliated and upset, everyone confronts Tanya about how disrespectful it is, not just to Sami by spreading lies about her, but also to actual trans people by making a joke out of them. It's all very open-minded for a bunch of rowdy teenagers.
    • On a meta level, it's very poignant in light of StarKid beginning to see one of their own Creator Thumbprints as transphobic—they consider their long tradition of casting male actors as comically creepy, shrill, or unattractive women as an Old Shame that mocks trans women, especially in light of J. K. Rowling, to whom they owe the source material for their breakout hit, going public and unwavering in her own deeply-held anti-trans views. Whatever missteps StarKid may have made which they're now trying to atone for, this shining moment in their very first project together proves they've always had their LGBT Fanbase's backs.
  • Another a meta form of Fridge Heartwarming: This is a show about a couple of frustrated creative young people who find fame and fortune seem totally out of their reach, until fame and fortune suddenly hit them all at once from an unexpected source. That mirrors the real-life journey of Team StarKid, who worked incredibly hard on this series only to watch it sink without a trace — until it suddenly found an audience after their silly Harry Potter parody went viral.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Toby describes Little White Lie's song as "Totally Awesome"
  • One scene has Tanya hopping up onto a table which caused many viewers to expect her to start rolling around on it like Draco.
  • For A Very Potter Musical fans, the simple fact that this show features Harry and Draco in a Slap-Slap-Kiss style romance. (And that Tanya is an archetypal Draco in Leather Pants.)
  • Duder, like Ron, believes that you shouldn't ever tell girls you like them, because it makes you look like an idiot.
  • Meredith Stepien as Tanya's rival mean girl, for people who've seen Firebringer.
  • Kevin's aunt to Tanya:
  You should come by for tea some time, so we can talk about Kevin!
  • Ginny's song "Harry" from A Very Potter Musical first appears here as "Sami" (Word of God is they ran out of time to write songs and assumed no one would have seen this show). The hilarity comes in with the fact that this song is sung by Darren Criss, Harry's actor, making the two songs when juxtaposed sound like an ironic All Love Is Unrequited situation. (Starkid actually did arrange "Harry" and "Sami" into a duet for the 2012 Apocalyptour.)
  • Zach, played by Brian Holden, complains about how time consuming it is to burn Little White Lie's promo CDs. In real life, Brian and the Langs decided it wasn't worth the effort to burn DVDs of A Very Potter Musical for the whole cast and decided to just upload the recording to YouTube instead. This random decision is the entire reason Team Starkid now exists.
  • Toby trying to break the ice with Sami backstage by pointing out they're both wearing ties got this reaction from people thanks to Blaine's signature suit-and-tie look on Glee — and thanks to the Throw It In! "Fuck the tie!" moment in A Very Potter Senior Year.
  • Having a band and a song named "Love Grenade" was probably originally a reference to Tom Jones' "Sex Bomb", only for Ted Nugent to actually drop an album with a title track called "Love Grenade" in 2007 (the same time this show went live).
  • Tanya's awkward dance moves would later go viral as part of the "I Don't Really Wanna Do the Work Today" dance from Firebringer.
  • The whole joke with Meredith being Innocently Insensitive about the rumor Tanya started that Sami is going to come out as trans became this after Meredith Stepien came out as non-binary in Real Life in 2020.
• Ho Yay: Between Sami and Tanya, especially Tanya laying her hand on Sami's arm and Sami slapping it away with "Don't touch me."
• Moment of Awesome: Designated Hero and Designated Villain they might be, but the high-stakes race between Sami and Tanya—Sami trying to find and delete Kevin's website before Tanya finds it and discovers his music—is thrilling and full of tension.
  • Out-of-universe, the SPACE Tour contains an epic moment where Lauren Lopez and Brian Holden teased the possibility of Little White Lie Season 2 coming out in 2012... before definitively stating it was not because "Little White Lie is over. It's over now" and then immediately segueing into "It's Over Now".
• Moral Event Horizon: If you didn't think Sami's initial decision to steal Kevin's music was this, then she probably crosses it when she deletes Kevin's personal website just to keep from getting caught. Everything he hosted there other than his music — blog posts, videos, fanfic — is now irretrievably gone. Keep in mind she still doesn't know if he'll ever wake up.
• Narm Charm: Lauren Lopez's Fake Cutie act as Tanya Freemont is exaggerated to the point of absurdity and comes across more as a Tom Boy doing a mean impression of a Girly Girl than realistic acting (even her Creepy High-Pitched Voice is clearly several tones higher than her natural speaking voice). It is, however, hilarious to watch — Eric Kahn Gale admitted it was nothing like his impression of what an Alpha Bitch should be like but rewrote Tanya's lines to fit Lauren's take because he enjoyed it so much. Arguably Tanya's obvious fakeness makes the glimpses we get Beneath the Mask that much stronger, especially Tanya's tearful rant at the end of the show where Lauren speaks in her own voice for the first time.
  • Tanya's relentlessly artificial persona may now be fully justified with the reveal that she's been following the instructions in The Bully Book.
• Retroactive Recognition: Aside from all the members of Team Starkid in the cast, there's also the female vocalist for the Theme Tune "Caught in the Lie" and "Duder's a Spy", Michelle Chamuel, who became known nationally as a member of Usher's team on the 2013 season of The Voice.
  • Most of the future Starkid troupe members that appear here are in named speaking roles, but there's also a blink-and-you'll-miss-it appearance by Dylan Saunders as a random popular kid who yells "Hey, Duder!"
• Tear Jerker:
  • Duder trying to work up the confidence to talk to girls with the help of Tanya, before admitting his crush on her, only for her to awkwardly leave to find Toby.
  • The Sami song is also pretty tear jerking.
• The Scrappy: Sami. She's an Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist: We're not supposed to like her. Elona Finlay, the actress who played Sami, was very glad that people picked up on this — in fact, she said many Pet the Dog moments for Sami were edited out of the final cut of the series so people would understand how unforgivable her actions are.
• Wangst: The defining trope of The Ex-Boyfriends and their music. A Take That! to 2000s Emo.
• The Woobie:
  • Kevin, so much.
  • Arguably Duder, he seems like a honestly decent kid who defers to his sister on what they should do, though he would rather quit and be honest more than once. His confession of his feelings for Tanya are heartfelt and sincere that he honestly likes her for who she is, not how popular she is with the "in crowd".

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