YMMV / The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals

• Accidental Aesop:
  • You don't need a singular goal or want to succeed. Paul remains immune to the Hive's machinations because he's content with his life, and his heroics are done to rescue Emma or inspired by her.
  • Protect yourself with the right equipment when going to face a Nigh-Invulnerable foe. Paul might have avoided inhaling the spores from the meteorite if he had worn a mask to keep himself from inhaling them.
• Actor Shipping: There was tremendous shipping for Mariah Rose Faith and Robert Manion after this show, ironically despite the fact that their characters almost never interact onstage (except for being the two backup cops in "Show Me Your Hands"). It's mainly due to Mariah and Robert being the two youngest members of the cast with among the most powerful vocal ranges, as well as their flirtatious banter on social media and the multiple duets they've done together for YouTube. (And it's notably all in jest because Mariah is quite public about having a boyfriend, who also frequently shows up in her videos.) Cue massive squeeing at the prospect of the two of them playing a couple in Black Friday, followed by massive tears at Mariah having to bow out after being cast in the touring production of Mean Girls.
• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • During "Show Me Your Hands", Charlotte faces her assimilated husband Sam, and there's just one moment where he lifts up his sunglasses and gasps, "Charlotte...?" Was this Sam genuinely breaking through for just a moment, or the alien just messing with Charlotte's head? For that matter, if it was really Sam, did that one gasp come out of joy and relief, showing that he did care about her to some degree, or was he just so discombobulated from being assimilated and just said the first thing that came to mind?
  • Like with Sam up above, there is a moment during "What Do You Want, Paul" where after Mr. Davidson calls his wife on the phone to tell her he wants her to choke him out during sex where he gets a bewildered look on his face and claims he forgot, before hanging up on her and getting back to singing. Was what was left of Mr. Davidson trying to save face in front of his employee and wife? Or perhaps trying to keep from her somehow being infected over the phone somehow? Given what Hidgens says about there being spores in the air and all it takes to be infected for some people are just hearing someone sing...
  • Even on this wiki there's some controversy over whether Bill was really a good father — there are little hints that his bad relationship with Alice may be partly due to the fact that he seems more interested in competing with his ex-wife to be the better parent than actually listening to Alice. (One popular interpretation of the lyrics of "Not Your Seed" saying "I was fucking seventeen" despite Bill earlier saying she's eighteen is that he's lost track of her birthdays; another argument is that she means she was seventeen before the divorce.) One has to keep in mind that while Bill may be an Unreliable Narrator, assimilated!Alice is surely even more so.
    • Is any of the things assimilated!Alice sings about resenting Bill for true, or is the Hive Mind using Alice's memories about things Bill worried about in order to drive him over the edge? Keep in mind at the beginning of the show, Deb keeps Alice from being pressured into smoking, but during "Not Your Seed" she claims "You were right, Deb is a stoner". There's also her line "Why does it hurt to love you...?" which is fairly somber compared to the rest of the number. Was this the real Alice attempting to fight back from the inside? Or just assimilated!Alice twisting the knife even more?
  • Part of the theme of this musical seems to be that all of the characters have Hidden Depths lending themselves to this. Is Emma really an underdog hero or is she in fact an irresponsible jerk who unnecessarily takes out her anger at her own poor life choices on her coworkers and customers? Sam is a scumbag, no doubt about it, but Charlotte doesn't seem like the easiest person to live with either — and she cheats on him right back with Ted. Ted, for his part, certainly owns that he's a sleazeball, but seems actually emotionally hurt by Charlotte treating their relationship as just sex, and has a moment of empathy with actual tears in his eyes when he hears the plot of Workin' Boys.
  • Hidgens inspires his fair share of debate, mostly over the question of the degree to which Workin' Boys is based on real life. Is Hidgens thinking about real friends he's lost touch with, or making up a pure fantasy of a life he never had? And does either of these options make him enough of The Woobie for us to forgive him for betraying and ending the human race?
  • And then there's Paul himself. Does his apathy and passivity at the beginning of the show — on topics from ranging from giving to the homeless to saving the planet to helping Bill with his daughter — make him a relatable Classical Antihero or just a Jerkass? Is his hatred of musicals genuine or is it him protesting too much because he has the potential to love musicals more than anyone else, which might be the reason the Hive Mind becomes obsessed with him and possibly leads to his body becoming the new Hive Queen when the meteor is destroyed?
    • Does Paul try to like musicals? Or did he just listen to one and decided he would never like any? Supporting the former theory is that Paul is the one to know the most of Moana, and he's seen both Godspell and Mamma Mia in the past. A popular Youtube comment theory is that he tries to listen to musicals, just in case he ever finds one he likes.
  • The ending. There are at least four interpretations one can take. Jon Matteson said he had a specific idea in mind when he performed it, but has kept mum about what it is, leaving everyone else to wonder...
    • The most straightforward interpretation: Paul has been completely assimilated by the hive, has lost all autonomy and his sense of self, and will now forcibly assimilate or murder Emma, and then help spread the infection until they take over the world. For the record, this is the one Lauren Lopez believes.
    • A more optimistic interpretation is that Paul has not assimilated, and is merely faking it so he can fool the hive, and some of his lyrics in "Inevitable" are actually him dropping hints to Emma that he's still himself, and she needs to play along, so they can live to fight another day.
    • Some believe he was assimilated, but still has enough of his original personality left to be Fighting from the Inside. If this is true, it raises some questions about the autonomy of other assimilated characters, most notably Alice.
    • For a very depressing interpretation, there's also the possibility that Paul hasn't been assimilated (at least not completely)... yet. However, having seen the infection spread outside Hatchetfield, he realized there was no stopping it, and thus crossed the Despair Event Horizon, choosing to give in and join the hive, because there's no point in resisting anymore. Thus, "Inevitable" is encouraging Emma to stop fighting a hopeless cause and just give in, Paul telling her "it's inevitable for us."
    • Notably, which interpretation you take changes the meaning of the final song's first lyric: "Emma, I'm sorry. You lost." Either an assimilated Paul is mocking Emma, or he's truly apologizing for having failed to prevent the end of the world.
  • The Hive throughout "Inevitable". Is the Hive once again trying to "convince with soliloquy" and convince Emma that joining them is a good thing, and is Paul leading the number because the Hive knows Emma trusts Paul and might listen to him? Or is the Hive just playing with its food throughout the whole song, and Paul is there to further torment Emma? Perhaps the Hive will keep Emma alive just to torture her, since they took the time to heal her leg rather than let her bleed out?
• Angst? What Angst?: Emma gets one moment that even shocks the military officer that rescued her; after being the Sole Survivor of an alien invasion and learning the entire town of Hatchetfield was wiped out, Emma is more concerned about the fact that her faked death wasn't cool rather than her family and friends having been assimilated and killed, including her brother-in-law and nephew. Of course, shortly after this, she breaks down on learning she failed and the man she loved is a zombie. 
• Ass Pull: Professor Hidgens's Face–Heel Turn where he drugs Emma and Ted, ties them up, and plans to commit Suicide by Cop by letting the Hive zombies into his compound. Before, he was established as the most competent of the survivors, shooting a brainwashed Charlotte and Sam at point-blank before they could kill Ted. Why is it? He claims that if the survivors stop the apotheosis, then the world will return to what it was with wars and famines. There's not much foreshadowing of it, and his actions ensure Paul commits a Heroic Suicide on a theory ultimately proven false, rather than flee to the mainland with Emma. Even Emma is aghast that Hidgens would betray their tiny group after he seemingly had rewarded her faith in him.
• Breakout Character: Even the cast pretty unanimously agrees that Robert Manion as Prof. Hidgens is this, with people clamoring to see more of him in a full-length version of Workin' Boys, as difficult as that might be to fit into continuity.
  • A much milder example is Manion's other character - an archetypal nerd with two line ("And I still haven't gotten my hot chocolate. I have very low blood sugar.")
  • Ranboo is one of the stans who tongue-in-cheek believes "Hidgens Did Nothing Wrong", and a ton of the fans who arrived after he gave TGWDLM a Colbert Bump on his alt Twitch account in March 2021 use his phrasing of "Hidgens apologists" to describe themselves.
• Broken Base:
  • Is America is Great Again a hilarious moment that uses real life events to give the audience chills? Or is it an overly anvilicious song that has no reason to exist? Or is it a great song that doesn't fit into the musical?
  • Everyone loves Beatty's solo in Join Us (And Die) but there's some debate on Charlotte. Is she an annoying character who takes away the spotlight from other, more interesting characters? Or one of the funniest parts of the musical (special mention going to her romance with Ted)? Or was she meant to come off as annoying and hypocritical?
  • In hindsight, while TGWDLM is unquestionably one of the best Starkid shows in their oeuvre according to pretty much every fan you ask, TGWDLM's popularity very much led to Starkid fandom becoming a Broken Base between two "generations" of fans, the pre-Hatchetfield and post-Hatchetfield fandom, with sharply diverging tastes and attitudes between the two. There's been a mild backlash from older fans at seeing this show generally topping everyone's "favorites" list — and the song "Showstoppin' Number" and the performer Robert Manion specifically — to the exclusion of everything else in Starkid's 10-year history. This became much more of a Broken Base with the release of the sequel, Black Friday, which has been much less of a universally beloved fan favorite and driven a lot more debate over Starkid's "new direction" with the Hatchetfield series.
• Canon Defilement: A tongue-in-cheek version — there's a tribute video of Jon Matteson being absolutely psyched to sing the TGWDLM medley at Starkid Homecoming, a set of songs that, in the context of the show, were specifically about him hating musicals and refusing to sing with them.
• Cliché Storm: All of the songs verge into this territory, thanks to the meta nature of the musical. Special mention goes to Working Boys, a hilariously extended Overly Long Gag milking one particular cliché (Glory Days).
• Crosses the Line Twice: In "La Dee Dah Dah Day", Paul escapes into a side alley after being freaked out by the infected singing in the street. A homeless guy asks for some change, which Paul gently turns down... Only for the homeless guy to stand up and sing about how happy he is to be homeless.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: A song version. The "Working Boys" number is popular enough that people are calling for a full musical adaptation.
• Fanfic Fuel: Starkid shows have had their fair share of fanfic in the past, notably people getting really into the jokey universe made up for Starship, but the reveal of the Hatchetfield series as the first ongoing continuity in a long time has gotten people extremely excited about backstory and lore, especially with how much the sequel Black Friday deepened the setting.
• Fan Nickname:
  • Robert Manion's One-Scene Wonder "Hot Chocolate Boy", who Nick Lang confirmed is the Hero of Another Story. Eventually revealed to be Peter Spankoffski.
  • Lauren Lopez's unnamed teen girl character in the yellow dress is called "The Hatchetfield Bee", after a Creator In-Joke where Lauren would pretend to sting the other actors while dressed as her. (She has repeatedly denied the Fanon that the Bee is Grace Chastity.)
  • Fans randomly decided Ted's last name was "Porker", a Memetic Mutation from Fan Art of a Crossover between TGWDLM and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse making a Composite Character of Ted and Spider-Ham. Led to a further Memetic Mutation of Nick Lang repeatedly denying that this was his last name, and people repeatedly trying to guess his actual surname, which turned out to be Spankoffski.
• Fanon: It's become fairly established in Fan Art of this show that assimilated humans develop vividly bright blue eyes (like spice addicts).
• Fourth Wall Myopia: Alice tends to get hit with this by fans who blame her for getting herself and her father killed, since she got off the bus on the way home to Clivesdale to go see her girlfriend Deb. Thing is, she did that before she had any way of knowing about the infection, and by the time she would've realized what was going on, the bridges were closed, meaning she couldn't have gotten home even if she'd had access to a vehicle. From Alice's POV, when she decided to go see Deb, she had no reason to think it was anything but a regular day where she'd get to see her girlfriend, get on the next bus, and go home with no incident.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Ted being an asshole during the apocalypse and antagonizing Bill — namely, telling him not to bother trying to save his daughter since she's likely already dead, something he's regrettably right about — is one of his most loathsome moments. Then in Season 2 of Nightmare Time we get confirmation that the "hot chocolate boy" is Ted's younger brother Peter, who was one of the first people we saw to be infected. Ted makes no mention of having a brother in this show, but if at any point earlier in the day he witnessed Peter singing and dancing, his lashing out at Bill could be interpreted as carrying feelings about his brother's death and taking it out on Bill, a somewhat more sympathetic reading of the moment.
  • Alice accuses Bill of liking Grace Chasity better than her, to which Bill responds, "At least she's nice to me in church!" Bill also wishes Alice would date someone more like Grace, rather than Deb, to Alice's revulsion. The second season of Nightmare Time introduces us to Grace properly, and we find out she is an extremely obnoxious Holier Than Thou Principles Zealot, and Nerdy Prudes Must Die confirms she's homophobic. Alice's vehement dislike of her, and her hurt at thinking her father prefers Grace, feels extremely justified in hindsight. (Bill himself says he's surprised he was defending "Grace Chasity, of all people," suggesting even he finds her a little much at church, even if he's unaware of how bad she can get.)
• Heartwarming in Hindsight: Many of Paul's heroic actions are inspired by The Dulcinea Effect; while he is nice to his friends and sympathetic to Charlotte's plight, the first awesome action he takes is saving Emma from her zombified coworkers and getting her to a safe alleyway. Emma even admits that she knows he wasn't coming to the coffeeshop for singing or plain black coffee. Later installments establish Paul and Emma as an Official Couple, including the Nightmare Time iteration where Robot!Emma falls for Clone!Paul and insists that her original Emma would have done the same in due time.
• He Really Can Act: This was Jon Matteson's first performance with Team Starkid, and at first all he has to do is serve as the Straight Man to everyone else as the Hive Mind infects his friends and coworkers. Then when he attempts to blow up the meteorite to stop the invasion, the Hive starts infecting him as well. Jon has to portray Paul being forced to sing and fighting it off to save the day. Cue a terrifying finale where it seems that Paul survived, but then he starts singing to a healed Emma...and you can see the terror in brainwashed Paul's face as he's forced to belt that he wants her and she'll be happier just joining the Hive.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: In a Memetic Mutation from "The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals as Vines", one fan made a video outlining this show's parallels with past Starkid shows.
  • In particular, Jaime Lyn Beatty has been onstage lovers in Starkid shows with Darren Criss, Joey Richter and Jeff Blim. It seems unlikely that Darren will come back for a full show anytime soon, but in the meantime we finally get to see her, Joey and Jeff in a Love Triangle (with her as a maximally Woobie combination of Sally, Candy and Mouthface.)
  • Whether or not it was intentional, the line "fill up your tumbler" (as in a glass of whiskey) from "Showstopping Number" has been reinterpreted by fandom as a command to fill up their Tumblr with gifs and memes of Robert Manion, and have happily complied.
  • The basic idea of this show matches this series of pranks Improv Everywhere did in Real Life, which makes Paul's extreme Freak Out reaction even more hilarious.
  • One of the suggestions Mr. Davidson makes to Paul to become less boring in "What Do You Want, Paul?" is to "Twitch to the masses". After this show went viral, Jon Matteson, who plays Paul, has become a fairly popular Twitch streamer.
  • A lot of younger audience members commented that the minimalist set for this show — with an abstract backdrop of light-up color-changing rectangles — looked "like a Tiktok background". Fast forward to Nightmare Time in 2020, whose Title Sequence literally recreates the set of TGWDLM as a Green Screen background.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • The apotheosis is upon us. ^Explanation The Arc Words of the alien Hive Mind.
  • Think about the implications! ^Explanation Paul's plea to Emma when he's trying to convince her that everything becoming a musical is scary. It's also used by fans of the show with regards to theories, particularly concerning the opening/closing number.
    • I didn't think about the implications! ^Explanation Emma's reaction to witnessing the conversion process. Also used whenever someone posts a particularly convincing theory.
  • Five o'clock can't come soon enough! ^Explanation A repeated riff in the Working Boys pitch.
    • One fan created a "The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals as Vines" video that went viral and spawned a host of imitations and associated YouTube Poop. Available here.
    • Replying to any occurrence of the name "Greg" or the phrase "you and me" with "And Steve", "and Stu", "and Mark", "and Leighton", followed by multiple people replying "and Chad!"
  • As of 2020, the audio clip from this show "Black coffee/I'm your coffee gal—" "NOOOOO!" has become a popular meme on Tiktok, as a stand-in for anywhere a Big "NO!" might be appropriate.
  • A Running Gag among the Team Starkid fandom, including on the biggest fan wiki, is trying to identify who the real "latte hotté" Ted was talking about is if it isn't Emma. In the actual show the implication is pretty strongly that it was Zoey, but fans ended up naming every single character in the show as the "latte hotté", followed by naming every single member of Team Starkid in Real Life.
• Misaimed Fandom: Professor Hidgens' enthusiasm for Workin' Boys was unexpectedly infectious, as a large number of fans immediately fell in love with the project. To the point where some actually expressed disappointment that the next Hatchetfield project wasn't a defictionalization. As others have pointed out (including Nick Lang) however, Workin' Boys was explicitly written to be a terrible, unworkable idea with a bare bones uninteresting premise, zero plot, and a ludicrously long running time (even for musical theatre). It's telling that the Workin' Boys short film is focused almost entirely on the making of the show.
• Narm: "Not Your Seed" is a Tear Jerker. However, close to the end, Alice's friends sing "Not your girl!" as back-up, which sounds a lot like "Nacho girl", sucking some of the tension out of the scene.
• One-Scene Wonder:
  • The "Smoke Club", the briefly-seen friends of Alice and Deb; fan-favorites Joey Richter and Lauren Lopez play two teenagers smoking multiple cigarettes at once.
  • Hot Chocolate Guy (the one who has very low blood sugar) has also proved ridiculously popular despite only appearing Paul's first scene with Emma (and in the background during La Dee Dah Dah Day).
    "And I still haven't gotten my hot chocolate. I have very low blood sugar."
• Signature Scene: The entire "Show Stoppin' Number" scene, due to it being the show's most popular song, and ending with Hidgens' gruesome death.
• Signature Song: "Show Stoppin' Number" is far and away the most popular song, and the one most fans associate with the show—even more so than the title number!
• Special Effects Failure: This show embraces the B-movie feel of having extremely low budget blood and gore. Special mention goes to Sam having his skull "busted open" by Ted by having a blue plastic "head wound" prosthetic obviously stuck to his head under his hat (which, in at least one performance, kept falling off). Prof. Hidgens is carried offstage by the aliens and returns with an obvious body-puppet so that the aliens can rip his guts out.
• Spiritual Adaptation: It's basically Invasion of the Body Snatchers as a musical.
  • The ending (our leading man tries one last-ditch attempt to defeat the horrifying villain and fails fantastically, leaving the villainous force to take over the world) is very similar to Little Shop of Horrors.
• Tearjerker:
  • Bill discovering his daughter has been infected, and she sings a song rubbing in his face about how he should have fought harder to keep her. It affects him so greatly he almost kills himself. And then is just killed by his "daughter" anyways.
  • Ted's reaction when it sinks in that Charlotte is dead, Bill died, and Professor Hidgens nearly got him and Emma killed. He tries to apologize to Paul and Emma, saying that he's sorry for being a jerk and will try to do better. Then he tries to ditch them to save his own skin.
  • Emma's monologue to Paul on her wasted relationship with her sister and her general feelings of inadequacy and unhappiness with how her life has turned out so far has been known to cause lumps in a few throats and is often the first thing people point to when they want to discuss Lauren Lopez's skills as a dramatic actress.
  • The moment where Emma convinces Paul to leave her in the helicopter wreckage because she's got a pole impaled through her leg and only he can blow up the asteroid. She then tries to confess that she knows he was coming to Beanie's to see her, but can't find the words as Paul tells her to save her strength.
  • In the climax, the zombies point out to Paul that if he blows them up with the grenade, he won't get away from the blast long enough to survive. They ask him what he wants. Paul hesitates before saying it doesn't matter what he wants. He thought of the implications that doing this means he'll never have a chance of reuniting with Emma, or truly living.
  • Doubling as Nightmare Fuel, Emma breaks down at the show's conclusion when Paul reveals that he didn't survive blowing himself up along with the meteorite. Instead, the Hive ended up reviving and using him as their new leading man, to lure Emma into a false sense of security. Emma tearfully says, "Get away from me! You're not Paul, you're one of them!" It's implied the Hive will keep her alive to witness her horror at seeing the man she loved brainwashed into becoming the thing he hates, along with her former friends, coworkers and acquaintances.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • One of the complaints about this show is that Corey Dorris doesn't get a solo at any point (except for two lines in the Opening Chorus), which is a waste of an amazing performer, and from an in-universe perspective it's a wasted opportunity to have Paul directly rather than incidentally confront the death and conversion of his best friend Bill.
  • We only ever see Alice twice, once during the meteor strike and then "Not Your Seed." Her struggles with peer pressure in the former and her side of the relationship with Bill in the latter might've made for a really interesting character to follow.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Alice comes across as this in her solo “Not Your Seed”. To be fair, she was taken over by an alien. But still, the message she has lines like, “If you actually paid attention to me.” The thing is, in literally every scene her dad is in, his first priority is her. In the first scene he’s in, he complains about losing her, making her sound ungrateful of a man who would clearly do anything for her. In fact all their problems are even justified seeing as Alice herself admits that Deb is a stoner.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Political?: One of the songs is about (Hive Mind-infected) cops boasting about how they can do whatever they want and if anyone disobeys they'll shoot them. Though it's possible (and perhaps all too easy) to read in a satire of American police brutality, the main point of the song is clearly that, as always with the Hive Mind infectees, the cops are playing out common "tough police officers" tropes without any meaning left behind them, as exemplified by their nonsensical litany of "Get out of the vehicle! Get back in the vehicle! Slowly get out of the vehicle! (etc.)". The political interpretation is, of course, helped by the fact that another song is clearly political: "America is Great Again", sung by villains currently posing as American military.^note "America Is Great Again" elicited audibly uncomfortable laughter from the audience, first comparing the meteor to Donald Trump and then comparing the Hive Mind (and by extension the forces behind Trump's election) to a "Final Solution" and "Singularity achieved through a predestined self-destruction". The metaphor behind the idea of a relentlessly destructive Hive Mind became very clear very quickly.
  • Paul's apathy about donating to Greenpeace in Act 1 arguably foreshadows Prof. Hidgens' Motive Rant about how the only way to motivate the human race to save the planet from themselves is assimilation into the Hive Mind.
  Greenpeace Girl: Do you want to save the planet?
  Chorus: Of course you want to save the planet!
  Greenpeace Girl: Do you want to save the planet?
  Chorus: There's just one way you can do it!
  Greenpeace Girl: By singing a song... Singing along!
• Win Back the Crowd: Not that Team Starkid ever exactly lost the crowd, but there were definitely concerns about the future of the Starkid brand after half the regulars moved to LA and the rest stayed in Chicago, and especially with the bombshell that beloved actor Joe Walker had quit theatre in a depression after the election of Donald Trump. Those concerns seem to have been dispelled — despite this show having a smaller cast and budget than past productions, it's been a massive hit online and has single-handedly jolted Starkid's social media fandom out of dormancy.
• The Woobie: Charlotte and Bill after he finds out his daughter has been assimilated.