YMMV / The Stupendium

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • The Captain from the Frostpunk songs. A good person desperate to save their city, as seen in "A Shelter from the Storm", or an iron-fisted tyrant, as shown in "A Purpose For New London"? Perhaps it's a mixture of both, a Tragic Villain forced to extremes to save their city, or a good person gradually corrupted by power and desperation.
  • The Imposters in "An Imposter Calls".
    • In Stupendium's ending (where they are ejected), are there any more imposters remaining? If so, are they Dan Bull, the player or someone else?
    • In Dan Bull's ending. Has the player discovered that the Stupendium is the imposter yet? If so, is the Stupendium taunting the player before killing them? If not, is the Stupendium trying to keep their cover so that they could infiltrate the base? Or have they decided to spare them?
• Aluminum Christmas Trees: In the Data Stream, the list of data in the Bridge of the song isn't just a parody of overreaching data collection. The list is based off of data that Facebook actively collects, as Stupes points out in a comment on a reaction to their song.
  As for 'this could be the future', that section is written entirely using a list of data already collected and sold by Facebook. ;)
• Anvilicious: Many of their songs, such as "The Fine Print" and "The Data Stream" focus heavily on corporate exploitation and the dark side of capitalism.
• Complete Monster: See here.
• Crosses the Line Twice; Pretty much the entirety of "Losing My Patients" is about a self-proclaimed surgery expert mutilating his patients out of sheer incompetence, but the way he does in is so darkly hilarious you can't help but laugh.
• Fashion-Victim Villain: The Stupendium as the Goose in "What a Fowl Day." Rather than literally wearing a goose costume, they invoke the image of a goose by wearing an over-the-top goose-themed suit. Their outfit includes a white tuxedo with feathers on the shoulders, a white top-hat and gloves, an orange tie and pocket square, tinted orange-ish Round Hippie Shades, and in some shots, a walking stick. Some commenters have pointed out how ridiculous the costume is, although this was almost certainly intentional.
  "You're dressed like the leader of an evil Pokémon team and I love it."
• Genius Bonus:
  • "Milk, Milk, Lemonade" has over 100 beverage puns. While some are obvious, several refer to lesser-known brands, drinks from certain cultural cuisines, and one new soft drink only found in the United Arab Emirates that was specifically included to stump viewers.
  • "Rogue's Gallery" also features numerous puns on art styles and artists, some of which are well-known, while others are more obscure.
  • Among Spamton's nonsensical Word Salad Lyrics in "Ad Infinitum" is "milk the humans of their kindness" — a reference to a line from Macbeth.
  • The lyric "Sixteen tons of scurrying death" in "The End of the Line" is a reference to the Working Class Anthem Sixteen Tons by Merle Travis — the segment of the song that line appear in also rhymes with its chorus.
• Growing the Beard: "Why Did I Say Okie Doki?" may have been their breakout hit, but their style was really codified with "Matter of Facts" and "Chairman of the Board." They had their actual beard before this.
• Harsher in Hindsight: "Vault Number 76" has the line “I don't want to set the world on fire but your house will do just fine”, which was coincidentally quoted in verbatim by a Dundee man threatening his ex-boss a year later.
• Heartwarming in Hindsight:
  • One of the lines in "OnlyCans" is "If you're ace, demi, pan, flexible/End of the day we are all can-sexual!". Later that year, the Stupendium came out as pansexual and non-binary, and even sold custom Pride merch for the Trevor Project.
  • "A Little Theorizing", a song dedicated to Game Theory, came out only a month before MatPat announced the end of the channel, accidentally going from a simple homage to a nice farewell.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Their "Back Together" song had a brief bit with Mr. Hippo worrying he would undergo Chuck Cunningham Syndrome in the FNAF Franchise after not appearing in Help Wanted. Then Five Nights at Freddy's: Security Breach came out and showed he still had a presence, whether the other characters liked it or not.
• Heartwarming Moments: Now has its own page.
• Ho Yay: Stupes and Dan Bull's characters in "Tune into the Madness" spend most of the music video sitting around the dinner table, watching television together, or enjoying similar domestic activities.
• Magnificent Bastard: The Stupendium made a name of injecting plenty of personality into their songs, something that these characters, whether played straight or given Adaptational Villainy, use to stand out as particularly clever bastards:
  • Among Us song An Impostor Calls (with Dan Bull): The Stupendium themselves plays The Impostor, once again seeking to eliminate the Skeld crew. Disguising as one of the crewmates, they and a second Impostor pick off the crew one by one, with Stupendium managing to remain undetected while hiding the existence of their partner, countering the points of Dan Bull when accused. At the end, The Stupendium gets outed and remains gleeful during their ejection, confident that their partner will get them with the remaining crew none the wiser.
  • Animal Crossing songs:
    • "Nook, Line and Sinker": Tom Nook is the charming founder of the "New Horizons" getaway project. An expert con man, Nook would trick customers into moving into a unfinished village, which forces the villagers to pay for finishing it. When it would collapse on itself, Nook would trick the villagers to move to a new island, repeating the cycle, with the implication that this has happened before many times. Nook then pins the blame on the Mayor, though not before criticizing him for his treatment of Isabelle. Though somewhat smug, he manages to keep his ego in check, and he manages to get away with everything he's done.
    • "Rogue's Gallery": Crazy Redd is a charismatic Con Man who sells seemingly genuine works of art. Effortlessly charming the listener into buying his wares, it's eventually revealed that he actually steals the original art from museums, makes nearly perfect forgeries, and sells them to unsuspecting customers, with the fakes being so good that he sometimes accidentally sells the original, something he uses to frame the customer for theft. Being ruthless enough to murder anyone who threatens his business, he makes his leave upon being detected, but not before promising the listener that he'll mail the art to you.
  • Cyberpunk 2077 song "The Data Stream: The enigmatic narrator represents the Arasaka Corporation and its interests. Cunning and smooth, they detail Arasaka's rise to power through the destruction and consumption of rivals as well as advocating for their rule, noting how Arasaka took over and replaced governments, claiming cities and even making customers into cyborgs for their own benefit. As the song goes on, the narrator not only continues to advertise their rule, but begins to verbally deconstruct the masses for letting Arasaka take control thanks to their apathy, advocating control for Arasaka, noting how they profit in countless ways from the people who claim to hate them. At song's end, the narrator bolsters Arasaka's power, before closing off by noting that society's ignorance and consumerism allowed Arasaka to take the world.
  • Death and Taxes song "Rest Employed": Fate is the head of the afterlife's death department. Calculating and brilliant, Fate continues improving the efficiency of the department, constantly iterating upon it to ensure it keeps up with humanity. Throughout the song, Fate periodically issues creative threats to the newest undead employee under his command, maintaining the loyalty of his employees through fear and keeping them from interfering with his work, and argues that human lives are worthless due to their short lifespans, assuaging possible guilt about human suffering. All the while, Fate begins subtly hinting that he may want to destroy mankind and end his misery, deftly hiding his intentions and never letting his calm demeanor slip away from him. In the end, Fate keeps his goals under wraps as he welcomes yet more pawns to his service.
  • Evil Genius 2 song "A Fiend Like Me": The Stupendium plays a bombastic Evil Genius who aims for world domination. Disguising their lair as a popular resort to lower suspicions, they have any spies trying to sneak in foiled by creative and effective traps hidden around their lair. Having numerous silly but dangerous schemes to Take Over the World, it's shown that they've already shrunk and stolen a number of monuments for their personal use, ending the song by enacting a scheme to assassinate world leaders by using laser dolphins to kill them while they're barbecuing.
  • Fallout: New Vegas song "The House Always Wins": Robert House is as brilliant as ever. A survivor from the first Nuclear War, he made a civilization from a casino called The Strip from scratch, enabling refugees to happily live in paradise, if they're willing to pay some fees. House openly admits that he funds the place using the money of broke gamblers, using it to invest in security robots that ruthlessly kill anyone who challenges his authority. Despite this, he genuinely believes The Strip is humanity's best shot at utopia, pointing out how the other settlements aren't exactly trustworthy either, as well as criticizing the political nature of the pre-wasteland world.
  • Hitman songs "The Second" and "The Apex": Agent 47 is the world's greatest hitman as accurately portrayed by the songs. Being assigned targets to kill by the I.C.A, he executes them in style, often never being seen even by the target before killing them and making his escape. Often donning flawless disguises, he's also capable of pulling off creative-yet-practical kills, wether it's a toaster in a bathtub, dropping a chandelier on them, sniping them from afar, or poisoning food. Brutal yet effective, Agent 47 will always get the job done no matter what.
  • Untitled Goose Game song "What a Fowl Day": The Goose is a mischievous fowl who spends his time playing tricks on a small village, cleverly pranking the locals while avoiding their attempts to get rid of him. Reveling in his job, he exploits the fact that the R.S.P.C.A. prevents the villagers from killing him, using it to get away with his deeds. Despite his attitude, he sincerely believes that what he does is for the best of the villagers, as he sees his tricks as liberating everyone from their boring lives, describing his deeds as "Occasional chaos, but awfully tasteful".
• Memetic Mutation: Several of Stupes' songs have gone viral on Tiktok of all places, particularily "Vending Machine of Love" and "The Fine Print". "The Fine Print" in particular was misattributed as a song cut from the musical Hamilton, which Stupes themselves expressed both amusement and annoyance at.
• Moment of Awesome: In the Muppet Cypher, Stupes sings an entire verse in mock Swedish, which is no small feat considering how much gibberish the Swedish Chef tends to spout.
• Nightmare Retardant: In "The Toybox", a Jump Scare shot of Huggy Wuggy showing off its More Teeth than the Osmond Family is closely followed by an animated clip of Huggy Wuggy giving a hilariously exasperated eyeroll after being slapped in the face with the GrabPack.
• Realism-Induced Horror:
  • "No One's Home" relies on our fears of the government violating our rights to privacy and the possibility of living at the mercy of a brutal totalitarian regime. Never mind the fact that the second part is something we've seen way too much of, the first part is something even citizens of "free" countries have to worry about.
  • "The Data Stream" lists a disturbingly detailed list of information that Arasaka collects about people. Each of those examples is information that is collected and processed (and used to fine-tune the algorithms of) large real-life companies.
  • "The Fine Print" and other songs with heavy themes about corporations taking capitalism to its extreme portray not just "Capitalism Is Bad", but the blatant admittance by the entities behind the corporation as aware you know and just barely trying to pretend they're not uncaring. A number of YouTube comments on the original video outright point out that, while a bit fantastic, the themes and lyrics in The Fine Print sound like something that could genuinely be on the horizon for the global economy of the real world.
• Tear Jerker:
  • "Little Rover," an elegy for the Mars rover Opportunity.
  • Fazbear Family is a song for Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria Simulator. Scrap Baby's part is pretty depressing.
    I'm not a monster, I just want to be liked
    Am I what you designed, Daddy?
    Do you feel pride?
    I want to talk about those feelings inside
    But every time I open up,
    Some children tend to die...
  • "Shelter from the Storm" is about the town of New London's descent into a totalitarian, nightmarish regime. The whole song could be viewed as the plight of New London's captain as he desperately fights to keep his people alive, even though he has to resort to more and more tyrannic methods. The question remains, though: Was it all worth it? Did they do it to warm their cold hearts, or did they do it because they are cold-hearted?
    • This fan-animatic manages to make it even more tearjerking, portraying a captain who desperately works to save his city... and succeeds, but at the cost of history viewing him as a monster. In the end of the animatic, an angry mob builds on his final decisions to spark a brighter future, and he smiles as he is executed for his crimes.
      Fingers splintered into kindling
      And hearts as dark as coal
      As heat and hope are dwindling
      We march towards our goal
      Committed to hymns we sing
      So after all is told
      The generations after us aren't cast into the cold.
  • The West was One turns the somberness of earlier songs up to eleven, being all about the end of the era of the wild west. SquigglyDigg's haunting voice during the chorus does not help things.
    I'm out here avenging the death of the Old West
    Even if it isn't dead to me.
    The day it dies is one I hope I don't live to see
    But this hayride is fallin' by the wayside of industry
  • And So We Fall, Stupendium's song on Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout details the Fall Guys as suffering from the constant challenges in which they participate on the reality show, most noticeable in these lyrics:
    We will smile through the pain
    Then climb up and start again
    Living someone else's game
    As we tumble to the ground.
    We have no noses to be broken
    But our spirits feel the sting
    One more baton to the face
    At the back-end of the race
    Never-ending fall from grace
    Second place don't mean a thing, we fall.
  • Four is very different from the above in that it's based off of the Stupendium's actual personal life, which makes all the somber subjects sting even harder because they actually happened.
    You were at my first kiss, you heard all the pain it came to
    You witnessed my last Christmas
    With my whole family in the same room.
    You're the night that I spent sleepless hoping mum would be alright
    You're the spot that I was standing
    When I heard my Grandad died.
    You're the space I baked that cake to finally say that I forgave her
    You're the desk where I made my closest friend
    The bed where I betrayed her.
  • Open the Sky has an incredibly somber tone throughout, with the robots suffering existential dread about their existence in a walled tomb now that the humans who created them have rendered themselves extinct.
    Built this place to keep you safe
    And then the haven changed to grave
    But left us sentience by mistake?
    Well, that's hardly civil.
    At least, we think you did
    That's what we seem to be.
    Is this gift a glitch
    That twisted free of bland obediency?
    Or are our souls a mix
    Of ceaseless tangled frequencies?
    Chewing up and spitting memories
    In random sequences?
  • A Little Theorizing is an upbeat bop about Game Theory's theories, but the final shot is a Game Theory editor Ronnie Edwards, who committed suicide in 2019.
  • The bridge of Adequate Wordsmith really makes you feel bad for Stupes, even though they decide all the pain they describe was worth it.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: As beautifully sung and written as "The West Was One" is, Stupendium's Arthur Morgan is a brutal outlaw who abused the freedom the era gave him to rob and murder innocent people. His lyrics were more in line to gang leader Dutch Van der Linde's preachings and Dutch becomes an abusive, self-righteous traitor who abandoned Arthur and John to die. Considering that most of canon Arthur's whinging about civilisation was in the early chapters, it is possible Stupendium played an early incarnation of Arthur, or a Low Honor incarnation. During a conversation where Arthur brings up encroaching civilisation to justify his more horrid acts, he is cut off as his conversational partner tells him he could still have done (and still could do) good.

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