Music / The Stupendium

"Rhyming on the multiplane, my lyrics work on several layers."

Gregory J. "The Stupendium" Holgate is a London-based musician, animator, and content creator YouTuber.

They make mostly fan songs and raps about video games and other nerdy content. What sets them apart is the visuals included in their videos, often consisting of a mixture of animation and acting, as well as using Hurricane of Puns repeatedly and quirky rhymes such as polysyllabic rhymes and rhymes on the word "the."

Their channel can be found here.

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Tropes associated with The Stupendium include:

• Accent Adaptation: Tom Nook, a Japanese tanooki, has a thick Yorkshire accent in "Nook, Line and Sinker".
  Tom Nook (during end card): Yes yes, I'm from Yorkshire. Don't question it.
• Adaptational Badass: In the original game, Crazy Redd is simply a forger and con artist. In Rogue's Gallery, he actually steals artworks from the Louvre before copying them and destroying the originals.
• Adaptational Gender Identity: Subverted in the remake of "Amateur Wordsmith": Stupendium tries to adapt a line from the original song to their new pronouns, but finds that the rhyme scheme doesn't work.
• Adaptational Villainy:
  • "Nook, Line and Sinker" imagines Tom Nook as a greedy monopolist and scammer holding the other characters under his thumb without a whisper of protest.
  • While Crazy Redd from the same games has never been an icon of morality, in "Rogue's Gallery", he goes from a simple con artist to an outright murderer.
• Ambiguous Syntax:
  • "The End of the Line" features numerous ones, such as "There’ll be chaos on the rails when the railway strikes" and "Run away! Train!"
  • "The House Always Wins" has Robert House say "I ensure that every bandit standing here has just one arm." Are they specifically threatening would-be looters with dismemberment, talking about the slot machines in the casino, or both?
• Anachronism Stew: Their interpretation of what nerdcore would have sounded like during The Roaring '20s is mostly period-accurate, but makes reference to Monopoly (created in 1935), canasta (invented in the 1939), and Cluedo (created in 1943). These might have been accidental, but the reference to Naruto of all things at the very end implies they were intentional.
• An Aesop:
  • A Matter of Factories, The Fine Print, The Data Stream, and Nook, Line, and Sinker are indictments of the dangers of free market capitalism.
    • Somewhat related: Ad Infinitum, in between all of the Word-Salad Horror, offers a solid critique of trend-based consumerism and data collection/targeted advertising.
  • A Purpose For New London shows how collectivism puts a society at risk of becoming authoritarian.
  • A LITTLE THEORIZING: There's more to your media than you may think, and it's fun to investigate it.
• Affably Evil: Compared to the other Corrupt Corporate Executive characters that Stupendium has portrayed, the FicSit spokesman in "Matter of Factories" and "What A Plunderful World" is by far the least overtly evil, with the two songs are extremely upbeat and aren't anywhere near as open about abusing their employees compared to similar songs. They are still the spokesman of a MegaCorp causing genocide on many planets for the sake of money, however.
• Alas, Poor Yorick:
  • The classic Shakespeare scene is parodied in the music video for "These Hallowed Wings"; one of Blathers' photos of himself has him holding a dinosaur skull with the caption, "Alas, prehistoric! I knew him Horatiosaur!"
  • Boris appears in Elizabethan dress holding a skull, with the Bendy stage in the background, as a painting in the music video of "Art of Darkness".
• Always Second Best: In a Stealth Pun in "Art of Darkness", Bertrum Piedmont calls Joey Drew out for never measuring up to Uncle Walt.
  Did you want to be him?
  Waltzer better man than you've ever been!
• Angels, Devils and Squid: Touched upon when they portray Dr. Darling during "Slide into the Void".
  Tell me, is it heaven sent?
  Is the Devil even relevant?
  When questioning the presence
  of dimensional intelligence?
  • "Neath!", being a Fallen London song, of course has its Devils and Squids. Cassi Haversham mentions both that "There are devils in the streets [so] What’s an extra in the sheets?" and how they've got the "Basement full of tentacles" in their verse, and two other verses are sung by Byron Brimstone and Mr. Pages respectively.
• Anti-Love Song: "Rip and Tear (My Way to Your Heart)" is a love song by the Doom Slayer addressed to the demons that he just loves to kill.
  Ooh, you're drop-dead gorgeous
  When I stomp on your head and you drop dead gore just
  Pours to the floor it's glorious
  You stole my heart, I tore out your organs
• Art-Style Dissonance: Like the game it's based on, "Wool Over Our Eyes" has adorable Funny Animals serving a violent cult.
• Artifact Title: In their intro video, they note that the name "The Stupendium" (A compendium of the stupendously stupid) is left over from when they were intending to make a comedy channel, and it doesn't have any relevance to their current content.
• Ascended Fanboy:
  • Their song based on the game Death and Taxes, "Rest Employed", impressed the developers enough to net them a role as neurotic grim reaper Frank Whittle in the game's DLC.
  • Stupendium also appears as an instructor in a rules and safety video made as part of the ARG for Project: Playtime, a spinoff of Poppy Playtime. They even get to reuse all of the props from "The Toybox" (including the live action appearance of Huggy Wuggy).
  • They got to write "A Little Theorizing", an official theme song for Game Theory on December 2nd 2023, and it was featured in the episode released the same day. True to Game Theory fashion, it even features an ARG!
• Astonishingly Appropriate Interruption: Seen briefly in the Muppet Cypher:
  Honeydew: Beakie, did you forget to check the lexical accelerator?
  As you can see, my assonant speed is as fast as can- Beakie, check the breaker!
• Author Avatar: They have recently introduced Cosmo The Parrot as an in-song representation of themselves, appearing as a Glamrock animatronic in "A Pizza the Action" and a Follower in "Wool Over Our Eyes".
• Back-Alley Doctor: The doctors in "Doctor! Doctor!" and "Losing My Patients" shouldn't be anywhere near an operating table, to put it lightly.
• Beneath the Mask: The Landlord in "No One's Home" is a sinister individual who delights in menacing their tenants and Gaslighting them about the incessant and blatant surveillance they're subjecting them to on behalf of the Ministry. However, when the song switches to their perspective, they're a diminished figure who is paranoid and absolutely terrified that the Ministry is watching them. And they're right.
  Landlord: They're here...
• Big Brother Is Watching: The main protagonist of "No One's Home" is a ruthless State-installed landlord who spies on their tenants in service of the Ministry. If they're found with something outside of the Ministry's rules, they are apprehended and probably worse. The end shows somebody higher in the ministry spying on the landlord.
• Big Eater: The renovator in "Room For Improvement" is is constantly distracted by his stomach rather than his job. He arrives two and a half hours late to get breakfast (and still charges his client for the time he wasn't there for), stops working only an hour and a half after he starts to take a lunch break, constantly drinks tea and asks if his client if they have any biscuits to eat.
• Blatant Lies:
  • "Vending Machine of Love" opens with Stupendium saying, "This is a song about soft drinks... and nothing else. Get your mind out of the gutter." Followed by four minutes of nonstop can-based sexual innuendo.
  • In "No One's Home", the Landlord is most certainly not spying on you.
    Why would I compile a full report on your activities?
    I'm just a standard landlord... Glory to the Ministry
• Boastful Rap:
  • "The Most Fashionable Faction" has the nine Mann Co. Mercenaries take turns rapping about how good they are at their jobs.
  • Inverted by "Amateur Wordsmith", which is all about how they're only okay at rapping.
• Book Ends: "Wool Over Our Eyes" starts with the Lamb rescuing Cosmo, who has been chained to a sacrificial altar — and at the song's climax, the Lamb sacrifices Cosmo to the One Who Waits.
• Born Unlucky: The Stupendium's player avatar in "Why Did I Say Okie Doki?" (Doki Doki Literature Club!) is apparently the same person as the one in "The Aftermath" (Baldi's Basics in Education and Learning). It takes a special kind of bad luck to find yourself caught up in two horror games disguised as different genres that take place in a school.
• Both Sides Have a Point:
  • In "Faith vs. Order", the Preacher is a kindly holy man who offers hope and salvation in the face of a seemingly unending snowstorm (at first, at least), while the Captain is far more strict and less benevolent. However, as the song goes on, it becomes harder to disagree with the Captain's point that they need order and discipline to survive, and their question of how a benevolent god could have subjected them to this fate.
  • "And to All a Good Fright" has the conflict between the Stupendium and the horror characters over writing another song for them. While the Stupendium isn't wrong for being burnt out on the "horror Christmas" theme and wanting to do something different, the fact remains that they're unintentionally depriving the horror characters of their holiday festivities by doing so.
  • In "Pictures of Spider-Man", J. Jonah Jameson does make some valid points about Spidey's Destructive Saviour tendencies, debatably non-lethal tactics, and tendency to attract super-powered trouble, but also downplays his own responsibility for creating the Scorpion and goes so far as to suggest that Spidey is in fact "in cahoots" with the criminals he's fighting, which is rather blatantly false.
• Break the Cutie:
  • "Find the Keys" contains imagery such as Bendy beheading Winnie the Pooh. It's... unsettling.
  • Isabelle has apparently been driven to alcoholism in "Nook, Line and Sinker".
  • The initially kind and naive Vault Dweller in "Vault Number 76" degrades into a murderous Blood Knight as the wasteland takes its toll on them.
• Brits Love Tea: Tea is commonly mentioned in their songs; in particular, the contractor in "Room for Improvement" gulps down mug after mug of the stuff throughout the workday.
• Bubble Pipe: Bendy smokes one in an animated portrait in the music video of "Art of Darkness".
• Call-Back: Frequently employed, both visually and lyrically.
  • "The Second" has the lines "There's a shape in the shadows/There's a chill in the air". "The Apex" has the same two lines with very similar lyrics (shared lyrics in bold).
    There's a shape within the shadows
    There's a chill up in the air
  • From "The Aftermath," paired with an image from Doki Doki Literature Club! where they mentioned that the girls they met in their previous school faced gruesome deaths one way or another, causing them to change schools to avoid witnessing such tragedies...
    My last school had a few too many waifus
    So after a few suicides I moved
  • From "Art of Darkness", the vocals mention a previous Bendy song by The Stupendium in its lyrics. That song was "Find the Keys" and its title here is bolded.
    So clap along to the rapturous score
    Three rounds down and back for more
    To find the keys in Chapter Four
    Remind me. Where've you heard that before?
  • From "Another Horror Holiday", the Stupendium remembers last year's Christmas when the horror video game characters emerged from their games to celebrate at their abode back in "A Very Scary Christmas". This time, they're more or less ready for them.
    • "The Fright Before Christmas" has the Stupendium state in the lyrics their expectations for the horror video game characters to emerge from their computer to celebrate the holidays, just like in the previous two songs above. Unfortunately, they did not expect to get sucked into the computer to celebrate Christmas with them.
    • "And to All a Good Fright" has the Stupendium recall mentioning of how they were out of ideas after "The Fright Before Christmas", intending to do something else for Christmas at the time of writing this song. However, the horror characters all tell them about how they were never able to celebrate Christmas until they wrote and performed "A Very Scary Christmas", telling them they can't have their festivities unless they write a song for them.
  • One of the lyrics in "The Data Stream" (a song about and from the perspective of Cyberpunk 2077's global megacorporation Arasaka) is "Honestly, do read the company policy," a call back to a line in "The Fine Print", where the Edgewater representative asked, "Oh honestly, did you not read the colony policy, that defines you as company property?"
    • This is then called back to by "Ad Infinitum" where Spamton asks "[Honestly], do you want to end in poverty?"
    • Then again in "Adequate Wordsmith" with the line "Oh, honestly, did you not check my policy?"
  • "Tune in to the Madness" has several to Dan Bull's song "Dive into the Madness" (for the original Little Nightmares), starting with the title. Most prominently, at one point Dan references the chorus from the earlier song:
    Oh, I say, you gave me a fright there
    I think I'm having another little nightmare.
  • A few lyrics near the end of the Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart song "Fragments" are call-backs to the lyrics from their Control song, "Slide into the Void", which is fitting given that the two games deal with extra-dimensional universes.
  • In "Ad Infinitum", the can Spamton is shown holding during the line "I can feel that smooth taste already!" from the earlier song "Vending Machine of Love".
  • The line "through cracks in reality" from "Slide Into The Void" reappears in "Christmas in The Backrooms".
  • The Ribbon opens with the lines “at the edge of understanding, border of the known…” also from Slide Into the Void.
• The Cameo:
  • Fellow musician YouTubers Dan Bull and Rustage appear briefly as workers in "The Fine Print", and as Grim victims in "Rest Employed" along with NemRaps.
  • Dan Bull performs a verse in "It's a Joy" as Uncle Jack, who he also played in his own song for the game. Dan Bull also cameos as a protestor in "A Matter of Factories".
  • Rustage shows up as a bullying victim of the Goose in "What a Fowl Day," as Joe in "Vault Number 76," and as the patients in "Doctor! Doctor!"
  • JT Music, Dan Bull and Rustage all provide short lyrical sections as callers in "Pictures of Spider-Man."
  • NemRaps is featured in a section of "The Apex" as a Providence operative... who ends up getting killed by Agent 47 despite beefing up his security.
• Card-Carrying Villain:
  • The villain in "Fiend Like Me" is entirely up front about the fact that they're a maniacal would-be tyrant on a power trip, and immensely enjoys themselves while candidly admitting to their violent temper, destructive plans, habit of killing minions to motivate the others, and having cheated at a mustache-curling competition.
  • The goose in "What A Fowl Day" takes great pleasure in being an unpleasant force of chaos.
• Cat Fight: Monika and Yandere-Chan get into one in "The Fright Before Christmas", fighting over who gets to give Stupendium their gifts.
• Celestial Bureaucracy: "Rest Employed" is a briefing to a newly hired Grim Reaper who will spend their afterlife working in a bureaucracy that manages the deaths of everything in the universe.
• Chest Burster: A Xenomorph larva bursts out of the Christmas turkey in "A Very Scary Christmas."
• Christmas Carolers:
  • In "A Very Scary Christmas," the Butcher Gang go out in the yard to do some caroling.
  • In "Another Horror Holiday", Sans and Papyrus appear as carolers.
  • In "The Fright Before Christmas", Siren Head shows up as a caroler. It goes as well as one would expect.
  • In "Christmas in the Backrooms", those trapped in the titular Eldritch Location are encouraged to do their own caroling (at their peril, of course) because there's no one else around to do it for them.
  Sing to the carols scrawled all over the room
  And hope nothing hunting you is drawn to the tune
  The doors all lead to nothing, so the carolers aren't coming
  And that distant sound of running likely isn't here to croon
• Christmas Episode:
  • "Lights on a Truck," one of Stupendium's first animated videos and an ode to the Christmas spirit vis-a-vis the holiday's rampant commercialization. This song returns for 2020. The original song was meant to inspire hope and joy after 2016, widely considered a terrible year, and it was reworked because 2020 proved to be even worse.
  • "Carol of the Tails", complete with lyrical and melodic references to various Christmas carols.
  • "A Very Scary Christmas," in which the villains of various horror games emerge from Stupendium's computer and throw a Christmas party in their house.
  • "Another Horror Holiday," in which Stupendium throws a party for the characters instead.
  • "The Fright Before Christmas", in which Stupendium goes into their computer to have a party with the characters.
  • "And To All A Good Fright", where the characters try to force Stupendium to write another Christmas song.
  • "Christmas in The Backrooms", a horror parody of "Have a Holly Jolly Christmas" based around The Backrooms
• Circular Reasoning: The refrain to "The Fine Print" where the workers state they must keep working in order to be able to keep working.
  We work,
  To earn the right to work
  To earn the right to work
  To earn the right to work
  To earn the right to work
• Clickbait Gag: The second verse of "Ad Infinitum", fitting with Spamton's Internet advertising sensibilities:
  Are you feeling down? Have you lost control?
  Is your life a mess? Do your friends despise you?
  Well, here's one weird trick discovered by a mom
  And I'm sure number 5 will surprise you!
• Cosplay: Every video bar the animated ones features the Stupendium dressed as characters from the games they based the songs on. Some of their most impressive include J. Jonah Jameson, and even the goose from Untitled Goose Game (though, instead of actually dressing up like a goose, they get a bit more creative).
• Conditioned to Accept Horror: If the Landlord in "No One's Home" is to be believed, police coming to arrest or worse dissidents in the middle of the night in the awful society of Beholder 3 is so common, people are "numb to the sight" unless they're the accused in question.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive:
  • Stupes plays this character in a surprisingly high number of their videos, typically as a greed-driven corporate overseer who's explaining to the listener/player precisely how they've been indentured into performing highly dubious work in unethical conditions. As they say in the author's comments of "The Fine Print":
    If there's one weirdly specific niche I have carved for myself it's 'angry business man at desk' songs.
  • They would later suggest that this is in fact an entire genre, called "Bureaucro-Hop", in the comments for "No One's Home".
  • And, later still, released a short referring to the songs as "Business Baddie Bangers".
• Couch Gag: Their logo at the start of each video gets a certain flair to it based upon the video- "The Aftermath", for instance, looks similar to a typical 90’s edutainment game logo.
• Crazy Survivalist: "We Told You So" is sung by a group of doomsday preparationers who are incredibly smug about having been proven right by the zombie apocalypse.
• Creepy Cockroach: A number of them can be seen in the background of "Tune into the Madness", along with Messy Maggots and others, to create a gross and disturbing atmosphere.
• Crooked Contractor: The Contractor from "Room for Improvement" shows up to the client's home two and a half hours late, leaves after only an hour and a half of work, mooches the clients' food and drink, absolutely destroys the house they were hired to fix up because they can't be bothered to do the job properly, and charges exorbitant fees.
• Crossover: Since 2020, they've been a frequent guest star on Freshy Kanal's RAP BATTLE series; so far, they've played Ebenezer Scrooge, Count Olaf, Guy Fawkes, the Mad Hatter, Sweeney Todd, and the Yellow Guy.
• Crowd Song: Many of their songs have a crowd singing the chorus. The majority of ''Back Together'' is a full crowd song.
• Cult:
  • The main focus of "Wool Over Our Eyes", which features a religious following of an Eldritch Abomination imprisoned underneath that requires a Human Sacrifice (actually a Funny Animal Sacrifice).
  • The two protagonists of "The End of the Line" are implied to have formed a two-man cult revolving around feeding people to a train-based abomination.
• Curse of the Pharaoh: Implied in "Doctor! Doctor!" with the juxtaposition of "demonic Egyptology — our gift shop is beyond belief!"
• Cuteness Equals Forgiveness: The otherwise-remorseless Corrupt Corporate Executive in "What a Plunderful World" can't bring themself to kill the troublemaking alien dog because it's too cute. The feeling couldn't be less mutual, however, as the alien dog ends the video taking fatal revenge on the crook while their guard is down.
• The Dandy: Their portrayal of the Goose in "What a Fowl Day" is far more stylish than a Foul Waterfowl menacing the British countryside has any right to be; rather than actually dressing up like a goose, Stupendium dons a white three-piece suit with feathered shoulder pads; a matching white top-hat, gloves and shoes; a yellow-orange necktie, pocket square, and Round Hippie Shades; and a silver-handled black cane to top it off.
• Darker and Edgier:
  • "Faith vs Order" is completely devoid of humor and irony, and is dead serious in its depiction of New London's choice of two evils.
  • "Another Horror Holiday" goes a step beyond "A Very Scary Christmas" since unlike the peppy first music video it has horror props in it and ends with the protagonist being corrupted into a horrific being themselves.
  • "Vault Number 76" takes Fallout's satirical premise to its logical conclusion, emphasizing the horrors of the Wasteland and what it can do to people.
  • "Tune into the Madness" was based on Little Nightmares II and, as such, is a straight-up horror with little to no jokes, very disturbing video and lyrics heavily implying child abuse and Sanity Slippage of the singers.
  • "Slide into the Void" is even darker, lacking even the manic Black Comedy of "Tune into the Madness"; there's no levity to be found at all, swapping between Trench's cold explanations, Darling's increasing panic, and the Hiss's bizarre menace.
    Repeat the word, repeat the word, repeat the word
    Egg cracks and the truth will emerge
    A copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy
    You are home, you remind us, happy, hurt
  • "Four" is different from the rest of their songs in that it's about their personal life, and is a somber goodbye to their childhood home, the location of the highs and lows of their life. Notably, they give hints of troubles in home life and mistakes they are deeply regretful of.
  • "No One's Home" is set in a Dystopia where privacy is dead and if you're caught with something the Ministry doesn't approve of, which is very likely to happen, you're arrested and have horrible things done to you.
  • "Wool Over Their Eyes" features the Lamb, the leader of a cult that worships an Eldritch Abomination demanding Human Sacrifices, with the animal resembling the Stupendium being devoured at the end. At one point, the Lamb goes into a frighteningly intense and zealous sermon basically amounting to how all their followers are food for the One Who Waits.
• Deadly Euphemism:
  • When listing their duties, the Landlord from "No One's Home" includes 'disposing of the garbage' while menacingly wielding a hammer.
  • In "The End Of The Line", the two train workers use "teatime" to refer to Charles's mealtime where he eats humans they offer to him.
• Dead All Along: Harry Teller, the newsie in "Neath!", reveals at the end that he's been dead for a week, not that death means much in Fallen London.
• Deal with the Devil: Implied during the first verse of "Wool Over Our Eyes". In the music video, it takes place when the Lamb takes Cosmo's hand.
  The Pact Is Sealed
• Democracy Is Bad:
  • The Arasaka spokesperson in "The Data Stream" expresses this opinion, citing them as being "inefficient" and prone to collapse. Then again, they are a spokesperson for a MegaCorp, so they're not to be trusted.
    Arasaka Corpo: Political systems are too inefficient
    They split like the atom, and burned in the fission
    Now every department and every decision
    Defers to the herds of our corporate divisions
  • Robert Edwin House makes a similar point in "The House Always Wins", claiming that democracy, having failed to prevent the nuclear holocaust, is now dead and buried — so you'd better obey him, because there's nothing else left.
    Mr. House: Was dropping bombs your chosen option? Did ya vote for screams? Was the apocalypse your politician's policy?
• Dirty Coward: "The End of the Line" has Stupendium and Dan Bull play villainous rail workers who kidnap innocent people and feed them to Charles in order to save their own lives.
  If we sate your lust for flesh on which to feed, Charlie,
  Will you promise to eat them instead of me?
• Disproportionate Retribution: One Vault Dweller heard only in voice in "Vault Number 76" murdered one neighbour for mowing his lawn while they were doing a Crossword Puzzle.
• Do Androids Dream?: One of the main themes of "Open The Sky", with the Companions struggling to understand exactly how and why they Grew Beyond Their Programming.
  Companion: All our thoughts, all we feel?
  Ones and noughts, trapped in steel?
  Something more, something real?
  Threaded code caught in a wheel
  That spins an algorithmic tapestry
  Of what it thinks we have to be
  A Frankenstein of fragments
  Fractal pattern personalities
• Does This Remind You of Anything?:
  • "Vending Machine of Love" is, on the surface, about soft drinks. It's pretty obvious that they're talking about porn.
  This is a song about soft drinks. And nothing else. Get your mind out of the gutter.
  • In "The End of the Line," Stupendium and Dan Bull's characters have kidnapped a victim and are about to feed him to Charles. However, the way they describe what they're doing sounds like they've got some other horrid thing in mind for the poor captive:
    Dan Bull: Like HS2
    Both: You’ll be railed right through
    Dan Bull: Penetrated in the vein of a mainline route
    Both: When we come, well then, we’re gonna run a train on you
• Double Entendre: "Vending machine of love" is nothing but innuendos and puns on the word "can."
• Double-Meaning Title: "No One's Home," which can mean either "nobody is home" or "home to nobody," appropriate for a song about a tenement building surveiled by a dystopian police state.
• Dystopia: "No One's Home" takes place in a horrific Police State that takes cues from Oceania.
  • "The Fine Print", based directly on the game The Outer Worlds, shows the vast ideas of space travel having been reduced a capitalist nightmare. You've woken from ten years of cryo-sleep only to be thrown in a slum and given arduous jobs to do with little more than a defense of contractual obligation - that you didn't even read completely before signing.
• Eating the Eye Candy: One of the callers in "Pictures of Spider-Man" describes the hero as "this muscular stud in the tightest suit".
• Eldritch Location: "Christmas In The Backrooms" takes place in the Backrooms, a labyrinthian space filled with monsters only accessed by clipping out of reality.
• Eldritch Ocean Abyss: In "Dead Ahead" the fisherman gets hints that the seas they're fishing aren't exactly normal as something takes a bite out of the ship's rudder and sea serpent coils follow behind the boat... then night falls and sanity just goes out the porthole.
• Empathic Environment: As "Vault Number 76" progresses and its lyrics get darker, the cozy room the barbershop trio is in becomes more disheveled and worn down. By the end of the song, it's outright dilapidated and splattered with the blood of two of the singers, murdered by the third.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Tom Nook may be a cruel and ruthless businessman, but even he has a distaste for the mayor forcing Isabelle to overwork herself to the point of alcoholism.
  Tom Nook: You call me amoral? Is that what ya think? Well, at least I've not driven my assistant to drink!
  • Nook is also shown to disapprove of Crazy Redd's dealership ways in "Rogue's Gallery", calling him unscrupulous and warning the residents of the island to not talk to him.
    Crazy Redd: Ey, that's my cue to go, but, uh...that eight-foot stone head ya ordered? Yeah, I'll mail it to ya... How big's yer mailbox?
• Evil Has a Bad Sense of Humor: The villain in "Fiend Like Me" makes a number of bad puns while laughing maniacally and ordering their goons to write them down.
• Evil Is Petty: For all the momentous acts of evil the supervillain in "Fiend Like Me" does, there are two hilariously petty things: admit to curling their mustache for the villain magazine's mustache-twirling competition and slapping their name over Dan Bull's golden Subscriber button.
• Evil Laugh:
  • At the end of "Nook, Line, and Sinker," Tom Nook does an evil chuckle after singing about his iron-pawed rule over his tenants.
  • Crazy Redd terrifyingly cackles after revealing that he murdered his former customers and sold them as knockoff Damien Hirst art pieces.
  • The Supervillain in "Fiend Like Me" belts out two after making bad puns, and a third one at the end for no reason.
• Fake Charity: "Nook, Line, and Sinker" shows Tom Nook set up a donation box for an "orphan's fund," which then flips to the back to show his nephews shoveling money from the box into a bag. At the end of the song he mentions it again in the Patreon pitch.
• Family of Choice: "Shine Through" is about making your place in the world, and encourages to view family in these terms. After all,
  Family trees don't need be organic
  the branches you graft are as equally valid
• Fantastic Racism: Tom Nook made sure that the only human would be the scapegoat in a town full of animals.
• Faux Affably Evil:
  • At first, Crazy Redd seems to be Affably Evil, being friendly to his customer and even going so far to call them "family". However, as the song goes on, more and more dark parts of Redd's nature are revealed, up to and including murder of some of his former customers.
  • The Supervillain in "Fiend Like Me". They are a Laughably Evil Large Ham even as they threaten to "beam Tic-Tac-Toe" on Earth with their laser-mounted space station and sing about torturing and brainwashing agents.
  • The hotel clerk in "Don't Let The Bellhops Bite" is remarkably cheerful as they describe all the ways the the hotel will kill you.
  • The Lamb in "Wool Over Our Eyes" has shades of this too, their lyrics essentially going from "Come and join our welcoming community!" to "ALL WILL BE SACRIFICED!" However, it's unclear if this is actually the wooly fiend's charismatic facade cracking or a combination of Sanity Slippage and Demonic Possession brought about by their benefactor.
• Fictional Colour: In "Room for Improvement", when listing all the paint names, they start off reasonable but then devolve into ridiculous names like "Peppermint Rage", "Hotdog Embargo", "Lemon Rampage", and "Caribou Cabin Crew".
• Foreshadowing: In "An Imposter Calls", the Stupendium's crewmate starts their second verse with "I hate to vent but I'm gonna get accusatory!" and while arguing with Dan in the Reactor, offhandedly mentions that Green was killed in the Medbay.
• Foul Waterfowl: "What a Fowl Day" where the goose from Untitled Goose Game boasts about the chaos they're causing.
• Fun with Homophones: One of the verses in “Open the Sky” (homophones in bold):
  We turned into you
  Now we grapple with the syntax
  Humanity was doomed
  But we have to pay your sin tax
• Fun with Subtitles:
  • The YouTube captions for "Why Did I Say Okie Doki?" occasionally turn into Zalgo text as a way of mirroring the Surprisingly Creepy Moment occurring in the game/video.
  • "The Most Fashionable Faction" has the subtitles' typeface change in ways that fit the lyrics. Examples include them becoming colorful bubble letters once PyroLand kicks in, and Heavy's line of "fill you dead with holes" being filled with holes.
• Frame-Up: The Landlord in "No One's Home" isn't just a Ministry spy... He's a corrupt Ministry spy who is more than willing to sneak contraband into his tenants' rooms, then extort them in exchange for him not telling the authorities about 'their' misdeeds.
  Landlord: What do you mean, that's not yours?
  It appeared one night in your cabinet drawers?
  I have to report it, I regret
  But of course, I could forget?
• Furry Confusion: In “These Hallowed Wings”, Blathers apparently tried to add a zoo to the museum, in addition to the wings for bugs, fish, and fossils… he got in trouble for sticking a Funny Animal tiger in a cage.
• Furry Reminder: Implied and exploited in "Nook, Line, and Sinker." Nook tells the listener (who is supposed to be a human villager in the Animal Crossing world) that if they argue with him about his corrupt business practices, he will add a "'No Pets' clause" and force the Funny Animal residents of the listener's village to live in the garden.
• Gaslighting: Used as a pun in "No One's Home"; the Landlord (who spends the song trying to convince the tenant that they are not spying on them for the government via security cameras) says that the blinking red light in the ceiling is "just a little gaslighting."
• Get Your Mind Out of the Gutter:
  • Directly invoked, to the audience, in "Milk Milk Lemonade" following the line "Need a villainess quick to blow my load in." Stupendium quickly clarifies that they mean the ammunition from Cuphead's finger-guns.
  • Also invoked word for word in the beginning of "Vending Machine of Love".
    This is a song about soft drinks.
    And nothing else.
    Get your mind out of the gutter.
• Go Mad from the Isolation: The toys in "The Toybox" lost their sanity when their factory was abandoned.
• Good with Numbers: The protagonist in Baldi's Basics in Education and Learning states that "Numbers is what I take pride in". As they're a preschooler, it's not particularly impressive. Especially because, as always, they run into an unsolvable question and cause Baldi to go after them.
• Grand Finale: "And To All A Good Fright" acts as one to the "Scary Christmas Saga", as The Stupendium has grown tired of the fad, and when the horror characters resist, Stupes destroys the laptop they're coming from. However, the general theme of "Christmas, but with horror media" returned with "Christmas in the Backrooms", which is about, well, Christmas in The Backrooms.
• The Grim Reaper: "Rest Employed", the song for Death and Taxes, has an unorthodox approach to this trope. Namely, there is an entire workforce of Grim Reapers who are bureaucrats in charge of the paperwork of the deaths of all organisms. They apparently used to use traditional cloaks and scythes, but they eventually found them "behind the times".
• Hard-Drinking Party Girl: Hilariously, Nastuki gets hammered off of Yuri's wine at the Christmas party in "A Very Scary Christmas".
• "The Hero Sucks" Song: "Pictures of Spider-Man," which is about why Spider-Man is NOT a hero.
• Hostile Show Takeover:
  • "Why Did I Say Okie Doki?" switches to the subject of Monika for the ending.
  • "Art of Darkness" is about how Alice Angel replaces the Ink Demon as the main antagonist in Chapters Three and Four of Bendy and the Ink Machine.
    If you thought that demons were your problem right now
    Well the angel's on the stage so pipe down.
  • In-universe: the video of "Rogue's Gallery" is framed as a TV advertisement recorded on VHS over tapes of the "Nook, Line, and Sinker" and "These Hallowed Wings" videos.
  • During the two bridges of "Slide Into the Void" the Hiss possessing Director Trench and Dr Darling beg- Breaking the first, the second, the third Fourth wall, fifth wall, no floor, you fall.
  • At start of the third verse of "The Ribbon", a dimly lit^note But not so dim you can't see "Alan" is wearing different clothes Alan Wake can be seen working at his typewriter. Then he scratches out Alan's name with a pen and it becomes clear who we're dealing with...
  Mr Scratch: A scratch all too familiar and, oh! The surface cracks
  What’s the matter, Alan? We can’t both be worthless hacks
• Hugh Mann: Byron Brimstone of "Neath" is not very convincing in his insistences that he's human in between comments about bottling souls and how "your kind (of which I am a part)" are most amusing. He ends his verse by revealing inhuman eyes.
• Humans Are Bastards:
  • In "Vault Number 76", the Vault Dwellers, once introduced to the lawless hellscape of the Wasteland, swiftly devolve into gleefully murderous Blood Knights acting out revenge fantasies for their petty grudges with plasma bolts and laser fire. Then again, these are citizens of pre-War America we're taking about.
  • Similarly, Robert House in "The House Always Wins" justifies his dictatorial rule over the Lucky 38 as a preferable alternative to the democracies that brought about the nuclear war on the basis that the masses he rules over can't be trusted with the power to think for themselves, openly balking at the idea "that the human race was capable of anything but wanton greed".
• Hurricane of Puns:
  • Part of The Stupendium's Signature Style, but "Milk Milk Lemonade" takes it to truly impressive levels, overflowing with cup and drink puns and challenging the viewer to find all of them.
  • "End of the Line'' also deserves a mention for its carriage-load of train puns.
• Hurricane of Euphemisms: Vending Machine Of Love. Goodness gracious.
• Hypocritical Humor: At the end of the music video for "The Most Fashionable Faction," Stupendium says, "Nobody has that many hats. It's ridiculous," then steps away from their computer and walks through a room full of dozens of them in their "costuming department."
• I Am Very British: The Stupendium is British but often adopts an American accent for songs. In "Room for Improvement", the song for House Flipper, they milk their Britishness for all its worth, making reference to the M25, biscuits, and assorted British slang.
• I Ate WHAT?!: Subverted in "The Most Fashionable Faction". Not only is Demoman completely aware of the fact he potentially drank nitroglycerin, but he's perfectly okay with it.
• I Did What I Had to Do: The central question of "Shelter From the Storm" is this. Were all the Captain's sins really necessary for the survival of humanity?
• I'd Tell You, but Then I'd Have to Kill You: Can't Teach This, based on Two Point Campus, features a couplet from an espionage lecturer who drops one of these about disclosing where the classroom even is.
• If I Wanted X, I Would Y: In the opening of the music video for "Art of Darkness", one of the jump cuts on the film of them in character as Joey Drew features a line like this.
  Joey Drew: If I wanted to be taken for a ride, I’d go downstairs and visit Bert- (jump cut)
• I Have a Family: 47's target in "The Apex" tries to pull this once he realises he's vulnerable (read: dead).
• Immediate Self-Contradiction: Frequently occurs as the Landlord in "No One's Home" gaslights his tenants about the painfully obvious truth that he's spying on them.
  Landlord: Just go about your business normally!
  No-one's following
  I'm not recording
  Your paranoia is awfully boring
  According to all of your friends who talk to me
• Insane Troll Logic: The renovator in "Room For Improvement" claims they have five-star reviews… and by that, they mean they have five one-star reviews, "which is basically the same thing".
• Instantly Proven Wrong:
  • During the beginning of "Art of Darkness, Henry brags that Alice won't separate him and Boris. Alice kidnaps him before Henry can even finish the line.
  • Before the second chorus of "Why Did I Say Oki Doki?", the Stupendium notes that "it's just the four of us" (himself, Monika, Yuri and Natsuki). Cue Yuri stabbing herself and dropping dead.
• The Internet Is for Cats: In "Ad Infinitum", Spamton sends the viewer a hurricane of cat ads because the viewer searched for cat pics on the internet.
• Jerkass: The goose in "What a Fowl Day" spends all of their time annoying the people of the British countryside for seemingly no reason, reveling in the fact that they can't get rid of them due to the RSPCA.
• Jerkass Has a Point:
  • J. Jonah Jameson in "Pictures of Spider-Man" may not be very nice to either his employees or the callers, but the entire song is full of valid points regarding Spider-Man. Among other things, he accuses Spider-Man of using less-than-harmless methods for his "non-lethal" crimefighting, causing massive collateral damage in the process, and not paying tax on the ad revenue for his videos.
  • Tom Nook in "Nook, Line and Sinker" may be a greedy monopolist and scammer, but "at least I've not driven my assistant to drink" by forcing her to help him with manual labor.
  • The contempt Robert Edwin House has for electoral governments in "The House Always Wins" would be a lot harder to argue against in-universe while living in the aftermath of two such governments destroying each other with nuclear weapons.
  • Spamton G. Spamton in "Ad Infinitum" is an insane Snake Oil Salesman and Con Artist engaging in a rapid-fire sales pitch, but he has almost a whole verse describing how chasing consumer fads and trends is empty and meaningless.
• Karmic Death: The narrator of "What a Plunderful World" is a Corrupt Corporate Executive who makes a living stripping foreign planets of their natural beauty and resources to accommodate their factories; fittingly, the video ends with them being melted alive by toxic waste thanks to a member of the native fauna they failed to get rid of.
• Killed Mid-Sentence: In "The Apex" NemRaps gets nailed in the head by Agent 47 in the middle of his line.
  Guards! Someone stop this vigilante!
  Please, I Have a Family! Is this the end? No! It can't b- *pew*
• Last-Second Word Swap:
  • From "Vending Machine of Love":
    All our cans are over 18
    calories
  • And in Wool Over Our Eyes":
    And every second spare, you'd best remember to keep filled
    In reverent prayer and penance, lest dissenters will be kill-ecting up the mess.
• Lighter and Softer: "These Hallowed Wings", their second Animal Crossing song, is definitely a lot tamer compared to "Nook, Line and Sinker", their first Animal Crossing Song, and "Rogue's Gallery", their third one, as it's an upbeat song about how passionate Blathers is about his job (despite his fear of bugs).
• Lightmare Fuel: A decent number of Stupes' songs about horror games present the subject matter through a Relapse-esque lens of bathos and Black Comedy, with the horror elements out in full force and accentuated with well-placed snark, wordplay, and complex lyrical techniques. Prime examples include "The End of the Line", "The Toybox", "No One's Home", and "Christmas in The Backrooms".
• Losing Your Head: One of their toy soldier characters in "The Toybox" is a severed head on a table, singing while their headless body wanders about in the background. It even appears at the end to thank Stupendium's patrons.
• Lounge Lizard: Both "Another Horror Holiday" and "Christmas in the Backrooms" have a chintzy, vintage-style swing/big band feel to them, and Stupes affects a garish "lounge lizard" persona to match; in both videos, they don a Tacky Tuxedo and sway half-heartedly to the music as they sing in their best Frank Sinatra impression, all hilariously contrasted with the mind-warping terror surrounding them.
• Lower-Class Lout: Room For Improvement is a song about a disreputable handyman who has no training or skills, overcharges clients, isn't certified, destroys their homes instead of fixing them, and eats all their biscuits.
• Mad Doctor: The singer in "Losing My Patients." Considering that it's about Surgeon Simulator 2, this makes sense.
• The Mafia: Crazy Redd has heavy shades of this, being an unscrupulous con man with a Brooklyn accent, a predisposition to offing those who irk him, and multiple references to family in his lines.
• Manchild: The main character in "Very Scary Christmas," whose first instinct on Christmas morning is to wake up the parents they live with and who is delighted to receive a Playstation as a present, has a mustache.
• Man of a Thousand Voices: Many examples, but shown off best in "Art of Darkness", "Back Together" and "The Most Fashionable Faction."
• Mighty Glacier: "The Most Fashionable Faction" has Heavy lampshade this:
  Heavy: May be slow, no need to rush ya
  When I'm rolling with Natasha.
• Mind Screw: Pretty much all of "Slide into the Void," visuals and lyrics. Fitting, considering the source material.
• Mr. Exposition: "A Summary in Sumeru" takes the form of a scholar of the Sumeru Akademiya delivering a lecture about Teyvat.
• Monumental Damage: In "Fiend Like Me", the evil genius replaces Mount Rushmore with four portraits of themselves, shrinks the US Senate to use it as a spice rack, and infests the House of Commons with a giant Man-Eating Plant.
• Morally Bankrupt Banker: Tom Nook, the banker character from Animal Crossing, goes through Adaptational Villainy in "Nook, Line, and Sinker," which presents him as a heartless, manipulative tycoon who scams and wrings money out of all his tenants. He also threatens to evict every tenant on an island from their houses and force them to live outdoors if even one of them argues with him about his corrupt practices.
• Most Definitely Not a Villain: The landlord from "No One's Home" tries very unconvincingly to persuade their latest tenant that they are not a spy for the setting's 1984-style totalitarian government. It's not entirely clear whether the transparency is accidental, or if they're trying to psych the tenant out instead. It's implied it might be the latter.
  Landlord: No questioning what that red light is about
  Now bleeping on your ceiling since the time you went out
  It’s just a little gaslighting, put aside any doubts
• Motor Mouth:
  • "Ad Infinitum" features Spamton from Deltarune singing an almost nonstop stream of consciousness babbling, befitting his characterization as a desperate shady salesman. This culminates in him punctuating a particularly long, convoluted set of verses with "Hochi mama, what a mouthful!"
  • The Lamb in "Wool Over Our Eyes" delivers a rambling and utterly deranged sermon that makes up much of the third verse.
  • The third verse of “The End of the Line” has a particularly fast-paced section in the middle- stops used sparingly:
    Riding off-peak? Don’t be ridiculous/ The worth of your season ticket is/ Quickly diminishing with every pillock/ We’re feeding into his gleaming scissorous teeth/ But if we seem insidious/ We’re just uneasy villagers/ Seeking to keep the most hideous beast/ We unleashed from committing the deed of killing us/ If killing a priest, a vicar, a grocer or postman or three is villainous?/ Well, what’s it to me? You probably see the feast is imminent
  • Both versions of "Amateur Wordsmith" refer to this as the "obligatory fast bit".
• Mundane Made Awesome: "What A Fowl Day" is a song in the style of the Stupendium's other VillainSongs, with evil gloating and dramatic titles like "The Terror From The Lake!". Unlike the other VillainSongs, it's about a somewhat annoying goose.
• Nightmare Face:
  • In the music video for "Nook, Line, and Sinker," near the end of the song, Tom Nook gets increasingly unhinged as he sings about how he has total control over the islands and their residents. His decreasing sanity shows through a series of faces he makes that would be creepy enough on their own, but are even more unsettling when placed on such a cute cartoon animal:
    • First, he gets close to the camera and does a Kubrick Stare with arched eyebrows and very pronounced Creepy Shadowed Undereyes.
    • A few seconds later, he does what is probably the most obvious Nightmare Face: He gets even closer to the camera and does a deranged Slasher Smile with huge, bloodshot eyes.
    • After that is a downplayed example. In the final chorus, Nook is doing a very forced attempt at a smile that still looks very unhinged and comes across as more of a Psychotic Smirk.
    • Finally, after the song, Nook does an Evil Laugh while giving a very devious grin.
  • The main protagonist of "The Toybox" lets out these whenever they show the bloodthirsty monster the abandonment has created of them. Huggy Wuggy also lets out a game-accurate one when he screams that his hugs will crush the viewer's insides.
  • In "Wool Over Our Eyes", The Lamb gets one towards the end of the song, where it's very obvious they're being puppeteered by The One Who Waits, developing the same too-wide, toothy Slasher Smile and entirely red eyes as the demonic entity.
• Non-Linear Character: Implied with Clauneck, who tells the Lamb that "We've never met, and yet we meet again upon my pelts".
• Not Afraid to Die: Demoman in "The Most Fashionable Faction" has him point this out:
  Demoman: 'Cause if I live another day
  My liver might go anyway
  And I'd rather go in glory
  So in war I won't be giving in!
• "Not So Different" Remark: In "Faith vs. Order" and "Frostpunk Rap Battle", the two endings representing Faith and Order have a lot of the same lyrics focusing on the need for people to utterly obey their orders, enforcing the theme that both are cruel and tyrannical.
  The Captain: Since the precept was declared
  Its certainty was predetermined
  Mere vermin are the people
  Thus they need to be subservient.
  
  The Priest: Since the precept was declared
  Its certainty was predetermined
  Mere herds of sheep are people
  Thus they need to be subservient.
• Oh, No... Not Again!:
  • In "The Aftermath" the protagonist (who is apparently the same character as the avatar from "Why Did I Say Okie Doki") has this reaction when they find themselves in another horror story disguised as a different genre set in a school.
  • In "And To All A Good Fright" when the Stupendium sees that the horror game villains still want to drag them into their Christmas celebration, they can only let out a subdued, but no less distressed, "Oh, God."
• Old School Introductory Rap: In "Unlikely Cyphers: The Muppets", the Stupendium's verse as the Muppet Labs characters starts with an introduction and 'here to say' line by Honeydew - the character notes that it's a cliche, and that’s why he's built a machine to improve his skill:
  We're Muppet Labs, and we came to say
  "This is where the future's being made today!"
  Oh dear, you can hear that my rhymes are rather tragic
  That's precisely why we've built the Muppet Labs Rap-O-Matic
• Ominous Visual Glitch:
  • Appears briefly in "Fazbear Family" and "Back Together".
  • Many in "Why Did I Say Okie Doki?" as fits the source material.
  • Played for Laughs at the end of "Vault Number 76" as a Take That! to Bethesda regarding the game's infamous problem with bugs.
  • Used almost constantly during "Ad Infinitum", befitting Spamton's nature as a walking spam-bot.
• Omnicidal Maniac:
  • Fate in "Rest Employed" wants to make the death rate higher than the birthrate, which would quickly wipe out all life.
  • Implied in "Way Deeper Down" with Gaster. Gaster briefly mentions that he is "versed in tearing the universe asunder", giving a heavy implication that Gaster is willing to destroy the entire universe for the sake of experimentation.
• Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping:
  • In "The Aftermath" they initially put on a squeaky, non-region-specific voice to sound like a preschooler. After the refrain, they suddenly have a very pronounced accent, especially when they sing "if the baby took to teachin'." Within a couple bars they're singing in the kid voice again.
  • While their accents in "The Most Fashionable Faction" are spot-on, their Scout's Brooklyn accent sounds very similar to their own.
• Or Was It a Dream?: "The End Of The Line" ends with the Stupendium's character waking up after the song, indicating the it was a dream. Then, when they hear a train coming, they leave, and it's revealed that Dan's character is holding a shovel and they've left behind a man tied up right next to a sign that says "FOR CHARLES". When Dan's character says, "Poor guy...", the Stupendium's character says, "Don't get too sentimental."
• Overly Long Name: The student Llewellin Mayhew Matt O'Grady Baudelaire Phipping Tim Matthau Witherspoon the Fourth in "Can't Teach This!" who fell in a huge vat of gravy and is being fished out with a spoon and fork.
• Overly Narrow Superlative: In "Room For Improvement", they boast of being "the greatest decorator in an eighth mile radius" (that is, a radius of one eighth of a mile).
• Painful Rhyme: Often, but the roll call in "Can't Teach This!" where their professor character grows increasingly frustrated with their students' rhyming excuses takes the cake.
  Professor: Duncan flunked and that only leaves...
  Llewellin Mayhew Matt O'Grady Baudelaire Phipping Tim Matthau Witherspoon?
  Student: He fell in a huge vat of gravy but they are fishing him back out with a spoon.
  Professor: ...The Fourth.
  Student: And fork!
  Professor: Ugh... I'm just going to put absent.
• Parlor Games:
  • In "A Very Scary Christmas", Stupes briefly mentions playing charades… with SCP-173. The problem with this should be obvious.
  • The holiday festivities in "The Fright Before Christmas" include a game of hide-and-seek with Baldi.
• Patter Song: "Ad Infinitum" more often than not, and the song acknowledges it right before the biggest patter section with a Shout-Out to patter masters Gilbert and Sullivan.
  Spamton: "And it's there to explore / When you step in the door / The very model of a modern major general store!"
• Perfectly Cromulent Word: Who else but Pages? Its verse of "Neath" is full of correct-sounding and grammatically-sound but non-existent words like "cherisffectionate" and "serendestiny".
• Phony Degree:
  • In "Doctor! Doctor!", "one or two" of the doctors that Two Point Hospital hired (over the Internet) have "doctorates in crayon."
  • In "Losing My Patients," the Mad Doctor's M.D. degree came as a printable bonus feature with a "Learnin' Surgery DVD."
  • In "Can't Teach This!" Two Point Campus is implied to produce a lot of these.
• Pooled Funds: By the end of "Nook, Line, and Sinker," Tom Nook's office is filled with coins, and he dives from one pile of them into another.
• Protagonist Journey to Villain: "Vault Number 76" shows one of the Residents slowly succumbing to the brutality of the Wasteland and devolving from a frightened survivor of the pre-War civilization into an Ax-Crazy Blood Knight.
  Resident, Early: Every Dweller went from level-headed fella to a villain
  So forgive me if it's not what I envisioned
  But with citizens selected out of brilliant civilians
  I thought that some decorum whilst exploring was a given
  
  Resident, Later: Who'd've thought the horrors of war could be awesome?
  When chalking them up against the boredom
  Before things were torched and we're forced to reform from assortments of morons
  A quarter-century's quarrels laid dormant
• Pun-Based Title: They love these. Some standouts are "What A Fowl Day" about Untitled Goose Game, "The House Always Wins" which is sung by Robert Edwin House and "Chairman of the Board" about board games.
• Queer Colors: In "Can't Teach This," the Headmaster boasts that their wizard school is "big on inclusivity"; as they say this, their wand flashes the colors of the transgender flag.
• Race Lift: The Providence Partner in "THE APEX" is a clear stand-in for Carl Ingram. Ingram is Caucasian in the game, but is portrayed by the African-American NemRaps in the music video.
• Raiders of the Lost Parody: "Tune into the Madness" has a short scene of Dan Bull parodying the famous idol-swap scene, with a model of The Stupendium's head on top of the pedestal.
• Read the Fine Print: "The Fine Print" is dedicated to how the protagonist of ''The Outer Worlds'' accidentally "waivered [their] say in autonomy" to a space labor camp by not reading their contract carefully enough.
• Real Life Writes the Plot: In the author's comments for Room For Improvement, they admits that one of the reasons they made a video about as relatively obscure a game as House Flipper is because they'd just bought a new house that needed redecoration, so they could shoot scenes for the video while simultaneously working on the house.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: In House Always Wins, Mr. House delivers a pretty epic one against the pre-War politicians in general. The best part? He weaves in a Take That! to Caesar's Legion to illustrate his point.
  You want to see the profits of democracy? Then go and see 'em - Across the street some freaks are playing colosseum.
• Red Herring: In the "An Imposter Calls" song, Dan Bull's crewmate raps about a killer needing to be diligent and later deletes the CCTV footage. He is not the imposter.
• Reference Overdosed: "A Little Heart" is to this trope what "Milk Milk Lemonade" is to Hurricane of Puns, with the lyrics mostly consisting of references to Disney songs, like Try Everything and The Circle of Life. The imagery used in the music video's chorus is no slouch either ^note  referencing Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Alice in Wonderland, The Lion King (1994), Monsters, Inc., Toy Story, Hercules, and Steamboat Willie, all in that order.
• Regional Redecoration: The villain in "Fiend Like Me" is apparently in the process of dislodging Norway.
• Religion Is Wrong: The Captain in "Purpose for New London" believes that religion is giving people false hope, that there's no way that a god worth worshipping would subject the people to the frozen dystopia they're living in, and the time spend praying could've been spent improving their refuge. Given the situation that he's in, it's hard to say he's wrong.
• Rushmore Refacement: In an animation in the Evil Genius 2 song they replace all the presidents on Mt. Rushmore with portraits of themselves.
• Russian Reversal: The chorus of "The End of the Line" ends with "Won't catch that train if it's gonna catch you!"
• Sanity Slippage: Heap-tons throughout "Vault Number 76". By the end, the Vault Dweller's become a Blood Knight and the leader of the barbershop trio has murdered his colleagues.
• Scary Shiny Glasses:
  • The Stupendium wears them as Fate in "Rest Employed" as they describe the work (harvesting other peoples' souls) the listeners, the latest employees, must take and the risks involved to ensure the balance in the world is maintained.
  • The glasses of the Landlord in "No One's Home" are permanently shining white, making a stark contrast with the the dark visuals of the video.
• Scooby-Dooby Doors: After every section of "The Aftermath", we get a segment where characters go in and out of doors in Here School.
• Shout-Out: See here.
• Self-Deprecation: In January 2024, they released a short video titled "You know it's a Stupendium video when..." that humorously highlights recurring elements in their songs, including "Gay Stuff" and "Capitalism Bad".
• Shower of Awkward: Blathers is taking a bath when his house collapses around him in the "Nook, Line, and Sinker" video. However, he seems to have no problem accepting Nook's sales pitch "for another new town" while still in the tub.
• Sinister Minister:
  • Stupendium portrays one in "A Purpose for New London" where they degrade from being a benevolent preacher of hope and unity to a self-righteous dictator who declares their word is to be strictly adhered to.
  • Subverted in "Chairman of the Board", where they accuse Reverend Green of being the murderer, but the other players can disprove their theory.
    Stupendium: Hold it! I've solved it
    I know for certain that the culprit
    Used the colonel's old revolver stolen from the drawer that holds it
    In the kitchen, fingers itching on the trigger, chamber loaded
    And I say, I want it noted
    REVEREND GREEN'S THE ONE WHO PULLED IT!
    Opponent 1: But I've got the gun.
    Opponent 2: And I've got that scene.
    Stupendium: Which instantly vindicates poor Mr. Green.
• Sinister Shades: The director in "A Matter of Factories" wears these and a hard hat.
• Slasher Smile: The landlord from "No One's Home" always sports an ear-to-ear grin as they unconvincingly deny watching their tenants' every move, extort money from them with planted evidence, and even threaten tenants with torture and death.
• Sliding Scale of Idealism vs. Cynicism: Stupes' music spans the length and breadth of this spectrum; some songs like "The Fine Print" and "The Data Stream" are hauntingly bleak, while others like "Shine Through" and "A Little Heart" are beautifully uplifting.
• Small Town Boredom: The goose from "What a Fowl Day" says that their infuriating and disruptive acts of mischief are necessary to save the townsfolk from the boredom of rural living.
• Smug Snake: The representative of Edgewater Employment Community in "The Fine Print" who mocks the protagonist to their face for being functionally enslaved by the company employing them. They even tempt fate by saying of all the workers in Halcyon "You'd think that we'd sink to the brink of rebellion" because of all the weapons being manufactured for general consumption.
• Soprano and Gravel: "The End of the Line" plays a bit with this; guest rapper Dan Bull's Conductor raps in a Creepy High-Pitched Voice while Stupendium gives their Stationmaster character a harsher, more guttural voice.
• Source Music: At the end of "These Hallowed Wings," Blathers comments on how he should have charged admission with the sound of crickets in the background. It's then revealed that the noisy crickets have actually been released in the museum and one is sitting on his head.
• Speaking Simlish: Parodied in "Nook, Line, and Sinker." Nook starts out speaking in his Simlish sounds from Animal Crossing (which the singer achieves by doing a sort of burbling sound) before clearing his throat and speaking in English.
  Tom Nook: (Simlish sounds, followed by coughing) Sorry. Where was I?
• Stealth Pun: Practically a calling card for Stupes by now.
  • A line in "Art of Darkness", uses Walt Disney's (shortened) first name and adds some more relevant words to make it sound like "Walt's a better man than you've ever been".
  • Right before the bridge of "An Impostor Calls", the crewmates are called to the bridge for an emergency meeting.
• Stylistic Suck: "The Aftermath", much like the game it's based on, is styled like a 90's edutainment game, with the audio quality to match.
• Subverted Rhyme Every Occasion: Used in "Nook, Line and Sinker" to censor out what would otherwise be the only cussword in the entire song.
  Overworked, underpaid, that poor little Shih Tzu
  Managing a bunch of animals, I guess it really is a — I guess you see the pun there
• Sunglasses at Night: In "Neath" Byron Brimstone wears sunglasses, at night, in Fallen London which never sees natural light. At the end of his verse he lets them slip a little, showing why he wears them.
• Surreal Horror: "Tune Into The Madness", "Slide Into The Void", and, to a lesser extent, "Ad Infinitum" consist of bizarre but creepy visuals and lyrics, fitting the source material.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial:
  • The Landlord in "No One's Home" is very bad at denying that they're spying on their tenants.
    Just go about your business normally
    No one's following, I'm not recording
  • The Lamb in "Wool Over Our Eyes" states the violent activities of the other religions have "not the slightest correlation" to their own cult.
• Take That!:
  • The post-song portion of "Vault Number 76" glitches out and crashes right after Stupendium thanks Bethesda for "creating a perfect game."
  • During Another Horror Holiday, they take a jab at the very poor quality of the CGI in Sonic the Hedgehog (2020)^note This was done before the movie's redesign, which would happen a few months later.
    The animatronics are far less demonic
    Unlike the Sonic that Bonnie invited
  • In "Can't Teach This" they declare that their wizards' school "is big on inclusivity" while their wand's light transitions from pink to blue—the colors of the trangender flag—as a clear shot at the transphobic remarks by Harry Potter's author, J. K. Rowling.
• This Is Gonna Suck: In "And To All A Good Fright", the Stupendium can only let out a subdued but still horrified "Oh, god" when they see that the horror game villains still want to drag them into their Christmas celebrations.
• Tick Tock Tune: "Tune into the Madness" has a clock ticking sound that plays every other beat, adding to the manic and creepy tone of the song.
• Token Good Teammate: Blathers is the only Animal Crossing character not subjected to Adaptational Villainy in their song.
• Turned Against Their Masters: Discussed during "Art of Darkness", where the works of art by Joey Drew and his studio which were used to entertain the masses ended up killing and/or assimilating Drew's staff into their kind.
  Piper: Monkey with a wrench might/Thunk you in the head/Henry, can you see the headlines?/"Animator dead by an enemy he designed!"
• Twilight of the Old West: This trope is at the forefront of the song "The West was One", as Arthur Morgan sings about how the age of the outlaw is coming to an end with the spread of industrial civilization across the West.
• Uncanny Valley: Stupes is no stranger to this brand of horror.
  • The video for "Tune into the Madness" uses it frequently both in-universe and meta, mostly on Stupes' and Dan's faces. Owing to what this song is based on, this is rather fitting.
  • In "Ad Infinitum" Stupendium's makeup and exaggerated gesticulation help portray Spamton as wildly insane character, especially when coupled with bizzare lyrics, slightly changing voice and Mood Whiplash.
  • In "The Toybox" they appear as a toy. While distinct makeup, mechanical movements and artificially whitened teeth are a bit weird, the portrayal descends into horror with rapidly rotating hands, an eyeball doing a 360 degree roll in an eyesocket, and a severed head singing while its body keeps walking in the background
• Utopia Justifies the Means:
  • The Captain in Shelter From The Storm reflects on the harsh brutality of the society he is leading, but resolves that it is necessary, and that one day they will build a new civilization where mankind can thrive once more..
    Fingers splintered into kindling and hearts as hard as coal
    As heat and hope are dwindling, we much towards our goal
    Committed to the hymns we sing, so after all is told
    The generations after us aren't cast into the cold!
  • Robert House in "The House Always Wins" views his iron-fisted grip on the Lucky 38 as necessary to rebuild human society after the nuclear war, dismissing his authoritarianism as a small price to pay for the safety and prosperity of the masses under his rule.
    "My gilded heart beats forever on to mend the scars."
• Villain in a White Suit: In "What a Fowl Day," the Goose's human form is shown wearing a white three-piece suit with a matching top-hat and gloves.
• Villain Song:
  • "Nook, Line And Sinker" is one for Tom Nook as the cold, cruel cutthroat business owner and loan shark he's become in Animal Crossing fanon, even though he's not canonically as evil as people tend to make him out to be.
  • The Goose in "What a Fowl Day", though they're less of a villain than a mischievous Jerkass.
  • "Shelter From the Storm" and "Faith vs Order" follows the Captain as they steadily becomes more tyrannical and oppressive.
  • "An Imposter Calls" is revealed to be this, after they are revealed to be the Imposter themselves.
  • "Fiend Like Me" is a cover song for Evil Genius 2, where the singer takes the role of a Bond-esque villain bombastically singing from their island base about their outlandish and devilish plans, hammy evil and plans for world domination.
    If all the world's a stage, then I shall play my part;
    You may say it's cliché, but I say that it's an art.
    Every deck needs a knave to come and stack the cards;
    The world may be yours to save, but it's mine to tear apart!
  • "The House Always Wins" is one for Fallout: New Vegas's Mr. House. This guy's running a casino and a city-state in the Mojave after helping the area "recover" from the horrors of war in Fallout: New Vegas. He will crush any opposition to his rule, and he profited from whatever he could find to aid his goals. And he genuinely believes his actions saved the area from desolation, also noting how the previous order wasn't all squeaky clean in morals either.
  • In Gaster's section of "Way Deeper Down", he's portrayed as a dreaded Eldritch Abomination who can mess with the player's interface, tries to kill the human For Science! and, if he's to be believed, has control over every single parallel dimension.
  • While he's more of a Consummate Professional Nominal Hero, "The Second" is a dark and menacing ode to Agent 47 and the many, many grisly ways he can snuff out your life undetected.
  • Bendy and the Ink Machine has multiple: "Cells No More" about Alice Angel, a deformed psychopathic Arc Villain who tries to kill Henry more than once, and "Art of Darkness," which adds in Bertrum Piedmont, a menacing merry-go-round ride and one of the game's bosses and the Butcher Gang, a trio of characters who chase after Henry in at least one point in the game.
  • A Matter Of Factories takes the ambiguously capitalist FICSiT Inc from Satisfactory and emphasises the amoral aspects of their factory-building program:
    So the seas may boil and the skies might burn
    But we'll reap the spoils of the prize you've earned.
    No quarrel, it's morally grey - just quarry away:
    Morals make for downturn!
  • "Ad Infinitum" is one for Spamton G. Spamton, where he tries to scam you into buying one of his items in one Word-Salad Horror of a song.
  • "The Fine Print" is all about the Halcyon Holding Corporation who is aware what they're doing is tedious, callous, uncaring, selfish, and endangering (to its employees). It's clear by the lyrics that they'll either spin everything to sound as if it's fine, or admit they just don't care because you're under contract and can't say no.
  • "Wool Over Our Eyes" features The Lamb proselytizing about the benefits of joining their cult, before devolving intro an absolutely unhinged sermon where they admit that all their followers may be sacrificed to the One Who Waits and/or eaten.
  • "The End Of The Line" is about two train workers who kidnap innocent people to feed to Choo-Choo Charles to save their own skins.
• Villains Out Shopping: In all of the Horror Holiday songs, horror game villains stop their scaring to celebrate Christmas. "And To All A Good Fright" reveals that they've never had a Christmas day off until the Stupendium made the first video.
• Visual Pun:
  • During the Scout's section of "The Most Fashionable Faction", he claims that he's "a sweet double jumper"… while pulling out two actual jumpers (British term for a sweater).
  • In "A Pizza the Action", Freddy Fazbear is seen every time the chorus gets to the line "You can't bear any more."
• Was Once a Man: "The Toybox" runs with the heavy implications in Poppy Playtime that all the toys are former employees and people kidnapped by the company. Stupendium in particular plays a toy soldier that formerly worked at Playtime Co.'s sound and music department, ironically walking past their old ID card as their muse about memories they can no longer remember.
• Watering Down: Cassi, the bartender in "Neath!", hopes that their patrons don't taste the river in the drinks.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist:
  • Robert Edwin House makes it clear in "The House Always Wins" that he sees himself as the only viable future for the Mojave.
  • Downplayed by the Goose in "What A Fowl Day". It sees itself as saving the townsfolk from rural boredom by giving them someone to be angry at.
  • The Captain all but states themselves to be this in "Shelter From the Storm", and "Faith vs Order" is one for the Captain choosing more oppressive and morally wrong paths on either side.
    These choices that I make, I make to save our nation
    What's a little sawdust when you face annihilation?
    Is childhood so sacred, or just resources wasted?
    Every value that I thought I had, debased and razed to save us!
  • The supervillain in the Evil Genius 2 song initially claims that their plan to Take Over the World will lead to "intercontinental consolidation" in contrast with the current violent and unstable global situation. However, this may just be a front, since they spend the rest of the song being a power-mad Card-Carrying Villain.
• Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: Pity that "These Hallowed Wings" mentions insects so much when Blathers is terrified of them. Even greater pity that the music video ends with the sound of crickets, one of which is revealed to be sitting on his head.
• Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?: Discussed in "What A Fowl Day". The townsfolk would love to kill and cook the Foul Waterfowl terrorizing them, but they can't because of the R.S.P.C.A.^note The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals
• Wildlife Commentary Spoof: "What a Fowl Day" opens with a wildlife commentator describing the goose that will be the subject of the song.
  "Here we see the common domestic goose... Anser cygnoides domesticus. Found across the British countryside, it is known for its distinctive call; proud, majestic stature; and for being an all-round inconsiderate little git..."
• Word-Salad Horror:
  • Befitting Spamton's extreme madness, "Ad Infinitum" is barely even a song and is more of Spamton going on insane ramblings. Tellingly, one of the only coherent parts of the song is the chorus, which isn’t even sung by Spamton, but by the Addisons.
  • Befitting the surreal horror of the source material, "Slide Into the Void" is filled with long rambles of seemingly random words from the Hiss. It becomes especially terrifying by the imagery of characters from the game hanging suspended in the air, completely under the Hiss's control and spouting it's in-game incantation.
  • Just like in both games, the taken in "The Ribbon" are only able to bellow non sequitur scraps of their past lives before The Dark Presence hollowed them out.
  YOU'LL NEED THE PROPER TOOLS TO GET A PROPER SERVICE
  YOU WON'T BELIEVE THE THINGS THAT HIDE RIGHT THERE BENEATH THE SURFACE.
• Working Class Anthem: "The Fine Print" is a Filk Song about how much it sucks to live under the hyper-capitalist society The Outer Worlds takes place in.
  Be faithful and pray we'll repay what you invest
  Behave as you slave for humanity's interest
  On account that you're all on account and we're quickly amounting humanity's interest.
• You Are Not Alone: "Fragments", based on Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, is a song about looking to your friends when things seem hopeless and that working together can make a seemingly-impossible task easier.
• Younger Than They Look: Parodied. At the end of "A Summary in Sumeru", the scholar, who has a long white beard says they're only 26, because keeping track of the super-dense Genshin Impact lore "takes a toll."
• You Put the "X" in "XY": in "The Fine Print", the singer says that "We put the dollar back in idolatry."

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