Web Original / Shout Out

This page lists shout-outs from web-published original works.

Works with their own subpages:

Other Works

Antlers Colorado slips a couple lines of Hotel California into a section of its first chapter, possibly both a reference to another work of horror web fiction as well as the fact that the Chapter One Big Bad is disguised as a motel worker.

The Backloggery, a video game-tracking website, has badges for those who meet certain requirements in their collection. Having most of your games marked as beat earns the "Consider Yourself a Hero" badge (which resembles one of the power-ups from Contra as well), while having most of your games marked as complete earns you the "Master of Unlocking" badge.
Chromagic shouts out to a whole bunch of things. Mostly Pokémon.
Decades of Darkness has shout outs to, among other things: a group of popular rock bands, Star Wars, Call of Cthulhu, and so on and so on.
DeviantArt: This picture does a shout-out to three separate anime at once.
Dream High School lets readers win the chance to add sentences to the story, and one of the readers chose "We need more dakka."
Entirely Presenting You: A few aliases, and even the chapter titles, reference songs and lyrics.

There are also tons of these (to other literary and artistic works) in the blog novel Fartago. Just the ones we've caught: 2001: A Space Odyssey (the entire premise, that a monolith gives a tribe of cavemen self awareness, and they soon discover a bone can be used as a weapon), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Don Quixote (the plot structure of two members of a society being outside their society and commenting on it), the writings of Sigmund Freud (the fact that the characters are motivated by their realization they will eventually die), Waiting for Godot (the writing style), The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Chapter 1: "The Unbearable Lightness of Cat Poop"), Superman and Batman (Flying Tago and Furry Night Bird Farta), The Lord of the Rings (Chapter 3: The Fellowship of Fartago), "The Treachery of Images" ("Zis Ees Not a Poop"), and those are just the ones I caught in the first three chapters.
Google:
- If you enter "The Shire" and "Mordor" and select walking directions, Google Maps will respond with a custom error stating "Use caution – One does not simply walk into Mordor.". See here.
- Google's Wave service was named such because that's what communications were called in Firefly. The crash message is even Wash's infamous line "Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!"
In Graven Hunter Files novel Trial and Error Sye notes his ancestor Kyrie was sent to and kicked St. Brutus's home for criminal youths, a reference to the school in Harry Potter that Harry's Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia force him to claim he is attending to his Aunt Marge.
The parodic zombie comedy How to Survive a Zombie Apocalypse employs a huge number of this. Chapter titles include Fifty Shades of Collin or Breaking Duff as examples.
The "anti-walkthrough" website IT-HE Software includes tons of shout-outs in its articles — to movies, obscure songs, etc. For instance, the chapters in the Thief walkthroughs: "The Mines of Moria", "Tom Braider", "It's HammerTime", "The Heresiarch's Seminary".
Lost Boys of the Cascades has several shout outs, among them its title and the name of its main character being references to Peter Pan.
The Protectors of the Plot Continuum stories are a Shout-Out to everything, in theory.
Rotten Tomatoes indulged in this doing a consensus: "Look on Gods of Egypt, ye filmgoers, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay of this colossal wreck, boundless and bare. The lone and level sands stretch far away. (Apologies to Shelley.)"
Spectacular Organic's logo is very similar to the logo of Spectacular Optical, from the film Video Drome.
Spectral Shadows does this a lot. More so than you might realize. From the final serial being titled I Pity Inanimate Objects, to a place called The Point of Know Return. Serial 2 is said to be planned to be a bunch of shout outs to anime and manga, and over in Serial 11 you have towns named things like Noire and Oz, with a society that matches the name in some form. Then you get into the actual music, with bands having names like Ultraviolet and a musician named Axel Rhoades, and too much more to list.
The official Tumblr for Splatoon is prone to making these in the tags:
- The Karate Kid gets three quotes, all of which are variations of "X does not exist in this dojo does it?"
- "#I'm so excited! #And I just can't hide it!" is a quote from "I'm So Excited" by the Pointer Sisters.
- At one point, the Lab suggests the audience make their own Fresh Prince pun.
When one registers for online content on the St. Louis Post-Dispatch website, one of the password recovery questions asks for the airspeed of an unladen swallow.
TFWiki.net often makes Shout Outs to other works. For instance, the captions in the article for The Transformers: The Movie are all quotes from Star Wars Episode IV, and the live-action movies go the same way (Transformers (2007) quotes the 80's movie itself, Revenge of the Fallen quotes The Empire Strikes Back, Dark of the Moon quotes The Wrath of Khan, and Age of Extinction quotes Jurassic Park); some characters have Actor Allusion for a caption (Wreck-Gar is all about "Weird Al" Yankovic lyrics); and the Armada Megatron page has at least two Shout Outs to Atop the Fourth Wall.
Void Domain has shout-outs aplenty. Almost all the background teachers have names referencing other works.
- Isaac Calvin is Isaac Asimov and his character Susan Calvin from I, Robot.
- Franklin Kines is a combination of Frank Herbert and his Dune character Liet Kynes.
- The school's first dean was a woman with the last name of Halsey, the name of the dean in H. P. Lovecraft's Herbert West–Reanimator.
- The necromancer Sawyer one time stays in The 'Burbs and later moves to the hotel from The Shining.
- One professor starts to discuss the Manton Effect just before the chapter ends.
Whateley Universe:
- It is really a superhero comic-book universe. So most of the buildings at Whateley Academy are named for famous writers and inkers of comic books. Schuster Hall, McFarlane Stadium....
- There are tons of shout-outs in "Tales of the MCO, because the entire story is the protagonists watching an anti-mutant television show and MSTing the heck out of it.
- The online Evil Mart is named Sin d'Rome Mercenarium.
- The Phase novels are littered with shout outs, because Phase is a Deadpan Snarker with a lit background.
- The first Phase novel has shout outs to the Bible, pointing out how Phase starts out as a pompous, spoiled rich boy. The chapter titles are Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, and they metaphorically follow what happens to him in his first month or so as a mutant.
- The third Phase story has chapter titles based on the twelve labors of Hercules, with references to those labors scattered throughout.
- The sixth Phase story is "Ayla and the Grinch" which is an obvious Dr. Seuss reference for a Christmas story.
- The seventh Phase story has chapter titles which are all biblical angels, since the A plot involves shoulder angels. Yes, shoulder angels.
- The eighth Phase story has chapter titles from Spenser's "The Faerie Queene". Phase is that kind of person.
Wiktionary:
- In the entry for keikaku, the example sentence is... well, guess.
- The entry for ? (shin) also has a rather familiar example sentence.