Adorkable: Quirrell enjoys sipping tea by the fire and isn't very good at concealing the fact that he's got Voldemort under his turban.
Actor Shipping: Ironically, while Ron and Draco are two of the only characters to not have Ho Yay in the musical itself, and while the song as written is a Counterpoint Duet but absolutely not a love song between the two singers, fans have detected a great deal of subtext in performances of "Granger Danger" by Joey Richter and Lauren Lopez since the original performance. In a hilariously Gender BendingPair the Suitors situation, the 2017 Leakycon performance even ended in a kiss. Became justified when Richter and Lopez announced their engagement in 2020, though it's unclear when they actually started dating.
The SPACE Tour version of the song, unlike the staging in the original musical, portrays Joey and Lauren as friends commiserating over their unrequited crush (which they may or may not realize is on the same girl). It ends with them running off together to cry in the choir room.
Alternative Character Interpretation: Just about every character is played differently from the original series, which is of course done for laughs (and used brilliantly).
Harry and Ron are now jerks and Harry has a huge ego. But they learn.
Angst? What Angst?: An awesome moment from Ron and Hermione. Their best friend has walked off to turn himself in and die. They know as a result the last hope of the wizarding world is gone. What does Ron do? He takes Harry's place as leader, rallying all the students to barricade the doors, prepare for battle, and get some snacks. Why? Because it's what Harry would do.
Awesome Ego: Unlike his canon counterpart, Harry Potter is definitely not a Humble Hero.
Harry: I'm Harry Freakin' Potter and I'm the man!
Continuity Lock-Out: If you haven't read the Potter books, you'll understand about half the plot and almost none of the jokes.
At first it seems to be Nightmare Fuel with the graveyard, as Harry briefly drops his rivalry with Cedric to say they need out of there, only for it to resurge when Cedric asks where his sense of adventure is. Just as they fight, Quirrell kills Cedric and incapacitates Harry, allowing Voldemort to rise. Then...Voldemort does a tap dance number with his feet. He also makes Harry participate via the Imperius Curse.
"So you're Thomas Jefferson, and I'm your Sally Hemings, is that right?"
Ron and Hermione's kiss.
Snape's death scene. Being bitten by a coral snake? Eh, not funny. Being bitten on the wiener by a coral snake? High-freakin'-larious.
Quirrell's introduction: "GO HOME, TERRORIST!"
By the time the third musical rolls around, and Voldemort/Tom Riddle is telling his grandpa he needs to wipe shit off his penis, you might do a Double Take about what rabbit hole you fell down and how you got here. Mood Whiplash? Probably the crowning moment of it the entire series.
Who expected Goyle and Quirrell to be two of the best characters?
Draco Malfoy was always intended as a major character, but Lauren Lopez's performance is unarguably one of the major reasons the YouTube recording went viral and kicked off the whole Team Starkid phenomenon. The whole rest of the cast — and even Tom Felton — agree.
Fanon: According to YouTube comments, Rumbleroar is Aslan's brother. Makes sense. They're both supernatural talking lions who, apparently, reign over their continuities' afterlife.
Fan-Preferred Couple: An invoked case as the show still uses the Official Couple from Harry Potter of Ron/Hermione, yet plays out with the creators' own preferred couple of Draco/Hermione, which as a result has expanded even more.
Funny Moments: Has its own page. Basically, any scene that has at least two or more characters interacting with each other.
Pottermore spoiler: Quirrell apparently used to press wild flowers.
Also, in a limbo-like place, after he dies, Harry asking how Lost ends.
The "Hermione is ugly"Running Gag is this, given that her actor in the films, Emma Watson, is considered one of the prettiest women in Hollywood. (Though she wasn't exactly considered to be ugly when the play was made, either.)
Harry wanting to take Cho Chang to Winnipeg is this since somebody discovered that the city has a "James Avenue" intersecting with a "Lily Street," in China Town no less.
The idea of a House Cup Tournament with champions like the Triwizard Tournament became funnier in 2021 with the real-life Tournament of Houses game show, featuring teams of champions representing each Hogwarts House.
Voldemort and Quirrell. So, so much. Given the style of the show, it's very blatant and clearly deliberate. As of the 3rd show, it's literally canon: They have a child together.
Dumbledore and Snape. Quite a bit, actually. Dumbledore calls Snape "one of the kindest, bravest, gentlest, sexiest men I have ever known!"
Harry:Why do you trust Snape so much?! Dumbledore: Because I love him!
Neville greeting Harry and Ron with the line, "How are you fine, strapping young gentlemen?"
Harry describing Dumbledore as "the most beautiful wizard".
Draco and Goyle have quite a few close moments as well.
Snape smacks Harry on the behind before he does the first task.
Snape: "Is that a new body, my lord? You look absolutely ravishing."
Love to Hate: Voldemort is still an evil, racist murderer, but his absolutely hilarious portrayal causes him to steal the show.
Memetic Molester: Senior Year says that Slughorn was arrested for collecting young boys, Slytherin built the Chamber of Secrets in a girls' bathroom so he could watch them pee and Filch is arrested for interfering with Hermione while she was paralyzed.
Molly Weasley shows up just to do her scene with a Jewishaccent.
RUMMMBLEROAR!
One True Pairing: This whole musical exists because the writers were Draco/Hermione shippers, leading to Darren Criss writing "Granger Danger", which became the seed for the idea of doing a full musical. Ironically, in the actual musicals Draco's hopeless crush on Hermione is mostly played for Black Comedy.
An ironic And You Thought It Would Fail example. Most of the theatre kids at UMich reacted to Matt and Nick Lang's final announcement of the casting for A Very Potter Musical as literally "the worst possible choices"; the Langs describe being mocked and criticized for it all the way up till the show's premiere. The two choices that got the biggest "What the hell?" were... Darren Criss as Harry Potter and Lauren Lopez as Draco Malfoy. Needless to say, the YouTube audience finds these to be the most irreplaceable members of the cast, to the point of Lauren as Draco being the Breakout Character of the whole Starkid franchise.
The original favorite among the theatre crowd for Harry was Brian Rosenthal, since canon!Harry is The Woobie and Brian excels in that role. Harry instead being a tall, handsome, muscular Jerk Jock with an Awesome Ego was a majorAlternative Character Interpretation that set the comedic tone for the whole show. (Which adds to the hilarity of making Professor Quirrell, of all people, be The Woobie in the first show, and Brian going on to play Harry's dad — who in canon was much more similar to Darren Criss' portrayal of Harry as a self-absorbed fratboy — in A Very Potter Sequel.)
Lauren Lopez was widely favored for the role of Hermione; Lauren now describes losing that role to Bonnie Gruesen as having "dodged a bullet". Turning Draco Malfoy into a Cross-Cast Role was an impulsive Throw It In! decision because they really wanted her in the cast and didn't know where else to put her — which she successfully turned into the funniest part of the show. (At the A Very Starkid Reunion show in 2015 Lauren's entrance as Draco got longer and louder applause than Darren's initial entrance as Harry.) Bonnie even lampshades that Breakout Character Draco is more popular than her starring role of Hermione in the official Behind the Scenes video.
History Repeats: Something very similar happened with the role of Sami Reese in Little White Lie going from a male in the initial planning to female with casting Lauren in mind — only for it not to work out, and Lauren to instead create the Breakout Character of Tanya Freemont.
In a lesser example of this, Britney Coleman and Tyler Brunsman were considered the two most accomplished musical theatre performers in the cast, and the two of them slumming it in this joke production in minor roles was basically Stunt Casting. The creators were very aware of this in Tyler's case, giving him a One-Scene Wonder solo in the opening number and then conspicuously "wasting" him for the rest of the show as a goofy comic relief character, to the point of having him lie motionless as a corpse for a hilariously long time after Voldemort kills him while everyone else has a big song and dance number. (And then bringing him back as Fudge in Act 2 only to kill him again and keep him onstage through an even longer and moreincongruous musical number.)
For those who weren't one of the three people who saw Darren Criss on Eastwick before A Very Potter Musical. This started happening a lot more to him once he starts appearing on Glee.
These days the biggest retroactive recognition reactions are seeing Devin Lytle from Ladylike as Cho Chang.
The Scrappy: Bellatrix, if the Youtube comments are to be believed. Most people claim the reason that she is so disliked is because almost all of the Alternative Character Interpretation is done fantastically but in her case they just made a really cool character annoying. And not to mention that with Voldemort only Affably Evil, she is actually the true villain of the story. There's also some Die for Our Ship to blame.
What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: Even less for kids than the later installments of the original series. Once they put it on the Internet and opened it up for all ages, they cut out some of the dirtier portions.
Draco × Luna, who in the main series never even spoke to each other.
Lupin × Cho is also teased — again, never even spoke to one another in the main series (at least not that we know of; he must've taught her class, though). Note that this is first-year Cho, who's supposed to be eleven years old.
Not to mention Umbridge and Dumbledore. Or Umbridge and Firenze.
There's even a few references to Snape × Grubbly-Plank, which is so crack filled that more than a few casual Harry Potter fans probably had to do a quick google search to remind themselves who Grubbly-Plank even is.
Creator's Pet: According to Nick Lang, Matt Lang has an odd fixation on the character of Seamus Finnegan and made sure he would be in this musical after he was cut from the first one. Nick claims at least three scenes featuring Seamus monologues were cut from this show for time.
Stomping Scabbers to death after they realize he's Peter Pettigrew, only for it to turn out that Pettigrew was actually hidden in the Taylor Lautner poster.
Any of Draco's monologues about using the potty. They go from amusing to disturbingly awkward to freakin' hilarious.
When Dumbledore rejects Umbridge and she can't stop crying it's a genuinely sad moment. Then Dumbledore assumes she's laughing, starts talking about how funny the story is, and even high fives Snape while she's still sobbing in the foreground. It is hilarious.
"Harry Freaking Potter" gleefully parodies the Crowd Song chorus:
Harry: But this is all so sad, I mean my mom and dad died long ago... Chorus:[cheerfully] Long ago they died!
The entire Mama Umbridge scene. On the one hand, Umbridge hallucinating about her abusive mother, prompting her to want to kill Harry Potter is pretty disturbing. On the other hand, said mother is played by Nick Lang and speaks in a ridiculously strong Southern accent.
Draco's reaction to Dobby being his father:
Draco: Oh, Dobby! Now I lament all those times I beat him senseless within an inch of his life, and then, oh right, yeah, that one time when I drowned a litter of his young, my... brothers?
The Scarf of Sexual Preference. It was a one-off joke in AVPM, but he's awesome in the sequel. "Metrosexual!" indeed.
Jim Povolo (who plays Goyle, Firenze and random Death Eaters) get a big laugh from the audience whenever he says anything. "Is that crosshatching I detect?"
If YouTube comments are anything to go by, Brian Rosenthal (Quirrel in AVPM) has quite a lot of fangirls (and fanboys) thanks to his Cockney "Irish" accent.
Nick Lang plays a handful of one-off characters (Arthur Weasley, Sorty, Scarfy, Peter Pettigrew, and Umbridge's mother) and nearly steals the show in almost every appearance.
Harsher in Hindsight: Portraying Umbridge with an obvious male actor is incredibly awkward after J.K. Rowling's openly transphobic public statements starting in 2019.
Yaxley as a snivelling coward is made really funny by Peter Mullan's badass take on the character in the first Deathly Hallows film.
Future Malfoy claims that he is very nice and is friends with Harry Potter in the future. By AVPSY, he is nice, and by the end, he does become friends with Harry.
Lucius starts off the play with a line about how there's "literally no way" to continue the storyline, poking fun at how AVPM drew so much of its plot from the final Harry Potter book that StarKids would be forever screwed over in any attempt to produce a sequel (thus making a prequel the only logical choice). Fast forward a few years, and we now have the story of Harry Freaking Potter's senior year.
Lucius's declaration that "There is literally no way to move forward from this point!" is surprisingly prophetic in light of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and its time travel plot.
The parallels to Cursed Child continue when the final twist is that the character who gives the Trio access to a Time-Turner themselves is... Draco Malfoy. (Who is, indeed, really nice in the future.)
The scene in which Lucius reveals that he is not Draco's father is meant to parallel a somewhat-climactic scene from Avatar: The Last Airbender between Zuko and his father Ozai. Then we learn that Ozai might not be Zuko's father, either.
Even funnier considering Voldemort said Ozai's speech from the last episode of Avatar word for word in A Very Potter Musicalnote "You're weak, just like the rest of your people ("just like your parents" in Voldemort's case)! They did not deserve to exist in this world — in my world! Prepare to join them. Prepare to die!"
More accurately disturbing in hindsight, but wizards canonically didn't borrow plumbing from the Muggles until the 18th century. Before then, they would relieve themselves wherever they stood and magically whisk away the evidence. So Draco and Luna claiming all the best wizards use diapers wasn't entirely wrong.
The joke about Dobby being Draco's real father suddenly became a lot more plausible in canon after Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, which introduces a half-elf character.
Harry and Ron are closer than usual, having been sorted as "Metrosexual" and "Bi-curious". They even give each other a kiss on the cheek.
Ron: Want to hold hands? Harry: I'd love that!
For a song about Snape's love for Lily, Lucius and Snape are really rather close during "Guys Like Potter".
Some slight Remus/Sirius ("It feels so good to hug and kiss you again", which is a very popular slash pairing from the original books. Slight?! There's that very obvious kiss.
Harry: I'm not afraid of you! You're a teacher, you can't hurt me. [scoffs] Do your worst. Umbridge:[turns around slowly] Oh, I will. [CRACK] See you in hell, Harry Potter.
Oh, and don't forget her finger. It bends to an unnatural degree, and it STAYS THAT WAY for the rest of the scene. Unless Joe Walker has double-jointed fingers, that crack probably wasn't his knuckles.
"Guys Like Potter" manages to be incredibly sad despite the use of the word "pwned" and lines like "so many assholes in my face."
Sirius and Harry both seeing James and Lily in the Mirror of Erised.
And, at the end of that scene, Snape turning back for a couple of seconds and seeing Lily on her own before the lights fade.
At the beginning of "Those Voices", right when Harry sings "I know you..." That by itself is enough to turn on the waterworks, but immediately after that you can just barely hear a hushed gasp from someone in the audience, which makes the moment even more effective.
Theme Pairing: Fans have theorized that Lockhart wants to impress Rita Skeeter because they both have a bone to pick with the Power Trio.
Lavender Brown cries when she's scared, so she might qualify.
Draco, who just wants his dad to be proud of him and to use the potty. It doesn't help that Lauren Lopez has some of the saddest puppy-eyes this side of anime.
Cho Chang has a moment of this when she's afraid of what will happen to her with the abstinence rules in place.
Especially Brittany Coleman during "When You Have to Go All the Way Home". The official subtitles even read "[Amazing riffing by Bellatrix]" during her part.
The Triumphant Reprise of "Back To Hogwarts" is made of this. As is the Epilogue version.
In a flashback, Dumbledore says to Riddle "Well, Tom... sometimes... sometimes you accidentally kill your family" to cheer him up, referring to Arianna. You can hear the audience go "Hahahaha-ooooohhhhh".
Whatever Filch got up to with a petrified Hermione.
Hilarious in Hindsight: When Senior Year was launched, it was not too long after the release of the final film. Many fans thought this was the last major Harry Potter related thing they were going to see for a while (something AVPSY was lampshading, thinking the same thing) and treated the play not only as a final send-off to the AVPM trilogy, but to the Harry Potter franchise as a whole. Of course, this ended up being far from the truth, thanks to the announcement of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (and sequels) in September 2013, followed by so much more, including the copious amounts of information J.K. Rowling released about the Wizarding World in general, the expansion of theme park, the update of Pottermore, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery, and even newer fan work, like Puffs the Play and the work of Broad Strokes Productions.
Rumbleroar returns for one scene. For some reason, it wasn't shown in the Youtube release.
Also, Tom Riddle's family.
Lily, James, Cedric, Lupin, Sirius, and Snape all show up to sing "Everything Ends" in the Resurrection Stone scene.
Bill, Fleur, Percy, George, the Ghost of Fred, and Mrs. and Mr. Weasley all appear just in the beginning of the show at the Burrow.
Fenrir Grayback and Mad-Eye Moody/Barty Crouch, Jr., appear just in The Teaser.
Special Effect Failure: Darren Criss' microphone malfunctioned and didn't record anything, so all his lines are heard with the camera's on-board mic, resulting in a very distracting shift in audio quality whenever Harry speaks.
who was jailed after setting a woman on fire for eating a bacon sandwitch. It was meant to be a joke, but many people took it completely seriously.
