Forever & Always
- Actor Shipping: People who love seeing Robert Manion and Mariah Rose Faith playing a couple finally got to officially see this in a Starkid show, albeit in a confusing, non-diegetic way, by having them play lovers in the Surreal Music Video for "Forever & Always".
- Adorkable: People hoping for this from Paul and Emma's marriage were not disappointed; their banter at the wedding and afterwards is exactly what people wanted from Paul's nerdy awkwardness and Emma's feisty Tsundereness, and remains endearing even as the plot keeps thickening with revelations about impostors and time travel.
- Author's Saving Throw: In the original broadcast, Paul 23 admits that, while Emma has in fact been Emma 2 since the day Paul met her, he in fact killed and replaced the real Paul when he'd already been dating Emma for three months. Emma 2 is visibly disturbed by this, but goes along with his hopes for continuing their marriage anyway. This snippet of dialogue is absent from the show's YouTube release, perhaps because the creators felt that particular bit of Black Comedy went a little too black; without that confession, their continued relationship comes across as much more consensual. For bonus points, it also brings back the Paranoia Fuel that other universe's Pauls might actually be Paul 23.
- Captain Obvious Reveal: YMMV on exactly how obvious it was, but a lot of people saw the Terminator Impersonator reveal coming, once it was clear that both Emmas are completely physically identical (requiring some kind of supernatural explanation) and Emma 2 was straight-up planning on murdering Emma 1 and perfectly confident in her ability to do so.
- Esoteric Happy Ending: An intentional one — Paul 23 and Robot Emma declaring their devotion to each other after everything that's happened would be heartwarming if it didn't come at the expense of the lives of Real Emma, Real Paul, at least a hundred bystanders, the Homeless Man — whom we soon find out is actually Ted and whose death consigns him to the unspeakable hell of the Bastard's Box — and God knows how many other people in the future.
- Fanfic Fuel: Paul 23's name indicates that there are 22 (or 21, depending on how they did the counting) other clones of Paul Matthews somewhere being used for nefarious purposes by CCRP.
- There's a surprising amount of this for fanfic writers who focus on Slice of Life interactions between the characters, like Emma's newfound interest in vegan cooking, Bill being Paul's acerbic and cynical yet supportive dispenser of marriage advice, or little details like Paul's over-the-top horror at the idea of any kind of roleplaying (even in bed) or Emma telling him to relax by playing "your videogame". (The fact that Paul is a gamer but only habitually plays one videogame has led to a lot of Wild Mass Guessing over what it is, with a lot of people guessing Animal Crossing: New Horizons, in part thanks to Jon Matteson streaming it a lot in Real Life.)
- Fan Nickname:
- The script simply calls the android "Emma 2" in the stage directions (and at one point "Robot Emma"), and she doesn't get a specific name in the actual dialogue. Fans tossed around several punny nicknames for her — "Femma", "Emmposter", "Emmabot", "Other Em", "Not-Emma" — with the most popular one to date being "Emdroid".
- Some fans also distinguish Emma 2 and Paul 23 from the real deal by calling them "Emma Matthews" and "Paul Perkins", derived from their joking that they'll be taking each other's names.
- Hilarious in Hindsight: For longtime Starkid fans, the fact that both of the lead actresses in Firebringer have now also played murderous gynoid killing machines who fall in love with seemingly unimpressive random human men, the first being Meredith Stepien's character Mega-Girl in ''Starship.
- The line in The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals' "What Do You Want, Paul?", where Mr. Davidson sings, "I hire you Pauls to keep our stock high!", originally came off as Mr. Davidson just describing generic office workers as "Pauls" in keeping with Paul being The Everyman — but comes off as way more sinister now that we know that CCRP is literally making an army of enslaved clones of Paul.
- Moral Event Horizon: If Emma 2 didn't cross this by trying to Kill and Replace the real Emma, she definitely crossed it when she murdered a bar full of witnesses.
- They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: There's a minority of fans who found their imaginations captivated by what kind of backstory the Homeless Man could have that let him accurately identify Emdroid as an impostor, and found the Downer Ending that he's just Ted from the future disappointing. (There's at least one major Fix Fic on AO3 that ignores "Time Bastard" to create a different backstory for "Forever and Always".)
- They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Emdroid and Paul 23 are, overall, very popular characters among the fanbase, but there's a hardcore minority of Paulkins OTP shippers who took the Bait-and-Switch of not seeing the real Paul and Emma's wedding pretty hard (especially the news that we haven't seen the real Paul in Nightmare Time at all).
- Unexpected Character: Jeff Blim attends Paul and Emma's wedding, not as Mr. Davidson or Sam (both of whom are revealed in "Time Bastard" to also be in attendance), but as the Man in a Hurry.
Time Bastard
- Actor Shipping: There was some hilarious irony in the casting with Ted reaching untold new heights of creepiness by hitting on Emma at her own wedding, and having her humiliate him by calling him on it publicly — when this is all happening in the same Zoom window because Joey Richter and Lauren Lopez are living together and engaged in Real Life. Fans were pretty delighted at being able to watch this interaction, followed by the interaction at the end where Emma brutally murders Ted with Lauren actually pretending to stab Joey in the back with a knife.
- Awesome Music: It hasn't gotten quite the same memetic prominence as "Got My Foot on the Gas"/"Jane's a Car", but "Time Bastard" has been widely praised for being one of Jeff Blim's most intricate compositions and one of his most successful Pastiches of another artist, being a tribute to Adele's Title Theme Tune of Skyfall the way "Jane's a Car" is a tribute to Classic Rock bands like The Eagles.
- Crack Pairing: The "Tedgens" ship got a burst of life from the scene of Hidgens and Ted Drowning My Sorrows together at the beginning of this story, despite the fact that they spend it talking about other people they wish they could be with. (At the very least, it's an opportunity to reveal that Hidgens is attracted both to female AIs and male humans.)
- Epileptic Trees: A particularly wild case involved Starkid fans plugging Tinky's full name into Google Translate to have it spit back out "Dark Peanuts", igniting a huge spate of Wild Mass Guessing that he has some kind of connection to Peanuts the Hatchetfield Pocket Squirrel, which is probably based on nothing. ("Dark Peanuts" is a "Blind Idiot" Translation based on Google Translate overfitting "T'noy Karaxis" to the actual Russian phrase "temny arachis", which any human looking at it can tell is wildly unlikely to have been what the Lang Brothers had in mind at any point in their creative process.)
- Harsher in Hindsight: Laughing at the Homeless Man's antics in the two stage shows was always Black Comedy since, you know, laughing at the homeless... but the reveal of his backstory, the painful witnessing of the moment he became the man Hatchetfield knows only as "the Homeless Man", makes seeing his antics funny upon a rewatch all but impossible.
- Hilarious in Hindsight: Jenny's Ford T-shirt could be Foreshadowing for the fact that Jane's ghost goes from possessing a Ford Mustang to Becky Barnes, played by the same actor, in "Jane's a Car".
- Jerkass Woobie: Ted was an Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist from the beginning, and the way this story breaks him edges him over into this category for sure. It takes him to new levels of Woobie-ness — with him uncontrollably bursting into tears when he sees Jenny again and starts dancing with her at their imaginary wedding — and Jerkass-ness — with his shockingly vicious and brutal No-Holds-Barred Beatdown on Andy. By the ending, though, with our realization that Ted has lived the relentlessly awful life of the Homeless Man for fifteen years — coupled with the Harsher in Hindsight aspect of all the Black Comedy he's been put through in previous shows — the Woobie-ness wins out by a mile.
- Moral Event Horizon: Ted's attack on Andy makes it clear he deserves whatever comeuppance he gets by the end of the story. It doesn't mean that we enjoy seeing it when it happens, though.
- Narm Charm: Andrew Kilgore's death cry sounding like a bland electronic tone after passing through the Machine Monotone filter is a probably-intentional example.
- Squick: Professor Hidgens' attraction to artificial intelligences returns despite, again, the closest thing to AI existing in his world being the likes of his Alexa and Siri. The fact that they sound like women is good enough for him, it seems. You know you've crossed a line when your sexual proclivitiess are squicking Ted out.
- Lest we give Ted too much credit for having standards, though, the narration goes out of its way to directly tell us that his office "stinks like old jism", to make it clear how much of an Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist and horny bastard the guy is.
- Ugly Cute: Even as a stuffed doll, Tinky is leaning heavily towards the "ugly" end of this trope.
Peanuts!
- Actor Shipping: Fans of Lauren and Joey's relationship did a lot of rejoicing over the fact that "Peanuts!" is the first duet the two of them have done onscreen together in over a decade (since their Signature Song "Granger Danger" in A Very Potter Musical in 2009). Hilariously, this song is also not a love duet, and is in fact once more just the two of them singing about their mutual devotion to a third party (in 2009 it was Hermione, played by Bonnie Gruesen, in 2020 it's... a squirrel).
- Awesome Music: When asked what her favorite Nightmare Time track was, Kim Whalen downplayed her own performance on "Time Bastard" in this episode and instead named "Peanuts!", which she said is incredibly catchy. Many fans agree.
- Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: Unlike "One Thousand Eyes" and "The Web I Spin For You", the end credits song of this episode does not tie directly into the second story of the double feature, instead being "Peanuts!", a song about Hatchetfield Running Gag Peanuts the Hatchetfield Pocket Squirrel, which features the squirrel attaining sapience and (apparently?) trying to conquer the world.
- Epileptic Trees: This bit was tailor-made to generate these from the fanbase, especially given Nick Lang's ominous Word of God statement that "Everything is canon". There's a lot of heated debate over whether this mini-story constitutes a Retcon of previous Word of God that Peanuts was nothing but an ordinary squirrel, or whether conversely those statements are a hint that Dan and Donna's POV in this story is not to be trusted.
- Suspiciously Similar Song: "Peanuts!" has a lot of Jeff Blim's recognizable Creator Thumbprints when writing a jazzy, up-tempo Patter Song, sounding almost like a reprise of "La Dee Dah Dah Day" from The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals.
- Unexpected Character: After we were blessed with the Man in a Hurry's unexpected presence at the wedding at the top of the show, he shows up again doing the Vox Pops in this newscast, in the hilariously incongruous role of being an Only Sane Man next to Dan and Donna (possibly because he's impatient with having been buttonholed for an interview).
- Peanuts himself making an appearance wasn't that unexpected since he'd already done it once before at the end of Black Friday, but having an entire song to himself took the fandom by surprise.
