Web Animation / Sufferhymn

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Sufferhymn is a YouTube Machinima series based on Final Fantasy XIV. The series first began airing in 2022.

The series follows the day-to-day lives of two Viera brothers — Lyon, a black-haired Viera with an iconic red shirt, and Hayate, a white-haired Viera who is an anime-loving ninja. The two brothers and a group of their friends go on raids, try to get laid, and generally have a fun time in Eorzea. However, they're on a quarantined Oceania server, where their antics are by-and-large not up to speed with the rest of Eorzea. Plus, there's visitors from a European server who keep trying to make trouble for them.

His channel can be found here.

Sufferhymn provides examples of:

• Adaptational Jerkass: Zigzagged. Clive Rosfield from Final Fantasy XVI is represented here as Clive "The Boss" Rosfield, who did all the things his game counterpart did, but he's considerably more smug and insufferable about it. Clive insists on telling Meteor how he defeated his game's Final Boss repeatedly, introduces himself by asking where the guild for "Best Final Fantasy Protagonist" is, and calls himself the most handsome man in all of Eorzea. That being said, Clive was a rather rude and curt Anti-Hero in his own game, and he even gives Lyon the iconic red shirt that would become a part of Lyon's look before Clive leaves Eorzea, so he's still a good guy, just much more smug.
• Adaptational Nice Guy: Zenos is portrayed as nicer than his XIV counterpart, portrayed as mellowed out with everyone else. Zenos even gives Lyon a You Are Better Than You Think You Are pep talk at the end of "The Sigma Protocol (Ultimate)", telling Lyon not to get himself down over not finding a girlfriend. That being said, it's also shown that this version of Zenos sells NFTs, still intends to kill the Warrior of Light, and lords over Fandaniel. So he's only a little bit nicer.
• All Just a Dream: Thoroughout most of the "We're All Gonna Make it" episode, Lyon appears to bribe some Hrothgar bodybuilders to take Lyon under their wing and train him. Lyon gets big muscles and starts attracting the attention of the ladies. But the ending reveals that it was all just a hallucination that Lyon had after getting thrown out of a bar in Costa Del Sol. Once Lyon realizes this fact, he's quite despondent.
• Alternate Universe: The quarantined Oceania server is where the majority of the show takes place, with Deranged Animation and/or Limited Animation on everyone with a general focus on comedy. There's also a European server, which features fluid animation and with counterparts to every character being treated much more seriously and darkly than the quarantined Oceania server. It's shown that characters from the European server can end up stuck on the Oceania server, but can't get back.
• Ambiguous Situation: Are these all characters in a video game, or are they just avatars of real people? There's plenty of Leaning on the Fourth Wall, but it's rarely outright broken, and several characters don't seem to recognize they're in a game. Either way, it doesn't get explained.
• Anti-Climax Cut: In "Merciless Miqo'te Maidens", Nihilyon is convinced to go to a party at Costa Del Sol with the promise of meeting cute Miqo'te girls who would be all over him. There's even a Fanservice montage of Miqo'te girls in skimpy outfits shaking their boobs and butts at the camera set to trap music to emphasize how much of a party it's going to be. But after a few seconds, the music and montage suddenly stops to reveal that the party is separated by gender, meaning that Nihilyon isn't going to meet any girls this way.
• As Himself: Played with. A few Final Fantasy voice actors — Luke Allen Gale, Peter Bramhill, and Ben Starr — reprise their roles as Zenos, Thancred, and Clive Rosfield, while also plugging their Cameo pages, including video clips of the actor saying the line that his character is saying. Also, Y'shtola and Urianger are voiced by Robyn Addison and Timothy Watson respectively, but their lines are done with AI-generated text-to-speech of their voices.invoked
• Bathos: The series jumps between anime-style action sequences and the Deranged Animation that machinima is typically known for at the drop of a hat.
  • At one moment in "Merciless Miqo'te Maidens", Cinder is giving an internal monologue about how she's going to kill Nihilyon, complete with flashy video effects that make her out to be a genuine threat. The next moment, she's giving a Curb-Stomp Battle to three male Au Ra characters with cartoony, over-the-top punching sound effects with Limited Animation to emphasize the comedy.
  • The episode "Endwaltzer" has a genuine battle between Nihilyon/Shadowcleaver and Cindergard, in which Cinder apparently cuts off Nihil's head and kills him. There's a brief moment of silence to heighten the impact, and then the mood instantly snaps to comedy when Cindergard compliments herself and how she should write an autobiography that will sell a billion copies.
• Batman Gambit: In "Many Men Online Repeatedly Pestering Girls", Uwulyon wants the weapon from a raid tier — specifically, the Abyssos Guillotine greatsword from Abyssos: The Eighth Circle (Savage). To this end, Uwulyon finds an ad for a party doing that raid with the leader being a tank who wants to be "respected" at all times. Uwulyon invokes the Shrinking Violet trope by calling the leader talented and handsome (almost throwing up as she does), then lying that she was kicked out of her last group because she "didn't deserve" the weapon. The play to the raid leader's ego works perfectly, as the next shot shows Uwulyon walking away with the Abyssos Guillotine strapped to her back.
• Big Brother Instinct: Hayate and Lyon get on each other's nerves a lot, especially with how Hayate's anime obsession and need to be babysat whenever he gets depressed sometimes causing Lyon no end of trouble. However, the two look out for each other as much as they can, with Hayate killing people who were bothering Lyon in one episode, as well as Lyon stopping Hayate from killing himself in another.
• Big "NO!": Omega-M gives one in "The Sigma Protocol (Ultimate)" after Nihilyon kills Omega-F. It prompts Omega-M to actually putting in effort in the fight.
• Blah, Blah, Blah: A few Miqo'te characters, when talking in the background, have their dialogue replaced with "meow meow meow" and/or "blah blah blah" instead of actual words.
• Casual Kink: Sofia is a sex worker at the Den of Dreams, which she enjoys because it means that anyone with a masochism kink will let her torture them for money. She's even shown on a TV commercial advertising the Den of Dreams being a good place to get cock-and-ball torture. However, none of the other characters make a big deal about Sofia being a sex worker. Instead, they come down on her for her abrasive and antagonistic personality.
• Caught Monologuing: Cindergard engages in Evil Gloating quite a bit, but it rarely makes her come off as intimidating; most of the time, people just ignore her monologues. Most of the Oceanians only hear a dog barking or growling whenever she talks, and the few people that can understand Cinder rarely listen to her in the first place. It fits Cinder's characterization as someone who is trying way too hard to be cool.
• Chuunibyou:
  • Part of the comedy with Cindergard is that Cinder is oblivious to the goings-on of the cast members around her, and that she's an edgelord fan character played straight. She has a Red Baron nickname in "The Hellhound", is with a group called "The Hellglaives", invokes the flames of the seven hells, wears black clothes, and generally talks dramatically at all times. However, this is generally played for the sake of making Cinder look silly, since the other characters in the Oceania server generally treat Cinder as a nuisance or think she's outright weird. Sofia is the one character who doesn't think Cinder is a weirdo, and even then, Sofia is more going along with Cinder because Sofia is attracted to Cinder rather than impressed by her battle prowess.
  • Nihilyon also gets this at first, but gradually adapts to the weirdness around him and embraces it a lot more often. That being said, he still ends up as the butt of jokes which rely on him playing some things totally straight, such as chanting "Mirror, mirror, on the wall, please torture my cock and balls!" at a glamour dresser because Lyon and Hayate told Nihilyon that it would make him change clothes.
  • In "Many Men Online Repeatedly Pestering Girls", Uwulyon is subjected to harassment from multiple different men. Despite proclaiming themselves as great warriors, they get taken out easily when Uwulyon is rescued, they all have very immature ideas of what they think is cool such as all wearing fedoras and trench coats with samurai swords, and they're also completely incompetent as criminals. One of the gang in a text chain also does things like trying to pretend to be a respectful samurai, while also saying that Uwulyon is his future wife because she "owes him" affection. The whole time, the gang is treated as completely immature and a bunch of incompetent sexist idiots.
• Comically Missing the Point: Part of "Endwaltzer" has Insomnia chastising Nihilyon for getting slow and complacent ever since he came to the Oceania server, saying that he's becoming "a fat meatball made of CostCo hot dogs" instead of keeping up with his training. Nihilyon emphatically interjects, saying that the hot dog deal also comes with a drink.
• The Comically Serious:
  • Nihilyon tries to ignore the wacky goings-on around him, playing it all with a straight face. At one point, he's told by Hayate and Lyon that the secret to finding a good outfit to wear on a date is to stand in front of a glamour dresser and say "Mirror, mirror, on the wall, please torture my cock and balls!" in a progressively louder voice.
  • Cindergard wonders why an innkeep offered her a free "wee-fee" (read: wi-fi), and she takes it as an insult that she's not strong enough to get her own. Also, when she draws Nihilyon to try and find him, the drawing is incredibly bad, but Cinder thinks the drawing is great because she was told by the other Hellglaives that she's severely "artistic" (read: "autistic").
• Country Matters: After Sofia insults Mizuki's appearance, such as saying that Mizuki has a gigantic crinkly forehead and that she needs a hairstylist to cover it, Mizuki sarcastically thanks Sofia for the advice, then calls her a "massive cunt" with a Slasher Smile.
• Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: Hayate can frequently be strange and bizarre, as he's completely obsessed with anime shows and his battle logs, to the point of nearly being Driven to Suicide when his logs are temporarily deleted. But he's one of the most powerful people in the server. For one, he defeated Omega-M in The Omega Protocol (Ultimate) with just a single move, and also sends Cindergard flying away with the same move when Lyon is in danger. Hayate is also able to stop time when he does the things he does. It's never explained how he's this good; he just is.
• Curb-Stomp Battle:
  • Cinder takes on three male Au Ra sunbathers when she tries to attack Nihilyon. Not only does the beatdown go for so long that the time transtitions from mid-afternoon to sundown, but the three Au Ras are all left in battered, broken heaps after Cinder is done, while she herself never takes a single hit.
  • Upon learning that Omega-M deleted his logs on FF-Logs, Hayate one-shots Omega-M with an anime move. He later sends Cindergard flying with the same move.
• Deranged Animation: As is typical of machinima comedy, characters frequently go Off-Model for the sake of a joke. Eyes will pop out of their sockets or otherwise stretch way beyond the skull's eye sockets, mouths will open and twist far beyond jawlines, limbs and digits will twist into positions that would be excruciatingly painful if they really happened, and bodies will generally twist and turn in ways they're not supposed to. However, none of the characters react as if they're having pain to any of this, instead carrying on like nothing happened. At one point, a Miqo'te girl flips the double bird at Sofia, despite her body being twisted into a pretzel on the ground, with both of the offending Miqo'te girl's arms twisted into knots in order to flip off Sofia. The whole time, the girl looks more angry with Sofia than anything else.
• Didn't Think This Through: "The Cursed Timeline where Yoshida adds Voice Chat" has voice chat removed from XIV after only two hours because of how badly it gets abused by everyone. The final clip is Naoki Yoshida leaning his head back, looking upset.
• Disproportionate Retribution
  • Hayate tries to kill himself because Omega-M got Hayate banned from FF-Logs. This ends up being treated like an actual suicide attempt despite being played for comedy.
  • Cindergard says that Sofia owes her a debt that Sofia will never be able to repay, but Cinder ultimately decides to make Sofia her retainer in Hellglaive for the rest of Sofia's life as a way to repay the debt that she now owes. This debt is because Cinder's strawberry milkshake was taken away after Sofia distracted Cinder, despite the fact that Cinder wasn't done with the milkshake yet.
• Dissimile: In "Many Men Online Repeatedly Pestering Girls", Lyon gets turned from a male Viera into a female Miqo'te. (No explanation why, he just does.) In an effort to try and cheer up Lyon, Hayate says that this is just like an isekai, a genre of anime where the protagonist is Trapped in Another World, except that it's the same world and all Lyon's friends are still here. In other words, nothing at all like an isekai.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: Early episodes tend to feature less of the Deranged Animation and Limited Animation that the series would later employ quite a bit. The first episode "This A Cooking Game, Man" features just Lyon and Hayate, but neither one speaks, and the animation is consistently fluid throughout, with the two just making emotes over background music. The early episodes are also about XIV in general rather than trying to tell a story. Among them is "Crystalline Conflict! A Test of your Reflexes!" which is a dead-serious tribute to the titular Player Versus Player mode, edited like a professional video meant to hype it up.
• Entitled to Have You: In "Many Men Online Repeatedly Pestering Girls", once Uwulyon starts a streaming career, she starts raking in a massive amount of gil from simps who want her to notice them. However, one of them sends her a text message string that comes off as really creepy, to which Uwulyon tells him to "fuck off" and leave her alone. The male player responds by insulting Uwulyon, then saying that she's a slut. It's a way for the narrative to paint this particular male player as a total loser.
• Even the Subtitler Is Stumped: In "The Life-Stream 2", an Au Ra woman calls out to a bald man reading the story of the Silver Samurai. However, the Au Ra woman is speaking so quietly that not only can the audience not hear the woman, but the subtitles on-screen don't give any sort of indication as to what she said.
  translator's note: ???
• Evil Doppelgänger: Zigzagged. The characters from the quarantined Oceania server all have counterparts on a European server. However, such characters are rarely outright evil; instead, they're more like hardcore roleplayers who remain in-character at all times.
  • Nihilyon is a member of the Hellglaives known as "Shadowcleaver" in the European server, and treated as a fierce warrior. But Nihilyon is actually quite patient, quiet, and down-to-earth, as well as being a Fish Out of Water when it comes to trying to get a date or pick up girls. Either way, the rest of the gang tolerates Nihilyon's presence, even if Lyon and Hayate pull pranks on him quite a bit.
  • Hayate's counterpart is also a Hellglaive, likewise known as "Shadowstalker" over there. He comes the closest to a proper evil counterpart, as Shadowstalker ambushes Cindergard while Cinder is in New Gridania searching for Nihilyon. Shadowstalker's assault is stated to be an attempt to kill Cindergard, for reasons he refuses to explain.
• Evil Gloating: Cindergard engages in this quite a bit, and it's shown that the European server she and Nihil are from don't consider this particularly unusual. But when Cinder tries monologuing in the Oceania server, it rarely works out the way she hopes it will. Most of the Oceanians only hear a dog barking or growling whenever she talks, and the few people that can understand Cinder rarely listen to her. At one point in the "Merciless Miqo'te Maidens" episode, Cindergard goes on a long rant about her intentions to kill Nihil, only to get distracted by beating up three Au Ra men. By the time Cinder is done, Cinder is quite shocked and upset to see that Nihil has just walked away after Cindergard was Caught Monologuing.
• First Law of Gender Bending: While Fantasia bottles seem to exist on the quarantined server, it isn't until Uwulyon learns of an etnire lake of the stuff in "Many Men Online Repeatedly Pestering Girls" that she has any prediliction in switching back to Lyon.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus:
  • Text messages are frequently used between characters to communicate with each other, which often go by too quickly to read on a straight viewing, requiring the viewer to pause the video or go back and read them in order to get more context.
  • In "The Life-Stream", after the Hilariously Abusive Childhood segment between Alphinaud and Forchenault, the scene transition shows Ameliance (Alphinaud's mother and Forchenault's wife) yelling at Forchenault with Alphinaud grabbing onto her for security, all while Forchenault looks proud of himself.
  • During the White Mage leveling montage that Sofia goes through in "Merciless Miqo'te Maidens", when the camera pans to the Vault from Heavensward, there is a blink-and-you'll-miss-it shot of Archbishop Thordan and his Knights Twelve dancing over the body of Haurchefant Greystone, an ally of the Warrior of Light in the Heavensward expansion who suffers a Character Death in the cutscene which follows the Vault. If you know anything about the MSQ of XIV, you know that this is owing to the fact that the Knights rendered the spoilered character Killed Off for Real.
  • The montage in "The Sigma Protocol (Ultimate)" features a few moments that can only be appreciated by pausing the video. One of them is Lyon flipping off a lamppost in Kugane with an Observation Point on top of it. This spot is notoriously hard to get, because you have to complete the Kugane Jumping Puzzle and then somehow jump onto this one spot perfectly. The next shot is a question as to why there are so many gay jokes in the series, to which Word of God replies that it annoys "projecting idiots" who comment about it.invoked
• Fun with Acronyms: The title of one episode uses MMORPG for its title, but takes it to mean "Many Men Online Repeatedly Pestering Girls", which is what the episode is named.
• Gravity Is a Harsh Mistress: When Nihilyon and Cinder each arrive in the quarantined Oceania server, it's way over Costa Del Sol, causing them to fall from the sky. Each time, neither one falls until they notice that they're hundreds of feet in the air, which only happens a few seconds after arriving.
• Ham and Deadpan Duo: Cindergard and Sofia fulfill this pairing in "Merciless Miqo'te Maidens" and "Endwaltzer". Cindergard is a grimdark "edgelord" character played completely straight, given a dark Red Baron title in "The Hellhound" and invoking the flames of the seven hells, complete with Ominous Latin Chanting in her music, and presented as a mysterious force to be reckoned with. Meanwhile, she's paired with Sofia, a courtesan at the Den of Dreams sex dungeon, who frequently makes jokes and insults people, is a White Mage who doesn't want to be one "because healing is for smooth brains", and has only a surface-level niceness that shows there isn't much more to her than that.
• Hilariously Abusive Childhood: In "The Life-Stream", Alhpinaud is taught how to swim by his father Forchenault throwing him into the ocean. Alphinaud barely makes it back to shore, whereupon Forchenault declares "Round two!" and throws him back in the water. This is all done with Limited Animation and exaggerated facial expressions, so that it's intended to be played for comedy.
• Iconic Item: Lyon's "iconic red shirt" is treated like one, always referred to as such and mentioned as an essential part of his character. The episode "Clive's Eikonic Adventure" shows that Clive Rosfield was the one who gave it to Lyon.
• Imagine Spot: In "Lyon Nemesis : 2.0 You Can (Not) Fantasia", when Nihilyon is sent to the quarantined Oceania server, he imagines himself gracefully falling through the air, hitting the docks of Costa Del Sol with a Three-Point Landing and the water splashing behind him, complete with rock music. When he actually lands, Nihilyon just painfully faceplants into the dock.
• Inconsistent Episode Lengths: The series is all over the place in terms of length for its episodes. The first episode — "This A Cooking Game, Man" — is only 58 seconds long. Meanwhile, the longest episode is "Merciless Miqo'te Maidens" at just over 43 minutes in length. The rest of the episodes can be anywhere from five to twenty minutes in length, although earlier episodes do tend to be shorter.
• Inexplicably Awesome:
  • Hayate is obsessed with anime shows and tropes, yet seems to exhibit all the power and poise of a stereotypical anime protagonist once he decides to actually try. Hayate not only sends Cindergard flying away with ease when she tries to attack Lyon, but Hayate also one-shots Omega-M in an Ultimate raid, which should be outright impossible. Either way, there's no explanation for how Hayate is capable of doing the things he does.
  • Insomnia can not only do just about anything in the name of helping Nihilyon — including instantly giving him the ability to talk to everyone else on the quarantined Oceania server when he otherwise couldn't communicate, and making a stripper he bought a date with fall hopelessly in love with him — but everything about her is intentionally left vague as to how Insomnia is able to do any of this.
• Intelligible Unintelligible: Played with. The audience can understand what characters from the European server are saying, but the characters from the quarantined Oceania server can't understand their European counterparts. However, the reverse isn't true, as the Europeans can understand the Oceanians just fine.
  • When characters from the European server speak to each other, it's through the medium of text boxes on the screen. When Nihilyon is brought to the quarantined Oceania server, he tries to talk to Lyon and Hayate, but neither of them can understand Nihilyon because they can't see his text boxes. Nihilyon is forced to communicate by writing until Insomnia is able to give Nihilyon the ability to talk.
  • Whenever Cindergard speaks, it's shown that all of her speech sounds like a German shepherd barking or growling to everyone else. At one point, Cinder tries to rent a room in Limsa Lominsa, but the innkeeper just says "What the fuck?" when she tries, because he can't understand her.
• Jerkass: Sofia loves torturing people at the Den of Dreams, feeling that they have it coming because they're perverts (despite the fact that Sofia, as an employee of the Den of Dreams, is a sex worker and therefore giving these perverts a place to go). Also, she demands that she be given a White Mage job stone from various people for no reason at all, constantly insults other peoples' looks, smacks people around with a Bitch Slap for the most mild of offenses, and refers to herself as "canonically the cutest, most adorable Miqo'te girl ever" despite having nothing to back that up. The episode "Merciless Miqo'te Maidens" also shows that Sofia lied on her job application that she was the best healer ever, but still thinks that she could be so anyway "because healing is for smooth-brains" and belittles anyone who mains a healer.
• Laughably Evil: Cindergard is the closest thing this series has to a villain, in that she keeps trying to kill Nihilyon and generally make trouble for everybody else in the name of accomplishing her mission. That being said, the series is also all too willing to made Cinder the butt of a joke. Cinder plays everything seriously despite the comedic elements and weirdness around her (such as sniffing Lyon and Hayate's seats in a restaurant to catch their scent), and is also portrayed as being a shameless edgelord who is way too uptight for her own good.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: Played with. It's unclear whether the characters are Player Character avatars, characters who know they're in a video game and that Eorzea is just the game's world, characters who think Eorzea is the real world, or some combination of all three. The characters frequently use fan-speak terms, such as referring to Asphodelos: The Fourth Circle (Savage) as "P4S", the raid's name in the hardcore raiding community. Also, FF-Logs — a third-party website used to track combat efficiency in raiding — is used as a plot point, as Omega-M deletes Hayate's logs from the website and bans him for the sake of being a Troll. Finally, big names in the XIV raid scene like Xenosys Vex are treated as badass warriors of incredible talent, as well as using memes from the XIV fandom. However, the characters all act as if the goings-on of the plot are happening to them and not human players, such as the risk of death when performing a raid being portrayed seriously, as well as Hayate trying to kill himself because he got banned from FF-Logs being treated like an actual suicide attempt despite being played for comedy. Also, nobody ever talks about logging out, real-world events, or things that would logically require them to have out-of-game knowledge in order to know. In spite of all of this, the fourth wall is never directly broken, nor do the characters speak of any life outside of Eorzea. Ultimately, when determining how strong the fourth wall is at any given moment, the series leans towards whatever would be funniest at the time.
• Limited Animation: Characters on the quarantined Oceania server tend to move in jerky, stop-motion-like movements as a way to emphasize the comedy, as well as only moving their mouths when they speak while the rest of their body is stock still. If the animation ever turns smooth and fluid, it's a sign that things are getting serious and/or dramatic.
• Makes Just as Much Sense in Context: Lyon is turned from a male Viera into a female Miqo'te named Uwulyon, because the female Viera instructor from the Starter Guide Series mentioned that a Player Character's race and gender can be changed. Why did that make Lyon change both race and gender? It's never explained, and Lyon as just as confused as to everyone else as to why it happened.
• Nice Guy: Meteor, the canonical Warrior of Light. While he's a bit of a goofball and is frequently oblivious to the goings-on around him, Meteor is unfailingly polite, kind, and generous with his time, never so much as raising his voice. When Urianger corrects Meteor about the fact that Meteor is pointing the wrong way towards the New World (as in, the setting of Dawntrail), Meteor thanks Urianger for correcting him. Also, Clive retells the story of how he beat the Final Boss of his game many times to the point Meteor gets sick of it, but lets Clive tell it again to keep him happy. And when Meteor leads a group into a raid against Hesperos, Meteor compliments the vampire, saying that his cape fluttering in the wind is "simply entrancing" to look at, then turns around and compliments Cinder's name immediately after.
• Oblivious to Love: Cindergard can't see that Sofia has a massive girl crush on her. At one point, Cinder says that she and Sofia have showered together, and also had a big sloppy kiss on the lips as a goodnight ritual, and yet Cinder still doesn't pick up on it.
• Occidental Otaku: Hayate not only fights as a Ninja whenever he goes on a raid, but he obsesses over anime at all times. He considers anime the greatest thing he's ever seen, to the point that when he considers killing himself over getting banned from FF-Logs, Mizuki puts on some anime, which distracts Hayate into complacency. He's also regularly shown using moves from anime, such as a domain expansion from Jujutsu Kaisen and summoning the Fox Devil from Chainsaw Man. Hayate even texts other people in Japanese, to the point that the one time Hayate sends text messages just in English, it's noted how serious things must be. However, the server that he and the main cast are in is based on Oceania, far to the south of Japan, and other characters also comment how Hayate's obsession with anime is unhealthy.
• OOC Is Serious Business: Hayate is such a weeb that he even texts people in Japanese, even if he also provides translations. This is despite the fact that everyone else on the server only speaks English. So when Hayate is texting Roadman Grim in "The Sigma Protocol (Ultimate)" with just English text, Roadman notes that Hayate "must be serious to not be messaging in Japanese" because Hayate is worried about his brother Lyon, who has gone missing after drinking way too much alcohol.
• Running Gag: Lyon doesn't just wear a red shirt, it's an "iconic red shirt" and referred to as such every time it's brought up.
• Second Law of Gender-Bending: In "Many Men Online Repeatedly Pestering Girls", Uwulyon initially texts Hayate to say that she misses being a dude, but the vast amounts of money she gets from the streams she does and the easy attention and/or perks she gets from being a girl have Uwulyon debate between changing back to male or staying female. She ultimately chooses to stay female. Then it turns into a Subverted Trope when Lei just shoves Uwulyon into the Fantasia lake anyways, and Uwulyon turns back into Lyon.
• Shout-Out:
  • The first sketch of "The Life-Steam 2" is the "Steamed Hams" short from The Simpsons Season 7 episode "22 Short Films About Springfield", albeit with Fandaniel taking the place of Principal Skinner and Zenos in place of Superintendent Chalmers.
  • "The Coolest and Most Exciting of House Showcases" features Lyon moving backwards into some foliage, a reference to Homer Simpson doing the same in an episode of The Simpsons.
  • One of the poses Hayate makes in "Merciless Miqo'te Maidens" looks like he's performing a domain expansion from Jujutsu Kaisen. That same episode also features Hayate making the same hand gesture that Aki Hayakawa uses to summon the Fox Devil from Chainsaw Man.
• Speaks in Shout-Outs: A few characters just use voice clips from other people.
  • Hayate is Filthy Frank, an American sketch comedy YouTuber.
  • Lyon is voiced by Maxmoefoe, an Australian YouTuber. This lasts even when he's gender-bent into Uwulyon.
  • A blue-haired male Lalafell is voiced by Danny-G, a British TikTok content creator known for his loud, unhinged rants.
  • The Au Ra male Jinn is voiced by Uncle Roger of The Uncle Roger Show, a middle-aged Asian uncle with an exaggerated Cantonese accent that bullies people for not properly cooking Asian food.
  • A blue-haired Viera is Tyler1, an American video game streamer known for being a Large Ham and Chewing the Scenery.
• Stalking Is Funny if It Is Female After Male: In the "Endwaltzer" episode, the male Cabal Gravebound is being stalked by the female Storm Intwain, to the point that Storm breaks into the set of "Eorzea's Finest" in-universe, attacks the other contestants, and sexually assaults Cabal off-camera. The whole time, this stalking and sexual assault is played for comedy.
• Stylistic Suck:
  • Omega-M's speech is always subtitled with leet-speak and misspellings. By contrast, Omega-F's subtitles are always parsed and capitalized correctly, complete with proper grammar.
  • "The Cursed Timeline where Yoshida adds Voice Chat" is intended as Sensory Abuse. Not only is everyone's mic quality downright awful, but certain raids (the the 24-man Crystal Tower raids) are impossible to hear anyone clearly because everyone is talking all at the same time.
  • Cinder's drawing of Nihilyon is very badly done, as it's way too wide and features stink lines to try and make him look bad, making the drawing come off as childish. All of this is on purpose to paint Cinder as The Comically Serious.
  • "This News Should Concern You" starts as an April Fools' Day joke. Not only does it feature an Unregistered Hypercam 2 graphic in the top corner, but the animations are all just emotes ripped straight from the game. However, the joke ends after about halfway through, and it becomes an ad for upcoming episodes instead.
• Sub-Par Supremacist: In "Many Men Online Repeatedly Pestering Girls", Uwulyon is subjected to harassment from multiple different men, all of whom are portrayed as losers. Despite proclaiming themselves as great warriors and insulting women, they're completely incompetent in battle to the point that they get taken out easily when Uwulyon is rescued, they all have very immature ideas of what they think is cool such as all wearing fedoras and trench coats with samurai swords, and they're also completely incompetent as criminals. At one point, a gang member criticizes another for using real names in a text message chain, only to call the first poster by his real name in order to tell him to stop doing it. The only fight they're shown winning is when they all gang up on Lyon in an attempt at blackmail, and even that gets resolved quickly once Nihilyon beats them all up with his bare hands. Finally, they're all treating Uwulyon like they're entitled to her affection because they donated money to her when she was streaming a Call of Duty game.
• Suicide as Comedy: At one point, Hayate wants to kill himself because he was banned from FF-Logs. Thankfully, Lyon stops him from doing it. The comedy comes from the fact that this is done with Limited Animation, as well as the fact that Hayate was going to kill himself because he got banned from a website.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
  • In "Lyon Nemesis : 2.0 You Can (Not) Fantasia", when Nihilyon is sent to the quarantined Oceania server, he imagines himself gracefully falling through the air, hitting the docks of Costa Del Sol with a Three-Point Landing and the water splashing behind him, complete with rock music. When he actually lands, Nihilyon just painfully faceplants into the dock, much to his shock and dismay because the Rule of Cool from the European server no longer applies to him.
  • "Merciless Miqo'te Maidens" sees Cinder beat up three male Au Ras because one of them said "hey babe" to her while she was trying to kill Nihilyon. Cinder's beatdown is a full-on Curb-Stomp Battle in her favor, but by the time she's done beating up the Au Ra men, Nihilyon has just walked away and left the beach, much to Cinder's surprise and frustration.
    Cinder: Typical. Now back to the target... (turns around to see Nihilyon is gone) Who is no longer here. Brilliant.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: In the episode "Lyon Nemesis : 2.0 You Can (Not) Fantasia", Uwulyon's posts on Instagram all repeatedly insist that she's totally a girl and not a Viera man who inexplicably got turned into a Miqo'te woman.
• Take That!:
  • Male Au Ras are typically treated as weaklings, as Cinder beats the crap out of three of them in "Merciless Miqo'te Maidens" for trying to hit on her.
  • "The Coolest and Most Exciting of House Showcases" shows an extremely cramped bare-bones room with the caption "Largest London Apartment" as a dig as British housing size.
  • ArtharsFF14, a XIV YouTuber, is frequently the subject of derision. At one point, Sofia shoots his avatar's head off with a rocket launcher, and a male Lalafell calls him a "little moppet" right afterwards. Also, a male Hyur with modeled after Arthars in appearance and using his voice shows up in the same banned zone that Hayate ends up in, which is implied to be because he wouldn't stop hitting on Miqo'te girls until one of them got fed up and reported him.
  • "FF14 - What Your Race Says About YOU" insults every race and gender except for Miqo'te women and Viera men, with whom Roy G. Biv lavishly praises as perfection. However, he makes no secret about the creator's hatred for the character of Wuk Lamat, a Base-Breaking Character from the Dawntrail expansion, by having Roy G. Biv insult Wuk Lamat when talking about female Hrothgar players.invoked
    Roy G. Biv: [Wuk Lamat] is a walking never-ending joke, a comedy with no punchline, and a ceaseless tragedy who needs to flatline. It is my firm belief that the only reason mods are still a thing is not because they are the sole coping mechanism for a sizable chunk of players barely clinging to their subscriptions. No, it is because when Yoshi-P returns home, exhausted from another long day of approving the worst decision he ever made, he logs onto his mod beast, [and] strides into the JP server club scene to live out his final fantasy. And this is his fursona that we are now canonically cursed to suffer. If you play a Hrothgar woman, then you probably worship this parasite as someone who shares her undiagnosed affliction, aka the crushing burden of needing to be the center of attention at all times. And if you can't force yourself into someone else's narrative, you'll orchestrate your own, scored to a rotating playlist of mental illnesses set to shuffle. Yes, I fucking hate Wuk Lamat. I'm not going to pretend she was well-written in any way, shape, or form. So suck my balls.
• Third Law of Gender-Bending: In "Many Men Online Repeatedly Pestering Girls", Uwulyon is repeatedly hit on by a stereotypical "neckbeard" player, which she outright tells him is creepy, yet he texts that Uwulyon owes him for giving her money. However, Uwulyon also exploits how easy it is to get men to do what she wants by convincing a raid leader to let her have the raid weapon by calling him handsome and talented while acting like a Shrinking Violet, even if she has to turn away to avoid puking after she flirts with the raid leader.
• Toilet Humor: In "Merciless Miqo'te Maidens", Sofia says that she needs to pee so badly that the stream of piss will cause a Rejoining.
• Verbal Tic: Meteor has a habit of taking in very large, very long breaths when he talks. His speech is also usually peppered with awkward, inappropriate pauses.
• Virtual-Reality Warper: God, aka Naoki Yoshida, has the power to ban people at will for anything he deems fit. Most of the time, he's shown to use this power at least somewhat responsibly, such as banning people for harassing women or for announcing to everyone that they're going to go masturbate, which God's assistant makes a server-wide announcement about, telling people that nobody needs to hear that. Hayate eventually gets banned, but it's for interrupting God's dinner and insulting him, sending Hayate to the Brume with no way out. However, God does eventually let Hayate out after he feels that Hayate has learned his lesson.
• What If God Was One of Us?: God is another player on the Oceania server, dressed in Casting gear and using the same appearance as Naoki Yoshida's avatar uses whenever he communicates to XIV players in-game.
• What's a Henway?: Thancred does this as a Running Gag with him.
  • Thancred gives a whole speech to Ran'jit about falling into a trap, as Thancred asks if Ran'jit knew Joe. When Ran'jit answered "Who's Joe?" to that, Thancred responds with "Joe Mama".
  • In "Clive's Eikonic Adventure", Thancred offers Clive a cup of hava. When Clive asks what hava is, Thancred responds "have a nice day". Thancred really thinks it's funny, as he says he's on a roll right after that.
• You Are Better Than You Think You Are: Zenos gives Lyon a pep talk at the end of "The Sigma Protocol (Ultimate)", saying that Lyon shouldn't be so concerned with getting a girlfriend because he already has friends and family who love and care for him. And if Lyon wants to find a girlfriend, he should stop looking for one, and the right girl will come along eventually while he just enjoys his life.

Nihilyon: Anyway, back to my inner monologue.