Web Animation / The Stickworld

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The Stickworld is a Stick Figure Animation series started by Zeruel82Mk2 on November 7, 2013. Of course, before the series was called this, it began with a smaller line of FlipaClip videos called The Cliff, in which random stick figures would try to jump across a cliff while killing anyone who got in each other's way. This bloodbath eventually leads to something powerful being summoned and needing to be dealt with before it causes too much destruction.

Not including the content for first five episodes of The Cliff, there are 4 seasons of the Stickworld:

• Season 1 has episodes 1-16 with The Cliff 6 as the finale.
• Season 2 has episodes 17-24 with The Cliff 7 as the finale.
• Season 3 has episodes 25-50.
• Season 4 is currently ongoing.

Set in the same universe is an Obstacle Course series in which a group of Stick figures with varying powers goes through many dungeons, but will always come back from death.

Tropes found in The Stickworld include:

• After the End: As revealed in various backstories, The One had apparently succeeded in destroying the first Stickworld. The second time The One showed up, the Creator realized what was happening and dismantled the second Stickworld himself whilst moving any survivors to the 3rd and current Stickworld.
• All-Accessible Magic: Anyone in the Stickworld is capable of learning magic, though it usually depends on whether they have anyone they can think of protecting.
• Anti-Magic: Comes up as a purple field of energy that disables all forms of magic, even Flight.
• Author Avatar: The Creator himself. Naturally, his power level is also based on the number of subscribers he has.
• Awesome, but Impractical: As powerful as they are, there's a video explaining why Overseers can't do Obstacle Courses. While they're virtually immune to all traps, they're also way too big for an obstacle course and will get stuck. Overseer Justice can't even lose the course since she can't even die from any of the traps, and thus, she's stuck.
• Barrier Warrior: One of the most common forms of magic has a stick figure form a small shield in front of them to reflect attacks.
• The Beastmaster: Summon magicians will try to control monsters to do their bidding, but will usually be killed if they try to control one that is too powerful.
• Black Magic: The attacks used by the Dark Magician, named Dolph Dundgren, and the Shadow Magicians, are colored black. Dolph in particular is able to use magic despite not caring about his family, which heavily implies that he's relying on The Power of Hate to fight instead of The Power of Love that most magicians rely on.
• Bookends: For much of the series, Lolph had been stopping The One from destroying the Stickworld. Season 2 ended with The One having a Heel–Face Turn, and at the end of Season 3, he and Lolph are the only powerful entities left to protect the Stickworld after Amon killed off Ava as well as the other Overseers.
• Curb-Stomp Battle:
  • In "The Stickmen vs the Serpents", the final two fights end up like this, with the Obstacle Course stickmen getting instantly obliterated by a blast from the Elder Serpent, and the Dark Serpent's presence instantly evaporating the stickmen just by merely showing up.
  • The non-canon Mini Cliff Battle 21 has the Avatar Magician simply use waterbending to melt an Ice Spirit in seconds.
  • In The Stickworld Part 49, Amon first easily bested the three Overseers, then after a bit of damage did the same to The One, and lastly obliterated Ava the moment he escaped her stun-locking. All this, in 3 minutes.
• Death Course: Various instances of these are found throughout the Stickworld, usually to protect a MacGuffin necessary for the plot. Eventually an entire spinoff series became dedicated to a group of stick figures solving these.
• Death Is Cheap: The spinoff Obstacle Course series has it so that the titular dungeons occur within in a different dimension where death is a temporary phenomenon, so anyone who loses can come back in the next video.
• Dispel Magic: Overseers have the ability "Magic Control" which lets them divert most magic attacks wherever they want. This can make it relatively easy to deal with threats that rely on magic to fight.
• Energy Ball: How the most basic magic attacks can manifest. These can also explode if the magician firing them is experienced enough.
• Fire/Ice Duo: Several episodes featured a fire magician and an ice magician who engage in several fights before eventually crashing into and killing each other during The Cliff 6.
• Floating Continent: When Mike and his family got Taken for Granite by a Chaos Magician, Lolph decides to find a book describing the Status Heal spell in a hidden cloud city. When he gets there, he finds out that it's currently led by Cloudia, a cloud magician whose father was killed by The One during The Cliff 1.
• Gravity Master: A gravity magician can specialize in altering which way their enemy falls. If a stick figure is forced to fall towards the sky this way, it doesn't last forever, so they'll fall back to their deaths if they can't fly.
• Gemini Destruction Law: The Two-Headed Giant requires both heads to be destroyed at the same time, otherwise it will put up a shield and quickly regenerate the destroyed head. The combined force of three Overseers eventually launch an attack that hits both heads for 600 damage, killing it.
• Herd-Hitting Attack: Force magicians can produce a wave of magic around themselves which can push back enemies, or outright destroy them if they're too weak.
• "Instant Death" Radius: The Dark Serpent has such an overwhelming aura that even its mere presence is enough to kill most higher-level mages and below.
• Kamehame Hadoken: Energy magic fits this trope better than regular magic, as it can be fired continuously and can even cause a Beam-O-War.
• Law of Chromatic Superiority: Most magicians that aren't part of the main cast are drawn in different colors to represent how powerful they are. Beginners are pink, rookies are green, intermediates are yellow, experts are red, masters are blue, legends are purple, myths are gray, and time magicians are cyan. Balthazar's backstory reveals that this change in color is a side effect of special crystals at a Wizarding School that make it easier to focus when learning magic.
• Lighter and Softer: All videos after The Cliff 5 had it so that stick figures do not bleed when wounded or killed, but are simply Reduced to Dust.
• Limit Break: Throughout the third season, the Overseers pick up powerful attacks that can only be used at 25% health. Lolph in particular learned two of these, but stopped using Meteor Burst in favor of Hyper Beam.
• Logical Weakness: Mini Cliff Battle 21 pits the Avatar Magician against an Ice Spirit, which could normally give an Overseer some trouble. As the Ice Spirit is basically frozen water, the battle doesn't even last a few seconds when the Avatar simply waterbends the ice spirit to melt it into lifeless water.
• Magical Star Symbols: One episode of the Obstacle Course series had the stick figures fight a Pentagram magician, whose power is emphasized by the pentagram-shaped aura around him. Pentagram magicians would debut in the Stickworld series proper when two of them challenge Lolph and Rolph to a Wizard Duel.
• Magic Versus Science: One of the main antagonists is The Scientist, a stickman who considered magicians to be cheaters and created increasingly powerful Robots to eliminate them.
• The Night That Never Ends: Season 3 had Mike and his friends travel to an entirely different planet where the sunlight was blocked out by the Stickworld. What they didn't know was that other people lived on that planet, and were working to see the Stickworld destroyed if it meant saving their own home.
• Omnicidal Maniac: The first season as well as the first 5 episodes of The Cliff have Lolph and his allies deal with The One, a demonic entity hellbent on destroying the Stickworld's inhabitants, and even got close to killing the Creator.
• Our Giants Are Bigger: The backstories for Balthazar and the First Overseer reveal that the stick figures of the first Stickworld were several times larger than the second Stickworld's citizens. Notably, Mr. Sheep and his siblings inherited the intelligence, strength, and durability of their parents (stick figures #8 and #69) separately, despite being as small as the second generation of stick figures.
• Overshadowed by Awesome:
  • As shown in The Stickmen vs the Serpents, the main Stickmen in the Obstacle Course are ultimately this compared to the Overseers and their vast power. While they do manage to defeat the weakest Serpent and nearly manage to defeat the second, they get absolutely curbstomped by the last two, with the Dark Serpent's mere presence being enough to evaporate the Stickmen by just showing up without attacking at all. To be fair, the Dark Serpent even gave Overseer Lolph massive trouble to the point where the Creator had to fight it off, and still managed to deal a hefty amount of damage to the Creator themselves.
  • A similar scenario happens in The Stick Figures vs the Ice Spirits, where they could defeat the Baby Ice Spirit, lost to the Junior Ice Spirit after a tough fight, and getting absolutely curbstomped by the Ice Spirit and Speedy Ice Spirits.
• Pyrrhic Victory: The Final Battle of Season 3 sees the Stickworld saved from Amon's sheer power, but by then Ava, Justice, and Rolph are Killed Off for Real, and the Creator had lost his creation powers. Zeruel and Lolph end the episode with a Shout-Out to Avengers: Infinity War, which ended on a similarly bleak note.
• The Power of Love: Magic is usually harnessed when a stick figure focuses on those they wish to protect. As it turns out, Balthazar became the first magician when he drew on his desire to protect his sister Ava. After they defeated the First Overseer together, he would go on to teach other stick figures to use magic by telling them to think about those they want to protect.
• Public Domain Soundtrack: Practically all of Zeruel82Mk2's videos use copyright-free music that can be found in the audio library at YouTube.
• Secondary Sexual Characteristics: Female stickmen are differentiated from male stickmen by having an oval-shaped head instead of a circle, as well as "breasts" made out of two extremely short lines on their chests.
• Shattered World: The aftermath of The Cliff 6 has the Stickworld split in half by The One, though he would put it back together as part of his Heel–Face Turn in The Cliff 7.
• Shout-Out: Lolph and his family take their names from Swedish actor Dolph Lundgren, with Lolph's name being a Spoonerism of the man's.
• Sizeshifter: Size-changing magicians can either shrink down to the point that they're invisible or grow to be big enough to squash other stick figures.
• Snakes Are Sinister: Episodes 11, 12, 14, and 15 have a series of serpentine monsters threaten the protagonists. The fourth one, the Dark Serpent, proves to be so powerful that Lolph decides to get the Creator to dispose of it. Subverted by the Light Serpent, which pulls a Big Damn Heroes when the Ultimate Demon has the Overseers on the ropes, and dealing a generous amount of damage to the demon before it's ultimately overpowered.
• Stat-O-Vision: Throughout the series, stick figures would be described in terms of a general Power Level as well as a magic Power Level if they use magic. Episode 18.5 eventually has the Creator rework this trope by describing them in terms of attack, defense, and health, since it became too difficult to estimate a Power Level.
• Stick Figure Animation: Most characters in the series is some kind of Stickman with the potential to attain some power.
• Time Master: Some stick figures are able to become Time Magicians and stop everything that isn't them for several seconds. A variant of this is the Chrono Magician, who can see into the past of wherever they are, even as far back as previous Stickworlds.
• Toilet Humor: The Stickworld isn't above being silly in this manner, with instances such as stickmen getting a Groin Attack, or the Obstacle Course series having a Stench magician as a guest for some episodes.
• Too Dumb to Live: Apparently, stick figures won't stop trying to jump across cliffs because bridges make it too easy. Magicians who learn Flight don't have this excuse, but will usually run into something that kills them anyway.
• Weaponized Stench: While they aren't common, Stench magicians can release a yellow cloud potent enough to make their enemies vomit, even if it can't actually hurt them.
• What If?: A number of Mini Cliff Battles pits characters that never interacted in canon against each other, in a non-canon scenario:
  • Mini Cliff Battle 14 pits The One against the Dark Serpent, with the former beating the latter in a Curb-Stomp Battle.
  • Mini Cliff Battle 17 pits The One against the Sword Demon, who puts up a better fight than the Dark Serpent before being decapitated.
  • Mini Cliff Battle 18 pits the nanomachine-infused Scientist/Big Brother against the Dark Serpent, with the former winning handily against the latter.
  • Mini Cliff Battle 22 pits the nanomachine-infused Scientist/Big Brother against The One, with the latter easily tearing the former to shreds in a Curb-Stomp Battle.
• The Worf Effect:
  • There are quite a few instances where an Overseer gets decisively beaten or even killed to show how deadly the new monster or threat is.
  • Two Mini Cliff Battles show how outmatched the Dark Serpent (which required the Creator's help to defeat) is against newer villains. 14 has The One curbstomp it while only taking minimal damage, while 18 has the nanomachine-infused Scientist handily winning against it.
  • As powerful as the nanomachine-infused Scientist is, Mini Cliff Battle 22 show how outmatched he is against The One by simply having the One telekinetically tear him to shreds.
  • In case every bit of build-up evaded you, Amon establishes himself as the most powerful opponent yet by destroying the (nearly-)indestructible Black Trident.
• Worf Had the Flu: Ava's final attack leaves Amon with less than 10% of his HP left, and crippling him into not even being able to fly, it being enough to make him beatable.

...Biatch!