Web originals with their own pages
Literature
- Most chapters of Sailor Nothing are straight prose, but Chapter 7 is an animation in the style of an 8-bit video game, and another is a set of four "mini-chapters" from different points of view.
- The Whateley Universe was strictly a light-hearted Superhero School comic book realm, until "A Simple Game", the first Carmilla story, which dove head-first into Lovecraft Country.
- And even then, the stories are all 'protagonist in a superhero setting' except for "Tales of the MCO' in which some of the main characters sit around and watch television. And heckle.
Podcasts
- Kevin and Ursula Eat Cheap have the letters shows, often recorded in advance of con appearances as filler episodes, which generally do not include any food at all.
- Random Assault: The show runs on this. It's ostensibly a gaming podcast, but the topics are all over the place.
- Welcome to Night Vale has a couple examples of this. The most obvious one is "A Story About You", in which the usual news style is discarded in favour of a second-person narration describing the day in the life of an 'ordinary' Night Vale citizen. "The Sandstorm, Part B", is also an example, as the majority of it is narrated by Kevin, Cecil's Desert Bluff's counterpart.
- An even better example is "The September Monologues," which changes the entire episode formula. It begins differently, without the usual "Welcome to Night Vale" catchphrase, and ends without the usual "good night." The episode itself is a series of 3 monologues from various characters, each one with a brief introduction from Cecil. What is even more unusual is the lack of weather, (save 6 seconds of generic music that are immediately cut off.)
- There's also The Weather, where the report stops and a song plays, typically around the climax of the episode.
- Episode 5b
of Battle for Dream Island Again, which is a Platform Game, when compared to 5a and 5c, which are both regular animations. - DEATH BATTLE! typically has the hosts Wiz and Boomstick analysing two (or more) characters in a lab without a story of their own. Episode 150 on the other hand tells a story about Boomstick trying to find his father. Wiz and Boomstick spend the whole episode outside of the lab and interact with the fighters (Macho Man and Kool-Aid Man). The typical structure of "analyse first combatant, then analyse second combatant, then show the fight animation" is not used, instead the analysis covers both combatant back-and-forth and some of it are explained in the middle of the fight.
- Excalibur vs. Raiden also breaks the usual formula, though not to the extent of the previous example. We see Wiz and Boomstick in the lab on their day off and Wiz staring at his computer curious about Warframe, and the two then start having a personal argument about which Warframe would be beating Raiden in a fight, like the playground debates we used to have as kids.
- Most of the "irregular" episodes of Happy Tree Friends qualify, such as:
- "Ski Patrol": A parody of an old instructional video, about ski safety.
- "Dino-Sore Days": A parody of an early Disney short, starring Cro-Marmot.
- "Ka-Pow!": A three-episode Spin-Off starring Flippy, Splendid, and Buddhist Monkey.
- The HTF Breaks, a series of one-minute episodes.
- Love Bites, a series of short Valentine's day skits.
- Kringles: short Christmas episodes.
- Smoochies: Animations with three options, all three of which result in the character dying.
- Homestar Runner: Instead of their usual Halloween cartoon, for 2021 the Brothers Chaps developed a short point-and-click Adventure Game, Halloween Hide & Seek, where Homestar had to track down the other characters so he could continue his annual tradition of humorously misidentifying their costumes. Appropriately enough, all the characters' costumes are from adventure games (including Homestar himself as the Hero from Quest for Glory, Marzipan as Trixie the Giraffe-Necked Girl from Scranton from Sam & Max Hit the Road , and Strong Bad as Sludge Vohaul from Space Quest II: Vohaul's Revenge).
- Meet the BLU Team: While all the other videos in the series demonstrate each class's incompetence compared to their RED counterparts, Meet the BLU Pyro actually makes the Pyro deadly, and instead of having their vision distorted by Pyrovision, they see everything in black and white and know what they were murdering. The fact they cannot see color though didn't end well for the rest of the BLU Team either.
- SCP Animated - Tales from the Foundation: The (Now taken down) episode that focused on Sirenhead.
Websites
- The Athletic did a ranking of the greatest National Hockey League players since the 1967 expansion (100, but named NHL99 because it was effectively 99 players below #99 who earned a consensus first place). Shades of this trope happened in the entry for Scott Stevens, that had some readers complaining that the article only discussed Stevens' hard hits and how they're a legacy that doesn't fare well today. But then two entries downright focused on ancilliary aspects, with a Sergei Federov article about his white skates and a Larry Robinson one on him being a polo enthusiast, and the comment sections are mostly people complaining that it wasn't what they wanted in a series about hockey players.
- The Jolly Roger Telephone Company is a internet-based company that designs bots which are intended to waste the time of telemarketers and other unwanted callers. One of the bots, to date only featured in a single call on the company's YouTube channel, is a "no-bot" which will never agree with anything that the caller says. The other bots are all designed to be agreeable, if in a somewhat vague and slightly non-committal way, in order to waste as much telemarketer time as possible. This bot, however, is seemingly running a "test-board" and repeatedly ask the caller how they got routed to him and will answer direct questions with "nope" or "mm-mmm." It was created by request of one of the customers who wanted a bot that would never agree to anything. Because of this, most telemarketers hang up on it after about a minute or less, but it's still considered a "win" because it breaks their auto-dialer, causing the call to be routed to an agent and at least wasting a bit of time.
- Alternate History Hub's video on the Armenian Genocide is completely different from the usual format. Not only does it not touch on anything related to alternate history what ifs, but the episode is played completely straight without the usual snark, comedic elements or background music. All to show the seriousness of genocide denial.
- The Angry Video Game Nerd has two specials where he reviews film sequels with confusing names and an entire dedicated review of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III. His review of the Atari 5200 also stands out as quite a bit different as he is completely unable to actually play the thing: he spends the entire episode struggling to hook it up to various video game BGMs before realizing all of his controllers are broken. He doesn't even talk about a single game.
- Despite the normal Caustic Critic tone of the series, he's also done a few positive reviews over the years, such as Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, his Castlevania and Contra retrospectives, EarthBound, and Ninja Gaiden. Of course, some of these games are so brutally difficult that it still brings out his rage.
- The Annotated Series breaks up its main features (video game based movies or TV shows) with intermissions that are usually completely unrelated to the central videos but are of similarly poor quality. These are typically meant as Breather Episodes for the riffers (and by extension the audience) to use to warm up before the next feature, but sometimes the intermissions end up being so bad they usurp the main feature.
- Part two of the Extra Credits video game addiction episode consists of, instead of their normal visual pun, fast paced, analytically style show, the writer for the show giving a monologue to the audience. This is because the issue hit a little too close to home for him to write, so he decided to tell his story instead.
- "Until the Lion Learns to Speak" from Folding Ideas. Instead of analyzing stories and music, he decided to discuss Somalian culture because he's worried about Somalia's current struggles overshadowing their rich history. Especially since they were the first country and developed the first written language. At the end, he plays the Somalian song, that the title's named after, with his friend.
- Formula 1: On a channel that's all about modern and historical Formula One racing there's a video called "Romain Grosjean Cooks Up a Feast", in which F1 driver Romain Grosjean cooks mashed potatoes while discussing the rest of the meal.
- Freshy Kanal: "Frodo Baggins vs. Ancient Egyptians" (an April Fools episode) ditches the usual Epic Rap Battles of History-inspired format and instead tells a story of Frodo journeying through the Egypt and trying to give the One Ring to the Egyptians while rap-battling them.
- Game Grumps, usually a channel devoted to JonTron and Egoraptor playing video games together, has a special video to showing off the VERY strange Miis they found on a used Wii that Arin bought.
- The end of their Joe & Mac playthrough: KITTY CATS DANCING! Cue rave-like video of Ego's cats while Jon and Ego start singing Space Jam songs. Oh, and Jon masturbating.
- Speaking of JonTron, while he's no stranger to intentionally deploying the alligator, his review of Christmas with the Kranks has an amazing unintentional one where he's running around during new years getting people to give Tim Allen impressions. All is fine and well until one man seizes the mic and instead starts ranting about how churches are evil drug-selling organizations and that he's going to start his own "pure" one. Other than one brief failed attempt to get the mic back, Jon spends the entire time standing by with the best bemused and most uncomfortable expression he's ever put on film.Jon (whispering): LET'S GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE RIGHT NOW.
- lonelygirl15 has had a number of these, from "Proving Science Wrong... with Lonelybeast and Danielgirl 15", in which the two main characters acted the part of each other, to "Coming For You", a threatening video posted by a Shadow.
- Mystery Science Theater F1's episode on the 1991 Australian Grand Prix is done entirely in rhyme due to the race being incredibly short.
- New Father Chronicles: Some of the videos, such as "My Wife is Not Here" and "My Daughters Got COVID", are not comedy skits, but rather La Guardia explaining a serious situation he's experiencing.
- The Nostalgia Critic:
- In his review of We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story, instead of doing it as any of his own characters, Doug Walker did the review as an imitation of Hunter S. Thompson. This didn't go over well with some elements of his fanbase. Lampshaded, since the episode opened with, "Anyone who doesn't know who Hunter S. Thompson is will probably hate this review. - NOSTAGLIA[sic] CRITIC".
- He did the The Good Son episode completely through title cards and subtitles (after losing his voice).
- He similarly did Alone in the Dark (2005) via Text-To-Speech because the movie was so awful it made him lose his voice (in reality he was simply sick), with Linkara and Spoony showing up to help him review much to his chagrin.Rob: Hi, guys!
Critic: Oh Jesus. No. - He did Raiders of the Story Arc of The Transformers as Optimus Prime.
- In one episode, instead of a review, he did a Let's Play of The Simpsons: Bart's Nightmare.
- While The Odd One's youtube channel usually consist of his League of Legends highlights video, every once in a while, TOO upload unedited videos of games other than LoL he played during his stream.
- He also uploaded full unedited LoL match of him playing the jungle, leaning more towards education rather than comedy.
- Even more different is the random review of hotels that he happens to stay in for an event like PAX east, blabbering about the items in his room.
- The Proper People had one episode where they drove and investigated the supposedly-paranormal Clinton Road in New Jersey, which had little to do with their main focus, urban exploration.
- The reviewer Todd in the Shadows typically reviews pop music. One week, during a bout of writer's block, he instead made "Top Ten Groin Shots in Movies". And another time he did "Top Ten Buses of the 90s".
- The Unlucky Tug: "The COMPLETE History of Hiro, Master of the Railway" is the first Sodor's Finest episode about a character introduced after Thomas & Friends Shifted to CGI. As a result, the video's segments are about his relationships with specific characters, rather than how he's portrayed in each continuity.
- Unlike other Wham City projects, The Cry of Mann lacks an ARG for fans to discover and dig through in order to find extra material, with Tanking Mann and a few tweets from the cast as the only side-material on offer. As Nick Nocturne explains, the series is more in line with their live shows, which features audience participation similar to what The Cry of Mann accomplishes with the phone calls.
- With The Angels provides two examples, "Sunshine Film Academy", presented in the style of a commercial, and "Lifetime Achievement Award", presented in the style of a music video.
- Dream's videos have it happen on a few occasions:
- One video has Dream hunting down George as the latter tries to beat the game. Dream wins after knocking George off the starting End platform, even more surprising considering Dream had died and lost all his gear mere seconds prior.
- Another video has Sapnap hunting Dream — the "different" here comes from the fact that Sapnap has full diamond gear from the beginning. Sapnap wins soon after Dream leaves the Nether.
- One video has Dream and George team up to beat the game while an AI hunts them down. The video ends when the AI kills Dream.
- A special video Dream did with famous YouTuber MrBeast has Dream hunting down MrBeast himself, as well as his friends Karl and Chandler, the catch being that the three only lose when each of them dies once, but even those who have died can continue to protect the survivors. It's also notable in that Dream is noticeably holding back, as Beast and his friends are considerably less skilled at Minecraft. To make things fair, Dream has given the three a full set of iron armor to start, and he also doesn't employ his usual tactics of setting traps and psychological warfare. If Dream even tried to go as all-out as he does against his own friends, the video would have ended in the first two minutes.
- And yet another video has George and Sapnap team up against Dream. Eventually averted, however, as more than one hunter becomes the norm as Dream continues to improve and it's clear that more hunters are needed to keep things fair (notable as George, Sapnap and Bad are no slouches in Minecraft — Dream's just that good).
- Twitch Plays Pokémon Black 2 is the stream's first LP of a Pokemon ROM Hack to entirely replace a main series game, rather than being a randomized vanilla game.
- Kitboga is a scambaiter popular on Twitch and YouTube. Scams related to technical support, "refund" scams and IRS/tax scams tend to be Kit's bread-and-butter. There are a few, however, which are rather different, such as the ones in which he clicks on phishing links sent by followers to show viewers what they're all about. Some are in a PSA format, explaining / exploring how a particular scam works and maybe including a portion of a call after the PSA. Finally, he's even explored a couple of the "love" scams, such as people preying on postings from dating sites, or even a bizarre one involving love potions.
