Harsher In Hindsight / Web Animation

• In 2006, Arfenhouse 6 took a crack at rogue security software (ala WinFixer) with a scene where the movie is briefly hijacked by a (clearly fake) scareware virus posing as an antivirus program. Fast-forward to 2015: Adobe Flash, the program used to animate Arfenhouse, is revealed to be so full of security vulnerabilities that tech experts are calling for it to be retired for good and all, which finally happened in 2022.
• ASDF Movie:
  • The seventh episode, while still hilarious, has a lot more jokes about death and suicide than previous entries. A month after it was released, the creator admitted he had been suffering from depression and that it may have been subconsciously influencing those jokes, though luckily he emphatically denied wanting to commit suicide.
  • This is also one of the main reasons the original Crash Zoom was canceled. After the Sandy Hook shooting, a crazy person breaking into a school and killing children was a lot less funny.
  • In asdfmovie10, Jacksepticeye appears in a sketch as a character who tries to tell another character not to jump to their death, then pulls out a camera and tells them to jump so he can record it. Jacksepticeye later tweeted a warning about a Logan Paul video featuring the corpse of someone who committed suicide.
    • Doubly harsher in hindsight, Seán would later open up about his mental health problems, up to and including contemplating suicide.
  • In THE TWENTY MINUTE ASDFMOVIE, an angry potato tells the "I like trains" kid, "I am an angry potato and I hope you get cancer!" Edd Gould, who voiced the "I like trains" kid, later died from cancer.
• The Cyanide and Happiness short “Hello Youtubers” shows a vlogger recording (and then presumably posting) the moment she learns her father died in a car accident. The Stinger has her filming an “unboxing” video of her dad’s coffin. Some commenters were worried that at the rate teenage Youtubers were going, it would be predicting the future. With the highly controversial Logan Paul video of him filming a dead body in Japan’s “Suicide Forest”, that future seems to have arrived.
• DEATH BATTLE!: "Galactus vs. Unicron" involves both combatants tearing their way through the universe, with the fight beginning with The End of the World as We Know It. Rooster Teeth would be shuttered by Warner Bros. Discovery a few weeks after the episode released, jeopardizing the future of the show.
• Dick Figures has the episode "Pleasure Cruise", where Red and Blue are having a vacation on a cruise ship and they end up trying to save it and the passengers from a terrorist who plans to blow it up after being mistakened for secret agents. Although they defeat the terrorist, the bomb blew up before they could act, causing the ship to sink. On Jan. 13, 2012, the ship Costa Concordia has been grounded with several dead and missing. The episode was uploaded on Youtube at Jan. 12.
• Dorkly Originals:
  • Amiibo Story ends with a joke portraying the then Nintendo president Satoru Iwata as an inept and angry boss. A Nintendo employee reports on Amiibo's skyrocketing demand and he responds with ordering more copies of Nintendo Land as well as slapping the employee and storming out of the room angrily when he mentioned a proposed Pokémon console game. The real-life Iwata passed away just four days after the video was uploaded.
  • If Videogames Were 22% More Realistic ends on a self-deprecating gag about how Dorkly overused the "huh, neat" punchline and that it wasn't special anymore. This ended up being their second-last video (not including a compilation video of their 2019 content) before nearly the entire staff of Dorkly (as well as their sister channels CollegeHumor and Drawfee) were abruptly laid off without warning in January 2020 after they were sold off by their parent company.
  • Mario Responds to PETA features Mario addressing and debunking the claim that he uses real fur suits, which is played for Hypocritical Humour because of all the animals (Monty Moles, Cheep-cheeps, Yoshi, etc) that he does casually slaughter while talking about how he'd never harm an animal as endangered and defenseless as a tanooki. Nine years later, the video Mario Meets a Real Tanooki ends with him causally murdering the tanooki he had been bonding with for its fur.
  • Luke Won't Forgive Anakin portrays Luke and Leia refusing to accept Anakin's redemption. The new canon Expanded Universe novel, Bloodline, shows that while Luke might have redeemed Anakin, Leia still sees him as Darth Vader and despises him for it. It's also clear in The Force Awakens that Vader's atrocities have a left an impact on the galaxy even 30 years after his death.
• Eddsworld:
  • Shoe killing Laurel in "MovieMakers" is treated as a funny moment for how sudden and anti-climatic it is. The Eddsworld comics would later reveal that Eduardo and Laurel were dating prior to her death, with Eduardo genuinely missing her.
    • The comic also has Jon attempting to comfort Eduardo due to the latter being depressed about Laurel's death. Jon himself would end up dying in "The End", and "The Beaster Bunny" shows that Eduardo's still depressed from it.
  • When the group is hiding in a diner in "WTFuture", Matt asks why he and Tom are also running away when Edd's future self only wants to kill his past self. Tom replies that "without Edd it would just be me and you. And well, that would suck." Fast forward two years later and the real Edd's passing makes that joke a lot less funny. Another joke had Tom getting cancer in the future because of a laser he got hit by.
  • All of the older episodes that killed off one or more of the boys (such as "Matt Sucks", "Ruined", and the "Zombeh" episodes) ended up becoming this after Gould's passing. They, or at least Edd, stopped getting killed off as of the ''Legacy'' era as a result.
  • Tom's Jerkass Woobie attitude would end up becoming this due to his real life self's Creator Breakdown after Gould's passing.
  • In a similar vein, the characterization of Tom as a chronic alcoholic becomes less funny due to Thomas Ridgwell's real-life struggles with alcoholism and depression.
  • The Eddsworld comic #179, titled "Surgery", feels much more depressing when you realize it was the very last comic strip Edd Gould made before he passed away.
  • This fan drawing from 2014 has Tord among the villains harassing the Eddsworld crew. Tord would ultimately betray the other three boys and perform a Face–Heel Turn in "The End".
  • "The End" featured Tord returning and turning evil. His voice actor for that episode, Jamie Spicer-Lewis (Larsson was unavailable as he left the show eight years before the episode), would later be barred from any future involvement in the series following revelations that he had sexually abused a minor.
• Homestar Runner isn't immune:
  • In the Strong Bad Email Specially Marked, Strong Bad suggests the viewer tries cereals with certain sound effects, one of those is "gunshots in a crowded mall" this joke aged terribly with the Westroads Mall Shooting of 2007, and the many other shootings committed in malls in the US.
  • In the Strong Bad Email "the movies", there is a Running Gag involving turning off your bazooka before the movie starts. This is significantly less funny in the wake of the Aurora, Colorado movie theater shooting at the midnight premiere of The Dark Knight Rises.
    • Made even worse by the fact Strong Bad, who got annoyed and blew up the theater near the end of the e-mail, was once The Joker for Halloween. Shortly after Aurora, James Holmes dyed his hair green and claimed he was The Joker.
  • Near the end of "Fall Float Parade", a giant Marshie Balloon feebly controlled by The Cheat rams into the platform where Marzipan and Coach Z are reporting. This became less funny when three days after the cartoon was posted, a Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon accidentally slammed into a streetlight, injuring two people.
    • In a similar vein, three years later a balloon version of Keith Haring's "Figure With Heart" bumped into the booth where the hosts were broadcasting from. No one was injured, though, and they were quick to make jokes about it afterwards.
  • "Best Caper Ever", which is about Homestar floating on an ice floe through the Arctic as Strong Bad and The Cheat try to remember what happened, came out February 9, 2009, one day after 134 people were rescued from a freeflowing sheet of ice that broke off into Lake Erie. Because of this, the page title of the cartoon was "Total Coincidence! Not Intentional!".
  • The Strong Bad Email "winter pool" is about filling up a pool with red gelatin. Unfortunately, it also contains a Fan Disservice joke about attracting "oiled-up Bill Cosby" that's a lot less funny after his sexual abuse allegations and subsequent trial.
• kitty0706's video Mass Defect has a joke in it called, "Take cancer and die." The joke now becomes horrendously unfunny because kitty0706 has passed away from leukemia.
• Cancer's Passion, a short cartoon on Newgrounds, features a hotdog vendor whose mother is in a cancer clinic, with her death at the end serving as part of the punchline. The hotdog vendor's voice actor lost his real life mother to leukemia less than two years after the cartoon was made.
  • Fun With Suicide by the author Livecorpse is much darker in retrospect as he committed suicide several months later. Even moreso by the fact that one of the options is "Suicide by Cop", considering that he was on the run from the police when he died.
  • An old Newgrounds stick figure animation Mystic Island: Part 2 involved a joke early on where Sam (the protagonist) narrates how he became an island castaway after the ship he was on sank. When Sam attempts to recall how he remembers the ship sinking, it is depicted in a Stylistic Suck flash cartoon fashion of the ship exploding before it slips under the water quickly in one piece. At the same time, someone voice-acts the explosion and yells before being dragged under the sea in a No Budget fashion. The scene then zooms out to two stick figures representing James Cameron and a "Cool Effects Guy", where James Cameron proceeds to beat the snot out of the cool effects guy with a baseball bat for blowing $800,000 on the aforementioned ship-sinking sequence. At the same time, a 'Technical Difficulties' message censors the beatdown. Though it might have seemed like a harmless joke for 2001, just 22 years later, a real deep sea implosion tragedy associated with the real RMS Titanic would befall a real business entrepreneur and Ocean Gate CEO Stockton Rush and four passengers of the deep-sea submersible vessel 'The Titan' because of underfunding and Rush cutting many corners in the development of the submersible before his trip to the titanic wreck wound up with the vessel imploding and killing him and his four paying passengers instantly. In the news coverage of the tragedy that followed, James Cameron himself would break down how Stockton Rush's neglect of safety and proper testing was down to his questionable business practices involving the use of cheap building materials and trying to make money quickly on paying passengers to stay profitable before he could afford to build an improved vessel. Cameron also adds how he usually tells people who don't know better about deep sea exploration not to board a submersible if it is headed for a depth it cannot withstand, and that he would have warned the passengers had he been on the MV Polar Prince in person before they boarded the Titan vessel. The Ocean Gate website also shut down with a disclaimer message not long after the tragedy.
• Red vs. Blue:
  • In the first season, Grif saves Sarge from a bullet wound to the head with CPR, and Sarge (unfairly) chews him out for such a stupid choice of medical attention. Years later, when mass shootings became a major hot button issue in 2018, Rick Santorum got into hot water for suggesting students learning CPR would be better than gun control laws.
  • In Episode 50 of The Blood Gulch Chronicles, published in 2005, Church attempts to save Captain Flowers from a heart attack in his sleep by giving him an injection. It turns out, however, that the injection had aspirin in it, which Flowers was allergic to, and was what actually caused his death. In 2015, Monty Oum suffered an allergic reaction during a routine medical procedure and died ten days later. Once you notice the similarities, it's hard to find the scene anywhere near as funny as it was before.
  • Most of the second half of Season 4 and all of Season 5 portrays Church as on the verge of reaching his Rage Breaking Point as he struggles to keep Blue Team at least partly functional despite the world seeming to fall apart around them. This is largely Played For Black Comedy at the time, but The Project Freelancer Saga would later reveal that the Alpha A.I. was successfully tortured past the brink of insanity multiple times by having him be Forced to Watch as the people he cared about most died horribly and he was told that it was all his fault. So in essence, Church is pretty much going through his worst possible nightmare all over again throughout the last portion of The Blood Gulch Chronicles - and he doesn't even realize it.
  • In Reconstruction Delta tries and fails to reassure Church by saying "I believe that Agent Washington's sanity is well within acceptable deviations, for now." Well, by the end of Recreation, "now" is officially over.
  • In Recreation, when Simmons and Lopez are "discussing" whether or not Donut is the real Donut or not, Lopez says they should shoot him anyway. Donut is shot and seemingly killed three episodes later.
  • In Revelation, Tucker tells Tex and Church not to come and ask the other Blues or the Reds for help if they die again, as they usually do, when they go to the Freelancer base on Sidewinder. A couple episodes later, the Meta stabs a two-foot spike into Tex's helmet.
  • In one of the early seasons, the cartoonish O'Malley talked Church into paying him $20 to examine Tucker, claiming that if he didn't, Tucker would die and Church would spend the rest of his life wondering if he couldn't have done something to save him. If you consider what is later revealed about Church — and O'Malley — this threat becomes much less comedic.
  • In season 16, Jax Jonez acting as a Prima Donna Director and treating his cast and crew like crap is a lot less funny to watch after it turned out the show's production company was being ran like that, with accusations of excessive crunch and unpaid overtime.
• RWBY:
  • In Volume 1, Jaune makes a suicide joke about his predicament at school to Pyrrha. Later on, Pyrrha dies in battle against Cinder and Jaune develops a genuine death wish.
  • In Volume 3, an argument between Ironwood and Qrow ends with Ironwood declaring he'd shoot Qrow if he was one of Ironwood's men, and Qrow humorously retorting that he'd shoot himself if he was one of Ironwood's men. In Volumes 7-8, it becomes clear that Ironwood was not joking. He shoots Oscar for trying to talk him down from abandoning Mantle, and he shoots Councilman Sleet for objecting to martial law. The only reason he doesn't shoot Marrow for refusing to support him any more is because Winter quickly disarms and arrests Marrow before Ironwood can fire, thereby saving his life.
  • Nora's Big Eater tendencies, usually played for comedy, take a darker turn in Volume 4 when we learn she was once just a Street Urchin who spent many days scavenging in the trash for food and came close to starvation more than once. No wonder she takes nearly any opportunity to eat her fill as a young adult...
  • In Volume 1, RWBY and JNPR get a front-row seat to Cardin and his team bullying Velvet, with team CRDL pulling on her rabbit ears and mocking her for being a Faunus. While Pyrrha expresses disgust over Cardin's actions and Yang remarks on how hard the Faunus must have it, none of them actually do anything to stop Cardin's discriminatory treatment or even speak up about it despite finding it reprehensible. Four volumes later, Ilia lumps all humans into two categories; The ones who hate the Faunus, and the ones who stand by and let that hatred happen, which is exactly what happened in the first volume.
  • The RWBY creative team is based in Texas. A major plot point in Volume 7 involved Mantle's heating grid going down, leaving the city's residents facing life-threatening freezing conditions. A year later, the team was affected by real-life power blackouts during a heavy snowstorm that left Texans facing life-threatening freezing conditions for two weeks.
  • Ruby's Volume 1 pep talk with Jaune about leadership is played as heartwarming at the time; she affirms that, as leaders, they're not allowed to be failures otherwise they'll bring their teams down with them. However, Ozpin warns Oscar in Volume 5 that being a role-model for others is a terrible burden and Volumes 7-9 explore exactly how this mentality is impacting both Ruby and Jaune. Always putting others first and never tolerating their own failures crushes them under the weight of The Chains of Commanding. They both reach their Rage Breaking Point in Volume 9, Chapter 7, revealing just how much their mental health is suffering from Jaune feeling like a Failure Hero and Ruby feeling like her pain is invisible to others. This leads to Jaune experiencing Sanity Slippage and Ruby crossing the Despair Event Horizon.
• RWBY Chibi:
  • In "Mortal Frienemies", Qrow and Winter's bickering causes Ozpin to lament that "flirting used to be a lot less destructive in my day". Volume 6 of the series proper reveals that's because flirting was never the part of a relationship Ozpin had the difficulty with. Ozpin and Salem were originally married until it collapsed in a terrible fight that accidentally killed their children; the world has been subject ever since to a Secret War between two immortals who cannot permanently defeat the other, making it the longest, bloodiest and most destructive divorce in Remnant's history.
  • In "Mysterious Red Button", Neo chooses to fall into a trap that Roman accidentally falls into, proclaiming via sign that he's an idiot, but he's her idiot. Her subplot in volume 6 of the series proper involves her seeking revenge for Roman's death because he was the only person in her entire life who ever cared about her.
• In one of the fastest cases of this (it was funny for at most eight hours), Spill's audio review of The Dark Knight Rises starts off with the crew joking about critics being killed at the film's premiere. Then the Aurora, Colorado massacre happened.
• The second episode of Super Freakin' Parody Rangers features Blue Ranger Willy getting replaced by his brother Billiam, who is an over-the-top Camp Gay stereotype. Years later, David Yost (the original Blue Ranger) revealed he's gay and the reason he left the show was due to excessive gay bashing. Suddenly, Billiam feels even more wrong.
• There is a video on YouTube that portrays the cast of Toy Story as Animated Actors who groan in frustration when they learn that a fifth Shrek movie is being made^note More specifically, they're groaning over the then-upcoming prequel film Puss in Boots (2011). In February 2023, Disney confirmed that Toy Story 5 was being made, which some people did not like, not helped by the mixed receptions of Toy Story 4 and Lightyear.
• YouTube Poop:
  • "mark3611's" video, "Billy Mays Sells Zorbeez in a Bad Mood", throws in a final joke by overlaying Billy saying "A year's supply of powder!" with an image of cocaine and a razor. Well, given the results of a certain autopsy...
  • Mako Explores His Sexuality had Amon announcing that he'll call upon Obama to shut down the government...a year before the actual shutdown.
  • An awkward one for cs188; a Poop of the song "Gangnam Style" by PSY titled "OPPA GODDAMN STYLE", uploaded in October 2012, had the Word Salad Lyrics "We are not unarmed/Korea got a bomb/US could become a target!". Nearly six months after, big tensions occurred between the US, South Korea and North Korea, with the latter slinging threats of "thermo-nuclear war" haphazardly.
  • The SML YTP “Bowser the pedophile” became this after it was revealed that Logan sent pornography to minors via chat messages and has been dating someone’s cousin.
• Your Favorite Martian:
  • Bill Cosby's appearance in "Orphan Tears", where he is the first thing DeeJay sees when he wakes up from a hangover, can be this in light of the sexual abuse cases that have permanently damaged his reputation, including slipping roofies into women's drinks.
  • The ending of "Nerd Rage", where the Nerd lambasts another nerd for not knowing who Joss Whedon is, calling him "one of the greatest writer/directors of our time", stings hard now that the nerd community at large has shunned him after his bouts with infidelity, sexual misconduct, and a series of workplace harassment allegations.
• Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation did a completely fake joke review of Duke Nukem Forever a while after said game was cancelled. Fast forward a few months, and the review has been voted the #1 fan-favorite. A few days afterward, DNF was announced to be Un-Cancelled at PAX 2010, and would come out to overwhelmingly negative reviews (with it really saying something when Yahtzee actually tried to list some positives of the real life game when he actually reviewed it).
  • Additionally, Yahtzee gave an overall positive review to Telltale Games' The Walking Dead, but snarked at on how it would likely end with the typical Bittersweet Ending of a Zombie Apocalypse story where the survivors end up rebuilding civilization. The actual game ends on an infamously heartbreaking Downer Ending which has Clementine forced to kill her Parental Substitute at his own urging as all of their friends have either been Eaten Alive or have disappeared, with the last shot of the game being Clementine nervously walking across a field on her own as the sun sets and there's no one left to help her.