Adorkable: Shantae is already cute herself, but her occasional dorky quirks that have been with her since Pirate's Curse take the cuteness up to eleven. Examples include pretending to be a pirate and getting overly excited over staying at an island for a vacation.
Alternative Character Interpretation: While there's no doubt that Shantae is a good person, one has to wonder if she's just snarky or a Jerk with a Heart of Gold. Is she really as pure and kind-hearted as she seems? Or, considering the way she kills some enemies and how cruel she can be to people like Bolo, is she more of an Anti-Hero? Friends to the End offers more fuel to the fire — some of Shantae's memories aren't particularly flattering in regards to her friends, and it's unclear how much of that can be chalked up to her being twisted by dark magic.
Aluminum Christmas Trees: Yes, there is such a thing as egg coffee like what Poe enjoys drinking. However, most recipes don't call for a rotten egg to be used.
Depending on the fan, Squid Baron is either the funniest character in the series or the most annoying.
Either you love Sky for being the group's Only Sane Man, her gimmick as a War Bird trainer and her sibling like relationship with Shantae, or you utterly hate her for being a Jerkass to Bolo and Rottytops (who are very popular with fans, see below), her plots of trying to find a boyfriend being stupid and pointless and her refusal to help out during most of Seven Sirens.
Cult Classic: The first game bombed on release, and the sequel spent years in Development Hell because publishers didn't want anything from WayForward that wasn't a licensed game or a casual downloadable title. Even so, the Shantae series still manages to have a sizable fanbase most other smaller games could only dream of, to the point that it was successfully crowd-funded to become one of the sleeper hits of 2016.
Demonic Spiders: The Wetmen present in every game except for Risky's Revenge are amongst the toughest enemies in the series because of one ability, their blocking. Simply attacking them by button-mashing has no effect as they can efficiently block Shantae's hair, and their dash attack while predictable can be hard to avoid depending on the room they're fought in. Even worse, a red variant with even more health and aggression appears in Seven Sirens.
Draco in Leather Pants: Risky Boots gets this a lot, especially in fics that ship her with Shantae. While Pirate's Curse does reveal a softer side to her, she also makes it clear that she is not going to reform. Most fans, however, will have her make a Heel–Face Turn from Shantae's influence.
Everyone seems to love Rottytops, to the point that, for Half-Genie Hero, the additional backers managed to push the final total just over the stretch goal to add her to the game.
Tuki, a lamia shopkeeper that you run into occasionally in levels, has a decent amount of fanart dedicated to her.
Fan Nickname: One of the planned enemies for Shantae Advanced was an undead Elite Mook who attacks Shantae by spanking her repeatedly whenever he catches her. When the demo of the game was shown to the public for the first time, fans were quick to dub him as Spanky Joe.
Fanwork-Only Fans: One of the main appeals of the series, as told by the fans, are how charming and diverse the cast of characters is, all with standout designs, memorable personalities, and fantastic humor. Those who aren't frequenters of the indie scene or outright don't like the gameplay style of Metroidvanias often find themselves engaging with fan work as a way to grow attached to the characters, which isn't a hard task, as fanwork for Shantae is very abundant on the internet, safe for work or... otherwise.
Invoked between Shantae and Risky. The opening scene of Pirate's Curse alone, with the bathtub, seems to indicate Risky has an interest in Shantae. Shantae, on the other hand, keeps trying to turn Risky to her side. While such personal level interest is part of the genre, Shantae and Risky seem to cross the line. Especially as Risky's very plan in Pirate's Curse seems to hinge on Shantae being Shantae. Indeed, the ending of Risky's Revenge seems to play with the concept. Risky is talking about stripping Shantae of her powers, but with the line break being where it is, it becomes "Strip you(line break)of your powers." That has to be intentional, since there is more than enough room to put the line break anywhere else.
While barely anything of the sort occurs between Shantae and Risky in the story of Half-Genie Hero, the very first two pictures in the first Fan Art room of the art gallery features the two of them and are quite shippy.
The games have a not-insignificant Japanese fanbase despite the fact that it took them a long time to come out in Japan. The combination of Animesque-Kawaii-Fanservice-Metroidvania likely has something to do with it. There's even an official Shantae Chargumin figure that specifically mentions how she has "passionate fans in Japan also."
And then there's this piece of fanart, released in hopes of encouraging WayForward to get hopping on the worldwide release of Risky's Revenge.
Ken Sugimori — character designer of Pokémon — is a fan of the series.
Goddamned Bats: The snakes present throughout the games are a real pain. They die in one hit from either Shantae’s hair or her tools, but almost always come in packs or alongside other enemies, taking focus away from more important threats. They also respawn frequently and infinitely, so you’re often better off ignoring them unless you need a few extra gems to buy an upgrade or potion.
Harsher in Hindsight: Back when the Kickstarters for both games were first up, two◊ pictures◊ of Shantae high-fiving Beck were made by both WayForward and Comcept. This led to backers of both games becoming Friendly Fandoms, and along came a slew of fan-art between the two. Unfortunately, Mighty No. 9 fell into a bunch of controversies (two of the most infamous being the constant delays and the "Masterclass trailer"), and soon both Shantae fans and MN9 backers started to grow disgusted towards the game, leading the once-friendly fanart turn to Shantae trying to ignore Beck. With this in mind, this makes the above two pictures extremely awkward.
Some fans accurately suspected that the half-genies' kidnapping in Seven Sirens was done mostly through someone deliberately aiding the Sirens, specifically the mayor of Arena Town. Played with in that the mayor wasn't actually real in the first place and was an elaborate disguise by Risky Boots, which took everyone by surprise.
As soon as she was shown off, nearly every fan called that the zombie half genie, Fillin The Blank, was Rottytops wearing a costume.
LGBT Fanbase: Considering how every main female character is extremely attractive, it was a given. And even for the guys, characters like Bolo and the Ammo Baron aren't exactly hard on the eyes.
Magnificent Bastard: Risky Boots is the self-proclaimed Queen of the Seven Seas and Shantae’s Arch-Enemy. Seeking power and riches, Risky has made a habit of letting Shantae do the hard work before reaping the rewards. She has managed to disguise herself as a Guardian Genie to trick Shantae into giving her the Elemental Stones and kidnapped her uncle Mimic to force Shantae to give her the Magic Seals she needed to steal Shantae’s power and make an evil copy of her. When the Pirate Master returned, Risky enacted a bold scheme by teaming up with Shantae and manipulating her into regaining her powers without anyone knowing so she could destroy the Pirate Master for good. Returning to her ambitions of conquest, Risky feigns defeat so she could leave Shantae a blueprint she stole but had secretly tampered with which uncle Mimic uses to build a machine that corrupts genies. While suffering occasional bouts of anger, Risky always bounces back as fierce and cunning as ever and is feared for good reason.
Moe: Cited by Destructoid in their review of Risky's Revenge: Your first instinct on seeing the female main cast is probably not so much "Whoa, that's hot" as "Aww, that's cute".
Moral Event Horizon: Risky seems to have crossed it in Half-Genie Hero, when she tricks the heroes into building a machine that, when activated, corrupts Shantae's magic, allowing her evil-aligned genie-half to take control and putting her friends and everyone in Scuttle Town in grave danger. Risky then makes off with the Dynamo and leaves Mimic, Sky, Bolo, and Rottytops at Nega-Shantae's mercy, while planning to subject the inhabitants of the entire Genie Realm to the same fate. It's only thanks to The Power of Friendship that Shantae returns to normal, and even that was evidently something Risky didn't see coming.
Most Wonderful Sound: The little eight-bit squeaky noises Shantae makes when she's crawling on the ground are surprisingly catchy and pleasant to hear; telling when they've appeared in every game to date, even on stronger hardware! Likewise, the satisfying chime that plays when the game is successfully saved.
The Scrappy: You won't be surprised to find that many fans despise Mayor Scuttlebutt, due to his habit of repeatedly firing Shantae on the stupidest imaginable pretexts. It doesn't help that at one point he sells the entire town to the Ammo Baron, just so he doesn't have to deal with the Baron's forces and Risky at the same time, and gets away with it. It says about how hated he is when one of the most widely agreed upon positives of Seven Sirens is that he makes no appearances.
Rottytops, a zombie, manages to break into a ruin by tearing her leg off at the knee and picking the lock with her exposed shin bone. Still cute, but rather disturbing.
How Uncle Mimic explains how he prevented triggering a pressure trap: by switching the treasure with the contents of his bowels.
One of the fishermen:
"When I was a little boy with a full beard..."
They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: One of the things that was praised about Pirate's Curse was how it managed to take the Cliffhanger from Risky's Revenge and weave it into an overarching narrative. However, Half-Genie Hero ended up going back to the episodic story approach that the first game took, which carried over into Seven Sirens, thus leaving the connections between games as very thin.
Tough Act to Follow: Kaufman's soundtracks for the first four games is consistently praised as one of the series' strongest points, so when it was revealed that he wouldn't return to work on Seven Sirens, people naturally became worried that the composers hired wouldn't live up to his work. After release, the soundtrack while considered decent to good by most players with a few standout tracks, has also been criticized for being more "generic" and relying too much on chiptune notes in comparison to what the previous games had.
What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: Some attribute the commercial failure of the first Shantae game to this, among other factors. Shantae's cutesy, colorful graphics, goofy humor, E rating, and being on the kid-friendly Game Boy Color lead to the assumption that it's a kid's game. The problem is, it's also strangely...sexy for something aimed at kids, and also more difficult than your average kid's game. Later games avert this more and more by adding some darker humor, among other content, to the point that Half-Genie Hero (and later Shantae and the Seven Sirens as well) is given the ESRB of T for Teen in North America.
Shantae. Despite coming off as super cute and cheerful, it won't be long before her shell cracks. Shantae has a bunch of insecurities about herself and beats herself up whenever something doesn't go as planned, even when there was nothing she could have done to stop it. Building on this is that she is often fired from her job as guardian, even when she does her best when dealing with the attacks. It's at its worst in Half-Genie Hero when she is fired for not being able to prevent the attack in the first place and in Risky's Revenge when the mayor launches a smear campaign against her. In the former game, Mimic even tries to help her by building a machine to keep evildoers away. The end result is her being turned evil due to Risky's sabotage, nearly being erased, and having to watch her body try to kill her friends. It's pretty telling when the worst that she ever gets in Seven Sirens is some stage fright when her new half-genie friends suddenly get taken away during a performance, and it's still not nearly as bad as what she goes through on her other adventures.
To an extent, Shantae's friends are also woobies; the most prominent being Bolo. Despite not being that bright, his heart is clearly in the right place. However, nearly everyone talks down to him and treat him like he's nothing, and solely refer to him as an idiotic pervert who can't do anything useful; including Shantae. Even when he does prove himself (like in Friends To The End), people still make snide remarks at, hurl insults at and have even physically attacked him for extremely minor things. It almost makes you wonder why Bolo still sticks around his so-called "friends" — and by extension, the rest of Scuttle Town — if they keep perpetually proving time and time again that they actually hate him.
In the first game alone, you learn that none of the other zombies even so much as likeRottytops and her brothers. Things get worse for her in Risky's Revenge when she sells out Shantae to Risky but gets nothing out of it, causing the poor girl to run off in tears. Her human soul in Pirate's Curse even tells Shantae that she really wants to be friends with her, but feels like she keeps screwing things up. Seven Sirens even made it clear that she was so insecure in her friendship with Shantae that she was convinced Shantae wasn't going to invite her on the trip so she stowed away in her luggage, making it all the more painful to learn that Shantae was going to invite her, but couldn't find her because she was hidden in the luggage.
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