YMMV / Steam Powered Giraffe

• Actor Shipping:
  • Inverted. Many fans shipped Walter Girl Paige with Rabbit when Paige Law and Bunny Bennett were dating in real life. This also applied to Walter Girl Brianna and The Spine when Brianna Clawson and David Bennett were still together.
  • This also happened with The Spine and Rivet (an original robot character created by David's girlfriend Gabi) as well.
  • It's now common to ship The Spine with Walter Worker Chelsea, who is played by David's current girlfriend Chelsea Penyak. It helps that David and Chelsea already have the duet "Soliton" together.
• Alternate Character Interpretation: Some fans see Peter Walter I as a Mad Scientist who treated Delilah like a prize to be won without regards to her feelings, and see him as taking advantage of his maid Iris Tonia's infatuation with him to get her in bed. Interpreting any of the bots as a Stepford Smiler is also becoming increasingly popular in fanworks.
  • Which would make the song "Brass Goggles" a rare moment of honesty. "Photographic Memories", too, as the entire song is The Spine's mourning.
  • Is Rabbit just a normal robot or is there something seriously wrong with her? A lot of songs, as well as the Walter Robotics video, seem to suggest the latter. It especially stands out when comparing "Honeybee" (Rabbit lamenting over a human lover that died of old age while he kept going) to the later "Eat Your Heart" (in which Rabbit takes great pleasure in tormenting & upsetting someone in love with her, coupled with the extremely creepy artwork for the single). Could lament over the war & loss of her human partner have led to some serious issues?
• Angst? What Angst??: Hatchworth, in regards to his confinement.
• Awesome Music: Has it's own page here.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • The Walter Girls are also highly popular, to the point where there were complaints for a while that all the art and posts about them were clogging the Tumblr tag.
  • GG the Giraffe has amassed a decent fanbase as well.
  • Even the band's photographer, Trekkiebeth, has a following! She even gets her own fanart from time to time.
  • Considering there are people who have cosplayed as nameless background characters, characters whose name is ''all'' we know about them and characters who have yet to appear in canon, it's safe to say the fandom can make one out of anyone.
  • At a recent concert, David took a photo of himself in costume with a stern-looking stagehand in the background. Fans started to speculate about this mysterious man, growing even more excited when he appeared yet again. Throughout the night he quickly became a fan favourite, until finally this happened.
• Epic Riff: The guitar in "Automatonic Electronic Harmonic" and the keyboards in "Ju Ju Magic".
  • Never forget "The Space Giant". The bots literally killed an all-powerful space being with those guitar riffs.
  But first, the Space Giant needed proof that this truly was Steam Powered Giraffe, so it proposed a duel and revealed a guitar made out of the cosmos. The ensuing duel would come to be known as the most awesome duel in all the universe.
• Fanfic Fuel: Several parts of the band's history have yet to be elaborated upon, or left deliberately ambiguous, such as the stories behind some of the album artwork, the backstories and fates of song characters such as The Suspender Man and Airheart, The Spine's desire to be human, how the Walter Girls came to work for Walter Robotics, and why Rabbit and the Spine have green eyes despite being powered by Blue Matter.
  • Bunny herself encourages this during her art livestreams, revealing huge chunks of information about certain aspects of the band's backstory while keeping deliberately vague (or silent) about others. She once teased, "There's a lot of secrets in the Walter family—and we're just scratching the surface."
• Harsher in Hindsight: The band's jokes about how the audience should "enjoy [the Jon] while he lasts" because of his finite fuel supply became this when he actually left the band.
  • "Hold Me" was a song written by Bunny about her girlfriend. They'd broken up by the time that the album came out.
• Ho Yay: Hatchworth's debut at the Youmacon concert was filled with a lot of him being very close with The Spine.
  The Spine: Hatchworth, tell me again how much you love me.
  Hatchworth: Oh, very much.
  • and
  Hatchworth: (in response to a fan's compliment) Oh, thank you. You're my favorite pretty girl in a pretty dress. (to The Spine) That is of course except for you, The Spine.
  • Yet another moment during a concert: At one point after Hatchworth mentioned a "snake in his pants" he turned to The Spine and said “you have to suck out the poison."
  • Another moment happened when Hatchworth is stuck on one knee with a hand raised to the Spine, Hatchmeister asks Rabbit to fetch a ring out of his back pocket to which the Spine smacks Hatch's hand away saying:
  The Spine: That ship is not sailing.\
• Misaimed Fandom: As evidenced by one couple who considered using it as their wedding song, there are at least a few folks who see "Honeybee" as a straightforward love song.
• Nightmare Fuel: It's more likely than you think.
  • While Rabbit's character video is mostly funny, there is a part where she makes a... sound.
  • The Vice Does Tight and Necrostar both sound like something fitting for a Cosmic Horror Story.
  • The teaser for The Vice Quadrant features creepy narration over the sonar noises from Bleak Horizon, the guitar from Fire, Fire, and an extreme closeup of The Astronaut's corpse.
  The Astronaut (Voice Over): There is a place, far from our own world, that would challenge our determination, our willpower, and our strength. Some of us could endure it, but others... (The Astronaut's helmet slides open as the music stops) Well, they'd break... (The Astronaut's purple, glowing eyes open with a Scare Chord) Just like I did...
  • Eat Your Heart evokes this before the song even begins thanks to the artwork showing Rabbit with an unhinged jaw eating a piece of a heart, one eye on a wire behind her head and a creepy heart on a plate. The song itself is about taking great joy in someone's misery after being heartbroken, yet Rabbit performs it in an upbeat 1950s style, as if somehow causing this type of suffering is normal.
• Signature Song: "Honeybee" is the band's most-viewed YouTube video by far, and often cited by fans as the song that introduced them to their music. "Brass Goggles" is another candidate, as it does a much better job of presenting the band's Steampunk robot gimmick, and it's treated as Steam Powered Giraffe's theme song.
• Tearjerker: Most of their songs are pretty lighthearted, if not comedic, but some are ... less so.
  • "Honeybee" can bring a tear to the eye.
  • "Fire Fire", about, well, astronauts burning to death out in space. The very dark lyrics are masked by some light vocals and music, but the song is still depressing.
    • Especially if you believe the popular Fanon that the song was inspired by the death of Walter family member P.A. Walter IV, a NASA astronaut who was killed in an unexplained explosion about his ship.
    • Word of Bunny, compiled here along with other Vice Quadrant plot points, confirms this as canon. Except he didn't die. As per the Vice Quadrant timeline linked on the main page, he survived the explosion (which his involvement in has only been documented for Universe Omega, as he had already become Commander Cosmo in Universe Prime) and would meet Cosmica two years later.
  • The malfunction that occurred during the February 17, 2013 show. The 'bots had a sudden breakdown between sets, and booted up with a little-used file ... containing the events of the 1897 Copper Elephant War. The result was nothing short of heartbreaking.
    Rabbit: (frightened) Pappy! Pappyyyyyy!
    The Spine: Rabbit! Rabbit, you must get up...
  • "Turn Back the Clock" has become infamous within the fandom for the amount of tears it has caused.
    Where'd my girl run to? Will she be back soon?
  • Quintessential isn't short of these either, particularly "Photographic Memories"
  All those memories
  I can't wash them away they are
  embedded in my brain
  and I am all alone now
  • Meta example: This video from 2012. Notice how uninterested The Jon looks. This was several weeks before he left and Sam Luke was promoted from drummer to Hatchworth.
• Unintentional Uncanny Valley: It works against them in an odd way: when they mimic mechanical movements, their jerkiness is just a bit too fluid to be anything but human. They actually manage to get to the valley from the opposite end.
• The Woobie: The fan's reactions to Hatchworth's debut performance was mostly a chorus of "awww"s.
  • Averted when he seems to become aware of the effect he has on the audience.
  "I just wanted to bait the audience and get that 'awww.'"
• What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: They maintain that they're fairly family friendly, which is mostly true... But then you get into songs with existential angst (Brass Goggles, Wired Wrong), suicidal narrators (Honeybee, I'll Rust with You), and even an occasional Family-Unfriendly Death (Fire Fire). Though most of this is in somewhat coded references that a young listener wouldn't hear.