A simple, not fully comprehensive guide to stick figure community art styles you might find on the internet:
Despite being such a simple object, something universal to humanity when drawing a simple person, there's a lot of ways to depict a stick figure. Almost infinite ones. And some of these ways to draw a stick figure have developed into entire communities; just by looking at the way someone draws a "stick figure" character, you can probably tell what corner of the internet they've stuck their nose in!
Probably what first comes to mind when you think of those fancy stick fight animations. These guys have been around for longer than many people have been alive, having been founded in 2005 by Stone. Many people who started out animating with RHG eventually moved on to become professional animators for cartoons, movies, and even anime.
RHGs and Dojo Duelists are often animated using symbols and objects in Flash, creating a distinct "segmented" appearance. When up close, they often have hand drawn facial features, which adds more to the style of the artist and animator.
Fans of RHG and Hyun's Dojo are often inspired to animate or create colorful and violent stories based on these characters, and quite a few of them seem to find old men incredibly sexy.
An interesting fact about the RHG style and its fanart is that most RHG fanart is in a style commonly referred to as glorified stickfigures, with simple, full bodies and detailed features. I am unsure as to the origin of this art style, but if anyone knows where it first originated, I would love to know.
Gildedguy's Glorified Stickmen
A bit of a side-community to Dojo and RHG is that of Gildedguy's community, who I am happy to represent. Gildedguy started animating in 2006, but truly became more of an internet sensation in 2011 with the release of Slush Invaders. Gildedguy the character made his first official debut in 2015 with Gildedguy vs. Fry, a speedbattle[though he made an appearance in the Slush Invaders game before that.]. Since then he has been releasing at least one new big project every year, with the quality of each animation ramping up as time goes on.
Gildedguy's art style involves large heads and stumpier proportions, with enormous eyes. His style is extremely unique for a stickfigure artist, and you can almost always tell when someone has been inspired by his art and animations.
Gildedguy has a very interactive community, and he has inspired many people that I know to start animation, be it when he first started with Slush Invaders or even as recently as Story 7. Many members of his community, myself included, do not find themselves interacting with many other stick figure communities, though overlap between Gildedguy and almost any other large stick figure community is also very prominent and common.
Animator vs. Animation [Alan Becker]
The source of nostalgia for many my age, these little stickfigures have kept a chokehold on their corner of the internet for nearly two decades, with the first Animator vs. Animation being released one year after RHG's founding, in 2006. Ever since then, AVA and its sidestories of AVM strike inspiration and excitement into the hearts of its fans. Many children and adults alike love the stories of these stickfigures, with simple but nuanced characters and visual stories that anyone can enjoy.
Unlike with many RHGs and Duelists, AVA stickfigures are hand drawn and have more fluid and bendy limbs, and have no facial features except in the case of a single Youtube short as of the time of this being posted.
Fans of AVA sometimes draw in the art style of the source material, but here on Tumblr, I've also seen a lot of them giving them more detailed bodies and faces, as well as clothing and hairstyles. Many copycat animators on youtube exist with nowhere near the level of charm and love put into Alan Becker's AVA.
I'm not actually fully familiar with Henry Stickmin, its games, or its characters, but it's hard to find any other stickfigure style as distinct as this one. With detailed heads, hands, and feet but stick-thin bodies, Henry Stickmin stands out while also sticking to the stickfigure art style.
Henry Stickmin first debuted in 2008 with Breaking The Bank, a point-and-click adventure game.
Dick Figures is a crass, adult-oriented short animation series on YouTube, which debuted in 2010 and released a feature-length film in 2013. The shorts are almost always immature and vulgar, calling to the times of the internet that they originated from.
Dick Figures features hand drawn stickfigures with stick-thin bodies and detailed faces.
I've found that fans of this series do not often cross over into the internet territories of other Stickfigure communities, and instead spend more time in meme communities.
MO4 is a Japanese RPG game with a very niche and dedicated art community behind it. While Marikin Online 1, 2, and 3 did technically exist, they were never fully finished games and are no longer available to the public. From what I can tell, MO4 first released around 2018, and I can find little other information about the series' history itself in a cohesive place.
The characters are unusual and distinct, with one of them even somehow landing on the Sexypedia. They have gray or white skin with few body features aside from their faces, and many of them will be adorned in fancy billowing clothing.
I can't say much for the game aside from the fact that it is intended for mature audiences, and has dark themes such as abuse and sexual harassment.
You'll find that many fanartists for this game are Japanese or Chinese, and may be difficult to find outside the community itself, but once you find one you'll almost definitely stumble into 20 more.
One of if not the most controversial groups of stickfigure communities on this list, Countryhumans are character designs based on countries and historical regimes. They have distinct character designs with facial markings based on their respective flags.
Countryhumans were likely founded in 2017 in a Russian forum, almost definitely based upon or at least inspired by the 2009 Polandball comic. As is the nature of depicting entire countries as characters [IE Hetalia and Polandball itself], this community wound up creating many offensive caricatures of countries and citizens of the countries it represents, and is frequently put under criticism for doing so, as well as shipping said countries with other countries that have warred, invaded, or forced oppressive regimes upon others. The sexualization of regimes such as Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and ISIS are especially causative for this.
Due to its controversial nature, many stickfigure artists - especially east Asian artists - around the world have wound up blacklisting Countryhuman community members and artists from interacting with them.
Mid-Fight Masses and related characters
Mid-Fight Masses, and its related characters, were a phenomenon released in the early modding days of FNF in 2021. While these characters were not created for the mod - instead being made as early as when their creator, Dokki Doodlez, was 9 or 10 years old - they were popularized in the FNF mod featuring them, and became somewhat of a sensation, being some of the most popular characters in the fandom.
Sarvente, Ruv, and other characters in the universe sparked their own microfandom outside of FNF, with many new and young artists creating characters based on their distinct designs. With colorful facial markings, detailed clothing, and blank white eyes, many stickfigure characters created in 2021-present follow these design traits. They stand out from other popular stickfigure communities in the sense that many of these characters very rarely are shown committing violent acts, and have much more whimsical and fantastical lore.
