I figured it was just a play off the meme
Edit: I hid the link because some sidebar content on “Know Your Meme” may not be SFW even if the main page content is fine
#1238 : See It Coming
Things are picking up speed. And that certainly explains the beanbag.
OK, I’m going to have to remember that trick with the door.
Spoilers
Isn’t the Beholder one of those sacred TSR/WotC properties? Is this going to be a “We have Beholders at home” version? Unlike one-off jokes like the mind flayer, this looks like a pretty major part of the story.
Edit: Yes, it’s on the Protected Identity List: beholder, gauth, carrion crawler, tanar’ri, baatezu, displacer beast, githyanki, githzerai, mind flayer, illithid, umber hulk, yuan‐ti
I recognize that Burlew could have gotten permission (he did cartoons for Dragon, after all). Was still my first thought though.
I think you can still make use of a beholder in a dnd based webcomic under protected speech. There are other web comics with mimics, beholders, rust monsters, and gelatinous cubes, all of whom are unique to DND.
So Serini has been adopting and raising monsters, eh? First the trolls, now this. I wonder if that will prove relevant to negotiating with Redcloak?
None of those (except for beholder) are protected though. WotC explicitly grants a license to use the other critters for people making D&D related stuff.
Too lazy to look for the strip but there was a throw-away joke early on (during a Q&A with the cast) about how some beholder wasn’t going to be allowed on the strip.
As Zz’dtri pointed out, parody is protected speech. The prior appearances of the illithids and the beholder were explicitly making fun of the concept of Protected Identity, and didn’t really do anything else besides make fun of the concept. They were pure parody. Sunny, however, does not seem to be parody, and does have a role in the story, for which the fact that e’s a beholder specifically (and not just some random eyeball-monster) is directly relevant.
That was my thinking. You can have a five second appearance by Mickey Mouse for the purpose of saying “Holy shit, we can’t have Mickey Mouse” but you’re not going to be able to use him beyond that.
Of course, again, the simplest answer is likely “Burlew asked (paid?) and WotC said yes” since he already has some past connection with the company. The previous jokes were years and years ago and things change (and popularity grows).
I’m amused that the lowly carrion crawler is on the list. I wonder if displacer beasts lord it over blink dogs that they’re on the list and dogs aren’t. I would have protected hook horrors before umber hulks.
Did 3.5e still split up the various types of See-In-The-Dark-Vision? I notice that the dwarves’ eyes are glowing and V’s aren’t.
Since Serini clearly has at least two monsters working for her, it bears mentioning that Sunny’s orange speech bubbles match those of the unseen monster from the end of Utterly Dwarfed of the one who helped carry the paladins out.
I’m not sure why this is spoilered, but I’ll follow suit:
The Beholder is “Product Identity” and is not covered by the Open Game License. However, I don’t think Rich Burlew is relying on the OGL for OOTS. I’d think the parody exception covers him. He has in the past marketed some of his artwork on its own, including minis/tokens/pawns based on his art, so he might run into some trouble if he included “Sunny” as a “Beholder” in one of those projects. But there are a lot of miniatures, tokens, pawns and so forth of “floating eyeball” monsters from various third parties, and WotC has generally let those slide.
ETA: ninja’d by a whole squad of comments
It was right after the link and I didn’t want anyone reading “Beholder” before reading the comic 
This actually has some very interesting implications for that conversation we had a while back about always evil monsters in DND - at least in Rich’s world.
So far, Rich has played some of the Always Evil tropes straight, and subverted others.
Goblins are usually evil, but just because they were raised in a harsh and violent culture - see the origin story for O-Chul for a great example.
Vampires are always evil, because when you become a vampire your soul is replaced by an undead spirit created from your darkest moments, as we learn from Durkon. Durkon winning back control is an amazing feat, achieved only because he is a very strong cleric (probably in the top 5-10% of divine casters in the OOTS world, considering his level). Durkon probably has one of the strongest wills of any living humanoid in the OOTS world. And even THAT was implied to be temporary, which is why he had to be killed and raised rather than just controlling his vampiric body going forward.
Now we see a Beholder, who apparently isn’t Evil. But in DND beholders are always evil, and not really due to a cultural thing - beholders innately worship the Great Mother, and their entire society is built around the fact that all beholders view the Great Mother as the perfect being, and themselves (as in the individual beholder, not the whole species) as the perfect mortal representation of the Great Mother while all other beholders are grotesque, twisted mockeries of that divine perfection. Creatures other than beholders are even more vile and disgusting, which is the one reason beholders will sometimes stop being disgusted with one another long enough to team up against the other races. This is apparently due to some kind of magic on the Great Mother’s part that changes what each beholder learns when they look into the Great Mother.
Beholders have had different life cycles in different editions, but one constant is really bad parenting. Sometimes beholders didn’t do any parenting at all (in 5e they dream other beholders into existence by accident, meaning there aren’t beholder babies; but in say 3.5 which is what OOTS was originally based on, they spit up a bunch of babies once in their lives, eat all but one, then chase that one off to fend for itself). So the beholder mindset appears not to be passed down through education and culture, but to be magically innate to a race that is magical in nature and cannot exist without magic.
So, did Serini find a way to override these behaviors in an infant beholder? Or does beholders just not work that way in OOTSverse, and like more “grounded” races (no pun intended) can be evil or good depending on how they are raised?
In passing, I’ll again raise the point that Burlew himself has said he’s not strictly using 3.5E game mechanics.
I’m not sure if this was the case in 3.5, but in at least some iterations of D&D, elves have “low-light vision”, which allows them to see in dim light as if it were bright light, but does not allow them to see in total darkness, while dwarves have “darkvision”, which allows them to see in total darkness within a certain range, but only in black and white.
I think it’s mostly based on what WOTC created wholesale and what they lifted from elsewhere. Even the rust monster, which you pointed out IS SRD - they may have created the concept of “rust monster” but the design is stolen from a cheap plastic “dinosaur” made in China decades ago, and maybe that’s enough to sink a copyright claim…
Low light vision for V (see well in faint light) and Darkvision for the dwarves (see perfectly, but in black and white, in total darkness)
Sure. I was asking if there was a potential 3.5e-based reason for it though. I know 1e/2e had “ultravision” for dwarfs and “infravision” for elves but, by 5e, it was all just generic “darkvision” and was wondering where it stood in the middle.
Well, ackshually…in AD&D (1e/2e), both elves and dwarves had infravision. Drow and a few other critters, usually ones found primarily in “the Underdark” (before it was really firmly established that was a thing) had “ultravision”. IIRC, the only functional difference was that infravision had a range of 60 feet, while ultravision had a range of 90 or 120 feet. In the Underdark, drow and other denizens cold see you before you could see them, even if you had infravision.
W’eves… 
I do wonder about the presence of “tanar’ii” and “batezuu” on the Product Identity list. Those are just other words for “devil” and “demon”, and TSR certainly didn’t originate either of those (in fact, some of the specific demons and devils, they themselves got into legal trouble over, for being too similar to others’ intellectual property). Is it just those two words that are protected?
It being words that are protected is also supported by both “mind flayer” and “illithid” being on the list, those being synonyms referring to the exact same creatures. But on the other hand, there’s apparently also something called a “mind flayer” in Star Wars lore. So I dunno.