Establishing Series Moment / Fan Works

• A Brighter Dark: When Corrin kills Rinkah and Kaze in chapter 2, unlike the original, where she Took a Third Option. Solidifying that Anyone Can Die, Corrin is not an All-Loving Hero, and that mistakes on the part of the characters would be punished severely.
• Cinders and Ashes: the Chronicles of Kamen Rider Dante opens with Hotaro getting into a debate with Altair over whether to join her in her quest for revenge, setting up the Central Theme for the first arc. However, it's when we focus on Hoshi do we get an idea of the genre this fanfic would go. For a majority of Hoshi's POV, the first chapter came about as a standard Self-Insert Fic... Until Hoshi's meeting with Hotaro takes it literally as Hotaro is Hoshi's self-insert, whose dying act is to pass his belt to him. The final words of the chapter then establish both its tone and just how deep the fanfic would go, with Hoshi mentioning how the creator of Altair whose death is the cause for her revenge is his friend.
• Christian Humber Reloaded is initially the story of a wolf named Vash who's strong enough to kill anyone who crosses him, but when Vash somehow turns into a "Super Sayin(sic)" and wipes out a group of raiders that destroyed the village where he was living, you get the first clue that this is a story about an overpowered hero who gets powerups right and left.
• The first story of the Facing the Future Series sets the premise of the following stories when Sam gets ghost powers.
• Fatherhood Platon: The fic opens with Molly being ordered around by her idiotic father, Martin, and having to do his job for him, reflecting the central conflict of the fic.
• The Game of the Gods starts with a heroine using a "magic spell" to enter Middle-Earth through her television. Her parents come home to find her lifeless body with her head inside the broken television, establishing the story as a Parody Sue fic.
• "Dobby relished his groinsaw's roar as he withdrew the flesh-choked blade from the astronaut's ruined skull." With this opening line, thus begins the immortal fanfiction masterpiece known only as Thirty Hs, and it just gets even more insane from there.
• How I Became Yours establishes itself when Zuko, having learned about his and Katara's miscarried son Kuzon and Mai's role in keeping Katara's letters from him, beats Mai up, dismisses her arguments out of hand, divorces her and sets out to find Katara. The fact that Zuko is supposed to be in the right goes a long way in showing HIBY's kind of morality.
• The second paragraph of In This World and the Next talks about the implied (and soon, confirmed) rape of Hermione Granger by "Ronald Fucking Weasley," then the third has a fairly hasty and acrimonious off-screen breakup of Harry and Ginny. This is only the tip of the iceberg, but it does go to show how far the author's willing to go to set up Harry and Hermione, including time travel.
• In the Sesame Street fanfic Lessons Learned on Sesame Street, the nature of the fic becomes apparent very early on when Maria starts masturbating upon waking up. As one Dramatic Reading found here put it:
  "We're getting right into it! Wow!"
• Light and Dark The Adventures of Dark Yagami establishes its highly illogical and unpredictable plot by having Light's father, who is initially shown to be in America^note The canon series takes place in Japan, so it's obvious that the author is taking liberties with canon with the rest of his family, suddenly turn out to be disguised as Watari, and even more suddenly turn out to actually be on L's side at the end of the next chapter.
• A young man nervous about a paternity test meets his baby daughter, and all his anxieties wash away as he promises to be the best father he can for her...thus begins the story of Ma Fille.
• Marie D. Suesse and the Mystery New Pirate Age!, in its introductory scene, has a paragraph lampshading the typical descriptions of self-inserts while describing Marie.
• At the end of the prologue for Mass Effect: Human Revolution, Shepard is found murdered. This is not your usual Mass Effect crossover, and Anyone Can Die.
• The horribly misspelled Author's Note leads into Ebony describing herself to the reader, and we know the true nature of My Immortal from the very start.
• Naruto Veangance Revelaitons showcases what kind of a fic it is with a brief parenthetical note in the first chapter after describing the main character's hair as being like that of Justin Bieber (i dont liek him tho FUCK HIM HE SUCKS ALL MODERN MUSIC FUCKING SUCKS")
• The sequel to Naruto Veangance Revelaitons, New Champion Evangelion most effectively showcases its status as a Fix Fic in the equivalent scene to Shinji's first battle. Ronan achieves 10,000% synchronization and curb stomps the Angel with minimal damage, all while pointing out Shinji could never do what he did.
• Overlady sets the general tone of the story with its very first sentence.
  This dark and malevolent tale of wickedness begins, as such things do, on a dark and stormy night. Well, no. That's a lie. It was a dark and stormy mid-afternoon. But it was still pretty sinister!
• Pokemon Opal And Garnet's first moment revolves around a prologue showcasing the invention of the Devolver, before us being introduced to our protagonist, Kaylie Rodgers... whose father has been dead for 10 years. This is not your regular Pokemon fanfiction, and it clearly shows, diving (albeit in a K+ rated way) into such concepts as death (from cancer, no less!), bullying and prejudice, child abuse, smoking and doing drugs and why it's bad for you, and the controversies of politics, particularly going against the latest presidential administration and bathroom laws regarding the LGBT community.
• The Pokéumans Fan Verse has had several of these from its many stories:
  • Blinding Desires begins with the protagonist being experimented on by Pokextinctionists, opening right when they blinded her.
  • Well-Grounded Confidence: Moe flips out and batters a guy after being accused once too often of being a spy and a freak, highlighting the personal struggle and the level of dealing with his past and other people that the protagonist will have to go through to earn his happy ending.
  • Ares: The arrival of Bruno, a Fourth-Wall Observer who dresses like a real-life member Team Rocket Admin, to get the ball rolling on the series' trademark weirdness. It gets stranger from there.
  • Monster ends the very first chapter with the Peter waking up from the experimental procedure to discover the base in ruins and everyone dead.
  • Iron Ghosts: The reporter who started to get a lead on the existence of the Iron Ghosts is murdered by two assassins from the Ghosts at the end of the prologue. This is a Villain Protagonist story, and it is not nice.
  • Just Another Story: The entire first chapter that shows that this story runs on awesome.
  • Back And Forth: The first time Para loses control to Lyz and literally tears a troop of bad guys to pieces. A grave warning that this story is going to have a lot more serious overtones than the author's previous works.
  • Sadly, most of the badly-written stories have a badly-written first chapter that sets the tone for the rest of it pretty well.
• The first installment of The Prayer Warriors has the protagonist talking with his girlfriend about their plans to rid the world of everyone who doesn't share their religious views, highlighting their mission. They then almost effortlessly defeat and kill Grover Underwood, showing how easily and brutally they deal with their enemies.
• The first chapter of Romance and the Fate of Equestria brings the Mane Six together in a sleepover party. It sets up the premise of Twilight beginning her studies on The Power of Love, and displays the character dynamics, humor, and sexy but not smutty atmosphere which would permeate the rest of the story. In particular, Applejack's outburst of "Twilight, where do you keep the liquor?" is considered the definitive moment of establishing the story's tone.
• Seventh Endmost Vision begins with the fic's version of one of the most famous opening sequences in all of video games- the Bombing Mission that starts Final Fantasy VII. However, to highlight the massive differences from canon that this fic uses, it starts on the train to the mission, with Tifa trying to catch a nap while advertisements blare around her talking of Barret being a Shinra Head, Lucrecia running the Science Division while married to the leader of the Turks. Just to further enforce how different the setting is, the members of AVALANCHE beside her are Rufus, Reno, Rude, and Elena.
• The Stalking Zuko Series begins with Katara outlining the purpose of her diary- to keep tabs on Zuko after his Heel–Face Turn so that if he betrays the Gaang again, she won't be surprised. She starts off by listing her observations about Zuko, and despite insisting on referring to him as "Subject" and denying that she'll never be interested in him, notes that Zuko looks hot without his shirt on, and that he "never smiles." This goes to show that the entire series is colored by Katara's perceptions, and her growing (but not yet realized) feelings for Zuko.
• Suikakasen's first episode begins with a lighthearted and comical scene similar in tone to the source manga depicting a fistfight between Yuugi and Suika as their way of playing rock paper scissors... and then it cuts to a flashback of child Kasen starving to death (she gets better) because her mother abandoned her in the woods with all of the sadness and angst that comes with such a scene being played up as much as possible. One hell of a Cerebus Rollercoaster coming up!
• The Sun Soul firmly establishes itself as Darker and Edgier from the get-go with Ash coming across several growlithe corpses and nearly dying to a wild pokemon attack in the first chapter. But exactly how dark the story will be isn't shown until the second chapter when a red Gyarados wipes out Pallet Town and all its inhabitants except Ash, Misty, and Oak.
• Young Justice Titans, while technically a Continuation Fic and season 4 of Young Justice quickly establishes what this season is going to be like in the prologue. Why? Because in the very first chapter it features a superhero being murdered ON SCREEN by a Church Of Evil, and it was a member of the team as well. This establishes the Darker and Edgier (well, relatively speaking) tone this season is going to feature in its Story Arc. So much so, that the next chapter is almost something of a Mood Whiplash when it cuts to the Titans fighting killer robots.
• Oyasumi Midoriya solidly establishes the fic's premise, and its surreal nature with the prologue, "Present Day, Present Time". It opens with two officials talking about Izuku's Quirk and trying to work out its exact nature, strongly hinting at its immense power. The chapter ends with the two officials suddenly disappearing.
• The first chapter of Sly Cooper and Carmelita Fox and the Thievius raccoonus remakes the first level of the first Sly Cooper game, ending with Carmelita "failing" to shoot down Sly at the precinct after he steals intel from her office... only for Carmelita to regroup with him, Bentley and Murray, congratulating themselves for the False Flag Operation they pulled before she kisses Sly.
• There's Something Wrong With Us: The fic opens with Velma talking about how certain shows, like Rick and Morty, love to mock their audience with smug self-awareness. This reflects how the fanfic explores the characters' humanity rather than using them to mock the audience, which is what many Scooby Doo fans accuse Velma — both the show and the character — of doing.

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