Technically, work on Portal: The 4th Millennium franchise started (2008 December) after the Soviet Union's dissolution (1991 December) and the "earliest point" of the franchise (1910 April) occurs before the Bolshevik take-over of Russian Empire (1918 November).
, Aperture ScienceBusiness Magnet, Portal: The 4th Millennium franchise isn't really popular, it just tends to get on top of Google searches a lot.Its entire story can't be explained with one work set in it, and stacking works one upon another makes it worse. (In fact, why won't you get your ass away from this page and read about a work that is less confusing and isn't likely to blow your head up just by its description.)
"Era 1" Portal: The 4th Millennium franchise is divided into these main parts:
Portal: The 4th Millennium. (Insert Portal 1 plot here) Cut to 3000s, Aperture is in complete half-disrepair and is run by a purely artificial A.I. called <<Spectator Name Here>> an apparent heir apparent to Cave Johnson called Aperture Science Business Magnet, who also has the ability to make stuff work in insane ways. He made a whole new Earth in such a way, and everything was fine and dandy. Well, maybe except that the enemies from a thousand years ago were still here.
Thinking with Portalsspeculation. Cut to Cave Johnson's era. (This refers to Cave Johnson's era fleshed out before Portal 2 retconned everything.) Cave and Gladys (I told you about retcons man! I told you dog!) Johnsons are working in the past Aperture Laboratories when Cave suddenly contacts an extraterrestial ever-expanding empire known as the Combine. He orders them to turn his wife into the evil sarcastic computer of all time, and in return, gives them the Aperture energy balls. (No wonder they don't appear in Portal 2.) (Insert Portal 1 plot here) (AGAIN)
Portal 2: The Fake Community-Made. Cut to the present day. After finishing their epic saga, several leftover members of Thinking with Portals forum, most notably a guy THINKING that he is the Business Magnet, gather around and think "Portal is dead! We need something else! Perhaps a Portal 2! Yeah, we definitely need a Portal 2!" It attempted to snowball from here, with "the Business Magnet" compiling what he worked on in Hammer Editor and stuffing it into a mod. Though, it simply appeared to get (?) Valve's attention, and they launched an alternate reality game everyone expected to relate to Half-Life 2: Episode Three, but guess what. It was not.
Portal 2: The Stupidest Sequel of All Time. Cut to 2107, the world of the alternate reality game. Chell "Johnson" is awakened by some crazy automated system and notices Wheatley. They go through Portal 1 world, much changed since the Portal 1 times, encounter Doug Rattmann and the Companion Cube and get to awaken GLaDOS. Since that's where the alternate reality game ends, end of story? Not in the slightest. Just stuff Chell and Doug into Portal''mods'', including the same goddamn The Fake Community-Made and three mods the author chose to see as his favorites, namely Blue Portals, Portal: Prelude and that third one which was never supposed to exist. Then have a whole lot of crazy plotholes happen and bam, the author is turned into a Fan Fiction Writer of the 22nd Century.
Session#257. Cut to the present day. AGAIN. The same three "favorite" mods (read: their facilities) come into an agreement to break the space-time continuum and meet up in one time, using a clearly MS Paint Adventures element, Sburb "1.0". Meanwhile, the "2012" "Business Magnet" MAKES Sburb 1.0 and launches into his own adventure in - you guessed it - Land of The Fake Community-Made. He ends up destroying and recreating the world, again, but in a slightly different way which is now all MS Paint Adventures-themed.
Project: Midnight. Cut to post-Portal 2: The Stupidest Sequel of All Time times. A result of Chell's and Doug's actions, taking a shape of human and naming herself "Contine Overseer", purposefully strands herself inside a post-apocalyptic city where an organization called "New Dawn" is genetically modifying humans and giving them superpowers (which is obviously evil). Some of these "projects" (now called "rebels") run away and the New Dawn members chase them around. How Contine is involved? She is... just in the city and among these characters, and is affected by their actions. This story never ended, and likely never will.
Intermediary space: Cut to the present day, the Business Magnet (he mentioned it so many times, he must be right) comes across an Eldritch Abomination made by an alternate version of Project: Midnight, "Empress Contine Overseer". After killing an innocent victim, "irenicPie", the Business Magnet takes his pen against Empress Contine by continuing writing a sequel to Portal 2: The Stupidest Sequel of All Time only to find himself dead. He (who OF COURSE comes back to life) and irenicPie make friends, switch bodies and turn into Alternian trolls.
Lumina Squires'sSgrub Action. Cut to Alternia. One of these trolls, Lumina Squires, sets up a memo on Trollian. She, like thousands of other fated trolls, has come across Sgrub and makes this memo to find friends. After fucking the timeline up once she eventually goes to play Sburb with several fated-to-be friends. She eventually finds herself in a quite-not-love feeling towards one of them, Enine Estel, but it fails and everything drifts over to Portal 2.
Thinking with Diversity Vents work. Cut to the present day. Portal 2 is nearing release, and its magnet (heh heh) is attracting nearly everyone else. Including the Business Magnet. He attempts to phase in Portal 2: The Fake Community-Made maps again by using a completely new style and "original puzzle elements". It doesn't go far, but boy does it get references to itself.
Portal: PreludeConvention. Cut to GLaDOS's (or should I say, ASCAIS's) turn-on. Most of Aperture Science employees from all times are invited, and it becomes what you could best call a fan convention. This includes suddenly younger Chell, a Bring Your Daughter To Work Day participant, and pretty much everyone from above stories. They got some stuff, they did some things, and ASCAIS was turned on and "everything went DOWN". It ended there? No! Not so easily! One Alternate Universe was proposed, involving the Morality Core being stuffed into GLaDOS instead of ''Caroline'' (here, fixed), but it never saw the light of the day.
The Inevitable Sunset. Cut to the present day. The Business Magnet is suffering a Creator Breakdown and his worst enemy suddenly takes it over. She isn't very good at managing such things, almost instantly making a Mary Sue of herself, and in the unreleased ending by a secondary manager quits the idea and lives on her life with Doug in Mexico, hence closing Era 1.
Portal: The 4th Millennium franchise provides trope examples of:
Actionized Sequel: Portal 2: The Stupidest Sequel of All Time is this to the Portal game, to the point that it doesn't really fit the atmosphere.
Airstrip One: Let's just see how horrible the franchise has got it.
Aperture Science 3007 Colony, officially the Republic of Idiots (Idiotų Respublika) is a nickname for an Aperture Science colony in northern Europe, the southernmost of the three Baltic colonies (the other ones, Latvia and Estonia, being controlled by Black Mesa). Situated along the southeastern shore of the Baltic Sea, it shares borders with Latvia to the north, Belarus / White Russia to the southeast, Poland, oops I mean Land of Life and No Death, and the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad to the southwest. Across the Baltic Sea to the west lies the country which claims it madeMinecraft and another one full of pigs. Its population is 3320 (99.9% of its original population emigrated). Its capital is the Village Meškučiai and largest city is Vilnius.
2010: Simultaneously with the Combine OverWiki renaming itself to "Cake Wiki", Portal: The 4th Millennium franchise became designed after the Combine, leading to names like Combine Overtal 2: The Blackest Mesa of All Time.
2011: Not as elaborate, but the Soviet Union is returning and Portal: The 4th Millennium Wiki is a Soviet republic.
2012: There was a huge buildup that preceded this April Fools' Day by providing pictures of Vriska over the news, but on the day itself, the author went to play in a Minecraft Invader Zim server, because Minecraft is the TV show about Steve? trying to take over the Earth and Herobrine trying to stop him and Invader Zim is the video game where Dib landed on Zim's planet and forgot he was supposed to kill Zim.
Artifact Title: Originally a story of a new far-future Aperture leader, it has taken on two other fandoms, Homestuck and Invader Zim, and most of its plot revolves around the 20th, 21st and 22nd centuries.
Artificial Brilliance: 0ver5e3r was built to be better than GLaDOS in every way, and even scores an additional point in the Aperture Intelligence scale.
This trope also includes the "lightbugs" from Thinking with Diversity Vents work, which do something you wouldn't expect from an amateur mapper: normally, they go around until you complete a test chamber (which is just a button leading to "the outside"), but once you hop onto them, they will go away from a test chamber.
Bigger Is Better: In general. Portal: The 4th Millennium franchise doesn't play with human sized toys, no, everything must be at least kilometer in scale.
2011: The Grand Relaunch, which is preceded with a recap that is as good as a Yet Another Christmas Carol minus An Aesop and a character to deliver it to.
Though it really is the third anniversary, which makes Portal: The 4th Millennium franchise itself a huge Christmas Episode.
Fish Out of Temporal Water: It is more of a rule and not exception for characters to transfer between epochs (and, by extension, timelines and galaxies).
Massive Multiplayer Crossover: If you write fan fiction for or make a mod for Portal, there is an approximate chance of 10% that the Business Magnet will include it in his ever-expanding franchise.
If the fan fiction or mod becomes (in)famous, the chance raises to 100%.
If the plot for the fan fiction or mod changes, said work is discredited from the franchise, yet the things "borrowed" from it remain.
If you actually frown upon that, it gets to an edit war lasting a goddamn year.
Missing Episode: For a franchise that has colossal amounts of content that was released, expect even more colossal amounts of content that was cut.
For example, Portal: Prelude Convention AU No. 1, described above.
Even worse, a Portal: Prelude Convention AU No. 2 was announced, and is described in Portal: The 4th Millennium Wiki, but also never saw the light of the day.
Another notable example is: The Business Magnet mentioned that Portal 2 Episode Two: The Stupidest Sequel of All Time Part Two is an alchemization result of Portal 2: The Stupidest Sequel of All Time and never-released concept art for the said fan fiction.
And unless the concept art is miniature / pixel art, the result can't be only one fifth of Portal 2: The Stupidest Sequel of All Time.
No Export for You: There is a work, named Lena Bestselerovna: The Real Fail, about the life in the Aperture Science Golden Age, which was never translated from Lithuanian.
And even even worse, you can find Portal: The 4th Millennium franchise by Googling "4th millennium".
Oddly Named Sequel 2: The Electric Boogaloo of All Time: Originally played weird with Portal 2: The Fake Community-Made and Portal 2: The Stupidest Sequel of All Time being done within two months' period, but then it had to be made worse with endlessSnowclones of "Portal 2: The Stupidest Sequel of All Time".
Orwellian Retcon: You can literally do that with the Fan Fiction Application.
And it will spawn a billion other transcripts of some text pertaining to event X:
Pinocchio Syndrome: For any given Aperture Intelligence, expect them to have precisely two human versions: one that was the intelligence's origin, and one for which the intelligence is an origin.
And they apparently still retain whatever mental abilities they had while still a machine.
Punctuation Shaker: If there's any reason to stuff first "@" into a name, then "¤", and then just forget the rules of grammar altogether and talk in apparent gibberish.
This also leads into a NoFanFiction.NetCompliance: FanFiction.Net thinks "GL@DDA Magnet" is an email address.
Rage Against the Author: The latter half of Portal 2: The Stupidest Sequel of All Time and all the works onwards will almost always feature the creators with a hostile relationship towards the Business Magnet, even when it doesn't make any sense.
interdimensionalPortaller: You see how almost all the characters he is writing about are against him?
irenicPie: but if the character that wins against him is written BY him, doesnt that mean he's not actually that bad at all?
Ragnarok Proofing / Modern Stasis: You'd expect a society in an unclear state after 1000 years after a major catastrophe to be completely different, but Black Mesa? Still here. GLaDOS? Just stuff her into a human and everything's fine. Modern-day countries? Just with funny names, but still here. Most of the main cast? Through one or another way, still here. Is this the 3000s or still the 2000s?!
You have to look for ridiculous future skyline to identify between 2000s and 3000s: the Combine Citadels and their derivative buildings are scattered around the world in 3000s.
Rasputinian Death: Exaggerated, in the means that the characters use the equivalent of plot devices to kill each other and survive. May also be an example of Schrödinger's Cast.
Empress Contine, for one, has an indestructible server network telling her how she is going to die in alternate timelines, so that she can avoid it and continue living.
Combine that with the fact that she aspires to take over the world and... well... this universe is doomed.
Though, that still doesn't explain how she manages to die in the alternate timelines, where the server network is still working.
Recursive Fanfiction: As mentioned on "Massively Multiplayer Crossover", Portal: The 4th Millennium franchise is based more on Portal and Portal 2 fan works rather than Portal and Portal 2 themselves.
There was also a joke about "the only example of third-level Recursive Fanfiction": Portal -> ITS MY LIFE! -> Portal: The 4th Millennium franchise -> The Inevitable Sunset: An Impossible Continuation.
Portal: The 4th Millennium franchise itself is also updating, and seemingly faster than Skepkitty can MST (which results in Andrew Hussie-like speeds as Skepkitty MSTed 6 chapters of ITS MY LIFE! in one day).
Rule of Symbolism: Most of things occurring in the franchise are either symbolism or references.
Like the number 22 and the 22nd (or, as it would be said in Lithuanian, XXII) century.
This page in fact originally listed 22 tropes.
Though, the number increased.
Show Within a Show Type 4: Portal 2: The Stupidest Sequel of All Time exists inside itself.
Originally, Portal 2: The Stupidest Sequel of All Time was a one block ficlet, and hence did not feature any numbering.
The second take was preceded with "I wrote the next part."
Once on deviantART, the parts were given proper cardinal names: Parts One, Two, Three and Four.
When Chell and Doug part their ways, Part Five was separated to Parts 5c and 5d. (The system was later expanded to include "w" (Wheatley), "co" (Contine Overseer) and "a" (the Business Magnet).)
Prologues, epilogues and specials are not numbered, though they still suffer from the letters and the first one was still designated as "Part 8,5".
Portal 2 Episode Two: The Stupidest Sequel of All Time Part Two, being a direct sequel, continued the numbering with Part 21c.
Or, these are CHAPTERS and the fan fictions are PARTS, which makes MUCH MORE SENSE.
Portal: Prelude Convention uses an entirely different system. The first ficlet is named "The Original Convention" and subsequent additions are named "AUs No. 1, 2" and so on. (That is to say, if they were ever released.)
Later the name "Portal: Prelude Convention AU No. #" is more like an In Joke rather than a serious separate chapter.
OFU Portal: The 4th Millennium Edition, when it's not being an OFU, lists the names of characters appearing in each chapter. Mainly because there are twenty characters whose points of view we are dealing with and not two.
Unusual Euphemism: Portal 2: The Stupidest Webcomic of All Time seemingly has a new way of insulting people, taking obscure words (or actually mashups of words) to insult, such as "driving-on-rails", "Pascal-programmers" and "the worst thing since the guy who banned sliced bread".
WeirdFourth WallShit: To correctly understand how fourth wall works in Portal: The 4th Millennium franchise, this analogy may help.
1. First consider that for a fan fiction to be "published" and "existent" you need two separate programs: a text editor (be it as simple as Notepad or as complex as MS Office Word) and a publisher (usually third-party, see Notable Fanfiction Archives for a list.)
3. Then imagine the characters inside what the author was writing were given access to the Application. (Since they were modifying the Application, they were modifying the events around themselves.)
4. Then imagine said characters eventually became Mary Sue-level.
5. Then imagine said characters challenged the author to an equivalent of rap battle and won.
6. Then imagine said characters started writing and making up a new fictional franchise. Maybe it is still real life, maybe it is based on a Show Within a Show, maybe it is fixing the past's mistakes.
Then the Business Magnet called Portal: The 4th Millennium franchise "a totalitariancountry".
Write Who You Know: Often characters will be snuggled from real life and written as if they were always fictional, to the point of the Business Magnet claiming they were always fictional.
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