Fanfic / Death and Taxes

"Once upon a time at the foot of a great mountain
There was a town where the people known as Happyfolk lived
Their very existence a mystery to the rest of the world
Obscured as it was by great clouds"

— Fire Coming Out Of The Monkey's Head, Gorillaz

Death And Taxes is an Alternate Universe fic of Happy Tree Friends by Str8aura.

For decades, the population of a small town in America have been completely removed from time. Nobody can enter, nobody can leave, and nobody can die; every time they do, they simply respawn back as if nothing happened. And as it happens, fate itself seems conspired to kill them as frequently and as painfully as possible.

In these times of uncertainty, certain people only seek to worsen things. A dark force is rising in Happy Town, and citizens left to oppose it are losing more and more hope for a future every day.

Beginning as an anthology detailing the lives of various Happy Town citizens, Death and Taxes quickly develops an overarching story with the murderous Flippy emerging as its central protagonist.

It can be read on AO3 here.

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Death And Tropes:

• Adaptational Protagonist: While Happy Tree Friends never had a 'protagonist' per se, the clear stars on all the merchandising and with heavy focus in the show were Cuddles and Flippy. Here, they're the antagonists.
• Adaptation Deviation: Characters are far more adult and mature. Happy Town's repeated deaths are acknowledged and said to be part of a curse the town inflicts on its residents. Several smaller changes are made to characters, like Splendid having no superpowers, and Flippy not having Dissociative Identity Disorder.
• Adaptation Expansion: The characters and lore are given far more detail and backstory than the show ever gave.
• Adaptation Origin Connection: Pop was Flippy's general back in the war. Cuddles, Giggles, Sniffles, and Toothy were childhood friends who happened to live in the same town.
• Adapted Out: Certain characters, like Lumpy or Disco Bear, never appear in the story.
• The Alleged Car: Cuddles' car, which is later used by Flippy. Ironically, despite the first paragraphs of the entire story being dedicated to describing how poorly it runs, it manages to survive a head-on collision with Giggles' minivan.
• AM/FM Characterization: Because most characters couldn't choose what music they brought into Happy Town, this happens frequently.
  • Petunia is a massive David Bowie fan, owning all of his albums up made until Year One. She also listens to Dire Straits with Handy.
  • Cuddles prefers Electric Light Orchestra, specifically owning a tape of Out Of The Blue. When Flippy borrows his car, he listens to it and finds himself surprisingly enjoying it.
  • Giggles references Jimmy Buffett to Russel, who doesn't react to it, but he later worriedly asks Lifty if he's still alive in the modern day.
  • Handy sheepishly admits to enjoying Spice Girls.
• As You Know: The first chapter features an early scene of Sniffles explaining the town curse to his friends, who are already very familiar with it.
• Arc Words:
  • 'Life went on', often at the end of a chapter.
  • 'BITCHES PROTECT BITCHES' becomes one later. Giggles owns a shirt with the text on it which she lends to Russell, and the line is quoted a handful of times between characters. By the end, Russell gets the line carved into his new peg leg.
• Beige Prose: Certain scenes (such as Lammy remembering her home break in, or Shifty encountering Flippy in the desert) consist entirely of a handful of curt sentences.
• Bittersweet Ending: Flippy is dead, and everyone is free from the town curse, but it's clear nobody will be able to return to a normal life. Giggles and Shifty are together after the latter lost his arm and his brother and the former realized a relationship with Sully isn't possible. Both are penniless and have no plans for the future other than to keep moving forward. The only one who gets a confirmed happy ending is Russel, who leaves Giggles to return to the ocean he loves with plans to spend the rest of his days there.
• Bizarrchitecture: Lammy's home, when Mr Pickels takes residence in it. The kitchen remains intact, but the rest of the house becomes a strange funnel of furniture and rooms, shifting and changing in response to Lammy's emotions.
• Breather Episode: Chapter 10 takes a break before the action opening, and allows Giggles and crew to take a break and have dinner before the big fight.
• Buried Alive: Flippy's method of ending people in a deathless world, first by land, and then by water.
• The Bus Came Back: Cuddles and Giggles are both introduced in the opening chapter. Cuddles takes five more to reappear, and Giggles six.
• Call-Back:
  • Giggles and Handy arrive at Petunia's doorstop in the exact same way, described with the exact same words, twenty-four years apart.
  • Reflecting on his life shortly before his death, Cuddles recalls his childhood friendship with Sniffles, an element of his character (and a character) that had gone unmentioned since Chapter 1.
  • Cuddles dies listening to the same song he was listening to in his introduction.
  • Heading to the final battle, Giggles borrows a tape of David Bowie from Petunia's massive collection previously seen in her solo chapter.
  • In the finale, Flippy once again dies skewered on his own blade as he did with Pop, only permanently this time.
  • In her list of things to remember, Petunia wonders what Star Wars entry the modern world is on. When she meets Lifty later, she eagerly asks the same question.
• The Cameo: Nutty shows up briefly in chapter 8, and is absent from the rest of the story.
• Capepunk: A rare hopeful example. Resident superhero Splendid is powerless, and often regarded as an idiot and a fool by those around him, but loves his job and still continues to be a lasting symbol of hope to Happy Town's residents.
• Cast Herd: Independent characters slowly form groups that oppose or aid each other. Giggles, Lifty, Shifty, and Russel form the primary heroic group, aided by the neutral Handy and Petunia, and opposing the villainous Flippy and Cuddles.
• Central Theme: Despite being filled with gore and violence, Death and Taxes tries is ultimately about the goodness in people prevailing through brute force of will.
• Closed Circle: A rare self-imposed one. Lammy refuses to leave her house due to traumatizing circumstances back in Year One, meaning she continues for quite some time to have no knowledge of what the rest of Happy Town is like. Her chapter is situated entirely within her house.
• Complete-the-Quote Title: "Nothing in life is certain except death and taxes."
• Conditioned to Accept Horror: For the residents of Happy Town, death and dismemberment are a daily event. None of them react to it with much more than tired dismay, although a few have adjusted better than others.
• "Could Have Avoided This!" Plot: Many characters didn't even live in Happy Town when Year One began, and simply happened to be in town for that day. Handy later laments this, noting that if he had just stayed in bed that day, he would have had a long and happy life.
• Crisis Point Hospital: In Year One, Happy Town's only hospital was flooded with patients as a result of mass deaths. In the modern day it's on the brink of closing, since it's not exactly needed anymore.
• Darker and Edgier: Death and Taxes comes with almost none of the black humor inherent in its parent series, treating the premise of infinite deaths gravely seriously.
• Darkest Hour: Chapter 10. The plan to save Splendid failed, Shifty is dead and likely captured, Giggles and Lifty can't go back home, and Flippy is coming for them. They decide to embrace this, planning on making a Last Stand against Flippy.
• Deader than Dead: By Happy Town standards, burial. Splendid is horrified by the process when he undergoes it, since it blurs the lines between death and life until he can no longer tell what he is.
• Death Is Cheap: Because of the curse, killers like Flippy need to get significantly more creative in order to make their kills stick.
• Deer in the Headlights: Quite literally, when Flippy turns on the headlights to indicate his presence to Giggles and company. All of them freeze, and nearly avoid being run over.
• Dramatic Irony:
  • Any scene set before or during the start of Year One. The narration makes it in no way unclear what's going to happen to these characters in the coming days.
    The place is Happy Town. The time is noon. In two day's time, everybody who lives here will be dead.
  • Shifty and Lifty meeting Flippy. The audience knows he's a maniac serial killer; they don't.
• Drink-Based Characterization: Giggles and Petunia both independently own Bacardi Superior, and share it with their respective guests.
• Eldritch Location: Happy Town. Aside from the curse, everything about it is strange and unnatural; A lake and a desert exist only a short distance away from each other, the former of whom conjures up strange storms to anyone who attempts to cross it. At its edges, the invisible barriers keeping people inside are both seemingly tangible and intangible, capable of cleaving a person in half (while somehow keeping them alive) but still able to be moved through harmlessly. And of course, the fact that it's a Genius Loci that 'woke up' and began tormenting its residents is another thing.
• Ensemble Cast: The closest thing the story has to a 'protagonist' is Giggles, although many other characters take the role of a hero fighting against Flippy or aiding others in some way.
• Epigraph: Every chapter opens with a segment from Fire Coming Out Of The Monkey's Head, usually relating to the events of the chapter in some metaphorical way. More specifically;
  • Chapter 4: Here they played out their peaceful lives, innocent of the litany of excess and violence that was growing in the world below. This chapter is a Breather Episode detached from the previous chapter, which introduces who will become the main antagonist, and focuses on characters unaware of these dark going ons.
  • Chapter 5: To live in harmony with the spirit of the mountain called Monkey was enough. Here Happy Town is introduced, who will be the metaphorical 'spirit' in every lyric quoted after.
  • Chapter 6: Their very existence a mystery to the rest of the world, obscured as it was by great clouds. Here, two people from 'the rest of the world' arrive in Happy Town, which was previously obscured to them.
  • Chapter 8: Holes began to appear, bringing with them a cold and bitter wind. Flippy is back, and things are beginning to get worse.
  • Chapter 9: And soon they began to mine the mountain, its rich seam fueling the chaos of their own world. The chapter opens with Lifty and Shifty digging holes for Flippy, mining the 'mountain'.
  • Chapter 11: There were no screams. There was no time. The mountain called Monkey had spoken. 'The spirit' being Happy Town has indeed spoken to the town's inhabitants, delivering a message to them.
  • The epilogue simply features the final lines of the song, which specifically refers to a 'Little town in USA'.
• Episode of the Dead: The first chapter focuses on the zombification of Mole, and the ramifications of a town-wide zombie apocalypse. After this zombies are dropped from the story entirely.
• Everything's Deader with Zombies: Happy Town demonstrates the ability to turn its citizens into zombies, but fails to utilize this any further after the opening chapter.
• Exposition Already Covered: Sniffles' attempted explanation of zombies, which is repeatedly derailed.
• Four Lines, All Waiting: Multiple plotlines and character arcs begin to converge near the end, merging into one singular story.
• Furry Reminder:
  • Sniffles somewhat sheepishly admits he used his anteater tongue to restrain Mole, to the slight disgust of the others.
  • Petunia briefly brings up asking a cow down the street for milk before quickly changing the subject.
  • Russell's being an otter becomes plot relevant when it comes time to dig up Splendid from the ocean, as he can operate underwater better than most, even disabled.
  • Lammy is described as bleating a few times, and her nature as a prey is used as a metaphor to contrast with the predatory Happy Town.
• Genius Loci: Happy Town. It goes from a vague intelligence to clearly speaking to characters, and making its motives clear. It used to just be a patch of American land, but was built over time into a town, with the act of resources being harvested compared to dissection for it. As a result, it hates the life that lives inside it, and makes them suffer eternally as a result.
• I Found You Like This: Giggles finds Russell washed up on the beach, and takes him in to nurse him back to health.
• Ironic Echo:
  • Cuddles' words in the first chapter: "So long as it can torture us, the universe says it's game." Much, much later, Giggles (who was present when the line was spoken) repeats it to Lifty.
  • Similarly in his introductory chapter, we hear a snippet of ELO's "It's Over", which repeats during his death.
• Lightning Can Do Anything: Mole's zombification is said to have been brought about by lightning. Granted, the characters admit that this makes no sense, and exists purely to torment them.
• New Rules as the Plot Demands: In-universe. As Cuddles puts it, 'as long as it can torture us, it's fair game'. Happy Town repeatedly twists the rules of its own curse to inflict further pain on its residents.
• Mature Animal Story: The story features cutesy anthropomorphic animals as the original series does, but doesn't pretend to be for children as the original does.
• Mundane Fantastic: After twenty-four years of the Happy Town curse, few are surprised by it anymore. It's become a tragic part of life.
• Mythology Gag:
  • The first chapter, featuring Mole reincarnating as a zombie, references his role in the canon episode Remains to be Seen, where he is the only surviving zombie.
  • Petunia's love of Star Wars references her cosplay in Wrath Of Con.
  • Flippy's jeep is the same as his in the show, as seen in Double Whammy.
  • Happy Town takes the form of a pickle to Lammy, clearly referencing the canon character of Mister Pickels, although he's never referred to as such.
  • Year One is eventually revealed to be 1999, the same year Happy Tree Friends began.
• Platonic Kissing: Giggles and Petunia share a kiss when they meet again, although 'platonic' is questionable giving they've presumably slept together in the past.
• Plot Hole: Why, exactly, Happy Town (as Lammy) kidnapped Splendid is never elaborated on, other than to provide a Motive Rant.
• Religious Horror: Flippy is a very religious man, which paints all of his actions. He mistakes the actions of Happy Town as the actions of God, and likewise when it begins to betray him, he sees it as the Lord himself abandoning him.
• Removing the Head or Destroying the Brain: The Trope Namer is quoted by the Genre Savvy Toothy and Giggles when Sniffles attempts to explain their newfound zombie virus.
• Resurrective Immortality: The core of Happy Town's curse is that it brings back the dead, over and over again, and heavily skews fate to kill them multiple times a month. Bodies remain where they die until none are looking at them, at which point they respawn somewhere else, oftentimes the place they've spent the most amount of time at recently.
• River of Insanity: Russell's journey into the Happy Town lake to try and escape. All of the crew except for him died, his ship split in half, and he came home with a Mystical Plague.
• Rotating Protagonist: Initially, every chapter focused on a different part of Happy Town, with it's protagonist providing the chapter name. However, as a plot began to develop, this habit dropped and protagonists began to repeat.
• Ruder and Cruder: Death and Taxes is much more verbal and crass than Happy Tree Friends, and features explicit references to sex and fetishes.
• Sea of Sand: The desert outside Happy Town is described as seemingly infinite, and always just big enough to be impossible to cross by foot.
• Shout-Out:
  • Pop reads from Frog and Toad to Cub in their opening scene.
  • In the same chapter, Flippy quotes from The Cask of Amontillado.
    "For the love of god, Montresor, for the love of god!"
  • Russell demands alcohol of Giggles in a very Alestorm fashion, crying for 'wenches and mead'.
  • Russell refers to alcohol as grog, which Giggles takes note of. He also quotes Macbeth's 'wanton boys' line.
  • In the same chapter, Giggles explains to Russell that 'the cannons don't thunder, and there's nothing to plunder'.
    • In the epilogue, Russell recites a bar of that same song to himself while thinking of Giggles, confirming he's familiar with it.
  • Flippy's method of punishing Splendid is taken directly from Preacher.
  • Chapter 10 quotes Hotel California while Shifty is walking through the desert, seeing 'a shimmering light' which turns out to be Flippy's headlights.
  • Shifty recalls reading Dune, and specifically the pain box, while he's losing his arm.
  • At Petunia's house, Lifty is put on the spot to recollect the last thirty years of history. Among the things he mentions are Doctor Who being revived and Michael Jackson dying. In turn, each of the characters ask about their favorite musician (David Bowie, Jimmy Buffett, Johnny Cash, Fats Domino), who he recognizes zero of.
  • While sawing off Shifty's arm, Flippy quotes a Bo Burnham lyric... From a song that wouldn't come out until a decade or so after they were separated from the outside world.
  • Lammy compares Pickels' erudite method of speaking to Snagglepuss.
  • Petunia lists Star Wars and The Simpsons in her journal of things to remember. The journal itself evokes the similar memory keeping journal Fran kept in The Stand.
  • The repeat usage of the term 'Year One' calls to mind many comic book's habits of using that term in their titles, such as Batman: Year One.
  • The teacher Giggles and Cuddles shared as a kid is named Miss Cheerilee.
• Song Fic: While not fitting the classical definition of a Song Fic, this fic uses music in multiple ways throughout its run. Gorillaz opens every chapter, multiple characters are defined by the music they listen to, and quotes from songs are sprinkled throughout subtly.
• Speech-Centric Work: While it features multiple action sequences, the early half of the fic dedicates entire chapters to simply speaking.
• Torture Always Works: Flippy is repeatedly stated to torture people for the information he needs, and Giggles does a minor variation to Cuddles. Granted, the latter heavily featured talking in the interrogation.
• Uncertain Doom: Pop's last appearance is driving away from Happy Town, hoping to somehow be able to leave. Only his truck is found after this, leaving his fate uncertain, although past attempts to leave Happy Town have all ended in failure.
• Undeath Is Cheap: Killing Mole easily reverts his zombification, with little further impact on the plot.
• Unnaturally Looping Location: Part of Happy Town's curse. Walking far enough in any direction will bring you no further away from town, making leaving impossible. This is most apparent with the seemingly infinite desert Flippy does his work in.
• Weird West: Some elements of this. Even ignoring the massive supernatural desert, parts of Happy Town are described like a classic cowboy town, ruled with fear by a Texas Red style outlaw. Shifty and Lifty, a pair of bank robbers, rolling into town and becoming caught up in the local conflict calls to mind multiple spaghetti westerns. All of this comes on top of the supernatural elements at play from the start.
• While Rome Burns: At the very beginning of the Happy Town curse, while mass panic spread through the streets and people began dropping like flies, Splendid ecstatically celebrated his first saved life.
• Who Wants to Live Forever?: Everybody in Happy Town is functionally immortal, and they're all miserable about it.

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Life went on.