Fanfic / HTF The Stranger

The Stranger is an Adventure/Sci-Fi Horror Happy Tree Friends Fan Fic written by HTFan. The prologue chapter was published on March 24, 2015 on FanFiction.Net, and the whole story was completed exactly 9 months later, on Christmas Eve that same year.

20 Minutes into the Future, a Mad Scientist known only as The Mad Man has offered 21 people of varying personalities to test out his new virtual reality machine. Little do the volunteers know that The Mad Man plans to keep them as captives for his own personal entertainment. With his soon-to-be prisoners in place, the twisted scientist proceeds to completely alter their memories and personalities, before setting them in avatars resembling cuddly forest critters. With the new virtual world, christened as "Happy Tree Friends", finally complete, The Mad Man establishes himself as a Mad God, creating various "situations" which always end in the visceral demises of the innocent captives, just for them to wake up perfectly fine the day after with no recollection of the torture they went through, only to die again. And the vicious cycle continued, unquestioned and uninterrupted, for just over a decade...

Until one day, someone else suddenly appeared in The Mad Man's virtual world. Unlike the other humans trapped inside, the mysterious Stranger had his memories intact. When The Stranger recognized that the fluffy-critter utopia he was lost in was actually a nightmarish hellscape in disguise, he decided that he had to find a way for him and the other captives to escape, by any means possible. Can The Stranger win his fight against the unstoppable, godlike powers of The Mad Man?

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The Stranger provides examples of:

• A God Am I: The entire motivation behind The Mad Man's plans. He created the Happy Tree Friends world to wreak all sorts of misery and destruction without repercussions.
• Big Badass Battle Sequence: The fic climaxes with an all-out war between The Stranger with his army of militarized tree friends and The Mad Man with his army of shadows.
• Big Damn Heroes: Right as the Mad Man is about to deliver the finishing blow to The Stranger, Fliqpy barges in and distracts Mad Man long enough for Stranger to overtake his position as administrator.
• Bittersweet Ending: The Stranger successfully sets everyone free, but at the cost of his own life, and most of his efforts were forgotten after the captives were freed. The Mad Man is still alive in the real world, unpunished for his actions, but it's implied that he learned his lesson.
• Blithe Spirit: Despite not being as carefree and cheerful as other examples, the titular Stranger is still one of these. He's a Fish out of Water and the only human in the virtual world not under the Mad Man's control, and his overarching goal is to break this control from everyone else by intervening in situations and making them more aware of the Awful Truth.
• Broken Bird: The Stranger, full stop. All he wants is to go home, but he's forced to spend several months trapped in a world where death lurks around every corner, all the while The Mad Man controlling it constantly mocks his idealisms. This goes deeper when it's revealed that he used to be the apprentice of the Mad Man, who wanted to use the virtual reality technology to make the world a better place, only to have his brain forcibly wiped so the Mad Man can carry on with his plans. And we learn this after we learn that The Stranger's not gonna make it.
• Card-Carrying Villain: The Mad Man. He fully admits to being Sick and Wrong for enjoying what he does, but keeps going anyways because it was his life's goal to be able to play God.
• Central Theme: Free Will vs Fate. Our hero defiantly refuses to be involved in The Mad Man's plans, scraping tooth and nail to free all the captives from their gruesome fates and help them develop into the independent, self-sufficient people they once were.
• Chekhov's Gun: One of Flaky's quills gets stuck to The Stranger's arm while trying to carry her to safety. He decides to hold on to the quill as its sharpness can make a very useful weapon. Sure enough, it proves very useful when The Stranger has his back against the wall by Shadow Evil.
• Chronic Hero Syndrome: Deconstructed. In the early chapters, The Stranger tries to do the best he can to prevent any violence, only for his interactions to cause total mayhem. He soon falls into a deep depression despairing that there is nothing he can do to save anyone. Reconstructed when Stranger develops a plan to set everyone free, which relies on repeatedly saving the unique tree friends until they develop awareness like him.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: Well, this is a Happy Tree Friends fanfic after all.
• Cue the Rain: The Stranger is hiding in a dumpster to escape the police, and The Mad Man has just told told him the Awful Truth about the world he's stuck in. Right after The Mad Man leaves, it starts to rain, and all The Stranger can do is lie in fear.
• Did You Actually Believe...?: The Mad Man mocks The Stranger for thinking that he could end his reign of terror with a simple bullet to the head. The Mad Man then proceeds to show how strong he really is when in the role of administrator.
• Dramatic Irony: When The Stranger is introduced, he spends the first few chapters learning the ins and outs of the virtual reality he's trapped in. Meanwhile, anyone who has seen the original show or has read the prologue knows full well what Stranger is in for.
• Dreaming of Things to Come: Compounded with Self-Fulfilling Prophecy in Chapter 2: Reality. The chapter opens with The Stranger having a nightmare about Giggles dying with a slit throat and an evil doppelgänger of himself staring him down with a bloody knife. Bear in mind that at this point Stranger is unaware of the Unexplained Recovery rules, and still thinks the tree friends are just humans in costumes. When Stranger comes across Giggles later in the chapter, he attacks her under the impression that she and Cuddles faked their deaths just to screw with him. The Stranger then tries to cut open Giggles's "costume" with a knife, only to be greeted with a stream of High-Pressure Blood, prompting a Mass "Oh, Crap!" (including one from Stranger himself).
  • A more subtle example happens in the start of Chapter 5. The nightmare ends with The Stranger charging down an army of evil generic tree friends, which parallels The War Sequence which happens in the climax. A similar nightmare happens at the end of Chapter 12, with a vision of the Mad Man towering over a destroyed Happy Tree Town holding a burning blade.
  • The nightmare at the end of Chapter 8 not only foreshadows Flippy's debut in the following chapter, but also Flaky's cause of death in the Final Battle, which includes her assailant and even the exact location.
• Dwindling Party: The Final Battle plays out like many Happy Tree Friends episodes, starting with a large cast of characters and ending with very few survivors. In this case, every unique tree friend, The Stranger, The Mad Man, 299 generic tree friends, and thousands of Living Shadows participate in the fight, but only Stranger and Flippy (technically just Fliqpy) survive to the end.
• Fair-Play Villain: Despite having the ability to completely destroy the virtual world with a press of a button, The Mad Man decides to keep The Stranger on a level playing field, not really showing off the full extent of his power until his plans start to fall apart. And right before their showdown, The Mad Man heals the injuries Stranger received over the course of The War Sequence to ensure a fair fight.
• Fake Memories: A "Host" within the virtual reality (in essence, the unique tree friends) can have their mentalities altered by the administrator (The Mad Man), giving them new memories that may or may not line up with the original host's mindset. Since The Stranger wasn't properly programmed in, he enters the HTF server with all of his memories unaltered.
• Fantasy Gun Control: Just like the original show, firearms don't show up anywhere in Happy Tree Town. Subverted when Flippy reveals that he was stashing a handgun just in time for the Big Badass Battle Sequence.
• Given Name Reveal: The Stranger's name is revealed to be Ezekiel Pearce after he takes the ATC for himself and uses it to search for the server shutdown command.
• Happily Failed Suicide: After passing the Despair Event Horizon, The Stranger decides he has no option left but to die, planning to jump off the roof of a tall office building. At the last second, he notices an oil tanker crash into the base of the tower, the resulting explosion shakes the building off its foundation and start to collapse. The Stranger immediately rushes down in an attempt to save the people inside or at least go down fighting. He ends up successfully rescuing Flaky, not only gaining a new friend but in the process also discovered a loophole in the world's Reset Button properties, giving him the inspiration to make a plan and shut down the Mad Man's virtual reality for good. And given the Mad Man's ability to cause such a disaster on a whim, outright saying he was responsible for it during his Breaking Speech, this could also qualify as a Nice Job Fixing It, Villain.
• Hearing Voices: How the Mad Man interacts with Stranger up until the final confrontation.
• Heel–Face Turn: Fliqpy undergoes this when The Stranger reminds him of his fallen comrades and Missing Mom, asking how would they react if they saw what Fliqpy was doing to avenge them.
• How We Got Here: The first half of the epilogue is this, revealing that The Stranger was once a Wide-Eyed Idealist apprentice of the Mad Man before he was betrayed and left for dead by his own mentor.
• Humanity Ensues: After taking the Mad Man's spot as administrator for himself, The Stranger changes everyone's avatars into to their human selves when the next reset occurs.
• I Am Not Left-Handed: After Stranger successfully convinces all of Happy Tree Town that they are living in a simulation, the Mad Man demonstrates how his position as a god is Not Hyperbole: He drops a massive meteor on the town and summons a near-endless army of Mooks, forcing everyone to flee. This repeats itself when Stranger shoots The Mad Man, the latter instantly recovers and whips out the ATC to show how much control he really holds.
• Inevitable Waterfall: The fight between Stranger and Fliqpy in the woods is interrupted with one of these not long after they take their fight to a river.
• In the End, You Are on Your Own: When The Stranger finally meets the Mad Man face-to-face, he faces him alone.
• Loophole Abuse: Stranger's plan to free everyone involves this. The virtual world resets back to normal every 24 hours, recovering all property damage and erasing all memory of those who died when they recover. However, if anyone survives the interval between resets, then they will remember what happened in the resets they lived through. So if The Stranger saves as many tree friends as he can, the more likely they are to notice the other tree friends and significant property damage inexplicably recovering the day after, and will soon recognize the virtual world for what it is if their survival keeps up.
• Lotus-Eater Machine: The setting for most of the story.
• My God, What Have I Done?: The Stranger undergoes a very brutal one after killing Giggles in a paranoid rage, shattering his denial of everyone being simply weirdos in animal suits. Not helped by The Mad Man offering him the option to just go full Ax-Crazy.
  • Stranger suffers another one when he stabs Cub's dead body and realizes that the Mad Man nearly convinced him to eat the burned remains. This time Stranger almost resorts to suicide just to find a means to escape.
• My Greatest Failure: The events of Operation Tiger Bomb are this to Flippy, both sides of him.
• Mythology Gag: The Stranger refers to Flaky with male pronouns until he is proven otherwise. This references Flaky's infamous Viewer Gender Confusion from the main show due to her lacking Tertiary Sexual Characteristics.
  • Speaking of which, Stranger finds out Flaky's true gender after spotting a photo of her on a high school soccer team, referencing her brief stint as a goalie in A Change of Heart.
  • While The Stranger is looking for a situation he can safely intervene in, he sees events similar to the episodes False Alarm (Nutty running in to Lifty & Shifty in an alleyway) and In A Jam (The Mole running a blood drive). He settles on a situation that's a shot-for-shot recreation of Stayin' Alive. The next chapters also have situations that mirror the openings of Chip Off The Ol' Block, A Bit of a Pickle, and Double Whammy.
  • One of the kills in Fliqpy's rampage at the carnival is a direct reference to Cuddles's death in Mime to Five.
  • At one point, Stranger jokingly refers to Flippy as "a real party animal" and "the kind of guy who would use a cake slicer to cut someone's face off", then laments that he is a double whammy.
  • The tree friends sing the show's theme song while marching off towards the Final Battle.
• No Name Given: Unlike The Stranger, who has his true name revealed at the tail-end of the story, The Mad Man's name remains a mystery. Same can also be said for the true human names of the captives, only going by their tree friend names in the narration.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Normally, Flaky would want to stay as far away from danger as possible. But when she notices that the woods are on fire, knowing full-well that The Stranger and Fliqpy are still in there, she immediately rushes over to Stranger's rescue.
• Robbing the Dead: This is what The Stranger resorted to doing during the two month Time Skip between chapters 2 & 3 in order to survive, out of fear that he would cause another disaster if he had any extended interaction with anyone. It's mentioned he was reluctant to do so at the start, but soon began to accept that he supposedly had no other options.
• Sadistic Choice: When The Stranger activates the virtual world's shutdown procedure, he finds a video of the Mad Man giving him one final choice: either save himself and let everyone else die, or sacrifice his life to let everyone else go, and if he doesn't choose within 24 hours, everyone dies. After some long thought, The Stranger ultimately decides to let himself die to free the Mad Man's captives once and for all.
• Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!: The Stranger's motivation to free everyone inside the virtual world. The Mad Man sees no problem with the endless misery he puts on his captives since they wake up with no memory the day after. But Stranger sees this as completely sick and wrong, arguing that nobody deserves to be put in a situation like this.
• Snow Means Death: The Final Battle occurs during a cold winter's day, complete with snow.
• Spared by the Adaptation: The Stranger intervenes midway through a recreation of the episode Stayin' Alive; he saves Petunia and chastises Disco Bear for being a Casanova Wannabe Lethal Klutz.
• Take Me Instead: With Flaky in Fliqpy's clutches, The Stranger offers his life in exchange for hers. This gives Stranger the opportunity to talk down Fliqpy by reminding him of his Dark and Troubled Past.
• Technical Pacifist: The Stranger. While he isn't afraid to use violence to make a point, he's appalled at the prospect of killing someone.
• The Hero Dies: When faced with a Sadistic Choice, The Stranger chooses to sacrifice himself to let everyone go.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: The Stranger gives one directed at Disco Bear after witnessing and stopping his antics:

  The Stranger: "Dude, stop being a total dick and leave these women alone! If they did not want to dance with you in the first place, why in the actual fuck do you think they would want to do it if you forced them to? That's just harassment there, you dick! (...) Listen here, asshole! If I see you messing with these women again, trust me, there won't be anything left of you when I'm done. Now crawl back home you prick!"

• Time Skip: Quite a few, ten years pass between the prologue and chapter 1, two months pass between the events of chapters 2 & 3, four months go by between chapters 6 & 7, three months separate chapters 11 & 12, and 5 years pass between The Stranger becoming the new admin and him finding the shutdown command.
• Took a Level in Badass: Over the course of the story, The Stranger and Flaky evolve from a depressed hermit and The Paranoiac into an All-Loving Anti-Hero and a Hope-Bringing Plucky Girl respectively. And in the climax, just about every unique tree friend that isn't Flippy, Splendid, or Cub don soldier gear and gain the capability to mow down dozens of the Mad Man's Mooks at once.
• Tricked-Out Gloves: The Administrative Tactical Computer, or ATC, is a glove-bound supercomputer that The Mad Man was developing over the course of the story. This device by itself was what caused every situation in the virtual world to happen.
• Troubled Backstory Flashback: When The Stranger starts reading Flippy's diary, we are treated to a flashback that explains how Flippy's Superpowered Evil Side came to be.
• Two Guys and a Girl: The Stranger, Flaky, and later Flippy.
• Victory Is Boring: The Mad Man admits in a pre-recorded video that he has grown bored after playing God for over a decade, and was actually planning his own downfall at the hands of The Stranger as soon as he showed up. The Mad Man was planning to activate the virtual world's failsafe, destroy the facility housing it, and disappear into the night. But when The Stranger, a literal uncontrolled variable, appeared, The Mad Man decided to give himself one last challenge.
• Villainous Breakdown: When The Stranger finally convinces all of the tree friends that they are being controlled by The Mad Man with an iron fist, The Mad Man drops all pretenses and turns Happy Tree Town into an apocalyptic wasteland.
• We Only Have One Chance: Unlike all the other tree friends, The Stranger was not properly programmed in, so if he dies, he's Killed Off for Real.
• Wham Line: Ever since The Stranger rescued Flaky, he was acting like an overprotective parent to keep her safe. This all comes to a head in Chapter 14, when Stranger wants Flaky to opt out of the upcoming Big Badass Battle Sequence, she responds by repeating one simple word until Stranger cracks from the pressure and admits his love for her...

  Flaky: "Why?!"

  • During the final confrontation with the Mad Man, one of the tricks he shows off through the ATC truly shows how much control he has over the virtual world.
    The Mad Man: (while taking the form of a generic tree friend) "I was always there, every step of the way."
• Wham Shot: While showing off the powers of the ATC, one of forms the Mad Man takes is none other than the Shadow Flippy that killed Flaky.
  • The Stranger has finally made it to the Mad Man's computer and is ready to activate the shutdown command... only to be greeted with literal billions of files. Only one of these files holds the true shutdown program, and there's no search or sort tool to help him out.
    • And when Stranger finally does find the correct file, he's greeted with a pre-recorded video from the Mad Man telling him he has one last trick up his sleeve...
• What the Hell, Hero?: The Mad Man is outright flabbergasted at the prospect of The Stranger attempting to reason with Fliqpy. From Mad Man's perspective, such a thing would be a suicide mission at best, and for VERY good reasons.

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