La Belle
is a Super Smash Bros. murder mystery. It was a collaboration written by Herr Wozzeck, Royal Fanatic, Baby Gurl 278, and KILL THE EMPIRE. It is currently completed, although the collaboration element was ditched after a very long stretch of time due to the myriad scheduling conflicts that eventually arose.
The smashers are invited to a tournament; however, before long people begin turning up dead all around the smashers, and it's left to the smashers to figure out what is going on before everybody winds up dead. Do they succeed? Only time tells.
This fanfic provides examples of:
- Black Dude Dies First: A meta subversion occurs with Falco. While Falco isn't exactly a black character, he was a popular first victim in the Super Smash Brothers murder mystery fanfiction written at the time La Belle was started.
- Chivalrous Pervert: Falco hits on Isolde pretty frequently before he's killed off.
- Dead Person Impersonation: Sergio is living both as himself and as Albrecht.
- Driven to Suicide: Roy, upon finding out that he was an unwilling pawn in someone else's murder scheme.
- Evil Plan: The murderer killed the head of the tournament so he could supervise all of the murders. He then cast a ton of magic to live his double life, hide bombs, open gateways to alternate dimensions, and make sure the Smashers couldn't escape. And on top of that, he hypnotized Roy into doing his bidding. He even finds ways around the characters' various attempts to break the order. The only reason he's stopped is because other characters come onto the scene, which did not go according to plan. The fact that Fox, Isolde, and Peach manage to come up with a way to Out Gambit him helps, too.
- Failure Is the Only Option: Played with; Bowser tries to disrupt the order during one of his matches by forcing a draw. It doesn't work.
- Foreshadowing: Quite a bit.
- Before one of the murders, Popo's CD player goes missing. When the footage of Link's death is viewed one chapter later, Bowser comments that the CD player is playing opera and that the murderer has 'nice taste'. Which doesn't help Albrecht thanks to a long-standing European tradition of classical music.
- Roy goes into a lot of pain when he first meets Sergio, then feels easy enough. Is it any wonder, then, that he winds up being a tool for the murderer to kill people?
- Albrecht's smirk after Pichu tells him about Master Hand violating his orders.
- The Evil Plan has hints all before Fox and Peach reappear. "Peach" is oddly quiet just before her match, she doesn't seem to know her own moveset, Fox tells Marth he believes his claim that Isolde isn't the murderer, he goes missing right after his match, and the static seems to come in conveniently in the middle of that match.
- Albrecht states that Sergio knows dark magic and is studying what is keeping the smashers inside. Of course, we all know how that came to be after The Summation...
- Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse: Sergio was a victim of his village, who did nothing good to him. The survivors don't buy it.
- From Bad to Worse: Basically every event leading up to Bowser's death. The murders begin getting broadcasted outside of the mansion, the black magic at work is revealed, Roy paralyzes Bowser when he tries to kill Sergio, the investigation falls apart, and what makes it all worse is that by the time Samus dies the only characters left are those that have been developed through the entire fic.
- Heroic Sacrifice: Isolde, as part of a plan from Fox to save whatever smashers are left.
- Hidden Villain: The murderer is really good at hiding within the same track of land. It turns out he's Hidden in Plain Sight.
- Invisible Wall: It's implied very late in the fic that even if the Smashers left the mansion, this would be keeping them all from escaping.
- Just One Little Mistake: Sergio should probably have not brought Albrecht's body with him for Peach to see at one point.
- Kangaroo Court: Almost subverted; Ganondorf was given a fair trial to test the red herrings against him. It's ultimately all rendered useless by the fact that one of the members of the jury was hypnotized by the killer, which worked perfectly to the murderer's advantage when the jury ended up in a tie.
- Magic-Powered Pseudoscience: The murderer's method of killing people, whereupon he uses magic to send them to an alternate dimension with traps that are designed to kill the victims.
- The Meddling Kids Are Useless: The impromptu investigation that Bowser puts together starts off solid enough, but it crumbles under the combined weight of stress, the lack of any real evidence that can convict people after Ganondorf's death, finger-pointing, and Bowser being paralyzed by Roy. However, Soren and some of the Brawl newcomers come to the mansion and eventually help Fox with new insights into the murderer's magic.
- Men Are the Expendable Gender: Played with. Most of the victims are men. However, this is a given since there are only five women amongst all the men around them, thus resulting in fewer opportunities to see them killed off. Also, since Peach is the only survivor amongst the women it technically means the men get off relatively lucky.
- Mind Rape: The murderer really loves to toy with his potential victims, and it only gets worse as the murders progress and especially when he starts broadcasting the murders very late in the story. It gets especially bad on Bowser's end once the investigation starts to crumble.
- Private Detective: Bowser becomes this after the first few murders. He even gets together a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits to attempt to solve the murder.
- Rabid Cop: Master Hand, who jumps to all kind of conclusions when he looks into the murders. It's what causes Bowser to open his own investigation separate from Master Hand. Predictably, Master Hand gets himself killed.
- The Reveal: The murderer's idenity.
- Rube Goldberg Hates Your Guts: Oh, dear. Let's just begin with the fact that most of the murders don't even happen in the same dimension and we'll leave the rest up to your imagination.
- Sadistic Choice: Well, almost like one. For the first few murders, it operates very randomly. As victims get killed off, however, the Smashers find themselves having to make extremely difficult decisions on who should live and who should die. It doesn't help that most of the later murders relish in
Squick.
- Summoning Ritual: The murders were made for a ritual that would help Sergio get revenge on the world.
- Suspiciously Cracked Wall: There are "white screens" throughout the mansion that serve as portals to the dimension that people are killed in. They tend to solidify when a murder isn't happening or if someone isn't exherting extreme physical pressure on it, though.
- Unresolved Sexual Tension: Marth and Isolde; the two get rather comfortable around each other, to the point where it seems they fall in love. Neither one really acts on their feelings. It doesn't help that Isolde eventually becomes a victim herself.
