A TALE OF FRIENDSHIP, HONOUR, AND THE GLOCK XVII
Morgan Freeman's Blessings on this Beautiful Hood!
is a Crossover between The Boondocks and KonoSuba written by The Grand Cogitator in a collective fit of quarantine-induced cabin fever. The story follows Huey, Riley, and Aqua exploring the world while providing commentary on the ever-popular Japanese Isekai genre through the lenses of two African-Americans.
When Huey and Riley Freeman died to finish off Mecha Wuncler, the last thing they expected to see in the afterlife was a silver-haired and very white "goddess" named Eris. Because the afterlife is a bureaucracy run by white people, Eris' superior Aqua gave them the choice of going to paradise... or being revived in another world to do battle with the Demon King with a special cheat ability.
Only problem with that standard selling point for the recently dead?
The Freeman brothers are not Japanese hikikomori and have never even touched a Japanese RPG.
Aqua's boss, who appears as none other than Morgan Freeman, decides to punish the lazy goddess by sending her with the brothers as their glorified tutorial. Now stuck on this world, the Freeman brothers need to learn to navigate this new environment while getting VERY pissed off at the ridiculous level-grinding.
As of February 4, 2022, the story is complete.
Morgan Freeman's Blessing on this Beautiful Hood! provides examples of:
- Adaptational Intelligence: Aqua, in stark contrast to her portrayal in her source material, takes up more of a leadership role in this story, as she has to explain to Huey and Riley how the rules of the world of Konosuba work. It's less impressive than it sounds, since neither of the Freeman brothers are familiar with typical RPG tropes like classes and leveling up, compared to Kazuma who was a stereotypical shut-in video game nerd and thus had no need for any exposition, meaning Aqua has an actual purpose now instead of being useless.
- Adaptational Nice Guy: Kazuma is a lot more straightforwardly heroic compared to how he is in the source material, even if he still is a massive pervert. Some For Want Of A Nail is involved, as he took a cheat item as opposed to Aqua herself out of spite in this timeline, meaning he wasn't saddled with the useless goddess at the start.
- Adorably Precocious Child: How Darkness and most other people see Riley, much to his annoyance. Actually enforced because of the world's TV-14 filter, so any Charisma gain by the young Riley that would usually go into seduction goes instead to his adorability. Even succubi are only subjected to Cuteness Proximity around Riley instead of wanting to bed him.
- Adaptational Relationship Overhaul: Kazuma and Kyouya are friends in this fanfic, while Kazuma greatly dislikes Kyouya in canon due to the latter's white-knighting and greater success.
- Age Lift: Huey and Riley are teenagers in the fanfic as opposed to 10 and 8 respectively like they were in their series. However, some mentions of their previous life indicate that a Time Skip of some kind did occur from where their series ended.
- Awesome, but Impractical: Riley's cheat item was a Glock, and while a gun is a fairly impressive tool in a Medieval-era society and very effective against monsters and adventurers, Riley never bothered to ask for infinite ammo and wasted his bullets. Needless to say, he soon runs out and finds himself eaten by a giant frog.
- Back from the Dead: It turns out that Bushido Brown, who had been killed by the Hateocracy, was revived on Axel to help teach the adventurers that Aqua sends there. Unfortunately, Aqua didn't bother to look into his background enough to know how much of an opportunistic rich prick he was.
- Berserk Button: Shou Tucker and Light Yagami share a cell in Hell where their eternal punishment is sharing a room with another narcissistic genius with a god complex who pushes their buttons. Light tells Shou that he's not a genius, he was just sticking things together and hoping for the best. Shou tells Light that all he'll ever be is a footnote in history instead of a legend like he wanted. Both men attack each other over this.
- Big Bad Ensemble: The third Arc Villains Tanya and Uncle Ruckus. Both of them want to undermine Huey's efforts to bring political reforms to Axel but for completely different reasons. Tanya later abandons Uncle Ruckus after finding out how unfathomably racist he is and pulls an Enemy Mine with the heroes after the Hateocracy take center stage for the final story arc.
- Big Eater: Crimson Demons burn through calories much faster due to their magic and thus need more food than other people. So the deep-fried high fat and sugar glazed heart attacks on plates Riley calls Soul Food is perfect for their needs.
- Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick: When asked by Aqua's boss what his ideal Saturday would be, Huey describes an eventful day that includes playing sports, hanging out with friends, reading books on philosophy and politics, and "inciting a low-scale rebellion".
- Butt-Monkey: Kyouya is often on the receiving end of various jokes and humiliations through his interaction with the Freeman brothers. He's effectively stolen what was Aqua's role in the original.
- Celestial Bureaucracy: Being a God isn't much different from having an office job. Your celestial work station is a cubicle and angels work as stage technicians and low-level employees like tea-ladies. They answer to upper management and have audits just like any mortal corporate drone would, and your performance will determine your position and duties in the company.
- Con Man: Bushido Brown gives lessons to adventurers like Kyouya for an outrageous fee. It’s only thanks to the Freeman brothers that his operation has taken a hit.
- Create Your Own Villain: The Murderhobos are composed of people Aqua sent to Axel who had their respective experiences go horribly wrong in one way or another. In-between all the general marauding, all of them want Aqua's head, blaming her for their misfortune. Granted, some of them like Kojiro were terrible people before being sent to Axel, but their creation was a product of Aqua's general carelessness.
- Divine Right of Kings: Turns out that this is actually literal on Axel. The nobles and ruling class have the blessing of actual gods and goddesses, meaning that if the nobles do anything too out of line they'll be punished by their deities. As a result, people find the idea of democracy laughable and Darkness figures that the only reason it worked on Earth was because no worthwhile deity actually backed the nobles.
- Enemy Mine: The Demon Lord offers an alliance to Aqua and the adventurers against the Murderhobos.
- Entitled Bastard:
- Bushido Brown is still this come his reintroduction in Axel, charging adventurers outrageous prices for his services and then making them spend even more money on personal luxuries for him.
- Kojiro Ueyama, the leader of the Murderhobos, is ultimately revealed to be this. He was expecting an easy life in Axel where he became a hero with zero effort with his “intellect” well-respected. However, he was blindsided by how difficult living on Axel is where his power fantasy wishes weren’t instantly fulfilled. He even becomes enraged by the fact that the Freemans are beating him because in his eyes they are just “noobs” and the girls are NPC “bitches”.
- Even Evil Has Standards: Naofumi might have be willing to break all the rules of Axel, enslave the populace and force reforms that only harm the people, but he is doing it under the misguided belief he's helping everyone in the long run. He is disgusted that Ruckus was motivated to help him purely for racist reasons.
- Raphtalia is disturbed by Naofumi's initial plan to round up church leaders for speaking out against him and brand them with the slave seal.
- Fish out of Water: Being that neither Huey nor Riley are RPG-playing otaku, the RPG-based rules of Axel are completely foreign to them. Providing guidance to them is why Aqua's boss sends her down with them against her will.
- Greater-Scope Villain: Colonel H. Stinkmeaner is revealed to have gotten his Hateocracy back together in Belzerg, with all of them deciding to spread chaos and misery in their next life on account of the chaos from Nigga Moments literally empowering them in the new world. To that end, they bring back the souls of several isekai'd NEETs to form the Murderhobos and then transport a version of Naofumi Iwatami found at his lowest point to Belzerg after the Murderhobos fail.
- Hope Is Scary: Huey takes a while to acclimate to Axel, not just because of his inexperience with RPG's but because he keeps waiting for the setting to reveal its corrupt underbelly. Because he came from such a Crapsack World, he doesn't want to deal with the potential crushing disappointment of Axel being no better.
- Horrible Judge of Character: Kyouya is still utterly clueless about the true nature of multiple characters. Not only does he believe Aqua to be a wise goddess like in canon but he wholeheartedly believes Bushido Brown to be a wise master even as Bushido Brown very blatantly fleeces him.
- Interim Villain: Tanya is the only the only Arc Villain who wasn't brought to Axel by the Hateocracy. It's instead speculated that Being X sent her to get back at Aqua for ratting him out to HR.
- I Just Want to Be Normal: Darkness has realized and points out to Huey that as much as he gets on at his brother for not caring about the bigger issues, he's actually jealous of Riley for being able to fit into society and be accepted by people for doing so, while he's rejected by society due to being too intelligent not to notice it's flawed and try to change it. As much as he wishes his brother would look at the bigger picture, he also wishes he could just be as happy as he was.
- Irony: The fact that Kazuma and Kyouya are friends in this fanfic is this, considering the fact that Kazuma very much does not view Kyouya in that way in Konosuba.
- Karma Houdini Warranty: Being X receives this after failing so utterly in his duties. Thanks to tormenting his reincarnates, keeping souls in his desktop trash bin, performing unauthorized experiments, failing to properly define his world's belief system, and give mortals more than vague promises of paradise or torment for their actions, and posting offensive tweets about his superiors, he's punished by being trapped in his cubicle to work in total peace Just like he always wanted.
- Homura Akemi took Madoka's place as the goddess of magical girls to defeat the incubators and their plans once and for all, but because of all the stuff she did not least of which was stealing the apotheosis of someone much more qualified for godhood than her she was stripped of the bulk of her power and demoted to angel status and now works as an office tea-lady for the celestial realm.
- Massive Multiplayer Crossover: Besides crossing over The Boondocks and Konosuba, characters from other light novels, manga and anime, primarily other isekai works, also show up in the story with varying levels of importance, with even more given mention.
- Morality Pet: Even at his lowest, Naofumi still cares deeply for Raphtalia. What finally causes him to realize just how villainous he has become is when Raphtalia surrenders herself to the Soul Edge just to protect him in his misguided quest to conquer Axel.
- Narnia Time: In a conversation between Kazuma and Riley, they reveal that they died in 2016 and 2011, respectively. But Kazuma has been months in Axel, while Riley only a couple weeks. They conclude Aqua messed up.
- Nobody's That Dumb: Tanya tried to give Ruckus the benefit of the doubt thinking his cartoonish levels of racism was all an act, since nobody could possibly be so inept to place such importance on race above everything else.
- Noodle Incident: The circumstances behind "Mecha Wuncler", who Huey and Riley sacrificed their lives to defeat.
- No-Sell: When Riley infuriates Beldia into cursing him it fails to do anything. However because Riley told him his name was Nunya Biznes, the curse that required someone's real name to work failed to work.
- No Sympathy: Naofumi seems to have zero sympathies for Kazuma being shot by his samurai guard and doesn't care that his forced advancements have a negative impact on Axel's society.
- Not So Above It All: Wise Beyond His Years Huey, who otherwise dismisses anime and manga, apparently watched Dragon Ball Z (he insists it was only a single season) and started replicating Goku's moves, including his battle cries. He threatens Riley after Riley brings it up.
- N-Word Privileges: Kyouya Mitsurugi learns this when he accidentally calls the Freeman brothers the N-word, thinking it to be simply a phrase of familiarity since he's Japanese and doesn't understand it's a slur when spoken by non-black people. He promptly gets his ass kicked for it and learns to never say it to them again.
- Paper-Thin Disguise: Let's just say Eris is a lot less successful in initially passing herself off as "Chris" in this timeline. Both Freeman brothers immediately recognize her, and even Aqua is able to put it together after the Freeman brothers point it out.
- Pop-Cultural Osmosis Failure: Both Riley and Huey play this straight as neither are the typically isekai'ed NEETs and have no knowledge of Japanese pop culture. However Huey takes it a step further by knowing nothing about virtually any form of pop-culture. His head is solely filled with important facts and knowledge with no room whatsoever for things like entertainment or hobbies.
- Power Perversion Potential: Kazuma unashamedly uses the Ring of Gyges' invisibility to peep in on girls without them knowing.
- Pragmatic Villainy: Tanya might have had many unpleasant personality traits in her previous life, but being racist was not one of them. Since judging people on their skin rather than their merit would have caused the company to lose potentially highly skilled employees to their competitors.
- Race Lift: In-universe. No matter what he believed, Uncle Ruckus was a black man from a black family. Once being resurrected in Axel he had become Caucasian like he always thought he was.
- The Road to Hell is Paved With Good Intentions: The spirit of Tupac's hologram tells the boys grandfather that if Huey doesn't stop trying to bring his revolution to a world that doesn't need it, then he's literally got a room in Hell reserved for him.
- Ship Tease: Later chapters begin hinting at Riley/Megumin and Huey/Darkness. The pairings eventually undergo a Relationship Upgrade, with Huey and Darkness even getting married in the epilogue.
- Strange Minds Think Alike: Riley and Megumin strike up a friendship due to their shared love of "gang signs" and "badass titles". Due to not being Japanese, Riley has no idea Megumin is a Chuunibyou.
- Took a Level in Badass: Riley's fights in The Boondocks typically have him being subjected to a brutal Curb-Stomp Battle with very few exceptions. While he doesn't necessarily win all his battles in this fanfic, he's actually able to hold his own, thanks in part to having tangible stats he can upgrade.
- Took a Level in Jerkass: Naofumi Iwatami, while not the nicest person around, was at least something resembling a hero in his original world. Now on Axel, he's forcing societal and technological implementations while being completely oblivious and outright disdainful towards the residents' anger towards these actions without their consent. In his mind, he's only trying to make their lives better while these "idiots" are being ungrateful.
- Weak, but Skilled: Huey may be an impressive fighter, but he's still a kid and with the strength of one. He soon finds that his blows have no effect on a giant frog and is eaten as well.
- Weaksauce Weakness: As it turns out, Bushido Brown's sunglasses have prescription lens, resulting in him being disoriented when Kazuma uses his Steal ability on them.
- Weirdness Censor: Huey and Riley soon find themselves being unable to say the N-word on Axel, and can only utter a censored "N***". When they press Aqua about this, she simply replies that it's a "rule" in this world to keep things PG-13.Aqua: "I, uh, I’m afraid that racial slurs are forbidden in this realm! This adventure’s rated TV-14, don’tcha know?"
- Wrong Genre Savvy: Kojiro's problem is that when he was isekai'ed he expected it to be a complete cliche NEET fantasy where he was overpowered the second he arrived, could be the legendary hero with no effort, and attract a harem of beautiful girls who all adore him for no reason. While the world of Konosuba isn't a complete departure from a typical isekai world and does dole out cheat items, it is not a world were the adventurers just have everything handed to them on a silver platter and girls won't be any more attracted to an entitled jackass as they would've been back on Earth.
- Huey continually looks at the world much in the same way he did in the previous one. With the corrupt rich stepping on the oppressed, religion being used as a tool to manipulate the foolish and disadvantaged minorities being pushed to the edges of society. To his shock, he finds that those in power rule because of a real divine right to rule that would actually punish them if they abused their power, he finds it hard to argue that churches are just cons when he has unambiguous proof gods exist and those minorities who live as outcasts from the rest of the world did so willingly because they thought it made them seem cooler and more mysterious.
- Naofumi is an isekai protagonist from a deconstruction played for drama dropped into an isekai deconstruction played for comedy. He doesn't quite understand that.
