The Kingdom Beyond Midnight is a Super Mario Bros. fanfic written by Sightshade. It’s known for its darker-than-usual tone for a Mario story, and for its complex plot that pulls elements from many games in the series library, although it pulls most heavily from the RPGs.
It’s the night of the yearly Star Festival, and Mario is invited to attend the spectacular Starlight Gala at Princess Peach’s castle. (Ah, and Luigi is there too). But when a sinister falling star plummets from space and crashes into the castle, they all find themselves transported to an Alternate Universe where the sky is starless and empty – the result of a mysterious tragedy that happened twenty years ago, which killed the Star Spirits and left the world to ruin.
Almost instantly, Princess Peach is kidnapped again – this time by her own alternate self, who rules the darkened timeline as the tyrannical Empress Toadstool. With her own body failing her, and driven mad by grief, the Empress plans to steal her counterpart’s body, and then her world, for herself. To stop her, Mario and friends team up with a ragtag group of resistance fighters, with a mission to save Peach and get everyone back home safely… before it’s too late.
Also along for the ride is Vivian, one of Mario’s old partners who was also at the Gala. As a Shadow Siren, she should feel at ease in a land of constant darkness, right? But there’s something twisted lurking in the shadows of this world – something only she can sense. Is Vivian strong enough to face this new, unexpectedly personal foe? More importantly, will she ever be able to tell Mario how she feels?
The story is complete as of Oct 1, 2017, and can be found on both Fanfiction.net
and AO3.
It also has a character sheet, which needs love. Please put any tropes about specific characters there.
Tropes found in The Kingdom Beyond Midnight include:
- Acceptable Breaks from Canon: In Super Mario Galaxy, the Star Festival is said to happen once a century, but here it’s made into a yearly event, both to put more focus on the importance of Stars in the Mushroom Kingdom’s culture, and to explain why a second Star Festival happens in Super Mario Galaxy 2.
- Adaptational Mundanity: A mild case. Magic still has a big role to play, but a lot of the traditional Super Mario quirks are notably absent. Floating blocks are nowhere to be seen, Warp Pipes only appear in one chapter, and even power-ups (Fire Flowers in this case) are only used once, and very briefly at that. Overall, the setting is treated more like a world with some videogame-like elements, rather than a videogame world.
- Always Night: The other world has no stars, which includes the Sun. The sky is always dark to some extent, but Vivian notices how it fades from pure black to an “indecisive ashy grey” whenever it’s supposed to be daytime.
- Book Ends: The story ends the same way it begins – with Mario attending a Starlight Gala at Peach’s castle. The main change lies in Mario’s own happiness. At the start, he’s still trying to get over a painful breakup, while the ending has him proposing to his Second Love.
- Breather Episode: Chapter 6 is much fluffier in tone, and mainly focuses on Mario and Vivian shopping at the market while the reader catches up on the party’s current situation. In the notes, the author explains that she wanted to focus on Ship Tease instead of drama for a chapter to help cure a case of Writer’s Block.
- Chapter 13 has a similar purpose during Act 2, with Mario and Vivian having a heart-to-heart talk while locked in a dungeon cell, but since it maintains the dark tone set by the previous chapter, it’s more like an Action Film, Quiet Drama Scene.
- Canon Welding: The Mario series is infamous for its Negative Continuity, but here all the games explicitly take place in one timeline, with Mario and Luigi referencing things they did in the platformers, RPGs, and spinoffs alike.
- Chekhov's Gun:
- In Chapter 6, Mario finds a Fridge sticker while searching his pocket for coins. At first, it just seems like a quick Take That! at Sticker Star, but it ends up playing a key role in the final battle, when a last-ditch plan involves using it to freeze the Empress.
- The pair of Pretty Lucky badges, which Mario and Vivian buy in the same scene. Not only does one of them save Vivian’s life in Chapter 10, but they play into Mario’s Bluff the Imposter moment later on.
- Lastly, there’s Mario’s heirloom engagement ring. Peach briefly thinks of it at one point, and Mario and Goombella discuss it a few chapters later, but it doesn’t come into play until the epilogue, when Mario uses it to propose to Vivian.
- Continuity Cavalcade: This is one of the big things that sets TKBM apart. Cameos and references are everywhere, and are expertly woven together in a way that feels natural. It wouldn’t be much of a stretch to say that every game in the franchise contributes to the plot in some way, right down to obscure titles like Yoshi's Safari.
- Dressing as the Enemy: Several times, to the point where Goombella eventually calls the heroes out on it, and says they can’t do it anymore because the trick is getting stale.
- The Empire: Every bit as evil as ever, and ruled by a hedonistic, insane version of Princess Peach.
- Episode of the Dead: In Chapter 9, the party stumbles into a haunted swamp filled with Dry Bones, which turns out to be a mass grave left over from the Empress’s Koopa genocide. A frantic chase ensues, with the heroes trying to escape the swamp while not getting torn apart or swept away by waves of savage undead. Incidentally, the chapter was released only a few days before Halloween.
- Faceless Goons: The Empress has an army of these, with eerie helmets that light up from within, making them look extra intimidating in the dark. Peach knocks one out during her escape attempt, revealing that beneath their armor, they’re just common Toads.
- For Want Of A Nail: The split between the timelines ends up being tied to the fate of Younger Princess Shroob. In the main timeline, she died with her sister and their invasion fell apart. In the alternate one, she survived and fled back to their homeworld, mustering reinforcements to return with a second fleet which included her VERY pissed-off mother. The next invasion was far worse and pushed the Mushroom Kingdom to the brink of annihilation, which resulted in the Star Spirits sacrificing themselves (or Kamek sacrificing the Star Spirits) in order to save everyone.
- Flyaway Shot: The last few lines of the story seem written to evoke this, starting with Mario and Vivian’s embrace, before pulling back to show the rest of the festival, then up to the fireworks and the star-filled sky beyond.
- Fun with Acronyms: Par for the course, E. Gadd’s latest invention has a name like this. It’s called the Stellar Transmutation/Amplification Reactor, or S.T.A.R. for short.
- Glowing Eyelights of Undeath: The Dry Bones in Chapter 9 have these, naturally.
- Insistent Terminology:
- Mario and Luigi are ex-plumbers, thank you very much. With their full-time focus on adventuring, neither of them has plumbed a drain in years.
- Vivian isn’t a ghost, and she has no idea why people keep referring to her as such.
- Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: In the end, it’s ultimately left ambiguous whether it was Mario and Vivian’s True Love's Kiss or Kamek’s death that broke the spell and closed the miniature Void.
- Parallel Conflict Sequence: The climactic final battle in Chapter 16 switches back and forth between Mario, Vivian, and Bowser’s fight against the Starlit Empress, and Luigi and Bow’s fight against Kamek, with the switches happening faster and faster as things get more dire for the two groups and the chapter gets closer to ending.
- Rule of Three: Over the course of the story, a Star Festival is held three times. First at the very beginning, then the Empress’ festival at the start of Act 2, and finally during the Epilogue.
- Ship Tease: In addition to all the stuff with Vivian and Mario, there’s a fair bit of Ship Teasing between Luigi and Bow (with extra special emphasis on the “teasing” part). Nothing ever comes of it though, since Luigi is still happily going steady with Princess Daisy.
- The Stars Are Going Out: It’s pretty much the central trope of the story. The parallel timeline’s Stars went out twenty years ago, creating a hopeless and decaying world where no wishes can ever be granted. In the Interlude, we get to see just how it all happened, and it sure isn’t pretty. Kamek, in a desperate bid to stop the Shroobs, kidnapped the seven Star Children. He planned to link them with the Star Spirits and tap into their power, but the Shroobs found out and attacked the ritual site. The children were killed, and since the linking spell was still active, it took the actual Stars down with them. Yikes.
- Wanton Cruelty to the Common Comma: It’s not so much an overuse of punctuation in general, but the fic has a tendency to use semicolons where normal commas would’ve sufficed.
- Wham Episode:
- Chapter 7, the first time we meet the Empress in the flesh. Up until then, readers had likely been picturing “evil Peach” as some kind of Shadow Queen knockoff. But instead we get, in the story’s own terms, “a mountainous, corpulent, utter ruin of a woman,” too fat to move and partially covered in hideous burn scars. To make it even worse, we’re seeing all this from Peach’s viewpoint, and she’s terrified of what this other version of her has become.
- In Chapter 12, which kicks off the second act, we finally get to see the full extent of the Empress’ insane cruelty when she invites the entire kingdom to the capital for a Star Festival, then turns the S.T.A.R. reactor on them, transmuting her own city and subjects into ship fuel until nothing remains but an empty lunar wasteland. The first time reading that scene will take your breath away.
- The final scene of Chapter 14, when the Empress is restored to her true form against her will, and it’s revealed that she’s secretly been Empress Shroob all along.
- Wham Line: This line from Princess Peach in Chapter 14. By itself, the line means nothing and hardly even needs to be spoiler tagged. But with context, it manages to turn the entire plot on its head in the most chilling way possible.Peach: "Mushrooms don’t grow on Shooting Star Summit."
- When It All Began: An interlude between the two acts, titled The Last Bright Night, is a flashback seen through the eyes of a six-year-old girl – namely, the parallel world’s version of Peach. It finally shows the tragedy that was alluded to all throughout Act 1, and it’s easily the darkest chapter of the entire fic.
- Wretched Hive: In this timeline, Rogueport is a subversion. It’s still run by pirates and the Pianta Syndicate, but since the pirates smuggle in Shine Sprites to keep the city bright, and the Syndicate uses its influence to keep The Empire away, it’s comparatively a much nicer place to live than anywhere else. As Goombella puts it, "It’s the one place in this backwards world that isn't a total mess."
