For those who died in the works listed in the previous entry to make them so Tear Jerker-y or victims of those listed two and more entries up, (on top of the more sympathetic members of the latter who suffered and died due to their eviler members) not even death will make their suffering go away; they could end up in The Bad Place with the afterlife's morality system being so ludicrously high, Missy'sNethersphere to be turned into emotionless Cybermen, The Null to be slaves to Mother, Résurrection to be eaten in a dog-eat-dog world, or SCP-7179 to inevitably go insane.
It doesn't stop at fictional entities, as real-life countries are hellholes in this universe as well: Japan is filled with either psychopaths or apathetic bystanders, as shown by the life of Satou Matsuzaka; Serbia is filled with depraved deviants, as Miloš found out the hard way; South Korea is plagued by wealth disparity and corrupt capitalism, as shown by the desperation of the Kim family and countless people to the point of putting their lives at risk; Canada watches a very abusive game show where people get legitimately maimed or even killednote more likely the latter due to the nature of the universe, making it no less lethal and horrible than the Killing Games,Squid Game, the Hunger Games, Battle Royale, etc. and the US is just generally shitty with such lovely places like Liberty City, Vice City, Springfield, Shelbyville, Quahog, South Park, Gotham City, Bludhaven, and Innsmouth (and if you think the cities that were played for laughs in their source material are safer than the others; they’re far more sinister and dangerous here due to the Deconstruction and Take That! that runs rampant in League, as we’ve seen entirely innocuous fictional towns like Mayberry made realistically bigoted in the series), not to mention the countless examples of greatly exaggerated, far nastier depictions of cities from our world, in addition to being run by monsters like Frank Underwood and hosting eldritch horrors.
If all fiction is reality here, then that means damn near everything is in fact sentient, meaning the entire human race's existence has been subjugation and extermination. Not just the countless animals, plants, and poor Gaea (among other earth deities) who've had to suffer for our benefit, but the act of cooking and eatingis an act of murder. And since animals also have to eat, they too are guilty of subjugation and extermination.
As a consequence of all animals being sapient (due to the abundance of such fiction), and the cruel deconstructing nature of the League-verse, not only did works like Watership Down, The Plague Dogs, The Animals of Farthing Wood, and Padak happen, their tone and subject matter is now the norm for your favorite wholesome animal stories. Ditto for inanimate objects; the seriousness of The Brave Little Toaster and the works of Hans Christian Andersen, combined with the brutality of Sausage Party, now applies to wholesome stories of Animate Inanimate Objects. And once again, not even death will end their suffering. Also, since we know cells and the body's microorganisms are sentient, based on Cells at Work! and Osmosis Jones, when Hyde transforms, Mina got vampirized, or when Griffin got raped to death by Hyde, we probably got a Cells at Work! CODE BLACK situation.
This world also, in addition to fictional problems, suffers from many of the real world's problems. Think of how many "realistic" works of fiction use such issues like race tensions in America or real world atrocities like 9/11 as either a backdrop or the focus of their plots. Worse, there are many times where these problems actually intersect with fictional ones.
Want to find comfort in religion? Well, tough shit. While God has benevolent moments, like killing the Antichrist while manifesting as Mary Poppins and helping Bruce Nolan, if Shin Megami Tensei, Supernatural, and Preacher are to be believed, He/She is just as likely to be malicious.note It doesn't help either that "God" is a title that can be inherited by unstableindividuals. The angels too, not just according to the aforementioned works, but also the Hellaverse and Good Omens, among others. The Annunciation was Gabriel raping Mary to conceive Jesus. And speaking of Jesus, Hewasnotway cool. And other pantheons are far from safe, either; the aforementioned Supernatural has the Hindu pantheon as just as much comprised of Jerkass Gods as the others (Kali in particular gets the worst of it), and Hades and other death deities in general are pretty unpleasant.
All fiction being true means works that advocate very un-PC views as fact like The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Holy Terror saying black and Muslim people respectively are evil are correct. All myths being true means the Westboro Baptist Church's belief that tragedies are God's punishment for homosexuality is correct. Propaganda works like Tomorrow's Pioneers are reality. This would also add the likes of Earl Turner, the System, and the Organization to the already long list of threats.
More Fridge Horror, just Squick this time: there are a lot of NSFW (see our H-Game page, but many aren't there due to violating The Content Policy; also The 120 Days of Sodom) works out there that involve graphic depictions of taboo subjects, like rape, pedophilia, incest, bestiality, necrophilia, etc. All of these are reality in the League-verse.
For works whose appeal is seeing characters get mutilated and maimed in absurdly fucked-up ways only for them to get reset to die in new ways like Happy Tree Friends or Happy Wheels, what must their lives be like now that they're no longer just assets but people living in a world? Are they condemned to suffer over and over again while the rest of the world looks on?
Characters who are canonically a Harmless Villain or some such become far deadlier here due to the deconstructive nature of the universe and Moore’s antipathy to newer media, meaning the likes of Plankton have become genuinely terrifying threats here. Alternatively, their incompetence combined with the powerful technology they wield is taken to its logical conclusion and they detonate something like an antimatter bomb out of sheer lack of common sense.
Moore is also fond of realistic Deconstruction of characters to a logical extreme of real-world physics, as seen with Mr. Toad, Alice, as well as the aforementioned Harry Potter. So get ready for your favorite characters to appear as hideous, barely-sapient monsters with severe health problems in this world. Or perhaps disturbing tidbits about animal/plant biology take hold so Nemo and Marlin are now in an incestuous mating. Are your favorites human? Well, the entry about stuff like Holy Terror and The Turner Diaries being true also applies, so they may comply to horrible old stereotypes and be unrecognizable from what you love. Not to mention that Sun Wukong ended up taxidermied, who’s to say other heroes haven’t ended up the same way?
For any real-life people here, for the most part, they are much worse people than we know them, in addition to their actual flaws. George Washingtonwas a cannibal and became the Horned Serpent, Fred Rogers was a homicidal maniac, Mahatma Gandhi was a lech... you get the idea. And according to Inside Job, basically every politician and celebrity under the sky is part of a conspiracy making life on Earth worse with every year. Again, the possibility of stuff like The Turner Diaries being true doesn’t help either.
If Hope’s Peak Academy, Liberty High, and Crunchem Hall Elementary are any indication, the education system in the League-verse ranges from horribly incompetent to outright dangerous to students' (and teachers) health. (Given how this world works, most likely the latter, even in the cases that were the former in their source material) Not even kindergarteners are safe! And knowing how this world works, Miss Frizzle and Ella Mentry School are most likely a lot more sinister. (This also makes the originally comical portrayals of places like Jerome Horwitz Elementary into something much more dangerous and evil)
Children are not spared misery, and not just because of the aforementioned schools. Abusive Parents are a dime a dozen, and many of these kids grow up to be supervillains or slashers. Kids are so miserable that there's actually a secret child rebellion and fairies are assigned to abused children (which just ends up causing chaos due to them being The Fair Folk, possibly not having any actual benevolence). Kids are also easy targets for serial killers like the aforementioned Freddy Krueger and William Afton, manipulators like Roy Gribbleston, and molesters like Haiji Towa. Similarly, kid heroes and adventurers end up severely traumatized and permanently lose their innocence in the worst ways.
In already-bleak cases where a villain won, only to be undone by time travel, those futures must have been even worse in the League-verse. Just imagine the Master's conquest of Earth, Darkseid's conquest of Earth, or Ultron's conquest of Earth and add in rampaging SCPs due to the Foundation being wiped out, among many other possibilities.
The number of time travelers going up and down the timeline meddling with things and causing paradoxes must mean the spacetime continuum has more holes than a trypophobe's worst nightmare, making it free real estate for creatures like the Time Eater to run rampant.
With this jaw-dropping number of horrors, you may wonder, "How hasn't this darker-than-vantablack nightmare been wiped out already?" Well, it has, in fact, many times. Whether that be from an antimatter wave, the Tardisblowing up, or the Annihilarg detonating, this universe has been destroyed and restored on countless occasions. Or, limited to just Earth, SCP-2000 (a facility for cloning the entire human race after a catastrophe) has been used several times, plus Rick and Morty tend to create messes that they leave for another universe to start again.
TL;DR: Moore likely did intend the League-verse to be a Crapsack World, as he did include the molluscs and Great Old Ones in the series, and ends it with the apes, Skynet, and the Jabberwock attacking Earth, with the Daleks and Romulans attacking in the future. However, he likely didn't realize (due to his well-known disdain for modern fiction and focus on works from western Europe) the sheer extent to how much a world where all fiction is true is in fact a hellish nightmare where so much as sneezing in the wrong direction is a one-way ticket to an eternity of agony, not helped at all by his own biases skewing existing works in an even deadlier direction.
While the League-verse is certainly an incredibly bleak and hostile place, perhaps beyond what even Moore intended, there is some Fridge Humor to be found in the more absurd works and tropes being fact.
Basically everything can be mined. Though Fridge Horror once again rears its head when you realize greedy corporations will try to control production and use unethical labor destroying the environment to get anything.
Though God certainly isn't as benevolent of a force as they thought, the Israelites must have had more interesting lives if they knew what a hand grenade was. Also, Moses used a Beyblade to part the Red Sea.
Several real life locations are weird. Florida is filled with outrageous lunatics while Australia is simultaneously primitive in culture and immensely advanced in science thanks to Australium.
Volume I
When I read that Ishmael was working as a crewman for Nemo, I thought it logical: If you had worked for Ahab, you certainly can manage Nemo.
When Campion Bond states that, "The British Empire has always encountered difficulty in distinguishing between its heroes and its monsters.", you begin to find that it rings true for almost every single character in the series, every villain is some sort of bastardized hero, and almost every hero completely monstrous.
Volume II
At first I wondered why Moore would connect Raggedy Ann and Andy to The Black Lodge and the bizarre imagination of David Lynch, right up until I found out about Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical Adventure...and then I realized exactly why Moore did it.
In the New Traveller's Almanac, a few references to Wonderland pop up. Specifically, the details of The Hunting of the Snark are preserved in its entirety and the events of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Though in the latter's case, it turns Darker and Edgier with Alice dying from her organs being reversed from her trip to Looking Glass Land and slowly dying of starvation and the trip before that, being missing for months on end when it only felt like an afternoon. And not to mention Alan and Mina's visit to an unearthly being who turns out to be a Mugwump, which Jess Nevins notes, is similar to the Blue Caterpillar. Just what the hell is going on inWonderland?
Fridge Logic: Mina wears her scarf to hide the scars from Dracula's bite, which are significantly worse than most interpretations of vampire bites. But other than that, Mina's backstory is supposedly true and accurate to her originating novel. However, the subtly of a vampire's bite is a foundational plot point of Dracula. In the novel, Lucy, Mina's best friend, dies mainly because the protagonists do not figure out what is causing her periodic anemia until it is too late; they assume it is some kind of illness, and this false assumption causes many characters to make mistakes that cost Lucy her life. The first time we concretely know of Dracula biting Lucy, Mina herself mistakes the two resulting holes in Lucy's neck for pin holes resulting from Mina accidentally pinning Lucy's shawl wrong. If Dracula's bite literally tore the victim's throat open, there would be no question from the very first bite on her, which occurred weeks before Lucy's death, that Lucy was being attacked and losing blood through the wound rather than suffering from some kind of illness, and the novel's plot would have pivoted around entirely different information, subsequent decisions, and events. Not to mention that, as it's heavily implied Dracula bit and drank from Jonathan on Jonathan's last night held captive if not on more occasions while Jonathan slept, Jonathan would have had similar scars—and that's if he could have escaped at all, considering he would have had to survive scaling down the walls of Dracula's castle and making the miles to the nearest town on foot while being chased by the female vampires and wolves after suffering from having his throat arterially torn open mere hours earlier and receiving no medical attention until several days after this. And if Jonathan didn't survive, not even Van Helsing would have had enough information to deal with Dracula. And even further, after the attack on her, Mina goes on to essentially lead the pursuit of Dracula when he flees back to Transylvania; how could she have done that in the time described if she was healing from having her throat torn open? Unlike many other versions of vampirism in fiction, healing is not accelerated in vampires or their victims in this novel; Jonathan bashes Dracula's head badly with a shovel during his captivity and months later the wound is still there; Lucy, despite being infected, is still fully physically impeded by the wounds and health problems caused by the attacks on her until she dies and fully becomes a vampire. Basically, a severe wound resulting from a vampire bite completely contradicts Mina's backstory because the implications of said grievous wound would destroy the basic logical progression of her novel of origin and leave a long series of gaping plotholes in its wake.
In real life, the hypothesis that Santa Claus was originally based on mushroom-eating Siberian shamans is pretty thoroughly discredited, but this is the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, where All Myths Are True - Including myths about other myths.
The Black Dossier
In The Black Dossier, a section written in a pastiche of Shakespeare, we learn that the original 007 was, of all people, Prospero. At first, I thought this connection was a bit far fetched. It wasn't until later that I learned a bit about John Dee's career. Moore has Prospero stand-in for Dee in the League universe. Dee, best known as an occultist, was also a spymaster for Elizabeth. He corresponded with the Court in secret, signing his name with a special glyph of his own invention: two circles under the top line of an acute angle.◊ And yes, it was this practice that inspired Ian Fleming during the creation of the James Bond character. I'll never doubt Moore's research again. Also, it's widely thought that Shakespeare based Prospero on John Dee, adding another layer to the symbolism.
The team of Bond, Night, and Drummond can be seen as somewhat parallels of Murray's original League. Superficially, they resemble Allan, Mina, and Hyde with their dynamic, with Bond as the established British hero, Night as an influential female member of the group, and Drummond as a very Hyde-like brute. Adding to that is Bond and Night's relationship, as well as Drummond's loving defensiveness of Night (albeit in the context of a godfather, rather than an attraction). Going even further, Bond also turns out to be a parallel of Griffin, being a stealthy and murderous rapist who betrayed England to another power when he killed Night's father on behalf of the CIA. And true to form, the Hyde-like Drummond goes after Bond, although, sadly and unlike Griffin, Bond kills Drummond and gets away with his treachery.
Orlando's promiscuous behaviour can be explained by their backstory. Their behaviour is the result of being repeatedly victimized throughout their entire immortal life.
The Black Dossier reveals the significance of Dr. No's name- a tip-off that there was No Doctor. But one thing Moore didn't point out- in the novel, No is killed by being crushed via a heavy crane load of guano, an indicator that the Dr No story was, in fact, a load of birdcrap.
Moore referring to Bond as "Jimmy" seems to be another way of Writing Around Trademarks. However, James Bond was actually called Jimmy in the first US Edition of Casino Royale. And fitting to Jimmy's rampant misogyny, the title, cover art and blurb carry some pretty uncomfortable undertones today.
Of all Bond's adventures, why did Moore choose to refer to Dr. No the most? First, the book is arguably one of the less realistic adventures. The other books were gripping, fairly realistic spy or crime yarns in various countries, with fairly plausible villains such as career criminal Auric Goldfinger or psychotic hitman Red Grant. Dr. No, however, had Bond sent to a tropical island, meet a beautiful girl who could tame small native animals from childhood and face down a former Tong Lord with no hair, his heart on one side of his body, a bizarre surname and steel claws for hands, armed with a massive tank that looked like a dragon and having a pet Giant Squid, as well as living in an Elaborate Underground Base. Among the other adventures, most which involved taking down enemy agents or criminals, it seems a little outlandish, which would be no surprise that it turns out to have been a lie created by Jimmy's American employers. There's also a little Genius Bonus-Jimmy claim to have aided Felix Leiter in the mission. However, Jimmy is this universe's version of Fleming's Bond, and in the novel, Leiter wasn't even involved at all. Jimmy also claims that he stopped Dr. No from achieving world domination using thermonuclear missiles. Anyone who read the book will know that this is bullshit-No's plan wasn't even world domination, but to simply redirect the missiles to blow up Miami and Kingston while continuing his mining operations.
In 1910, there is a reference to Ice-9, which suggests that the events of Cat's Cradle happened in the League-verse. However, in that novel, a bit of Ice-9 falls into the ocean and destroys the world by freezing the world's oceans, events that are obviously difficult to reconcile with League continuity. Fridge Brilliance hits when you remember that superheroes are also real in this universe, and if they're anywhere near as powerful as they are in their own comics, the oceans freezing over doesn't seem like an insurmountable problem after all—they deal with stuff like that all the time.
The 14th Earl of Gurney is actually the main character of The Ruling Class, which premiered in and is set in 1968. (made into the more famous film in 1972). His presence in 1910 in this story was an egregious research mistake on the part of Moore ... or maybe not. In his stories, Macheath is always saved from execution at the last second by something contrived. Having a character from an entirely different time period exist here and profess to committing Jack's crimes is as contrived as it gets!
Heck, there may be an even simpler answer. Setting the events of the play in 1910 instead of Victoria's crowning, having the Earl of Gurney show up six decades early, Jack the Ripper... the entire set up is hugely anachronistic. Just like the actual Threepenny Opera is!
Crowley, 60's rock, and Harry Potter. All are treated Satanically in Century. This seems an odd move for the left-hand path follower Alan Moore. Until you remember that people still falsely accused these things of being Satanic, and all fiction is true in this continuity.
A lot of readers say that Harry Potter gets a rotten deal in League:Century, that it's totally inconsistent with the character of the books and that Moore did not research the source material well. But then consider that the Antichrist finds out that he's an Unwitting Pawn, that his adventures were manipulated/staged to prevent him from fulfilling his true purpose. And then consider the final HP book, where the hero finds out he's an Unwitting Pawn for Dumbledore who enabled Harry's rule breaking and hijinks so that eventually he would commit a Heroic Sacrifice against Voldemort, and it's virtually the same situation, only taken one step further and submitted to Character Exaggeration.
Likewise, the Moonchild keeps whining about fame and takes anti-depressants. The character in the books is also quite a Wangst-filled teenager with trust issues and realistically, were it not a children's series, and closer to teenage life in the 90s and The Noughties, Harry would take anti-depressants to cope with his life and him lashing out as a school shooter is the logical correlative of students carrying weapons (wands) in a school environment, finding outlet to direct his rage at being betrayed by adults and constantly undergoing Broken Pedestal, which the Prime!Character frequently underwent in the main books.
Also, one needs to remember that Alan Moore worships a snake god and practices dark magic. It's only reasonable he'd want to depict the Moonchild as a villain— he’s a lot closer to a Death Eater than he’d like to admit.
Why are the author and artist described on the back flap of the Century hardcover as figures from folklore? Think about it. As many fictional characters as even remotely possible are real in the League-verse. We've seen cases of famous people being outright replaced - Hearst with Kane, Hitler with Hynkel, etc. In order to make room, a ton of real-world people would have to be replaced with fictional characters. Which raises two questions with the same answer: what place could all those real-world people have in the League-verse... and what kind of fictional characters does the League-verse have if not the ones of our world?
Nemo Spin off
In an In-universe interview it's revealed that Janni Nemo fought Godzilla with the Nautilus, perhaps this incident inspired the various Gotengo's that appeared in Toho Kaiju movies.
It's shown Germany under Hynkel's regime is highly advanced in technology thanks to the work of Carl Rotwang. This is an easy explanation for the other cases of Stupid Jetpack Hitler in fiction, such as Compound V.
The Tempest
It's revealed that the League-verse's future is bleak, with ape men, Terminators and Skynet, Daleks, and Romulans confirmed to be around. Already horrifying, but it's going to get even worse. There are a few recurring things:
Ecological collapse leading to a diet of Soylent Green, desperate attempts to gain more resources like invading Pandora, and the construction of the Snowpiercer.
While the comment he made to her staying behind in regards to catching Hyde is still sexist, if you think about it, Allan does it for Hyde's protection more than Mina's. He's well aware of the crimes Hyde has committed, especially the murders and rapes. Allan's also aware of Mina's powers. He fears if Mina catches wind of Hyde's crimes she might tear him apart.
For Fridge Logic, while Skinner himself was a "new character", it is entirely possible for his book character to have simply been one of the un-named villagers in The Invisible Man.
Gray has a valid reason for objecting to Tom Sawyer's inclusion in the group not readily evident upon first watching. But the second time around, we learn the League was essentially being used as pawns by Moriarty, with Dorian Gray as their inside man. But Tom is a rogue element, naturally they neither need nor want him around.
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