Duchess Orobelle is the knot that holds the universes together. This is the legacy her late mother left her: if she dies, all reality would come to an end. She sits at the centre of a trouble history between four noble houses, the Hearts, Diamonds, Clubs and Spades, which together claim land in three universes as their own. For all twelve years of her life, Orobelle has grappled with plots foisted upon her by the Diamond Duchy's history of attempted coups and interfering with the House of Hearts' line of succession.
But none of the plots so far have been quite like this one. One night, she wakes up to the city centre destroyed, fifty civilians dead, and a ransom note hanging from her window that demands her life in exchange for the safety of her protector's niece, Freesia.
Orobelle soon learns that this threat comes not from any of the three known universes, but from far beyond them. More news cascades in. The eight heroes of scripture, said to hold her power in balance, are determined by scientists to live beyond these three universes. A tunnel into a fourth universe is discovered.
Orobelle decides she must gather the eight to defend her, and sets off to find them, each of whom lives in their own universe. None of them are aware that any universe other than their own exists, or know what their bizarre abilities entail. They are simply living out their lives, coming to terms with their strange powers, and trying to live in spite of them...
This web serial provides examples of:
- 20 Minutes into the Future: Adelaide's world is set in a future rather reminiscent of the present, albeit with advances in IoT, AI and as well as a major economic crash giving rise to a number of socioeconomic differences, including the fact that the US is now an utterly corporation-controlled Techno Dystopia. Pala and Fen's world is nominally this, but in practice, it is more of a Next Sunday A.D. setting.
- 20 Minutes into the Past: Hong Yi's world is explicitly Real Life in the Year 2013 (the year the initial chapter, 'A Fish Out Of Water', was written).
- Absurdly High-Stakes Game: A game of Hearts decides the heir of an ancient Queendom between four quadruplet sisters. Unsurprisingly, the outcome is disliked by everyone and what results are several centuries of infighting and civil war.
- After the End: Artur's world, a nuclear winter hellscape after international diplomatic relations utterly implode under the rule of unstable leaders.
- Alice Allusion: Orobelle's world (actually known as Wonderland to some) is an intentional reference to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: people fall through tunnels into other worlds, the four noble houses are named after the playing card suits, reality is as malleable as the language that describes it, and Alice Liddell herself is an historical figure in the story. Orobelle in particular embodies the allusion, with her predilection to lolita-esque fashion and involvement in monarchial politics.
- Alternate History: The worlds of Vesper, Marcia and Felix represent alternate histories.
- Arc Number: Twelve. Twelve universes, twelve main cast characters, Orobelle is twelve at the start of the story.
- Because Destiny Says So: Orobelle going out and finding the eight Cores: she's submitted to playing out the prophecies of scripture that surround her life.
- Big Brother Is Watching: The San Francisco of Adelaide's world is described as a "city of eyes," where every part of life is kept under watch by all-encompassing networks of cameras and monitoring devices.
This is a city of eyes, hiding in every wall and looming over every screen. But these are the eyes of the four megacorporations that puppeteer life from behind the scenes, and most of them operate with the greater parts of themselves distributed in networks across the world, so they do not answer to any law.
- Big, Screwed-Up Family: The four noble houses of the Queendom have a long history of secrets, Machiavellian plots, political violence and power struggles, all stemming from a card game that decided the succession five hundred years ago.
- Britain Is Only London: All the important events that have happened in England so far have taken place in London. Somewhat subverted when the story explores Vesper's life growing up in Fairford.
- Cast Herd: The cast of Revolving Door is easily subdivided by world. Each Core character
- The Chains of Commanding: Vesper is very much aware of the overwhelming responsibility entailed by her leadership, and takes the blame for anything and everything that goes wrong under her purview.
- Children Are Innocent: Invoked when Liss kidnaps six-year-old Freesia to gain some bargaining power over Orobelle—if a child's kidnapping doesn't compel her to act then her people will demand she do something about it.
- Color Motif: Every major character has a theme colour, as demonstrated in this image
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- Crossover: Invokes this. Revolving Door is designed as a collection of distinct stories in different genres that unite and bring each one's the central characters into unfamiliar worlds.
- Dark and Troubled Past: Most of the main cast have some form of dark past that has shaped them fundamentally, ranging from long-term incarceration, to parental abuse, to abandonment, to war trauma.
- A Day in the Limelight: Curia gets two chapters from her point of view. Honourless also gets her own chapter exploring her history, before receding into her role of party mule.
- Days of Future Past: Adelaide’s San Francisco is an aesthetic patchwork of every major historical era and culture, with particular references to Mesopotamian cuisine and Greek architecture.
- Death World: The Second World is a younger earth that's mostly barren and inhospitable to life, being covered almost entirely in desert plains, rocky mountain ranges and volcanoes.
- Decadent Court: The Four Houses of Wonderland, and many other royal and noble houses across it, are exceptionally prone to being this. It runs in the family.
- Differently Powered Individual: The eight Cores.
- The Dulcinea Effect: This may or may not have been at play when Felix decided he had to break Adelaide out of the laboratory almost as soon as he found out about her existence.
- Dysfunction Junction: What happens when you put nine people with deep-running struggles and traumas together in a team?
- Ensemble Cast: While Orobelle is nominally the main character, the story shifts its focus between the twelve main characters regularly enough that, in practice, the spotlight is shared quite evenly.
- Foil: Orobelle and Liss are this to each other, as the Anti-Hero and Anti-Villain of the story. Orobelle treats fate and predestination as all-important, Liss views it as a farce and insists on making her own destiny. The former is authority and order incarnate; the latter is the embodiment of the spirit of revolution. Yet both share their penchant for callously controlling and manipulating their subjects, and share pink as one of their theme colours.
- Fold the Page, Fold the Space: Metaphors of fabric and thread—for the worlds and passage between them—are everywhere in this story. When Honourless warps Vesper across a gap between worlds, she describes it as feeling like being torn from a piece of fabric.
- Framing Device: The entirety of Chapter 10 is a segment of quoted text, revealed in the next chapter to be from a book that Orobelle has read religiously—the scripture of the Light.
- Genre-Busting: It's got elements of Science Fiction, High Fantasy, Low Fantasy, Superhero, Slice of Life, Alternate History...
- Hero of Another Story: A lot of this going on with not only every member of the Ensemble Cast, but also some of the side characters, notably Lea, Curia and Amaranthia.
- Hitchhiker Heroes: Orobelle's city is attacked. She gets up and leaves on a long journey to seek out and collect the prophesied heroes, each in their own universe, with their own superpower.
- Humans Are Bastards: In terms of its outlook, Revolving Door does tend to look at how selfishness and cruelty have shaped every member of the cast, and how they've fended for themselves in worlds or communities where they cannot trust anyone else. That no one can be trusted to act selflessly, in particular, is the foundation of Liss' world view.
- Hyperlink Story: A dozen stories scattered across time and space in the multiverse, all of which will probably eventually unite...
- Istanbul (Not Constantinople): Marcia's world especially has a few nations known by other names in its version of history: most notably, as with the trope namer, the city of Constantinople retains its Roman name, and there exists an Islamic empire, known as Aslama, with active military frontlines with the God-Emperor-led Roman Empire.
- Limelight Series: The Light Left Under Trees, a Spin-Off webcomic that explores the lives of Pala and Fen, two members of the villain ensemble.
- The Little Detecto: Orobelle's corefinder has eight needles, each pointing towards a Core, or spinning uselessly if the corresponding Core is not present in the current world. It's unclear why a device of such specific purpose was ever made by the Queendom, or why said device was kept around when it did not appear to work, on account of none of the Cores living in Wonderland.
- Magic A Is Magic A: Travelling (or Ghosting) is governed by consistent rules.
- Magitek: Wonderland's magic, with many devices powered by the Light, and various are research facilities and department centred around the study of it.
- MegaCorp: Adelaide's world has a few of these, which together control the overwhelming majority of production, commerce and data in the United States: Mick's, P&E, Tesla Futures...
- The Multiverse: Revolving Door features a system of twelve universes, each one a fully-developed alternate reality that diverges from ours to different degrees. Our reality, in fact, is one of the twelve in this system.
- Mundane Utility: Hong Yi uses his gravity powers...to win at beer pong. Felix uses his photon powers...to create a fake profile image background. Vesper uses her electric powers...to retrieve small metal objects from under furniture (that is, until the army picks her up and trains her as a superweapon).
- N.G.O. Superpower: The corporations of Adelaide's world are described as operating outside the control of governments, entities with political heft in their own right.
- Not Wearing Tights: They do have the trappings of a superhero team, except for the costumes and names.
- Next Sunday A.D.: Pala and Fen's world is nominally set 20 Minutes into the Future, but appears almost indistinguishable to the present, partly due to the fact that all the relevant events so far have taken place in the developing island nation of Havaiki.
- Obvious Crossover Method: With universes that include Real Life, a world 20 Minutes into the Future and just about every other type of past and future beyond, it's exceedingly easy to justify crossovers with other works.
- Order Versus Chaos: Between Orobelle and Liss especially.
- Pocket Dimension: The cards that the Queendom nobles and court members can turn into seem to store not only the person turning into them, but also everything they carry, making for easy transport of large amounts of luggage.
- The Prophecy: Orobelle is impelled to initiate the plot by one.
- Real Life: Hong Yi's world.
- Royal Blood: Numerous characters, particularly Orobelle and the Cast Herd surrounding her.
- A Shared Suffering: Felix seeks out Adelaide right as soon as he finds out there's someone else in the city with inexplicable powers. They then bond over their mutual unfamiliarity with San Francisco.
- Scavenger World: Played with. In Artur's world, scientists no longer have access to the processes that gave rise, but they managed to jury-rig together supply chains from whatever facilities and resources are still available in the Arctic Circle. Everything runs on borrowed time however, as primary industries—in particular those relating to agriculture—have run completely dry.
- Second-Person Narration: Chapter 23, Stars in the Dark, lapses into this when narrating the events of Lea's past.
- Standard Post-Apocalyptic Setting: Artur's world, your standard barren icy post-nuclear apocalypse hellscape. And yes, it's in Russia. You're going to be hearing a lot about Artur's world in relation to apocalyptic tropes.
- Succession Crisis: Five hundred years ago, Queen Candoresse gave birth to quadruplets, and decided the succession with a game of cards. Everything went south from there.
- Sufficiently Analyzed Magic: Exemplified by the Queendom, the university has an entire department dedicated to the examination of magic, ahem, Cosmogony and Theology—science, magic and religion all wrapped up in a single field of study.
- Superhero Prevalence Stages: An Early Stage story with generally one superpowered individual per universe, with exceptions in Orobelle's world and Liss' world.
- Switching P.O.V.: Cycles through various characters' points of view of the same series of events when it isn't rotating protagonists.
- Tangled Family Tree: The Queendom's noble houses form one, par for the course among royal families.
- Tastes Like Friendship: Between Curia and Honourless.
- This Is Reality: Orobelle mocking the writer of the ransom note as overly theatrical in proclaming themself as "her villain". Contrasted with Liss' Genre Savvy attitude and her approaching her adventure as if it were a story. A little ironic considering Orobelle's prophecy-chasing plotline, versus Liss' Screw Destiny attitude.
My villain, indeed! One for theatrics and drama, and yet they clearly knew what they had done. They knew [Orobelle] had no choice but to act.
[Liss] knew a thousand things could happen in this moment to end their journey for good. But she knew none of them would.
She couldn't die yet. She was the hero of this tale.
She couldn't die yet. She was the hero of this tale.
- Villain Episode: Liss gets several interspersed through the story, forming not one but two parallel plotlines, one displaced temporally from the present events, though it isn't clear quite how far back.
- War Is Glorious: Discussed through Vesper's narration as she thinks on how propaganda paints a glorious image of war to attract enlistees to its bloody cause.
- War Is Hell: Played very straight with the backstories of Vesper, Artur and Liss. In all cases, war is shown to be utterly horrific, amoral and devoid of glory. None of them make it out without permanent psychological scarring and disillusionment.
- World of Action Girls: The main cast is overwhelmingly women, and of these, the vast majority of them can be considered badasses in their own right. The men on a whole tend to be milder and less combat-inclined.
