Fanfic Chop Suey - Television Tropes & Idioms

alt title(s): Pepperjack; Crossorgy

You know this is out there somewhere. And that if you're in the right mood, you're going to find it awesome.

Everything I like goes together!

The habit of many fan creators of adding elements to their fan works not because they're organically connected to that fandom, but because they happen to also be fans of those other things. Similar to Author Appeal, but often much more blatant.

The proof looks something like this:

I like Fandom A.
I also like Fandom B, Song C, Subculture D, Sexual Practice E, Religion F, Political Stance G, and/or Literary/Artistic Style H.
Therefore, Fandom A will go together well with any one or more of Items B-H.

Sometimes this works very well; Tropes Are Not Bad. At other times, this becomes an Author Tract, a confused mess, or just stupid.

The name of the trope comes from chop suey, a dish originally created out of all the ingredients the chef happened to have on hand that day.

Nothing to do with Chop Sockey (then again, who wouldn't want to mix a little kung fu in with their Harry Potter?). Also do not confuse with Fanfic Mary Suey, though they can overlap.

Also called a "Crossorgy". Not to be confused with Patchwork Fic, which blends elements from different continuities of the same series. See also Anachronism Stew, a common result.

Examples:

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Anime and Manga

This is the very reason for "Linkin Park Z" (i.e., Dragon Ball (Z) music videos set to Linkin Park songs), despite the fact that most Linkin Park songs are relatively dark and brooding and have little to do with the more cheerful and combat-oriented Dragon Ball sagas.
- This Troper once saw a thread on /mu/ suggesting that one should search You Tube for ":Your favorite band: Naruto" and see what kind of results you get.
  - That works with bands it really should not. And yet it is awesome.
A fic where Rei Ayanami revealed her love of Dungeons And Dragons. After that the whole thing dissolved into an Author Tract about how people can't appreciate modern fantasy.
One of the most infamous fanfics of all time is Neon Exodus Evangelion, a Neon Genesis Evangelion fanfic by a team of writers who also liked X-Com, 2001: A Space Odyssey, System Shock, The X Files, Tomb Raider, New England college life, confidence, antiauthoritarianism, motorcycles, the Titanic, the UK, original character shipping... but not necessarily anything the director of Evangelion had done with the characters. Those who felt Hideaki Anno's then-novel themes and characterizations were the best thing about Evangelion hated it, other people didn't. It didn't help that the main character was a particularly blatant Gary Stu (the author's desperate Parody Retcon notwithstanding and usually discarded).
- On the other hand, Shinji and Warhammer 40,000 is this done insanely, ridiculously, awesomely right.
  - S&WH40K is the God-Emperor of this trope.
Similarly, Eyrie Productions' flagship series Undocumented Features manages to do this with flair and actually manages the occasional Crowning Moment Of Awesome with an unexpected reveal of a previously unsuspected chop suey link.
- These can often be tongue-in-cheek shout outs as well, such as the UF versions of the Mythbusters being a Jedi (phlegmatic Jamie) and a Kryptonian (frequently self-destructive Adam).
This trope can also be used as a way of saying "everything I hate is universally hated", unless we have a trope about that (we might). For example, there was a Tenchi Muyo fanfic where Tenchi and his crew gave in willingly to Kagato because he threatened them with country music. Similarly, in the webcomic Its Walky and its predecessor Roomies, the aliens use the movie The Sound Of Music as a universal torture device.
- Musical choices are a very common element. Fanfic writers will often put Hogwarts students (even wizards born upstarts like Draco) in shirts advertising moody American Muggle bands that hadn't even been formed at the corresponding timeline. Another Tenchi Muyo example was alien princess Ayeka listening to "Bitch" (real subtle there.) despite the fact that she had never been to Earth, and the song wouldn't be written for 700 years.
- In the second X-Men movie, Wolverine steals Cyclops' car (again) for the group. They turn on the radio, and N*SYNC's "Bye Bye Bye" is playing. The writers were likely going for guilt by association.
A fanfic that combined Here Is Greenwood, Yu Yu Hakusho and Rurouni Kenshin, and did so in a seemingly logical manner. Until the end of the second chapter when Sailor Moon showed up out of nowhere.

Literature

The Finale of the Ultimate Meta Mega Crossover. Featuring A Fire Upon the Deep x The Melancholy Of Haruhi Suzumiya x Oh My Goddess x The Incomplete Enchanter x Book Of Amber x Callahans Crosstime Saloon x Buffy The Vampire Slayer x Star Wars x Robert Heinlein x Shinji And Warhammer 40 K x Thousand Shinji x Once More With Feeling x RE-TAKE Of Evangelion. In the first 1400 words.
Evanescence lyrics going with fan fics is disturbingly common for this reason. Just googling "My Immortal" on any fic site turns up far too many hits for comfort.
- The HP fic "My Immortal" is one of the worst examples of this trope. Everyone, everyone turns into a ~~gothic~~ goffik ~~Satanist~~ Stanist who swears a lot and sticks their middle finger up at preps. They also develop an unhealthy preoccupation with slitting their wrists.
  - Marty McFly from Back To The Future makes an appearance.
Unknown Troper once saw a fic about Harry Potter battling the threat of communism. It had Lucius Malfoy as a communist who was taking over the Ministry of Magic, and they planned to defeat him by... pointing out the fallacies of communism. The first Harry Potter book is set in 1991, the year the Cold War ended.
- Communism still exists in North Korea, and (stretching the definition somewhat) in mainland China and Cuba. But yes, it definitely sounds like written by an Objectivist.
- On the opposite end of the scale, there's an Avatar The Last Airbender fanfic featuring Zuko and a Mary Sue starting a communist revolution. Even people with only a passing knowledge of the show will know why this falls into "WTF?" territory.
  - The same author also wrote a fic where the Avatar Gang formed a band... and Zuko started dressing like Marilyn Manson... and the other characters actually knew who Marilyn Manson was.
Harry Potter fans (among others) call these elements "pepperjack cheese", or just "pepperjack", after a Harry Potter fanfic in which Hermione expresses a fondness for pepper jack cheese, a mild cheese with jalapeño peppers that's popular in parts of the United States but basically unknown everywhere else. England, of course, being part of "everywhere else", and it's nigh-impossible to obtain there.^*
^{You can occasionally find it in fast food restaurants, but you certainly couldn't in The Nineties when Harry Potter is set.}
The author baldly stated in her notes that Hermione liked it now because she (the author) liked it. It was such a blatant example (and relatively early in the sporking journal's history) that it soon became shorthand for "the characters must like what I like!"
- Of course, this is the same reason why Churuya likes smoked cheese...
A Drizzt Do'Urden fanfic that was slightly more nuanced than the standard. Catti-brie wanted to try bondage (Or So I Heard), and while Drizzt is at first interested (Or So I Heard), being from a society that goes beyond matriarchy to frothing boot-on-the-neck abusive power-crazed [expletive deleted], he started freaking out (Or So I Heard). He got used to it in the end, though. Or So I Heard.

Live Action TV

Musical

Tabletop Games

A plan for a story linking the GRIMDARK of Warhammer 40000 with Barney the Dinosaur. I fucking wish I was joking.
- Actually, that might work with the setting. There are a lot of alien species in the setting, many of them nameless and obscure, and it's not inconceivable that an alien psyker might brainwash a remote human world cut off from the Imperium...oh, who am I kidding, it's absurd. But it would be worth it for Barney to get purged by the holy bolter.
- This, where the Emperor is evil, all non-humans are trying to be friendly and everyone converts to Christianity. That the instigator is a Dark Angel (read:uber-fanatic) who Wangsts just because his home planet got hit by an Exterminatus. The sequel is just as bad, as the races well known for their Fantastic Racism and Omnicidal Maniac tendencies are being nice to each other, and the Marty Stu Dark Angel-wannabe somehow banished the Chaos Gods. The cause of all this? The Bible.
  - Heretic, the Emperor is Jesus.
  - "just because he was born with a few enhancements that made him super human" says the fic. Yeah a few enhancements like being able make stars go super nova and being the single most powerful being in existence in the fluff. If there is anyone in the 40k setting who can claim to be God it's the Emprah. Water to wine is enough, but flash frying a solar system isn't? Come on man.
  - "just because his home planet got hit by an Exterminatus". Warhammer 40,000, the only fictional universe where losing one's home planet is not considered sufficient reason for Wangst.
  - It's a case of Did Not Do The Research for the author, though, as the Dark Angels don't have a home planet, not since the Great Betrayal. They have their fortress-monastery, The Rock, which was supposed to be made from a chunk of Caliban, but that thing is still around.
  - However, since Marines don't breed, the individual Marines have to come from planets. Unless the Rock has a self-sustaining normal-human population.
  - Still, are Space Marines ever that sentimental? Are Dark Angels, when it means the deaths of aliens/mutants/heretics?
  - Not to mention that most Space Marine recruits grow up on feral worlds as child soldiers with battle axes or as members of an hiveworld scum gang. I'm sure that the Dark Angel in question had such fond memories of his childhood that he just couldn't bear the thought of his shitty home planet getting Exterminatused.
  - How much do you want to bet that Mariney Stu got picked on when he was a neophyte in his scout company. Brother Sargeant: "'Boo hoo, my planet got blown up.' That's a guardsmen's complaint boy. You'd best man up if you want to serve in my Chapter. Now show me your war face!"
- I present an example of a 40k crossover fic done right. This one's with Halo.

Video Games

Another fanfic included one Koopa kid converting another to Christianity via Easy Evangelism for no good plot-related reason. When I asked why, I was told it was just because the author was Christian and believed in trying to spread the word.
- Koopa died for your sins.
  - And in the eighth world, he rose again.
- Sadly, the "conversion fic" is (or was) a very common trope. It has been done with Harry Potter (who abandoned "witchcraft" in the process, of course) and, perhaps most ridiculously, Fox Mulder. Has the author of that last one seen how much porn Mulder has?
  - The Vatican has the largest porn collection in the world, you know...
  - Oh, it goes the other way too. Like a Harry Potter/Lord Of The Rings crossover where Hermione is in an orgy with elves and claims that soon, all religion will fade away. Just like in Middle Earth. Tolkien would have loved that.
  - A curious Star Trek The Next Generation/Battlestar Galactica (original) crossover fanfic had this as the climax, with a Mary Sue Enterprise crewman precipitating the rapture with a piano recital. It took a good chunk of both series humans (save for a beffudled Picard, musing on whether he could find faith), and even some Cylons, which were revealed to be lizards in silver armor. (This last is a reference to the little-known novelization of the original pilot movie, which was adapted from an early script that predated the Executive Meddling which turned the Cylons into robots in the first place.)
  - One Sonic The Hedgehog fic has a female velociraptor (with wings) who converts Sonic and the other Freedom Fighters to Christianity. Yes, really.
  - The Stealth Parody theory appeals to this troper. I think you've revealed your own prejudices for the rest though.
Remember 9/11? I do, and the 3 billion fanfics that have Osama Bin Laden being skewered by Cloud's BFS.
- In contrast, there was Who Will Read The Sutras by Allyn Yonge, released on 9/13/2001, in which Usagi of Sailor Moon was killed in the attack; it was unique in that there was no bloody vengeance inflicted upon bin Laden, who instead died ignominiously in a traffic accident while on the run, and it ends with Usagi choosing to read the Koran to the hijackers in Hell despite the Archangel Michael encouraging her to return to a mortal incarnation or leave the cycle of reincarnation entirely.
- There's also a fic out there in which Sailor Moon characters time-travel to the Titanic and meet Jack and Rose from the movie, and 9/11 is attributed to a fictional group called Ji-hadien. Some American sailor scouts (named for states) come to take revenge (whilst Sailor Moon is giving birth to Jack's baby), but the fic ends at that point and has been left abandoned since February 2002.
- One where Kim Possible is sent to kill bin Laden, and in the process she lectures him sternly on the treatment of women in Muslim countries.
- There exists a Fan Fic in which Sonic The Hedgehog gets killed rescuing people from the stricken Twin Towers.
- There was a BtVS fanfic wherein this tangible evidence of humans' cruelty to humans brought Spike to tears. And not in a jealous "Why can't I be that evil?" way. In a woobie needing-a-cuddle-to-make-the-bad-go-away way.
- By far the most confusing form of 9/11 sympathy has to come from, surprise surprise, furries who seem to have no problem whatsoever making the characters who routinely dwarf Godzilla give out heartfelt salutes over two very specific buildings between stomping entire continents flat and shed tears with enough salt water to flood entire cities, and that's not even going into other kinds of floods they are far more commonly guilty of.
The Command And Conquer story Tiberium Wars (no, not the So Bad Its Horrible official novelization) is a fanfic example done right. The author is clearly a big fan of Warhammer 40 K, especially Gaunts Ghosts, and this shows up in his portrayal of Nod which definitely has elements of the Imperial Guard and Space Marines. Not to mention all the other subtler shout outs (and not just to Warhammer 40 K).

Western Animation

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Deviantart user "RTTT" decided to combine the Rudolph: The Red-Nosed Reindeer special with elements from, of all things, Naruto, creating Rudolph: The True Tale.
Witness, Kratos the Cucumber! Link.
Dan Kim's Nana's Everyday Life fancomic mixes Elfen Lied with Gunslinger Girl, themes even darker than what canon touched upon, and some internet meme jokes such as Pedobear's appearance in a strip.
Bleedman has created online doujin based on Powerpuff Girls [1] and The Grim Adventures Of Billy And Mandy [2] that crossover with several series he seems to love.
And Shine Heaven Now was once a Hellsing comic, which got several more series and ideas jammed into it, including characters from the obscure anime, Victorian Romance Emma, and the author's favorite Sailor Senshi, Sailor Pluto.
TRES pretty much has all of the doujin-ka's favorite animanga series.
A poorly written (but impressive in its use of multimedia) crossover between Blade, Buffy and Castlevania — the kicker was that the author made both Buffy and Blade distant descendents of Alucard with no real attempt to reconcile any of the respective series' Draculas with each other.
Harry Potter / Inu Yasha crossover. One, not as bad as many of the examples above, demonstrated why mixing the two universes is a bad idea. Imagine Kagome shooting an arrow at a group of Dementors. In the Harry Potter universe, wizards have an advanced spell that can drive Dementors away, and that's it. Kagome's arrows evaporated them in groups. Which is what they do in her own story to massed low and medium Youkai, and a handful of stonger Youkai. Only the really strong Youkai can take a hit from one of her arrows and survive, some better than others. Oh, and the author was mainly interested in Draco Malfoy.
The Land Before Time seems to get quite a few crossovers, but it's probably due to the massive limitations of the setting and the characters (come on, three of the main characters aren't even that good at picking stuff up). As such, there have been crossovers with Star Wars, Super Sentai and Yu-Gi-Oh!. One fan site even created a thread for posting deliberately weird crossover ideas.
This story is a prime example of this, combining the Land Before Time with Castlevania, Devil May Cry, Kingdom Hearts, Tomb Raider, Metal Gear Solid, Indiana Jones, Metroid, and a confusing original universe of the author's own design. All with absolutely no plot!
What, no Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny?
Zarla just released a flash video of all her favorite fandoms and OC's playing DDR. Olimar and the Pikmin are awesome. http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/510929. For fun see how many characters you can name.
Halo: Combat Evolution is a fic that combines the Halo universe with realistic combined arms tactics. The only jarring notes are a)the occasionally poor spelling and grammar, and b)someone denigrating something by saying it displayed incompetence the likes of which hadn't been seen since "the Bush administration of 21st century Earth". This is the rough equivalent of comparing something today to an event that happened in the Napoleonic war.
- Well, we do still describe someone's greatest defeat as their "Waterloo".
Parodied in Ithel, which devolves into the author putting in as many references as humanly possible. There's even Sister Act in there.
Once Upon A Shooting Star is a glorious example of this. It takes place in a Rock Band-esque world, but has many characters from many other video games in their own bands.

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