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Tropes:
- Affectionate Parody: Of the horror movie as a genre, with the characters immediately being Genre Savvy about what kind of story they're in and can opt to ruthlessly exploit it in order to get their way.
- Another Side, Another Story: This happens as part of the main plot of the Event, as there are two different groups exploring different mysteries of the Singularity, with the Main Quests being split between them. On one side consists of Emiya, Lan Ling, Murasaki, and Illya, and on the other, Sigurd, Brynhild, Tomoe Gozen, and Mash. The first group is accompanied by the real Master as they try to investigate the mysteries of the Singularity and the horror tropes enforced on the Servants, while the second group is accompanied by Xu Fu pretending to be the Master as she steers them toward investigating into Sessyoin Kiara.
- Anti-Villain: Xu Fu and everyone who were part of her voyage were trying to create a mask that can kill immortals, but the only reason why Xu Fu wanted to pursue it was because she looked up to Yu Mei-ren who at the time was not happy with her immortality. The Mt. Hourai villagers were given the option to leave the village and have their memories erased if they didn't want to take part in the experiments and the only person who the villagers purposefully killed was an outsider magus who looked down on them.
- Arc Villain: It turns out that the villain of the piece is a Servant named Xu Fu who set out to kill Yu Mei-ren permanently as part of a promise they made long ago. She is also responsible for Abigail (Summer)'s rampage across the lake.
- The Bait: When Chaldea crew needs a way to run from the zombie horde under a time limit, Yu Mei-ren offers herself to be the zombie bait as it doesn't really matter if she dies or not (and already having died just earlier to the zombies). Ironically she manages to reach the cottage first by using Anti-Fling Rondo to not only blast away the zombies, but also turn herself into a tornado to fly over to the cottage.
- The Beastmaster: One of the Interludes involve Kintoki, Robin Hood, Tawara Touta, and Mandricardo trying to investigate a possible "Oni Parade" as called by Raikou, only to find out Ushiwakamaru has been befriending the local wildlife around the camp (including a bunch of Demonic Beasts)
- Big Bad Ensemble: The event features three primary villains, two blatant and one hidden, each with their own agendas. None of them coincide with each other.
- The first villain is Abigail (Summer), who unlike Salem's Abigail in her Interlude is going all-in on stealing the Protagonist away to "save" them by trapping them in a Lotus-Eater Machine. She's only cooperative with the real villain up until the point where they start targeting the Protagonist.
- The second villain is Kiara (Summer), who as a former Beast you'd think would have some kind of grandiose scheme... when all she wants is to trap Andersen so he can write a sequel to The Little Mermaid.
- The third hidden villain, and by extension the real one, is Xu Fu. She constructed the Singularity in the hopes of creating her Death Mask that could finally give a Mercy Kill to Yu Mei-ren. She summoned Abigail (Summer) to this end, but was blindsided when Kiara suddenly manifested and the two seized different halves of the Singularity away from her, forcing her to improvise like mad.
- Breaking Old Trends: This is the first summer event to feature absolutely zero variants of Altria or other characters with a "Saberface", unlike the last four summer events.
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Cliché Storm: Parodied to hell and back. Xu Fu weaponizes many classic horror movie tropes to complete her Death Mask, and Murasaki having gone on a horror movie binge knows exactly how to counter them. - Continuity Nod: Emiya gets a few nods back to Fate/Stay Night.
- He notes that nothing feels better to a Servant than to be trusted enough to catch their falling Master, as a nod to his relationship with Rin and even Shirou's to Saber.
- He physically cringes when Yu Mei-ren points out how dumb it is to fight yourself, referencing his whole plan and conflict in the visual novel.
- When Sigurd jokes that "even a highly experienced Archer" is weak to an innocent young girl, Emiya agrees after a glance at Illya, just like how she's his Morality Pet that he wouldn't shoot even to save himself.
- Crazy Enough to Work: The plan to "defeat" Abigail (Summer), who's effectively an Invincible Villain due to the circumstances of the Singularity, is to get her to give up and make a contract with the protagonist, who's the only person she actually truly likes. The way they do this is by putting the protagonist in a life-threatening situation (via Yu Mei-ren blasting them high into the sky with Anti-Fling Rondo) that demands Abigail will have to swoop in to save them via making a contract. It works like a charm, even as Abigail screams/cries What Were You Thinking? the whole time.
- A Day in the Limelight: Yu Mei-ren is the spotlight Servant, who was planning on taking a romantic vacation with Xiang Yu but unfortunately had to go to the camp by herself.
- Deus Exit Machina: MHXX's Foreigner sensor detected Abigail's presence, but the nature of the Singularity prevented it from giving her accurate location readings so she can't conveniently beat up Abigail as soon as she showed up.
- Didn't See That Coming:
- Xu Fu wanted to use Dark Lan to break Yu Mei-ren down mentally by having him vent all of his frustrations on her. But as Prince of Lan Ling is such a Humble Hero normally, all he does is praise her to high heavens which is something he wouldn't normally do, which just enrages Yu enough to make her stronger.
- The last possible death Xu Fu needed to complete her immortal-slaying mask was to have Yu Mei-ren get killed by herself, with Xu Fu splitting her in two as she entered into the Singularity and then take control of one of the two halves. What she didn't take into account was how Yu's Noble Phantasm involves herself blowing herself up to become a blood storm, something that Yu Mei-ren utilizes to her advantage by blowing herself up as well so that the two bloody remains can merge together and reform back to a single entity.
- Failed a Spot Check: Outside of Mash nobody on the southern side of the lake realized that there was something off about the Master even though it’s shown that Xu Fu disguised herself as the opposite gender.
- Fantastic Racism: One of the unlockable journals is that of a mage from the West who was lured to the mountain in order to obtain their family's secrets, with him bemoaning how he could let a bunch of "yokels from the East" pull the wool over his eyes and in disbelief how such a sect could progress so far on their immortality research with no one finding out about it.
- Fishing for Sole: While trying to catch the lake's shark curse, Emiya reels in multiple aquatic beasts, Shuten Douji, Blackbeard, Bartholomew, and Lakshmi, who wasn't even in the water.
- Good Thing You Can Heal: Yu Mei-ren and Kiara are the only Servants successfully targeted by the Death Mask, with the former's natural regeneration and the latter's Independent Manifestation being the only things averting a permanent death.
- History Repeats: One of the files shows how a researcher lacking in common sense tried to use zombies as manual labor, only for it go catastrophically pear-shaped. One of the Interludes has Asclepius trying the exact same thing, but luckily MHXX stops him before it gets too far.
- Killed Off for Real: The Death Mask used by Xu Fu is speculated to be capable of corrupting a Servant's Saint Graph, even preventing Chaldea from re-summoning the same Servant. Even the incomplete version does catastrophic damage to Kiara, who only survives due to an Emergency Transformation.
- He's All Grown Up: An alternate version of Hans shows up in the event, way older than he is in the playable version.
- Indian Burial Ground: Murasaki points this trope out when the graveyard for the Mt. Hourai villagers just happened to be in the cottage basement.
- Lotus-Eater Machine: Moon Cancer Kiara traps Servants in worlds of their desires, and tries to manipulate you into joining them.
- Ma'am Shock: When Kiara Lily ages up and becomes Moon Cancer Kiara, Mash mistakes her for Lily's mom. Kiara goes grey, while glass is heard breaking.
- The Mirror Shows Your True Self: While Xu Fu is able to disguise the fact that she needs to assume the form of the Protagonist of opposite gender with illusions, one shot inside a mansion has Mash notice Xu Fu under her real disguise through a mirror, though she doesn't react any more than she was suspecting beforehand.
- Nightmare Sequence: Columbus, Spartacus, and William Tell end up trapped in a dream hotel and turned into their own personal nightmares: a Columbus whose first expedition failed and seeks solace in alcohol while struggling to amass the funds he needs to try again, a Spartacus who bent the knee to tyranny and appears as a joyfully obedient corporate drone, and a Tell who accidentally killed his son and now murders those he deems "evil" in a twisted quest for atonement. The party has to defeat them to wake up their true selves back in reality and save them from their torment.
- No-Sell: Murasaki explains that horror movie monsters in certain genres are often resistant or immune to their traditional weaknesses to heighten the danger they represent. Sure enough when the party tries to counter Fujino's mystic eyes with a mirror, she overcomes it almost immediately.
- One I Prepared Earlier: Emiya tries to protect the group using a mirror he projected ahead of time, leaving Illya feeling like she's on a cooking show.
- Our Slashers Are Different: Phantom had been turned into a classic B-Movie slasher by the Singularity, being way stronger and durable than usual (he can outright strangle Prince of Lan Ling with the Saber incapable of escaping; with him also stating Phantom feels more like a hero straight from mythology with those sort of parameters) while trying to go around killing his victims. When Murasaki realizes this, she proposes two options to dealing with him; stall out until the morning when his invincibility is revoked or have Illya face him.
- Our Zombies Are Different: Murasaki knows all about zombies as one of the biggest classics of the horror movie genre, at one point worrying about whether the ones they encounter in the supermarket are "walkers" or "runners", and warning the protagonist that while they might be resistant to zombie bites if the cause is the result of chemical contamination and their body registers it as poison, they and the other Servants shouldn't take the chance. She also gets slightly defensive when Yu Mei-ren asks if zombies, being moving corpses, are basically just jiangshi, insisting that while they're similar they're not the same thing.
- Right for the Wrong Reasons: Yu Mei-ren is correct that Andersen is key to beating Kiara. She isn't correct that it's because the two are secret lovers.
- Samus Is a Girl: Reese XP is revealed to be a married woman with a husband and child of her own. Even Jeanne is baffled where the two came from.
- "Scooby-Doo" Hoax: The Fate equivalent of one. It transpires that the event's main threat isn't eldritch or demonic in nature but a carefully constructed scheme by a rogue alchemist weaponizing horror tropes.
- Sequelitis: In-Universe; the event's epilogue is one big joke about poorly made sequels tacked on to a hit horror movie. The bosses are unoriginal, the plot barely exists, and the final boss keeps nerfing everyone on the grounds of running out of budget or the original director ditching the project for Hollywood.
- Summer Campy: The event takes place at a summer camp where our heroes are forced to endure various horror genres.
- They Killed Kenny Again: Yu Mei-ren keeps finding herself in positions where she gets murdered via horror-movie tropes once per night (an axe to the head, twisted into a pretzel by Fujino's Mystic Eyes, killed while taking a shower, bitten by a zombie, catching fire when trying to save a melting wax figure of Xiang Yu), only to revive thanks to her immortality. By the zombie death, everyone's more shocked and exasperated by how she keeps falling into these pit-traps than actually by the deaths themselves.
- Threatening Shark: One of the Interludes involves the Summer versions of Nero, Marie, Scathach, Carmilla, and Anne & Mary all being menaced by one in the camp lake while they're on Nero's golden amphitheater preparing for a concert, and it starts trying to sink it. Scathach immediately jumps into the water to fight it, while Anne asks if they have any oxygen tanks to feed it "like in that one movie." As it turns out, the shark is actually Reese XP, who Jeanne reluctantly let go this summer. Another Interlude has Chaldea exorcise the curse in the lake making Reese XP aggressive so that everyone can swim in the lake without fear.
- Tomato in the Mirror: This happens to the player as the Event goes on, as Mash slowly starts to realize that the Master you play as when accompanying Sigurd, Brynhild, Tomoe Gozen, and Mash is an imposter hiding as a version of the Master's opposite gender character, while the Master you play as while accompanying Emiya, Lan Ling, Murasaki, and Illya is the real Master.
- Too Dumb to Live: One of the unlockable files for the immortality research delves into how someone had the bright idea of using zombies for menial labor and thus freeing up researchers to be diverted to other projects. The last entry has someone who was nearly mauled to death by said zombies once they went out of control pointing out that the "genius" who came up with this idea didn't even bother collaring the zombies to guard against this.
- Vile Villain, Saccharine Show: Summer events in FGO are typically light-hearted and silly. That's still the case here since this event is an Affectionate Parody of various horror movie tropes, but this is starkly contrasted by the rather extreme threats that the actual villains pose: Abigail (Summer) is a Nigh-Invulnerable Eldritch Abomination that is actively trying to murder your Servants (and worse, has a legitimate grievance for doing so), Kiara the Evil of Humanity needs no introduction, and Xu Fu's incomplete Death Mask is capable of destroying a Servant's Saint Graph (and if completed could erase them from the Throne of Heroes permanently). Death isn't something a Chaldea Servant usually has to worry about, so your faithful allies suddenly being as mortal as you are in a horror setting where people will die casts a deeply unsettling pall over the usual Summer fun.
- What Are Records?: Emiya is struck back when he realizes that Illya doesn't know what VHS tapes are, or how she has only seen Shouwa-era magazines on textbooks. Murasaki joins him on the pains of the generation gap due to her painful court days.
- Whole-Plot Reference: The Interlude aptly titled "Go, Guihunbusters!" is one to Ghostbusters, with three Servants (Wu Zetian, Medusa Lily, and Miyu) joining together to fight ghosts with a later fourth addition (Summer Helena), complete with the "Mahatma Packs" that shoot streams of magical energy particularly effective against spirits. Their final foe is even a superpowerful ghost that takes a form based on the thoughts of the heroes, only to end up taking a form that's Nightmare Retardant (turning into Jaguar Warrior's 1st Ascension due to Wu's fear of cats), and is beaten by "crossing the streams" of the packs. They even lift quotes straight from the movie.Wu Zetian: (on the "crossing the streams" plan and their slim chances to survive) I love this plan! I'm excited to be a part of it!
- Wife Husbandry: Yu Mei-ren comes to the assumption that the reason why Andersen is in the Singularity in an adult form is because Kiara wants to recreate The Tale of Genji where the young Sessyoin Lily is raised by Andersen like he was her lover. Kiara gets so offended by Yu Mei-ren's accusations that she transforms into her Shen form.
