General/Unsorted
- The Bat Boy from National Enquirer fame is an actual cryptid in this 'verse, as is The Mothman.
- Verity mentions Carmen Sandiego by way of witty banter.
- Verity quotes the sages: "you can't always get what you want."
- The Incredibles: Verity specifically calls out the villain for monologuing.
- The two cuckoos in the family are Angela Baker and Sarah Zellaby, referencing Angela Zellaby from The Midwich Cuckoos. This, like their psi-etiquette, chosen from Babylon 5, is an in-universe character choice. Sarah's IM username is also "Midwich_Girl".
- An obscure reference to another filker: "Emerald Green" is a Pegasus-winning song. The writer of "Emerald Green" also has a song about a Siren making a living as a singer.
- Dire Straits: Verity invokes "Money for Nothing" when having to talk to Candy about something (and the titles of Magic for Nothing and Tricks for Free are also references to the song).
- Because Antimony reads a lot of comics, she refers to one of Verity's moves as "pulling a Gwen Stacy".
- Sam invokes Gwen Stacynote to put Timpani at ease when they're on the trapeze to assure her he won't death drop her.
- Super Chicken: "you knew the job was dangerous when you took it" is paraphrased here as it was in Newsflesh, although attributed to Darkwing Duck; making it double as Creator In-Joke.
- Kim Possible: Antimony uses Kim's Catchphrase, "What's the sitch?"
- Antimony also peppers her internal monologue with references to shows and animation:
- The Opening Narration to The Six Million Dollar Man runs through her head.
- She describes herself as smarter than the average bear, which is the catch phrase of Yogi Bear.
- Antimony describes herself as not wanting to Drew Barrymore herself in a reference to Never Been Kissed.
- Antimony describes someone else's sudden change in attention as if they'd sensed a disturbance in The Force.
- Antimony, in a moment of antipathy toward her sister Verity, sneers at her for wanting to look like Batgirl.
- The field guide mentions that the Angler Tortoise may have inspired the Graboids of Tremors.
- In an interview
note , Seanan mentions that Evelyn is "basically Marilyn Munster, and that makes me happy." - In a Tumblr post, Seanan confirmed that Verity was named after Verity Lambert.
Discount Armageddon
- Verity is thankful that her grandmother took shots at The Boob Fairynote , resulting in the girls of the family being modestly endowed.
- Land of the Lost (1974): Verity refers to an unknown creature as a Sleestak until she finds out what it really is.
Midnight Blue-Light Special
- Kitty is a fan of Sesame Street and owns both Elmo slippers and Grover pajamas.
Verity Shorts
Waking Up in Vegas- The title may be from the Katy Perry song of the same name.
- Dominic pulls apart the lyrics of "Folsom Prison Blues":Dominic: Why would you shoot a man just to watch him die? If you shoot a man, it should be because you want that man dead. Shooting him simply to see what happens is a waste of both bullets and a good opponent. It makes no sense.
- The Aeslin mice watch the VH1 Video Countdown and try to match Taylor Swift's dance moves. Later on, they watch a Law & Order marathon.
My Last Name
- Verity compares her mom's appearance to Carol Brady.
- The Aeslin mice's "yay, we're almost home" song includes several verses from "The Wheels on the Bus".
Half-Off Ragnarok
- Sarah likes watching mathematical television shows like NUMB3RS and Square One TV.
- When discussing her scrambled brain, Sarah references classic children's stories through the Queen of Hearts and Humpty Dumpty.
- Chandi is a fan of LazyTown, while a gorgon child likes Pokémon. Many child visitors to the zoo must be convinced that Slytherin doesn't make all snakes evil.
- Alex describes Sarah giving the Covenant agents Laser-Guided Amnesia in the previous book as convincing them that the inhabitants of New York were not the droids they were looking for.
Magic for Nothing
- The person who trained Antimony on the flying trapeze was Grayson Campbell, which makes it a meta and in character Meaningful Name since Nightwing was circus born trapeze artist Dick Grayson in the comics, who grows up to use I Shall Taunt You as a combat technique, much like Verity, Timpani and Sam do.
- Antimony has a female Aeslin Mouse she calls Mindy. When a male Aeslin shows up and joins them, she informs him she can't pronounce his real name and asks if it's all right to address him as Mork.
- Antimony calls for her Aunt Mary by reciting, "Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse," much to Mary's dismay.
- The Covenant uses Men in Black as a reference point and a method of making their goals accessible to modern day recruits.
- Antimony complains that the Covenant, being the dark side, should have offered her cookies.
- Timpani mentions the Stalk from Saga after meeting a cryptid who looks an awful lot like the character.
- Antimony ends up hitchhiking on a lonely stretch of road, like the end scene of every episode of The Incredible Hulk (1977).
Calculated Risks
- Sarah mentions basing her "rules of telepathic conduct" on X-Men comics and Babylon 5.
- Mark compares Annie to Firestarter.
- Antimony mentions that the dimension they're trapped in "plays by Doctor Who rules", with normal gravity and a breathable atmosphere.
- Sarah calls her occasional Become a Real Boy tendency a "Blue Fairy impulse".
- Sarah says the suns in the alien dimension look "more like the sun from the Teletubbies than a real celestial body had any right to", though at least they don't have faces.
- "Not to get all It's a Wonderful Life about my own situation, but removing myself from Annie's memories had definitely kicked the support out from some of her ideas about the world."
- The intro for one of the chapters gives the setting as "the classroom where this terrible, awful, no-good, seemingly endless day began".
- Sarah mentions Artie talking her down from destroying the world as "very Crowley talking down Aziraphale before the Apocalypse".
- This conversation:Antimony: Isn't that why we have the mice? So nothing ever gets lost, or left behind, or forgotten?Sarah: Getting a little Lilo & Stitch there.
- On the very next page, Annie compares Mark's little sister Cici to "the second coming of Ramona the Brat".
- When Sarah explains how she folded spacetime to get from Oregon to Iowa, Annie asks if they're going to "go all A Wrinkle in Time".
- "Maybe we accidentally pulled a Dorothy and dropped a university campus on somebody's sister."
- "It's not a horrible, life-threatening situation if we don't have to run back and forth across an easily drawn space like we're characters on Scooby-Doo."
- Sarah mentions that the landscape in the "giant bug dimension" at night feels like Mordor.
- "In this case, the zombies really did want to eat brains, they just wanted to eat them on a psychic level rather than a physical one, which would be no more pleasant for their targets than the Romero method."
- Sarah mentions that "Many Bothans died to bring us these plans."
- When James pets Greg the Giant Spider, he says he feels like what Sweetums would feel like if he were real.
- At the climax of the book, Sarah tells James she's feeling like the geophysicists in The Core, and then has to explain to him what the movie's about.
- When Mark is explaining to the Johrlac children that Greg the Giant Spider is friendly and Sarah rides him, one of them asks, "Like She-ra and Swift Wind?"
- "He was bathed in lens flare, like a character from the J. J. Abrams Star Trek reboot."
- Sarah mentions how much Gwen Stacy's supporting cast must hate her fondness for Wall Crawling.
Spelunking Through Hell
- Despite Seanan confirming that Alice was not named after another Dimensional Traveler, she does note the connection to Alice in Wonderland a few times.
- Alice describes the rounded doors in the Autarch's compound as "Hobbit-hole doors".
- She compares Sally and the other guards' armor to Mad Max costumes. She also calls Helos to a cross between Mad Max and Lord of the Flies.
- Alice says Kirk's Rock from Star Trek: The Original Series would fit right in with the badlands of the bottle world.
- Sally calls Alice the "Bride of Frankenstein", and says "Bride of Gandalf" doesn't have the same ring to it.
Backpacking Through Bedlam
- Alice notes that Sally is "walking without rhythm so she won't attract the worm" (actually a giant mole, which may eat giant worms).
- When they're heading to meet Kenneth, Alice says they're "off to see the wizard", and she describes the aftermath of Sarah's teleportation of the university campus as "going full Dorothy".
- Sally quotes the catchphrase "We provide...Leverage", to Alice's confusion.
Antimony shorts
Singing the Comic-Con Blues- "I am what happens when nerds are allowed to marry nerds and thus produce even more nerds, like nerdiness squared, like what happens when Seymour from Little Shop is allowed to hook up with Jordan from Real Genius. And if you got both those references, odds are good that you're a nerd, too."
- Artie jokingly suggests Aquaman as a solution to the siren problem.
- Antimony talks about Alex's membership in the Society for Creative Anachronism in the exposition.
- "As if reading comics were anything unusual in a world where Iron Man is still breaking merchandising and box office records."
- "Age of the geek, baby."
- The Aeslin mice completely clear any leftover food from plates, described as one of their more Cinderella-esque attributes.
- Once they get to Seattle, Sarah points out a cosplayer dressed as Marvel Girl, another telepath.
- Antimony cosplays as Lara Croft (or at least a generic tomb-raiding female Adventurer Archaeologist). Sarah cosplays as a Jedi, appropriate for someone using Jedi Mind Tricks to get into the convention.
- Annie likens the show floor opening up to Wonka's chocolate factory.
Blocked
- Annie describes herself as "more Wednesday Addams than Marcia Brady".
- She says being on the field cheerleading "felt like I was going to pull a Jean Grey and ignite from within". Hilarious in Hindsight when we learn she has pyrokinetic powers in the later books.
- In the next scene, she's reading Astonishing X-Men.
- When Kevin tells her he wants her to "be part of the world", she says he's "coming dangerously close to reciting lyrics from The Little Mermaid".
- Annie picks her fake last name "Thompson" because it's the last name of the protagonist from A Nightmare On Elm Street.
- Elsie says Annie would be happy if she was "that dude on The Twilight Zone who lived through the bomb being dropped and then had all the books in the world and no one to tell him to put them down". Annie points out that he broke his glasses.
Fran and Jonathan shorts
Stingers and Strangers- Fran calls Eleanor "the Wicked Bitch of the West", and compares Heloise to Snow White.
Alice and Thomas shorts
Take the Shot- Mary asks Thomas "Are you a good witch or a bad witch?" after finding out he's a sorcerer.
Off-Balance
- Thomas expected Aeslin mice to sound like Mickey Mouse.
Other shorts
IM- Artie compares Johrlac to the Brood.
- After waking from sedation, Elsie Harrington acknowledges she's getting her faculties back by wiggling her big toe.
