It's pretty much impossible to talk about this web animation here without spoiling the whole context of it here. Please make sure to watch the original video first before reading this page, as all spoilers are turned off for this article. You Have Been Warned!
"I didn't think it'd happen so soon."
Velma Meets the Original Velma
is a fanmade Web Animation by Avocado Animations, based on Scooby-Doo and Velma. The events are triggered in the Velma universe when Norville brings in a brown dog with a familiar collar. Then suddenly... she starts remembering.
This animation contains examples of the following tropes:
- Adaptational Abomination: Scooby-Doo in canon is just a talking Great Dane. This story turns him into some sort of Animalistic Abomination instead.
- Ambiguous Situation: While Scooby is a reality warping Animalistic Abomination and would later actively reset the world to keep Velma from remembering, it's unclear why he first attacked and killed everybody when Velma realized that dogs can't talk. The most likely explanation is that it simply put her too close to unearthing Scooby's true eldritch nature, which Scooby was afraid would damage the dynamic between them.
- Animalistic Abomination: It's not exactly clear what Scooby is in this but he's clearly far more removed from a normal dog than his canon counterparts already was; he can stand perfectly on two legs, extend his body in lethal ways and rewrite reality to change the world and reincarnate his closest friends. Oh, and he speaks in garbled yet elegant English.
- Apocalypse Maiden: Velma plays an interesting variation of this trope. While she's not part of any prophecy that spells her being the one to end the world, her asking how can Scooby talk causes the mutt to have a Freak Out and kill everybody before restarting the world. Her unexplained Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory also ensures that when, not if, she begins to question things, Scooby will repeat the cycle once again.
- Armor-Piercing Question: "Why can Scooby talk?" Not even Scooby himself could answer that, and it was this question that kickstarted the entire plot.
- Artifact Title: Simply put, Velma doesn't meet her past self. At least, not physically.
- Aspect Montage: When Scooby mentions how Velma remembered her past over and over, multiple past iterations of herself (her A Pup Named Scooby-Doo, What's New, Scooby-Doo? and Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated incarnations) are shown on-screen before returning to her present-day counterpart.
- Bait-and-Switch: To say that Velma meeting different versions of herself isn't what happens in this short is a bit of an understatement.
- Black Bead Eyes: Scooby's post-reveal form has a small pair of these - just small enough to clash with the face they're on; reinforcing how "wrong" Scooby is.
- Black Comedy: Scooby's embarrassed groan in response to Velma's cheer at being "meta" is quite possibly the only moment of unambiguous comedy in the entire short… and it's very quickly followed by him gruesomely killing her.
- Bloodier and Gorier: While most of it is either offscreen or only in small flashes, the video proves to be far more gory than the Scooby Doo franchise normally is.
- Came Back Wrong: After killing the members of Mystery Inc., Scooby always takes a bit of their essence and recreates them alongside the entire world. However, each time he does, he captures less and less essence, meaning they end up as more flawed than the original. He's done this so much that the Velma cast are his most flawed recreations yet.
- Cosmic Horror Story: Once Velma realizes that something is wrong, Scooby comes clean to her and reveals himself to be an Animalistic Abomination with control over everyone else's lives.
- Darker and Edgier: A paranormal Scooby, blood and gore abound, the main protagonist outright dying at the end, not for the first time... Yep, this animation is darker than even the original Scooby-Doo content.
- Deconstruction: Of the Scooby-Doo series, its history, shows like it, the idea of Status Quo Is God, and stories with lots of spin-offs and continuities. Scooby is a talking dog because he's an Eldritch Abomination taking on A Form You Are Comfortable With so he can enjoy a "simple" life solving mysteries with humans that he's taken a liking to, but anytime the status quo starts falling apart, he throws a fit and reboots the world to try and go "back to basics" because he can't accept change, ironically just skewing things further and further away from the original version.
- Disproportionate Retribution: Scooby's response to the cast noticing he can talk is to massacre them all wholesale and reset the universe. Repeatedly.
- Downer Ending: Velma fails to run away from Scooby-Doo, who decapitates her while lamenting that he'll get it right next time.
- Dramatically Missing the Point: After listening to how Scooby has repeatedly slaughtered past iterations of the Gang and kept trying to recreate them but with less of their essence available to him, making them "flawed", Velma is more focused on the fact he said they're flawed at all, incredulous they could be in any way flawed when they're "meta" now. This just reinforces Scooby's belief she needs to die.
- Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Despite his brutal actions, despite the fact that he is in every sense a monster, one of the first things Scooby says to Velma is, "I love you. You know that, right?" The very reason he keeps bringing the Mystery Gang back is that he, deep down, despite it all, genuinely does love them.
- Evil Reactionary: Scooby effectively. Part of why he keeps resetting the world and won't accept the gang knowing he's not a normal dog is because it disrupts his preferred status quo, and he considers each subsequent world more and more "flawed" largely on the basis that it's more and more different from what he knows. In a lot of ways, he's effectively portrayed as a fan who refuses to accept any version of a series other than the original.
- Gory Discretion Shot: We don't see how Scooby killed the other members of Mystery Inc after Velma ran away, but his bloody muzzle makes it clear it wasn't a clean job.
- Happy Ending Override: Applies to every past iteration of Scooby-Doo, but most noticeably with the Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated incarnation. After successfully defeating the entity, resetting the universe to one where everyone's lives are much happier, and going on a trip to see Harlan Ellison at Miskatonic University to solve more mysteries, that iteration of the world came to an untimely end because of Scooby killing the Gang and resetting it, it all but said the Velma iteration was the next one.
- Honor Before Reason: Scooby could probably avoid the whole problem he's in by just not resurrecting Velma with the rest of the gang when he does a reset, since she's the one who always sees through the illusion and recovers her memories. But excluding her would mean not having things precisely as they were in the original world and he refuses to do that; both because he loves Velma as much as the others and because he refuses to accept such a radical change.
- I Just Want to Have Friends: A brutal deconstruction. Scooby simply wants a world where he can enjoy adventures with those he loves, but he brutally murders them and recreates their world every time they notice anything out of place; unaware or unfeeling of the strain it puts on Velma. Worse still, he loses a bit of their essence every time he does this - meaning he'll only be able to keep it up for so long before they're all gone.
- Jawbreaker: In the montage depicting Scooby's massacre of the initial cast, Shaggy's jaw is outright bitten off his face.
- Killed Offscreen:
- In the original iteration of the gangs death, while his killing of Fred and Shaggy are shown, Scooby's killing of Daphne and Velma goes unseen, though their corpses are shown with the others.
- None of the incarnations in between the original and Velma are shown being killed, the flashes of the Velmas from A Pup Named Scooby-Doo, What's New, Scooby-Doo?, and Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated all but outright saying those incarnations of the Gang were killed too.
- Killed to Uphold the Masquerade: Scooby murders the cast and resets the universe every time Velma remembers the original timeline in an attempt to return things to "normal," but he has less to work with each time, meaning he probably can't keep it up forever.
- Lame Comeback: When Scooby claims that Velma is his worst recreation of the Mystery Gang yet, Velma (the character) tries to argue against it by claiming that that can't be, because they're now meta. Scooby ends up uttering a disgusted "ugh" before putting her out of her misery.
- Mythology Gag: When Scooby reveals his true form to Velma, his dog tag shifts from the traditional look to the version from Shaggy & Scooby-Doo Get A Clue!.
- Never Shall The Selves Meet: Despite what the title and thumbnail imply, Velma never ends up physically meeting the original version of Velma.
- Not So Above It All: When Velma protests the show's current incarnation isn't flawed because they're now Meta, Scooby can only utter a deadpanned, completely disgusted "Ugh."
- Off with His Head!: Velma's fate at the end of the animation, with her head being bitten and ripped straight off by Scooby.
- Oh, Crap!: Scooby's expression says it all when Velma questions why he can talk and the others follow suit.
- Pre-Mortem One-Liner: Scooby delivers one to Velma right before killing her."Please don't run... I don't like to chase."
- Restart the World: This is what Scooby does every time he's found; he kills the entire cast, takes a bit of their essence, and recreates the world into a different iteration. He's done this enough so that there's been over half a dozen iterations, with the Velma one being the most recent and, in his own words, the most flawed.
- Revisiting the Roots: A meta deconstruction of the concept. Scooby keeps killing the gang and resetting the world out of a desperate desire to restore everything back to how it was in the original version of the world (i.e., the original Where Are You? show). Instead, all he accomplishes is losing more and more of the essence of the show with every attempt to force things back to basics.
- Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory: Velma is somehow able to remember things between the re-iterations of the Scooby-Doo universe, even to the present day.
- Self-Inflicted Hell: Scooby's decision to kill and resurrect his friends all because Velma asked how he could talk resulted in one. He continues to kill and resurrect them; knowing that Velma will end up having questions, and knowing that each time he does it, things will only get worse for all of them.
- Soundtrack Dissonance: Towards the end, the music has an almost upbeat tone that greatly clashes with the existential horror of Velma's existence.
- Status Quo Is God: Deconstructed. Scooby wants to keep everything "simple" and Strictly Formula. He will not tolerate any disruption of the basic premise of things — him and the gang solving mysteries — and reacts violently to anything that threatens to be a disruption.
- Stylistic Suck: The animation styles and quirks of each era of Scooby-Doo is faithfully recreated whenever they're glimpsed, such as the stilted animation of the original or the crass, offensive humor of Velma.
- Take That!: During Scooby's speech, he mentions how he captures less of his friends' essence on each reiteration, a prod at reboots gradually losing the charm of the original cartoon, before stating that the Velma universe is, in his words, "my most flawed world yet".
- Teeny Weenie: When Velma first sees the dog that Norville brought, she calls the dog "big and brown, which is the exact opposite of Fred's tiny white d-" before she has the flashback.
- Tragic Mistake: The moment Velma chose to overcomplicate things by questioning Scooby's ability to talk, since the whole thing wouldn't have happened had she just kept it to herself. Scooby's rushed decision to immediately kill his friends didn't help, either.
- Uncanny Valley: Scooby just looks... wrong in this animation, especially towards the end. He's drawn in a much more realistic style and almost completely unanthropomorphized, which makes it particularly unsettling seeing him talk and stand on his hind legs like a person.
- Uncertain Doom: When Scooby confronts Velma outside, his muzzle is covered in blood, and a scrap of blond hair can be seen on his lip. Considering what he did to other Mystery Inc incarnations, it's highly likely he already killed the Velma incarnations of Fred, Daphne, and Norville.
- Vicious Cycle: The Scooby-Doo world has apparently been in one of these since Velma questioned how Scooby can talk. In it, Scooby's talkativeness gets pointed out, he freaks out when he can't answer it, kills everybody and takes their essence before recreating the world.
- Voice of the Legion: Scooby's post-reveal voice sounds like several different voices overlapping with one another.
- Well-Intentioned Extremist: Scooby. While his methods were brutal, all he simply wanted was a world where he could enjoy adventures with his pals in Mystery Inc.
- Wham Shot: Scooby standing up on two legs.
- Would Hurt a Child: Implied. Among the recreated and destroyed worlds shown in A Pup Named Scooby-Doo, where the gang are all pre-teens and Velma especially was only 8.
- You Can't Fight Fate: Velma attempts to flee from Scooby by the end of the animation, but is left stuck at one spot, unable to truly escape her inevitable fate.
