From Clockwise at Top Left: Rhomb, Infin!Eight, Kite, Yelley, Keytar, Blendy, Harp, Telephone, Nova Wand, Icing Bag, Magnifying Glass, Disco Ball, Honeycomb, Pillar, Faberge Egg, and Megaphone | Not Pictured: P.A.B, Bell, Gauze, Peach, and Typewriter
Vortexes & Velvets (V&V) is a web-animated Object Show created by ᛃNevadaTheXtateᛃ
(Battle For Trillion Dollars). The Pilot was uploaded to Nev's YouTube channel on 28th January 2020 under the Working Title Visual Void before the first episode was released exactly a year later.
Twenty objects unwillingly find themselves transcending through time and space as P.A.B abducted them as the contestants of their interdimensional gameshow Vortexes & Velvetsnote whether they want to or not.
Due to Nev leaving for military service, they entrust writer Andy Duthie to take over as the showrunner from episode nine onwards.
All the episodes can be watched here.
Contains the following tropes:
- Abhorrent Admirer: Blendy has an unrequited and very much unwanted crush on Kite. Manipulations from the latter and Yandere tendencies from the former aside, Kite is a lesbian according to
Word of Gay meaning this Blendy's chance for a relationship with her was doomed from the start. - A Dog Named "Dog": Across all dimensions, what remains constant is naming conventions of objects being named after their species as seen for the contestants. P.A.B and his family advert this.
- Alliterative Name: Vortexes & Velvets
- A Lizardnamed Liz: Blendy and Yelley have the honor of their name being a mashup of their species (A blender and the cour yellow respectively) and the "-y" suffix.
- Animate Inanimate Object: No matter what dimension the cast is in, they and the world's population are walking, talking sentient objects.
- Cyclops: Gatsby has only one visible glowing eye so does Molokh whose face is on the one-sided die with the dot acting as the eye while the rest of the cast have peripheral vision.
- Dimensional Traveler: P.A.B can hop from one dimension to another with his abilities or use a special machine to transport the contestants for his interdimensional gameshow whether they like it or not. This also means he can leave eliminated contestants behind in the previous dimension as a penalty for losing but promises to pick them up and go back home once the competition is officially over.
- Game Show Host: P.A.B is the official host of Vortexes & Velvets while the unofficial ones would be their siblings who tried to usurp the role from them by hijacking the show, sending them away, and forcing their contestants to whatever whims or demands for challenges. It doesn't last long since P.A.B would find a way to return before the voting and their siblings would hightail to whatever dimension they came from.
- Hostile Show Takeover: Starting from "Latibule.", P.A.B's extended family constantly hijacks V&V for their own amusement and to annoy their sibling to no end.
- Gatsby turns P.A.B into a People Puppet and makes some of the contestants perform a play to please the king and queen of the dimension using voodoo dolls of themselves while the others do meaningless errands.
- Molokh sends P.A.B back to earth right after the finale of Battle For Trillion Dollars and challenges the contestants to a real-life game of chutes and ladders.
- Living Polyhedron: Rhomb is an 18-sided rhombicuboctahedron die while Yelley is a yellow square.
- Meaningful Name: Gatsby's name is after Francis Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby for his flamboyant and prideful character.
- My Nayme Is: Molokh's name is spelled with a "k" instead of a "c" like how it's usually spelled in biblical mythology.
- Non-Gameplay Elimination: Fed-up with Kite's manipulative ploys and drama-stirring, P.A.B opts to eliminate her in "Knock Knock" alongside Blendy after her latest stunt tricked the latter into getting the most votes and the confrontation that followed. They then abandon them both in the latest dimension and Kite has to deal with a furiously aggravated Yandere Blendy (Though they both got turned into People Puppets by Gatsby before anything ugly could happen).
- People Puppets: As the prophet of authority, Gatsby can attach strings to his targets and convert them into puppet versions of themselves he can manipulate and talk through them. The victims are conscious throughout but can do nothing about it.
- Third-Person Person: Yelley refers to himself in the third person for no reason other than to highlight his off-putting and eccentric personality.
- Token Minority: Disco Ball is the only armless object of the entire cast.
- Voice Changeling: Gatsby can channel the voices of the objects he turned into People Puppets as a medium and make them say what he wants them to say.
- Second Episode Introduction: Blendy, Keytar, Kite, and Rhomb were dragged into the game in the second episode as unwilling, last-minute replacements for the four contestants who mysteriously disappear.
- Shout-Out: All the episodes from the Pilot onwards are titled after a Vaporwave song.
- Sinister Scythe: Thanathos is the anthropomorphic version of one as fitting for the prophet of death. He also wears a pair of stud bracelets to show he means serious business.
- Whatever Happened to the Mouse?: Bell, Gauze, Peach, and Typewriter just straight-up vanished when the second episode came around and was replaced with Blendy, Keytar, Kite, and Rhomb. When the contestants question the change as well as the newbies who were angry over being abducted to be replacements, P.A.B has no idea what happened and simply shrugs the incident off. It turns out the missing four were in a cavernous pit of god-knows-where as Nev wrote them out of the show this way.
- Yandere: In spite of the V&V crew insisting he's just "love-sick", Blendy is a prime example of the trope: being overly possessive for Kite (Despite Incompatible Orientation and he knows it), his eyes becoming crosses whenever he becomes violent and threatened to harm her once he realized she tricked him.
