History Literature / TheHermuxTantamoqAdventures

%%* ImmortalityImmorality

* ScrewTheRulesIHaveConnections: Tucka is very easily able to talk a judge who's a close friend of hers into holding a hearing to legally transfer the Varmint theatre into her control. All she has to do is promise him support for re-election (judges here, apparently, are elected).

& ScrewTheRulesIHaveConnections: Tucka is very easily able to talk a judge who's a close friend of hers into holding a hearing to legally transfer the Varmint theatre into her control. All she has to do is promise him support for re-election (judges here, apparently, are elected).

* OverprotectiveDad: Fluster Varmint to Beulith, especially since he's a widower.

* CatsAreMean: Their extinct civilisation—clearly an AncientEgypt analogue—enslaved mice.

* CruelAndUnusualDeath: Mousetraps. Mutant killer bees. Nailed into a crate of rocks and pushed into a river. Thankfully none of them actually happen. [[spoiler:Except for Termind the parrot's death—he is strangled and ''stuffed'' with sawdust, making him a real ventriloquist's dummy. Which his owner Gilden Binter has no skill at operating.]]
** Hard to say if it's ''cruel'' or ''death'' per se, but it's certainly ''unusual''—drinking the very potent antiaging serum from the moon plant in the first book will rapidly and entirely deage a person … potentially turning them all the way back into egg cells, [[spoiler:as Dr Mennus learns the hard way]].

* DeadlyEuphemism: Ventriloquist apprentice Magner Wooliun ([[spoiler:alias Corpius Crounce]]) claims to the police he was ''cleaning'' Gilden Binter's puppet—but as said puppet is a ''living'' parrot and Binter is a fraud, it's quite clear to the reader what he actually means. Especially when Hermux finds this out the next day the hard way.

* DoesThisRemindYouOfAnything: Mice have speciesist prejudices against other rodents, and in ''The Sands of Time'', mouse-supremacist movements regularly harass chipmunks like Birch as well as his "chipmunk-loving" mouse friends—including Hermux's parents; a very clear analogue to [[UsefulNotes/CivilRightsMovement racist white humans targeting black activism and their white allies in the 1950s and 1960s]]. Meanwhile, Hinkum, the BigBad, even appropriates all scientific and technological discoveries in this world as the work of his own ancestors and claims the glorious mythic past is an all-mouse effort—a typical political device used by RealLife Fascists, dictators and other megalomaniac leaders.

* EarlyBirdCameo: Former movie star Nurella Pinch is first mentioned in the first book as an unfortunate victim of Dr Mennus' beauty procedures and thus had to retire from show business and become a recluse, but she only reappears under her actual name in the third book to defend the Varmint theatre from Tucka's attempts to buy it out. She also appears in the same book very early on [[spoiler:under an assumed name—as Glissin, the costumer]]. (Ex-husband and action-movie director Brinx Lotelle is also mentioned in passing in the same breath as Nurella in the first book and likewise is more focused on in the third.)

* FantasticRacism: The various species of rodent have several stereotypic ideas about each other. Even Hermux is influenced by this at first, calling chipmunks "a clownish lot" and not believing a mole could be a {{Mad Scientist}}. He grows out of it eventually. Others don't—the villain of the second book is even working with unsubtly-labelled "mouse supremacists", many of whom are behind the harassment of non-mouse rodents including chipmunks like Birch, as well as his mouse sympathisers.

* FountainOfYouth: Literally the InUniverse term given to the moon plant unearthed by the Dandiffer expedition with the help of Teulabonari's indigenous Nerran (chinchilla) communities—just eating its leaves will rejuvenate fur and energise the body, and the Nerrans themselves have made a tradition and ritual of distilling its antiaging serum and gargling it in significant ceremonies to stay ageless (but not drinking it—it's too powerful for that, as it can completely deage the unwitting drinker into babyhood or even further).

%% * GettingCrapPastThe Radar: Due to overwhelming and persistent misuse, GCPTR is on-page examples only until 01 June 2021. If you are reading this in the future, please check the trope page to make sure your example fits the current definition.
* HeKnowsTooMuch: Likely how Dr Jervutz was murdered in the first book—it seems he found out [[spoiler:Dr Mennus is after the rejuvenating plant samples dug up by the Dandiffer expedition. Jervutz thus tries to warn Dr Dandiffer about this but is killed before he can do so]].

* LaserGuidedKarma: Tucka's ending in the first book—[[spoiler:she gets herself trapped and drastically remodelled in the U-Babe cosmetic surgery machine]].
* LiveMinkCoat: Flies, in this case; Tucka wears an entire dress of living flies in ''The Sands of Time''—and (for better or worse) they're not even tied down that tightly, so that a single dramatic dance movement shakes them all off.

* OffingTheOffspring: Thankfully averted, but the third book came scarily close—[[spoiler:Corpius Crounce nearly killed ''Beulith'', his own daughter, with a falling spotlight. In his defence, he didn't know.]]

* RedHerring: When Hermux tails the shady-looking rat who showed up demanding Linka's watch in the first book, he follows the rat into a building that includes an office for an organisation called "Aviators Anonymous". Naturally Hermux thinks this is where the rat went, what with Linka being an aviatrix and all—but it has nothing to do with the case he's following. Instead, said rat goes into an office called "Automated Laboratory Equipment", which [[spoiler:builds specialised machinery for Dr Mennus' experiments]].

* RetroUniverse: Ironically for a series centred around a watchmaker, and setting aside the fact that the series takes place in a human-free WorldOfMammals—the time setting of the series is never specified. Although they use human terms for measurements of time, no years are ever specified, with all historical dates reckoned from the present (e.g. "n years ago").
** Regarding technological development, the closest human analogue is tricky to place, but technology appears to have reached the equivalent of [[TheThirties 1930s]]–[[TheSixties 1960s]] human levels. Communications technologies have largely not advanced beyond telephones, telegraphs, and film; airplanes (such as Linka's) are vaguely implied to be analogous to pre-1950s human planes, and television sets are rarely mentioned (though they exist—Linka has one at home), let alone computers. The one exception may be the U-Babe cosmetic surgery machine in the first book, which is operated from some sort of computer panel, but [[{{Zeerust}} it is treated as being ahead of its time]].
** Meanwhile, what little is mentioned of social attitudes roughly parallel mid-20th-century social views in the human world—the most obvious being the isolated cases of FantasticRacism (i.e., speciesist prejudices held by mice against moles, chipmunks, etc.), similar to American racism in the [[UsefulNotes/CivilRightsMovement 1950s–1960s]].

* TheSvengali: What Crounce thinks Nurella Pinch is to Beulith—training her as a replacement star whom she can control.

* WorldOfMammals: Most of the sapient species in this world are various kinds of mammals—various rodents, carnivores like otters and cats, insectivores like hedgehogs and shrews, etc., though there are the occasional sapient bird exceptions. Most nonmammal species like birds, reptiles and insects fulfil many of the niches that mammalian pets—and prey animals—fill in the RealLife human world.

* DeadlyEuphemism: Ventriloquist apprentic Magner Wooliun ([[spoiler:alias Corpius Crounce]]) claims to the police he was ''cleaning'' Gilden Binter's puppet—but as said puppet is a ''living'' parrot and Binter is a fraud, it's quite clear to the reader what he actually means. Especially when Hermux finds this out the next day the hard way.

* EarlyBirdCameo: Former movie star Nurella Pinch is first mentioned in the first book as an unfortunate victim of Dr Mennus' beauty procedures and thus had to retire from show business and become a recluse, but she only reappears under her actual name in the third book to defend the Varmint theatre from Tucka's attempts to buy it out. She also appears in the same book very early on [[spoiler:under an assumed name—as Glissin, the costumer]].

** Hard to say if it's ''cruel'' per se, but drinking the very potent antiaging serum from the moon plant in the first book will rapidly and entirely deage a person … potentially turning them all the way back into egg cells, [[spoiler:as Dr Mennus learns the hard way]].

* MinorCrimeRevealsMajorPlot: In the first book, Linka's abduction → [[spoiler:Conspiracy to get the Fountain of Youth plant and its chemical analysis, and silencing (i.e. murdering) anyone in the way]]

* FountainOfYouth: Literally the InUniverse term given to the moon plant unearthed by the Dandiffer expedition via Teulabonari's indigenous Nerran (chinchilla) communities—just eating its leaves will rejuvenate fur and energise the body, and the Nerrans themselves have made a tradition and ritual of distilling its antiaging serum and gargling it in significant ceremonies to stay ageless (but not drinking it—it's too powerful for that, as it can completely deage the unwitting drinker into babyhood or even further).