Despite the deliberately limited set up Home Safety Hotline has, the game has a good few characteristics in the Callers, Workers, Fae and Fae-related problems the game's world portrays.
If you see any of these in real life, well, you know the drill.
(Currently under construction)
Home Safety Hotline
As a Whole:
The titular hotline the player character works for, the Home Safety Hotline is a service homeowners can call to deal with a variety of problems ranging from the mundane to the not-so-mundane, in the latter case in particular, The Police tend to refer people with the number to this service.- Blue-and-Orange Morality: As a fey-based organization, this is a given. It often leads to Disproportionate Retribution and valuing children on the same level as pets. Consistently, deadly fae do not have methods given to kill them, something implied to be because the Hotline sees their interactions with their victims as natural predator-and-prey scenerios.
- Deconstruction: To The Men in Black and how they run.
- While they seem to be operating towards a "greater good" of hiding a magical world from normal society, its still impossible for all the strangeness of a whole world to be covered up completely effectively (such as a False Rose Bush making it into the news), and it leads to people being skeptical and uninformed.
- The limits of the technology that is available during an earlier time period causes their systems to be sporadically unreliable. Anything more complicated seems to be done with magic as a result.
- A strict mindset that inhuman/impersonal founders and supervisors have is not necessarily helpful. In this case, Since the higher ups are fae, they are almost always unwilling to harm other fae, leading to more supernatural problems than mundane ones, as well as tending to leave human customers with vague or unhelpful info. The rather archaic punishment of turning people into mice has also lead to said intelligent mice being discovered at large and jeopardizing the secrecy.
- For Inconvenience, Press "1": Subverted and Downplayed. There is an automated voice that tells people to hold, but otherwise, the player is an actual person on the other end figuring out what info to send the callers. It also has no bearing how fast the Player is in sending a response to Callers who are in otherwise time sensitive predicaments. Downplayed in many cases, as the Hotline generally shies away from actually getting rid of problems, preferring their callers to either give in to situations or live with it.
- Hoist by His Own Petard: Implied to almost be the subject of it on a large scale due to people studying the sentient mice they've created in large amounts due to firing employees, especially Considering these mice can do things like type and send emails and dial phones. That's not even getting into broadcasts reporting fae due to their neglect of dealing with the problems being called over.
- Incompetence, Inc.: The Players performance aside, In-universe it seems like the bubble they are trying to preserve is just about on the edge of bursting, as a majority of the creatures situations they are called to deal with are ultimately just left to their own devices. In addition, it's happening enough that fae are making it into news reports and other unrelated businesses are beginning to implement things about fae into their ads. In any real-world scenario, the Home Safety Hotline would've been subject to tons of investigation well before this point for their suspicious activity.
- The Men in Black: A mystical take on this, while simultaneously also being a much more mundane example. The Hotline has its own specialized removal teams for the various creatures and phenomena, but are greatly limited simply due to the fact they are more-or-less a call-center service and that they charge for their services.
