Chili and the Chocolate Factory: Fudge Revelation
is a fanfic by gazemaize set in a shared universe of the works of Roald Dahl, particularly Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. It parodies, among other things, both its own source material and Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality as well as other Rational Fic that followed.
Chili and the Chocolate Factory provides examples of
- Author Avatar: The story eventually includes one of Roald Dahl, in the form of a pickle ("Road Dill") lying in the middle of a street.
- Charlie and the Chocolate Parody: The plot opens with Charles Bucket inviting six children to his factory, to be determined by a familiar, if slightly updated contest.
- Deconstructed Character Archetype: Of The Wonka, by way of his successor in Charles Bucket. Through some combination of isolation, the weight of expectation and the ordeal of the first factory tour, he ends up adopting the cheerful-if-abrasive demeanor of his mentor while hiding a deep inability to accept other people's suffering as real. Combined with all the physical power of the factory and a vindictive streak, this makes him very dangerous to the children and to the world at large.
- Decoy Protagonist: Triple subverted, or thereabouts.
- During the golden ticket contest, Kid Detective Chillenial Lee is introduced as he announces that he's solved the mystery of how to get the final ticket, while Chili still hasn't found a computer to attempt the puzzle. Lee is dead wrong while Chili solves it by accident.
- During the factory tour, Chili is eliminated second, just before Keerthi figures out the exact nature of Charles' insanity and the rest of the the group has to keep her from being murdered by Charles in retaliation.
- Ultimately, Chili is responsible for freeing the other children from the "non-citizens hospital", letting them fight back against Charles in the finale, and is the one to figure out the mystery of the Pickle, letting Mahuika save the world.
- Exact Words: Charles likes to invoke this to the children, though the "exact" interpretations he insists on of his own words soon grow increasingly nonsensical.
- Feghoot: The story eventually leads up to a pun.
- Flat Character: Mahuika vapes. Charles has created many people like her, about whom only a single fact is true. She's gotten better by the epilogue.
- Greek Chorus: During the golden ticket contest, each chapter has a brief intermission in an unnamed online chatroom. The chatroom mostly talks about the contest and its consequences for the world at remove, though they also discuss the events of the decades between Charlie and Chili to establish them for the reader.
- A Lesson Learned Too Well: Keerthi realizes Bucket went through the original factory tour at a very impressionable age, seeing the other children get laser-guided karmic punishments for their vices and himself rewarded by inheriting the factory. Consequently, he grew up thinking the world is inherently just, and by extension, that any terrible thing that happens to anyone must be deserved. This in turn left him effectively apathetic to any amount of suffering in the world, and willing to create the overtly monstrous parts of the factory.
- Lost in Character: Tide believes this is what ultimately happened to Charles Bucket, reflecting on her own experience as an unintentional cult leader.
- Outgrowing the Childish Name: Charlie Bucket exclusively goes by Charles by the time of the story. Though intended to convey maturity, it really signifies his inability to outgrow either the experience of the original factory tour or his adopted The Wonka persona.
- Meta Fiction: The story eventually begins to turn into this, as the pickle in the street becomes more and more important to the story.
- No Ending: After five of six tickets have been awarded, and Chili sets out to grab the final one, the chapter "The End" takes place exclusively in the chatroom, with only two members awake. One of them writes a rueful rant about apathy in the face of the vastness of the world, with no small amount of rage at people who would craft things that feel meaningful only to take them away prematurely. This is chapter 6 of 23, chapter 7 completes the Compound Title with "of the Contest: the Sixth Ticket".
- Powered by a Forsaken Child: An important ingredient for making chocolate is slavery, without which it tastes terrible. Normally the slavery is introduced into the chocolate by using unfree labor in poor countries to grow cacao, but Charles Bucket provides his own source of slavery inside the factory itself - on a vast and horrifying scale.
- Puzzle Thriller:
- The beginning of the story involves people's attempts to solve Charles Bucket's riddle in order to win one of six tickets to tour his factory. The riddle itself consists of a website that contains the text "Put what I like most into the bucket", a picture of a bucket, and a text entry field. The solution is entirely logical when taking into account the events of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory into account. What Charles likes most is, logically enough, chocolate. And in the original story, Willy Wonka demonstrated a method of "sending objects by television", and TV screens and computer screens are the same thing. So the solution to the riddle is to follow the directions entirely literally: take a physical bar of chocolate, put it on the picture of the bucket, and then push it into the inside of the computer screen.
- As in Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, at the climax of the story, the fic's author challenged the audience to come up with the correct solution to the problem the main character faces. Mahuika mindlessly obeys any command of the form "Mahuika, vape and X", and Chili (and therefore the audience) has to tell her what to do in order to save the world. This was a Foregone Victory for the audience. Literally any command at all would have worked, because vaping itself was what Chili needed her to do.
- Red Herring: The text entry field in the website of Charles Bucket's riddle. Also, the fact that the children who solved the riddle before before the audience learns how all had (or at least appeared to have) interests that bordered on obsessions.
- Shout-Out Theme Naming: The Greek Chorus chatroom users mostly derive their names from the readership of Alexander Wales, with slight permutations.
- These Are Things Man Was Not Meant to Know: Astronomy is treated this way in-universe. This is because, as in Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, outer space contains Vermicious Knids, which are extremely dangerous creatures that would have destroyed the Earth long ago if not for the fact that they can't survive the heat of re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere. If anyone ever builds a spaceship and leaves the atmosphere, a Vermicious Knid will steal it, ride it back to the Earth's surface, and then destroy the world. So to keep people's curiosity from causing this disaster, looking at the night sky is forbidden and punished by the Anti-Astronomers, and astronomy is something that only literal cartoon villains engage in.
- World of Weirdness: Being set in a world in which basically everything ever written by Roald Dahl is completely true, the resulting Crossover Cosmology is appropriately bizarre.
