Blythe's Little Problem is a Littlest Pet Shop (2012) fanfic written by Glu. In the story Blythe Baxter gets turned into a cat and has to find a way to turn back to normal before the fourth day passes or else she'll remain a cat forever. It can be read here.
Tropes:
- Animorphism: Blythe turns into a cat, while Sue Patterson turns into a ferret.
- Bittersweet Ending: Depends on how the reader sees it. On one hand, you can see the happy ending for Blythe, or see a bad ending for Josh since he lost his pet cat and has no idea where she is.
- Boring, but Practical: The resolution to the plot: Sugar Sprinkles only has to sing the Love Spell song in reverse in front of Josh and Jasper to respectively to turn Blythe and Sue back to their normal selves.
- Chekhov's Gun:
- Sue finds it odd that Jasper stares at her. Turns out, he was under the influence of the love-spell and thus causing Sue to turn into a ferret in the long run.
- And later does Sugar Sprinkles doesn't come along to see Cat!Blythe because she is focused on her Love Spell project. Turns out she was testing it on Jasper and Sue.
- Continuity Nod:
- Josh's band make Blythe their mascot, due to being inspired to take a mascotte because of Zoe's performance.
- Josh thinks that Blythe has no crush on him, due to her acting goofy in front of him and trying to evade him.
- Didn't See That Coming: Pretty much everyone's reaction when it's revealed that the magic that would cause Blythe to talk to animals didn't turned her into an animal, but rather Sugar Sprinkle's Love Spell, giving her hope to become normal again.
- Didn't Think This Through: Vinnie. He simply suggests that Blythe should accept her new life because the other pets are also okay with their lives, forgetting that she loses everything she is and had in her life in the process. He gets smacked a lot for it by the other pets.
- Do Not Call Me "Paul": After the four days are over and it looks like Blythe is going to be a cat for the rest of her life, she asks her friends to start calling her 'Dina', since that is her new name.
Blythe: There is no Blythe Baxter anymore. There is only Dina the cat.
- Eating Pet Food: Blythe decides to do this because she needs food. She isn't fan of it, but doesn't sees cat food as terrible.
- Happily Adopted: Despite not being a fan of it, Blythe considers herself lucky that the Sharp family is nice, kind and accepting to her. She even states that if she has to be a cat, the Sharps would be the best owners for her.
- It Makes Sense in Context: Pretty much the revelation: it turns out the Love Spell from Sugar Sprinkles caused Jasper and Josh to 'love the first pet that they see'. Since Sue and Blythe aren't pets, they thus get turned into one and become destined to become pets of their supposed boyfriends, who earlier on had a crush on them due to the spell.
- I Miss Mom: Blythe suppresses thoughts about her mother. When the four days are over and Blythe thinks she will be a cat for the rest of her life, she finally breaks down about it by thinking "Mom... I'm sorry".
- Interspecies Romance: Averted. Josh has a crush on human-Blythe, but just sees cat-Blythe as a normal cat.
- It's All My Fault: Blythe blames herself for it that Josh thinks that she would be uninterested in him due to her ignoring him.
- It Was Here, I Swear!: Zoe remarks how she smells Blythe's scent at Josh's place when they try to rescue her. They came at the wrong time, however, as this was the first moment for Josh to take Blythe with him to the band.
- The Legend of Chekhov: The pets read through the journal of Twombly's great-grandmother that Blythe had becomed cat due to her powers of talking to the pets. She has to turn back in 4 days before it becomes permanent. One of her options would involve jumping off a building or cliff, but Blythe decides not to do it. This is good, because it was another force that turned her into a cat. If she had jumped off a building, she would have died.
- Loss of Identity: In a span of 24 hours does Blythe turns into a cat, is being seen by everyone except her pet friends as such and gets Josh as her owner. She also loses her social life and her fashion career in the process.
- That Man Is Dead:
Blythe: There is no Blythe Baxter anymore. There is only Dina the cat.
- Mascot: Blythe becomes one for Josh's band, who were inspired to take a mascotte because of Zoe's performance in the series.
- Meaningful Rename: When adopting her, Josh decides to name Blythe 'Dina'. This is reference to Alice in Wonderland, which the Littlest Pet Shop series is heavily based on.
- The Mind Is a Plaything of the Body: Over time, Blythe becomes more and more a cat in her mind, to the point where she - and the narrative itself - accepts her new name Dina as being her own.
- No Antagonist
- Oblivious to Love: Due to Blythe acting goofy in front of Josh and trying to evade him, along with her rejecting him on Skype, Josh thinks that Blythe has no crush on him. When he tells that to his 'cat', Blythe gets a My God, What Have I Done? moment. In the epilogue, after being turned back to her normal self, she states that she will make the first move to him since she had been acting so stupid earlier on.
- Or Was It a Dream?: The gang hopes that Sue thinks that her being turned into a ferret was All Just a Dream. It hasn't been confirmed if this was the case.
- Parental Issues: Fisher Biskit tries to educate his daughters. They are mostly uninterested and just do what he asks because he dragged them into the Largest Ever Pet Shop.
- The Power of Friendship / True Companions: The pets of the Littlest Pet Shop help Blythe out in her troubles whenever they are able to do so, to the point where they break into Jasper Jones' place to get Sue back so they could take her back home where she would turn back to normal in peace.
- Shapeshifting Excludes Clothing
- Shout-Out: The author has listed several references that he supposedly used:
- The Littlest Pet Shop series is heavily based around Alice in Wonderland and the Nonsense Genre. Therefore the author decided to name Blythe being a cat with the name Dina, which was the name of Alice's pet cat.
- The Synthesis solution is a satire on the ending of the video game Mass Effect 3. This goes even further when Twombly's great-grand mothers' book implies that one solution to turning back to normal is to 'add your energy to the crucible'. At one point does Minka even think that the robot from Largest Ever Pet Shop is the Catalyst.
- Blythe/Dina slowly becomes more cat-like as the story drags on. This is based around the 1922 novel Lady Into Fox.
- At the beginning of the story does Blythe arrive at school way to early; This is a reference to My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic Season 1 Episode 11 where something similar occurs to Twilight before Winter Wrap Up.
- The quote 'her yell was long and loud' at the end of the second chapter is a reference to the ending of the movie 300.
- The beginning of episode 4 is ripped off from the book Finding The Fox by Ali Sparkes.
- In chapter 6 Sunil says "I have the feeling these words caused millions of voices to suddenly cry out in terror and then were suddenly silenced". This is a reference to both Star Wars and Mass Effect 3.
- In chapter 14 Blythe thinks 'oh, yes, that's right. I'm going to be a cat forever', which is a reference to the anime Tokyo Mew Mew where main character Ichigo says the almost exact line.
- In chapter 14 Zoe says that they got a whisper from a little bird. This is a reference to Game of Thrones.
- In chapter 14 Sue closes her eyes and opens them again to escape from her ferret-nightmare. This is a reference to the 2010 version of Alice in Wonderland (2010).
- Josh is a fan of what seems to be the LPS version of the True Capitalist, along with callers using the in-universe series My Small Squirrell to try to make Ghost mad instead of using My Little Pony.
- Starting a New Life: If Sue didn't come along, Blythe would have probably remained a cat for the rest of her life as being the pet of the boy she had a crush on.
- You Can't Fight Fate: After the four days are over, Blythe realizes she is going to be a cat forever, and contemplates over this idea.
- You Can't Go Home Again: Given that no humans realize that Blythe is the cat who is writing messages to them, Blythe is forced to left her home before her father would come back from his flight trip.
