Follow The Leader / Fan Works

aka: Fanfic

• At one time, there were far too many Cardcaptor Sakura fanfics that blatantly copied each other; as soon as someone comes up with something unique and interesting, a wave of people start ripping it off right down to the last joke and plot point.
• Doctor Who fanfics have many fanfics about fans of the show ending up in the universe, one way or another. Reality on Fanfiction Dot Net is currently one of the most popular ones, involving a fan ending up right near the end of Doctor Who S27 E1 "Rose" and later expanding on several characters and the episodes themselves. In Time, which appeared around the same time, is another well-known one which detailed a fan of the show that encounters Ten near the final specials before his regeneration.
• 75% of all Dragon Ball Z fanfiction starts with an alien spaceship crashing down on Earth, and ends with a character using a new form of Super Saiyan to beat them. It will also be set during the 3 months before the Androids, the 7 years before Cell or the 10 years after Buu. Other common elements include Vegeta or Broly getting possessed by Babidi, Buu or Cell absorbing someone new or each other, Saiyans inexplicitly growing back their tails, Bardock being rewritten as an honourable anti-hero and Future Trunks travelling to New Namek to use the Dragon Balls there.
• The Land Before Time fanfiction. Considering that the series is set in a relatively limited environment (prehistoric times), whenever one writer does something different that gets respect, you can expect to see a lot of clones pop up. Such types include war stories, time travel stories, crossovers. Not that these fics are necessarily bad, but they tend to all come at once as trends, resulting in you finding that all new fanfics lately are centred around Chomper perhaps, while you were particularly hoping for something based more on the main five characters.
• The Loud House:
  • Among Loud House fanfics, the story Requiem for a Loud led to several other stories about Lincoln dying. Other popular topics are Lincoln running away from home after feeling unwanted or being mistreated by his sisters, and Lincoln becomming a superhero.
  • Fix Fics based on rather badly received episodes, such as "No Such Luck" and "Brawl in the Family", are also highly likely to spawn a horde of imitators.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • Since the fanfic Progress became popular, it has become commonplace for other writers to portray Princess Luna with a Companion Cube abacus.
  • Same with Cupcakes (Sergeant Sprinkles). Ever since it became popular, there have been many other My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic Dark Fics set out to copy its success.
  • The same also goes for My Little Dashie, which has become a Fandom-Specific Plot to the point where it's almost a Fandom Specific Trope. Nowadays, knock-offs of it with another pony in the place of Rainbow Dash are a dime-a-dozen, and not one of them has gained as much fame / infamy. It seems to have tapered off lately, partly because there's really only so much you can do with the plot and it's been worn absolutely smooth.
  • Often there are (usually unauthorized) fan-sequels written for popular stories, many of which have a completely different writing style and a tone that is sometimes quite changed from the original. The good ones stand out on their own so that they can be seen as an extension (or in some cases, a Deconstruction) of the original author's work, and have plenty of fresh ideas to make them just as likable if not more so. The bad ones are nothing more than cheap attempts to try and ride the coat-tails of another author, and are quickly derided as such by reviewers. The latter case is seen somewhat often by the myriad number of terrible Past Sins and My Little Dashie sequels out there that hope to garner positive votes and reviews solely because they are set in the same universe as the originals.
  • Brony in Equestria stories (where the main character is usually male, has knowledge of the series and more often than not gets turned into a pony and has incredible powers) are so widespread and often of terrible quality to the point that Equestria Daily has banned them completely, and in general they are also frowned upon elsewhere unless they are very good. Go to the My Little Pony section of FanFiction.Net or Fimfiction.net and you are almost guaranteed to find at least one or two stories of this type on the main page, due to the massive Longing for Fictionland this series has. This is not to be confused with Human in Equestria stories, where the character(s) have no knowledge of Equestria or its inhabitants whatsoever.
• The Naruto fandom has started a following of Self-Insert via Reincarnation fanfics - the Author Avatar/Original Character is reborn into the Narutoverse. Although the first noteworthy story to try this might well be Only a Moron by swabloo (which actually veers into Dark Fic territory at times), this trope is applied to Dreaming of Sunshine by Silver Queen. In addition to having a likeable, relatable person as protagonist, DoS touched on other (innovative at the time, at least) elements: the person being "chakra sensitive", since having memories of their past life means chakra is an unfamiliar feeling, like an extra limb; trying to not change things too much because they're aware of how the ripple affect could render their knowledge useless; feelings of alienation from their friends (even while befriending even Naruto); not remembering all significant details due to fading memories over time; and most of all managing to focus on the protagonist without making it feel like the world (or story) revolves around them.
  • The nice thing is that many of these authors try hard to not copy the same formula, even with this sort of inspiration. For example:
    • In Little Acorn the character is blind, does not remember her past life beyond flashes, and instead of being the sister of a noteworthy or popular character, her older brother is Yoroi Akado (a Mauve Shirt at best in canon).
    • In Distorted Reality, the main character is given bumps at the start: she's a prideful teenager reborn into the Hyuga clan (more specifically, the branch family), and must deal with the Curse Mark, all that's associated with it, and the harsh life of a ninja. On top of that, while unike LA she remembers her past life, she knows nothing of the Narutoverse in return.
  • Common Itachi/Sakura plots in Naruto fic involve Sakura running off to get Sasuke back from Orochimaru's clutches, and getting captured/used as bait for Naruto by Itachi. Many cite Metamorphosis as inspiration or influence.
• An interesting trend has popped up amid the Negima! Magister Negi Magi fanfic authors. After Shadow Crystal Mage popularized the idea of crossing over Negima with Lyrical Nanoha, a few other authors have taken up the mantle. Currently, Mage and two others are writing stories in which Negi is sent to Uminari as a teacher for Nanoha after the events of A's. Ironically, one of the copycats, Zephyr-Fiction's Equal & Opposite Attraction, has garnered the most press. Mainly this is because Mage has many more projects on his plate.
  • It helps that both Anemoi(Zephyr-Fiction) and Shadow Crystal Mage have a tendancy to bounce ideas off one another on this very site.
• Neon Genesis Evangelion:
  • The Child of Love: This story started the trend of Shinji and Asuka having a daughter in fanfiction. When they have offspring in any fanwork, ninety percent of time it is a girl: Akiko, Sakiko, their two unnamed children in RE-TAKE, Aki, Kali, Ariel, their unnamed daughter in Last Child of Krypton, Misato, Ryuko in Ghosts of Evangelion
  • Speaking of Neon Genesis Evangelion fanfiction, Advice and Trust caused a small but noticeable surge of Eva fanfictions appearing on to the forum where it was first posted, to the point that there is a dedicated tag on the site for them.
  • Children of an Elder God and Shinji And Warhammer 40 K started the "Badass Shinji" trend that Thousand Shinji, Nobody Dies and dozens of Eva fics copied. Similarly, Thousand Shinji popularized the "Dark Badass Shinji" stereotype, spawning a bunch of stories in which Shinji was an anti-hero.
• Pokémon:
  • Count the number of fanfics which focus on an original trainer, who sleeps in on the morning when they're supposed to receive their first Pokémon, arrive at the lab only to find that all the usual starters are gone and instead get a completely different starter. Very often a rare and valuable Pokémon. Almost always an Eevee. Their goal is always to become a Pokémon master. To be fair, this is the purpose of the main series. The use of Eevee has generally slowed down, but OC journey fics are still the same even without Eevee.
  • There are sometimes fics that appear to be OC journeys at the start, then have a twist at the end that makes you think "what the heck..." until you re-read it. Then there are Pokémorph fics where a human turns into a Pokémon with no prior warning...
  • Fics with the basic premise "nearly everyone Ash Ketchum ever knows tells him to give up, causing him to run off and prove the betrayers wrong at a giant tournament years later" are extremely common and tend to follow similar tenants to each other, mostly varying in just who 'betrays' Ash (ranging from just his friends, to his friends and family, to his friends, family, and Pokemon).
  • Ashes of the Past started a trend of making Peggy Sue fics. The premise usually is "Cyrus comes back after he was thought to be defeated and erases the universe, but Arceus manages to send Ash in the past so Ash could stop Cyrus", though two of them have a different one, namely Ho-Oh hears Ash hoping for his adventures to never end in the first episode and granting that wish, but Arceus undoes the wish when he finds out, which calls for Ash to be sent in the past, and and a third mixes the two premises by having Ho-Oh granting Ash's accidental wish being the reason Cyrus could erase the universe. Among those with the Cyrus premise, the most known is Pokémon Reset Bloodlines.
• Total Drama:
  • The "me too" mentality is the reason why this fandom is known largely for its (in)famous "Starring You" stories.
  • Many competition stories, "Starring You" and otherwise, borrow liberally from the early Total Drama fanfic, Total Drama Comeback. Writers of Comeback-influenced stories commonly acknowledge that influence or even dedicate their stories to its author.
  • When Total Drama Alphabet appeared, with its conceit of one contestant name for every letter of the alphabet, a host of imitators followed.
  • Being the most popular Dark Fic of the show, Despair Island has inspired several dark fanfics, with Total Drama being a Deadly Game and the contestants fighting for their lives. Some notable examples include Total Drama: Pomewin Island and Loud Ed Despair Island (the latter being a Darker and Edgier version of the Loud Ed Drama crossover fic).
• Cassandra Claire's Very Secret Diaries for The Lord of the Rings fandom inspired several copycats in several fandoms, some acknowledging their inspiration coming from her. Even to this day, several years after their creation you still see some of her more infamous quotes scattered about fandom.
• In 2001, Potato Salad of Fanfiction.net wrote Ask Sonic (and other associated characters), which had reviewers sending questions through reviews or e-mail and having Sonic The Hedgehog and the rest of the cast answering them as fan mail. It became very popular and soon numerous Ask Fics began to show up on Fanfiction.net until it and other interactive fanfiction were banned from the site. Which did nothing to slow them down as they moved to Tumblr, where built-in ask system made it easier for them to thrive further.
• Nearly every Harry Potter story in which Harry is betrayed and sentenced to Azkaban follows the exact same template: Most of his friends repeatedly Kick the Dog, and instead of dying or going insane, Harry becomes powerful in prison and later wipes out Voldemort and all his Death Eaters with a single attack. Depending on the author, he then proceeds to kill everyone else as well or spend the rest of the story brooding with those who stuck by him (usually Snape, Neville, Luna, and a few others), while those who betrayed him plead for his forgiveness.
• Everybody wants to write about what Sherlock Holmes did during his Great Hiatus (the three-year period during which he faked his death), right? It's been the subject of numerous pastiches and online fics. Aragonite a.k.a Marcia Wilson has made the argument that none of these stories, however, deal with Dr. Watson, Inspector Lestrade, and Scotland Yard, and the adventures they must have been having in that time period. So she wrote her own series, which she plans to convert into self-published books. Thus far, only one other Fangirl has taken up the torch, so to speak, but that's not the only thing Aragonite started. She was arguably the first Fan Fic author to give any serious depth to the men of Scotland Yard and use them as the protagonists, rather than using Holmes or Watson. She also bestowed the name Geoffrey upon Inspector G. Lestrade, and that name has gained popularity among both the canon and Sherlock branches of the fandom.
  • The Fan Fic series following in Aragonite's footsteps is the Deliver Us from Evil Series. The name "Geoffrey" is also used.
  • Another fic on the wiki to utilize the name "Geoffrey" is A Study in Regret. Incidentally, the author was inspired by the Deliver Us from Evil Series and dedicated the fic to that author.
• If you go onto the official fansite for The Thing, you'll find a lot of fanfiction of various sorts. Given that both films (but especially the 1982 movie) end on a very ambiguous note, a lot of fanfics will attempt to explain what happens next. The majority of these stories tend to keep to the very bleak ending of the movies, often involving one of the two survivors being revealed to be a Thing and/or a later encounter with the Thing. However, the story Unfinished Business was a deliberate attempt to break from this trend with a much more optimistic tone.
• Voltalia has admitted to liking the idea of giving her favorite shippings mixed-gender twins, so much so that when she created mixed-gender twins for the popular Superjail! Foe Yay Shipping Warden/Mistress, another author put them in upon the suggestion of a reviewer on FanFiction.net when she decided to write in the Mistress being pregnant in Extended Stay. It looks like they're going to be quite popular.
• Though possibly not the first, after The Legend of Spyro: A New Dawn was made, fics where Spyro and Cynder must go on a new quest with a bunch of Original Characters and a few characters from the classic series rewritten to fit The Legend of Spyro verse became shockingly more common. See Fandom-Specific Plot for more details.
• Rhyme and Reason, the very first Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers Fanfic (written from 1993 to 1995 and published in 1996), first averted this trope and then played it straight. The aversion was that a story that long and well-written did not inspire other fans to write their own fics at first, but instead intimidated them because they knew they could never even achieve half of it. It was another story published in 1997 which finally kicked off the general Fan Fic writing, but Rhyme and Reason set the general tone for most CDRR fics to come — Darker and Edgier, giving the Rangers more serious cases to solve, more dangerous opponents and more emotional turmoil.
  • Rhyme and Reason established Chip and Dale's fan-given last names, Maplewood and Oakmont respectively.
  • Also, like Rhyme and Reason, most CDRR fics are "pro" (which refers to Chip×Gadget; "anti" would be no Chip×Gadget, for example, shipping Gadget with someone else or decidedly not at all).
• After seeing the popularity of Screw Attack's DEATH BATTLE! series, DeviantArt user Dimension-Dino followed the same style for writing his own, which has so far spawned dozens of imitators. Coincidentally, while the hosts for all the writers started as carbon copies of Wiz and Boomstick, they gradually began to develop their own personalities, such as Dimension-Dino's Ray developing into a legimate case of The Straight Man, unlike Wiz.
• Dante's Night at Freddy's 2: Animatronic Boogaloo plays this for laughs with a one-off joke involving lots of entertainment restaurants also being inhabited by killer animatronics and including varying kinds of food from Chinese to Ethiopian.
• Many Godzilla fanfics on DeviantArt are directly inspired by Godzilla Neo, with their stories and character designs being clearly based on those of Neo. In all fairness, most of these stories eventually strike out on their own in different directions, though most people's understanding of Vagnosaurus, Shiigan, Balkzardan and the other original Godzilla Trading Battle Kaiju comes from Neo and so they take heavy inspiration from Neo when adding them into their own fanfiction.
• When Miraculous Ladybug "salt fics" were starting to become more widespread in the fanbase, a Tumblr user by the name of ozmav wrote a fanfic in which Marinette got help dealing with her problems from (and eventually fell for) Damian Wayne. A good number of fans took the pairing and ran with it, not only creating the Maribat AU (home to a slew of other stories similar to the original in concept), but also popularizing an entire sub-genre of crossover salt fics where Marinette's class travels to another location and she gets help taking down Lila and/or a love interest from a group of non-Miraculous characters.
• Dragon Ball Z Uncensored, a website which compared the US edited version of Dragon Ball Z with the original Japanese release, would later inspire such websites like Sailor Moon Uncensored and Dogasu's Backpack (which is focused on Pokémon: The Series).
• This is epidemic in the fanvid community to the point where the page features common techniques and songs. One popular video uses a certain editing style or song and for the next year or two (or even seasonally) multiple similar videos will appear cross-fandom.
• The GameFAQs Character Battles had long been dominated by Link until 2007 (he only lost one contest where he entered, to Cloud), when voters fed up with him winning every year propelled L-Block (yes, from Tetris) to victory. When the 2008 nominations came along, many, many people tried nominating a bunch of random joke characters in an attempt to recreate L-Block, without considering why L-Block succeeded in the first place.
  • The Weighted Companion Cube from Portal admittedly did very well - going farther than the returning champion - but proving no jokes are forever, Link still won.
    • Likewise, the Character Battle was probably the inspiration for GameSpy to do a gaming contest (a GameFAQs equivalent appearing some time later was a coincidence).
• For a while, there were Mobile Suit Gundam SEED fanfics following the lead of Brothers in Arms by having a Defector from Decadence join the crew of the Archangel at the series' start and cause changes to the canon from there.
• A relatively minor example: while Child of the Storm, a crossover between Harry Potter and Marvel Cinematic Universe, didn't even come close to inventing the idea of one of Harry's being someone other than Lily or James, or even Lily or James being a Composite Character with another character (in this case, James was Thor), but its success did spawn a surge of imitators, a number of which copied its Mega Crossover attributes too - certainly, quite a few are decidedly up-front about what they're following on from.
  • Interestingly enough, the author has credited SmallvilleX: Evolution as an influence on his writings (the Marvel/DC part, rather than the Harry Potter part), perhaps making it Older Than They Think.
• The Draco Trilogy started (and named) the Draco in Leather Pants portrayal of Draco Malfoy. It also started or at least popularized some other Harry Potter fanfic clichés, like making Draco more sympathetic by portraying his father as an abusive bastard. The funny thing is, the vast majority of young fanfic writers who currently use these clichés have likely never heard of Cassandra Claire. They just copied them from earlier fanfics, who copied them from still earlier fanfics and so on, going all the way back to The Draco Trilogy. Cassandra Claire also popularized the idea of certain characters being "Magids", which are especially powerful wizards. When The Draco Trilogy was at its height, the concept of Magids was borrowed by numerous other Harry Potter fanfics, but now it's a Forgotten Trope.
• Eiga Sentai Scanranger was created to let its author complain about Power Rangers, yet seems to have taken quite a few cues from the imported show. Interesting is one scene where the blue ranger flies off the handle at the changes made in Power Rangers: Dino Thunder, but no mention is made of how the character concepts for Mesogog and Elsa are almost identical to two villains from Scanranger. The Big Bad is a former colleague of the team's mentor sharing his body with an evil presence, and the lone female villain wears black leather and spies on the heroes via her job at their school (Scanranger did it first).
• While not the first fanfic to explore servants from other media sources, Fate/Zero Sense is known as the most popular take on this, with equal parts action and comedy. Several other Fate/stay night' and Fate/Zero'' fanfics explore this possibility, and most of them admit they were inspired by The Infamous Man's story, right on the summary no less.
• The Good Hunter (and to a lesser extent, its Spiritual Predecessor The Night Unfurls) is credited for spawning a number of works in the form of SoulsBorne x Monster Girl Encyclopedia (MGE) crossovers. Some of the imitators include A Hunter's New Home and The Knight.
• A Girl and Her Bike: SwapAUAnon has stated that the story is inspired by Cyclone and Cody Fett's Spark to Spark, Dust to Dust.
• Quite a few The Familiar of Zero fanfics have been made with the premise of 'What if X got summoned instead of Saito?' All of them were complete crap, at least until gabrielblessing's The Hill of Swords came along with its lauded execution of the concept. One well-timed Plot Bunny thread later, SpaceBattles.com's Creative Writing forum was flooded with copycats. A fair few of these, such as Unfamiliar, Zero's Shock and The Shadow of Zero match or exceed the original in quality.
• Infinity Train: Blossoming Trail was not the first Crossover fanfic with Infinity Train but became the first to both crossover with Pokémon: The Series and Silent Hill while also deconstructing almost every trope relating to certain types of fic (in this case the ones found in Betrayal Fic, Revenge Fic and Accusation Fic). Many stories began to follow in its wake (namely: focusing on a female side character boarding the train), with Infinity Train: Boiling Point being the most prominent one (to the point that the author herself gave her approval)
• The King Nobody Wanted: Since this story's 2015 launch, other A Song of Ice and Fire fanfiction stories have pursued what might have happened if Robert died at the Trident with or instead of Rheager. Said stories tend to have Stannis becoming king (or at least Lord Paramount of the Stormlands) and the war resolving itself differently. Notable examples include Let the Galaxy Burn and Wounds.
• The Mass Effect section of fanfiction.net was known for having relatively few self-inserts. Enter Herr Wozzeck with his self-insert Mass Vexations. After that, a great number of self-inserts began to show up around the website, with varying results.
• Family Guy fanfiction was never too great, until a guy named Malcolm Fox wrote a story named Meg's Boyfriend. The story was funny, amusing, had a varied cast of characters, hilarious OCs, great plots, and it emulated the show's essence like no other fanfic. Many other authors began to write similar stories, in an attempt to achieve Malcolm's success.
  • Attack of the 100-Foot Meg Griffin and The Spellbook are probably the two most notable, both of which also treat Meg much better than in canon.
• The Misfits Series by Red Witch was the first to crossover X-Men: Evolution and G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero through the Brotherhood of Mutants leaving Magneto and being adopted by the Joes. Since there, numerous authors such as L1701E and Persiana13 have done their own version with Original Characters and variants of other Marvel characters such as teenage versions of the Avengers (to parallel the younger versions of the X-Men). A few such as RogueFanKC have expanded on the crossover element by adding other series such as Dinosaucers, SWAT Kats, Justice League, and Teen Titans.
• The current trend among people who write Troll Fics (or who just want a lot of reviews and attention and don't care about the quality of their work) seems to be to copy My Immortal's format, issues with spelling, My Chemical Romance references, and Goth main character.
• NGE: Nobody Dies have spawned a whoppingly large Expanded Universe around it. The author of the original even made some of these canon, like Ichi's Birthday Party, The Story of NERV-Alaska and The Kei Files.
• While Of Mice and Mayhem did not kick off a wave of Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers Fan Fiction Graphic Novels, many authors of later stories found the idea of Tammy being a nurse to their liking.
• According to the Reunions Are a Bitch universe the Colonials of Battlestar Galactica were huge wankers before the Cylons kicked their collective arses to the curve, what with the whole starting a holy war against Earth thing. Naturally, the story was so popular that now there are dozens of different fics detailing the Colonials getting in over their heads while trying to Take Over the World. Most commonly these involve crossovers with Halo or Stargate SG-1, but other types do exist.
• invoked VS Whitty was the first well-known mod of Friday Night Funkin' where the final song dramatically raises the stakes, the opponent Turns Red or goes One-Winged Angel, and the song itself is a brutally fast-paced Difficulty Spike compared to the previous songs. This became such an oversaturated concept that many later mods specifically went on to either avert it, subvert it or lampshade it.
• While the concept is challenging and requires a lot of dedication to complete, The Victors Project from The Hunger Games has inspired a number of fanfics that chronicle the 73 victors before Katniss and Peeta, including Cheating Death: Those That Lived, Her Entire Species", and ongoing or abandoned works like Champion, The Grim Grey Path to Freedom, and The 75.
• After Vow of Nudity invented a unique new type of LitRPG (the author generates character stats and rolls dice in-story, but the characters themselves aren't aware of this and never acknowledge this facet of their existence), multiple different authors started writing their own stories in the same style. Some of them even take place in the same setting, and are listed on that page.
• What About Witch Queen? has underplayed example, as Kai mentions that many young noble ladies in Arendelle started to dress like Elsa (which is more than a bit revealing, especially by their standards), to their families' chargin.
• This parody chart◊ for My Hero Academia got its start when the creator noticed how many fics were aping or imitating Yesterday Upon The Stair.
• Once upon a time, a fanfic writer called Roxius wrote a Crack Fic for Code Geass titled You Got LuluRolled. This spawned many similar Crack Fics in several different fandoms, not all of them titled with some variation of "You Got [Character Name] Rolled!" Most of the imitations are actually derived from superstarultra's Haruhi version, You Got HaruhiRolled!, which is generally considered superior to its inspiration.
• Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series has had many knockoffs, some of which gained a life of their own while others bit the dust. Even Dragon Ball Z Abridged, currently the most well-known of its craft, originally started off as a similarly fun little project in the vain of other Abridged Series before it evolved into more of a character-focused dramedy with higher production values and more emphasis on the comedy aspect. This in turn led to similar shows following their example with the most famous being Sword Art Online Abridged.
  • The creator has even done voices for some of them, as well as lampshading it in his own series, by turning the "Multiply" spell card (which makes copies of Kuriboh) into "LittleKuriboh Impersonators". Yami activates it in his duel against Pegasus.
  Pegasus: There's so many of them! I can't tell which one is the original!
  Yami: That's right, and that means you'll never be able to watch the Abridged Series ever again!
  Pegasus: NOOOOO! I can't live without Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series! It's so important to me!
  Yami: Don't worry, Pegasus. There's always Naruto: The Abridged Series, but we all know that's not quite as good!
  • The joke also applies to how many people were literally just titling their video "Abridged series episode x" and weren't trying to be Littlekuriboh, but were just being bait-and-switch trolls.
• Similarly, there's PurpleEyesWTF, who basically kick-started the premise of "this is your Abridged Series on drugs" with Code MENT and None Piece. Unsurprisingly, people have copied that genre as well.
• Squidward's Suicide was the first (or, at the very least, the Codifier) for the Lost Episode Creepypasta type. While the genre has generally expanded to include other forms of media (such as Flash Games), the concept of "seemingly-innocent kids' show that has a dark, twisted side" has become a genre in its own right, and Squidward's Suicide is generally considered the origin of that genre.
• The Dornian Heresy was the first Warhammer 40,000 fanfic in what became the "Alternative Heresy" subgenre; the premise was a Mirror Universe where the canonical Loyalist and Traitor Primarchs had their positions flipped, with Rogal Dorn taking Horus Lupercal's place as the Arch Traitor. This inspired a slew of similar stories, usually with one or another loyalist Primarch taking the position of Arch Traitor; The Roboutian Heresy and The Imperial Heresy are just the ones with their own trope pages.

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