Lampshade Hanging / Fan Works

Lampshades hung in fanfic and other fan works.

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• Ascend (xTSGx): The Oddly Specific in Chapter Ten's book, So You've Been Subpenaed to Testify Before Parliament: An Oddly Specific Book on How to Handle a Visit Before Equestria's Legislature.
• Always You: Dream Within a Dream is lampshaded when Strange asks if she's going to be going through the whole "waking up twice" cliche, just before it actually happens in the story.
• but i wrote the words to the swan song: Juliet Capulet lampshades how obvious that her "Juliet Brontë" alias was partly her real name when Natasha Romanov asks about it.
  "That obvious, huh?" she laughs. "Well, half of it is."
• Child of the Storm does this a lot, and it's part of the author's heavily Discworld and The Order of the Stick influenced Signature Style. For instance, the first chapter of the sequel, a standard Breather Episode, has Harry thinking that it's all going to be fine. The last line disputes this.
  Really, you'd think he'd know better by now.
• Code: Pony Evolution does this tons. Heck, reterusu just loves lampshading stuff in general.
• Contraptionology!: In the epilogue, Applejack mentions this is the third time this year they've had to rebuild Ponyville and adds that "we're kind of getting a rhythm for it".
• Queen of All Oni : Jade lampshades the squid Shadowkhan mask ending up on Finn by accident.
• Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series:
  • Half the humour is hanging lampshades on ridiculous plot points, poor character traits, screwing the rules due to money, excesses of Serious Business and gratuitous use of ancient Egyptian laser beams, among other things.
  • The series also lampshade its own jokes, such as in Episode 63, during flashbacks, multiple characters say "I don't understand why it's called that" when the abridged versions of the God Cards are played and are met with the reply "Nobody does, it isn't funny"
• Sailor Moon Abridged regularly points out its plot holes, and one of the scene transitions is Serena saying "plot hole!"
• Dragon Ball Z Abridged does this from time to time as well. In episode 38 Android 17 asks how Gero made himself into an android. When Gero responds that he made himself a new body and put his own brain into it Android 18 asks how he managed to do that. Gero responds with a bewildered "How did I do that?"
• In the Broken Bow series, Book 3, we get this lovely exchange when Ari McMurphy, who is incidentally a child of the Goddess of Chaos, keeps saying things like "At least it can't get any worse!" Things, of course, immediately get worse directly afterwards.
  Armani: Ari, oh, dear, sweet, precious Ari...Have you ever heard of the term ''genre-savvy''??
• Played straight, and then lampshaded in this chapter of a Warhammer 40,000 fanfic, which has the main character bash an Eldar Farseer and Space Marine Terminator with a fire extinguisher in much the same way as he did the previous chapter, gives a snark about the possibility of it becoming a running gag, then goes on to extinguish the smoldering lampshade behind him.
• Chapter 8 of Takamachi Nanoha of 2814 by Shadow Crystal Mage makes fun of this trope, repeatedly having characters ask where other characters want lampshades hung, or variations thereof. It also plays this trope straight, sometimes in the same paragraph as the gags.
• The real-life author of Equestria: A History Revealed tends to lampshade some of the narrator's more erratic behavior and her tremendous leaps of logic.
• Kyon: Big Damn Hero as a TV Tropes/Haruhi crossover (whatever that means) seems obliged to lampshade everything. Well, when tropes aren't being discussed...
• The Mass Effect Self-Insert Mass Vexations does this a lot, particularly as far as the orange paperweight goes.
• In Aeon Natum Engel, if the situation is lampshadable, it WILL be Lampshaded.
• A Very Potter Sequel has a (seemingly) improvisational instance of this. There is a scene where Ron attempts to pull a poster of Taylor Lautner off the wall in Umbridge's office, but it appears the actor has too much trouble trying to tear it down and ends up returning to the group, saying "it's stuck on with magic!" When they appear in the next room — which is the same area on the stage they just "left" — they comment on the fact that "there's a Taylor Lautner poster in here, too!"
• In this Glee fanfic, Rachel pretends to be a boy so that she can enroll at Dalton, and ends up being Kurt's roommate. Upon finding out that she'll be rooming with the only person in the place who is in on the secret, she says: "Oh. Well, that's ridiculously convenient."
• Obsessive Lily Disorder The story is set in the seventies and Sirius is singing a lot of more modern songs. James points this out:
  "Sirius, for Christ's sake," James sighed, "Will you ever stop singing random songs that probably haven't been written yet and are completely out of this time period?"
  Sirius looked at him blankly. "Wha...?"
  "Never mind."
• In his Castlevania II: Simon's Quest With Lyrics video, Brentalfloss is stopped partway through by the infamous "What a horrible night to have a curse" box.
• There were a few lampshades to the writer of Ed, Edd N Eddy: The High School Years, particularly in chapter 5 and less so in chapter 4.
• In another Friendship is Magic Fan Fic, Silent Knight, Chapter 3 has Pinkie Pie, the resident Cloudcuckoolander, lampshading that the Original Character might be a Self-Insert. It has yet to be disproved.
• In Fantasy Sports League: "It's unprecedented! In the history of literature and sports I don't think there's ever been a case where a group of ne'er-do-wells were able to band together and in the most unlikely of conditions, take on an all-powerful foe! This is amazing!"
• The King Nobody Wanted: Tytos tells his free-riders about the War of the Ninepenny Kings in a way that pokes fun at how it's presented in The World of Ice & Fire. He notes how storytellers focus almost solely on Barristan Selmy's duel with Maelys the Monstrous and don't even mention what happened to most of the other Ninepenny Kings. In this universe, four of the other warlords died in the conflict, which dragged out for six months after Maelys died.
  Tytos: [T]o hear the singers tell of it, all that happened was we landed, Lord Ormund died, Maelys and Barristan fought, Maelys fell, and then we went home .
• Adventures of the writer does this do pretty much every trope it uses.
• Those Lacking Spines is, without a doubt, the single most lampshade-riddled fanfiction ever. It takes the time to bring up anything and everything ever done by a fanfiction writer who wrote about Kingdom Hearts and Organization XIII, and proceeds to mock it and deconstruct it in every single way possible.
• There are a lot of these in Calvin & Hobbes: The Series.
• Jewel of Darkness: Jinx gets what may be one of the funniest examples of lampshade hanging ever when, after a string of failed attempts to find of method of flight, she utters this gem:
  "How hard can it be to defy the laws of physics? Everybody does it."
  • While explaining to Ai how she intends to turn the Titans against each other, Midnight points out how heroes normally use the same tactic against villains.
  • Beast Boy lampshades the Collapsing Lair trope when Midnight's lair begins to self-destruct after the Final Battle of the first arc:
  "And there's the post big fight self destruct."
  • Same chapter, Robin explains why he thinks Midnight survived:
  "No body, no death, in our line of work."
  • When Terra expresses surprise that Jump City has a diamond mine, Cyborg states that the city has a lot of stuff, and that he sometimes still gets surprised. This most likely is in reference to the fact that the city's layout on the show often seemed to change depending on the needs of each episode.
  • Jinx at one point wonders why buildings always end up on fire when they're attacked by villains.
• In the Total Drama story, Legacy, Heather comments on the seeming absurdity of her decision to name her baby after a former enemy.
• The protagonist of Sophistication and Betrayal has a habit of doing this, particularly any time Pinkie Pie does something weird.
• The 24 fanfiction "24: The Parody" constantly lampshades, especially with the scenes with the writer and the editor. In fact, lampshading is probably the reason WHY this story exists.
• The Adventures of Irving and Friends has plenty of it:
  —Buford: Ugh! How come whenever someone is about to say something important they get cut off? That gets annoying.
• The Ranma ½ Elsewhere Fic Boy Scouts ½ has a character, Bill Gelinas, who has developed a strange knack of pointing out when things are too convenient, or of thinking that he sees unlikely patterns in the lives of himself and his fellows. His declarations of such have even developed a stock response of, "Shut up, Bill!" that has been so ingrained in his fellows that they have been known to shout it out almost like a Pavlovian response even if Bill is not present when something too convenient occurs. (Or, to really break the fourth wall, on rare occasion a scene with such an occurrence without him present has cut away to him for him to randomly declare the convenience of something he'd logically not know is happening.)
• Sonic: Evil Reborn Zero revolves around this trope. A character who's just a bit too cool and important mostly of melee combat drops in out of nowhere? He even has his own light saber, despite the heroes usually using melee combat? Must be some 8 year old's Wish-Fulfillment come to life or something. Another hedgehog? And the big evil guy's a hedgehog too? Why is it that hedgehogs are the pinnacle of anything? Why can't it be something more original, like a mink? Or an aquatic type? Sonic is the chosen one? Nooo... Really? Who'da thunk.
  • Also used to dramatic effect. Why exactly do the super forms need 50 rings? And if you used more than one ring a second, do you get some sort of power boost?
  Bystander: "Cinos? It's Sonic spelled backwards! Cinos is... evil Sonic... Because he's... Cinos. Who comes up with this stuff? I'd expect better from a teenager's first attempt at a novel!"
• Navarone spends half the story lampshading events in Diaries of a Madman, from the strange nature of the world, to the crazy nature of Equestrian villains. He's also quite fond of ranting on about the inexplicable uses of hooves ponies are capable of.
• You can trust Discord to get a major one in for the Triptych Continuum (even if you can't trust him for anything else), complete with appropriate accessory. His description of the mission in the main story comes out like this: '"You're going to go do something that I, with all my power, could seemingly accomplish all by myself with practically no effort on my part. But instead, I'm sending a bunch of considerably lesser strengths out there for reasons which I will not explain and allowing my quasi-omnipotent self to take a nap while everypony else deals with all the trouble." He glanced back at Celestia, adjusted the lampshade resting on his head. "That's about right, isn't it?"'
• In The Story to End All Stories, the characters are constantly questioning everything that happens to them and there are quite a few jokes about them and the stories they inhabit.
• A major part of the story in The Keys Stand Alone: The Soft World. The four, especially John and George, almost constantly lampshade the craziness they discover after returning to C'hou after almost six years. At first John handwaves everything with “Lennon's Law”: “Everyone's crazy except us.” But that glib statement doesn't really answer anything, as Paul points out. Still, they have no basis for thinking that anything's truly wrong... until they discover at the end of the book that they've been in a giant MMORPG. And what they've been lampshading has been standard conventions of Role Playing Games and other types of games, and also of fantasy and science fiction. Suddenly, everything makes a lot more sense.
• Loaded Bones generally pokes fun at and lampshades Yu-Gi-Oh!'s tropes and conventions.
  • Zorc's second head and Diabound's generally phallic design are made fun of, with Ryou wondering how Zorc could even walk.
  • Yami Bakura notes that Yugi got rid of Dartz, with "winning card games and shouting about friendship turning out to be yet another mastermind's fatal weakness."
• Done in The Lone Traveler. Various plot holes from the Traveler's canon universe are mentioned in-story. So, too, are the author's occasional errors where one of the protagonist's names is concerned.
• Done by Pinkie Pie in The Meaning of Harmony, when she mentions the convenient timing of the letters Princess Celestia sends them, usually just after a plot-relevant conversation.
• The Many Dates of Danny Fenton (Danny Phantom Western Animation, TV Series, and Comic Books.): Since he's gone out with girls who are far from normal as he is, Danny outright questions what kind of dating service he's agreed to.
• Captains Crash: Launchpad comments on the frequency of the Meaningful Name within Equestria, and notes that if his own world followed the same kind of rule, he'd have been a lot more cautious about accepting an invitation to see a new invention by somebody called "Gearloose".
• At one point in Wilhuff Tarkin, Hero of the Rebellion, Tarkin declares "Though I'm starting to wonder how bad Skywalker was at hiding his relationship with Senator Amidala" after one of the many people knowing of it turned out being Gilad Pellaeon-and years before finding out just how many people know.
• A Diplomatic Visit: In the third chapter of the fourth story, The Diplomat's Life, Night Light points out that Sunset Shimmer's singing voice sounded like Twilight's singing voice, but pitched differently. As fans of the series know, Rebecca Shoichet is the singing voice (and speaking too, in Sunset's case) for both characters.
• The Sunlight Bride'': Sunset Shimmer asks why the human world uses all sorts of horse puns for naming things, despite having no real special association with horses.
  Twilight: This coming from the walking talking unicorn from a dimension of horses.
  Sunset: Yeah, and when we name everything a pony pun of some sort it's cute and cheeky. When you humans do it, it's weird.
  Twilight: I'm failing to see the problem here.
  Sunset: What do you call that thing in the street, the hole that leads down to the sewer?
  Twilight: A horsehole.
  Sunset: WHY!?
• Unity (pink_shoes): The overall goofiness of the fic and its source material is poked fun at when Megatron is unsure whether he's imagining an uptick in strange events following the Cybertronians' awakening on Earth.
• Naru-Hina Chronicles:
  • After being in denial at first over learning that Naruto is the Fourth Hokage's son, it doesn't take that long before Sasuke realizes that this is something everyone should have noticed long ago given that Naruto looks a lot like Minato.
  • To make Mina stop asking her to ask Sai out on a date, Kei asks Mina if she had sex with Kiba yet. This makes her blush and she remains silent for a moment before deciding to Change the Uncomfortable Subject by saying they should continue eating their ice cream. Kei then says she somehow thought her friend would say that.
  • In Chapter 122, it seems like at first that Evil Sasuke has been defeated by the real Sasuke. However, one moment later, Karin points out he hasn't been defeated. This causes Naruto to wonder out loud "Why is it never easy, for us?"
  • In one of the Mini-sodes, during a sleepover at Naruko's home, Hinago tells her he didn't want to assume they were sharing the same bed, hence why he brought a sleeping bag:
    Naruko: [smiling] Oh come now Hinago, you know you can sleep with me whenever you want.
    Hinago: [blushing and having Blank White Eyes] R-Really?! Wait... You do mean just sleep... right?
    Naruko: [also blushing and having blank white eyes] Huh?! Oh! I err... I-I guess that did come out a little awkward, heh-heh!
• True Potential:
  • Shikamaru comments on how often C-Rank missions end up becoming more dangerous than they should be due to somehow ending up involving fighting against a high-level missing-nin (as it happened to Team 3, Team 7, and Team 10), to the point that he thinks that the "C" of the C-Rank stands for "Curse".
  • A similar conversation happens when they find out about Akatsuki's plan to invade Kumo during their Chūnin Exams, which is similar to the Sand-Sound Invasion that happened during Konoha's.

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