Fernlets by Fern
Tropes:
- Big Brother Is Watching: In Fern’s Imagine Spot, she imagines Muffy as a ruthless dictator in a factory, shouting orders and looming over her via a giant screen as Fern frantically writes greeting card messages on an industrial belt.
- Crash-Into Hello: Fern and Muffy run into each other (literally) at the mall and drop what they were carrying. They later realize that they each grabbed the other’s card for Mother’s Day, kicking off the plot of the episode.
- A Day in the Limelight: For Fern.
- Forced Creativity: The popularity of Fern and Muffy's greeting card business forces Fern to produce large quantities of her Fernlets, making her lose her creativity and burning her out.
- Oddly Specific Greeting Card: Late one night, Muffy calls Fern to ask for a "sorry I accidentally shaved your hamster" card.
- Screw the Money, I Have Rules!: When Muffy's finally had enough with Fern’s strange poems, she fires her. Fern doesn’t mind though, as the integrity of her art is more important to her than the money she was getting from the greeting card business.
- Soul-Crushing Desk Job: Fern's job writing greeting card messages quickly becomes this, as something she once enjoyed turns into an exhausting chore.
- Status Quo Is God: When Fern branches out into different forms of poetry for her greeting cards, Muffy disapproves and urges her to stick to what worked before.
- Writer's Block Montage: Fern realizes she used all her best ideas for Fernlets for the cards she and Muffy were selling when she tries to write one for her mom’s birthday card. A montage plays of her struggling with Writer's Block and surrounded by balls of crumpled paper. Not having any luck, she uses Muffy’s generic card from earlier in the store and immediately regrets it.
Prunella and the Haunted Locker
Tropes:
- Character Name and the Noun Phrase: The episode’s title is in this format.
- A Day in the Limelight: For Prunella.
- Facepalm: Prunella does this after she pounds her fist on the lunch table and makes even more popsicle sticks fall off her model of the Eiffel Tower.
- Faux Horrific: The episode's Cold Open features a game show called "Face Your Fear," hosted by Brain. There are three contestants (Buster, D.W., and Prunella), and the objective is to state your worst fear and face it on camera. A fear-o-meter then judges your reaction on a scale of one to ten. When it’s Prunella’s turn, Brain leads Prunella to a backstage curtain covering her fear. The curtain opens and Prunella screams loud enough to break the fear-o-meter. Her greatest fear turns out to be a normal school locker.
- Although to be fair, Buster and D.W.’s fears of poached eggs and an imaginary monster respectively aren’t scary either.
- Nightmare Sequence: As the legend of the haunted locker starts seeming more and more real to Prunella, she has a nightmare in which locker 237 comes alive and eats her, along with her shop class project.
- Real After All: Fern finally reveals that she made up the story of Jack Murphy, and there is no such person. However, the episode finishes with a swing seat moving by itself along with the sound of a child's laughter.
- Superstition Episode: While at first Prunella brushes off Fern’s story as just an urban legend, she begins to notice strange smells coming from locker 237 and experiences a string of bad luck - just like Jack Murphy did.
- Urban Legend: Fern tells the urban legend of locker 237’s previous owner, a Lakewood student from the 1950s named Jack Murphy, whose smelly locker gave him bad luck and eventually made him disappear.
- Visible Odor: In Fern’s story about Jack Murphy, the smells coming from locker 237 are shown as visible green tendrils.
