Web Original / Protectors of the Plot Continuum

Jay and Acacia, by Bold Font.

"It's happened again." Jay leaned back from her console, indicating a flashing red light. "Someone's mucking with the plot continuum."

— PPC: The Original Series, mission 1 Rambling Band

The Protectors of the Plot Continuum are a metafictional online community dedicated to preserving canon in fandom, promoting good writing, supporting critical thinking and analysis in fanworks, and above all, having fun. It also popularized the Mary-Sue Hunter concept, having its origins in the efforts of a pair of writers in the early 2000s who noticed that the release of the The Lord of the Rings film trilogy resulted in Sturgeon's Law being on full display in the resulting fanfics. The concept has since grown into a Shared Universe about many different fandoms written by a multitude of writers. Because of the wide variety of PPC authors, the styles of writing present run the gamut from literary-oriented criticism, to madcap zany fun, to downright raunchy humor.

The setting is an organization of the same name as the group, whose purpose is to tamper with fanfiction in order to bring it closer to the Canon of the original work. The agents who work at the PPC are tasked with resolving the consequences of fanfic writers not thinking things through, regardless of the form they manifest in. However, the organization began with Mary Sue assassinations, and is most well-known for this. Possession Sues, Bad Slash victims, and other OOC characters are exorcised back to their Canon selves, but in earlier stories they could usually be fixed by simply removing Original Characters. Especially lucky or non-disruptive Original Characters may get recruited into the organization — for those who defend the canons must have a dash of the extraordinary in them.

The agents of the PPC usually work in pairs, as they are often fans of the canons they delve into and need help with staying objective on missions. Alternately, they work in pairs because their bosses (a group of sentient flora from another planet) specifically try to create Odd Couples, which is supposed to improve mission performance. They are equipped for their tasks with a camouflage generator that hides them from canon characters and an electronic device that determines a character's status in the narrative and how much they've been distorted by the badfic. Proper job training for the agents is minimal at best, and the sizes of their paychecks and the state of their equipment is likewise marginal.

Overall, the setting thrives on Surreal Humor, the Rule of Funny, and the power of Tempting Fate. Typos in fanfiction are frequently interpreted as literally as possible by the canon, producing bizarre results. Electronics tend to blow up at the first excuse or develop sentience if not properly maintained. Actively attempting to relax results in being sent on another mission just as soon as the agents start to get comfortable.

Ideally it strives to be a community of writers and fanfiction lovers first, not bullies. Within the community it is heavily frowned upon to take a pot-shot at a fanfiction writer — it is inarguably poor fanfiction that is the subject of their ire, not the people who produce it. Of course, the effectiveness of this is rather subjective.

The group has a wiki with a helpful guide for newbies. Its Posting Board (where most conversation is done) is here while The Original Series and some of the early spinoffs can be found here. All PPC fiction can be found here, and it has its own tag on AO3. They also have a list of things the agents aren't allowed to do.

The Official Fanfiction University (and its spinoffs) share a multiverse with the PPC, while the Anti-Cliché and Mary-Sue Elimination Society is a similar but distinct organization with its own canon and way of doing things.

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This provides notable examples of the following:

A to F

• Absurdly Sharp Blade: The sharpness of hammerspace knives can be controlled by the wielder's thoughts, but they default to "murderously sharp".
• Aerith and Bob: The PPC's agents come from all over the multiverse, creating an understandable disparity in names. The Department of Mary Sues alone has agents whose names include the likes of Brenda, Diocletian, Martin, and Evangeline von Lilith.
• Alien Blood: "Mary Sue" characters bleed red or pink glittery blood, or, in extreme cases, only glitter.
• Alien Hair: Agent Alloy, thanks to a typo in her home fic, has green, papery hair.
• Alien Geometries:
  • The Word Worlds are extremely literal when interpreting poorly phrased or illogical prose, resulting in eye-blinding sights or mind-bending shapes. Placing a non-canonical location in the wrong place can do truly gruesome things to the local landscape.
  • Depending on who's writing any given story, PPC Headquarters is either merely a huge labyrinthine building, or a partially sentient structure that's always shifting around. Either way, it's easy to get lost inside the place, and oftentimes the only way to find the place you're trying to go is to distract yourself and not think about it. The place was built by Plant Aliens, who seem to be able to navigate it just fine.
• Aliens in Cardiff: PPC Headquarters' Real Life base is in New Caledonia, a French-owned island in the South Pacific. Nobody is quite sure why it's there, of all places, though there are other doors to HQ scattered about Earth and the multiverse in general.
• All Your Base Are Belong to Us: The PPC's headquarters has been invaded on several occasions. Culprits include armies of Mary Sues, a rouge security department, and a stampede of creatures created due to a typo in a spambot's message.
• Anatomically Impossible Sex: Agents regularly encounter instances of intercourse in badfic that display general ignorance of how the human body moves and responds during sex.
• And I'm the Queen of Sheba: Two variants based on Tolkien's Legendarium crop up in Agent Suicide's missions, commenting on the Idiot Ball in the badfics.
  • From "'Twas Many and Many a Year Ago in a Nondescript Random Town by the Sea":
    Jack [Sparrow], being a savvy captain, didn't trust this woman one inch and told Bootstrap that a gal is all very well, but this "true love" stuff didn't happen in one hour, and certainly not with some lady who might well be a poxed-up tart for all they knew.
    Yeah. And the Balrog just tripped.
  • From "The OOCest Teacher We Could Hope For":
    Naturally Cheerilee, being an experienced teacher, drew on the education courses she had taken and her own prior experience with other classes to help her handle this.
    Yeah. And Ar-Pharazôn's fleet simply struck a reef.
• And I Must Scream: Within Suefics, the canon characters are either actively replaced and shoved in a Plot Hole for the duration, where they may or may not be able to see what's going on, or they're mind-controlled by the Sue, forced to do what the Sue tells them to, and, at least some of the time, conscious of how horribly out-of-character they're being forced to become.
• Androcles' Lion: Velociripper reveals in his first mission as an agent that he sought revenge on his author for being used as a tool for terrorizing the protagonists, resulting in his grudge against said author's persona, Falchion. He ultimately puts an end to this grudge, and his general hatred of humanity, after Falchion shows him the kindness and mercy he needs to emotionally recover.
• Angrish: Agents have sometimes babbled incoherently if they're particularly angry with a badfic. Agent Kaguya is even worse – he becomes The Unintelligible every time he's on a mission.
• Answer Cut: Gabrielle wonders why the Flowers assigned her and Doktor Trollenfisch a badfic that would usually be handled by the Department of Bad Parody, as the two of them work for the Department of WhatThe. The story promptly flashes back to Doktor Trollenfisch practicing the sousaphone next to the office of Admiral Pansy, who happens to be the Department Head of Bad Parody, at three in the morning.
• Anthropomorphic Personification: Has its own page on the Wiki. Aside from this, the "gijinka" definition of this is an apt description for some agents, such as Omicron the Dalek and Backslash the Honedge.
• Any Last Words?: In the mission "In Other News, Water Is Wet", the villainous invokedGod-Mode Stu Titus asks Agent Chakkik, whom he horribly crippled when the latter tried to take him on in single combat, if he has any last words. Chakkik responds by quoting, "[...]for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee..." followed by a Spiteful Spit. Titus prepares to kill him and the invoked Gary Stu protagonist anyway, but what he doesn't know is that Chakkik has become part of a Badass and Child Duo, and the child in question was requesting the assistance of Davy Jones himself at the time. Suffice it to say, she is not happy when she finds out what Titus did, and at her command, the Kraken devours Titus, the protagonist Stu, and every single one of the villain's remaining crew members besides.
• Apocalypse How:
  • The DOGA is known to destroy Suvian star systems via Sun Crushers, as they won't go away on their own.
  • If badfic-created alternate universes are too different from canon, they will collapse after the Sues are killed.
• Applied Phlebotinum: Agents utilize technology from all over the multiverse, with the most commonly-used tech including neuralyzers from Men in Black and SEP fields from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: Charge lists often start with technical errors, progress to serious problems like Rape Is Love or Canon Defilement, and quite often end on the charge of "Annoying PPC agents".
• Artificial Limbs:
  • Technician Narcolepsy of Testing and Application (a division of DoSAT) has artificial eyes and a computer in his brain.
  • Agent Ally Malet has an artificial eye and arm.
• Artistic License – Biology: A common charge for badfics is Bad Biology, which covers situations where organisms are portrayed in ways inconsistent with how reality works. Sub-varieties of the charge include nonsensical health problems and medical treatments, the laws of genetics being ignored, lack of knowledge about anatomy, and characters doing things that are physically impossible (usually in regard to sex).
• Artistic License – Linguistics: The head of the PPC's postal department has a "Czechoslovakian accent". No such accent exists, mainly because there is no such thing as a Czechoslovakian language. Not to mention that there's been no such thing as Czechoslovakia since 1993.
• Ascended Extra:
  • While most characters from The Original Series ended up permanently retired, particularly insane, dead, or in upper administration, Agent Lux will show up — and molest — nearly every spin-off.
  • Some agents, after appearing as background characters in other works, also get their own missions or entire spinoffs.
• Ass Shove: As the Department of Bad Slash frequently deals with pairings who both have the same type of equipment, one of the duties of Bad Slashers is noting and critiquing inaccurate depictions of anal sex.
• Ax-Crazy: Sometimes an Agent loses it. Often in spectacular manner.
  Agent Len: "Mr. Rogers! Mr. Rogers!"
• Baby Morph Episode: At one point, the Continuity Council of Gallifrey-in-Exile (plus one) get de-aged into various stages of childhood. Chaos ensues.
• Badass Army: The Black Cats are an organization that, prior to their expulsion from the PPC, used to be a Secret Police force. Even though The Mysterious Somebody quickly became the real threat during the Crashing Down story, the Cats have made the best showing against the PPC out of any groups to attack Headquarters; this is partially because most of them were former PPC agents themselves, and thus knowing how best to fight them.
• Badass Creed: The PPC Constitution includes the statement "Do not meddle in the affairs of assassins, for we are heavily armed and quick to anger. And not noticeably subtle."
• Badass Normal: Many agents are ordinary humans who get the job done through whatever training they received, rapidly gained experience, and sometimes luck. "Normal" is a relative term in the PPC, though, given that they can recruit from almost every continuum that's ever been written; nonhuman characters include elves, dragons, Funny Animals, dinosaurs, aliens, and a superintelligent shade of the colour blue.
• Bad Is Good and Good Is Bad: Mini-Battle Android Troopers turn hostile whenever concepts associated with the American Way are brought up and show loyalty to people who mention villainous concepts. This is because they're based on villains from an '80s cartoon and act accordingly.
• Ballet Episode: The Four Demonly Kings' first mission as a quartet is into a badfic based on the ballet version of The Nutcracker. Because of this, the fic's environment is rendered as a ballet stage and the agents' movements are affected accordingly. This includes being unable to speak and bodily movements restricted to ballet moves during fic events. After the mission, everyone except Urato is in excruciating pain.
• Bamboo Technology: Among the various items used by the tech department includes Calvin's duplicator and transmogrifier, which are merely cardboard boxes oriented in specific ways and powered by believing that they'll work.
• Battle Couple: Some pairs of agents are in an active romantic relationship with each other and continue protecting the multiverse from the effects of bad fanfiction together.
• Beard of Evil:
  • The Mysterious Somebody is a clone of Dark Jedi Joruus C'baoth who engineered an epidemic of insanity to take over the PPC and spent most of the 90s in charge of the organization. While in control, he started a department that acted as a Secret Police force, funded most of the PPC's activites via a factory that produced Mary Sues, and used his mind control abilities to keep people from suspecting him of any wrongdoing. The image of C'baoth used to represent the Mysterious Somebody on the wiki sports a long white beard.
  • In the Mirror Universe where the PPC is an organization run by Mary Sues, the counterpart of Makes-Things has a beard.
• Beauty Equals Goodness: Inverted; the villains are Mary Sues, whose unnatural beauty is another facet of their nature as brainwashing reality-warping abominations. The Assassins that hunt them down, by contrast, are typically fairly scruffy people who've had too little sleep and too much time since their last shower.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: Supernumerary asked to be partnered with an Andalite from Animorphs due to their normally logical, professional manner. The Andalite he ends up with, Ilraen-Aroline-Fothergill, is a Blank Slate due to lacking any defining characteristics whatsoever in the fic he was recruited from; he has barely any personality at all to begin with, let alone anything that would make him act in a logical and professional manner.
• Berserk Button: Agent Trojie has such a deep respect for Kurt Cobain that writing bad Real-Person Fic involving him is enough to send her into a burning rage.
• Beware the Nice Ones: Any agent who has a sweet and friendly demeanor will inevitably become a terror to Suvian entities, as agents' jobs include assassinating Mary Sues, performing exorcisms (which involve bashing the possessed character over the head) or similar violent or semi-violent duties.
• Big Damn Heroes: The Librarian gets a particularly epic moment when his fellow agents are captured by Daleks — having previously abandoned his companions, he reappears just when the Daleks are about to execute them. He straps explosives to the Daleks, delivers a Pre-Asskicking One-Liner, and blows them to kingdom come.
• Bill... Bill... Junk... Bill...: Techno-Dann sifts through a box of assorted ray guns in search of a shrink ray, so that he can fit a dragon into your average small apartment:
  Dann: Death ray ... heat ray ... death ray ... freeze ray ... manta ray?
• Bloody Hilarious: Trivialization of violence is frowned upon, but for the sake of humor, anything is possible, whether it be hedgehog skin to the groin, head trauma by marital aid, or humanoid fox handing someone your liver.
• Brain Bleach: Bleeprin (bleach combined with Aspirin), its variants, and Suebuprofen are used to help agents cope with anything disturbing they witness while on missions.
• Brainless Beauty: The Mary Sues that the agents face are almost universally "beautiful" and universally dumber than a shoe.
• Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick:
  • invoked Charge lists tend to start with minor charges like "having bad spelling", go on to charging for horrific Squick or disrupting the entire fabric of the multiverse, then finish on the unofficial charges like "confusing PPC agents".
  • The Department of Angst deals with overly melodramatic fanfics. Their methods of cheering up canon characters include balloon animals, sock puppets, sun lamps, chocolate, and hard drugs... though its operatives are encouraged to avoid medicating people if possible.
• Bug War: The 2008 Macrovirus epidemic is aggravated by the giant viruses from Star Trek: Voyager infecting Paul Bunyan early on; his growth hormones make them turn into giant killer bugs that run amok in HQ. Over one thousand agents are killed by the bugs, and the place is torn apart. On top of that, Sues invade shortly afterward.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Most agents are quirky, to say the least. Most of them are competent, too — else they’d have snapped or died long ago.
• Burp of Finality: When one mission involving the Pirates of the Caribbean continuum goes pear-shaped and a Gary Stu and his ship full of generic crewmates nearly kill one of the agents involved, another agent summons Davy Jones' Kraken as backup. Cue a Mighty Roar, everyone on the ship (except the agents, who'd already escaped at that point) ending up on the business end of a Total Party Kill, and a burp from the Kraken to top it off.
• The Bus Came Back: Sean, who used to be Agent Luxury's boyfriend, returns after an absence of nearly a decade to help a team of newbies tackle an NSFW crossover involving a Slimer replacement raping Sam from Transformers. His disappearance is handwaved by him explaining that he spent most of the decade lost in a plothole.
• Canon Discontinuity: Some agents and their respective missions have been officially declared non-canon, either due to their author leaving and requesting as such or for being too much against what the PPC stands for.
• Cartoon Creature: Generic Beasts are furred humanoids of no identifiable species, spawned from fics written for franchises featuring multiple kinds of sapient animals when the fic writer forgets to specify what species a new character is.
• Cats Are Mean: The DIS emblem was a crouching black cat; they also employed at least one anthropomorphic cat, who was certainly a very nasty individual.
• Cerebus Rollercoaster: Because of the many authors and writing styles present in the community, PPC stories tend to run the gamut of comedy and drama.
• Cerebus Syndrome: Partly defied, partly played straight. Steady drama in the PPC community has led to a massive backlash against Emergencies (attacks on HQ or similarly large threats). However, the quality of writing has increased and the PPC itself has become a real "world" rather than just a way to spork bad fan fiction.
• Child Soldiers: Agents as young as twelve are sometimes sent into the field (though agents under fifteen are not particularly common). The average agent is in their mid-teens to early twenties.
• Chivalrous Pervert: A lot of agents spend their time on missions ogling over their Lust Objects, while at the same time protecting them from the horrors of badfic. Some even extend their horniness to other agents as well.
• Clap Your Hands If You Believe: If you remind an agent that Bleeprin shouldn't be chemically possible, it may stop working.
• Cloud Cuckoo Lander: Many agents are kind of goofy or crazy. For instance, Jay loves taking photos of vicious beasts, Acacia turns homicidal whenever she's frustrated, and Foxglove watches Happy Tree Friends (a very gory Subverted Kids' Show) while she eats.
• Cluster F-Bomb: When Falchion reads off the charge list to the "heroic" invoked Gary Stu on his first mission, he's so mad at him that he practically spews out the F-word every five seconds.
• Combat Pragmatist: Cheating in a fight is common and, depending on the strength of the Sue or canon characters they're fighting against, often necessary on the part of the agents.
• Comedic Sociopathy: As demonstrated in one of the FAQs.
  Q: Don't our agents have rights?
  A: No.
• Comedic Work, Serious Scene: The show is usually a silly comedy, but the mission covering Little Miss Mary has a Downer Ending. Rina and Zeb kill the Harry and Snape impostors, but then the Harry impostor attacks Zeb, causing Rina to think he's dead. She passes out, cries hysterically, and decides to go rogue and rename herself The Aviator.
• Comically Missing the Point:
  • Nonhuman agents unused to human ways sometimes misunderstand things in humorous ways.
  • It goes the other way, too: Agent Naomi (human) objects to Agents Stormsong (weasel) and Skyfire (stoat) teaching their adopted daughter Molly (ferret) about weapons because she's about six in human years. Skyfire acknowledges this, pointing out that said teaching has been left terribly late (at least for their home continuum).
• The Comically Serious:
  • The Ironic Overpower works to make sure any character with dignity is stripped of it.
  • Agent Omicron is a Dalek given the Human Factor to make him less hostile to other lifeforms. He takes the game of Cluedo just as seriously as exterminating Mary Sues, and is the PPC's "Supreme Cluedo Player" despite always thinking the victim was responsible for the murder.
• Cool and Unusual Punishment: The unusual ways most Agents dispose of Sues involve things like feeding them to monsters, throwing them into volcanoes, etc. On top of that, there's actually a department called the Department of Cool and Unusual Punishment, which presumably deals with this.
• Cool Shades: All agents wear these or close their eyes when using neuralyzers, so they don't accidentally wipe their own memories.
• Crazy-Prepared: Agents trend to either this, or the Indy Ploy. A particularly noteworthy example would be Agent Trojie, who carries a Mary Poppins-style Bag of Holding that has everything from a handbook on obstetrics to the complete works of Tolkien to a kitchen sink. It also has expanded to such a degree that finding anything not used daily requires spelunking gear, and a number of Nifflers are believed to have taken up residence.
• Crazy Workplace: The organisation is about people entering bad fanfiction and reverting it back to the canon portrayal. PPC HQ is well-known for being hard to navigate and having many insane or weird agents, and it's run by sentient flowers.
• Crossover: By the Mega Crossover nature of the PPC. The missions also tend to be riddled with references to other canons the authors like or hate.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: Sues are sometimes subjected to those, though torture is frowned upon and is against the rules.
• Crunchtastic: "Glaurunging" — see Unusual Euphemism. An MSTing also featured the use of the word "Malletspace" as a verb.
• Cuddle Bug: Luxury will try to hug or grope whoever she meets.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: More often than not the result in the few cases where a Sue/Stu actually fights a PPC agent. (Serves them right for curbstomping all comers in their own stories... the Sues, not the agents, of course.) The 2008 Sue invasion of PPC Headquarters turned into this pathetically quickly. Most invasions of HQ tend to turn into this as soon as the initial surprise has worn off.
• Cut His Heart Out with a Spoon: Nearly any Agent when upset or angry enough with invokedMary Sues and their authors. Usually happens with their Lust Object in apparent dire straits. This especially applies to new Agents and those just somewhat, just somewhat upset with the Flowers.
• Cyborg: Post-resurrection, Agent Suicide's body composition includes 11% artificial components, which his Wiki page notes as meaning he technically qualifies as a cyborg and "is well on his way to switching from 'animal' to 'mineral.'"
• A Darker Me: Some agent characters are based loosely on their creators, except with better names and much more violent.
• Deadpan Snarker: Most agents adopt making sarcastic remarks about what's happening around them as a means of coping with bad fanfiction.
• Death as Comedy: Some of the deaths thought up for Sues are absolutely hilarious.
• Death by Childbirth: Agent Momoka's mother died giving birth to her.
• Deconstruction: For all the tropes on here, for the most part, the PPC is nearly entirely meant to be taken as a formulaic deconstruction of bad fanfiction and prose in general, up and to including the Ironic Overpower and the fact that much of the PPC verse is powered by the physics of narrative and that that missions take place in Word Worlds and is meant to follow the Rule of Funny.
• Demonic Possession: Author/Sue-Wraiths possess canon characters and force them to act on their (depraved) whims. They usually have to be exorcised before they can be destroyed - or in at least one case, purified.
• Department of Redundancy Department: Two of the infrastructure departments at Headquarters are called the Department of Redundancy Department and the Repetitive Department of Repetition; agents find them annoying to report to because one has to repeat everything they say in a slightly different way at least once. The joke about tautology is furthered by their choice of symbolism; both departments have a music note on their flash patches that sound identical despite being written differently, and the Flowers in charge of them are the Coriander and the Cilatro, which are different names for the same plant.
• Determinator: The PPC in general when it comes to killing badfic - no matter what happens to them, be it giant microbes, Mary Sue invasions, or body-swap incidents, they'll just keep on trucking.
• Deus ex Machina: Palutena becomes a literal example of this when she saves Agents Sarah and Rashida from a Sue-wraith and turns it into Agent Cupid. Also see Do Not Taunt Cthulhu below.
• Distant Finale: Some participants write a "Ten Years Hence" story that serves as this to their agents.
• The Ditz: Lux appears to be so, remaining happily oblivious to attempts to dissuade her from her constant grabbiness up to and including physical attacks. Jay Thorntree also described herself as one.
• A Dog Named "Cat": Laburnum's pet hellhound is named Crow.
• Door Roulette: In "The Fine Art of Copypasting", Agents Sergio, Nikki, and Corolla follow a Sue down a hallway with several doors at the end. Since they didn't see which door the Sue went through, they end up checking them one-by-one trying to find her before Corolla simply opens up a portal to where the Sue is. The doors they try lead to an airport runway, Kyosuke's hospital room, the Doctor building a cruise spaceship out of Legos, and The A-Team in a shootout.
• Door Stopper:
  • Herr Wozzeck's missions average around forty pages long each and he's written a couple dozen of them.
  • SkarmorySilver's missions tend to be on the longer side of things. The mission where he sporks a badfic of his own creation clocks in at a mind-boggling 87 pages. In single space.
  • Iximaz's missions of The Girl Who Lived series, when condensed, are a total of 201 pages and 78,300 words long; for perspective, that's longer than the first Harry Potter book.
  • A co-write between Desdendelle, KarrinBlue (a.k.a. Firemagic) and Maslab sporking a horrid Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha Striker S x Halo fic is 67 pages long.
• Double Entendre: Some agents — particularly in Bad Slash — like to point it out whenever the writing sounds like it's making a dirty joke.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: Some of the Sues killed by agents have been literal goddesses. Or demi-goddesses, in the case of Maia in Lord of the Rings. Killing them is possible not because the agent is overpowered, but because Mary Sues are not very intelligent or have very shallow ways of using their powers that lead to their demise. Or, in the case of Agent Mike de Bergerac, it is because the agent is overpowered.
• Do Not Taunt Cthulhu: A particularly Sadly Mythtaken one of the above was taken out when Agents Suicide and Ithalond invoked the actual Sekhmet the Destroyer, who proceeded to vaporize the Sue. The Goddess of Destruction apparently does not appreciate having her name misspelled and her powers mixed up and given to a bitchy teenager.

  • A Smauglock Stu idiotically provoked Ancalagon the Black. He is described as gazing into the mouth of Hell.

• Dream Deception: In "Illogical in All the Right Ways", Christianne and Eledhwen assassinate a Spock impostor and his girlfriend, then convince the canon characters that it had all been a nightmare.
• Dropped a Bridge on Him: Makes-Things. This bridge was removed; a member of the PPC got permission to go back and write a proper death scene for Makes-Things.
• Drowning My Sorrows: In Bleepka, usually. Several agents consider "drinking until I forget why I wished to be drunk" to be a good stress-relieving method.
• Dysfunction Junction: Nobody in the PPC is entirely sane. They wouldn't be in the PPC if they were, and the job tends to wear down the ones who start that way anyway.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: The original twenty-six missions of Jay and Acacia have the same basic irreverent tone as later PPC works, but much of the organization's worldbuilding and behavior is noticeably different than what it would evolve into.
  • Two separate devices are used to determine information about fic characters besides their name, species, and canonicity: the Character Analysis Device, which states how much a character is influencing the narritive, and the Canon Analysis Device, which states how Out of Character someone is. Since most of the information they provide is redundant to each other, they were later combined into a CAD model that does the same thing as both devices and more.
  • Original series missions and earlier installments in the Shared Universe openly criticize the author of the fic being sporked in addition to their writing. Later missions drop the Ad Hominem aspect of the sporking and just focus on the contents of the fanfiction.
  • Restoring canon in the original series merely requires killing the Mary Sue(s). The concept of Canon Damage as a force that makes it harder for canon to restore itself would later be introduced to give agents more work to do, mainly in the form of wiping any memories of the badfic from the canon characters.
  • The only effect bad spelling has for most of the original series is being a charge. The concept of Word Worlds interpreting typos literally for comedic effect doesn't show up until the twenty-fourth mission out of twenty-six. While the concept of miniature creatures being created by misspelling character names is mentioned, it's only in the context of the Official Fanfiction University and not as something agents encounter during missions.
• Earth-Shattering Kaboom: The Department of Geographical Aberrations has been known to blow up Suvian worlds — and star systems; they have licensed Sun Crusher pilots.
• Eldritch Abomination: A version of Big Brother from Nineteen Eighty-Four. Also, Cthulhu himself used to appear in the earlier spinoffs, to whom Sues would often be fed (although, in the very first one, the Non-canons are fed to the Watcher in the Water). This has become forbidden by PPC policy though (apparently the Sues are making him fat), and thus Cthulhu no longer shows up. The Sues/Stus themselves can count, as well.
• Emergency Transformation: Several agents, such as Tawaki Penguin and Rina Dives, have been turned into Time Lords so they can regenerate and heal off what otherwise would be a fatal injury.
• The Empire: The Enforcers of the Plot Continuum, the PPC's Evil Counterpart in the mirror multiverse.
• Enemy Civil War: The power struggle between the Venomous Tentacula and Forget-Me-Not for control over the League of Mary-Sue Factories after the Yarrow's death. The Tentacula won.
• Everyone Can See It: In regards to Agents Eledhwen Elerossiel and Christianne Shieh. They got together eventually.
• Everyone Has Standards: There are a number of rules enforced both upon the fictional agency and its fandom in order to keep them from devolving into the trolls, griefers, Hate Fic writers and neer-do-wells they sometimes get accused of being.
  • The gathering of charges serves two purposes. One, it helps to explain in generally non-subjective terms what makes a story bad in the first place, instead of just saying it's bad and acting like everyone agrees. Second, it prevents agents from acting on a "shoot first, shoot some more and when everyone's dead, give a reason for it" attitude.
  • Torture is outright prohibited on the job. Besides ethics, it's also pragmatic as it prevents any Sues from pulling something out to save their skins. Doesn't mean that agents won't enjoy watching Sues who get tortured as part of the story.
  • Directly insulting the author of the work or killing a fictional representation of them is also a no-no. This ensures focusing on the story and prevents an invocation of Never Live It Down.
  • Officially produced works always fall under their jurisdiction, regards of their popularity and perceived quality, meaning agents have to put it back the way it was and can't change it just because they don't like it. One agent ended up getting removed from continuity for trying to alter Harry Potter canon...by blowing up Hogwarts with a Sun Crusher.
  • Certain execution methods for Sues have been banned for being far too cruel, violent or excessive. They usually involve rape.
• Everything's Better with Sparkles: Inverted; Mary Sues sparkle and their glitter is dangerous in large quantities (it can Sue you).
• Exact Words:
  • When badfic gives improbable descriptions, World Worlds tend to interpret them in highly literal and comedic ways.
• Extreme Omnisexual: Agent Luxury is open to propositioning just about anyone, to the extent that the group's wiki states that her Lust Object(s) are "all sentient beings". Her only actual no-no appears to be children, as she gets angry for the first time ever during a poorly-handled scene of child sexual abuse.
• Face Palm: Used quite often by most agents; they'll put their hands to their faces if something annoying happens.
• Fake Faint: In one mission, Rarity the miniature draconequus pretends to faint when it sees Celestia, to be dramatic.
• Family-Unfriendly Death: Some agents get very creative with Sue deaths, but being distastefully vulgar or invoking the same things you are condemning are frowned upon.
• Fan Disservice: The No-Drool Videos featuring such beauties as the Unseen University’s Librarian.
• Fire-Forged Friends: Most agent pairs that start out with the two of them bickering or otherwise having hard feelings turn into friends.
• Fluffy Tamer: Any agent with a large collection of minis, since minis are usually smaller versions of vicious monsters like Balrogs or Acromantulas.
• Foreign Cuss Word: From French to German to Russian to Old English to Klingon.
• Funetik Aksent: Part of the disguise when agents enter literary continua in which the accents get written, and some agents have them all the time.
• Fun with Acronyms: One of the disguise generators is called the Disguise-Outfitting Ryticular Kostume System, or D.O.R.K.S. No one knows what "ryticular" means, while "kostume" is definitely spelled with a K because the patent had a typo as opposed to it just being that way to make the acronym work.
• Furry Confusion: Human agents Laburnum and Foxglove go to the Real World for a holiday and bump into agents Naomi (human), Drake (anthro fox in human disguise), Stormsong, Skyfire, and Stormy and Sky's adopted kids Molly and Moses (all various anthro mustelids in human disguise). In a conversation, Drake wants to go to a zoo, but Sky argues against it on the basis that Molly would have a fit (she already had one after encountering a pet shop).

G to M

• Gadgeteer Genius: Makes-Things, Techno-Dann, Liz O'Grady, and the entire Department of Sufficiently Advanced Technology as a whole are technicians and are commonly seen fixing and building things.
• Gallows Humor: You kinda need a dark sense of humor when your job is primarily killing things.
• Gargle Blaster: Pink Stuff, Euphoria Elixir from Harry Potter mixed with Romulan Ale from Star Trek. Knocks you out something fierce but leaves a killer hangover.
• Gender Bender:
  • There was an... incident... involving an Ax-Crazy Agent with a Transformation Ray.
  • Agent Cadmar has been left female as punishment for his behavior in a mission gone wrong.
• Gentle Giant: Stephanie Podd is 11 feet tall, and she won't hurt a fly...ing fish.
• Genre Roulette: While it's a comedy first and foremost, the multiversal setting makes it only natural that it takes a turn for horror, or sweetness, or action, and back to comedy.
• Genre Savvy: As expected in a setting where irony is enforced by the Legal Department, most but not all Agents have at least a decent grasp on the more common tropes.
• Glamour Failure: Having one's disguise drop or otherwise fail is always a risk.
• Glitter Litter: In "How Will I Clean My Fur?", Steven gets hit with a prank that leaves pink glitter all over him. It sticks to him, too, because he'd previously been drenched in a strange, fictional goo.
• Good Is Not Nice: Though all the agents are technically fighting to protect the multiverse, you see quite a few Jerkass agents.
• Good Thing You Can Heal: Canon characters cannot truly die until their "official" deaths in the canon material. Agents can die, but Medical has the best techniques and instruments from just about anywhere in the multiverse, so anything short of death can be healed or at least patched up.
• Gory Discretion Shot:
  • Often, especially invoked squick-laden bits of fics aren't quoted directly. The most extreme example is probably from the Cluny Fic, where the agents spend most of the truly disgusting scenes screaming, throwing up, banging their heads against walls, and drinking as much alcohol as possible without going into any more detail about what's happening than that it involves a spear.
  • There was also a Sexy Discretion Shot involving Agents given a mission on their wedding night.
  • Valon and Kala's first dance is completely offscreen.
• Grammar Correction Gag: Agents sometimes respond to titles or prose describing horrible Gorn or Squick or extreme Canon Defilement by pointing out spelling or punctuation errors, either as a case of Comically Missing the Point or in a vain attempt to keep their minds off the horror.
• Group-Identifying Feature: You can tell what department an agent works for by looking at the symbol on their "flash patch", which is essentially an ID badge. There are too many departments to list here, but for a few examples, the Department of Bad Slash has a three-eyed rubber duck, the Department of Floaters has a waterlily, and the Department of Implausible Crossovers has a flying pig.
• Grossout Fakeout: In "How Will I Clean My Fur?", there is a tsunami of thick, white gunk that is said to come from Ned Flanders. However, the narration confirms that the substance is "a completely fictional liquid and not what it was implied to be".
• Hand Wave:
  • The Doctor visits Headquarters during a major blackout, but has his memories of the event wiped afterwards. A few months later, some agents stumble across him while dealing with a Door Roulette and he somehow recognizes them. Agent Sergio attributes the discrepancy to the Doctor being resistant to neuralysing as a side effect of being "a madman with a police box".
  • Agent Sean goes completely unmentioned in any PPC writings following his break-up with Luxury, only to pop up again over a decade after his last appearance. The only explanation he provides for why he disappeared for so long is that he got lost in a plothole while on a mission in the Lord of the Rings continuum.
• Hates Being Nicknamed: Agent Acacia gets annoyed whenever her partner Jay refers to her as Acy, to the point where her saying "Don't call me that" in response has become her catchphrase.
• Hate Sink: The Notary, who is an arrogant, racist, obstructive, and hostile prat of a Time Lady.
• Head-Tiltingly Kinky: Happens often, especially in Bad Slash. Often combined with Quizzical Tilt.
• He Who Fights Monsters: One of the many perils of being an agent is the risk of, in the process of fighting Mary Sues, becoming one yourself.
• Heel–Face Turn:
  • A few Mary Sues (and even one or two Sue-wraiths) reform and become agents, though their interactions with other agents (who make a living off killing Sues) are rather awkward.
  • The Nightshade started out as the Mysterious Somebody's secretary, then went on to be the Department Head of the Department of Operations; the restructuring of the Board of Department Heads after Crashing Down was done specifically to keep her off it. In the same storyline, Ontic Laison has one after her insanity was cured, having been Obliviously Evil beforehand.
  • Omicron, a humanized Dalek who reformed and became an agent. Likewise Agent Charlie, originally of the Imperial faction. Agent Fearn, who has been given the Human Factor, counts as well.
• Heroes Prefer Swords: Swords are the most popular weapon by far among agents, and many enemies of the PPC also use them. Partly justified by the fact that agents need to use weapons that fit the continuum they're in when doing missions, or they're risking contaminating the canon - bladed weapons are almost always canonical. It is unknown if preventing the non-canon weaponry from being found by canons is a loophole, but agents prefer to be safe rather than sorry on that ground.
• Heroic BSoD: A commonplace occurrence. About half the agents end their careers too insane to work (most of the rest are killed in action).
• Herr Doktor: Doktor Trollenfisch is referred to as a doctor, sporting a labcoat and goofy German accent. He is also a lurid pink pufferfish about a foot across with a love of oompah music, and has no idea what Germany even is. It's best not to question it.
• Heterosexual Life-Partners: Some agent pairs are best friends of the same gender. "Things I Am Not Allowed To Do At The PPC" instructs the agents not to refer to their partners this way, though.
• Hormone-Addled Teenager: Most of the Mary Sues and their writers are teenage girls who have the hots for one of the characters. Some of the agents have tendencies that way, but tend to get it squicked out of them.
• Humans Through Alien Eyes: Nonhuman agents have a hard time getting used to the majority species.
• I Call It "Vera": Some agents name their weapons or belongings.
• I Do Not Own: Every mission starts off with a disclaimer reminding us Jay and Acacia made the PPC, who the owner of the original property of the fic is and who the fic belongs to, usually snipping that they can keep that last one.
• I'm a Humanitarian: Sue Soufflé and capital-W Water are made from Mary Sue flesh, or blood in the latter case, and agents in the more species-diverse settings show little concern with sampling. Agents may not consider Sues human, and certainly don't consider them people, though.
• I'm Having Soul Pains: Recruited goodfic characters sometimes have problems when a particularly bad piece of work gets into their continuum.
• Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy: Invoked by Agent Zug after his intern, Cy (a former Stormtrooper) tried to shoot a possessed canon and missed. Or, as he put it, "You're a Stormtrooper who just tried to shoot a named protagonist".
• Impressive Pyrotechnics: Especially in the Department of Geographical Aberrations. They’re called “The Pyros” for a reason.
• I Need a Freaking Drink: Particularly bad fics or annoying co-workers tend to lead to agents drinking alcohol to cope.
• Initiation Ceremony: Has, at least in the past, included the Trial of Tom Bombadil's Poetry. Then comes the Sue-smiting.
• Insane Equals Violent:
  • Both averted and played straight. Most agents are a little crazy, but those who have real-world disorders aren't any more violent than anybody else (which, granted, isn't saying much when it's a PPC agent you're talking about). However, insanity induced by contact with too much horrible fan fiction does occasionally make agents find themselves a flamethrower and start burning things. The violence is nearly always a comical sort.
  • They also distinguish between the Played for Laughs "insanity" and the Played for Drama "mental illness."
• Instant A.I.: Just Add Water!: Any HQ technology with a speaker or display either a) ignites, b) explodes, or c) becomes sentient or sapient. This has resulted in Consoles with a twitter account, and disguise generators with a sense of humour. Especially problematic with Simulation Generators, which start out producing simple if realistic automatons, but will develop Clone Angst and Expendable Clones if not carefully monitored, eventually producing simulations that try to kill and replace the character they simulate.
• Interspecies Romance: The PPC is a multidimensional organisation. This is the inevitable result. For instance, Christianne and Eledwhen are a human/Tolkein elf couple.
• Intimate Healing: The usage of sexual intercourse to resolve angst and heal injuries outside of the few continua where it's supposed to happen constitutes a charge; this is due to the unrealistic results, the intimacy often involving a Mary Sue, and the fact that people with mental and/or physical health issues in real life may not be interested in sleeping with anyone.
  Jennifer Robinson: (...) And tell them from me that Healing Sex is not a legitimate medical procedure.
• Ironic Echo Cut: During the Mary Sue Invasion of 2008, Jennifer Robinson finishes her instructions to the agents defending the Medical Department with a directive to tell the Sues for her that Intimate Healing isn't a proper medical treatment. The scene cuts to Agent Omicron mowing down Sues while echoing Robinson's statement.
  Jennifer Robinson: Take 'em out. And tell them from me that Healing Sex is not a legitimate medical procedure.
  [cut to Agents Kamkenta Duval and Omicron killing Sues]]
  Omicron: EX-TER-MIN-ATE! BY THE WAY, HEA-LING SEX IS NOT A LE-GI-TI-MATE TREAT-MENT.
• It Came from the Fridge:
  • Eating from the cafeteria should earn hazard pay, as it's likely to send you to Medical.
  • Slorp is an animate pile of Suvian meat given life by the cafeteria's haphazard food preparation and the inherent improbability of its ingredients.
• It Makes Sense in Context: Most of what the PPC does. Bonus points for most of the context also requiring context.
• It Gets Easier: Agents usually get used to killing Sues; it helps that they're effectively fighting to protect all of existence. On the other hand, the longer they are agents, the more likely it is that they'll lose their sanity altogether. Terrible fanfiction is very stressful.
• It's Personal: Many agents have a Berserk Button relating to their home canons being Sued, or their Lust Objects being interfered with.
• It Runs on Nonsensoleum: The basis for most PPC Technology are stabilized Plotholes. If you tell someone that Bleeprin, literal Brain Bleach, couldn't possibly work as it does, it may stop working (and the Agent will then need to kill you). Humour and irony are (slightly) stronger forces than gravity.
• Jekyll & Hyde:
  • Dr. Niamh Tran is an abrasive Irish woman most of the time, but sometimes inexplicably turns into a cheerful Vietnamese woman.
  • Kaguya Hazama is normally a sweet, pleasant Nice Guy, but during missions he's angry and irritable.
• Just Desserts: Sues used to be fed to Cthulhu himself, before the practice was banned due to their making him fat. Other creatures which have since been used to off them include the Balrog from The Lord of the Rings, the Thread from Dragonriders of Pern, Suu the slime, Davy Jones' Kraken, a whole host of minis, and in at least one case, a nonhuman agent.
• Karmic Death: Mary Sues are subjected to this. For example:
  • Suicide and Dio subjected a G.I. Joe Sue who erased military discipline to the Reality Room, where the rigors of military life (intensified by her own attitude problem) reduced her to a glittery stain.
  • The Rainbow Dash impersonator in Rainbow Factory was turned into rainbows herself.
  • laura was killed by being tied to a tree in Mirkwood and a rock of the Ered Lithui and knocked out so that the tree and rock would take their natural places hundreds of kilometers apart. With bits of her still tied to them.
• Kill It with Fire:
  • A common reaction to most badfics.
  • Basically the go-to solution for the Department of Geographical Aberrations, leading to them being nicknamed “Pyro Department”.
• Killed Off for Real: For both Sues and agents. Canon characters cannot die until the author says so. Agents don't get this safety net.
• Killed Mid-Sentence: Sues often die this way. This is out of necessity, as the canon has a hard time correcting itself if a Sue dies on her own terms (and said terms often involve faux-eloquent Last Words).
• Lame Pun Reaction: During a mission to a fic based on Undertale, a Normal-Sized Temmie gets a tummy-ache from eating the agents' charge list... or, as Backslash puts it, a Temmie-ache. The Temmie, whose dialogue is usually filled with strange capitalization and punctuation, glares at him and switches to proper English to tell him to shut up.
• Lampshade Hanging: Near constant. One agent has been known to pull out and wave a literal lampshade.
• Like Reality, Unless Noted: World One is identical to present-day Earth except for the existence of various entrances into PPC Headquarters and their hidden city in the New Caledonian mountains. However, it's explicitly just a representation of reality rather than actually intended to be reality. Their wiki's article about World One elaborates further on the distinction by using New Caledonia as an example: The World One version of the island has a city that, while well-hidden, isn't impossible to find; the real-life island only has mountains and abandoned mines in the same location.
• Literal Genie:
  • When the fic writer makes technical errors, the fic world interprets it literally, frequently to comedic effect.
  • One Sue, thanks to a misspelling of 'lion', turned into a loin. She wasn't able to do much after that.
• Loony Fan: Fans of varying levels of loonyness are responsible for the creation of Mary Sues.
• Lust Object: Referred to by name for any character or object that gets an agent horny.
• Made of Explodium: Canon Analysis Devices frequently explode if they're pointed at a particularly bad Mary Sue/instance of Out of Character-ness or used for extended amounts of time. It's pretty rare for a CAD to survive more than one mission.
• Mary Sue: invoked The PPC uses a special definition of Mary Sue: a badly-written character that corrupts the canon for selfish or shallow reasons such that the real story could never take place. For example, Frodo would have never destroyed the One Ring if he was too busy being a badly-written love slave — the character that sets the canon into such ruin is considered a Mary Sue to the PPC. Mary Sues, or possession Sues, are the most frequent culprits that make terrible fanfiction terrible, and thus are hunted by the PPC. Because they are badly-conceived characters that could never be complete human beings, PPC canon considers them to be actually inhuman, and possibly not even living things at all. Some agents are reformed Mary Sues, either rescued from a story because they showed a scrap of humanity or written by PPC authors who have written Mary Sues in the past and wish to exploit that in their work. Also, uploading a Suefic is sometimes implied to be a Point of No Return for the Sue/Stu.
• Mary-Sue Hunter: The Department of Mary Sues consists of this; Agents in other departments specialize elsewhere (or “specialize” in not specializing, in case of Agents in the Department of Floaters). The PPC can be said to have popularized the trope.
• Mass "Oh, Crap!": Happens from time to time, usually when a large number of agents are involved and everything goes south. Large groups of Suvians may also get this when the agents step in.
• Mayfly–December Romance:
  • Judging by Fenworth and Paladin's ages in the Dragon Keeper Chronicles, Chrysocome and Del's marriage is this.
  • As of her second mission, Stephanie Podd the Kraken seems to be developing a relationship with Cupid Carmine, an immortal angel from Kid Icarus. Now, consider that the lifespan of an average World One squid is seldom more than 2-3 years...
• Meaningful Name:
  • Nendil Morifëa's second-name literally means "Black soul". Some other agents also have meaningful names: sometimes as a chosen alias or in the form of a pun, and sometimes because the culture from which they hail considers it normal. PPC Agents charge Mary Sues with this when it's out of place, tacky, and meaningless.
  • Makes-Things is called that because that's what he does.
• Meaningful Rename: Since names in HQ run the gamut from Alice to Supernumerary, more than a few agents have probably done this.
• Mega Crossover: Including some characters who are walking crossovers themselves.
• Mentors: A full spread of these tropes, albeit with a warning:
  Senior Agents either have an abnormal tolerance for things that turn other people into gibbering wrecks or they're faking it somehow. Either way, it is wise to tread softly until you have an idea which is the case. - The Manual
• Metafiction: Missions are parodies (in a certain way) of bad fanficition.
• Metaphorgotten: The Disentangler equates a Suvian turning into a Time Lady with Daleks liking bunnies in terms of overall wrongness, only to get sidetracked by the possibility that one of the Daleks working for the PPC actually likes bunnies.
  The Disentangler: That’s about as wrong as Daleks being into fluffy pink bunnies, although I think I might’ve seen Charlie in DAVD admit to his partner once that he liked fluffy pink bunnies, which was kinda traumatising but that’s not the point!
• Mirror Universe: Literally. More than one, in fact; there's at least the evil Suvian mirror multiverse, the one where everyone has sex all the time, and at least one known Alternate History multiverse.
• Missing Episode:
  • Some missions were on websites that folded and were not archived on the Wayback Machine. Now that Geocities has closed down, this applies to all PPC material posted to it and not uploaded to PPC: The Lost Tales. In the Original Series, "The Dark Elf" used to be a Missing Episode until it was found on the Wayback Machine.
  • In-universe, lost works from real and fictional cultures alike are archived in the Musée des Univers Perdus^TranslationMuseum of Lost Universes.
• Mister Seahorse: Male pregnancy is a common and serious charge, both dealt with within the Department of Bad Slash and the focus of the Division of Mpreg. Usually fixed by combining the debugger with a People Jar or more suitable parent (i.e., one with a uterus).
• Mistress and Servant Boy: Gender-flipped with Agents Kaguya, a wealthy young man, and Momoka, a girl who swears fealty to him out of gratitude for him and his family for letting her live under their roof. The former uses his master status to playfully tease the latter, the latter is attracted to the former, and they eventually become a couple.
• The Monolith: The main part of the Tomb of the Unknown PPC Agent; there used to also be tombstones, but these were removed.
• Most Common Superpower: Sues frequently have large breasts. Agents occasionally do, but less of a point is made of such.
• Most Fanfic Writers Are Girls: Leading to the need for "Isn't this sexist" section of the FAQ; playing the "sexist" card is something of a Berserk Button in general. Also, most PPC writers are also young and female.
• Mr. Fixit: The entire Department of Sufficiently Advanced Technology (or Ms. Fixit, as the case may be). Makes-Things especially has a knack for winding up in this role. One mission actually gave Makes-Things an assistant called Fix-It.
• MSTing: The missions are vaguely reminiscent of MSTs, as quotes from the fic are interspersed with commentary and such from the agents, though the agents are often carrying on their own story around the fic and only small snippets of the fics being sporked are used; at times, the fic itself is never quoted at all, being summarised instead. Some of the writers also do "official" MST fics as well.
• Mundane Utility: Flames can burn indefinitely without fuel or air. They naturally find use as torches, space heaters, and to melt snow when caught in an avalanche on Caradhras...or as it was called that time, Garadas.
• Must Have Caffeine: Agents don't get much time to sleep in the first place, so some make up for their sleep deprivation by drinking coffee.

N to S

• Names to Run Away from Really Fast:
  • Agent X, Luxury, Suicide, Velociripper, the Marquis de Sod, etc.
  • On the villains' side, the Mysterious Somebody and the Venomous Tentacula.
• Nightmare Fuel Station Attendant:
  • From the original series: Jay loves slimy tentacled things. She gets maternal over the Watcher.
  • Zara Smith has adopted a friendly replacement of the mutated bear from Annihilation and a fell beast.
• Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: Agent Tawaki is a werepenguin Borg who gets turned into a Time Lord.
• Noodle Implements: Agent Granjo tortures Mary Sues with a Narayani hammer, an empty tin can and a cell phone.
• Noodle Incident:
  • The No-Drool videos. All we know is that they're made up of some of the most invokedFetish Retardant scenes possible, designed to stop agents from lusting. Thankfully, apart from a few throwaway sentences, we don't know what these scenes are.
• No Off Button: Shortly after getting recruited, Makes-Things invents a portal generator that automatically creates self-powering portals capable of creating more portals in short succession, but forgets to include an off switch. Despite the generator's subsequent destruction, the portals continue multiplying rapidly because they're running off their own power and eventually destroy the Flowers' home planet.
• Nosebleed: No-Drool Videos are used to curb people getting nosebleeds around their crushes (and immaturity around Lust Objects in general).
• Not-So-Harmless Villain: Since the Sues tend to go down within a few paragraphs of being confronted, it's very easy to think this. But most of the time, the agents either have to restrain them or kill them with trickery, as these are still beings that can wrap reality or are incredibly powerful at the least. When the Sues are able to evade capture or fight back, they can severely injure or kill Agents as easily as anyone else.
• Not Where They Thought: In "How Will I Clean My Fur?", Steven makes two of these mistakes. First he thinks he's at home when really he's in someone else's apartment, then he thinks he's in the wrong story due to seeing a Pokémon centre (and the story is meant to be a Crack Fic of The Simpsons), but really he's in the right one.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome: Many plot developments occur completely off screen, with the reader only knowing about them due to an infodump on an agent's part.
• Older Than They Look: Due to the time distortions in HQ, many agents have experienced years more of life than their chronological age would suggest.
• One-Steve Limit:
  • There are three agents with the name Alison, all of whom spell it slightly differently (Agent Alison, Agent Allison, and Agent Ally).
  • The PPC has several members whose names are shortened versions of "Alexander": Alec Trevelyan, Alec Troven, Alex Bjørnsen, Alex Dives, Alex Orange, Alex Warren...
  • Two agents are named Charlie (a Dalek and a tabaxi), while a third is named Charlotte but goes by Charlie. Additionally, a Marty Sam in one of Jay and Acacia's missions is referred to as Charlie.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: Some agents, such as Supernumerary. Especially popular among the Time Lord agents, who are almost all renegades. Subverted, however, by the Notary — her name is Antrilovorasilendar — and Emiranlanoamar, AKA the Guardsman.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business:
  • In one mission, Supernumerary used Avada Kedavra on a vampiric replacement of Luna that had knocked out an agent he trained.
  • Jay drops her happy attitude when things get serious.
  • When Agent Ilraen starts swearing, you know something's gone wrong.
• Our Werebeasts Are Different: They include werewolves, werepenguins, weretigers, werehawks, and even a were-sea-anemone.
• Pardon My Klingon: "Kogec mjaaš!" Targir does not like seeing Han Solo replaced with The Sociopath.
• Parody Sue: Jaycacaia Thornbryd, who had the misfortune of ending up the PPC cafeteria, resulting in her remaining lifespan being measurable in milliseconds.
• Persona Non Grata: Agent Trojie is prohibited from going to Discworld when not assigned a mission there for some reason. This has nothing to do with the mysterious absence of important items from that continuum, such as the New Pie. The quarantined continua count for all agents, as their authors have forbidden fanfic to be written about them.
• Plant Aliens: The Flowers are giant, alien flowers given sentience (and, in many cases, grown to human size or larger) by the radiation given off by their sun being consumed by a black hole. They communicate and go about daily tasks primarily through the use of powerful psychic abilities, also given to them by said radiation.
• Plot Hole: The PPC uses plot holes in much of its technology, allowing its agents to move and communicate between worlds and universes. The entirety of HQ, in fact, consists of bits of building joined up via plot holes. People regularly fall into HQ because of this.
• Pop-Cultural Osmosis Failure: Agent Trojanhorse gets sent on a mission to a Real-Person Fic about Kurt Cobain despite having a Celebrity Crush on him and normally not being allowed "within two hundred light years" of her Lust Object. She suspects the upper management made an exception due to a lack of other people who know who Cobain is.
• Precision F-Strike: Agent Ilraen is a soft-spoken and often naive guy. So when he starts screaming about how something is bullshit, you know he's very not happy.
• Puff of Logic: One mission involves Agent Whitney encountering a Mary Sue in the middle of having sex with a monster that's made out of fire. Once Whitney reminds the Sue exactly what she's doing, she ignites on the spot.
  Whitney: (W)hen I pointed out that she was basically fucking a guy made of fire, she screamed and burst into flames.
• Punch-Clock Hero: Being a PPC agent is a job, though agents generally aren't paid much post-Reorganisation (before which they were paid very well and got frequent holidays, but at the cost of being ruled by the Big Bad and his Secret Police) and don't do it for the money. On the plus side, there isn't very much you need to pay for in HQ anyway.
• Punny Name: Some agents, such as Justin Agent, Beethoven "Moon" Sonata, Light Fixture, Night Shade, Peter Piper, and Blue Photon.
• Purple Prose: Suefics tend to go overboard with the florid writing.
• Put on a Bus: Sometimes an agent retires, is transferred to a new department, or goes mad.
• Quirky Household: Any group of agents that calls themselves a family will fall into this trope by the nature of the PPC.
• Rage Against the Author: Happens often, particularly against badfic authors. Doing much worse than raging isn't allowed, however.
• Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: The PPC is an entire organization comprised of individuals with a wide variety of backgrounds and dysfunctions attempting to protect the multiverse from the results of bad fanfiction.
• Rape as Drama: The focus of several possible charges, ranging from trivializing rape to worse.
• Rapid Aging: A Sue was forced to drink from the false grail, resulting in this.
• Readings Blew Up the Scale: The Canon Analysis Devices can explode when measuring high doses of OOC-ness.
• Reality Warper:
  • Sues, by their very nature.
  • All fanfic writers are this as well, as their words literally cause things to happen in the canon 'verse. In badfic, unfortunate spelling errors or syntax problems can cause some rather weird things to happen.
• Really 700 Years Old: Some agents, particularly the elves and Time Lords, are ancient despite not looking old.
• Reset Button: Neuralysing canon characters and removing the Sue or other centre of distortion doesn't merely fix the effects of the badfic, it effectively stops the badfic from happening in the first place.
• Revolting Rescue:
  • When a canon character eats something that ought to be poisonous, the agents will first try using a device to make the poison vanish from the character's stomach. However, if that doesn't work, the agent will try making the character vomit with ipecac syrup, and if that doesn't work, they'll try using senna pods to make them poo.
  • Discussed in one mission, where an agent wants to kill an anthropomorphic cat villainess by s masturbating (in reference to the meme "God kills a kitten every time you masturbate"), but his partner vetoes the idea.
• Ridiculously Cute Critter: Misspelling a character's name creates a tiny, adorable, and usually bloodthirsty version of a monster from the appropriate canon called a Mini. Even the minis based on hideous, monstrous creatures such as Lavos remain endearing.
• Ring-Ring-CRUNCH!: The consoles’ incessant beeping sometimes causes the agents to react… violently.
• Rouge Angles of Satin: Common in badfic; when applied to a character's name, it creates a mini.
• Rule of Cool: Usually invoked by the Sues to prop themselves up, though the agents can sometimes do this as well.
• Rule of Funny: If anything can be, the Rule of Funny is the guiding trope for the PPC. If a spinoff doesn't follow the Rule of Funny, or if a serious story for the PPC doesn't occasionally bend to its will, it's not really in the spirit of the PPC. As said above, the setting also has its own name for the Rule, the Narrative Laws of Comedy.
• Rule 34: A big reason many agents go through so much Bleeprin. The PPC also has its own version, "...there is fanfic for it."
• Rummage Fail:
  • The average Bag of Holding can hold a lot of stuff, which makes them convenient for agents on missions. This property, combined with Rule of Funny, also results in agents frequently pulling out the wrong thing while searching for whatever they need.
  • When Agent Zeb is looking for the spare remote activator to get the grievously injured Rina to Medical, he ends up emptying out Rina's left jacket pocket without finding it. Knowing that Rina will probably bleed out before he can finish searching the other pockets, he's forced to use the disguise generator to turn her into a Time Lord and force a regeneration instead.
• Running Gag: CADs exploding, consoles beeping at bad times, and others depending on the spinoff. The CAD gag could possibly be considered an Overused Running Gag, as it's now done almost every time a CAD is used at all and can give off the impression that PPC tech is completely useless.
• Scary Scorpions: Kala Jeng is a girtablilu native to the Monster Musume universe, meaning she's a short Romani girl attached at the hip to the body of a seven-foot, four-hundred pound scorpion. Not only that, but she's been repeatedly kicked out of the homes of her host families because of her Hair-Trigger Temper and violent tendencies. However, Valon seems to have gotten through to her, and they're married.
• The Scottish Trope: Both on the Posting Board and in the context of the missions, agents and writers avoid invoking the names of particularly horrifying badfics, either by censoring the name ("C*l*br**n") or just avoiding it ("That Series").
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: The Librarian's response to seeing a Dalek version of Harry Potter during a mission is to immediately portal away from it, leaving his fellow agents behind to deal with the situation. He comes back in time to save said agents from getting killed by Dalek Potter.
• Secret Police: The Department of Internal Security, after becoming corrupt; their existence was common knowledge, but the secret part was their corruption, the Mary Sue Factory they were protecting, and the fact they were torturing and murdering agents. The Department of Internal Operations can be taken as a more literal example, since in theory, only the Flowers even know they exist. In practise, there are rumours of their existence, but most still don't know the truth, and part of Agent Justin Agent's job is to discredit such rumours. According to one DIO agent, their existence being discovered would cause another revolt against the PPC's leaders, as they're too much like the DIS for most agents' comfort.
• Sensible Heroes, Skimpy Villains:
  • PPC uniforms are black, good for a wide variety of temperature ranges, and comfortable to spend time in. Sues usually aim for ostentatious, and in the Mirror Multiverse, the female agents wear very little.
  • Averted with Agent Luxury. Whenever she shows up, she's usually in some state of undress/ wearing skimpy clothes.
• She Is All Grown Up: Happens when younger agents visit home or the OFU they attended after some time, and in the Ten Years Hence stories.
• Shock-and-Switch Ending: Invoked, where agents enter stories (namely badly-written fanfiction) with bad or disturbing endings and change reality so that the stories have happy endings.
• Shoehorned Acronym: Justified. The Disguise-Outfitting Ryticular Kostume System abbreviates to DORKS. However, the "K" in "kostume" was there because of a typo on the patent form. No one knows the meaning of "ryticular", though.
• Shot in the Ass: Invoked in "He Was Practically Asking For It" when Rina decides to kill a Gary Stu early because he's wearing underwear with a target on the back and the idea of using it as a reference point for killing him via bow and arrow is too tempting to pass up.
  Rina: The Stu has a literal target on his ass! This is like the Holy Grail of Appropriately Ironic Assassinations! There's no way I'm gonna pass it up!
• Shouldn't We Be in School Right Now?: Most agents are in their teens, and the job leaves them no time for schoolwork, though they occasionally get leave to attend an Official Fanfiction University.
• Shout-Out:
  • When Agent Gabrielle asks "WHY IS THE POOP THERE?", Doktor Trollenfisch replies that if they knew why, they'd understand a lot more about the nature of the universe.
  • One badfic justifies its portrayal of Hermione Granger's parents via an author's note saying that nothing in canon contradicts the possibility of the Grangers being abusive. Agent Carlisle responds by invoking Russell's teapot, pointing out that there likewise isn't anything in canon contradicting the possibility of a teapot orbiting Jupiter, but that alone isn't proof that the teapot (or the Grangers' abuse) exists.
• Sick and Wrong: This is the reason Squick is a chargeable offense, and in the Bad Slash Department, a rather common one at that.
• Significant Birth Date: Agent Kaguya was conceived on a tsukimi night, which is how he got his name. He was then born on June 21, making him a Cancer, which is a sign ruled by the moon.
• Slasher Smile: Many agents, in some cases in a slightly different sense than usual.
• Smoky Gentlemen's Club: HQ's only private bar, the Pennacook Club.
• Squee: An interjection often leading the one uttering it to a round of No-Drool videos.
  • In continua where "squee" is a noun (common or proper), squeeing produces "Piercing Squees", large versions of whatever squee means in that continuum, that glomp the squee-er and vanish.
• Stating the Simple Solution: A group of agents lose track of a Sue that went down a hallway with several doors at the end and decide to figure out where she went by opening the doors one-by-one. Corolla eventually asks why they aren't using "the smart method" and uses the remote activator, which is standard-issue agent equipment, to open a portal directly to where the Sue is.
• Straight Gay: The PPC has a significant number of LGBT+ agents, who don't tend to follow any stereotypes unless they particularly want to.
• Strictly Formula: Agents get mission report/briefing, agents enter bad fanfic, agents bitch about bad fanfic, agents exchange smart-aleck banter, agents kill Sue and/or exorcise victims in variety of interesting ways, agents go home and do post-mission wrap-up. That it's still working like a charm is a testament to how terrible most of the target material is. And they're good about mixing it up just enough so that it doesn't get entirely predictable.
• Stumbling in the New Form: Whenever agents disguise themselves as My Little Pony style ponies, they struggle to walk on all fours (except Valon) and hold things in their hooves. And if they disguise themselves as a flying pony, they'll usually have trouble flying in the right direction as well.
• Suckiness Is Painful: Actually having to watch the horrible reality-bending induced by bad prose can cause really bad headaches.
• Summon Bigger Fish: As noted under Do Not Taunt Cthulhu, Agents Suicide and Ithalond got help from the real goddess Sekhmet after a Sue claimed to be her avatar.
  • Agent Cupid's first mission ended with him baiting Yveltal, the Destruction Pokémon, into wiping out an army of Suvian soldiers.
  • Valon Vance enlists the aid of the Puppet to deal with a psychotic Freddy Fazbear replacement.
  • And in an example involving actual sea life, this is how Lapis saves Chakkik from a near-fatal encounter with a literal, villainous invokedGod-Mode Stu. "RELEASE THE KRAKEN!!!"
• Super Gullible: Some Sues are rather lacking in the critical thinking department and will do anything an agent asks them to do. For just one example, Jay opened a portal and asked a Mary Sue to step through it, which she did. The portal, of course, led to the Whomping Willow.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: Agents tend to take down Sues in very cynical ways, especially Sues trying to make a cynical setting idealistic. Then there are Reality Rooms, which force canon-adherence and logic on everything inside them.
• Surreal Horror: Shows up unintentionally in a lot of badfic, as bad prose makes horrifying and physically-implausible things happen; for example, overuse of pronouns in a Slash Fic, where both characters are referred to as "he", sometimes results in both characters doing every action described to the other at the same time.
• Sword Fight: Many agents and enemies of the PPC use swords, so this happens frequently.

T to Z

• Tempting Fate: Agents deliberately aim to avoid invoking the "Laws of Narrative Comedy" or the "Ironic Overpower", as they are fundamental laws of the universe. Whenever an agent says anything along the lines of "At last, a break from badfic" or "Now I can catch some sleep", they get sent on another mission. If a mission is described as appearing "not too bad", it will rapidly get worse.
• Tentacle Rope: Stephanie Podd, a kraken from Monster Musume, employs this frequently.
• Theme Naming:
  • Floral Theme Naming: Three of Dafydd and Constance's children are named after the plants the latter grows. There are also agents Laburnum and Foxglove, plus the former's alter ego Hemlock.
  • Religious and Mythological Theme Naming, Shout-Out Theme Naming: The quartet of agents featured in the "Four Demonly Kings" spin-off all have surnames derived from The Golden Demon, while their first names are taken from Japanese folklore. Agent Kaguya's parents also have their first names referencing the same folk tale he's named after. The name of the ensemble (and the spin-off) itself alludes to two groupings of Buddhist deities.
• There Are No Therapists: Averted. There's an entire Department dedicated to this, and agents too close to snapping are often ordered to go there. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: The Canon Bomb is an explosive weapon that causes powdered canon to scatter through a badfic-warped location, literally rewriting it into its correct form and dissolving every uncanonical character or object caught in the very wide blast area. It only has one documented use, probably because the Agents who used it nearly got vaporized themselves (as they're not canon either).
• To Serve Man: Nonhuman agents who have a fondness for Suvian flesh might possibly fall under this trope, though it's acknowledged that Sues aren't human to begin with. Special mention goes to Velociripper, though, who comes from a continuum where predators seem to prefer humans more than bigger prey - and once ate a character replacement so completely that by the time he was done, only the bones were left!
• Tracking Device: Agents who are ex-Sues or close to becoming Sues are fitted with a tracking anklet.
• Tranquil Fury: Some agents are too professional, or just too far beyond rage, to express it much. This is usually very bad for the Sue.
• Transformation Ray: The Disguise Generator, necessary for continuum-appropriate disguises. The Disguise Outfitting Ryticular Kostume System is a similar device, allowing agents to change their disguise without having to go back to their RC.
• Trigger-Happy: One of the reasons agents being obliged to read charge lists before killing Sues is to stop them from killing at random.
• Ugly Cute: When a canon character's name is misspelled in badfic, a 'mini' creature appears: a small version of a monster from that canon. For Lord of the Rings, Mini-Balrogs, for Harry Potter, there are Mini-Aragogs, etc. These are cute, but also just as ugly as their larger counterparts.
• Uncanny Valley: Sues fall into this because they're too perfect. Their bodies often have many traits that would be attractive on their own, but are creepy and unnatural together.
• Unconventional Food Usage: This series has "dubious lube", which is wacky or bad things being used as lubricant, several of which are food. The list of items on the Wiki includes egg white, barbecue sauce, gravy, ketchup, melted sugar, vinegar, vegetable soup, honey, maple syrup, chocolate, melted cheese, a lollipop, mango pulp, and peanut butter.
• Unconventional Formatting: Kaguya's speech is literally unintelligible when he's enraged by badfics. To represent this, his dialogues in "angry mode" are bizarrely formatted, using various text sizes, fonts, colors and special characters.
• Undying Loyalty: Agent Momoka has this attitude toward Agent Kaguya due to her characterization's being inspired by the samurai archetype.
• Unexplained Recovery:
  • Canon characters can be "made to think they're dead" by fanauthors, but cannot actually die until their original author says they have. Dead agents usually cannot be resurrected, though Dafydd Illian is a notable exception. The Medical department can heal pretty much anything short of death.
  • Makes-Things abrubtly returns three years after seemingly having his heart punched out by a Kaiju macrovirus.
• Unnecessary Roughness: An important part of Australian Indoor-Rules Quidditch (a game stolen from Mac Hall). The main rule is "Cause as much damage as you can while you run around for the ball in the dark. Least injured team wins, outside of forfeit."
• Unusual Euphemism:
  • "Glaurung!", after the father of Dragons in Tolkien's Legendarium.
  • Agents have a tendency to swear by... odd decisions made in film adaptations of their favorite books. These include "Flaming Denethor!", "Jadis in a block of ice!", and "Radagast on a bunny sled!"
  • Other Creative Curses include “Reinforce Eins in a sweater!”, “Rein Zwei in a box!”, and "Son of a werechihuahua!"
• Vague Age: Agents tend to forget their ages, as HQ time more or less runs on guesswork. Some agents recruited from fics have no idea how old they were to start with, or are of species which don't age at the same rate as humans, so it's hard to tell.
• Victoria's Secret Compartment: During the mission for My Inner Life, Randa dopes up on Bleeprin and sticks the bottle down her shirt. Rina twice contemplates going after it before deciding to tough it out.
• Viewer Name Confusion: In-Universe, if a character's name is misspelled, they will be replaced by a small creature called a "mini".
• Vitriolic Best Buds: A common dynamic between agent pairs, as agents are usually assigned partners with different personalities — the Flowers think it helps prevent madness.
• Voluntary Shapeshifting: Putting on a disguise is effectively this, since it actually transforms the agents into their disguise — for example, when Jay and Acacia were disguised as Ents, they didn't feel anything despite being riddled with arrows.
• We Need a Distraction: Many agent pairs have used the strategy of having one agent distract the canons or the Sue while the other does what needs to be done — neuralysing, capturing, or killing.
• Webcomic Time: A problem for many writers, which is partly why Emergencies are frowned on now; it's hard to fit them into one's personal canon when struggling with a timeline. Time in HQ is pretty loosely defined, though, so most writers tend to just wing it or specifically state when a given story is set.
• Wham Episode: Crashing Down, where The Mysterious Somebody and his League of Mary Sue Factories and the Black Cats come back to destroy the PPC and are repulsed, albeit with heavy losses.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?: Or non-elf, non-alien, etc. Sues are always treated as though they are more like wild animals causing environmental contamination than a sentient being, so aside from charging them out of duty, the Agents have no guilt killing or even eating them.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Agents often call the Flowers out when they've had enough, or even each other.
• Writing Lines: Supernumerary makes his partner Ilraen write "I will not steal my partner's underwear" over and over as punishment for doing exactly that.
• Wunza Plot: Enforced; the Flowers purposefully create odd couples, then send them to fight Sues, disentangle bad crossovers, et cetera. Jay even described herself and Acacia as such in the author's notes for their second story.
  "One's a bloodthirsty killer. One's a flake with a Polaroid. They fight crime!"
• You Can't Go Home Again: Agents recruited from fics often can't go back for fear of death. Agents from World One often have trouble with the idea of readjusting to "normal" life. And some Agents are replaced canon characters...
• You Do NOT Want To Know: An all-too-common response when Agents are asked about something particularly nasty they saw on a mission.

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[BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP!]

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