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  • And You Thought It Would Fail: Complaints were made when the game first started about the structure, which kept everyone in mod-controlled Cast Herds instead of letting individual players run their own airships. This structure actually helped in the end by preventing the rampant character limbo caused by drops by keeping all the ships under mod control and having ready replacements for captains and first mates who dropped the game, as well as by allowing the plot to progress at a believable pace set by people who knew what was going on. And the game? It lasted from 2008 to 2011 and had a proper beginning, middle, and end.
  • Angst? What Angst?: Edgeworth made jokes about his own "death".
  • Arc Fatigue: Cutoff dates were implemented for plots that dragged out too long.
  • Archive Panic: Fanwriter-tan expresses this at the beginning of the feature, and only picked up the series near the very end because her friend list was filled with reactions to the game's OTP hooking up. Her anxiety fades as the feature goes on, and by the time she hits season two, she's officially addicted.
  • Awesomeness Withdrawal: "It's... it's actually over. Why? ;A;" was a common refrain for months. The reason that sequel supporters, reboot supporters, and Spiritual Successor supporters alike stated for their positions: everyone missed TST and wanted more in some way.
  • Bishōnen Jump Syndrome: Lampshaded constantly.
  • The Catchphrase Catches On: "Peanut butter cups" has become slang for "Everyone Is Bi" even OOCly.
  • Catharsis Factor: The ending arc. Finally, after almost three years of being innocent bystanders to terrorist plots, getting there too late, or being tricked into helping them out? The characters — and, thus, the players — really get to fight back. Judging by the last-minute return of player-favourite NPCs and former PCs, the mods definitely know this is a factor here.
  • Character Rerailment: The Bleach cast set out to deliberately do this when canon started shilling its villains and throwing its heroes at the altar to the point of making them boring.
  • Continuity Lockout: The mod team did their best to avert this by explaining previous plot-relevant events in info posts for later ones that were in some way related.
  • Crack Pairing: Many of them are game-canon. Many of them only make sense in context, such as age gaps being smaller or nonexistent (as a lot of characters who were younger in canon were aged up in the AU) and things that happened to get the characters to understand each other.
    • In-universe, Joshua's fanfics mostly consist of "crack pairings"... but then again, some of them ended up game-canon.
  • Creepy Awesome: Why do you think Kefka was brought back as an NPC?
    • Kefka nothing, Gin wins here. He had piles of CR and was the nominal villain of the second arc (well, technically, Aizen was, and for those very reasons, he fits here too), and the things he did in the game were legendary, from eating Ika-chan to scarring Shinjiro badly enough that he can't even think of pursuing his own relationships even after Gin's been out of his life for a year. The best thing he did, though, on the Creepy Awesome scale, was setting up his own Engineered Public Confession to get rid of his victim's ghost, while making sure that, even if everyone heard him admitting to killing Jean Morris, no one would believe him.
    • "Everyone is moe for Kaoru" became a minor meme in the third arc, partially because of her Creepy Child deadpan, Ambiguous Innocence, and capability of mass destruction.
  • Crossover Ship: Quite, quite common.
  • Dry Docked Ship: Angel/Zou is the one that first comes to mind, but speculation, headcanon, and outright game-canon have hooked many characters up in the game's backstory while leaving them single now.
  • Expectation Lowerer: The characters go on exciting adventures that affect the fate of the world, but the players seem to be just as concerned with how badly they fail at their day-to-day lives.
  • Fan Nickname: Too many to list, but...
    • Ships: Ammy (Amestris), AmTetris (same), Firetruck (Fiertia), Silvy (Silvana), Vicky (Victoria II). A number of names were suggested for Serenity, but none of them stuck.
    • Player Characters: Moose (Beat), Rou (Hijikata Toshirou), Tsunicorn (Leo), vK (Manfred von Karma), von Karmasaurus Perfex (same), Watanoodle (Watanuki Kimihiro), Zou (Hijikata Toshizou)
    • NPCs: There's a whole series of mooks who have received names. It started with Guard-kun and moved to his compatriots: Mage-kun, Servant-kun...
    • Pairings (game-canon and not): Lungshipping (Toshizou/Souji), Proxyshipping (Neku/Roxas), Team Yuribait (Nena/Sara), Bentoshipping (Watanuki/Ichigo)
    • Places: Crapmork (Kropmork), Kinkston (one-off town Jinkston), Silent Antrim (Antrim, naturally, though it's also the official name for the plot that took place in Antrim)
  • Fanon Discontinuity: An Aborted Arc where the Silvana was invaded by robots wasn't technically retconned out, but people tended not to acknowledge it after.
  • Fridge Horror: After the effects of the Hegua Lake explosion really sunk in, it took a while for the muns to realize that, hey, some of the characters' homes and families are gone now...
    • Nobody who's tried to explore the lower cloud layer has ever returned. It seems like a throwaway bit of flavour text to set the world in a sort of Age of Exploration, but much, much later in the game, we find out that there's a giant snake under there, and when you think about it, it probably ate them all.
  • Gameplay Derailment: Shiphopping had to be clamped down upon months after the game started, as people specifically apped characters with clear intent to never keep them on one ship.
  • Ham and Cheese: The players of Manfred von Karma, Leo, and Itou had a field day with this one after all their characters were hit by Berserk during a Status Effects plot. Their conversation over their journals in the middle of the battle became one of the most memorable moments in that entire plot.
  • Harsher in Hindsight: Hey, you know those falling islands that were a big deal back in "Season 1"? Yeah... after Climax Boss Jormungandr was revealed, it's pretty easy to tell what happened to them now.
  • Ho Yay: The game is actually considerably light on same-sex ships actually hooking up compared to other roleplays. It makes up for it with this trope in spades.
  • Idiosyncratic Ship Naming: A lot of people in the game really didn't like Portmanteau Couple Names for some reason or another, and many of the players took it upon themselves to think of new ship names because of this. The results were... mixed, but names like "Bentoshipping" get about as much use as their counterparts like "Ichiwata".
  • I Knew It!: A plot took place in the town of Spoons. One player pointed out that this sounded like Forks, and some jokes were made about how they would be fighting sparklepires. Many days later, more details about the plot were revealed...
  • Launcher of a Thousand Ships: Way, way too many characters are far too much fun to ship with everyone they know. In fact, it's almost a requirement in memes.
  • Like You Would Really Do It: Since there's no auto-resurrect in this setting, it's well-known that character death only comes when the mun fully intends to drop the character. Of course, with the ending coming up, the muns had less to lose...
  • Memetic Mutation: Are you a bad enough dude to kill the president?Explanation 
    • Go to bed, [X].Explanation 
    • An older one: Mello is Elvis!Explanation 
    • von Karmasaurus Perfex/Dinosaur von Karma. See Ascended Meme.
    • Ichigo being planesexual.Explanation 
    • Kaoru likes beds.Explanation 
    • Dice ship everything!Explanation 
    • Rou can only have what he doesn't want.Explanation 
    • Everyone Is Bi.
      • Peanut butter cups!Explanation 
  • Mind Game Ship: Gin/Shinjiro, oh, boy, Gin/Shinjiro. So wrong and so creepy, but if you like that kind of thing... yeah. In the invented AU where TST is a real show, the ship has a huge Misaimed Fandom.
  • Moral Event Horizon: Gin eating Ika-chan.
  • Newbie Boom: After the Series Hiatus, a lot of new players apped in with the soft reboot.
  • Player Punch: We liked that town/NPC/large section of the continent!
  • Rewatch Bonus: Go read some old logs knowing what you know now.
  • Ron the Death Eater: Parodied in a Kink Meme story making fun of bad fanfiction, in which the Parody Sue deposes a suddenly evil main character who would have shown the viewers no sign of being evil just for the sake of the fanbrat author's plot. The kicker? It's Bradley, who actually is a hidden villain.
  • Saved by the Fans: Edgeworth was supposed to be Killed Off for Real when Bradley caught him investigating the murder on the Amestris. Another mun who knew what was going on made the case that other character arcs would have more satisfying conclusions were he to live.
    • Narrowly averted. Kaoru was this close to saved before a rush of "Just so you know, I'm not killing off any of my characters, okay?" messages took over Plurk's TST contingent after Optimus Prime died. Her mun... stopped worrying about character death in finales being overdone.
  • Super Couple: Don't tell me Ness/Joshua doesn't fit.
  • Tear Jerker: Muns have freely admitted to crying IRL at many of the more dramatic scenes with characters they played or stalked.
  • Villain Decay: Averted; everyone pretty much stayed at their original threat level throughout. Due to strings of coincidences leading to apps and drops, no major villain stuck around in the spotlight for more than a year or so, so (in a blessing in disguise) there wasn't even much of an opportunity for them to start to suck!
  • The Woobie: Oh, heck, no matter who it is, usually someone will bawl their eyes out OOCly when a character is having a rough time.


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