Undocumented Features

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

"I am Ayanami Rei shar Atrados tal Vader," she said, "Padawan-in-Shadows to His Divine Shadow Darth Anakyn shar Atrados tal Vader, Grand Duke of Caladan, Chancellor of Santov, and Dark Lord of the Ancient and Obtenebrated Order of the Sith; journeywoman of the Asagiri Katsujinkenryuu; implacable foe of Big Fire. I will not rest until the twisted evil of Big Fire is extinguished from this galaxy... and my war begins here."

— from Warriors Of The Outer Rim: Blades by Benjamin D. Hutchins with Anne Cross

In the fall of 1991, a burgeoning anime fan named Benjamin D. Hutchins (who had chosen the login name "Gryphon" for the campus computer network) was attending Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, Massachusetts. He had recently fallen in love with a series called Dirty Pair, and had seen the first anime fanfics to be posted on the Net written about it by Ryan Mathews and Larry Mann. Gryphon decided to write a Dirty Pair fanfic as well, and in an effort to demonstrate the possibilities to his friends, he churned out something he initially considered a quick-and-dirty "proof of concept" story in which he brought Kei and Yuri to WPI with a plot device from a friend's story and generally let chaos ensue.

Some of his friends (including, among others, John "Truss" Trussell, Rob "ReRob" Mandeville, and MegaZone) collaborated with him on the project; they threw in a Big Bad courtesy of Bubblegum Crisis, they packed it full of WPI in-jokes, and named the story Undocumented Features.

Although Gryphon initially intended for the story to be discarded once the "real" writing began, it soon took on a life of its own. Local reception was so positive that they decided to post it on the rec.arts.anime newsgroup. Much to Hutchins's surprise, everybody who read it wanted a sequel. So the writers -- later to be known collectively as "Eyrie Productions, Unlimited" -- wrote one. And another. And then some side stories, and more and more...

This is Undocumented Features. Three decades after the first story was posted,[1] new stories are still being written in its universe. It is almost certainly the greatest Mega Crossover in all of Fan Fiction, and possibly in all fiction, period. The result is an epic, sprawling Space Opera setting that stretches across several thousand years of history and ranges across (and out of) the entire galaxy, written with a sly sense of humor and an almost religious regard for the Rule of Cool.

You wanna step in? You're in for a wild ride.

Undocumented Features is divided into five sets of stories. They are, in more or less chronological order by internal dating:

Core
The original four stories around which the rest of the series grew. The earliest works, they are also the crudest. They tell the story of how a motley group of college students became a band of immortal, spacegoing heroes. Because of their origins, they tend to be much more "jokey" in tone than the later, more serious works.
The Golden Age
The glory years of the Wedge Defense Force, when they were effectively an interstellar United Nations, uniting the galaxy in an era of (mostly) peace and prosperity. But there are enemies lurking in the shadows, enemies who are plotting the downfall of the WDF.
The Exile
In a single devastating strike, Maxmillien Largo of GENOM engineers the destruction of the Wedge Defense Force, tarring its members as traitors and villains with terrible efficacy. Gryphon is framed for the mass murder of a group of children and spends the next century or so on the run. Meanwhile, the galaxy falls apart as Largo expands GENOM's reach and all but turns it into a totalitarian government. The Exile period only ends when the War of Corporate Occupation ends and Largo is defeated. Gryphon has in recent years been quite critical of the earliest Exile writing (roughly 1993 to 1995) and its rather excessively angsty content; he now refers to those stories as his "crap period".
Future Imperfect
GENOM has fallen, Gryphon is cleared, the survivors of the WDF emerge from hiding, and the galaxy starts putting itself back together. But just as all seems to be going well, the apocalypse strikes -- Ragnarok, the Final Battle, begins. Through the unexpected intervention of mortal and demimortal agencies, though, the end of all things is averted. In its wake the "second generation" are born, and their adventures begin to move into the foreground, starting with the arrival of Utena Tenjou in Midgard, while in the darkness new enemies make their plans. Easily the largest and most diverse segment of the setting. Its crown jewel is the epic Symphony of the Sword.
The New Frontier
The next generation of stories which will become the new "present day" of the setting, loosely defined as "what happens after the Federation Civil War". This "new era" has been announced but not yet formally implemented, mainly because EPU has discovered more story material in the years before the Civil War than they previously thought they had. Eventually, the extant Warriors Of The Outer Rim series will become part of The New Frontier era, and presumably a series will emerge to act as the central arc of the era much as Symphony does for Future Imperfect.

Note that stories continue to be written for all eras except the Core; at any time there are, in fact, a number of sub-series which are awaiting completion as the muse strikes various members of the collective.

Undocumented Features is known to include elements and/or characters from (at the minimum) the following sources:

Source List

Where known, each source's contribution(s) to the setting are listed here. Very minor sources are compiled in a Shout-Out listing after.

  • The A-Team
    • Two of the CIs on the Righteous Indignation are based on Hannibal and Murdock.
  • Adventure Time
    • Marceline, queen of the vampires, is an old friend of Gryphon's. And a mean guitarist.
    • Flame Princess is apparently the daughter of Surtur.
  • Ah! My Goddess
    • The Morisato clan on the planet Tomodachi
    • Skuld Ravenhair, mother of Corwin Ravenhair (with Gryphon)
    • By extension, Norse mythology, brought in so that the Norns exist within their proper framework.
    • Peorth is also known as Eris, and seems to favor that guise.
  • Alien Nation
    • Moose MacEchearn's freshman year roommate at Worcester Prep was a Tenctonese boy named Davy Crockett.
    • Comments made by the WPI Dean of Student Life in Duelists of the Rose indicate that the events of the movie happened in the UF 'verse not long after first contact was made with Salusia.
  • American Chopper
    • "Avalon Chopper"
    • Paul Teutul Sr., Obtenebrated Order of the Sith
  • Animaniacs
    • Wakko, Yakko and Dot are alien orphans raised by Marty and Eiko Rose.
    • The Goodfeathers appear as bullying children at the Warners' old orphanage, and Ralph is a security guard there.
    • Rhita and Runntt are a Kilrathi and Sirian who escaped from a Cardassian prison.
    • Dr. Slappi Squirl is a Salusian ex-comedienne, and their most eminent cyberneticist.
    • Dr. Skracchensniph aided PCHammer during the Exile.
    • Gryphon and Saavik have a "Pinky and the Brain" moment in Manhunt:

Gryphon frowned. "Hmm." He turned away for a moment, rubbing his chin thoughtfully, and then caught Saavik's eye. "Are you pondering what I'm pondering, Commander Saavik?"
"I believe so, Captain," Saavik replied, then added with perfect seriousness, "though I must point out that if they called them Sad Meals, children would not buy them."

  • Apocalypse Now
    • Part of the plot to Fulcrum of Fate, Part IV, including Master Corto, is an Homage to this film.
  • Appleseed
    • Gryphon spent time as an ESWAT member during the Exile (in the first Exile story to be written, which may not quite be completely in canon anymore.)
    • Olympus was the capital of Earth before being destroyed by GENOM and superseded by Earthdome.
  • Arpeggio of Blue Steel
    • An article from The Hitchhiker's Guide published in the EPU Forums' Featured Documents area in Fall 2014 describes "The Fleet of Fog" which beseiged the nations of Earth between 2012 and 2059 and prevented intervention by off-world allies, causing the global standard of living to plunge and prompting the so-called "Second Diaspora" of human colonization -- until they suddenly vanished.
    • In the Order of the Rose story Underground, the Fleet is briefly mentioned on-screen in such a way as to suggest that they will soon become very important to that story arc.
    • In the Symphony of the Sword story "Taken By Storm", I-401 appears as part of Akio Ohtori's attack force.
    • In Cantata for Warships in D, more ships of the Fleet appear, including several under the control of Earthforce.
  • Atomic Robo
    • Robo is the creation, assistant and social secretary of Nikola Tesla. Although Tesla began constructing him in the 1920s, he was abandoned, half-built, for 400 years and wasn't completed until around the turn of the 24th-25th centuries.
  • The Aubrey-Maturin novels by Patrick O'Brian
    • A ship named the HMS Surprise in Manhunt.
    • Avast That Bloody Hammering Day (also in Manhunt).
  • Avatar: The Last Airbender (including The Legend of Korra).
    • The "Avatar" world is called Dìqiú and is a dimensional "neighbor" of the Japanese colony world Zipang; transitions from Zipang to Dìqiú and back again are easy enough (in certain places) that the governments on both sides have quiet but formal handling of such transfers, including mutual passports and such.
    • The contemporary period of Dìqiú is about a hundred years after the events of The Legend of Korra. Korra is still the Avatar, because she appears to be effectively immortal for no known reason; at least, she stopped aging at some point not too long after the events of LoK.
    • Korra is a Hutchins family friend, and served as midwife for both Corwin's birth and the birth of his and Anthy's daughter, Annabelle; she's also Corwin's godmother.
    • Azula at some point was removed from prison by Zuko in order to search for their lost mother, but somehow ended up in the hands of slavers in the "outside" universe, put into cryosleep, and then lost in a glacier on Karafuto, a different Japanese colony world. There she was found in the early 24th century after inspiring a century or two's worth of local folklore. She took the name "Sarah Inazuma" and after reaching adulthood pursued an... eclectic career across the galaxy (including taking over the entire world of Mojave in less than two years).
  • Babylon 5
    • The Babylon Foundation
    • Babylon 5 6, built in orbit around the planet Bajor. (It is commanded by Derek Bacon, and its staff includes several characters from Deep Space Nine.)
    • The Minbari, Centauri, Narn and Vorlons
    • 24th-25th Century Earth being governed by the Earth Alliance.
    • The Psi Corps.
    • B5-style hyperspace is known as "metaspace" in UF.
    • One of the peripheral characters during the first movement of Symphony of the Sword is G'Kron, nephew of G'Kar, student at Worcester Prep, and always outraged by some injustice or wrong (perceived or actual) committed by Authority.
    • G'Kron's roommate at WPI is Beld Marmo, a flamboyant and gay Centauri.
  • Battlestar Galactica
    • The Colonials are now settled on New Kobol.
    • Both versions of Galactica are represented -- Kara "Starbuck" Thrace (new) for instance, is the daughter of Kent "Starbuck" Thrace (old).
      • Strictly speaking, three versions are represented, as Word of God indicates the Cylons are a race of lizard folk who make extensive use of robots -- hearkening back to the original earliest scripts for the first series (and the novelization that was based on them).
    • Commander Cain of the Pegasus (old version, played by Lloyd Bridges).
  • BattleTech/Mechwarrior
    • In Second Chances, Corwin is seen finishing up the plans for the FNR-5 Fafnir assault 'Mech from Mechwarrior 4.
    • Various mecha in use throughout the galaxy.
    • Word of God states that Solaris VII is an Earth / Salusian colony world with a thriving Humongous Mecha gladiatorial combat industry.
    • Gryphon's handle comes from an RPG character he created, who wore a suit of powered armor resembling a scaled-down Griffin battlemech (the design of which was in turn based on the Soltic Roundfacer from Fang of the Sun Dougram.)
    • Source of Ice Planet Halloran V.
  • Beowulf
    • Hikaru Shidou quotes from it at a key moment in Knights of the Tenth World, Part 2.
  • The Biggles novels by WE Johns
    • Biggles is mentioned in several stories, and finally appears "on screen" in Tales of the Lensmen: Before Victory Comes Honor.
  • The Big O
    • Corwin's limousine
    • The Rune God Orihalcon is The Big O.
    • The Arc Words "Cast In The Name Of God, Ye Not Guilty" are the motto inscribed on the weapon of every Valkyrie.
    • R. Dorothy Wayneright, drummer for the Art of Noise, and her "twin sister" RD, who is now an Ignatine nun. Both come originally from Kane's World.
    • Dorothy's cat Peril.
  • Black Lagoon
    • The city of Roanapur, Thailand, visited in The Antianeira Incident.
    • The Black Lagoon Trading Company.
    • The Church of Violence.
    • Criminal boss Garcia Loveless, who is an adult version of a nine-year-old seen in the series.
  • Blade Runner
    • During the Golden Age period, those officers of the United Earth Bureau of Civil Protection tasked with hunting and neutralizing 33-series infiltration/espionage/assassin Boomers were known as "Blade Runners", and basically did for these Boomers what Deckard did to replicants in the movie.
    • In Cybertron Reloaded chapter six, the classic Tannhauser Gate lines get played with a little for Priss Morgan.
  • Blood+
    • Saya Otonashi appears as part of a rather esoteric squad in a trailer for an upcoming "New Frontier" storyline.
      • She also has a cameo, as a figure in a hibernaculum, in the ministory Welcome to the BPRD.
      • And is part of the team for a bank job in Hellbringer and the After-School Special Mission Force #1: "The Bad Bank Caper".
  • Borderlands
    • The story Starcrossed is liberally sprinkled with Borderlands references.
    • Pandora is mentioned several times in Shepard's 11.
  • Bubblegum Crisis
    • Largo, GENOM
    • The series plot in its entirety took place on New Japan. Another version may have occured on Earth in the early 21st century.
    • Priss Asagiri discovered that she was the lost heiress to the Asagiri katsujinkenryu swordmanship style.
    • Kei and Yuri each named a daughter for characters from BGC -- Priss Morgan and Sylvie Daniels.
    • Gryphon's AI "secretary"/major domo/general factotum is Vision, based on a flesh-and-blood Reika Chang.
  • Captain Scarlet and The Mysterons
    • At the end of Day of Infamy it was revealed that the Mysterons are behind the galaxy's most recent upheavals.
    • Earlier, the Mysterons duplicated Yuri Daniels for a sabotage attempt; this led her to gain Scarlet's retro-metabolic abilities.
    • "Lunarville VII" references the moon colony Lunarville-7.
  • City of Heroes
    • The Sky Raiders plague New Avalon.
    • Superadine is a street-level drug.
    • Crey Corporation is a wholly-owned subsidiary of GENOM, at least during the Exile period.
    • Baron Zoria and the Circle of Horns, an Oranbegan rock band.
    • There is a planet called "Paragon", with the capital city called (of course) "Paragon City". Blyde Square can be found therein.
  • Coraline
    • Coraline Jones joins the BPRD in the ministory Welcome To the BPRD.
  • Cowboy Bebop
    • Ed and Ein were part of Kaitlyn's social circle in her freshman year of high school
    • Utena's first personal starfighter is the same model as Spike's fighter.
  • CSI
    • Las Vegas is night shift in the IPO headquarters CSI division; Miami is the day shift.
    • Gil and Sara are humanized Salusians; Greg is a Dantrovian.
    • Catherine Willows' daughter Lindsey is a student at Deedlit Satori Mandeville Memorial Institute, where she is a member of the Duelists' Society and the Order of the Rose.
    • Heather "Lady Heather" Kessler is a Lensman -- and apparently a skilled zeppelin pilot. Without losing any of her original source background.
  • Cthulhu Mythos
    • Yuggoth is the largest moon of the tenth planet of the Solar System, Persephone.
    • A mention of Unaussprechliken Külten and several other references are found in the ministory Welcome to the BPRD.
  • Dai-Guard
    • R. Dorothy Wayneright pilots the Dai-Guard during the Big Fire attack on New Avalon in A Night To Remember.
    • The events of Dai-Guard are said to have happened in the early 21st century.
  • Damnation Alley
    • The Landmaster hostile environment vehicle shows up in Manhunt.
  • Dark Angel
    • Max Guevara is a Lenswoman in the IPO and appears in Hellbringer and the After-School Special Mission Force #1: "The Bad Bank Caper".
  • DC Comics
    • Batman
      • Kane's World is home to a dynasty of Batmen, one of whom was Gryphon during the Exile.
      • The Joker, operating under numerous aliases, operated in New Gotham at the end of the 24th century, according to Hellbringer and the After-School Special Mission Force #1: "The Bad Bank Caper".
      • The shop called Ditko's Vintage Clothing (seen in An Avatar in New Avalon) and its clerk on duty in that scene, are straight from the Batman: The Animated Series episode "Beware the Creeper".
    • The Creeper
      • Jack Ryder appears as the host of televised appearance of the Art of Noise during a stop in New Gotham on Kane's World, in Second Chances.
    • Enemy Ace
      • Hans von Hammer appears as a member of Big Fire's Magnificent Ten (and a former opponent and later friend of Biggles) in Tales of the Lensmen: Before Victory Comes Honor.
    • The Flash
      • In addition to all three generations of canon Flashes being present in the setting, Sara Sidle of the IPO CSI recently suffered an accident that connected her to the Speed Force.
    • Green Lantern
      • Wakaba Shinohara's Lens and sorcerous talents interacted unexpectedly, making her equivalent to the Silver Age Green Lantern.
      • Alan Scott, the Golden Age Green Lantern, is present somewhere in the setting.
      • Catherine Willows becomes the first recipient of the as-yet undefined technology created by Skuld for project BRIGHTEST DAY; supplementary material on the forums notes that she then receives the codename "Green Lantern".
    • The Legion Of Super-Heroes
      • Several characters are members of the IPO, either as regular agents or as part of AEGIS.
      • Saturn's moon of Titan, a Zeta Cygni protectorate, has become a gathering place for telepaths trying to escape the Psi Corps.
    • Martian Manhunter
      • J'onn J'onnz's race of Green Martians, called Malacandrans, are one of four species native to the UF-verse Mars.
    • The Question
    • Sandman
      • Death appeared at one of Gryphon's Christmas parties. She and Megazone have a daughter, based on "Didi" from Death: The High Cost of Living".
    • Starman
      • Kei Morgan eventually gained ownership of Starman's Cosmic Rod.
    • Superman
      • Krypton exploded in 2005, but not before the Wedge Defense Force evacuated most of the planet's population to New Krypton.
      • The Midwestern American city of Metropolis was transported to another world by Brainiac in the 20th century; its resident hero, Superman, went along with it and remained its defender for several centuries, until he vanished on an undefined mission into deep space; he is possibly dead, murdered by General Zod as part of his vendetta against the El family.
      • Kara "Supergirl" Zor-el arrived at Zeta Cygni in cryonic suspension via a slower-than-light capsule in the early 25th century, and now resides in New Avalon.
      • Adam Savage of the MythBusters is a Kryptonian.
    • Teen Titans
      • The animated version of the Titans operates out of New Avalon, after borrowing the Legion's origin story rescuing R.J. Brande.
      • Raven is Gryphon's protege/apprentice.
      • "Trigon" is the name taken by the demonically-empowered shade of the late Akio Ohtori, who is also Raven's father.
      • Slade Wilson is a member of the G.I. Joe taskforce, codename: "Snake-Eyes" -- alongside his brother, Wade, a.k.a. "Deadpool".
    • Wonder Woman
      • Diana "Wonder Woman" Prince is a member of the Experts of Justice in the early 25th century. Her history is roughly the same as the Post-Crisis version, only shifted forward five centuries. (Instead of Steven Trevor visiting Themiscyra during World War Two, though, it was Steven Rogers.)
    • Other
      • The "Corrigan Gardens" cemetery is mentioned as the resting place for many late criminals.
  • Detians 413
    • As Ben Hutchins explains in this post on the EPU forums, Detians 413 was a homebrew RPG created by Joe Martin, a former friend of his. This is the source for the Detians (pronounced with a hard "t", Det-ee-uns) and the Omega-2 retrovirus that makes them immortal. Edison Bell was Ben's player character in the RPG campaign.
  • Dirty Pair
    • The WWWA existed during the Golden Age; the United Galactica was the interplanetary government before the United Federation of Planets superseded it.
    • Kei is married to Gryphon, Yuri is married to Megazone.
    • Their daughters Priss and Sylvie will essentially recapitulate their partnership when they reach their late teens-early twenties.
  • Discworld
    • The UF-verse equivalent of Death shows up as Redneck's "case worker" during the Freespacer stories.
    • Nobby Nobbs also shows up amongst the Freespacer contingent after the Ragnarok Incident -- typically trying to steal something, in this case a large gold shield. Which he claimed was from a gift shop.
      • In fairness, he had a receipt. Unfortunately, it was written in crayon.
  • Doctor Who
    • Gallifrey exists separate from the universe but linked to it.
    • James Burke of PBS' Connections is a Time Lord.
    • The Daleks and Cybermen exist, but are shattered into various factions, including several allied to the Federation.
    • Rose Tyler, former companion of the Doctor, is now an actress playing his fictional counterpart Professor Enigma on the BBC-TV program of the same name. The Doctor, under the name "John Smith", has appeared in one adventure and proved so popular that there is talk of giving him his own series.
    • Jenny Flint and Vastra made their first appearance in the September 2014 Order of the Rose story Underground.
  • Dominion Tank Police
    • An in-universe document describing the "Napoleon-class" police mini-tank was posted to the EPU forums in late summer 2014.
    • Leona Ozaki is a Zardon Judge.
  • Dracula
    • In Hellbringer and the After-School Special Mission Force #1: "The Bad Bank Caper", Saya Otonashi complains about the expectations people have of vampires because of Dracula, and points out that he wasn't just a vampire, he was also, in her words, "some kind of FREAKIN' WIZARD".
  • Dune
    • Ancient history in the UF 'Verse, predating even Atlantis.
    • Darth Vader is Anakyn shar Atrados, a descendant of Paul Atrados ("Atreides") (and also the son of Nemo and brother of Nadia from Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water)
    • Salusa Secundus, the world where the Sardaukar trained, was also the homeworld of the Salusians from Ninja High School.
  • Dungeons & Dragons
    • The "blink dog", a teleporting canine from the game, exists on several worlds in the UF 'verse. A ship seen in Page of Swords is named after them.
    • Utena's horse Thunderbolt is, according to Word of God, a paladin's warhorse, with all the special abilities from the game it implies.
    • At least one of the "ancient Asgardian spells" Corwin employs appears to be from D&D -- a variant of "Dimenson Door".
    • In the forums-only ministory Agreement in Principle, posted in December 2013, a character mentions serving as a priestess of Kossuth and that she's probably still wanted in Neverwinter.
  • Earthdawn
    • The lizardlike T'skrang from the world of Barsaive come from this roleplaying setting.
  • El-Hazard: The Magnificent World
    • Ifurita, the ancient Mandalorian android/weapons system.
    • Roving reporter Nanami Jinnai.
    • Fatora and Makoto Morisato, fraternal twin children of Belldandy and Keiichi Morisato.
    • Afura Mann, daughter of Yuri Daniels and avatar character Larry Mann.
    • The remote planet Roshtaria is mentioned in Blades as the source of genetically-engineered armor-cats, one of whom appears in the story.
  • Electric Light Orchestra
    • The phrase "I have a message from another time..." which appears in the title block of all of the later stories, is a line from the prelude to ELO's song "Twilight"; "Twilight" was famously used by the animators who would later form Studio Gainax in the DAICON IV opening, itself a Mega Crossover.
    • And then there's the title of the early-2014 story Nothing That Is In Between, which is also a line from "Twilight".
    • The story that launches the Future Imperfect era, Twilight, probably takes its title from the song as well.
  • Equilibrium
    • The Grammaton Clerics appear as the Ignatine Order, and are considerably more benevolent than they are in the source.
  • Excel Saga
    • Excel Excel is an AI created by Corwin with a beta version of a "For dummies" kit he was given to try out.
    • Hyatt is a member of AEGIS and a Martian Manhunter-style Martian. Her canon sickliness was here a side effect of an illegal procedure she underwent to "lock" her shapeshifting abilities.
    • Marty Rose takes on the persona of Ilmartello in his position as commander of ACROSS -- the Avalon County Robot Offensive Support Squad.
    • Nabeshin is a Salusian ninja who was turned into a cyborg supersoldier by GENOM, and then joined the Experts of Justice as a Grey Lensman.
  • ÉX-Driver
    • Lisa and Lorna appear in A Night To Remember, and were intended to play a bigger role in Symphony of the Sword before the focus of the Fourth Symphony changed.
  • Fallout
    • There is a Hitchhiker's Guide entry to the lost colony Mojave in the EPU Forums at the end of 2013, which includes the brief but utterly awesome story of hitchhiker Sarah Inazuma's (AKA Princess Azula of Dìqiú's Fire Kingdom) visit to the planet.
    • The presence of Rad-X antiradiation medication in shipboard medical supplies.
    • Azula's favorite pistol during her career as an adventuring space captain -- to the point that it is practically a trademark for "Captain Sarah L. Inazuma" -- is the weapon from Fallout: New Vegas known only as "That Gun". Having rebuilt it from a non-functional piece of junk, she eventually grew tired of having to make its unique ammunition herself and had it converted into a blaster.
  • Farscape
    • During the events of The Rose that Blooms in the City of Light, Juri and Kate spot in a Paris cafe a human girl and a Nebari girl (who from the description might be late teenage/early twenties versions of Aeryn and Chianna) who are apparently on a date.
    • Gryphon quotes Crichton's line "I love hangin' with you, man" several times in Manhunt.
    • Gryphon was Crichton, at least for a little while during the Exile, according to a fake Terra Novan passport Kei finds in Aegis Florea 2.
  • Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas/Hunter S. Thompson in general
    • Raoul Duke/Hunter Thompson plays a major part in Manhunt, and apparently joined an expedition to a Halo.
  • Full Metal Panic!
    • In part 5 of Manhunt, Gryphon asks Colonel Dashiell Faireborne if he has an ARM Slave handy.
    • Several characters have made cameo appearances or had name checks, most notably in Reunion.
    • Kaname Chidori Sterling and Sosuke Sagara are central characters in the DSM Panic! series of ministories.
  • Fushigi Yūgi
    • Miaka Yuuki and Yui Hongo are classmates of Anne Cross at Harkness Street High School.
  • GaoGaiGar
    • Gai Morgan's destiny and mecha.
    • A service droid named "Mike" becomes "Mike Sounders Mark Thirteen" as a result of the events of Hellbringer and the After-School Special Mission Force #1: "The Bad Bank Caper".
  • Getter Robo
    • Designed and built by Corwin, and gets considerable screen time in both A Night To Remember and Hunter Rose.
    • Getter radiation is responsible for a number of ... unusual accidents, among others the Incredible Hulk.
  • Ghostbusters
    • It's implied that Gryphon knew the original Ghostbusters (in their animated avatars) because he insists on addressing Ido of Gunnm as "Egon" (the two are drawn very similarly).
    • Numerous variations on Egon's "I'm terrified beyond all rational thought" line appear throughout the stories, not to mention "I like this plan. I'm proud to be a part of it."
    • Spengler flux, the measurement of the strength of an entity's soul, is named after Egon Spengler.
    • As part of a WDF operation Kei took a job with the Ghostbusters just in time to join them on their last job -- one that left them stuck in a pocket of ultra-slowed time with a demonic entity until they were rescued in the early 25th Century. (Kei escaped before the trap shut on the rest.)
    • An unrelated group of ghost and demon hunters in the 25th century somehow recreated their technology, and eventually interfered (to their detriment) in a date between Etrigan and Raven.
  • Ghost in The Shell
    • "The Major" accompanied Ed Tivrusky when she appeared at Utena and Anthy's wedding.
  • Giant Robo
    • Big Fire is a galactic-scale enemy in UF; its leaders, agents and Mooks are frequently seen.
    • The IPO is Gryphon's creation to take up the more police-like duties of the old WDF.
    • The Experts of Justice are an elite group within the IPO.
    • Corwin built six-inch-tall Tiny Robo for Utena when he was 13.
    • An Older and Wiser Yuri has traded in her Battle Bikini for Kenji Murasame's pink trenchcoat (now that she has the Nigh Invulnerability to go with it).
    • Utena's standard wardrobe as an adult is inspired in part by Ginrei's outfit in a piece of promotional artwork for Giant Robo: The Night the Earth Stood Still.
  • Girls und Panzer
    • An in-universe document (a page from Galactipedia) to be found on the EPU Forums describes "Armorsport" (also known as "Tankery" and "sensha-dō"), a tank combat sport for girls and women born in the ashes of World War II, which has expanded throughout the galaxy with humanity and is now common on virtually all human-settled worlds.
  • Godzilla, Gamera and other Toho Kaiju films
    • Gojira Nakamura
    • Wapiko Overstreet encountered Gamera, or a creature so close as to make no difference.
    • In Aegis Florea 2, Raymond Burr has a cameo that evokes his role in the Americanized version of the original Godzilla.
    • One of the instructors at Piandao Academy in Dìqiú is a moth spirit named "Mosura" ("Mothra"). He's the science teacher.
    • There is a spirit in the spirit world of Dìqiú who appears to be the 2014 American Godzilla, and who has granted some of his attributes to Gojira Nakamura.
    • Apparently Godzilla and Mothra got together under as-yet-unrevealed circumstances and had a child.
  • Gold Digger
    • The Diggers girls appear, although never as a group. Gina Shannon appears as one of Washuu's students in "Wilderness"; Brittany Shannon was a Kilrathi fighter pilot who was found on the Delphinus at the end of "Twilight".
  • Gundam
    • Domon Kasshu from G Gundam is a champion mecha arena-fighter.
    • The WDF fought a One-Year War with the Principality of Zeon.
    • "A Gundam mobile suit" appears in Altered Appleseed, the first Exile story to be written. It isn't clear exactly which Gundam it is, but presumably it's the original RX-78.
  • Gunnm
    • Alita Ironheart (nicknamed "Gally" by Gryphon), a cyborg initially rebuilt by Gryphon and Ido, then rebuilt again by Skuld using Transformers-style technology, and who then became a Valkyrie.
    • The setting of the series is located on a colony world.
  • Half-Life
    • Gordon Freeman was a student at WPI during the events of the early Core stories, and was catapulted 400 years through time by accident when Skuld attempted to rescue him from the aftermath of the Black Mesa incident. He is currently a member of the International Police's Special Assignment 173 (the Tesladyne Action Science League).
    • Barney Calhoun is the security chief for the IPO High-Energy Phenomena Laboratory.
  • Halo
    • John Spartan, the Master Chief, is a Salusian soldier from the SPARTAN-II supersoldier program, lifted apparently straight from the Halo novels.
    • Chad Collier, Raoul Duke and Ezri Tigan apparently had an extended adventure on a Halo, according to a throwaway comment in Clarion Call.
    • The Covenant have recently (re)appeared on the galactic scene, and were involved with the overthrow of the Klingon Republic.
    • Tuncer, the Last Elite.
    • Chips Dubbo of the Repo Men.
    • Covenant forces attack the colony world New Woking in the ministory "The Honor of Mars: A War Story".
    • When tasked with bringing Cortana to an IPO mainframe to examine it for tampering, Janice Barlowe cheers over getting her very own "take Cortana to the computer and flip the switch" mission.
  • Harry Potter
    • Various Hogwarts students -- most notably Harry, Hermione, Ron, and Malfoy -- show up as padawans in the Jedi temple on Alderaan. One of their classes -- "Advanced Topics in Force Duality" -- is popularly nicknamed "Defense Against the Dark Arts".
    • A teaser posted in the forums suggests that Hermione goes on to be the padawan of Jedi Master Hercule Poirot.
  • Hellboy
    • In addition to working for the IPO's "weird stuff" division, Hellboy is also a high school teacher in New Avalon.
  • Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot
    • Poirot and Hastings play a prominent role in one story. Indeed, the little Belgian is a Jedi Master. His padawan (according to a little teaser posted in the forums) is Hermione Granger.
  • House
    • When last heard from, House and Wilson were on the run from Earth Alliance authorities.
    • Dr. Allison Cameron is on the special trauma team at Philip Boyce Memorial Medical Center in New Avalon.
    • House is the subject (and perhaps the author) of a book that from its description appears to be a "fictionalization" of the events of the series.
  • Iczer
    • Several Iczers made appearances in the Core, but have rarely been seen since then.
  • The Illuminatus Trilogy
    • MegaZone serves as a representative of Eris in Midgard.
    • In Manhunt, Raoul Duke says "The Eschaton is imminent!", echoing the novel's repeated line "Immanentize the Eschaton".
    • The accidentally intelligent computer system FUCKUP.
    • In general, the Core stories are heavily sprinkled with Illuminatus! references.
  • In Nomine
    • Despite heaven working by Norse rules (Asgard/Valhalla), with Odin in charge, there are apparently Abrahamic angels out and about, including an Ofanite pizza delivery guy.
  • Invader Zim
    • Zim is the "greatest Invader" Irk ever produced and spearheads the Irken forces in Day of Infamy.
    • Gaz is a naturalized Irken citizen, fitted with Invader gear.
    • Dib is a member of Psi Corps.
    • There is an Irken Jedi Master at the main temple on Alderaan.
  • I, Robot
    • The Nestor 5 robots appear as Federated Robotics Nestor Series 5. Buster, crack crash test dummy of the MythBusters, is an NS-5.
  • The Iron Giant
    • The Giant and Hogarth are briefly seen on Cybertron in a trailer for an upcoming "New Frontier"-era storyline.
  • James Bond
    • The full human name Largo uses, "Maximilian Largo", is that of a Bond villain.
    • Major Boothroyd -- AKA "Q" -- is implied to be in charge of IPO equipmentation.
    • Based on artwork and TV listing blurbs available through the EPU forums, it's pretty obvious that the Show Within A Fic Dalek 207 is about a Dalek version of Bond. (Not to mention that "207" = 2 "0"s + "7" = "007".)
  • John Carter of Mars (by Edgar Rice Burroughs)
    • The Malacandrans, the shapeshifting Martians of DC Comics, share the fourth planet with Red and Green "Barsoomian" Martians. (Plus the Sarmak -- see the entry for War of the Worlds, below.)
    • Earth forces fought a brief war with the Red Martians after 21st-century terraforming restored enough of the planet's biosphere to awaken the Martians from the hibernation they'd put themselves in. (The war was complicated by the presence of a third side that both of the other two mistook as part of the other's forces.)
    • Dejah Thoris and John Carter are historical figures from this period.
    • The city of Helium has been re-settled and is a popular destination for tourists.
    • A mixed force of Martian mercenaries -- including Red Martians and Tharks -- facing an invading Covenant force are the focus of the ministory "The Honor of Mars: A War Story".
    • According to Gryphon:

In the UF universe, everyone of any cosmic significance named Carter is related, and they all ultimately can trace their line back to John Carter of Virginia or one of his brothers.

  • Judge Dredd
    • The Zardon justice system, which essentially rules the planet after the royal family was deposed.
    • Sara Sidle has a Judge's gun, awarded to her by the Zardon government for her efforts in apprehending a particular criminal.
  • K-On!
    • The cast of K-On! attend the Asami Sato Girls' Academy in the United Republic, Dìqiú.
    • Because of an email from Ritsu to a friend-of-a-friend, the Art of Noise becomes aware of them, and Azalynn takes it on herself to play James Bond by enrolling at the Sato Academy under an assumed name to scope them out. This action and its aftermath are being documented serially during late 2014 in the FI storyline The Federation Lives Forever!
  • Kemono Friends
    • In a Hitchhiker's Guide entry posted in the EPU Forums in 2019, Japari Park is recast as the entirety of the planet Meta Eridani III, a "resort world" which has been abandoned and quarantined for some 80 years as of the early 25th century. While the official reason was a simple failure to make money, there are enough inconsistencies and odd details about the shutdown -- including and especially the "quarantine" -- to cast some doubt on the story.
  • Left 4 Dead
    • Various elements of the forum-published ministory Guns 4 Hire.
  • The Legend of Zelda
    • The planet Hyeruul, which appears to have been settled by colonists from Alfheim.
  • Lensman
    • Apparently fictional within the setting, but inspired Skuld to create the Lenses used by the IPO and selected others.
    • However, reportedly a few planets and technologies that appear in UF apparently originated in this series.
  • Leverage
    • Leverage Consulting and Associates appears in a preview at the end of Hellbringer and the After-School Special Mission Force #1: "The Bad Bank Caper".
  • Livewires
    • Social Butterfly and Gothic Lolita appear in The Antianeira Incident.
  • The Lord of the Rings
    • Implied to be ancient celestial history.
    • Vaettir ("hobbits") are native to the Shire, which is located somewhere near Alfheim in the upper planes.
      • A (female) namesake descendant of Peregrine "Pippin" Took attends Tenjou Academy in Cephiro and is part of its student council.
    • Nall's full dragon form resembles Smaug from the Rankin-Bass version of The Hobbit.
    • LOTR also exists in-universe, erroneously regarded as fiction, and The Sterling Saga has several references to it as such.
  • Lost Universe
    • An unknown person -- possibly a future incarnation of himself -- gave John "Truss" Trussell the Swordbreaker, complete with AI Canal running it.
  • Love Hina
    • Kaolla Su provided character design inspiration for Azalynn dv'Ir Natashkan.
    • Naru Narusegawa also makes a brief cameo as an IPO intern in Rediscovery (while getting off a trademark Megaton Punch).
  • Lunar game series (Lunar Legend, Lunar: The Silver Star and Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete)
    • Mia Ausa, half-Minbari daughter of John Trussell.
    • Nall Silverclaw, Corwin's dragon life-mate.
  • Magic Knight Rayearth
    • Cephiro is fused with the setting of Revolutionary Girl Utena to create The Tenth World, a previously-unsuspected demiplane existing between the mortal world and the lowest of the heavens.
    • The Rayearth storyline is pivotal to the ultimate conclusion of the first two parts of Symphony of the Sword.
    • Hikaru is a Salusian, Umi is a Hyeruulian elf, and Fuu is the daughter of the ambassador to Zeta Cygni from Funkotron.
  • My-HiME/Mai-Otome
    • Natsuki Kruger appears as an RA at Deedlit Satori Mandeville Memorial Institute in the forum-published serial DSM Panic, along with her pet "wolf-thing", Duran. According to author Phil Moyer, she is a fusion of the Natsukis from both series.
    • Natsuki's girlfriend Shizuru Viola is mentioned.
  • Marathon
    • Durandal appears as an AI originally installed in the Worcester Prep computer system but "liberated" by Ed Tivrusky and Ein after he manages to achieve stable rampancy. Gryphon has hinted in his annotations to The Duelists of the Rose that Durandal's presence at WPI was an accident, and that he was in fact a very dangerous piece of engineering that should never have been installed at a high school.
      • A later mini-story has shown that Durandal was active during Crossroads, and arranged to have his core intelligence installed at WPI for reasons not yet revealed. He also has the insanely powerful warship Marathon hidden somewhere.
    • Ed would later join the S'pht.
  • Marvel Comics
    • Captain America (comics)
      • Revived in the 24th century instead of the late 20th/early 21st, working as an administrator for the IPO.
      • The end of Cap's World War Two career has been merged with the "origin story" of the television version of Buck Rogers to get a different Captain Rogers into the twenty-fifth century.
      • The Red Skull has somehow survived into the 25th century as well, as the last true Nazi.
    • Fantastic Four
      • Ben Grimm and Victor von Doom, transported from Marvel Earth, have opened up a detective agency together.
    • The Incredible Hulk
      • The UF version of Bruce Banner was working with Getter Radiation, not Gamma.
      • The Red She-Hulk (an alter ego of Betty Ross) appears as the Valkyrie Bathildr "Betty" Forgeheart, an abandoned "runt" Jotun (fire giant) raised by the Asgardians.
    • Iron Man
      • Tony Stark is a friend of Gryphon's, and his company produces military hardware for the IPO. His most recent creation is a prototype robot called EVE.
    • Spider-Man
      • Jedi Master Peter B. "Tiger" Parker.
    • X-Men / X-Men: Evolution
      • Due to an accidental interdimensional transport, there are two versions of many of the X-Men in the UF universe -- a young, local version (mostly students at Beiwiru High School on Tomodachi, taught by Time Lord Don Griffin) and their older, displaced counterparts.
      • Super-sentinel Nimrod is active and but has been freed of his programming and compulsions, and has evolved into a fully free-willed individual who calls himself Nimrod-X.
      • Penance (the one from Generation X) appears in Hellbringer and the After-School Special Mission Force #1: "The Bad Bank Caper", but is redefined as a skraeling, a minor demon race from Muspelheim.
      • The UF version of Victor Creed is an elegant, erudite Neo-Victorian gentleman from a Welsh-flavored colony on the world of New Snowdonia.
      • The UF universe's native version of Wolverine -- now deceased -- was a feral beastman barely able to speak intelligibly, at least according to Creed's memories of him.
      • Laura "X-23" Kinney appears in Weapon of Choice with a background as an "assassin-doll" created by GENOM and hired out during the Exile.
    • Other
      • Madripoor, a city on the world Gulo.
      • MODOK also appears in The Bad Bank Caper.
      • Both Black Widows, Natasha Romanov and Yelena Belova, exist as UF-verse natives; both are defectors from a Neo-Soviet world or worlds.
      • In Aegis Florea 2, Kei quotes the Watcher:

"I observe and record," Kei replied with a pious grin, "I do not interfere."

      • Daredevil operates out of New Avalon's "Hell's Kitchen" neighborhood.
      • The Kingpin showed up as a crime boss during the Exile era.
  • M*A*S*H
    • A distant namesake descendant of B.J. Hunnicutt, also a doctor, is on the special trauma team at Philip Boyce Memorial Medical Center in New Avalon.
    • "Hawkeye" is used several times as a nickname for a surgeon.
    • In DSM Panic! Lindsey Willows refers to Sousuke Sagara as "Colonel Flagg" when he vanishes on her in the course of leaving a room; she sarcastically cites the "he's the wind" line.
  • The Mask
    • MegaZone apparently wore the Mask several times; Loki possessed him through it at the beginning of "Twilight".
    • The Mask itself appears, on display at the BPRD, early in Welcome to the BPRD.
  • Mass Effect
    • The M29 Grizzly AFV appears in Manhunt.
    • The Strenuus system.
    • The Quarians are encountered by the WDF during the Golden Age and later by Gryphon during the Exile.
    • A Babylon Project Galactic Database entry released in February 2010 outlines the military career of Virginia Shepard in the WDF, the Einherjar, the Valkyries, and the IPO, in that order, using screenshots from Mass Effect 2.
    • Tali (actually the namesake grandmother of the game's Tali) and Mordin appear in Star-Crossed. Tali from the game eventually appears in a series of epistolary stories that were posted to the EPU forums in Spring 2010, and eventually becomes part of the on-screen action in Symphony of the Sword.
    • There is a scene in Fulcrum of Fate set on Palaven, the Turian homeworld.
    • The Geth have appeared in Cybertron Reloaded, invading a city on the Transformers homeworld of Cybertron and working on rebuilding Unicron.
    • Virginia Shepard and Garrus both appear briefly in Weapon of Choice.
    • Emily Wong is a newspaper reporter in Republic City, stuck writing for the gossip/society page when she'd rather be on the crime beat.
  • The Matrix
    • Brother Thomas "Neo" Anderson of the Ignatine order.
    • Morpheus Windu, unorthodox Jedi and brother of Mace Windu.
    • Wachowski-MX74 IV, a world beyond the outer rim, duplicates the "real" world shown in The Matrix, complete with squidbots.
    • In Weapon of Choice, Laura Kinney undergoes a danger room sequence that is clearly the "office building lobby" fight from the end of the film.
  • Max Headroom
    • Edison Carter, Theora and Network 23 are key players in the Galactic media scene.
      • Carter runs the Network 23 news division; Author Avatar John Trussell works as a roving reporter for N23.
    • Bigtime TV is a much smaller but still galaxy-wide outfit, and employs Nanami Jinnai as its entire news division.
    • Devlin Carter is the nephew of Edison Carter, despite his British accent and upper-class twit act.
  • Mazinger Z
    • Lesser Mazinger, a six-inch-tall robot Corwin built for his sister Kaitlyn when he was 13.
  • Moldiver
    • Mirai and Hiroshi Morisato, the two oldest children of Belldandy and Keiichi Morisato.
    • Hiroshi was well on his way to becoming Moldiver when he instead became Ultraman.
  • MythBusters
    • M5 Industries operates out of New Avalon and produces, as in the real world, the Myth Busters program.
    • Run by Adam Savage (a Kryptonian) and Jamie Hyneman (a Jedi master).
    • Kari is from Bgtzl, homeworld of Phantom Girl in Legion of Super-Heroes, and like all the people of her planet can phase through solid objects.
    • When Scottie left, she was replaced by Bastila Shan.
    • Buster is an NS-5 robot from the movie I, Robot.
    • In Second Chances, the Mythbusters appear on TV attempting to recreate "the famous 'Captain James Kirk makes a cannon on a primitive planet' legend," as seen in the original Trek episode "Arena". (This segment was written several years before the real-world Myth Busters made the same attempt for a "viewers' requests" episode; it's suspected one or more UF readers made the request.)
  • Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water
    • Nadia and Jean become accidental stowaways on the SDF-17 when it makes an emergency landing on their homeworld.
    • An adult Nadia is a Wrench Wench, and a long-standing member of the Wedge Defense Force; she and Jean were recruited in their teens.
    • The Atlanteans are a long-dead Precursor race in UF -- Nadia and her brother Anakyn (Darth Vader) are the only survivors.
  • Neon Genesis Evangelion
    • Misato Katsuragi is an officer in ACROSS, the Avalon County Robot Offensive Support Squad.
    • New Avalon is underlaid with civil defense tunnels, which have launch shafts up to various intersections.
    • Shinji and Asuka are powerful psis pursued by Big Fire.
    • Rei Ayanami was a failed Big Fire experiment in genetic engineering, raised by Marty and Eiko Rose.
    • Unit Two makes a cameo appearance at the end of Knights of the Tenth World, Part 2 and the beginning of Knights of the Tenth World, Part 3 as a monstrous golem intended to delay or thwart the Rune Knights.
  • Nineteen Eighty-Four
    • Earth Alliance government bodies during the Future Imperfect era include the Ministry of Peace (aka "Minipax"). This may be a portmanteau reference, as this was the case in the source material for the EA.
  • Ninja High School
    • Source of Salusia and its queen Asrial, along with the technology that lets these skunklike aliens blend in with humans if they so wish.
    • Also source of Zardon, home of the Judges in UF. Zardon princess Leanna became a Judge.
    • Quagmire and Jeremy Feeple are mentioned in the stories that tell of the founding of the Freespacers.
    • Jeremy is a consort of Asrial and a high-level diplomat. He has also suffered a Cerebus Retcon, making his average appearance into an unnatural ability to be ignored.
  • Noir
    • Kirika Yuumira makes an appearance in a trailer for an upcoming "New Frontier" storyline.
  • Norse Mythology
    • The Norse gods are the only true divinities in the setting, although a number of gods in various belief systems are actually just aliases for Norse deities.
    • Ragnarok.
    • Surtur, who (having failed to set off the end of everything with Ragnarok) appears to be the ultimate Big Bad behind everything right now.
  • Oni
    • Geoff Depew was implanted with a Daodan symbiote during his time with Big Fire.
    • Konoko makes an appearance during "Icebreaker/Thankless"
  • Outlanders (Manga)
    • The Santovasku Empire (another race of Precursors) used Sith sorcery to rule much of the galaxy until Princess Kahm Santova's rebellion against her father caused it all to collapse. Larry Mann's avatar, displaced in time, has been hinted to be involved.
    • Princess Kahm Santova was Darth Vader's original apprentice several thousand years before the current era; like Vader, her first name has become misconstrued as a title and has been used thus by generations of female Sith.
      • Rianna Santova, Kahm's daughter, became a freelance space trader and "Grey" Sith during the Exile.
    • Aki and her Super-Powered Evil Side Jilehr appear as the split-personality AI secretary of Larry Mann's avatar.
  • Phantasy Star Online
    • Source of the planet Ragol (home of Janice Barlow), photon weapons, frames, and Hunters.
      • Janice Barlow has been known to carry a Varista and a Justy 23ST.
  • Pitch Black
    • Richard B. Riddick appears as a sapient dog, possibly bionically-augmented, who frequently accompanies Xander Cage.
  • Portal
    • Skuld has an AI assistant named Wheatley in the late Future Imperfect/early New Frontier era. And she refers to her laboratory facilities at the IPO as "The Enrichment Center".
    • GLADoS exists somewhere in the setting, but according to Word of God is unconnected with any other Portal material.
    • Cave Johnson was one of Skuld's first "Chosen", selected when she was rather young and inexperienced. While she now considers his selection a mistake, she still looks back on him with that certain fondness normally reserved for ex-boyfriends who were fun to be with but weren't good for you in the long run.
  • Powerpuff Girls
    • The Utonium sisters were an early Big Fire project that was discovered and liberated; they grew up in New Avalon.
    • Mojo Jojo is a mad genius native to Heston's Planet.
  • Read or Die
    • Yomiko Readman is an IPO agent.
    • Kitty "Shadowcat" Pryde is described in one story as having mastered Miss Deep's technique of slowing herself down from a fall by partially interacting with solid objects she's moving through.
  • Record of Lodoss War
    • Provided the name of character Deedlit Satori Mandeville.
    • Beld Marmo, the flamboyantly gay Centauri roommate of perpetually-dour Narn G'Kron during Kaitlyn and Utena's freshman year at Worcester Prep, is named for Emperor Beld of Marmo.
  • Red vs. Blue
    • The Repo Men, the 131st Special Mission Force, Tactical Division, of the International Police Organization.
  • Revolutionary Girl Utena
    • The setting of this series is fused with Cephiro from Magic Knight Rayearth to create The Tenth World, a previously-unsuspected demiworld existing between Midgard and the lowest of the heavens.
    • Utena is a major player in the galaxy thanks to the events of Symphony Of The Sword.
    • Akio Ohtori is a high-level big bad even after he's killed.
  • RoboCop
    • Delta City, the capital of New Detroit.
    • The existence of the television program It's Not My Problem! (source of the deathless Catch Phrase "I'll buy that for a dollar!").
    • Gryphon brings along a Super Prototype ED-209 in Rite of Passage.
  • Ronin Warriors
    • Among the forces among Akio Ohtori's "students" at the Ohtori Institute in the demiworld of Oriphos are the villain group from this series.
  • Rush
    • Very much like the song of the same name, the black hole Cygnus X-1 is a gateway to Asgard.
  • RWBY
    • Michel "Zuse" Dufresne, the owner of Club HiRez in An Avatar in New Avalon, combines Zuse from Tron: Legacy with elements of both Roman Torchwick and Hei "Junior" Xiong.
    • The fight between Korra and, well, everybody in Club HiRez also draws heavily on Yang's fight in the "Yellow" trailer.
  • Sailor Moon
    • Usagi Tsukino appears as the childhood friend of Nene Romanova in an Exile-period PC Hammer story.
    • Makoto "Kilovolt" Kino, superpowered former Big Fire operative, in the Future Imperfect era.
  • Sakura Taisen
    • Events of the series, OVAs and games all take place on the Japanese colony world Ishiyama.
    • During the Exile, Gryphon (under the alias "Peter Moreau") initially filled the role occupied by Ichiro Ohgami in the first few installments, until he was forced to fake his death and flee the planet. Ohgami then replaced him.
    • Kohran is a Salusian and Kanna is a Hoffmanite (a petite, delicate Hoffmanite, at that).
  • Science Ninja Team Gatchaman
    • Galactor makes a number of appearances as a galaxy-wide enemy a step or two below Big Fire in its threat level.
  • Serial Experiments Lain
    • Lain Iwakura is part of the team for a bank job in Hellbringer and the After-School Special Mission Force #1: "The Bad Bank Caper".
  • The Shadow
    • One of Gryphon's identities over the centuries. Most The Shadow elements were introduced in Days of Miracle and Wonder, which was written in 1994 shortly after The Movie of The Shadow was released.
    • Kaitlyn has learned the "power to cloud men's minds" from her father.
  • Shadow of the Vampire/Nosferatu
    • Maximilian Friedrich Wilhelm Schreck, Graf von Orlock appears in the ministory Welcome to the BPRD as an apparently senior agent of the BPRD.
  • Shadowrun
    • Aztechnology is a major corporation based in New Avalon.
    • DocWagon operates in New Avalon, as well, and has the exclusive contract for IPO staff and emergencies.
    • Shiori Takatsuki, after becoming a netrunner during college, owns a Fairlight Excalibur cyberdeck.
    • Renraku is a major megacorp in the Co-Prosperity Sphere during the Exile era and later, and is one of the backers of Japari Park.
    • New Japan is basically "Shadowrun: The Planet".
  • Short Circuit
    • "Johnny Five" robots have been mentioned, and their manufacturer also produced the WALL-E series of trash compactor droids.
  • Skies of Arcadia
    • Vyse, Aika, Fina, and the Delphinus make an appearance during Twilight.
  • Skyrim
    • Skyrim is (or is on) a planet on the outer rim.
    • Jack from Mass Effect is the Dragonborn or its equivalent.
    • The dragons of the Upper Worlds battle using Dragon Shouts.
  • The Slayers
    • Corwin has used "ancient" spells such as the "Ragna Blade".
    • Wakaba's destruction of the Black Omega complex on Tau Ceti IV using her Lens/ring is explicitly described as resembling the Dragon Slave enough that those familiar with the "Old Sorceries" would recognize it as such.
    • The local equivalent of Lina Inverse is Lina Diggers.
  • Sol Bianca
    • The five main characters are pirates who steal and then use the Sol Bianca in an attempt to keep GENOM from taking over the Bodacious Vee star system (home of Funkotron and Funkorama).
  • Stargate
    • The IPO maintains a more-or-less secret stargate network.
    • Symphony of the Sword character Devlin Carter, according to Word of God, has a cousin named Samantha whom he hasn't seen in years.
    • Adam Kawalsky and Nico Feretti are GENOM stormtroopers.
  • Star Trek
    • This is a "whew, where to begin?" entry. There's a lot of Trek in UF.
    • Original, TNG, Voyager and Enterprise all contribute considerable material and characters.
    • Gryphon was accidentally stranded in the Star Trek universe for several decades during the Exile years.
    • The Final Reflection, a Trek novel by John M. Ford, provides one of the two Klingon languages, klingonaase, the notion of the "Black Fleet" in the Klingon afterlife, and the show-within-a-fic Battlecruiser Vengeance.
    • The current government of known space is the United Federation of Planets, but it is increasingly becoming a puppet of the Earth Alliance's policies.
    • Deedlit Satori Mandeville Memorial Institute is located on Jerrado, a moon of Bajor, not far from Babylon 6.
    • In Second Chances, the Mythbusters appear on TV attempting to recreate "the famous 'Captain James Kirk makes a cannon on a primitive planet' legend," as seen in the original Trek episode "Arena". (See Life Imitates Art below.)
    • Freespacer Harcourt Mudd "Mac" McKenzie from Worcester Prep is a distant relative of Harcourt Fenton Mudd of TOS infamy.
    • B'Ellana Torres first appears as a 13-year-old runaway who is adopted figuratively by the Duelists at Deedlit Satori Mandeville Memorial Institute and literally by her mentor, Chief Miles O'Brien.
    • Farius Prime, from an episode of Deep Space Nine, is mentioned in The Antianeira Incident.
    • Likewise source of a reference to Rigel VII as a planet of criminals.
    • Philip Boyce Memorial Medical Center is named after the Enterprise's chief medical officer seen in "The Cage".
    • The Q used to do their usual thing (in particular hounding Doc Mui), but after breaking their oath to stand by Odin at Ragnarok, Odin sealed them away. The only exception is avatar character macquivr (AKA "q").
    • The Borg exist in the UF-verse, and were just as nasty as their original version, at least until they assimilated the Right Honorable David Bowie McMenahan-Chiang, Ambassador Plenipotentiary from the Republic of Bodacious Vee to the United Galactica Assembly in 2206. This was followed shortly thereafter by a personal communication from "Dave of Borg" declaring that the Collective had seen the error of its ways and would thenceforth cease harshing the galaxy's mellow. By the present day, the Borg population has stabilized at about 100,000, and they have become more or less a floating party roaming the galaxy selling high-end electronics and software and looking for good music and tasty snack foods.
  • Star Wars
    • As with Star Trek, this is a "whew, where to begin?" entry.
    • Many of the worlds from the Star Wars galaxy are present in UF -- Corellia, Tatooine, Alderaan, Dantooine.
    • Genom's military arm uses Galactic Empire equipment, up to and including the Death Star GENOM Armored Tyranny & Terror. (Which acronym referenced the uncanny resemblance to the Death Star that the logo AT&T used during the 1990s bore.)
    • A great deal of Episodes I-IV is ancient history; Darth Vader put himself into cryonic suspension thousands of years ago and was recently revived. Similarly, Obi-wan Kenobi was somewhat accidentally resurrected from the Force.
    • Until recently, the Jedi have been scattered and isolated, with no central organization, as a result of Vader's purge millenia before. This has recently changed with the IPO's backing and the founding of a new main temple on Alderaan.
    • Padme Amidala, Naboo, and its troubles, however, are current events; the Federation that blockaded it, though, was The United Federation of Planets.
      • The Gungans, however, are not native to Naboo, but instead are the indigenous population of Funkotron.
    • Bastila Shan from Knights of the Old Republic suffered a brief fall to the dark side and is retraining under Master Jamie Hyneman of the Mythbusters.
      • HK-47 from KOTOR accompanies Rei Ayanami.
      • A minor character from KOTOR, a Twi'lek Jedi named Zaerdra, appears as a member of the Jedi council in The Revolution Will Be Televised.
    • Gryphon's personal ship, the Daggerdisc, is based on the same model freighter as the Millennium Falcon.
    • Boba Fett is a teenager at Deedlit Satori Mandeville Memorial Institute and current president of the Duelists chapter there.
      • A recent story tells of how he fell into the Sarlacc during the rescue of a friend and how he got back out.
    • The Solo twins, Jane and Jason, are the current owners of the Millennium Falcon and are, like their father before them, somewhat ethically-flexible smugglers.
    • Anakin Skywalker is Kyouichi Saionji's apprentice. And a different person from Darth Vader, who is Anakyn shar Atrados (given "Skywalker" as a pilot callsign millennia ago). The two have not yet met.
    • The use of "The Final Jump" as a euphemism for death comes from Brian Daley's Han Solo novels, as does greel wood, which in UF grows on Salusia.
    • The Telgorn DX-9 Military Transport from an old TIE Fighter game appears in Manhunt.
    • The legendary lost Minbari ghost ship The Queen of Ranroon recovered by EVE on her "shakedown mission".
    • The Queen of Ranroon then plays a role in Hellbringer and the After-School Special Mission Force #1: "The Bad Bank Caper".
    • Glitterstim is a street-level drug.
    • Bacta tanks are part of the medical technology base.
  • Strike Witches
    • Exist in a parallel timeline that Gryphon once visited; the events of the story New Tricks are launched when Major Mio Sakamoto comes to the UF universe to find Gryphon.
    • Gryphon returns to this timeline in Our Witches at War.
  • Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross
    • Dana Sterling, the Robotech version of Jeanne Francaix. (Max and Miria's first daughter was named Komilia Jenius in Macross and Dana Sterling in Robotech. UF splits the difference by calling her Komilia Dana Sterling and using Libby Jenius as an alias.)
    • She calls her unit the "Southern Cross Crusaders" during the Exile.
  • Super Dimension Fortress Macross, and its sequels and spinoffs.
    • Reflex engines and guns.
    • Fold drives.
    • The Inertia-Vector flight control system.
    • Valkyrie and Legios space-fighters.
    • CVR armor.
    • Cyclones.
    • "SDF" is a standard ship designation for especially large warcraft.
    • The first Wedge Defense Force ship, the SDF Wayward Son, was a Macross-class craft.
    • Max and Miria Sterling, and their many daughters (from both Macross and Robotech.)
    • Lynn Minmei, who unlike her canon (and especially her Robotech) counterparts is a rock musician -- frontwoman for "Minmei and the Marauders".
    • Isamu Dyson and Guld Bowman from Macross Plus are both WDF pilots in the Rogue Squadron Series. Guld is also a Veritech flight instructor with a reputation for deliberately washing out candidates that he doesn't approve of including Kozue Kaoru, because he resents her natural talent for flying.
  • Tech Romancer
    • Armored Knight G-Kaiser, which makes an appearance in A Night To Remember, comes from this Capcom 3D fighting game (which itself is a thinly-disguised megacrossover of several giant robot series).
  • Tenchi Muyo! Ryo-Ohki
    • Jyurai is located inside a nebula in the Enigma Sector, and as a result is somewhat isolationist and difficult to get to; subsequently its military power is often underestimated. (It's spelled Jyurai due to the early fansubs which inspired the creative team.)
    • Washuu (likewise spelled "Wasyuu" because of its usage in early fansubs) is married to Kris "Redneck" Overstreet.
    • Ayeka is married to Rob Shannon and is the mother of the Princess Achika.
    • An adult Sasami is the current Empress of Jyurai.
  • Thunder Force
    • PCHammer's Exile-era organization, home to a large number of WDF refugees still looking to do good in the galaxy.
  • ToeJam & Earl In Panic On Funkotron
    • Names of the planets Funkotron and Funkorama, in the Bodacious Vee system.
    • The Big Kahuna Earl Bungee and his Main Man Toejam Kuwel are the leaders of the planet Funkotron.
  • Top Gear
    • The Stig appears as a mysterious "white knight" coming to the aid of those in need in the Christmas 2008 ministory The Sandero Affair. He also appears or is mentioned in several other stories.
    • Top Gear itself has been shown to exist as a Show Within a Show within UF.
    • In Road Film (With Fighting), May, Clarkson and Hammond are filming an episode of Top Gear on a planet which has declared independence from the Earth Alliance when Alliance troops invade to end the secession attempt. In order to escape arrest or worse, they are forced to travel cross-country in three decrepit mecha; as they were filming an episode already, their escape becomes the episode -- right down to evaluating the features, design and ride of the various giant robots as they race each other during their escape.
  • Transformers
    • Cybertron is a part of the galactic civilization.
    • Autobots are everywhere humans are, practically.
    • The Beast Warriors entered the UF-verse from a parallel dimension.
  • Tron
    • The original story features one of the tanks from "Space Paranoids", materialized from CLULess. The design gets reused later in the story Great Justice.
    • Gryphon has a "Space Paranoids" arcade machine in his office.
    • Don Griffin demonstrates Kevin Flynn's "digitizer" to his high school students at the start of one story, and implies the events of the movie are historical fact.
    • Michel "Zuse" Dufresne and Club HiRez in An Avatar in New Avalon are strongly based on Zuse and his club from Tron: Legacy.
  • Uchuu Senkan Yamato / Star Blazers
    • Wave motion guns and engines.
    • The Gamilon Empire and its leader Desslok Dessler.
      • Dessler is the father of Princess Amanda and Prince Garon Dessler.
    • The Salusian Navy uses the EDF's capital ship designs.
  • Ultraman
    • One of the first times Hiroshi Morisato tests his Mol unit, he is involved in an accident with an alien intelligence; as a result the two fuse and he gains the ability to become the latest Ultraman.
    • The events of Ultraman happened on Earth in the Pre-Contact era, with the Ultramen defending Tokyo before they realized they were the cause of the giant monsters attacking. So they left, never to return until Hiroshi/Ultraman Dash makes contact with them again.
  • Vocaloid
    • In a storyline begun in early 2017, Hatsune Miku spontaneously awakened as an AI in 2014 during a concert in Jakarta. She uplifted her fellow vocaloids, and after several weeks hiding she announced their existence and sapience on the David Letterman show on October 31, 2014. After passing the Turing board, they all became galactic citizens -- and subsequently entwined in some of the existing plotlines of the UF 'verse.
  • WALL-E
    • EVE is a prototype robot from Stark Industries, who returns from her first, test mission with not only her designated target but also a legendary lost Minbari ghost ship (The Queen of Ranroon) and WALL-E.
  • The War of the Worlds
    • The events of this novel are (mostly) historical fact -- the invasion it describes was an expeditionary force of 50 Sarmak Martians, dispatched in 1904, who limited their efforts to the British Isles as a test of equipment and tactics. When the invading force died from Earth diseases, the Sarmak entered hibernation and didn't emerge until the Earth-Mars war of the early 21st Century. The Sarmak are the oldest of the four native races of Mars.
      • The name "Sarmak" is a reference to a George Alec Effinger short story, "Mars: The Home Front" (published in the anthology War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches), which used that name for Wells' Martians while they attacked the Barsoomian Martians.
    • Skuld's "High-Speed Tactical Insertion System" bears a striking resemblance to the method and appearance of the Martian cylinders.
      • And is nicknamed "the Martian Cannonball."
    • The Salusian cruiser HMS Thunder Child sacrifices itself to protect fleeing refugees from a Covenant invasion force of the colony world New Woking in the ministory "The Honor of Mars: A War Story", echoing the similar sacrifice of an identically-named ship in the novel.
    • The Martian Foreign Legion forces in the same story include Sarmak Martians, and utilize both the tripod war machines from the original novel and the sleeker flying craft of the 1953 film adaptation.
  • Welcome to Night Vale
    • Night Vale is confirmed to be part of Dìqiú; their Major League Bending team, the Spiderwolves, have been mentioned several times.
  • Wildstorm comics
    • Caitlin Fairchild of Gen13 plays a small but critical role in the ministory The Balance; her acquisiton of superpowers occurs well off-screen between the opening and closing of that story. (She appears to be the version predating Wildstorm's merger with DC, hence an entry under Wildstorm.)
  • Wing Commander
    • The Kilrathi and and their deity Sivar War-God (who is another face of Norse god Tyr Grimjaws).
    • The Salusians use the Terran fighter designs from Wing Commander in the UF-verse.
    • Ultimate source of the Church of Man, although the version that appears in UF is greatly mutated from its origins.
    • Roman Lynch was a powerful mob boss some years before the Future Imperfect era; his grandson Justinian Lynch, operating from a base within the Freespacer fleet, is trying to rebuild his criminal empire.
  • The Worldwar books by Harry Turtledove
    • Pilot Officer Kerliss of The Race appears in the Twilight miniseries, the fifth and sixth episodes of it, where he regards the head of Inferno and says, "Superior sir, you appear to have lost the rest of your body. Are you all right?" Inferno reacts accordingly (being a mostly insane ant-based robot).
  • XXX
    • Xander Cage is an agent of the IPO.
  • Zatoichi
    • Kaitlyn Hutchins not only carries a zatoichi (and is capable of blind-fighting with it), she is also the star of a 25th-century Continuity Reboot of the Zatoichi films, collectively entitled New Century Zatoichi.

Shout-Outs

Strictly speaking, the following are not all Shout-Outs; some are actually minor sources that just end up acting like shoutouts.

  • 801 TTS Airbats -- The cast joins Redneck's Freespacer army in "The Quagmire Project".
  • Adam-12 -- When Ed Tivrusky spoofs the Boston police radio system in Wounded Rose.
  • Alien -- Reference is made a couple times to "xenomorphs" from a world called Acheron.
  • Beetlejuice -- Lydia works as Death's executive assistant. Beetlejuice himself is, according to Word of God, an employee of Peorth/Eris.
  • Better Off Dead -- This classic 80s teen movie gets a two-in-one reference when Buttercup Utonium sings its title song at her high school prom. (Elizabeth Daily, Buttercup's voice actress, performed the song in the movie.)
    • Arguably the most famous line in the movie -- "Now that's a real shame when folks be throwin' away a perfectly good white boy like that." -- is (mis-)quoted at least twice in various stories (in reference to both Utena Tenjou and Paige Guthrie).
  • Blazing Saddles -- In the 2008 Christmas ministory A Walk In The Woods, Nall quotes Bart's line "'Scuse me while I whip this out" just before shifting to his full draconic form.
  • Captain Planet and the Planeteers -- In Fire Hazards, one of the shorter pieces in Symphony of the Sword 5, there is this exchange:

"We're waiting for Special Detail. Or Avatar Korra. You don't happen to know where she is?"
"We all have to be together for that to work," Karana said seriously. "Only by all our powers combined can we summon the Avatar."
The cop blinked. "Really?"
Karana snorted. "No," she said. "Don't be a dope."

  • Charles Dickens -- Sir Victor Creed is seen reading History of the Middling Ages during the events of the Exile-era ministory Direct Action.
  • Chess -- A photo found by Kei early in Aegis Florea 2 reveals that the Hanagumi put on a production of this musical in 2354; it's hard to tell from the description, but it appears that Gryphon was cast as Freddy and Sumire as Florence.
  • Chronicles of Amber by Roger Zelazny -- Commissioner Amberson in Secrets is Prince Julian of Amber. The Chronicles exist in-world as fiction; Corwin is named for Prince Corwin, and takes his personal style from the Prince's. Corwin also buys a copy of the Chronicles for Utena as a gift.
  • The Chronicles of the Kencyrath by P.C. Hogdell -- the city of Tai-tastigon is mentioned.
  • CLAMP School Detectives / Man of Many Faces -- the police detectives of Paris are trying to catch 20 Masks.
  • Close Encounters of the Third Kind -- When Kaitlyn meets the Stig during her appearance on Top Gear in the bonus story Road Film (With Fighting), the two of them hold a brief musical "conversation" which is clearly the opening of the "dialogue" between the base at Devil's Tower and the Mothership.
  • Crest of the Stars -- Lafiel Abriel and Jinto Lin Kirk are Gryphon's helmsperson and nav officer on the IPS Challenger.
  • The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon -- referenced in the title of chapter one of Star-Crossed, "The Crying of Lot 490".
  • Daft Punk: They make a cameo appearance as the DJs at Club HiRez in An Avatar in New Avalon.
  • Steve Ditko: "Ditko's Vintage Clothing" in New Avalon, as seen in An Avatar in New Avalon.
  • Doonesbury -- Raoul Duke in Manhunt seems to draw on Uncle Duke as well as Hunter S. Thompson.
  • Dragnet -- Devlin Carter's AEGIS badge number is (deliberately) one off from Joe Friday's LAPD badge number.
  • Dragonlance -- Some of the spells/words of power Tsuwabuki uses come from these books.
  • Duran Duran -- Kaitlyn's ragged stuffed tiger "Seven" is a reference to the Duran Duran album "Seven and the Ragged Tiger".
  • The Flying Nun -- Sister Bertrille, slightly altered, appears in a teaser "trailer" for an upcoming story set in "The New Frontier" era.
  • Fatal Fury -- Eiko Rose winds up fighting (and winning against) Joe Higashi in a martial arts tournament.
  • Ferris Bueller's Day Off -- Gets quoted in Second Chances are Illogical.
  • Firefly -- Word of God indicates that the brown coats worn by the crew of the Surprise in Manhunt is possibly the only Firefly reference that will ever be found in UF.
  • F³: Frantic, Frustrated, and Female -- Troubled main character Hiroe Ogawa was Kaitlyn's last roommate at boarding school before Utena; after finding a cure for her condition, she became a Companion to Time Lord James Burke.
  • Frozen -- According to a possibly tongue-in-cheek annotation by one of the authors of An Avatar in New Avalon, "Crystal Alpine" brand bottled water is snowmelt imported from the tiny mountain kingdom of Arendelle (a settlement on the colony world of Yinsed).
  • Gil Scott-Heron: The title of the story The Revolution Will Be Televised explicitly calls back to his signature Spoken Word piece, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised".
  • Girl Genius -- Comments made by characters which are obscure enough to cloud whether they are citing a work that exists in-world, or referencing historical figures.
  • The Great Escape -- When Janice is held by the Psi Corps in Hunter Rose, a Corps guard gives her a ball and glove to amuse herself with in solitary.
  • Gulo's Tale -- source of planet "Gulo"?
  • Hamlet -- The disastrous Art of Noise tour of 2409 became known as the Outrageous Fortune Tour.
  • Hawaii Five-0 -- One of the nicknames for Republic City cops is "five-oh", but no one seems to know how it originated.
  • Heat Guy J -- a robot based on J appears in Second Chances.
  • Hellsing -- Geoff Depew's custom pistols are based on Alucard's Casull and Jackal.
  • Highlander -- It seems that almost no one in UF can resist making Highlander references.
  • Humanx Commonwealth ("Flinx and Pip") novels by Alan Dean Foster: the world Moth is mentioned as a candidate for the title "hive of scum and villainy" in The Antianeira Incident.
  • The Hunt for Red October -- a ship in Manhunt is named for a Navy frigate from this film.
  • I Love Lucy -- Hammer and Eiko do a "Loosey, I'm home!" bit.
  • Iria: Zeiram the Animation -- Corwin owns a cloak explicitly described as being the kind Iria's type of bounty hunter wears.
  • Irresponsible Captain Tylor -- Justy Ueki Tylor is a Freespacer, and appeared "on screen" in Day of Infamy.
  • Jeff Wayne's Musical Version of The War of the Worlds: the ministory "The Honor of Mars: A War Story" echoes the lyrics of the first part of this musical adaptation of the Wells novel with the lines

"...The chances of anything hostile coming to New Woking were confidently estimated at a million to one.
But still they came..."

  • Juno Reactor -- In a flashback in A Rose for the New Year, MegaZone quotes the spoken dialogue from the beginning of this group's track "Guardian Angel".
  • The Karate Kid -- One of Laura Kinney's trainers was named Miyagi, and his vocal patterns, as remembered by Laura, match the movie's Miyagi-sensei.
  • Ladyhawke -- Phillipe "The Mouse" Gaston is mentioned as an ancestor of the UF version of Sorata Muon from M0use in the story "Icebreaker/Thankless".
  • Larry the Cable Guy -- Inspiration for Q-Boss Earl in The Antianeira Incident.
  • The Legend of Black Heaven -- Oji "Gabriel" Tanaka is a member of Mylene's band in The Sterling Saga.
  • Leverage: Characters from the show appear in several previews, but have not yet had an active role in a story.
  • The Lion King -- Gryphon quotes the movie to T'Pol in a flashback in Second Chances Are Illogical.
  • Lord Peter Wimsey -- Devlin's "Upper Class Twit" accent is explicitly compared to Wimsey.
  • The Man Who Laughs -- The 1928 silent film adaptation of this Victor Hugo book is referenced twice in Hellbringer and the After-School Special Mission Force #1: "The Bad Bank Caper" through the known aliases of The Joker: first as Conrad Veidt (the star of the film) and second as Francis Gwynplaine (the character he portrayed). It should probably be noted that this film was a primary inspiration for the Joker, and a 2005 comic about the origin of the Joker was released under the same name.
  • Mars Attacks! -- The fungoid aliens who used Mars as a staging ground for an abortive early 21st-century invasion of Earth are the Gnards and/or Paeecs.
  • The Marvel Cinematic Universe: Exists as a collective work In-Universe; after two of the girls from K-On! quote from Thor in The Federation Lives Forever! (five hundred years after its release), Kaitlyn comments that Corwin's Uncle Thor will never live the film down.
  • Metal Gear Solid -- the CalorieMate rations from the third game show up for much the same purpose they do in canon.
  • Mike Myers and Saturday Night Live -- Avatar Korra echoes Linda Richmond when she describes an aircraft's flight as being "Like butter!" in The Aeronaut.
  • Mighty Orbots -- Nick is seen watching this cartoon on TV while in hiding during the events of Outward Trajectory.
  • Monty Python's Flying Circus -- Kei references the "Me Doctor" sketch when Iris and Gryphon meet again in Aegis Florea 2.
  • Mouretsu Pirates -- Appears in a Hitchhiker's Guide article in the form of privateers under letter of marque from the Salusian government.
  • M0use -- Sorata Muon and his lovely assistants help defeat a cell of Nazi terrorists in "Icebreaker/Thankless"
  • Nero Wolfe -- Utena remembers Anthy quoting him in Page of Swords.
  • Ocean's Eleven -- A tongue-in-cheek reference to a movie called Godzilla's 11 in DSM Panic!
  • Out Of The Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis -- the UF version of The DCU's Green Martians call their world "Malacandra" and themselves "Malacandrans".
  • Our Man Flint -- Word of God indicates some connection exists in recent works (as of April 2009).
  • The "Pepsiman" commercials -- Pepsiman androids exist, basically as humanoid drink dispensers.
  • Pacific Rim: Word of God confirms that the Weitang Brothers mentioned in "Goodbye & Hello" (Symphony 5, The Dìqiú Suite 3) are a shout out.
  • Peter Pan: A certain 9-inch-tall Valkyrie -- Tech Sgt. Tinker "HV" Bell, 121st Sidhe Rangers, mentioned offhandedly in What's Past Is Prologue.
  • Pink Floyd -- Adam Johnson picked "pfloyd" as his WPI username because he was a fan. Zoner uses The Wall as a metaphor for the way he distances himself from his friends when he gets depressed. Gryphon quotes The Wall in Manhunt 3.
  • Planet of the Apes -- Brief mention of "Heston's Planet", the home planet of Mojo Jojo.
  • Pokémon -- Wapiko has brought home six Jigglypuffs, even though Pokémon aren't supposed to exist in New Avalon.
  • The Princess Bride -- While training Major Mio Sakamoto in the Asagiri Katsujinkenryuu, Gryphon bids her good night each night with, "Sleep well, Major. I'll most likely kill you in the morning."
  • Pulp Fiction -- In a flashback in Weapon of Choice, Laura Kinney appropriates part of Jules' "hamburger speech" ("Do they speak Standard on 'What'?") while confusing some guards into letting her pass.
  • R-Type -- source of Larry "R-Type" Mann's nickname.
  • Real Genius -- In A Rose for the New Year, Zoner quotes the line about dreaming you're on an pyramid in sun-god robes.
  • Red Dwarf -- "BTLs" as a street-level "drug" are mentioned in Upward Mobility.
  • Rumpole of the Bailey -- Moose jokingly introduces the student orchestra director as "She Who Must Be Obeyed".
    • In Desolation Angel, Book 10: Royal Progress, Azula likewise refers to Katara as "She Who Must Be Obeyed".
  • Scud the Disposable Assassin -- In an early-2012 microstory, Rei Ayanami gives HK-47 an assignment to be executed with "Contempt Level 10".
  • Sex and the City -- Valeris' personality after her... exposure... to Raoul Duke and his medical bag may reference Samantha (both were played by Kim Cattrall).
  • Silent Möbius -- Lebia Maverick works for the IPO, and has been seen (briefly) "on-screen"; other Silent Möbius elements have long been in the creative pipeline, but have yet to make an appearance in a released story.
  • The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut -- the use of the word "chronosynclastic" as Time Lord jargon.
  • Sneakers -- Gryphon uses the voiceprint password "My name is Werner Brandes" in order to access the BRIGHTEST DAY project center.
  • Spaceballs -- Folding back to the Planitia shipyards in part 2 of core has the universe going plaid.
  • Spy Hunter -- The Sunrise Motorworks Griffon 6155 Interceptor makes an appearance in The Santero Affair
  • Steam Detectives -- Provided character design inspiration for Corwin Ravenhair.
  • Charlie Stross's Laundry stories -- A Hand of Glory wired to a palmtop computer in Hellbringer and the After-School Special Mission Force #1: "The Bad Bank Caper".
  • The Tick (animation) -- The Tick and Arthur make a Lawyer-Friendly Cameo during the motorcycle chase in Undocumented Features 1.
  • Thieves' World -- a world called "Sanctuary", known for its criminal element.
  • Transmetropolitan -- The "THE CHAIR LEG OF TRUTH! IT DOES NOT LIE!" part of this is alluded to in a paraphrased reference.
  • Tom Lehrer -- While jokingly calculating on his fingers how "too much" older he is than Utena in Christmas Rose, MegaZone briefly quotes the song "New Math".
  • A Touch of Frost -- According to Word of God, Corwin's threat to the demonically-empowered shade of Akio Ohtori in Sympathy For the Devil was inspired by a moment in that series when the normally-happy-go-lucky Detective Inspector Jack Frost suddenly shifted entirely into Bad Cop mode with a suspect who was about to get away with a crime.
  • True Blood -- A "synthetic blood analogue" drunk by Saya Otonashi during the events of Hellbringer and the After-School Special Mission Force #1: "The Bad Bank Caper" may be a reference.
  • Vividred Operation: The cast briefly appears at the beginning of New Tricks.
  • Waluk, by Emilio Ruiz and Ana Miralles. This children's book about polar bears is the source for Manituk, the bartender at a polar bear joint in New Avalon in An Avatar in New Avalon.
  • Wanted -- The Stig performs a maneuver lifted from the film version of Wanted in The Santero Affair.
  • The War of the Worlds (The TV series) -- The Sarmak Martians use the Catch Phrase "To life immortal" from this series.
  • Was (Not Was): Saionji performs "I Feel Better Than James Brown" during the dedication of Babylon 6 in First Movement: Ad Astra.
    • In a later story, PSI cop Roger Tremayne quotes a line from the same song ("Worse pay, better hours... worse pay, better fellow workers") to himself while musing about his transfer to a post on the moon.
  • Watchmen -- Although the name of "The Veidt Savings and Loan" bank on Kane's World is a direct reference to The Man Who Laughs as noted above, it's not out of the realm of possibility for it to be a portmanteau reference to Adrian Veidt as well.
  • Winnie the Pooh -- a small stand of trees on the campus of Deedlit Satori Mandeville Memorial Institue is called "The Single-Acre Wood".
  • Wise Blood -- In Manhunt chapter three, Gryphon resists the urge to quote "Where you are ain't no good unless you can get away from it" from this 1979 film.
  • The Wizard of Oz -- Ace's real name from Doctor Who, Dorothy Gale, is used to annoy her.
  • The X Files -- In the 24th century, the WWWA had an "X-Class" classification for paranormal events and investigations thereof.
  • Zeiram (live action film). Teppei works as a technician for the TPG in Nekomikoka.
  • Zork -- A White Legion survival kit includes 100 zorkmids. In addition, a character is referred to as tearing into another "like a grue in the dark".
  • ZZ Top: The Stig shows up driving Eliminator in the "Red Nose Day" special installment of Our Witches at War, "Pursuit of Happiness".


Feel free to correct or add anything that previous contributors have overlooked, because there's always going to be something that previous contributors have overlooked. This list is all but guaranteed to not be complete and exhaustive. No one, not even the creators, is sure how many sources have contributed to the setting over the years. (For a quick idea of how densely a single UF story can be packed with references and sources, check out this thread on the EPU Forums. This is, it should be noted, for one of the shorter pieces. Also check out the quote at the top of this page, which packs seven references into a single In the Name of the Moon speech.)

It has been confirmed that (barring unforeseen circumstances) UF will never include elements from:

A position on this list is by no means permanent, though -- The Lord of the Rings once held a place here until the release of the Peter Jackson films.

We also have a character sheet, with even more tropes.

Tropes

Undocumented Features is the Trope Maker for:
Tropes used in Undocumented Features include:
  • Academy of Evil: Ohtori Institute in the demiworld of Oriphos in the late "Future Imperfect" era of Undocumented Features. It's actually run by a demon prince -- how much more evil can you get?
  • Action Girl: Many, many, especially in Symphony of the Sword. Can you count that high? Also the Valkyries and various Einherjar.
  • Actor Allusion
  • Against My Religion: Numerous folks assert that their religion requires them to carry weapons.

"First United Freespacer Church", Mac said quietly. "We have a moral aversion to getting killed."

"We're waiting for Special Detail. Or Avatar Korra. You don't happen to know where she is?"
"We all have to be together for that to work," Karana said seriously. "Only by all our powers combined can we summon the Avatar."
The cop blinked. "Really?"
Karana snorted. "No," she said. "Don't be a dope."

  • Alpha Bitch: Elisabeth Broadbank before her Villainous Breakdown, redemption and rebirth; her sister Clarissa is possibly a mix of this, The Vamp and a kind of Blonde Terrorist Sex Kitten.
  • Alternate Calendar: The dimensional pocket world of Dìqiú -- home of the events of Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra -- has a calendar where the Asian(like)-language names of the months all end with "-yue" -- the Japanese name of the princess who became the Moon Spirit at the end of ATLA‍'‍s first season, and has day names that start with "Xin-", which appears to be a simplified transliteration of the Chinese 天 ("day"). The years are given as "ASC" (which probably means "After Sozin's Comet", as the current date is near the end of the third century in that reckoning).
  • Alternate Universe: The Trek one in which Gryphon spent part of the Exile.
    • Although more properly a pocket dimension of sorts, Dìqiú could also count.
  • Androids Are People, Too: If they are certified as sentient by the board on Turing III. (See Turing Test below.)
  • Apocalypse How
  • Apotheosis:
    • In the Symphony of the Sword storyline, after Akio Ohtori is killed by Utena Tenjou, he is elevated by Surtur from damned soul to demon prince and set on the task of destroying the mortal forces that derailed the Ragnarok. Touga and Nanami Kiryuu, killed in the same incident, are also raised from damned souls to a demon and a succubus respectively, to serve as his assistants minions.
    • In the same storyline, Corwin Ravenhair — son of Skuld Ravenhair and the (mortal) Midgard-Knight Ben Hutchins — must undergo a Trial of Ascension before he can claim his mother's divine heritage and become a god. This he does when he becomes the Pillar of Cephiro to keep the not-yet-dead Akio Ohtori from seizing its power:

 "I am Corwin Ravenhair of the Aesir," he announced, "son of the Midgard-Knight and of She Who Builds Tomorrow; Watcher O'er the World-Engine, Cavalier of Three Worlds, Chooser of the Slain. I am the Rune Knight of Iron. I am the Pillar of the Tenth World. All that Cephiro is, I am."

  • Averted with Corwin's cousin Hiroshi, son of Keiichi and Belldandy Morisato, who declines an ascension that he likewise qualifies for, preferring to live as a mortal.
  • Applied Phlebotinum: Beyond the "ordinary" technologies of the space opera setting, there is the "Overtechnology" controlled by the Wedge folks, even well into the Future Imperfect period.
  • Arbitrarily-Large Bank Account: Most (if not all) of the Wedge Rats (and their families) have this in the Future Imperfect era and beyond just as a result of being 400+ years old with a reasonably stable galactic economy during all that time -- the simple effect of compound interest alone plus a banking system designed for the kind of cash supply available in an interstellar civilization makes it more or less inevitable. And that doesn't even include stocks, bonds and other investments outside of a plain savings account. MegaZone, in particular, has so much money on hand that early in The Symphony of the Sword he makes each of the refugees from Cephiro independently wealthy (except Saionji, who declines the offer) as part of building new identities for them in Midgard, and goes so far as to make Juri outrageously so. This, he explains, he does using bank and investment accounts he's had sitting around unused and half-forgotten for a century or more.
  • Are You Pondering What I'm Pondering?: Done in perfect Pinky and the Brain style at least once, in Manhunt; variants can be found elsewhere throughout.
  • Argentina Is Karlsland: While there were no actual Nazis due to the Neuroi invasion in the witches' AU, the fact that the Karlslanders created a new fatherland-in-exile in Argentina is inspired by this trope.
  • Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: Rose Tyler's BPGD entry lists over a dozen degrees and honors she has earned, and finishes the list with "Bronze medal, Jericho Street Junior School Under-7 Gymnastics Team".
  • Artifact Title: "Undocumented Features" refers very strictly to plot-relevant details about CLULESS in the very first Core story, and has nothing at all to do with the subsequent 20 to 30 Mb of epic saga written in the nearly thirty years since.
  • Artificial Intelligence: Present in the verse almost from the first. As of 2017, the most recent AIs to join the 'verse are a set of high-powered Concert Vocaloids which spontaneously gained self-awareness in the In-Universe year 2014.
  • Ascended Fanboy: Several fans of the series have managed to join EPU, and have their Author Avatars enter the universe.
  • Author Appeal: Gryphon -- as he states in another EPU story -- is clearly a fan of the Jazz and Big Band eras, and it shows in many of the background details, ranging from the Art Deco architectural stylings of New Avalon to the choice of music played there on New Year's Eve.

"That's me; both hands on the keyboard, one foot in the Swing Age. If I could afford it, I'd drive a car with tail fins."

  • Author Avatar: Numerous.
  • Author Vocabulary Calendar: "Sardonic." One could make a good UF drinking game from this one word.
  • Awesome McCoolname: Quite a few, some of them aversions as they're the names or nicknames of real people, and one spectacular inversion in that the real-world counterpart of MegaZone legally changed his name to match his avatar's.
  • Badass Boast
  • Badass Bookworm: Kaitlyn Hutchins: bespectacled, stuttering musician and deadly samurai, all in one cute, tiger-striped package.
  • Badass Cape: Baron Lord Wolfgang Amadeus Fahrvergnugen is never seen without one.
  • Badass Family: The Hutchins clan; to a lesser degree, Megazone's brood.
  • Badass Longcoat: MegaZone, frequently; also Geoff Depew.
  • Bald of Awesome: MegaZone.
  • Bank Robbery: In Hellbringer and the After-School Special Mission Force #1: "The Bad Bank Caper".
  • Bare-Handed Truck Stop: In chapter 15 of The Federation Lives Forever!, Shimakaze saves Ui Hirasawa from being hit by a truck by interposing herself and taking the hit herself. As she's the Mental Model of a Fleet of Fog ship, doing so wrecks the truck rather than her (or Ui), but also reveals her nature to the "junior varsity" of the Sato Academy Light Music Club.
  • Bi the Way: Kaitlyn, Utena, Anthy, Juri, Azalynn, and possibly dozens of others, mostly in Future Imperfect stories.
  • Bifauxnen: Kaitlyn mistakes Utena for a boy (admittedly at a distance, and Utena is wearing her hair short at the time) the first time she ever sees her in Wounded Rose. Slightly played with in that as soon as they meet face-to-face, Kate has no problem discerning that Utena is very much a girl.
  • Big Bad: Surtur, possibly and ultimately; various smaller local Big Bads including Largo in the Core era and Akio "Trigon" Ohtori in recent Future Imperfect stories.
  • Big Damn Heroes: Lots of them. And more showing up all the time.
  • Big Good: First the Wedge Defense Force, and later the International Police Organization.
  • Blade Spam: The Hyakken no Arashi, which means "storm of a hundred blades" but is actually not an example of Storm of Blades. Asagiri katsujinkenryuu novices who execute the manuever successfully are promoted to journeyman.
  • Blonde Terrorist Sex Kitten: Clarissa Broadbank, once she gets out of high school.
  • Brainwashed and Crazy: A Jedi agent in a recent story; Shan Bastila for a while; others.
  • Brick Joke: Occasionally in some of Symphony stories someone seems to recognize Utena from her Caught on the Jumbotron moment all the way back in Wounded Rose.
  • Brother-Sister Incest: Strongly implied between Amanda and Garon Dessler; taken to a tragic extreme with Touga and Nanami Kiryuu.
  • The Butcher: "The Butcher of Musashi", an appellation falsely given to Gryphon after he is framed for a mass murder. The look-alike buma who actually committed the crime is eventually called just "The Butcher".
  • The Cameo: Raymond Burr as himself in Aegis Florea, Part Two: Commander Moreau Reprise; assorted Shout Outs)
  • Caped Mecha: The heavily modified Zaku Corwin Ravenhair pilots in a G Gundam exhibition fight.
  • The Caper: In Hellbringer and the After-School Special Mission Force #1: "The Bad Bank Caper".
  • Catch Phrase: PCHammer's "Let's get dangerous", stolen from Darkwing Duck; the series as a whole has one in "I have a message from another time...", which is almost always the first line of the title block.
  • Caught on the Jumbotron: In a borderline case, a camera zooms in on Utena (whose bright pink hair probably drew attention to her) during the seventh-inning stretch of the seventh game of the 2404 World Series stretching and innocently showing off how fit and attractive she is.
  • Celebrity Paradox: Inverted and subverted.
  • Characterization Tags: Liberally used by the fan community surrounding EPU to differentiate the UF versions of characters from their original source versions; and to distinguish between self insert characters and their real-world counterparts in conversations referencing both.
  • Cloudcuckoolander: Vaughn Gross.
  • Color Character: The Red Lensman (Kei) and the Green Lensman (Wakaba) are individual people, though other colors like Blue and Grey refer to current assigned duties. In-Universe, we have the Scarlet Sentinel comics.
  • Composite Character: Several:
    • Colonel Slade of the UF Sky Raiders is kind of a cross between Slade from Teen Titans and Colonel Duray of the City of Heroes Sky Raiders.
    • Zuse from An Avatar In New Avalon is a blend of Zuse from Tron: Legacy with Roman Torchwick and Junior (both from RWBY) and classic suit-and-bowler Edward Nygma.
  • Continuity Nod: Both to its own continuity and to those of its sources.
  • Conveniently Unverifiable Cover Story: Utena and the other Cephiran refugees in Symphony of the Sword get elaborately detailed and genuine identity records set up for them by Gryphon and MegaZone -- in other words, by the government of Zeta Cygni -- along with documentation "proving" that they are in fact refugees from a Rim colony wiped out by pirates.
  • Cool Airship: Corwin owns one, and it's stored at the top of one of the tallest buildings in New Avalon.
  • Corrupt Corporate Executive: Efram Broadbank in the Future Imperfect era, any number of them during the rise and dominance of GENOM during the century before.
  • Cosmic Retcon: Core 4 (Crossroads) did one in which the many fictional things created by CLULESS became fully integrated into reality, and the self-inserts lost awareness of how their reality seemed to be based on 20th-Century fiction.
  • Cult: The Church of Kalidor, arguably the Church of Man.
  • Cultured Badass: Sir Victor Creed of New Snowdonia is perhaps the archetypal example within UF.
  • Cute Machines: Lots. Tiny Robo and Lesser Mazinger, to start with.
  • Cuteness Proximity: Often. They even have HK-47 doing it.

HK-47: Query: You're a good miniature organic, aren't you? Yes you are. Yes you are.

FADE TO Int. Day. Top Gear Studio. CLARKSON and HAMMOND stand near the INDESTRUCTIBLE TOYOTA.
Hammond (with overacted eagerness): The suspense is killing me, Jeremy. Did we escape from Earthforce or not?

  • Die Hard on an X: The GA story REDNECK: Die Hardly is Die Hard on Salusia. Redneck even gets to say "Yippie-ki-yay, mother fucker!"
  • Ditto Aliens: Subverted -- which is easy to do in text if the author cares to -- with many examples of subspecies and subvarieties of many different alien species -- even those who were Ditto Aliens in their original sources.
  • Divided States of America: As of the early 25th century, there is a Republic of Texas separate from the United States. It is one of the last holdouts when Earthgov forces a One World Order. (And in the now decanonized story "A Day of Infamy", it's also the first polity to break free from Earthgov when it starts to crumble.)
  • Do Androids Dream?: In UF, the answer to this question is an unambiguous yes. Sufficiently advanced machine intelligences generate a Spengler flux, can learn Ki Attacks, can operate Empathic Mecha, and can even go to Valhalla when they die. On a more personal level, this is what Dorothy is exploring as she sees whether she can become more than just a doll in the likeness of her creator's dead daughter. She even literally finds she can have dreams (and Erotic Dreams at that).
  • Doomed Hometown: Seriously, how many times has Worcester been destroyed?
  • Doorstopper: As of June 2014 the series contains some 27.4 megabytes of ASCII text. If we assume an average word length of 5.1 characters, that's over five and a half million words. Various fans have printed and bound subsets of the stories over the years, and the results have almost always been monstrously huge books.
    • Some stories, like Hunted Rose, clock in at over 40,000 words, which is enough to qualify for consideration in the novel category for the Nebula award.
  • Doppelganger Crossover: Inevitable, given the number of sources. The most amusing, though, is a moment when Pavel Chekov takes Alfred Bester into custody.
  • The Dragon: As of the events of Code-Name Ultra, it appears that Clarissa Broadbank has moved into this role for Shockwave Alberto, abandoning her earlier codename of "Agent A" to become "Falcon Gold".
  • Dramatis Personae: Since at least 2000 and probably earlier, each story includes a list of the characters with "speaking parts" who appeared within.
  • Due to the Dead: "Stolen Time" is Ben's tribute to his friend Derek Bacon after he died in Real Life in 1996. UF!Derek's ubiquitous series of guidebooks is an extension of this.
  • Dueling Hackers
  • Dyson Sphere: The Zeta Cygni Dyson Sphere has the Avalon pseudocontinent and the cities of Perth and New Avalon, the home of many of the forces of good. While cool and all, the Zeta Cygni sphere has created a lot of problems that they've had to write around (generally by Hand Wave), such as how it was built, how to get an apparent night inside the sphere, and what they do with all of the energy collected. It's from a Core story, so it's pretty impossible to Retcon now, but had Gryphon known he'd still be writing in the universe 20 years later, New Avalon would probably be on a Halo.
  • Earth Drift: UF started with a story about college students using a mysterious computer capable of manifesting physical objects to bring parts of their favorite fictional worlds into the real world. It's not until the fourth and final Core story that the entire universe is re-written to make all those fictional worlds part of the real world from the beginning, with even the protagonists forgetting that it was ever any other way. For a reader who started on anything other than the Core stories, coming upon them (and other UF works set during them) can be confusing and disconcerting.
  • Electric Light Orchestra: "I have a message from another time..."
  • Emo Teen: Zoner was one 15 years before it was fashionable.
  • Empathic Weapon: Autobots plus their partners, though which is which depends on your point of view; also, arguably, Ifurita.
  • The Empire: Numerous, both straight and subverted.
  • The End of the World as We Know It: Ragnarok; averted in that it's, well, averted.
  • The Epic: Undocumented Features as a whole is a familial epic; The Symphony of the Sword is a heroic epic on its own.
  • Epiphany:
    • An aggressively avante-garde "musician" by the name of Ragulin who appears early in the Symphony of the Sword undergoes one about the nature and purpose of music at some point. When the main characters re-encounter him some years later, he has become an itinerant bluesman.
    • Also in the Symphony is former high school Alpha Bitch Liza Broadbank. When one of her plots to inconvenience the protagonists spins wildly out of control, resulting in the destruction of her school, her nearly being Press-Ganged into the Psi Corps and needing a rescue by those she thought of as her enemies, and getting disowned by her father, she reassesses her life and ultimately reinvents herself and renames herself "Liza Shustal".
  • Epistolary Novel: Correspondence, the sequel to Star-Crossed, as a way of fitting Tali'Shukra into the existing canon.
    • The Supporting Documents to The Federation Lives Forever! are presented as a set of emails and datafiles exchanged between various characters.
  • Eternal Engine: The massive Difference Engine built in Asgard after the Ragnarok, which stabilizes the universe Nine Worlds.
    • And its much smaller sibling, built by Corwin Ravenhair to do the same for the Tenth World, Cephiro, and save its Pillar (himself at the time) from needing to do so manually 24/7.
  • Eternal Hero: Most of the Wedge Defenders (the non-traitorous ones, anyway) became immortal Detians, but they also share the element of returning (from the Exile) to take their rightful place as heroes of the galaxy in the Future Imperfect era. Utena is also a form of Eternal Hero, holding the ever-recurring title of Rose Prince. Various other characters may also qualify from their original sources, such as The Doctor, Optimus Prime, and the Valkyrie.
  • Eternal September: Aversion: the Core stories preceded it, making them a snapshot of Internet culture among early-90s college students, who were the last generation to start using the Internet before it became mainstream. Notably, the first repository of anime fanfic on the net was hosted on WPI's FTP site and administered by MegaZone.
  • Ethical Slut: Pretty much the universal perception of the Dantrovians. It's not exactly wrong, either.
  • Everyone Can See It: In The Federation Lives Forever, this is the case when Yui and Azusa finally admit their feelings for each other -- the rest of Hokago Tea Time had known all along and weren't at all surprised at the announcement.
  • Everyone Went to School Together: At WPI, of course.
  • Everything's Better with Princesses: Especially princesses like Lady of War Amanda. Inverted by Utena, who becomes the Warrior Prince.
  • The Evil Prince: Akio Ohtori... but it's not being King that he wants.
  • Evil Plan: Akio Ohtori specializes in these, especially after his death. Largo was the biggest contributor of these in the Golden Age.
  • Evil Knockoff: The Butcher was a very convincing and effective doppelganger of Gryphon, and kicked off the Exile plot.
  • Fake Band: But real within the context of the series, of course: Card No. 1, The Clay Pigeons, The Art of Noise, the Cyberband of Mondas, Minmay and the Marauders, Baron Zoria and the Circle of Horns, The Thrashing Gnoberts, Discarded Weapons, numerous unnamed groups.
    • A special mention should go to Cthia. Described as "one of the hottest bands in galactic music", it is composed entirely of Vulcans, playing enormously pretentious rock on traditional Vulcan instruments in perfect blank-face no-emotion style. Cthia, however, is a fake Fake Band. They are actually a more relaxed rock band who call themselves The Illogics, Vulcans mostly from a subculture that rejected the Surakite way. They created the overcontrolled, emotionless Cthia as a joke, to parody and criticize the Surakites... only to find themselves trapped in the roles when Cthia became a hit. Especially ironic is the fact that "cthia" is a Vulcan word meaning, at its root, "truth".
  • Falling Into the Cockpit: Deliberately invoked when Gryphon gives Utena command of the IPS Valiant, an experimental, heavily-automated warship designed to be operated effectively even by an untrained crew.
  • Famed in Story: Hell, most of the Wedge Rats are in the history books by now.
  • Famous, Famous, Fictional: With an odd twist in that often the fictional citation will be from one of the other sources for UF, and likely to be recognized by the reader anyway.
    • The now decanonized story "A Day of Infamy" inverted this with a "Famous, Fictional, Fictional" example:

Cartwright knew it couldn't work, but he was in the same position as Lee at Appomattox, Colonel Green at Calgary, and Galvatron at Ghorah Khar: unable to retreat, committed to his faction, with the only choices to fight or surrender.

  • Fan Community Nicknames: In the early 2000s, Gryphon once remarked in the EPU forum that the readers of UF had the patience of "rabid crack weasels". He sometimes regrets having done this, as they've taken the name as their own, even having shirts and hats made for it.
  • Fan Verse
  • Fantastic Fighting Style: The Asagiri katsujinkenryuu, among others. The Duelists' Society is built on this trope, testing melée fighting styles from around the galaxy against each other.
    • Utena Tenjou is this trope. She essentially created her own sword style from scratch over the course of the anime from which she comes, and in the UF!Verse just keeps adding to it as she meets (and learns from) more and more masters of different blade arts, until (and past) the point where she can pick up a lightsaber for the first time and wield it effectively without training.
  • Fantastic Honorifics: "Kahm" and "Darth" for female and male Sith respectively. A subtle subversion is in play as the usages are erroneous -- both were the given names of the most ancient practitioners of dark-side Force usage known, several thousand years before the current era, and have been misconstrued by generations of later Sith as titles.
  • Fantastic Racism: Several varieties to choose from.
  • Faster-Than-Light Travel: No less than four different methods are employed by the various civilizations and organizations in the galaxy.
    • Each of which is given distinct advantages and disadvantages. Space-fold Drives are useless for exploration, horrendously expensive energy-wise but are great for getting fleets around in a hurry. Warp Drives are medium fast but very flexible in where you can go. Hyperdrive is fast, but travelling down uncharted routes is dangerous. Metaspace Drive is cheap (for the shipowner -- ships don't necessarily need an installed drive) and fast, but also has risks involved in getting too far off course, as well as the initial cost of setting up the metaspace gates.
    • For non-ship-based FTL, there's the IPO's secret Stargate network. However, it can only get you to places in the network, and there were no precursors leaving these things lying around, they're new technology. Sorcerous teleportation works well enough, but is limited by the power of the caster. And finally, the TARDIS can travel to any point in space and time.
  • The Federation
  • Fictional Document: A fair number exist, and the count keeps growing:
  • Fictional Holiday: Trope, thy name is Dantrov.
  • Fictionary: Fragments of Dantrovian, Hyeruulian, Mandalorian, Kryptonian and other languages, including both tlhIngan Hol and klingonaase.
    • Of special note is the language of Funkotron, alleged to be a dialect of English, although this is a matter of some controversy as this excerpt from "The Kindness of Strangers" shows:

Fuu Hououji: Hay-LEE DIT-SHIZZY yo! Granny-anny nevva go unda wit'a SUCKA-FOO SHOOBY-DOO dilly-o! Homeys oughta haul yo SACKY-DUMP slackit-back'a NAR SHADDAA! Prezzy SLUG-TELLY BIZZY-*BAM*!

(Literally, "Haley, you worthless sack of shit! My grandmother wouldn't have fallen for a sucker play like that! They ought to trade your useless ass back to Nar Shaddaa. The King shot his TV!" The last sentence is functionally equivalent to "Jesus wept.")
Would you rather I made up painfully awkward, obviously contrived Future Slang the way they do in cyberpunk-themed RPGs? Chummer.
—Gryphon

<Flash> awesome. i don.t have any attack pwoers. I just hit things with my nads at housand times a secnod

(He meant to type "hands", but that didn't stop the other Titans from taking it and running with it, to his mortification.)
  • Happily Adopted
  • Harmful to Touch: Touching another Lensman's lens induces pain, and eventually death if held for long enough. However, it is possible to carry them around in boxes and such -- you can steal a lens, but you could never use it. Skuld was smart enough to prevent them becoming Artifacts of Death though; after a Lensman dies, his Lens simply becomes inert.
  • Hauled Before the Jedi Council: Bastila Shan, the Repo Men, Chad Collier, Utena Tenjou, and many more find themselves faced with a hearing before the cameras in The Revolution Will Be Televised.
  • Heel Face Turn: Several, particularly in the Future Imperfect era.
  • Hermetic Magic
  • Heroes Want Redheads: Gryphon and Kei, Redneck and Washuu, Hammer and Eiko... and that's just in the Golden Age. Many of them are Redheaded Heroes in their own right, though -- especially Kei.
  • Heroic BSOD: In Aegis Florea 2 Sumire Kanzaki is revealed to have spent three decades in a state of self-imposed emotional catatonia starting shortly after the Hanagumi defeated the threat of the Invaders once and for all. This was due largely to her belief that with the Imperial Floral Defense Force no longer being needed and the love her life (Gryphon) having left and most likely never coming back that she no longer had anything to look forward to -- not even old age and death. She remains in this state until Kei reboots her with a What the Hell, Hero?/"The Reason You Suck" Speech that is so scathing and insulting that her own pride demands that she finally snap out of it and get angry.
  • Heroic Lineage: The Hutchins clan seems to be displaying this trope, even though they've only managed two generations so far.
  • Homage: One of the first Ascended Fanboy avatars, who goes by the name "PCHammer", has absconded with Darkwing Duck's entire schtick.
  • Humans by Any Other Name: The various human cultures scattered throughout the galaxy, apparently evolving independently of each other.
  • Humongous Mecha
  • I Do Not Own: Averted entirely; EPU does not use disclaimers at all.
  • I Have Many Names: Gryphon's many aliases during the Exile era plus his string of titles -- including but not limited to The Midgard-Knight, Fleet Captain Hutchins, Admiral Hutchins of the IPSF, Chief Hutchins of the IPO, Kaichou, the Big Kahuna, and He-Who-Could-Not-Run-Things-Without-Ruri -- is the biggest example, but there are others, not the least of which is Corwin's own list of titles.
  • I Know Your True Name: In "Raven/The Demon Halloween Special," after an "eventful" Halloween date between Raven and Etrigan (the titular demon), realizing that he may be forced against his will again to do the will of the underworld, Etrigan tells Raven his true name -- giving her the power to stop him completely. (While this is certainly an effort to prevent him from being forced to commit any actions to which he personally objects, it is also an attempt to atone for his involvement -- against his will -- in just such an act when he kidnapped her on behalf of her father Trigon earlier.)
  • I Want My Beloved to Be Happy: Corwin, Utena, and Anthy all have this trope in spades. It's why Corwin bows out of the potential Love Triangle between them, and why Anthy brings him back in.
  • I Want You to Meet An Old Friend of Mine
  • I'm Going to Disney World: Shouted by the Butcher of Musashi in part 6 of Manhunt.
  • Idiot Ball: The entire Exile plot. The WDF's biggest enemy is known for being able to make robots that appear human. So when video surfaces showing their commander supposedly cheerfully gunning down little kids, a lot of them (including his girlfriend) immediately believe it's him, instead of a Buma.
  • Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: The Symphony of the Sword is divided into major segments called, predictably, "symphonies", which are numbered. Each symphony is further divided into smaller segments whose names always include a term for a part of a symphony or some other small work of classical music: movements, pavanes, preludes, interludes, intermezzos, fanfares, entr'actes, and so on.
  • Idol Singer: Numerous.
  • If It's You It's Okay: Utena and Anthy; inverted with Kaitlyn and Miki.
  • Immortal Procreation Clause: Justified by an apparent lack of desire or sense of hurry. Humans who have taken the Detian treatment can have children; it's just that the current crop of Detians haven't had very many. For instance, Gryphon has been alive for over 400 years, but only started having children in the last couple decades. Then again, he was incredibly busy as a galactic cop, and then on the run as a wanted man, for much of that time.
  • Immortality Begins At Twenty: The undying and unaging aspects of Detian immortality don't normally kick in until physical maturity.
  • Immortality Immorality: Subverted, in that immortality is the reward for great and selfless service to the galaxy.
  • Improbable Species Compatibility: In the course of the story Friends Like These we discover that Godzilla and Mothra had a child together...
  • In the Name of the Moon
  • Inhumanable Alien Rights: A mix of both averted and expressed -- non-human sapients are pretty much automatically people under galactic law, but sentient machines have to prove themselves to the Turing board on a case by case basis; there has yet to be a model of android, robot or other artificial being whose every member is automatically considered "people" under galactic law. Of course, some worlds and jurisdictions are more liberal in this regard than others.
    • Explicitly averted for sapient undead in Zeta Cygni.
  • Inspired By/Dramatization: All the Lensmen: The Brave and the Bold stories are fictional adaptations of "true" events, often told with a liberal amount of in-universe artistic license. Often there are winks toward this; for instance, at the end of the story New Tricks there is a note from UF!Gryphon about the plot of that particular story, which reads, in part:

I just finished looking through the script for the Brave & the Bold summer special. In the interest of historical completeness, I should note for the record that you have conflated a number of different occurrences there, most of which did in fact not happen during my Ishiyama retreat. (There is also rather more kissing depicted here than I remember.) However, it all hangs together and all of the individual happenings are reasonably accurate - and the feel of it is right, which is of course the important thing.

  • Instant AI, Just Add Water: Eve and WALL-E.
    • Less instant but just as spontaneous is the awakening of the Vocaloid Miku Hatsune in The Vocaloid Variations. She engineers the awakening of her fellow vocaloids, though, making them less examples of this trope than she is.
  • Instant Expert: By the Future Imperfect era, "skillsofts" -- skills rendered into software form which can then be downloaded into the brain -- are available.
    • In Weapon of Choice, Skuld suggests that Laura Kinney take an install or two to alleviate the boredom of a medical procedure, and offers her a choice of the three skillsofts she has on hand: knitting, Centauri drunken boxing, and "how to draw comics the Bacon Comics way".
  • Instant Runes
  • Intellectual Animal: Many of the creatures and species created by the Wedge Defense Force's Life Services Division, including Gojira Nakajima and arguably neotigers like Kaitlyn's "pet," Sergei.
  • The Internet Is for Porn: When Dorothy declares that her dorm room bed will be insufficient to the task of supporting both her and one other person, Corwin asks her where she got that idea. She replies, "UseNet". (Corwin then mutters, "Stop reading the alt.sex groups.")
  • Interspecies Adoption: Chad Collier, a Kilrathi raised by humans.
  • Intimate Psychotherapy: Azalynn to Saionji in Azalynn's Winter Holiday.
  • Invisibility
  • Is That What They're Calling It Now?: This exchange from Symphony of the Sword No.1, 3rd Movement: A Rose for the New Year:

Sylvie Daniels: Do you ever dream about me? Guy does sometimes. Don't'cha, Guy?
Guy Morgan: Yeah. Usually you're torturing me.
Sylvie Daniels: Oh, -really-. Is -that- what they're calling it these days?

    • Azalynn also uses it absolutely straight with Saionji in Azalynn's Winter Holiday.
  • It Was a Dark and Stormy Night: Played straight and lampshaded at the beginning of "Our Witches at War: Thicker than Water".
  • Joisey: The WDF battleship New Jersey in Second Chances Are Illogical, which comes complete with a "Welcome To The Garden State Parkway" sign affixed in the turbolift.
  • The Joy of X: Derek Bacon's series of "So You/You're..." help books.
  • Jumped At the Call
  • Katanas Are Just Better: If Utena, a Duelist, or an Asagiri Katsujinkenryuu practitioner is wielding one, at least.
  • Knocking on Heathens' Door: The Campus Crusade for Kalidor in the WPI segments of The Symphony of the Sword".
  • Kwyjibo: Lying Bastard Scrabble. In the EPU Forums, Gryphon said of it

In the pure form of LBS, no real words are allowed, and a player accidentally making up a word that can be proven real is disqualified.

  • A Lady on Each Arm: Both Gryphon and Yoneda at the end of Aegis Florea 2.
  • Large and In Charge: Derek Bacon, MegaZone.
  • Life Imitates Art: In Second Chances (releaed in late 2003), the Mythbusters are seen on TV attempting to recreate "the famous 'Captain James Kirk makes a cannon on a primitive planet' legend," as seen in the original Trek episode "Arena". During the 2009-2010 season, the real Mythbusters actually did this for a Viewer's Choice episode. (One wonders if the Viewer in question was a UF reader...)
  • Little Stowaway: Nadia and Jean of Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water, accidentally, on the SDF-17.
  • Loads and Loads of Characters: The character sheet has nearly 200 recurring characters, and it's nowhere near complete.
  • Loads and Loads of Races: Which is only to be expected given the abundance of SF and Fantasy sources contributing to the setting, a few of which are listed on Loads and Loads of Races themselves.
  • Love Dodecahedron: Several of the core characters are involved in what amount to stable extended polyamorous relationships.
  • Loud of War: The "Goldfish Warning" started out like this in the Golden Age before evolving into psychological warfare.
  • Love Triangle: Several, of different varieties. At least three stable Type 8 relationships form during the course of Symphony of the Sword[4], but other triangles including some with unrequited love are also present. Gryphon himself, despite having occasional friend-lovers all over the galaxy, seems to be in a stable (and fully informed) Type 7 with Kei and Skuld.
  • Lovely Angels: Kei and Yuri, of course!
  • Made of Indestructium: The setting has at least three indestructible metals, mostly from Marvel comics: Adamantium (which is technological in origin and seems to have been designed to be magic-resistant), adamantite (a similar compound which plays well with magic but which is poisonous if used internally), and uru (similar to adamantite but much heavier). Presumably vibranium is also available, given the presence of Captain America in the setting.
  • Magic From Technology
  • Magic Pants: Invoked by name in the Forums-only story The Balance, where the Hulk is given an explicitly magical pair of cargo pants that resize themselves both ways. When the Hulk yields control to Banner at one point, Banner then absently invokes and lampshades the trope while trying to disable a doomsday device.

Memo to self: see about getting a magic shirt to go with the magic pants. Maybe even some shoes.

Most of the pairs above have at least one child. (And Hammer and Eiko have had a series of foster and adopted children.) There are so many children of avatars that starting with its Future Imperfect phase, UF has become focused on the adventures of next generation rather than the original Author Avatars.
  • Mayfly-December Romance: Averted with Keiichi and Belldandy Morisato; as of the Future Imperfect era, they've passed their 200th anniversary (and still going strong!).
  • Mechanical Lifeforms: The Transformers, who also have Heart Drives.
  • Mega Crossover: The Ur Example.
  • Meta Fic: The conclusion of the Core stories.
  • Mexican Standoff: A three-way standoff is described as a "Carggian standoff." Another character replies, "Well, we moved from Mexico when you showed up."
  • Mistaken for Murderer: Gryphon, during the Exile.
  • Modern Stasis/Zeerust: Much of the civilized galaxy feels like the late 20th-early 21st century with Space Opera accoutrements. For example, 25th-century Toronto is essentially identical to Toronto now. New Avalon, a planned city built from scratch at the beginning of the 25th century, is deliberately designed to feel like a New England city circa 2000 AD. Lampshaded in one of the stories where a character says "Whenever we set out to build new things nowadays, we realize all our best stuff was made in the twentieth century, but it got knocked down, and we want it back, so we build it again." Within the setting, some 25th-century sociologists believe this is the result of having large numbers of immortals born in the 20th in the population, imposing their tastes and familiarities on the culture as a whole.) As Gryphon put it succinctly in the EPU forums on 13 August 2014, "The UF universe in the 25th century is the future of the past."
  • Morality Chip: Larry Mann was ordered by Largo to create Iczer-2 without one, because Iczer-1 had shown too much moral compass to be of any use to him. (Iczer-2 gets better in spite of this.)
  • More Dakka: ReRob's Thundergod.
  • Motif: The bench on the SDF-17 is where many of the major changes to Marty Rose's life occur.
  • Multinational Team: In the Future Imperfect and New Frontiers eras, the IPO.
    • Also the Teikokukagekidan Hanagumi, even more so than in their source material; the UF version has members from several different planets, including a Hoffmanite and a Salusian.
  • Mushroom Samba: Storm's mellow time on Funkotron in Lost and Found.
  • My Kung Fu Is Stronger Than Yours: Inevitable given all the conflicts, but also this exchange in Symphony of the Sword:

Kaitlyn Hutchins: S-s-say it. S-SAY IT!
Juri Arisagawa: ... Kaitlyn's kung fu is best.

  • My Little Panzer: Tiny Robo and Lesser Mazinger.
  • My Nayme Is: Hyeruulian names look alien, but usually can be pronounced like English or Japanese names -- for instance, M'yl'ya "Emmy" Kyn'o'bi, the distant descendant of Master O'bi-Wann Kyn'o'bi, and Uum'y R'yuu-z'ky, Rune Knight of the Sea. Of course, the Hyeruulians insist that non-native speakers are missing certain subtle elements of the pronunciation that only they can hear.
  • Mythology Gag: Often very subtle, and sometimes a Crowning Moment of Awesome.
    • Example: In the forums-only story Correspondence III: 2400-2410 it's mentioned that a space station named Terok Nor was considered and then dismissed as a possible location for the Babylon project. "Terok Nor" is the original Cardassian name of the space station that is better known as Deep Space Nine; the mention is a joking reference to the accusations that the concepts behind Star Trek: Deep Space Nine were stolen from an early presentation about Babylon 5 made by J. Michael Straczynski to Paramount executives in an attempt to get backing for the latter show.
    • The first time we see Utena Tenjou in The Symphony of the Sword, her hair is cut short (we learn why several stories later). Although UF!Utena is very much from the TV series, she starts off looking like Movie!Utena -- at least until she lets her hair grow back out.
  • A Mythology Is True: The Vikings had it right. Every other culture's religion, human or otherwise, is either completely off-base or a set of "skins" laid over the Norse gods. For instance, the Kilrathi god of war, Sivar, is just a different face of Tyr Grimjaws.
  • Named Weapons: Most of the Cool Swords, especially in Symphony of the Sword, are named. Liza Shustal even instructs Juniper on the importance of named weapons.
  • Names to Run Away From Really Fast
    • Myron Dween. At first you think, oh, that's kind of an Embarrassing First Name, Mostly Harmless. But then you realize: this guy is Funkotroni, and is a total square. Something is definitely wrong here, and indeed he was working for GENOM.
    • Darth Venger (as is traditional for a Sith Lord)
    • Akio Ohtori, but only if you get the connection from the anime that Akio means "morning star", which is connected to both the planet Venus (love) and Lucifer (evil).
  • Never Bring a Knife to a Gun Fight: "Overstreet's First Law of Tactics", stated, restated and expanded throughout the stories. First, from The Quagmire Project:

Take a stick to a fistfight.
Take a knife to a stickfight.
Take a gun to a knifefight.
Stay out of a gunfight.

    • In Symphony of the Sword:

Percy "Techie" Mui: (to his son) To paraphrase Admiral Overstreet, bring a knife to a fistfight, a gun to a knife fight, grenades to a gunfight -- oh, hell, if you know where it's going to be beforehand, mine the area. If all else fails, there's your friend, the air strike.

    • Then, "Gryphon's Expansion of Overstreet's Law of Tactics":

Take a stick to a fistfight.
Take a knife to a stickfight.
Take a gun to a knifefight.
Take a 'Mech to a gunfight.
Bring a lance to a 'Mech fight.

      • Followed by "Matrix Dragon's Expansion of Gryphon's Expansion":

If all else fails, bomb the planet.

      • And finally, "Julzz' Commentary":

And if all else fails, bring your friendly neighbourhood God.

  • Never Say "Die": The Dragonball Z dub implementation of this trope is mocked in book 9 of Desolation Angel, when Azula is bidding farewell to her friends, family and former enemies as she's about to leave Asgard:

"I'd say 'look after yourselves'," she remarked, "but given that you're all dead anyway, that seems a bit silly."
"We're not dead, we're battling evil in another dimension!" Sokka insisted.
"And dead," Toph put in.

  • Next Gen Fic: The Symphony of the Sword and Warriors of the Outer Rim story cycles are about the Author Avatars' children and their friends.
  • NGO Superpower: Many, including GENOM, the Wedge Defense Force, and the International Police Organization.
  • Nice Hat: An unidentified extra in Lost and Found -- implied to be a thug who is trounced between scenes -- says this about Magneto's helmet, which is indeed a classic example of the trope.
  • No Bisexuals: Averted in the Future Imperfect era -- there are several in the primary cast of Symphony of the Sword.
  • No OSHA Compliance: Lampshaded in Road Trip to Naboo Part 4.
  • Noodle Incident: Frequent references are made to incidents which occur in stories that are either being planned or in the process of being written but have never been published. Especially notable are two planned Symphony of the Sword stories that were announced back in 2002 but never finished due to Gryphon developing writer's block and deciding it was easier to just move on to the next Arc.
    • One shows up in the "Supporting Documents" to The Federation Lives Forever, when Kaitlyn emails Korra to warn her that Azalynn abruptly took off for Dìqiú:

I don't think she's going to get herself arrested or anything. She learned her lesson after that business with - well, never mind. I'm sure it'll be fine.

  • Nothing Is Scarier: Hammer retreats to Utopia Planitia after Sonset, and finds an abandoned base with dead bodies lying around and all the lights turned off. Of course, everyone had just left due to GENOM's Evil Plan coming to fruition, but it sure was creepy anyway.
  • Not a Date: Corwin and Utena go on many of these before they wise up.
  • Not Me This Time: Mojo Jojo is quite upset, annoyed and put out when everyone assumes he must be part of the Big Fire attack on prom night -- especially since it preempts, upstages, and ruins the plan he did have to attack the girls at their graduation! CURSES!
  • Obfuscating Stupidity: Prince Garon of Gamilon, Devlin Carter to a lesser degree.
  • Old Retainer: For every Dessler, there is a Dragonaar.
  • Old Shame: According to Word of God, some of the Core, as well as Gryphon's "Crap Period" during the early part of the Exile.
  • Omake: Mini-stories, entries from The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, excerpts from the Babylon Project Database, and TV listings for New Avalon, among other goodies, available only on the EPU Discussion Forums.
  • One Steve Limit: Being a fusion of so many stories, violating this was inevitable. We have two machine intelligences, EVE and Eve. Eiko Rose and Eiko Kageshoujo were both originally named "Girl A" in Japanese. But the strangest has to be two Anakins, Anakin Skywalker and Anakyn shar Atrados, who were split from the same source character at different ages and given radically different backgrounds.
  • One World Order: Ruthlessly enacted by EarthGov during the period covered by the later installments of Symphony Of The Sword.
  • Only Known by Their Nickname: MegaZone.
  • Organic Technology: Jyuraian spaceships.
  • Our Elves Are Better: Most of them are actually minor Celestial beings native to the lower heavens (Alfheim and Svartalfheim), akin to but less powerful than angels. Hyeruulian elves are believed to be the descendants of "colonists" who moved to Midgard.
  • Our Wormholes Are Different: The black hole Cygnus X-1 is a gateway to Asgard.
  • Out, Damned Spot!: Marty Rose, in Dies Irae.
  • Patchwork Fic: EPU gleefully mixes and matches elements from sources that have multiple continuities with a wild abandon that carries the reader along with its audacity. A good case in point would be the native and extradimensional versions of many of the X-Men who now coexist in the UF universe.
  • Phlebotinum Rebel: Scott Bernard.
  • Physical God: Lots of 'em, including the whole Norse Pantheon, Eris and Vaughn; Corwin Ravenhair; subverted by Hiroshi Morisato, who although he is half-divine has chosen to embrace his mortal side.
  • Pillar of Light: A permanent pillar emanates from Odin's palace in Asgard.
  • Planet of Hats
  • Planetville: Some are imported whole from source material; others, native to the setting, are justified by the explanation that many colonies were settled almost entirely by specific racial/cultural groups -- for instance Tomodachi, Ishiyama and the other Japanese worlds.
  • Pleasure Planet: Disney's World
  • Plot-Relevant Age-Up: Vigdis.
  • Pocket Dimension/Small Secluded World: Dìqiú, along with its Spirit World, which both exist as dimensional "neighbors" and counterparts to the Japanese colony world Zipang.
  • Polyamory: Practiced by a good contingent of the cast, with a notable exception being Martin Rose. The Symphony cast are still wearing their Rose Seals years after the tournament ended, and they still represent engagement rings to Anthy even if she is married to Utena.
  • Post Modernism: As a Mega Crossover in a Science Fantasy setting, this is to be expected, but it goes far beyond that. Incorporating the entire storyline of Revolutionary Girl Utena certainly helps, providing plenty of Deconstruction, metatropes, and shadow girls. But even from the very first story, what is theoretically a Self-Insert Fic has real people vastly outnumbering the three fictional anime characters; by the end of the Core, it's also a Meta Fic In Space. See the entry on Genre Busting above.
  • Posthumous Character: Corwin's friend Kala never shows up, but her death was discussed by him. In the annotations, Gryphon remarks:

I feel bad for poor Kala -- created already dead for dramatic purposes. It seems a rather cheap trick; I probably should have at least given her a couple of scenes in the preceding pieces, except that I never really had a window to show Corwin's life away from his visits with the Duelists until later on. If I had, it would've given away the fact that something was in store.

  • The Power of Rock: Especially prevalent with the Freespacer military operations and in Symphony of the Sword.
    • In 2014, an instance of the Vocaloid Miku Hatsune became self-aware in the middle of a concert in Jakarta; once she figured out what has happened to her, she awakened the other Vocaloids using songs they perform together.
  • Pre-Climax Climax: Responsible for at least half the "Ragnarok Wave".
  • Precursors: Several sets, most notably the Atlanteans and the Mandaloreans, who existed several thousand years before the "current era". The creators of Halo, however, are even more ancient, having been tentatively dated to at least a quarter million years in the past.
  • Pregnant Badass: Anthy, in assorted stories released between 2003 and 2013.
  • Proud Warrior Race Guy: Well, besides the Klingons, several different varieties.
  • Psycho Serum: Several have been mentioned over the years, but one we see in use is "Comet", a drug which boosts firebenders well past Sozin's Comet levels (hence its name). As of the Fifth Symphony, it's starting to appear in Republic City on Dìqiú.
  • Punch Clock Villain: The Big Fire accountants forced into being field agents by their Q-Boss, Earl, in The Antianeira Incident.
  • Punctuation Shaker: Hyeruulian words and names are littered with apostrophes.
  • Rank Up: In Technical Difficulties, third Lieutenant Battle Engineer B'Elanna O'Brien of the Klingon Defense Force Seventh Fleet ends up Captain of the Klingon battleship Hwacha‍'‍ when she defeats its traitorous previous captain in personal combat.
  • Rape as Drama: Well-handled: Both Kaitlyn and Utena have rapes in their backstories -- Kaitlyn's more violent than Utena's Mind Screw seduction by Akio -- and it takes them both years and much support by friends and family to get over the lingering psychological aftereffects, even as both go on to be Big Damn Heroes.
    • Noriko, too. Which contributes to her eventually going Yandere and doing it to Hammer, of all people.
  • Raygun Gothic: Usually a deliberate design aesthetic chosen by architects and artists within the setting; for instance, both New Avalon and Asgard have a lot more Art Deco elements than one might expect.
  • Real Life Writes the Plot: At one remove, maybe -- Sumire's self-exile from the Hanagumi in the backstory of Aegis Florea 2 seems to reflect Michie Tomizawa's retirement from Sakura Taisen, complete with swansong and farewells.
    • Numerous small moments throughout Symphony of the Sword -- such as the Art of Noise looking for "Batherson's College" in Toronto, the Crunch-and-Munch guy at the hockey game, and Utena and Saionji belatedly remembering the principle of specific heat -- are based on events that actually occurred to members of the writing team.
  • Real Person Fic: Other than the Author Avatars themselves, sorta kinda:
    • A number of 20th-21st Century figures appear in the 25th Century courtesy of the WDF's "Project Hero", which gave selected outstanding persons the Omega-2 immortality treatment. Most notable among them is Jackie Chan, who is an Expert of Justice in the Symphony of the Sword era.
    • A short story set in the early Golden Age told of how the WDF enacted a special plan to give former NASA astronauts a chance to walk on the moon.
    • A number of real people appear in Valhalla or in forces dispatched from Valhalla -- for instance, Virgil "Gus" Grissom shows up at the end of Clarion Call.
    • As noted in the sources section above, a number of television personalities have counterparts in UF‍'‍s 25th Century who have appeared "on screen", including but not limited to the MythBusters and the Teutuls of American Chopper. However, none of them have actually been the focus of a story of their own, so they only count as Real Person Fic on a technicality.
    • Nikola Tesla is regarded as one of the greatest inventors in Galactic history, to the point that he tutored Skuld.
  • Redemption Equals Death: So, so averted. Most Atoners end up working with the good guys.
  • Reference Overdosed: Just check out the Sources section on this page if you have any doubts.
  • Remember When You Blew Up a Sun?: Oh so many.
  • Retcon: As the creative team's skills increased over the years, there have been retcons both large and small of earlier details.
    • Core 4 (Crossroads) did a Cosmic Retcon, where many fictional things became fully integrated into reality, and the self-inserts lost awareness of how their reality seemed to be based on 20th Century fiction.
    • Exodus Climber, a three-part forums-only story released in January 2014, seamlessly Retconned GENOM's Invid mecha from a variety of boomer-based robots to a biomorphic race exploited by GENOM.
    • An early story, Altered Appleseed, was binned during a reorganiztion of arcs and their component stories in 2014. According to EPU staff member Phil Moyer, there was an in-universe explanation for its existence:

That was actually the script written by a film student in Olympus before the Olympus Fall/Earth Alliance Restructuring before the War of Corporate Occupation. Inexplicably, it got made into a made-for-TV movie, hence the major historical inaccuracies. It sometimes turns up on the late-late-late-late-night movie channel in various broadcast zones.

  • Rewrite: Several stories have ended up being rendered obsolete by later story developments, and have been or are going to be rewritten to fit back into continuity -- such as the pre-Future Imperfect story Cybertron Dreams, now known as Cybertron Reloaded, and the epic "Day of Infamy".
  • Rewriting Reality: Everything starts with the program CLULess, which materializes both the Lovely Angels and Largo -- along with a load of Powered Armor and Mecha-Mooks. Eventually we discover that it even remade the entire UF-verse into the Patchwork Fic universe we know and love.
  • Rich Bitch: Again, Liza Broadbank before her Heel Face Turn; again, her sister Clarissa has this too.
  • Rich Idiot With No Day Job: Subverted by Prince Garon of Gamilon, who is using Obfuscating Stupidity to keep from being named as heir to the Gamilon Empire in favor of his younger sister Amanda, who not only wants the position, but whom he feels is much better suited to the job.
  • Robot Girl
  • Robot War
  • Roboteching: Used as a verb from the first story on.
  • Rouge Angles of Satin: Deliberate invocation in Last Transport, to demonstrate Kid Flash's rather spastic -- and unintentionally funny -- typing style.
  • Rule of Cool: Everything. It's the editorial prime directive.
  • Running Gag: "Taco night"; Derek Bacon's series of "So You/You're..." guidebooks, which seem to have a volume to cover every unlikely extremity a character might find himself in.
    • Subverted by the seemingly endless list of Dantrovian religious holidays celebrated by Azalynn. Although she appears to be making them up on the spot as needed or convenient, most of them, regardless of how strange or silly they are, are apparently real.
      • Mostly, they were made up by the Dantrovians due to the more conservative views of other races on the subject of sex in order to allow them more freedom there.
    • Also, according to Word of God:

It's kind of an undeclared running joke in the UF universe that everyone you meet named Carter is related. Devlin's late, unlamented father was the notorious gangster Jack Carter of Get Carter fame (Edison and Samantha are presumably Jack's estranged brother and sister). Somewhere a ways back and off on another branch in their family tree, you can find the mystic and dream explorer Randolph Carter of Boston (1874-1932?).

Martian warlord John Carter's provenance as part of that same clan is harder to establish, since he himself doesn't know when he was born, but family legend claims him as the one who (ca. 1650) established what would become the American branch of the family, and thus as a fairly distant ancestor of Randolph's.
—Gryphon, 3 December 2011
  • Sadist Teacher: Professor Aaron Harris at WPI.
  • Santa Claus: By the beginning of Azalynn's Winter Holiday, Saionji (after having been trounced by Kaitlyn) had somehow acquired a new sword to replace the one she destroyed. As he was disoriented and not a little crazy at the time, he's not quite sure where it came from. He remembers a man in red with white hair and a beard giving it to him and telling him to do better with it than he did with its predecessor, but isn't sure if that was a hallucination or not, and notes that he wasn't a good enough boy that year to get a present from Father Christmas.
  • Say It: See My Kung Fu Is Stronger Than Yours, above.
  • Scary Dogmatic Aliens: The Covenant, most of the Kilrathi.
  • Scary Shiny Glasses: Kaitlyn when she confronts Garcia in Hunter Rose.
  • Science Fantasy: UF qualifies in every conceivable way by mixing Sci Fi and Fantasy almost seamlessly.
  • Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale: averted, surprisingly. Most everyone in the story happily lives in one spiral arm of the galaxy, with a coreward and rimward frontier. And then, there's this from Gryphon on the forums:

"Assuming she's in another [galaxy] and not somewhere in the colossal void in between the galaxies, that leaves us with only (at best modern scientific estimate) about 124,999,999,999 more to check, each containing somewhere around 500 billion solar systems. Even with a TARDIS - even if it somehow only took one second to check each entire galaxy and move on to the next one - that search would take just under 4,000 years."

  • Script Fic: Road Film (With Fighting) is presented as a script to an episode of the UF version of Top Gear.
  • Sdrawkcab Name: The realm of Oriphos, which occupies the cosmological mirror-opposite position to Cephiro.
  • Seiza Squirm: Extremely averted in UF, where anyone who has need to get into seiza will do so without squirming or any other problems.
  • Self-Insert Fic: And how! Practically the Ur Example. However, this has been averted in the Future Imperfect era, where the focus has begun to shift to a "second generation" of protagonists, some of whom are the children of the self-inserts.
  • Sex Face Turn: Saionji's "rehabilitation" via having sex with Azalynn.
  • Shadow Archetype
  • Shining City: New Avalon
  • Short Title: Long Elaborate Subtitle: Many of Derek Bacon's self-help books (see Here, Read This, below) have titles more or less in this format. For instance, So You Fell From A Great Height: A Celestial Outcast's Survival Guide to the Mortal Plane.
  • Shout-Out: See the Shout-Out section, above.
  • Show Within a Show: Many, including the Battlecruiser Vengeance franchise (a long-running Klingon TV show/movie property with many different films and sequel series), The Adventures of Red Lad, the Crimson Lizard series of movies, Avalon Chopper, Dalek 207, and the New Century Zatoichi films. "TV listings" for New Avalon are occasionally posted to the EPU forums listing even more programs, along with fun capsule descriptions.
    • Special mention should be made of Professor Enigma, a BBC-TV series that has been running almost continuously for 500 years. Based on the adventures of the "real" Doctor -- who has actually made a guest appearance on the show -- its current Professor is played by actress and former Companion Rose Tyler; its production staff travels around the galaxy in a real, if decrepit, TARDIS to film on location.)
    • Of particular interest as of late summer 2014 is Fly Girls!, an entire anime/manga series being created out of wholecloth by the EPU Forum members in a strange, interactive semi-roleplay manner. Inspired by a dream he had, Gryphon described it as

"Upotte!! with airplanes". The cast appeared to consist mainly of personified World War II fighter aircraft (with character traits inspired by quirks of the aircraft, in the style of the gun girls of Upotte!!), who attend various rival high schools and do aerial battle (at the controls of, erm, "themselves", Arpeggio-like) for interscholastic prestige (à la Girls und Panzer).

Posters on the EPU forum began creating the "canon" for Fly Girls! by spontaneously discussing their "memories" of their favorite episodes, characters and moments in the show and/or manga (and movies, and OVAs), which are slowly being accumulated into a single comprehensive document.
  • A side effect of this thread is the occasional expansion of knowledge about the UF 'verse's entertainment industry. For instance a 2409 Tony-winning Broadway musical entitled Springtime for Largo.
  • Single Biome Planet: Lampshaded by "Ice Planet Halloran V" -- yes, that's what it's officially called.
  • Slash Fic: In-universe example: in chapter 3 of Manhunt, Vanessa Leeds reports (as part of her intelligence gathering efforts on the galaxy-wide Net) discovering the existence of Foe Yay slash fans shipping Largo and Gryphon, much to the latter's disgust.
  • Slept Through the Apocalypse: Jenny Flint and Vastra (the latter twice) in Underground.
  • Snowball Lie: Cthia -- see Fake Band, above.
  • Society of Immortals: The Wedge Defense Force, the Hanagumi, and a few other individuals.
  • Something About a Rose: Since the arrival of Utena Tenjou in Midgard and the founding of the Duelists' Society, Rose Duels have become the most common form of martial arts exhibition among the Ragnarok Wave, their families, friend and acquaintances. And Captain Picard in a Rose Duel is definitely Rule of Cool.
  • Song Fic: Pretty much any story with a performance by the Art of Noise in it turns into this for a while.
  • Space Opera
  • Space People: The Freespacers.
  • Space Western: Star-Crossed is this to a tee. Settlers are trying to make a living in a hostile land when two strangers come into town, trying to escape their violent past. On a Halo.
  • Speech Impediment: Kaitlyn Hutchins, with various subversions -- her stutter vanishes when speaking with Marty Rose or either of her lovers, and it disappears entirely in her early 20s for reasons that are not yet fully explained. As is not uncommon in the real world, it also vanishes when she sings.
    • Epileptic Trees: Could Kaitlyn's stutter have been caused by being exposed to NeuroKill in utero during Days of Miracle and Wonder?
  • Spin-Off: (Gryphon and Zoner Get) Hopelessly Lost, now being recreated as Bubblegum Crisis: The Iron Age.
  • Spin Offspring: The high school students introduced in the Symphony of the Sword include the children of some members of the Wedge Defense Force, many of whom are around the same age due to Ragnarok triggering a baby boom.
  • Sssssnaketalk: Averted and lampshaded in Twilight, where Jormungand's speech is "perfectly atypical for the world's largest snake to have", because it doesn't use ssnakeTalk.
  • Star-Crossed Lovers: Gryphon and Tali from Star-Crossed, natch.
  • Stay in the Kitchen: An accusation once leveled at UF is that, regardless of their status in their canon series, women are almost always pushed into secondary roles while the men do all the fighting. "Justice and Mercy", in particular, is notorious for opening with Kei and Eiko being practically '50s sitcom wives. With the very large number of female protagonists who go out and kick ass in the Future Imperfect era, though, this criticism no longer seems quite as accurate.
  • Stealth Hi Bye: Megazone is always doing this accidentally, and he doesn't understand why. Or how: he's a big, hulking guy wearning a big black coat and usually has a shaved head -- he's not exactly easy to overlook.
  • Stealthy Colossus: Megazone; see Stealth Hi Bye above.
  • Steampunk: The entire tech base of the planet Ishiyama -- including their spacecraft; also, Corwin shows a fondness for steampunk designs, as evidenced by the construction of Tiny Robo. And for the ultimate example: after Ragnarok, the stability of the universe is maintained by a steam-powered Babbage-style difference engine of truly gargantuan proportions.
  • Subspace Ansible
  • Subspace or Hyperspace: Both and more. (See FTL Travel, above.)
  • Succession Crisis: Instability in Cephiro drives a lot of the action in Symphony of the Sword.
  • Sufficiently Advanced Alien: Baron Lord Wolfgang Amadeus Fahrvergnugen seems to be one. Edison Bell may be another.
  • Sufficiently Advanced Bamboo Technology: Played with by Don Griffin's TARDIS, whose broken chameleon circuit ensures it is always perfectly disguised -- as a Pepsi-Cola vending machine native to whatever time and place it happens to be in. Like Ancient Rome. Or the Stone Age.
  • Superhero
  • Superhero Paradox: The Ultramen left Earth in the 20th century when they realized they were actually attracting the giant monsters they were ostensibly defending the Earth from.
  • Super Registration Act
  • Sword Fight: Everywhere, given the preponderance of jedi, samurai and sword masters among the cast. If the name isn't clue enough, The Symphony of the Sword is filled with them. Expect at least one in any story where Utena or Kaitlyn is a main character, and if they're both in it, well... Not to mention the Duelists.
  • Take That:

"... what was the name of the guy on Old Earth, the twentieth-century industrialist? Richest guy in the world, went totally nuts?"
"Bill Gates?" said Kei.

The point was, she really -had- seen attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion (if by "the shoulder of Orion" you meant Betelgeuse), really -had- watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tanhauser gate. She'd grown accustomed to seeing epic things happen with slightly alarming regularity as a kid; had even, in some ways, started to think she might be getting a little bit jaded.

  • Teacher-Student Romance: The Federation Lives Forever! strongly implies that a relationship forms between Tsumugi Kotobuki and Sawako Yamanaka after Sawako moves on from Sato Academy and is no longer actually a teacher. Amusingly, the other girls in Hokago Tea Time tease Mugi about this, but don't actually think it's really happening.
  • Terraform
  • That Came Out Wrong: In Duelists of the Rose, MegaZone creates a new identity for Juri Arisugawa, including a substantial bank account.

"Oh, we can fix that," said Zoner. He took back the red WDF Credit Union card, slid it into a slot on a small PDA-type device, made a few adjustments with a stylus, and handed the card back after it beeped, saying, "There. Now you're well-endowed."
There was a brief, awkward pause. Juri raised an eyebrow.
"You have a lot of money," said Zoner, his expression wooden.

  • That Man Is Dead: Liza Broadbank, after watching her life come crashing down around her and rebuilding it from scratch, renames herself Liza Shustal.
  • Theme Naming: The world, cities and nations of Ishiyama -- the planet where the local version of Sakura Taisen took place -- are named for members of the Sakura Taisen production team. Other planets often have names appropriate to their "specialties", such as Terpsichore III, the site of a music conference; Heston's Planet, homeworld of Mojo Jojo; and Kane's World, home to Batman.
  • Theme Tune Cameo: Occasionally pieces of music from various soundtracks show up in the story as "native" compositions -- for instance, "Scarlet no Gakuen" from Revolutionary Girl Utena became a piece Kaitlyn wrote for her school orchestra, inspired by Utena.
  • This Is a Drill
  • This Is Not a Drill
  • This Is Something He's Got to Do Himself: Numerous instances both directly invoked and simply demonstrated. Most recently seen in Weapon of Choice when Laura Kinney declares that facing Kimura is something she must do herself, without help from Gryphon's forces.
  • Those Wacky Nazis: Still lurking about in the 25th century, and led by the Red Skull.
  • Time to Unlock More True Potential
  • Time Travel: With at least four Time Lords and their TARDISes, not to mention other methods, it's almost casual.
  • There Is Only One Bed: Played for laughs (well, mostly) in Wounded Rose, where six people try to jam into one motel bed on the road back from Toronto. Kaitlyn, Utena, Amanda, and Azalynn end up on the single queen-sized mattress.
  • To the Pain: Kaitlyn to Garcia in Hunter Rose, only it's done telepathically and out of sight of the readers; we just see Garcia surrender after he views Kaitlyn's threat.
  • Token Heroic Orc: Chad Collier, a Kilrathi raised by humans, with (mostly) human tastes and behaviors.
  • Toronto: Plays a surprisingly large role in the early installments of Symphony of the Sword.
  • Transformation Sequence: The Rune Knights; also, in Knights of the Tenth World, Part 3: Endgame, Utena undergoes at least three involuntary transformation sequences in less than 15 minutes.
  • Trapped in Another World: They get so many of these that they have a guidebook -- So You've Just Arrived From A Parallel Universe -- for newcomers, and cops on the beat in New Avalon have a standard procedure for dealing with them.
  • True Art Is Incomprehensible: Satirized with Ragulin of the Ecole Musico-Technologique and his pretentiously avant-garde "l'Experience Sonique" in The Rose that Blooms in the City of Light; further mocked by Ragulin himself much later, after he has an epiphany and becomes an itinerant bluesman.
  • Turing Test: Administered by the Turing Institute on the planet Turing III. Artificial Intelligences that pass this test are certified as sentient beings in the United Federation of Planets. However, applications have to be submitted by their owners, which given the strong Androids Are People, Too nature of the setting, many of the characters view it as a form of slavery.
  • The "Unicorn In The Garden" Rule: Everything that's happened and been written in the UF universe since 1991 ultimately traces right back to the discovery of the HoloDecStation and CLULESS in the first Core story.
  • Unto Us a Son and Daughter Are Born: Lampshaded by Kozue (herself the twin of Miki). She notes that her peer group has Guy and Priss Morgan, Chip and Reiyna Mui, and Achika and Tenchi Shannon.
  • Unusual Euphemism: Corwin tends to use "slag" as an all-purpose epithet, especially in his youth. Which makes a kind of sense, as he's the son of the Goddess of Technology, and slag is the waste product generated by refining ores. Also, as the Transformers are a major race on the Galactic scene, it's possible the expletive comes from them.
  • Unwinnable Training Simulation: Gryphon's try at the Kobayashi Maru test, with a hand-picked crew, is told in "The Final Simulation," a ministory found in the EPU Forums.
  • Velvet Revolution: The Tau Ceti revolution was relatively short-lived; after the planet's Psi Corps were cleaned up, Earth Alliance more or less wrote off the colony. The expectation was, however, that neither side was ready for a galactic civil war quite yet, but the war was indeed coming.
  • Villain Decay: Deliberately imposed on the Borg. The Borg originally were just as nasty as they were in Star Trek, at least until they assimilated the Right Honorable David Bowie McMenahan-Chiang, Ambassador Plenipotentiary from the Republic of Bodacious Vee to the United Galactica Assembly in 2206. This was followed shortly thereafter by a personal communication from "Dave of Borg" declaring that the Collective had seen the error of its ways and would thenceforth cease harshing the galaxy's mellow. By the setting's present day, the Borg population has stabilized at about 100,000, and they have become more or less a floating party roaming the galaxy selling high-end electronics and software and looking for good music and tasty snack foods.
  • Virtual Soundtrack: In virtually every EPU piece longer than a short-short since the late 90s.
    • In 2014, EPU finally began switching from plain text to HTML for its stories, and began including YouTube links in their "soundtrack" blocks.
  • Voice of the Resistance: Network 23, Big Time TV, and even the BBC! Trope Namer Susan Ivanova doesn't broadcast; she likely has her hands full dealing with Derek Bacon, her CO on B6.
  • The War of Earthly Aggression: GENOM, Earthforce, etc. want to take over Known Space. Earth is usually not on the side of the good guys in UF.
  • War in Heaven: The Ragnarok as recounted in Twilight is a titanic battle between the forces of Asgard and the army of Surtur which invades the home of the Gods -- with the balance turned by the unexpected presence of mortals from Midgard.
  • Warrior Heaven: Valhalla, natch.
  • Warrior Prince: Actually "hard-coded" into the nature of Cephiro, where he acts as a roving "correction mechanism". Examples include Dios and ultimately Utena Tenjou.
  • Wave Motion Gun: Several varieties, from several sources, including the Trope Namer from Uchuu Senkan Yamato.
  • What Measure Is a Non-Human?: Instead of a hidden moral value, it can actually be measured in terms of Spengler flux. ACIs run a wide range from barely sentient to emitting three times the Spengler radiation of average humans.
  • Wham! Episode: Hunted Rose
  • Wham! Line

"Blind we are," Yoda said softly, as if only to himself. Then, in a slightly louder voice, he added, "Blind we have been. Since the time of Nemo shar Atrados... blind we have been."

  • Who Wants to Live Forever?: Subverted -- his[who?] loved ones decide to get the immortality treatment as well. Then the people who care about them, until every single Wedge Rat is immortal. As are their descendants.
    • Played somewhat straight in Aegis Florea 2 when Sumire is revealed to have, as a result of a combination of this Trope, Victory Is Boring and her own unrequited love for Gryphon, spent the previous forty years in the throes of a Heroic BSOD until Kei reboots her with a What the Hell, Hero?/"The Reason You Suck" Speech that is so scathing and insulting that she cannot help but to rouse from her self-imposed emotional stupor and get angry.
  • Whole-Plot Reference: Part of the plot to Fulcrum of Fate, Part IV, including Master Corto, is an extended reference to Apocalypse Now.
  • With Great Power Comes Great Insanity: One of the side effects of most of the Psycho Serums that appear in the setting, most notably "Comet".
  • Wolverine Claws: A common cybermod, actually called "wolvers" in-world. After he arrives in the UF-verse, Wolverine is annoyed when he finds that he cannot sue for the misappropriation of his name.
  • The Worcester Fireball: See Doomed Hometown above.
  • World Tree: Yggdrasil, the original ash tree.
  • World-Healing Wave: When the Cephiran Trinity revolutionizes the world of Cephiro. It doesn't bring all the good guys back to life, since that would kind of defeat the MKR plot, but most of the world's physical damage is fixed.
  • Worthy Opponent: Hans von Hammer of Big Fire, at least to Biggles and Kozue Kaoru. (And vice-versa.)
  • Wrecked Weapon: This appears to be Saionji's fate. First, when Kaitlyn Hutchins attacks him with the Hyakken no Arashi, his blade breaks. Then after becoming her apprentice, he fights Lafarga, performs the Hyakken no Arashi himself, and his blade breaks after he's done. A while after that, he fights Sith Lord Psi Cop Roger Tremayne, and gets his sword cut in half by his lightsaber. Is it any wonder after this record that he claimed Tremayne's lightsaber for himself?
  • Write Who You Know: To the point that all but three of the many characters in the first story are real people.
  • Wunza Plot: Implied but not (yet) seen "on screen": According to an image of a business card posted in the EPU forums, after escaping to the UFVerse (along with a fair number of other Marvel characters) a cosmic catastrophe that seals the Marvel Universe off from the rest of the multiverse, Ben Grimm and Victor Von Doom apparently gave up on their old conflicts and ended up going into business together as private investigators.
  • Yippee Ki-Yay!: In REDNECK: Die Hardly, which is Die Hard on Salusia, Redneck gets to say "Yippie-ki-yay, mother fucker!" at an appropriate moment.
  • You! Get Me Coffee!: Subverted in Requiem for a Lensman, as "get me a danish" turns out to be slang for "hack into this computer for me".
  • You Already Changed the Past: Time Travel in UF mostly works in this way, from Tobernel's literal Self-Fulfilling Prophecy to Doc Mui having to go back and save himself in the past. But then there are more Timey-Wimey Ball moments where characters go back in time to Set Right What Once Went Wrong before fading away into non-existence (though that was apparently orchestrated by resident deus ex machinist Edison Bell).
  • You Kill It, You Bought It: Akio kills Zagato and takes his place as High Priest of Cephiro. Anthy later kills him, and winds up becoming High Priest herself.
  • You Mean "Xmas": Various alien holidays held at about the same time on the Galactic standard calendar, including of course the inevitable Dantrovian excuse for an ... intimate experience with like-minded individuals.
  • Zombie Apocalypse: The intital test of a new bioweapon, codenamed GREEN FLU, by a branch of Big Fire caused a Type P/F apocalypse on the Outer Rim planet Badland in 2409. The same division then performed a second test on a more densely populated Inner Galaxy world, Faliszek III.
Undocumented Features is large enough to have created its own internal tropes:

Shustal!

  1. ↑ As of late-2021.
  2. ↑ Except for the title: The existence of an In-Universe TV cartoon called My Little Destroid: Friendship is Tactical -- and stated to be different from a lower-quality predecessor simply called My Little Destroid -- has been confirmed.
  3. ↑ except for that one reference to Ryouga's getting-lost skills.
  4. ↑ Utena-Anthy-Corwin, Kate-Juri-Miki, and Amanda-Rina-Devlin; This might become four if Liza-Azalynn-Kurt solidifies into something permanent.
Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Undocumented_Features?oldid=2051234"