La Belle

La Belle is a Super Smash Brothers murder mystery. It was a collaboration written by Herr Wozzeck, Royal Fanatic, Baby Gurl 278, and KILL THE EMPIRE. It is currently completed, although the collaboration element was ditched after a very long stretch of time due to the myriad scheduling conflicts that eventually arose.

The smashers are invited to a tournament; however, before long people begn turning up dead all around the smashers. And it's left to the smashers to figure out what is going on before everybody winds up dead. Do they succeed? Only time tells.

The following tropes apply to La Belle:

 * Acquitted Too Late:
 * Anyone Can Die:
 * Ascend to A Higher Plane of Existence: All of the victims when the murderer finally gets his due.
 * Asshole Victim: That's what he gets for locking up people without even giving them a trial.
 * Breaking Speech: Bowser gets two.
 * Black Dude Dies First: A meta subversion occurs with Falco. While Falco isn't exactly a black character, he was a popular first victim in the Super Smash Brothers murder mystery fanfiction written at the time La Belle was started.
 * Chivalrous Pervert: Falco hits on Isolde pretty frequently
 * Development Hell: The fact that it was a collaboration led to this; Baby Gurl 278 and Royal Fanatic both ran into major scheduling conflicts, and then KILL THE EMPIRE didn't update his chapters after a while. It would have become a Dead Fic if not for the fact that Herr Wozzeck finally took matters into his own hands and finished it.
 * Evil Plan and Gambit Roulette:  He even finds ways around the characters' various attempts to break the order.
 * Failure Is the Only Option: Played with; Bowser tries to disrupt the order during one of his matches by forcing a draw. It doesn't work.
 * Five-Man Band: With the investigation:
 * The Hero: Bowser
 * The Lancer: Fox, Popo
 * The Big Guy: Mario
 * The Smart Guy: Zelda, Marth
 * The Chick: Isolde
 * The Sixth Ranger: LOTS of characters, including everybody in the mansion after a certain point.
 * Foreshadowing: Quite a bit.
 * Before one of the murders, Popo's CD player goes missing. When the footage of death is viewed one chapter later, Bowser comments that the CD player is playing opera and that the murderer has 'nice taste'.
 * Is it any wonder, then, that
 * On a side note, Word of God has stated that Royal Fanatic almost put too much foreshadowing in that scene.
 * Albrecht states that
 * Gas Chamber: Luigi's death.
 * Green Lantern Ring: The killer's magic is this for the victims.
 * Gut Feeling: This is used to explain why Jigglypuff doesn't take part in the tournament.
 * Hidden Villain: The murderer is really good at hiding within the same track of land.
 * Infant Immortality: Heavily averted, and subverted very often.
 * Invisible Wall: It's implied very late in the fic that even if the Smashers left the mansion, this would be keeping them all from escaping.
 * It Got Worse: Basically every event leading up to death. The murders begin getting broadcasted outside of the mansion, the black magic at work is revealed,
 * It's Personal: It gets very personal by the time the fic reaches its final chapter.
 * Just One Little Mistake:
 * Kangaroo Court: Almost subverted; was given a fair trial to test the red herrings against him. It's ultimately all rendered useless by the fact that.
 * Kill'Em All: Of the 25 competitors at the start of the fic, only eventually make it out alive. And then there's the fact that  !
 * Let Me At Him: Happens pretty often. A given when the murderer loves toying with them.
 * Ludicrous Gibs: death.
 * Magic Powered Pseudoscience: The murderer's method of killing people, whereupon he uses magic to send them to an alternate dimension with traps that are designed to kill the victims.
 * Meaningful Name: Word of God has stated that the title of the fic refers to the match point of a fencing match.
 * Men Are the Expendable Gender: Played with. Most of the victims are men. However, this is a given since there are only five women amongst all the men around them, thus resulting in fewer opportunities to see them killed off.
 * Mind Rape: The murderer really loves to toy with his potential victims, and it only gets worse as the murders progress and especially when he starts broadcasting the murders very late in the story.
 * Murder By Cremation:
 * Never One Murder: It takes the Smashers a few murders to realize they're getting killed off systematically.
 * No Kill Like Overkill:
 * Private Detective: Bowser becomes this after the first few murders. He even gets together a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits to attempt to solve the murder.
 * Rabid Cop: Master Hand, who jumps to all kind of conclusions when he looks into the murders. It's what causes Bowser to open his own investigation separate from Master Hand. Predictably,
 * Red Herring: A few are played to get killed. For a murder mystery, however, these are surprisingly few and far between.
 * The Reveal: The murderer's idenity.
 * Rube Goldberg Hates Your Guts: Oh, dear. Let's just begin with the fact that most of the murders don't even happen in the same dimension and we'll leave the rest up to your imagination.
 * Sadistic Choice: Well, almost like one. For the first few murders, it operates very randomly. As victims get killed off, however, the Smashers find themselves having to make extremely difficult decisions on who should live and who should die. It doesn't help that most of the later murders relish in Squick.
 * Serial Killer: The murderer kills the next person who loses the match.
 * The Summation: How the murderer was able to kill everyone.
 * Suspect Existence Failure: Happens to and then very briefly to.
 * Suspiciously Cracked Wall: There are "white screens" throughout the mansion that serve as portals to the dimension that people are killed in. They tend to solidify when a murder isn't happening or if someone isn't exherting extreme physical pressure on it, though.
 * Ten Little Murder Victims: Obviously.
 * Throw It In: Jigglypuff was forgotten when the brackets for who would be killed off were first written. This gets a Hand Wave in the fic with the instance of Gut Feeling above as the story had already been started by the time someone pointed it out.
 * Unresolved Sexual Tension: Marth and Isolde; the two get rather comfortable around each other, to the point where it seems they fall in love. Neither one really acts on their feelings.
 * The Reveal: The murderer's idenity.
 * Rube Goldberg Hates Your Guts: Oh, dear. Let's just begin with the fact that most of the murders don't even happen in the same dimension and we'll leave the rest up to your imagination.
 * Sadistic Choice: Well, almost like one. For the first few murders, it operates very randomly. As victims get killed off, however, the Smashers find themselves having to make extremely difficult decisions on who should live and who should die. It doesn't help that most of the later murders relish in Squick.
 * Serial Killer: The murderer kills the next person who loses the match.
 * The Summation: How the murderer was able to kill everyone.
 * Suspect Existence Failure: Happens to and then very briefly to.
 * Suspiciously Cracked Wall: There are "white screens" throughout the mansion that serve as portals to the dimension that people are killed in. They tend to solidify when a murder isn't happening or if someone isn't exherting extreme physical pressure on it, though.
 * Ten Little Murder Victims: Obviously.
 * Throw It In: Jigglypuff was forgotten when the brackets for who would be killed off were first written. This gets a Hand Wave in the fic with the instance of Gut Feeling above as the story had already been started by the time someone pointed it out.
 * Unresolved Sexual Tension: Marth and Isolde; the two get rather comfortable around each other, to the point where it seems they fall in love. Neither one really acts on their feelings.
 * Unresolved Sexual Tension: Marth and Isolde; the two get rather comfortable around each other, to the point where it seems they fall in love. Neither one really acts on their feelings.