Planet Eris



"Clone of Benjamin Franklin: Why do you have your barber on emergency speed dial? Dr. McNinja: I don't know? Because life is crazy?!"

- The Adventures of Dr. McNinja

"Sasha: What do I wear to a first date with a vampire? Aylee: How should I know? I'm an alien! Want me to text my room-witch?"

- Sluggy Freelance

The implicit setting of a majority of web comics and roleplaying games. Especially those descended from Sluggy Freelance and Goats.

Guess what? Remember last week when The Devil possessed our resident alien when we killed that vampire? Well, this week we've got time traveling wizards on our tail! Good thing we acquired those Psychic Powers from that black monolith two weeks ago, eh?

...Basically, every concept or creature that was ever touched upon in popular culture is not only real, but has a vested interest in the main characters. However, despite the rampant weirdness, everything superficially appears to be identical to the present day.

Distinguished from superhero comic book settings in that in comics, the unusual is used as a plot device ("This guy comes from space, and that's why he has powers!"), whereas Planet Eris uses it as a plot enabler ("What if they all go into space, where binocular vision is considered a superpower?").

Often comes hand-in-hand with the Law of Conservation of Normality. Often develops a complex and nuanced Crossover Cosmology. Use of this in a serious manner with separate explanations of how all of the weirdness came to be turns it into a Fantasy Kitchen Sink.

This trope is named after Eris, the goddess of Chaos in Principia Discordia, the prime text of the Discordian religion. Also relates to the original Ancient Greek mythology version of Eris as the goddess of discord, strife and quarrels. Look up the The Iliad (especially the Judgement of Paris scene) for one of her most famous roles therein, you know the Original Snub and 'For the Fairest' and the Golden Apple Corps. Not to be confused with Eros, god of sexual love and beauty, or Ares, god of war, or Chaos/Khaos/χάος, who was the void before the creation of gods and earth. Yeah, Greek Myth was involved. Suffice to say Eris is the embodiment of the modern term chaos, discord and the fun stuff.

Finally, note that this has nothing to do with the recently discovered dwarf planet Eris, apart from the fact that Discordians did have a hand in suggesting the name. Hey, I've never been there, have you? Ditto for Planet Arus.

This is the most common setting for the Flat Earth Atheist.

Web Comics
"Did it ever occur to you guys that this plethora of widely varying perceptions is exactly the device I am applying in MT for a specific effect?"
 * Ctrl+Alt+Del In the beginning, the comic had many appearances of ninjas, an ogre, random arrows, one ''insistence" where Ethan kills a person before he can say all your base are belong to us. Now, the only "supernatural" things in the comic would have to be Zeke, Ted, Chef Brian, and any comic poking fun at a game, movie, etc.
 * Sluggy Freelance When Satan was summoned into Riff's computer in the very first series of strips, that was more normal than what would be the average. Not only are alternate universes, demons, aliens and Time Travel present and accounted for, but also aliens from alternate universes, demons from the far future and every other mind-wrenching combination you can imagine. Sometimes they fight each other.
 * The weirdest part? The Timeless Space arc was cut short because Abrams felt it didn't fit into the theme of the series!
 * Possibly he meant that he didn't think it was funny enough. Although considering the grim nature of the dimension and the occasionally brutal nature of the plot, he did pretty well at keeping up a laugh-a-day anyway. "What wizardry skips to the next bit?"
 * Ditto Goats.
 * Subtle, but still occurring, in Questionable Content: minor things, like one character being born on a space station, and the existence of miniature, bipedal, sentient robots.
 * Given how little we've seen of the world of QC, this could actually be an example of Twenty Minutes Into the Future instead, or at least a slightly different present.
 * Raised by robots
 * Even if it's just a bit in the future, that still doesn't explain the "mundane insanity" of Pintsize doing stuff that other AnthroPCs can't (zipping across town and back in less time than it should take to drive, let alone walking on his stubby little legs), the insane scooter girl, and then there's Steve's little adventures while he was absent from the comic for awhile...
 * Three words: Flying Roomba babies.
 * Also, arbitrary action movie justhappens.
 * Word of God - In the news post under this comic, Jeph Jacques says about QC, "...It is a comic in an alternate universe." So that explains THAT, I guess.
 * College Roomies from Hell contains elements of this shamelessly lives and breathes this trope as well.
 * Nicely summed up in this strip. That is by far not the craziest thing that ever happened.
 * Bloody Urban. Though it started off as a fairly standard Urban Fantasy, it now embraces this trope completely.
 * Demon Planet More of a Dig Dug vs. Lion planet destroyed by the machinations of Unholy Gorilla.
 * See also the webcomics featuring the Public Domain Character Jenny Everywhere.
 * Casey and Andy is fond of this sort of thing as well.
 * El Goonish Shive has tons of this. The "new readers" page actually contains a warning that the comic "often ignores the laws of Physics".
 * The "EGS Mayhem" forum is worse. As in, if the Eris Index of El Goonish Shive is x, then the Eris Index of EGS Mayhem is x^x, at least. There's a reason the forum tagline is It means "The Goonish Shive crippling of eye or limb".
 * As the comic developed, things became a little more internally consistent, although still pretty random.
 * Dresden Codak has more than a few instances of this. Niels Bohr is feline, unobserved and immortal. The Toltec underworld exists, Heaven exists (though not the type of heaven one might expect). The Egyptian pantheon exists, and so do robots and time travellers. And that's just the beginning of it.
 * And yet the fantasy and surrealist elements coexist alongside some rather solid, hard-SF science.
 * In The Adventures of Dr. McNinja, Dr. McNinja lives in an alternate-universe Cumberland, Maryland, in which vampires run the Red Cross, pirates still sail the seas and skies, and the mayor installed a working zombie defense system which got used. What's particularly funny is that no one takes the weirdness for granted.
 * Bob and George is a notable example of this trope in action. It has everything from alternate dimensions, time travel and lots of breaking the fourth wall. Seemingly everyone in that comic seems to be in on the joke, though. If anything, it's almost too goofy.
 * Scary Go Round is full of goblins, devil bears, talking flying bells, scheming Wendigos, Satan, Weird Science of many kinds, numerous bizarre conspiracies and a fish-man in self-denial.
 * Candi is a mild example. It's mostly about the lives of ordinary college students, but every now and then some weirdness pops up. It seems to be slowly increasing in frequency, too - first there was just the levitating ferret, then the squirrel mafia shows up...
 * The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob has this, with the caveat that all the insanity tends to gravitate around one guy.
 * Emergency Exit starts off completely normal (aside from the inexplicable insanity of Eddie), but soon drops into Planet Eris with the introduction of such things as Karl's apartment's alternate-reality portal, the talking cat Fred, witchcraft, curses, and shapeshifting villains competing in a quest to grab the pieces of some shattered artifact... Parallel Dementia, which EE crossed over with a couple times, starts looking normal by comparison, and that's a post-apocalyptic dark urban fantasy where nightmares and demons run rampant.
 * All of which serves to make the things Eddie says make a lot more sense...
 * The entire premise of Gunnerkrigg Court is the way in which the main character, Antimony, is completely unsurprised by any of the strange, mystical goings on at the titular boarding school.
 * Not exactly that surprising, since when she lived in a hospital, before she came to the Court, Antimony was on first name terms with several.
 * Narbonic (and presumably its Spiritual Successor Skin Horse) take place in a world where mad science in particular is pretty rampant. The existence of demons, Hell, and ghosts is confirmed, and aliens have been mentioned in throwaway. Human magic, as well as Earthly supernatural creatures, hasn't been shown yet, but mad science can replicate those pretty well (a newly-mad mad scientist has an almost magical field of entropic chaos around them, and Skin Horse feature science-created werewolves complete with infectiousness and regeneration) in one storyline.
 * Megatokyo. Kaiju, Ninja, Zombie Apocalypse, Humongous Mecha, Magical Girls, etc. Nobody seems surprised, though - it's Tokyo.
 * Parts of it are Largo's imagination, though.
 * It gets more complicated. Word of God says that the comic is about different perceptions of reality, much like a larger-scale version of the Hobbes conundrum. And nobody's reality is called "true" so far. So the girls may be parts of Piro's imagination and Largo may be entirely right.
 * Considering how strongly perceptions play into the comic, don't be surprised if the determinator of which reality is "correct" in the end is the audience.


 * What Piro sees is true for Piro. What Largo sees is true for Largo. Their realities (among many others) occupy the same space, but are effectively separate. They appear to represent the extreme ends of the spectrum, with most of the other characters sitting somewhere in between. In fact, Piro and Largo appear to be the only characters in the comic who have no perception of one another's reality, with everyone else having at least some degree of crossover.
 * Nukees is careful to paint its protagonist's encounters with the Egyptian Gods as delusions (or at least plausibly deniable) ... but the killer AI/giant robot ant/velociraptor is perfectly normal.
 * Khatru has Mad Science, Functional Magic, super-powered college students, and more.
 * Jayden and Crusader often has chaotic things occurring, ranging from an attack by a slime monster in the early pages, to time travel on a steam powered hover-motor-cycle in the middle to battling an enraged android currently.
 * The world of the The Dragon Doctors is pretty much this; it's 2000 years in our future, after the world has been blown up four times, the fourth of which fused it with several other worlds. Most sociological and technological conventions resemble those of modern-day society, but magic is ever-present and allows people to do all sorts of interesting things. The Docs are just as likely to treat pinkeye one day and face a killer sentient cancer another, or turn a gorgon into a human at her request. As their leader says, "We don't live in a world where nothing is real. We live in a world where everything is real... though not all at once."
 * While Sam in Sam and Fuzzy is often bewildered by strangeness, that he seems to be a magnet for it means that his life resembles Planet Eris. Demon-possessed refrigerators, ninja mafia, elaborate underground cities—all real, and all highly important to the plot.
 * While everyday life mostly stays normal in The-FAN, many supernatural concepts are mentioned in casual conversation. People with psychic powers or magical abilities (the later are referred to as Gifted) are no different from the rest of humanity. In fact, it would seem that humans are sharing the planet with other sentient creatures as well. Murke the shape-shifting imp is treated no differently than a human who's master of disguises would be.
 * A Girl and Her Fed: the central cast consists of a woman who can see ghosts, a cyborg federal agent, the ghost of Benjamin Franklin, and a genetically engineered neocon koala supergenius. Then things get a little weird.
 * I'm Not Mad appears to take place on Planet Eris, especially in the revamped second season.
 * Tycho and Gabe routinely encounter supernatural events, like zombie outbreaks, or even sentient robotic fruit fuckers, without it surprising them the least. It's pretty unclear how crazy their world really is, since half the comics happen in video game worlds.
 * Flaky Pastry in most ways bears a superficial resemblance to the normal world, but it started out with goblins and dragons and has been getting crazier ever since.
 * Axe Cop is pretty much a league of its own when it comes to this trope. Being concieved in the highly imaginative mind of a five-year-old might have something to do with that. Between hordes of dinosaurs, absurd superheroes, zombies, super-powered babies, ninjas, exploding telephones, sidekicks turned dinosaur turned avocado turned unicorn turned ghost turned ghostly dinosaur, casual space travel, robots and out-of-the-blue transformations, all Serial Escalation, and resident Badass Axe Cop himself, the comic takes this trope Up to Eleven.
 * Voodoo Walrus has a long history of baby powered dommcano based publishing houses, sentient cacti instigating catspolsions, and daytrips to future dystopias.
 * Sinfest except of course for the Reality Zone.

Web Original

 * In the WALL-E Forum Roleplay, the Chicago Colony is inhabited by humans, human popsicles, sapient animals, robots, robots that should have been part of a mass scrap years ago, an ousted robot spy, a robot based off an extremely destructive enemy automaton, a Turret rescued and given a robot body, a human robot sympathizer extremist, a human robot nonsympathizer, refugees from a nearly extinct race whose planet was blown up, refugees from a race of alien kangeroos whose planet was consumed by a Horde of Alien Locusts, refugees from a starship infested with Eldritch Abominations and generally considered to be a Bedlam House, a couple of immortal entities, and probably a few folks I haven't thought of. There's another faction located underground, they were until recently regularly attacked by a Reality Warper (who they finally killed), and some very old secrets have been discovered although there's probably some more. This is all considered to be completely normal.
 * There are also a few other places on the planet that are inhabited, and then you go into space and things get really weird... and that's not even counting Hyperspace Is a Scary Place....
 * The Onion could be read as a serious newspaper from a crazy parallel world.
 * Trinton Chronicles is a little bit of this in every single way with vampires, super powers, magic, and hyper tech being the norm.
 * Shiny Objects Videos, according to Word of God, is "everyday scenes from a world utterly unbound by the rules of reality as we know them."

Comic Books

 * Arguably the premise of Fables. Every single character from history and fiction that the author won't be sued for using is fair game as a character.
 * The same goes for spin-off series Jack of Fables.
 * Alan Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is this, especially if you read the text chapters and not just the comics. Not surprising, since the main premise of the books is that all written fiction is true.
 * The tie-in comics for Who Framed Roger Rabbit? go into some detail about what it's like to live in a town where all the inhabitants are cartoon characters. It's... chaotic, verging on a World Gone Mad (the first issue involves a safe falling from nowhere, a pair of Dancing Pants that talks like a gangster, and evil flying pizzas that are ultimately defeated by a pack of dogs).
 * Scott Pilgrim - The basic premise is this: In Canada, dating falls under Video Game Logic.
 * Played for Laughs in Sam and Max, which has aliens, psychics, zombies, wizards, gangsters, talking toys, ghosts, Santa Claus, elves, roadside Americana, dinosaurs, mole people, time travel, Satan and hell, vampires, sapient 80s computers, talking paintings... The surprisingly epic game The Devil's Playhouse is a story about a space gorilla attempting to steal the psychic brain of the President of the US, who is also a murderous rabbit creature and the second main character, while battling a dark wizard who wants the brain to unsummon Yog Soggoth, and a Reality Warper Pharaoh.

Fanfic

 * Calvin and Hobbes The Series has aliens, all sorts of technology, mad scientists...

Video Games

 * Second Life is this. Don't be fooled by the apparent pretenses at realism at the starting area.
 * Gaia Online features this, to an extreme, mostly due to its origins as a roleplaying community. They add a new canon race every year (or in the case of 2008 five), not including various item based and user created races. Santa Claus has been killed, revived, then turned into a cow. There have been two zombie invasions and an alien invasion. The first shopkeeper you meet is a former vampire with a talking cat. There are at least three Mega Corps, one owned by Mrs. Claus, and the other two owned by resident Megalomaniac Johnny K. Gambino . The Dark Elves run The Mafia. There is a city filled with Robots. Someone literally just found orcs in a cave. Centuar are bureaucratic environmentalists. There are Pirates, Ninjas, "Otami" Spirits, and The Men in Black. Oh, and random objects have been coming alive and attacking people. Strangely, NPCs only consider the last one weird.
 * Funnily, quite a few of those things were player made organizations before becoming entrenched in Canon.
 * In City of Heroes, Paragon City is a pretty weird place.
 * City of Heroes is actually rather internally consistent, although everything weird ever happens to be concentrated in the two faction cities. However, a lack of available lore leads to many players getting creative. This applies to any Superhero game, of course. Not many people want to conform to preset concepts and origins
 * Touhou: in the windows games: Vampires, Ghosts and a reality warper, Magitek moon people and bunny girls, rival Goddesses set up shop down the street, World domination/destruction by nuclear-powered Hell Crow, and UFOs, all while supplemental materials and Fanfic portray liberal Schizo-Tech, especially at the hands of the kappa and tengu, or whenever "technology becomes mythical" enough for it to disappear into Gensokyo. While they may fight for no reason at first, the various monsters or spacemen make up, and drink tea with all the other freaks afterwards.
 * The Sims and The Sims 2 are basically set on Planet Eris. There's the obvious stuff, like the alien abductions, vampires, werewolves, and so forth; and then there are the subtler examples found in the buyable objects' descriptions, like the fact that there's apparently a government rehabilitation program in which actual bears make teddy bears.
 * The Shin Megami Tensei games are almost certainly set on Planet Eris. Oh sure, it looks like Persona is set on Earth until you remember that the SEBEC Group built a machine that rewrites reality.
 * In Shin Megami Tensei I, Stephen Hawking created the Demon Summoning Program. In the sequel, he's still providing updates.
 * In Minecraft, common gameplay elements include zombies and skeletons, Giant Spiders, (sl)endermen, magic, ancient ruins, and interdimensional travel.
 * Planet Sera is relatively normal on the surface. Sure, they've got some pretty advanced tech such as Do-Anything Robots and Kill Sats even though all their buildings look pretty old-fashioned, but that's just because most of the money gets pumped into the military. When you go underground however, you start finding the weird shit, like an entire race of Bee People, a GIANT WORM!, and a miracle fuel.
 * Team Fortress 2 seemed logical and realistic enough when it was released. But in recent years, the continuity was expanded. Now, the canon of the game includes ghosts, magicians, time travel, laser guns from other dimensions, transformative elements that give people incredible strength, heightened intelligence and superb mustaches (yes, even the women), giant floating eyeball monsters that open portals to the Underworld...

Literature

 * One of the earliest examples, and arguably an inspiration for this trope's name: Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus! trilogy was deliberately written to be the Planet Eris of conspiracy theories.
 * Robert Rankin has built a highly successful writing career on this trope.
 * Simon Green's Nightside novels surely qualify, as they feature pop-culture figures like "the Traveling Doctor" operating side by side with mythological gods and extradimensional entities. One might walk into any Nightside pub and find a cyborg, a mummy, and a gnome in a Nazi uniform knocking back shots at the bar, none of which would strike the pub's regulars as odd.
 * The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway has decaying reality as the setting due to a super weapon gone awry.

Live Action TV

 * Power Rangers has ghosts, aliens, demons, alien demons, wizards, alien wizards, time-traveling mutants, at least one group of time-traveling mutant demons, ninjas, alien ninjas, sapient robots, alien sapient robots, and so on. Norse Mythology has also been shown to be at least partially true. Oddly, all of the disparate paranormal forces either produce Power Ranger teams or oddly similar monsters of the week.
 * Parent franchise Super Sentai wasn't quite on the same level, as the different teams only interacted in team-up films (generally treated as non-serial movies). Then Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger came along and treated the 34 previous years of insanity as a single shared universe.
 * Look Around You has ghosts, time travel, animals capable of building computers, resurrection, a disease that turns people into piles of rocks while granting them the ability to fly, and a thousand other bizarre things...all treated as perfectly normal.

Magazines

 * The comics in Top Secret seem to take place in a world made from all the video game settings mushed together, thus allowing the heroes to go on wacky hijinx with Indiana Jones or having their office attacked by the Death Star.

Newspaper Comics
"(Asok blows up some guy's head with his mind)
 * In its early years, Dilbert had strips involving dinosaurs, aliens, trolls, people stowing away inside Dilbert's torso, and an arc where Dilbert is killed by Mother Nature and is brought Back From the Dead. There's much less of that stuff now, though it's not completely diminished, what with consultants who dig into your flesh just to get at your wallet, the ruler of Heck (titled "Prince of Insufficient Light") showing up every now and again, talking animals who function as Corrupt Corporate Executives and Indians apparently being taught telekinesis in college.

Dilbert: They taught you some good stuff.

Asok: Nah, they don't even let you in unless you can do that."

Tabletop Games

 * Both the Old World of Darkness and the New World of Darkness. Vlad Tepes invented vampirical Scientology (which actually works), Frankenstein's Monster is the father of a race of other Frankensteinian monsters, evil aliens infect the souls of entire vampire clans, and five tons of other stuff.
 * The fanmade World of Darkness gameline Genius: The Transgression only continues the above trend.
 * Steve Jackson Games' GURPS Illuminati University gives every appearance of being created specifically to be the setting for pretty much any webcomic you care to name. The Phil Foglio art doesn't hurt that at all...
 * GURPS Illuminati also has this quality, but less light-hearted.

Anime and Manga

 * Arguably, Axis Powers Hetalia could count. You have aliens, mythical creatures visible only to certain countries, and other sorts of weirdness. And yet life goes on as normal for most of the human race.

Western Animation
"Jake: Are you haunting us? Ghost Princess: Yeeeeeeesss...
 * The Venture Brothers: A supervillain union, a henchman support group, Blaculas, sasquatches, haunted Indian burial grounds, necromancy, alchemy, super-science as a discipline of science, and you can even wake up in a bathtub full of ice in Mexico, minus your kidneys!
 * Garfield and Friends: Garfield foils multiple alien invasions, helps a witch get married, protects Bigfoot from nosy photographers, gets chased by a ghost, and encounters multiple robots and prehistoric animals. The characters in the US Acres segment find this happening to them as well, in addition to aliens and robots they've encountered an angel and discovered a chocolate mine.
 * The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy has this in spades, including the actual goddess Eris.
 * Pretty much the premise of Ugly Americans.
 * Futurama: Alien invasions, Timey Wimey Balls including a double-subverted grandfather paradox, brains that make people dumb and plan to destroy the universe once they're omniscient (leading to yet another Timey-Wimey Ball), time is both a straight line and a circle, Amazon planets, native Martians, amoral robots that want to kill all humans, robots insisting they evolved when they were created by man, celebrity heads in jars, suicide booths, a zombie that represents the spirit of Chanukah, a spaceship that became omnipotent when it crashed into God, rape tentacles from another universe, French-accented gargoyles, parallel universes inhabited by pirates, hippies, and people with no faces, believing you've ended up in a post-apocalypse 41st century only to learn that you just accidentally ended up in LA... Yeah. The future sure is wacky.
 * The Simpsons initially confined most paranormal weirdness to the Halloween episodes, but they eventually bled over into the regular episodes as well, resulting in a Springfield that's seen alien visitations, multiple acts of divine intervention (including a premature Rapture), Vishu living in the center of the Earth, Colonel Sanders and Spongebob Squarepants as divine entities, Bart having psychic powers, TVs that display plot-convienient commercials even though they're not plugged in, leprechauns, expies of the Thing and the Incredible Hulk, Chinese dragons, an island modeled after The Prisoner, the Dalai Lama having the power to fly, supernatural vision quests induced by eating too-spicy chili, and a little green man named Ozmodiar who only Homer can see or hear.
 * South Park
 * Adventure Time
 * Pretty much summed up in this exchange:

Jake: Oh. Okay."

Real Life

 * While most of it has been proven false, humanity managed to come up with and believe in everything listed here.
 * We already live in a world where the power of lightning is focused and channeled through melted sand and forced to solve math problems at blinding speed so we can write this very article, where constructs larger than most peoples' houses fly through the air on a regular basis because we want them to; where a surgeon can strap someone into a machine, examine their insides and slice undesirable bits to ribbons without actually cutting him open. Technology is rapidly approaching "Sufficiently Advanced" mark, and when it does we may find ourselves living on Eris.
 * You don't need "sufficiently advanced" technology to be on Planet Eris. You just need a sufficiently advanced mindset.