Brackenwood

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

A popular Flash series, featured prominently on Newgrounds.com, Brackenwood tells the odd story of Bitey, a mysterious creature known as a Dashkin. Living in a forest, Bitey fills his day with picking on other creatures, which has a tendency to come back to haunt him. Other creatures inhabit this strange land, like slow-witted elf-creature BingBong, Lemonee Wee the witch, and the easily angered Sasquatch-like Morrugs.

Created by Adam Phillips, AKA Chluaid, a former Disney animator, the series is famous for its absolutely beautiful artwork, which means new episodes of the series usually take a long while to come out. Also featured on Phillips' own Web site.

Tropes used in Brackenwood include:


  • All There in the Manual: A lot more is revealed about the YuYus here.
  • Berserker Rage / Beware the Nice Ones: After having his path blocked several times by Bitey, the baby Morrug twitches, his eyes turn green, and he goes feral attack mode on Bitey, ripping out a few tufts of hair in his rage.
  • Bilingual Bonus: The YuYu speak a Con Lang called Sarus, which is based on Solresol. Said language can also be rendered through colours, patterns of movement, or musical notes, so messages in Sarus appear throughout the series for the eagle-eyed viewer to pick out.
  • Brought Down to Normal: During the episode "Waterlollies", Bitey eats the said objects, giving him a Balloon Belly and robbing him of his famous speed, a fact several angry creatures have been awaiting.
  • Chase Scene: A frequent element in the Brackenwood series. Either Bitey's chasing after someone, or they're chasing after him.
  • Dark and Troubled Past: Bitey.
  • Extremity Extremist: The Prowlies only have one set of limbs, which serve as both their arms and legs.
  • Fauns and Satyrs: Bitey looks like a furry-faced faun.
  • Fragile Speedster: Bitey relies on his speed to wreak havoc. When he gets caught, he doesn't really pose a threat unless he can get free.
  • Friendless Background: Bitey.
  • Gentle Giant: When Bitey isn't messing with them, the Morrugs are peaceful keepers of the forest.
  • Harmful to Minors: Bitey being exposed to the annihilation of his race as a child, though he barely remembers it.
  • Hidden Depths: Bitey is revealed to be More Than Meets the Eye in "Last of the Dashkin".
  • I Just Want to Have Friends: Behind Bitey's jerkass exterior lies a bitter loneliness of being the last of his kin.
  • Inferred Holocaust: Something happened when Bitey was just a child, leaving him the last of his species. He appears to vaguely remember this event. It is implied in the episode "Last of the Dashkin" that the YuYu had something to do with it.
  • Jerkass: Growing up alone in the forest has turned Bitey into a bitter, rather cruel creature, always going out of his way to ruin someone's day.
    • Freudian Excuse / Jerkass Woobie: "Last of the Dashkin" explains that being an intelligent and emotional creature, alone in a world of simple animals, did a number on Bitey's psyche.
  • Kick the Dog: Bitey is a frequent offender.
  • Laser-Guided Karma: Bitey rarely escapes an episode without some of this.
    • He gets a good toss after beating up a Fatsack in his debut episode.
    • After picking on a group of Prowlies, Bitey takes a drink from the stream... in which BingBong just urinated.
    • Bitey gets whacked with a rock by the baby Morrug he was bullying in "Littlefoot".
    • After his daily ritual of being a jerkass to the rest of the creatures, Bitey has extremely bad karma when he ends up in the middle of some of the creatures that he's bullied through the series in "Waterlollies"; however, the karma doesn't hit Bitey until he is forced to regurgitate all the waterlollies that he eats at the end of the episode.
  • Last of His Kind: Bitey. Growing up alone has turned his personality into what it is today.
  • Living Shadow: The mysterious YuYu join together into one of these, which they use to drag a victim off to a briefly seen shadow world.
  • Loners Are Freaks: Bitey.
  • Making a Splash:
    • After destroying her flower pots, Lemonee Wee summons a seemingly endless tidal wave, dragging Bitey off, right into an angry Morrug's hands.
    • The wizard-like creature (a redesigned Lemonee Wee) that appears in the end of "Last of the Dashkin" has water abilities as well.
  • Mama Bear: Don't pick on the baby Morrug. Chances are his big angry mama isn't too far away.
  • Meaningful Name: Bitey is a super fast creature known as a Dashkin.
  • Mood Whiplash: "Last of the Dashkin" differs from the previous episodes focused on mischievous humor and Laser-Guided Karma; it ventures into Bitey's surprisingly deep past and explains why he acts the way he does today in a more somber telling.
  • Narrator: "Last of the Dashkin" breaks from the usual episode style, offering a narrator to explain Bitey's history, and why he acts the way he does.
  • Parental Abandonment / Parental Substitute: After the event that wiped out the other Dashkin, Bitey was taken in by the Morrugs, but they abandoned him when they had a child of their own. It's heavily implied that this is what caused Bitey to become such a cruel and hateful person.
  • Red Eyes, Take Warning: Inverted; the Morrugs normally have red eyes. When those eyes turn green, that means you've officially pissed them off.
  • The Resenter: Bitey is envious of the other creatures in the forest because they have by their own kin, while Bitey, being the Last of His Kind, has no one.
  • Retcon: Lemonee Wee used to be a standard-issue Halloween witch with a big warty nose who stood about two feet tall. Philips decided that this didn't really mesh with an alien fantasy world like Brackenwood, and she reappears at the end of Last Of The Dashkin looking more like a catlike wizard or shaman.
  • Ridiculously Cute Critter:
    • The baby Morrug is a big fluffy ball of cute. But he still has the Morrug temperament.
    • Also baby Bitey.
    • The Fatsacks.
  • Scenery Porn: Phillips isn't afraid to flaunt that Disney pedigree, as evidenced by the beautiful artwork of the forest setting.
  • Serial Escalation: During the episode "The YuYu", Bitey cranks his already superhuman speed Up to Eleven running around the entire planet in less than a minute.
  • Shoo the Dog: Happens to little Bitey when his adoptive parents, the Morrugs, have a child of their own.
  • Single Biome Planet: Bitey's entire planet appears to be a grassland with a forest.
    • Handwaved with the claim that it's considerably smaller than Earth (think a moon in the vein of Endor), and thus the various factors that give Earth more than one biome aren't in play as much.
  • To Be Continued: "Last of the Dashkin" ends with a mysterious wizard-like creature appearing in front of Bitey. Only time will reveal if she's a Friend or Foe.
  • Used to Be a Sweet Kid: Bitey, before he suffered from Parental Abandonment issues and loneliness.
  • The Voiceless: Everyone, with the exception of the Auld Sage and possibly Lemonee Wee. Word of God is that Bitey can talk, he just doesn't have a lot to say when Brackenwood appears to have a grand total of three truly sentient creatures, himself included.
  • Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: Bitey is afraid of spiders, as shown in "Littlefoot" and "Waterlollies".
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