Feedbackverse

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
The logo for the Audio series.

The Feedback-verse refers to a multiverse based around the winner of season 1 of Who Wants to Be a Superhero?, Feedback.

Common among all parts of the multiverse is the organization Tech Support, a group of powered and non-powered individuals who help Feedback save the world.

There are three main universes:

Fic-Verse: The original 'verse, this deals with the written canon. Anything put in fiction--be it short story, novella, or novel length--is fic-verse. This universe has spawned several Alternate Universe stories itself.

Audio-Verse: The audio series, which can be found at Brokensea.com. Diverges from the fic-verse from which it spawned, sometimes greatly. Has a spinoff based on Beta Flight, the super-powered group within Tech Support.

Roleplay-Verse (RP-Verse): The universe in which the semi-weekly roleplays take place.

A multiverse known for its Loads and Loads of Characters (over 40 at last count), most of which are AuthorAvatars of some sort. You can find the group behind the multiverse here.


Tropes used in the various parts of the Feedback-verse include:
  • Acting for Two: Matthew Atherton has spent two episodes of A Hero's Calling doing scenes as both Feedback and Spectre, often Talking to Himself.
  • Action Girl: Dragonryder, Shinobi, Wolf Girl--pretty much every female in Beta Flight, as well as Tech Support as a whole.
  • Alas, Poor Villain: Cover of Darkness in all its incarnations for the Dark Enforcer. Sure, he gets better, but still.
  • All Your Base Are Belong to Us: A common occurrence in the RP-verse, to the point where it's been Lampshaded in-character: "Headquarters is being invaded? Must be Thursday."
  • Alternate Continuity: Between the various parts of the multiverse (RP to fic to audio) as well as various alternate-universe fanfiction. And then there's episodes 3 and 4 of Beta Flight.
  • Ancient Conspiracy: The Order of Kain
  • And This Is For: Reboot "This" being a bullet to Favor's brain, courtesy of Pre-Fetch, in the audio episode "Eyes on the Sparrow, Conclusion"
  • Armor-Piercing Slap: Mnemonic's weapon of choice, which she's used against both Reboot (Ryuami Rising) and Sparrow ("K2's Bright Idea"). K2 gets a good one in on Blackthorn at the end of Conspiracy Cola.
  • Badass: Several; see below as well as the character sheet.
    • Badass Crew: Tech Support, natch.
      • Alpha Squad qualifies as well.
    • Badass Family: The Perkinses. Grandma and the latest generation are pretty normal, but Mickey, James, Frank and Bobbi? Dang.
    • Badass Longcoat: Dragonryder and Sparrow.
    • Badass Normal: Pre-Fetch, Reboot, Drive, Blackthorn, Back-up...if they're in Tech Support and don't have powers, chances are they go here.
  • Battle in the Rain: Pretty much the entire second half of Cover of Darkness.
  • Big Bad: Deathmatch, Kain. Favor seems to be getting set up as one in the audio-verse, as well. And for the Beta Flight crew, we've got Xanatos.
  • Brought Down to Normal: Audio-verse Sarah, as of the season 1 finale. This is presumably due to overuse of her powers.
  • Career Killers: Opus and Corsair.
  • Catch Phrase: "Time for some Feedback!" / "GAME ON!" Feedback actually needs to say the second one to activate his powers, but he and other TS members still use it as a non-powerful catch phrase pretty frequently ("Game on, sir.").
    • "Slice and Splice!" ~Arc
    • "I'm always 10-8" ~Blue Streak
  • Character Blog: Several group members (Arc, Blue Streak, Jitter, Mach5) have Myspace accounts for their heroic personas. Mnemonic, Defrag, and Wraith have Gaia Online accounts.
  • Character-Magnetic Team: Tech Support, which is still amassing members after a good almost-three years (this includes in real life).
  • Chekhov's Gun: Kingdom Hearts in the audio episode What Was Lost.
  • Chest Insignia: Arc, Mach5, Patriarch, Typhoon, and Feedback. The insignias of the last three are Brought to You by The Letter "S"
  • Civvie Spandex: Most of Beta Flight's costumes are this way; however, a few (Mach5, Patriarch) go with standard superhero fare, while some others (Dragonryder, Pulse) are just plain Not Wearing Tights.
  • Clothes Make the Superman: Feedback's suit (to an extent), Electric Surge's gloves.
  • Code Name: Every main character except Forthright, who "eschews such frivolity".
  • Colonel Badass: An interesting subversion - every time we've seen someone with this rank (Col. Miguel Campos in Conspiracy Cola, Col. Michael Weathers in Family), they've turned out to be evil.
    • We finally have a straight example in Col. Matthew Rimbault, a.k.a. Admin, in Endings and Beginnings.
    • And their first names all begin with the letter M. Accidental Theme Naming?
  • The Commissioner Gordon: General Jack Porter.
  • Continuity Lock Out: As a few people have pointed out, there's definitely been some of this regarding new members and the fiction-verse. ("Wow, the audio dramas are awesome! ...wait, there's a set of stories that are completely different? What?!?)
  • Crowning Moment of Awesome: Oh-so-many. Take a shot every time one Caith Donovan wrote one of these:
    • Feedback: One for pretty much every story he's featured in.
    • Archive: Facing down a zombie armed with nothing but a Guitar Hero controller. (from Late Night Double Feature)
    • AutumSnow: Capturing Daryl Matson at the end of Conspiracy Cola - "I want you to live long enough to fear the end before it finally comes for you."
    • Back-up: Taking out the 'Witch Wolf' during the climax of The Reverb Papers.
    • Blue Streak: "Like I said... you're under arrest, courtesy of the Blue Streak PD." (from Dreams and Memories)
    • Dark Enforcer: "My heart may be dark, but my fists are still made... of iron!" (from Cover of Darkness)
    • Drive: The "Hollaback Girl" sequence from Conspiracy Cola.
  • Crowning Moment of Funny: "And NO FOAM!"
    • From the first audio installment of Eyes on the Sparrow, "If you break out in song, Console, I'm going to punch you unconscious."
    • Same episode: "John Blackthorn and I are romantically involved." *RECORD SCRATCH*
  • Crowning Moment of Heartwarming: the beginning of Jitter and Tribunal's relationship in ADSR. Bonus heartwarming (and awesome) comes when you take into account that the two met and fell in love through Tech Support in real life.
  • Crowning Music of Awesome: All of David Krause's scores for the audio dramas. All of them.
    • Feedback's theme song, "My Calling". Listen to it and just try not to rock out.
    • See Drive's CMOA above. Never has Gwen Stefani been so badass.
  • Cryptic Conversation: An awesomely nonsensical one takes place in Masks, where Max Headroom ( ...yeah... ) alerts Feedback that Tech Support is coming to help him, and speaks in a series of seemingly random non sequiturs; among things, he mentions "a musician" - Jitter - who said he "sounded like a sparrow at sunrise", and comments on "the beautiful amber color" of champagne. (The bolded words are code names of members of Tech Support).
    • OutSource and Blackthorn have a coded conversation in the audio episode "The Next Great Superhero", disguised as an argument.
  • The Danza: Most characters in Tech Support are named either partially or entirely after their creators, to the point where listing the exceptions (Kim Gianopoulos as Krystle Karroux/K2, Mike Winters as Kyle Jensen/Mach5, Toby Krause as Michael Barton/Tribunal, Caith Donovan as Kevin Green/Sparrow, Krystle Eve as Trista Morain/Defrag) is far easier to do.
    • Sparrow gets two brief bouts of Danza-dom. At one point in Conspiracy Cola, he introduces himself as Leif... the creator's given name before he changed it. Much later on, in Avatar, we learn that Sparrow has been using Caith Donovan as a pen name.
  • Deadpan Snarker: Archive, in the audio series. Dragonryder, Reboot, and Sparrow in the fiction-verse.
  • Death by Origin Story: Melissa Amnesty (Arc), Jerry Krause (Jitter), Kyle Harrison and Lightning Strike (Electric Surge), Jim Barton (a twofer; both Blue Streak and Tribunal).
    • Elisa Anders is something of a subversion - even though she dies in the accident that gives Feedback his powers, she's not an especially large motivation for his heroics. However, she is the motivation for a villain's evildoing.
  • Died in Your Arms Tonight: If you are or were the Love Interest of a main character, chances are this is how you're going to go out.
    • Both Matt and Sarah in all versions of Cover of Darkness. Kinda.
    • Red Hawk in Lechara's arms in Masks
  • Disney Death: Both Feedback and Sarah, rapid-fire, at the end of Cover of Darkness. The titular character of Eyes on the Sparrow gets one too.
    • There is something inherently wrong with Sparrow popping up in any trope with "Disney" in the title.
  • Distinguishing Mark: In Ryuami Rising, the titular character's true identity is revealed because, well, how many people do you know with dragon-shaped scars on their necks?
  • Damsel in Distress: K2, and later Mnemonic, to the point where it's a Running Gag.
  • Dysfunction Junction: The whole damn cast. If, by the time you join Tech Support, you haven't had something unspeakably awful happen to you, just watch out. You will.
  • Eaten By a Snake: Done in a spectacularly brutal fashion to Router and Arc in System Crash and Conspiracy Cola, respectively.
  • Elemental Powers: Lechara, Dragonryder, Electric Surge, Blue Lotus, Hellion.
  • The Empath: Amber. K2 is something of a reverse empath, as she can project her own emotions onto others.
  • Ensemble Darkhorse: Considering the very, very vocal reactions to plans to kill off the character (both times!), Sparrow probably deserves to be called this.
    • Jay, the Halloween Horror Nights security guard in ADSR also counts.
  • Evil Costume Switch: Arc/Darc, Dragonryder/Ryuami/Loviatar, Defrag/Fragment, Blue Streak/Contrail, and Mnemonic/Lethe.
  • Evil Is Sexy: Darc. Oh so much.
  • Evil Sounds Deep: At least half the villains. Plus Sarah, while she's Drunk on the Dark Side.
  • Extranormal Institute: The Tower (Tech Support HQ).
  • Facing the Bullets One-Liner: In the audio-verse episode Eyes On The Sparrow Part 3: Conclusion, Reboot gets one just before having his neck snapped:"Favor - I'm no bargaining chip. It - it doesn't matter - what you do to me - Feedback - will - still - stop you!"
  • Fake Nationality: A LOT in the audio-verse. Aaron Einhorn (American) as Favor (Haitian).
    • Fake American: Devil Lash from "Beta Flight". His voice-actor, Dave MacIver, sums it up nicely: "Gotta love audio. Where else can a scrawny Scotsman play a big American nutter?"
    • Fake Brit: Opus, Surge, and the random coffeehouse barista from the audio dramas are played by Americans (Robin Carlisle, Steven Jay Cohen, and Mike Winters, respectively).
  • Fan Girl The ArcAngels, Arc's real-life fan club.
  • Fan Nickname: Many. Since 'the fans' and 'the writers' are generally the same people, most of these end up being mentioned in-canon.
    • FicBoot/AudioBoot, Schroedinger's Medic, Ken Aicheewawa (Reboot)
    • Little Mnemo, Mnemo-fish (Mnemonic)
    • Flyboy, Speedy (Mach5)
    • Streaky, Little Boy Blue (Blue Streak; second one doubles for Arc)
    • K2saurus Rex (alter!K2, as has been said elsewhere)
    • Dragonryder Barbie, Sailor Robin, Bubblegum Carlisle (alter!Dragonryder)
    • Team Evil, the Demon String Quartet (Fragment, Contrail, Lethe, and Loviatar)
  • Five-Bad Band: The villain group from the June 13, 2009 event:
  • Five-Man Band: Tech Support as an organization can be seen as this:
    • The Hero: Feedback. Duh.
    • The Lancer: Blackthorn, possibly Beta Flight.
    • The Smart Guy: Research and Development, Information Technologies, Medical.
    • The Big Guy: Search and Rescue, Recon, Base Security.
    • The Chick: Creative Arts. Forthright and all the other 'executives' work in the "holding the team together" sense.
    • Sixth Ranger: Any department that wasn't in TS from the beginning. Maintenance/Transportation, Beta Flight again.
  • Flying Brick: Mach5, Major Victory.
  • Freak Lab Accident: Responsible for more than one character developing powers, including Feedback himself.
  • Friends All Along: Barton and Blue Streak, shown in the fist part of the audio episode "Daddy's Little Girl"
  • Geeky Turn On: Matt to Sarah in the Hero's Calling pilot - "God, you're so beautiful when you're solving riddles...!"
  • Giggling Villain: Skindancer, and the Figurer from the audio series.
  • Good Is Not Nice: Sparrow is pretty much this trope incarnate. He isn't by any means the only example, but he's definitely the most extreme.
    • Conspiracy Cola is a one-stop shop of reasons why you really shouldn't piss people like Pre-Fetch, Drive, K2, Autum Snow, and Reboot off. In a nutshell - don't hurt children, don't help terrorists, and for the love of God, do NOT insult the great Freddie Mercury.
  • Happily Married: Feedback and Sarah. Mainframe and Kate. Nathaniel (Skin) and Kiya. After ADSR, Jitter and Tribunal (not technically but they might as well be). Patriarch and Christina. Generally just a lot more than you'd expect to see in a superhero series. And all but one of them are true in real life.
  • Heterosexual Life Partners: Outwardly, Pre-Fetch and Back-up's relationship seems to fluctuate between friendly rivalry and outright hatred. Read Dreams and Memories. Feedback notes that they bicker "like an old married couple", and they have been known to buy each other gifts (usually in the form of custom weaponry and field equipment).
    • While there are still shades of this in the audio series, it's really Pre-Fetch and Reboot, as evidenced in the the first installment of "Cover of Darkness" (reminiscing about their days in the military together) and the last installment of "Eyes on the Sparrow" (Pre-Fetch's reaction to ReBoot's death).
    • Skin and Pulse. Full stop.
    • In the RP-verse, Mach5 and Super Sport tend to act this way a lot. They even have pet names for each other. (Speedy and Sporty, respectively.)
  • Hurting Hero: Pretty much everyone at some point or another. This multiverse runs on angst.
  • I Just Want to Be Special: Sarah, Tom, and Nick Richardson in A Hero's Calling; Mnemonic in the fictionverse. It has turned out well zero out of four times.
  • I Know Mortal Kombat: Just about everything Feedback does. Justified by the fact that that's his superpower.
  • Intro Dump : One to introduce the scientists of Tech Support in "Second Skin." The Beta Flight pilot has two - the hero squad in part one of "Sow the Wind", and the villain squad in part two.
  • I Should Write a Book About This: The titular character of Eyes of the Sparrow thinks something to this effect, although it's more the character Leaning on the Fourth Wall than anything else:

"How strange," Kevin thought, as he rode the bus toward to the Rainier Beach neighborhood, "I started the day off so drab and normal. Since then I've saved lives, watched a man die, and have been reduced to fleeing from zombies on a city bus.
"This might make a decent novel."

  • It Was a Dark and Stormy Night: Group Project. That is all.
  • Jekyll and Hyde: Arc and Darc, Mnemonic and Lethe.
  • Journey to the Center of the Mind: The last third or so of Bereft.
  • Even Heroes Have Heroes: Feedback to Stan Lee, Arc to Feedback--okay, pretty much everybody in Tech Support and Beta Flight to Feedback. (In-character and out.)
  • Kung Foley: Ohh yeah. Although, considering the audio dramas are nothing but sound, it's completely unavoidable.
  • Loads and Loads of Characters: We know, we know.
  • Locked Out of the Fight: The climax of Late Night Double Feature and Mindtheft. The former even lampshades the use of this trope in video games.
  • Loony Fan: Eric Matson, an Ax Crazy psychic with an array of high-tech weaponry and an unhealthy obsession with Feedback, was rejected from joining Tech Support due to his poor mental health. His solution? Kidnap a pair of Tech Support members, torture them for information, leave their dead bodies somewhere that their comrades will be able to find them, and ultimately get accepted into Tech Support because doing all of the above apparently makes him awesome. (The plan got shut down just before the torture part could happen, but Tech Support probably would not have found it at all awesome if he'd gone through with it.)
  • Love Makes You Evil: Silly Con. Oh so much. And Michael Weathers from Family.
  • Luckily, My Powers Will Protect Me: Just about every single one of the audio dramas. Considering there are Loads and Loads of Characters to keep track of, it's kind of a necessity.
  • Man of Wealth and Taste: Razor.
  • Meaningful Funeral: ReBoot's at the beginning of the audio episode "Daddy's Little Girl, part 1". In the written canon, we also have the funeral of Fon Chian (one of Blackthorn's old Army unit) at the end of Conspiracy Cola.
  • Mildly Military: Tech Support. Mostly an organization full of civilians, parts of it are run by ex-military personnel (CPU = Chief of Operations, Pre-Fetch = Director of Recon, Reboot = Medical second-in-command).
  • Mind Rape: Played straight in "Rejects" when Matson subdues Mnemonic. Subverted when he tries to do the same to Sparrow and has it backfire on him.
  • Multinational Team: Tech Support is primarily American, but has members from Canada, Japan (and/or Russia, depending on the universe), Spain, England, and, um... Faerie?
  • Musical Assassin: 8-Track, Reverb, Lydia.
    • Jitter, Danger Woman, and Audiophile are all heroic versions of this trope.
  • Name's the Same: Feedback shares a name with a minor Marvel character. Providing a double-whammy and confusing things even more, the Marvel guy was part of a super-team called Beta Flight.
    • There have been several instances of random people wandering into Thursday-night chats, thinking they had found the channel for technical support.
    • Blue Streak (or Bluestreak) is apparently a really, really popular code name. Tech Support's got one, Marvel's got four. One of those is a supervillain, and another one is a woman.
    • Tech Support's Mainframe is a speedster and a technopath. Marvel's Mainframe is an android built by Tony Stark (presumably in a cave! With a box of scraps!)
    • There's a Marvel villain named Reverb, although he's very, very different from the one Tech Support has faced.
    • Marvel's got a Power Princess, and so does Tech Support. The latter is a cat. (And knowing the cat's owner, this could very well have been intentional.)
    • Pulse shares a name with another Marvel character (and a really awful horror movie).
      • Skin has a Marvel counterpart as well, although they probably don't know each other at all.
    • Depending on what you're reading, Silver is either a cook (Tech Support) or a mutant (Marvel).
    • Don't confuse Leslie "Wraith" Meadows with any of the three Marvel guys who go by the same nickname.
    • Schiz was right: everything really is taken by Marvel.
  • Names to Run Away From Really Fast: Played pretty straight with most villains. Heavily subverted by one protagonist. Come on, what's a guy with a name like "Sparrow" really going to...OhCrap.
  • Narm: "Chills just exploded down my back!" There are zombies tearing people apart. I should not be laughing this hard. ("Eyes on the Sparrow, part 1")
    • A certain line of Back-up's from "Eyes on the Sparrow, part 2" became genuinely funny when the actor quickly ad-libbed a couple good lampshadings of the narm...

Back-up: Like a monkey on a cupcake! ...what? Lord Jesus, I've lost my affinity for snappy comebacks.
Back-up: Like a monkey on a cupcake! ...what did I say? Oh my Lord. I've lost... I can't... someone kill me now.

Back-up: Like a monkey on a cu - whuh? I can't - I'm sorry. Can I... can I get a writer down here to fix this, please? What? I can't - I can't say this! What - 'monkey on a...' - what is that? I'm not trying to be a prima donna here, but come on. Who says that? Has anybody in this entire room ever heard that line before? Ever? Has anybody said that in casual conversation, or, has anybody said that period, if they're not high? I'm not high. Are you high? Were the writers high when they wrote this? Come on, people, we can do better than this garbage! What the heck, man! [a few seconds of incoherent stammering] Did you write - did you write this? Come see. I want you to get him - I want you to get him out of here. Get him ou - don't talk back to me. Don't talk back to me. I don't wanna hear it. We are done professionally! Done, you hear me? Get him off the set. Get him off the set, now!

      • And then he just goes quiet for a second and calmly continues with his lines, which just adds to it somehow.
      • A good third or so of this actually made it into the episode, too.
  • Nebulous Evil Organization: Again, the Order of Kain.
  • Never Trust a Trailer: In the Season Two trailer for A Hero's Calling, we're warned that Tonight Someone Dies. While that's technically true, it's not the person that the trailer marks for death. (Honestly, even without reading t he scripts beforehand, the fact that so much of the trailer is nothing but "O HAY GAIZ K2'S GONNA DIEEE" in flashing neon letters implicates a colossal Red Herring.)
  • No Name Given: "Protip: Absolutely no one calls Archive [by his given name]. Not even OutSource, who brought him into the organization. Probably not even his mom, not anymore." --Schiz
    • For that matter, OutSource himself. He is never named in his introduction, and the script simply refers to him as Protagonist. Eventually we get the first name of Alan.
    • There are a few members of Tech Support whose real names have been kept secret for going on three years now.
  • Nostalgic Music Box: Arc's got one that doubles as a Tragic Keepsake of his late girlfriend, Melissa.
  • Not Quite the Right Thing: Mnemonic's subplot in the second season of A Hero's Calling. Finding physical manifestations of Feedback's memories and working to preserve them before they fade into nothingness? Good. Doing so by feeding members of Tech Support to them? Not so much, really.
  • Not Using the Z Word: Inverted in Cover of Darkness. The 'zombies' attacking Feedback and the others are mind-controlled homeless people. While they certainly act zombie-like, they're just not dead enough to qualify.
  • Number Two: One for nearly every department of Tech Support. Dragonryder to Arc, PiperMage to Back-up, AutumSnow to Pre-Fetch, Reboot to K2. Most of them have actually had to be acting directors of their divisions at one point or another.
  • Obvious Trap: Quite a few of them.
  • Ominous Multiple Screens: Subverted; this is pretty much what Router's workstation is made up of, but he's one of the good guys.
  • One Steve Limit: Averted entirely as a result of several characters named after their creators. At last count, the database listed two Kens, two Kevins, two Krystle/Krystalles, two Zachs, three Johns, and four Davids. On the other hand, there is only one Steve. Go figure.
  • The Other Darrin: In the third episode of Beta Flight, Router's usual voice-actor Tanner Karns was suddenly replaced by Mike Sims, who sounds significantly older and speaks with a slightly different accent. The result was... incredibly jarring, and hopefully the switch is only temporary.
    • This is actually the second time Router has been Other-Darrin'd. One of his lines in the Beta Flight pilot had to be re-dubbed, so for about three seconds he's voiced by Alan White.
    • Steven Jay Cohen replaced Scott Hinze as Firewall in the second-season premiere of A Hero's Calling.
    • Lyn Cullen is also temporarily replacing Rachel Steiner as Angelus.
    • The first audio installment of "Eyes on the Sparrow" is full of this. Alan White replacing Oliver Tull as Out Source (yay), Steven Orr as Back-up (meh, but thankfully temporary), Lyn Cullen as Angelus as mentioned before, and a new character, Ms. Eng, gets Other Darrin'd mid-episode.
    • As of the second installment of "Eyes", Matt Burden has replaced Andrey Kuznetsov as Reboot.
  • Paper-Thin Disguise: Feedback seems to preserve his secret identity pretty well for somebody whose disguise consists only of a shiny super-suit and slicked-back hair. In fact, most of Excelsior Alpha (and a few Beta Flight heroes) is the same.
  • Plucky Girl: Mnemonic, circa Mindtheft. Defrag, circa her entire tenure at Tech Support.
  • Power Nullifier: Dorothy "Dot Zero" Chandler. There are also mechanical devices that do roughly the same thing.
  • Punch-Punch-Punch Uh-Oh: Pre-Fetch vs. the Dark Enforcer in the audio version of "Cover of Darkness"
  • Radio Voice: Lots and lots in the audio dramas. In fact, aside from "Second Skin", we never hear Router without a radio filter. Even used in the roleplays, where it gets denoted by ##surrounding the text with pound signs##.
  • Religious Bruiser: Back-up and Super Sport.
  • Reverse Funny Aneurysm: There's a small mention in The Reverb Papers of Jitter ogling some college girls while out on a mission. A few months after the story was published, the real-life Jitter announced to the group that he and the very male Tribunal had fallen in love.
    • In the same vein (and from the same story), the fact that Tribunal never took his female lawyer friend out to dinner makes a lot more sense.
  • Rogues Gallery: Oh yeah. Big enough that it would really be a bad idea to try and list everyone in it. Deathmatch, Opus, Corsair, Spectre, and the Order of Kain are just a few of the 'bigger' names.
    • Beta Flight seems to be developing its own already, at least in the audio series: Xanatos, Gridlock, Devil Lash, Steel Wing, and Genzo the Harpist so far.
  • Running Gag: Lots. Zombies, monkeys, "Oh, carp!", 333, Mnemonic and K2 being kidnap fodder, and plenty more.
    • Oddly enough, Tribunal's well-known fear of monkeys has nothing to do with this, as apparently he's had this phobia since long before the Feedbackverse even began.
  • School for Scheming: A variant in Conspiracy Cola; the Order of Kain is using a hospital ward full of terminally ill children - not a school - as a testing-ground for their new-and-improved Super Serum.
  • Secret Relationship: K2 and Blackthorn, who decide to keep it under wraps on the grounds that flaunting it would be unprofessional. They manage to keep the secret fairly well in the fiction (with only a handful of people in on it after two years); in the audio series, they come right out and spill the beans to most of Tech Support after a few months.
  • Shared Universe: Oh-so-much.
  • Shipping Much more than you might think. Feedback/Sarah is simply fact, and always has been. K2/Blackthorn has been around nearly as long, as has OutSource/Lemuria.
    • It's taken off more in the last year or so, too. We now have Jitter/Tribunal, Mnemonic/Pulse, Blue Streak/Opus and then Blue Streak/Defrag, Dragonryder/Hellion, Router/Fritz, with lots of hints at Sparrow/Lechara (and, in the Group Project, there are the alternate versions of Back-up/Lechara, PiperMage/Pulse, Major Victory/Amber, and possibly Defrag/Reboot).
    • And then there's Upload, who for some reason has decided that it is absolutely essential that Arc get himself a girlfriend, even though pretty much all of her suggestions have been vocally and repeatedly vetoed by the characters' creators.
  • Shout-Out: Many.
    • Pre-Fetch and Back-up's "Hail to the king, baby!" in Late-Night Double Feature.
    • Break Breakout is referred to as Prisoner 24601 in the Hero's Calling episode "What Was Lost".
    • A subtler example: Dr. Quarters from System Crash. As in someone's House, AKA living quarters.
    • In the Beta Flight episode "An Ill-Timed Affair" Mach5 and Wolf-Girl's son goes by the codename Airwolf (Emerald Knight lampshades this in the next episode).
    • Tribunal has been referred to as Tech Support's Own Phoenix Wright in one story.
    • Back-up, in the audio series, can occasionally be heard swearing in Firefly-esque Chinese.
    • James and Lily Snyder, two characters who frequently appear in Caith Donovan's works, may have been named after a certain other James and Lily.
    • Any nickname Mnemonic is given is usually one of these. So far we've had Little Mnemo, Mnemo-fish, and Captain Mnemo.
  • Show Within a Show: Who Wants to Be a Superhero? is still a television show in the Tech Support 'verse, but with a few differences, the main one being that the contestants were all actual superheroes wearing power-inhibitor bracelets.
  • Sickly Green Glow: Denotes some serious mystical bad is going on; usually shown as a change in someone's eye color. See also: Fragment.
    • Subversion - both Emerald Knight and Verdant have the green-glow thing going on, and in neither instance is that a bad thing.
  • Special Guest: Four of the Who Wants to Be a Superhero? contestants other than the titular one (Nitro G - three times, Major Victory, Creature, and the Defuser) have guest-starred in A Hero's Calling. It would have been five, but Steel Chambers was unavailable and Poor Man's Substitute Timm Gillick voiced the Dark Enforcer instead.
    • Several big names in podcasting have been featured in the show as well, including Mur Lafferty as Drive and Scott Hinze as Firewall.
    • New York Times bestselling author Scott Sigler makes a guest appearance as Zeke in "Eyes on the Sparrow, Conclusion".
  • Start of Darkness: "Midnight Assassin" and Descent, for Opus and Endec/Dark Doom respectively. Oddly, these are the only two, even though there are upwards of a dozen villains actively terrorizing the fandom and a few dozen more concepts.
    • Subverted in "Struck Twice" - Thomas Raynolds does actually put two and two together when it comes to Feedback.
  • Super Team: Uh, duh?
  • Tastes Like Friendship: "Feedback and Fried Chicken", to an extent. "Cheerios" is a more straightforward example.
  • Tear Jerker: Oh so many:
    • Matt's speech to Sarah in "What Was Lost" - especially the very last, "he'll have killed me without striking a single blow".
    • The last several scenes of Cover of Darkness in all versions, particularly the audio-verse.
    • The last few lines of System Crash caused the gal writing them to mist up a little.

"You don't know what the last two weeks have been like. That damned sickness already took my little girl from me... I couldn't bear it if it had gotten you too, Tanner."
Router shifted awkwardly in his chair, and turned to look up at his grandfather. "It's okay. I promise, I'm not going anywhere."

    • The epilogue of "Struck Twice" has reportedly made at least three readers cry.
    • Recon's death and, later, Admin's attempted suicide in Family.
    • If you didn't at least sniffle at the aftermath of ReBoot's death in the last audio installment of "Eyes on the Sparrow", you have no soul.
  • The Simpsons Did It: Summed up perfectly by Console and Schiz in a character-development discussion - "That name is actually taken by Marvel, I think." / "Everything is taken by Marvel, methinks."
  • Theme Naming: Most of the early members of Tech Support chose names based on computer parts or functions - CPU, Router, Drive, Pre-Fetch, Back-up, Reboot, Console, etc.
    • Live In Heaven, while one of the first to join the team, consciously broke the pattern - in his first appearance in the audio series, he gleefully notes that his name "has nothing to do with computers or tech support".
  • There Was a Door: Barton to Blue Streak after the latter's Super Window Jump into the former's office ("Daddy's Little Girl, part 1")
  • Thieves' Guild: Alter World apparently has one operational in modern southern California; Lechara is a former member.
  • Thoroughly Mistaken Identity: Silly Con thinks Mnemonic is the reincarnation of his dead wife.
  • Token Loli: Optical.
  • True Companions: Tech Support, both in-universe (all of them) and out.
  • Tuckerization: A lot. Dragonryder and Mnemonic's real-life friends tend to get mentioned by name in several stories.
    • Lydia (from ADSR) was named after a hated former boss of Jitter's.
  • Two Scenes, One Dialogue: Played for one of the very few laughs in "Rejects". AutumSnow is running from several robotic drones, when they suddenly explode. "I don't know what just happened..." Cut to (an aside of Mnemonic, messing with the antagonists' computers, grinning and realizing, "So that's what 'scuttle' means." And then cut to) Sparrow - "...but that was wicked cool!"
  • Unusual Euphemism: Go listen to the second-season premiere of A Hero's Calling. Just the first scene. You'll never look at military reconnaissance the same way again.
  • What the Hell, Hero?: John Blackthorn is usually a pretty good guy, but when he makes with the amorality, he goes all-out. As such, his attempted murder of Rivers in his origin story and just about everything he does over the course of Conspiracy Cola fail to go uncommented on. The epilogue of Conspiracy mostly consists of various parties calling him out on his actions.
    • Pre-Fetch gets one of his own in the same story, after using live ammunition on a man in a child-trafficking ring during a mission.
  • Where Does He Get All Those Wonderful Toys?: According to "The Next Great Superhero", Stan Lee apparently has superpower-inhibiting technology and a teleporter (he uses to make his reality TV show a little more interesting ). We are never told how he managed to get his hands on any of this.
  • Wipe That Smile Off Your Face: One of the many, many horrific uses of Skindancer's powers.
  • With Great Power Comes Great Insanity: Lady Feedback (in the audio series, at least), System Crash, Wreckage, and likely others.
    • Ryuami is an inversion, as her power-upgrade is a result of being driven off the deep end.
  • Woman in White: Silly Con's late wife Rosalind, Mnemonic (especially during "The Wolfram Mission" and the beginning of Mindtheft). Dr. Quarters is a male example.
  • Wonderful Life: There are a few elements of this in the Group Project, where Feedback gets to see just how screwed up Tech Support would be without him (and the story even takes place around Christmastime, too! Not that that effects the story in the slightest).
  • Zen Survivor: Sparrow, especially in his role as Mnemonic's mentor.
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