Fisher Kingdom

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
This page needs visual enhancement.
You can help All The Tropes by finding a high-quality image or video to illustrate the topic of this page.


"Wa..war....warning. Warning, destination universe imposing critical changes to basic structure of both organic and inorganic systems. Changes occurring primarily in hardware, minor changes detected in data... physical change is resulting in... oh you’ve got to be kidding me."

—GLaDOS, Better Living Through Science and Ponies

The places we live, work and play in have an effect on us. Usually it's subtle, and in fact it's far likelier that we end up changing the environment to suit our own needs. Not in this place, though. Maybe it's deeply infused with magic, or perhaps the universe itself has a different set of natural laws. Either way, the place changes you, and hard.

There are three kinds of Fisher Kingdom, at times overlapping.

  1. Mental Warping: This place changes you. It may be anything from a Sugar Bowl to a Crapsack World, but it has the power to re-mold your brain into that of a typical denizen. Any visitors from Real Life or a neighboring (but different) country will slowly have their personality changed into one of a "normal" person for that world, be they sugary sweet and nice or hard-boiled and jaded. There's a limited Truth in Television to this part, as living in one place for an extended period does have some effect in you, but in fiction this goes well beyond the usual spoken accents and behavioral customs.
  2. Physical Warping: The world itself is a Weirdness Censor, and will physically transform visitors to conform to its environment. Real Life people visiting a cartoon world will become 2D cartoon caricatures; visitors to the Sugar Bowl might have their wardrobe reaccessorized with frills, bows, poofs and the like; visiting a world of Talking Animals (or Petting Zoo People) may cause one to become anthropomorphized or transformed into an animal themselves, or so on.
  3. Life Link: If the land is magical or sentient, it can become its own Fisher King with the residents as its 'kingdom': If the land is well then the residents are healthy; if it gets burned, polluted or corrupted with The Dark Side? Well, lets just say the residents won't like the results. Frequently, residents are a Terminally Dependent Society on the land.

This is similar to a Genius Loci using The Virus. Though the world isn't usually possessed of an intelligence, the precision of some of the changes would logically indicate some form of intelligence at work.

Compare Fisher King, in which the land changes to reflect its ruler (and/or vice versa).

Examples of Fisher Kingdom include:

Anime and Manga

  • Cephiro in Magic Knight Rayearth is Type 3, which is revealed midway through the first season & becomes a major plot point in the second season.
  • The Cat Returns: The longer Haru stays in the Cat Kingdom, the more feline her appearance becomes. This is actually a mix of types 1 and 2, since she changes more if she starts to "lose herself" in the world.
  • Used in Catnapped, when the kids enter the cat world and turn into cats themselves. It's explained that instead of getting sunburns, the sun in that world turns people into cats. And if you stay there too long, you turn into an Eldritch Abomination, because... um... that's how radiation works.
  • Princess Tutu is apparently set in real-world Germany, possibly in the modern day, but visitors to Gold Crown Town seamlessly, instantaneously, and invariably become part of the fairy tale, anthropomorphic dancing animals and all.
  • Being a resident (or even a previous resident) of Hinamizawa means you get a chance of going all crazy.
  • The plot to Uzumaki. The town Kurôzu-cho is "cursed by the spiral" causing inhabitants to initially go mad, and obsessed with spiral shapes. Towards the end people start transforming into human-sized snails.

Comic Books

  • Those Annoying Post Brothers have the ability to reality-jump, and either change into a local form, or not, depending on their whim. They can, for example, change into a giant by going to a world of giants and becoming one, then returning to the world they started from but retaining their giant form. They can always return to normal by simply going home.

Fan Works

Film

  • Disney's Pinocchio has Pleasure Island, called Land of Toys in the original novel, where you never have to work. The longer you stay there, the more you start to turn into a donkey. Though you could say it's a more literal version of making an ass of yourself.
  • In the Tron universe, you will go from a normal human (User) to a program if you are digitized into a computer. You get to keep your mind, memories, face, and general body shape, but your clothes are substituted with a neat glowing bodysuit and you are subject to most of the "physical laws" of the computer world.
    • Tron: Legacy sadly throws this idea out the window. Your clothes go with you until you're "suited up" by the programs and if you're harmed, you bleed instead of being derezzed. You also age, but at a substantially reduced rate. Kevin Flynn looks as you would expect him to after 20 years between films, however time on the grid is compressed; meaning Flynn experienced thousands of subjective years while only aging 20 real years.
    • Users are also apparently a lot hardier and stronger than the average program, and Flynn can to some degree alter the computer world around him at will.
  • Stay Tuned was about a man and his wife who get Trapped in TV Land via some sort of magic satellite dish given to him by a Corrupt Corporate Executive who was in charge of producing a cable TV network for his boss, Satan, and did so by trapping hapless mortals and torturing them in the shows. They changed to fit whatever "show" they were in (the most prominent example being when they ended up in an ersatz Tom and Jerry show as cartoon mice).
  • Captain Hook invokes this in Hook, claiming that he is Neverland. It seems to not be true, or at least not as true as Hook thought it was, but it's never directly addressed after that.
  • The monster world in Little Monsters gradually transforms children who visit it into monsters if they spend too much time there.

Literature

  • The minor Philip K. Dick novel Eye In the Sky had this to some degree for all the worlds visited. "Justified" because these worlds were all inside people's minds, based on their own strong/crazy worldviews.
  • The Lotus Casino from Percy Jackson and The Olympians acts like this, causing people to get trapped by too much pleasure, sometimes for years.
  • The dystopian novel The Other Side of the Island has the first kind. Honor slowly forgets the time when she lived up north.
  • Many of the souls in Dante's Inferno change in some way, often to physically represent what their souls experienced on earth because of their sins.
    • It also had the Type 2 (Physical) effect, which turned everything grey. Very, very, emphatically grey.
  • Jack Chalker's Well World, where transformation into another species is the price of entry.
  • In Peter Pan, Neverland makes you forget.
  • in Honeysuckle Cottage, a short story by PG Wodehouse, the protagonist (a mystery writer) gets lift the cottage his aunt ( A romance writer) lived in for years. While trying to write his latest mystery characters and events from his aunt's work start showing up in his. He is obliged to flee the place (and give up a substantial inheritance)
  • In the story Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed by Ray Bradbury human colonists on Mars (it's perfectly habitable there) are slowly converted into Martians. External changes are subtle (see the title) but the personalities are completely rewritten and they completely forget their human pasts.
  • In H.P. Lovecraft's The Colour Out of Space, a meteorite containing a substance of a color and an element unknown to man lands in the well of a farmhouse. The soil around the well begins to change and a malaise radiates outward, in which all animal, plant, and human life begins to deform, takes on the color of the object from the meteorite, and eventually turns gray and crumbles. The illness is both physical and mental, and is not a simple case of poisoning, as the meteorite object is in some way sentient.
  • There's a canon example in Quag Keep and the sequel Return to Quag Keep by Andre Norton- a group of humans are brought in to the world of Dungeons & Dragons, but in the form of their player characters. As a result, one becomes an elf and another a lizardman.
  • An Elegy for the Still-living: The entire story takes place in one of these, though it is most obvious in the second chapter. Francis creates a world from his own beliefs, and it in turn changes what he believes.

Live-Action TV

Mythology and Religion

  • This concept is central in Feng Shui (and geomancy in general). And you can alter your environment to make life better for you.

Newspaper Comics

  • When Dilbert was transferred to accounting (made up entirely of trolls), he began to turn into a troll. See here.

Tabletop Games

  • The TORG game had several parallel Earths invading "the real world"; each one had a tendency to warp the new inhabitants to the new rules of that domain. Player characters had the ability to resist this effect to some degree.
  • Planescape (*D&D cosmology after Mystara and before 4th Edition) featured the Outer Planes of Elysium (pure Good) and the Gray Waste of Hades (pure Evil). A non-outsider on Elysium experiences increasing joy and satisfaction while there and finally has to make a will saving throw or fall under the control of the plane, becoming a petitioner of Elysium. In Hades, a non-outsider experiences increasing apathy and despair : colors become grayer and less vivid, sounds duller, and the risk of entrapping is the same as in Elysium (albeit less nice).
    • Other settings that don't use the standard cosmology may also include planes or regions with the "entrapping" trait of Elysium and Hades (like Dolurrh in Eberron).
    • Abyss (extreme Chaotic Evil plane) has places where sheer mind-blasting horrors and evil may not only kill a mortal visitor, but also instantly change into a bodak; those who die in more survivable parts of Abyss may or may not raise as bodaks one day later too. A bodak is neither alive nor has all common undead traits, attacks anything that moves in hope of being destroyed and its gaze in turn kills others; occasionally retains its mind almost completely, but majority keep just enough of traces to make them more unsettling.
    • One fan-created expansion of Arborea has the deeper layers of that plane progressively make a traveler younger the deeper they travel.
  • In Ravenloft, Darkon is a type 1 kingdom. Anyone from outside Darkon who stays for too long will have their memory altered to believe that they had always lived there, even to "adopting" random tombs as belonging to ancestors. Natives euphemistically refer to the phenomenon as "Finding one's roots". The Necropolis is a more blunt type 2: Enter, and you die and become one of the Undead residents.
    • With Dark Lords it works both ways, but are "chained" to the land and their curses. From "Expedition to Castle Ravenloft", Strahd has a connection to Barovia... literally. He gains supernatural powers on top of being a super-vampire from three fanes that makes him virtually impossible to kill.
  • This is how Arcadia works in Changeling: The Lost. Abducted humans find themselves forced into a role by the True Fae; similarly, the laws of physics in Arcadia have been thrown aside in favor of contract law, so they need to sign onto their masters' Contracts in order to survive. Both combine to physically twist the human into a new role—be it a loyal hound, a perfect lover, or a tree.
  • A more nightmarish variation comes from Warhammer 40,000 (who else?) in the form of the Eye of Terror and certain Daemon-infested planets within, in particular the Planet of Sorcerers. The longer you stay on one of these Daemon worlds, the more mutated you become, until you become a mewling, degenerate lump of writhing flesh. Ahriman of the Thousand Sons attempted to use his magic and try and save his troops from mutation. It, um, didn't work out too well.
    • Evidence also suggests that the Eye of Terror may be similar to the The Cat Returns example above (just not involving cute Cat Girls). In the 4th edition Chaos codex, it mentions that the only thing keeping the Chaos Marines alive, (mostly) unchanged, and (relatively) sane is their sense of purpose and undying hatred for all things Imperial.
  • The magical forest of Athel Loren from Warhammer Fantasy Battle is having this effect on the Wood Elves. As time goes by, they become and act more and more like trees (aggressive in summer, passive and torpid in winter) and develop a deeper and deeper connection to the forest spirits, although unlike most other examples here it's an incredibly slow (generations-long) process.
  • This happens in Don't Rest Your Head to most of those who get lost in the Mad City. They slowly lose their real selves until all that's left is their profession. They will just start to work ceaselessly until something happens to kill them. The only people immune to this are the Awake, and even they occasionally submit to it willingly given the alternatives
  • The Wyld in Exalted, home of The Fair Folk, has a stronger and stronger mutating effect on those who enter it the deeper in they travel. The Exalted are much more resistant to it than mere mortals are, however—and thanks to their tattoos, the Lunar Exalted are almost entirely immune.

Video Games

  • Silent Hill and its inhabitants change to reflect the inner turmoil of the protagonist. Which would make it the Life Link kind, with hints of Physical Warping: the protagonists get randomly teleported into different dimensions or locations and may have their clothes changed. The protagonist Murphy Pendleton of Silent Hill: Downpour gets turned into a Humanoid Abomination monster, and back again, during the course of the story.
  • Secret of Evermore had the PC's dog change form to fit whatever land he was in.
  • In The ClueFinders 6th Grade Adventures: The Empire of the Plant People, one of the team members is captured and starts to turn into a sentient plant herself.
    • This is stated to be the effect of her drinking the polluted water the plant-people are forced to drink; the game gets heavily into its Green Aesop near the end. Whether that implies that the plant people were all or even partially originally human is never adequately explored.
  • The Dark World/Golden Land in Zelda mythos turns people's appearances into what more accurately reflects their soul: Ganon gets turned into a pigman and Link into a bunny and in The Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess, a wolf.
    • It should be noted, however, that the Twilight Realm is probably not the same Dark World. The Twilight that covers Hyrule functions similarly (creating a slightly different and more evil version of the light world) but rather than reflecting their personalities, it causes the people of Hyrule to become spirits that are unable to interact with Link. Link only becomes a wolf because he is the hero foretold by prophecy to save the Twili race and become a "blue-eyed beast," rather than a spirit, when exposed to the Twilight.
  • In the Nintendo Power comic of The Legend of Zelda a Link To T He Past, Link turns into a werewolf, instead of a pink bunny. The in-game bunny is considerably more harmless.
  • In the Mass Effect games, the Reapers are a Type 1 that will gradually Mind Rape anyone who spends too long inside one (even a dead one) into a brainwashed Reaper worshiper.
  • In the Kingdom Hearts series, especially Kingdom Hearts II, Sora, Donald, and Goofy may magically transform into bodies more "appropriate" to the world they are visiting. This is relative, however. If humanity, cartoony or realistic, is the norm, there won't be any change. If speaking humanoid animals are the norm, there won't be any change. If non-humanoid speaking animals are the norm, they will change because apparently it is more "weird" for an upright-walking talking duck to exist in Simba's world than it is in the Pirates of the Caribbean world. Justified in the TRON world, however, because it's well known from the original film that digitizing people makes them neat and glowy.
  • Girls Love Visual Novel Aoi Shiro has the eponymous Blue Castle, a place of chaos (similar to the aforementioned Eye of Terror, except with lesbian Cat Girls) that will warp your mind and body.

Web Comics

  • Parson Gotti of Erfworld finds himself subject to the first variant. For example, any profanity he tries to utter comes out as "boop". Later it turns out the spell that summoned him included a subtle Mind Control aspect that made him more ruthless.
  • Danielle Kendall of Kevin and Kell is turned from a human to an anthropomorphic rabbit when she crosses over into the dimension that consists only of anthropomorphic animals.
    • It happened in reverse to Ralph and Martha much earlier in the strip. Ms. Aura and her child went from Vulture to Dolphin.
  • The Sanrio universe is this to Lovecraft's Elder Gods in Hello Cthulhu.
  • The worlds of City of Reality do this. Poor Hawk turns into a human while in Magic World.

Web Original

Western Animation

  • In Ozzy And Drix, Ozy starts to become a girl and turn pink when he goes inside a girl's body. He still kept his beard for some reason though.
  • Both Trapped in TV Land episodes of The Fairly OddParents.
  • Peter Pan and The Pirates: Peter Pan is Neverland, and Neverland is Peter Pan. See film entry for Hook, above.
  • In Adventure Time The City of Thieves turns anyone who goes there into a thief. However, it actually doesn't affect you like any of the three standard types of Fisher Kingdom. It's a city of thieves, so every second a theft happens. You're just probably gonna wind up stealing back what was yours from someone who stole it first.
    • Possibly subverted, as one could argue that taking back that which was stolen from you is not an act of theft, but simply reclamation of your property.
      • Bizarrely, the effects of the city can apparently be reversed by bathing.
  • A weird variant in SpongeBob SquarePants: everything underwater is rendered in cartoon form, while (most) everything on the surface is done with live action. On one occasion, SpongeBob and co. venture ashore, only to turn into puppets (a sponge on a Popsicle stick, anyone?) while on land.
  • The Mind Screw film The Elm-Chanted Forest has the main character fall down a hole and get captured by humanoid mushrooms. They tie him up so that eventually he will turn into a mushroom as well, because "Everybody becomes a mushroom down here". Except for a talking snail, apparently because the mushrooms have never noticed him. And then they sing a psychedelic musical number, starring a fungal Expy of Michael Jackson and Prince. And some of them appear to be wearing blackface. Did I mention this movie is a Mind Screw?
  • In The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy episode "The Prank Call of Cthulu", Billy and Irwin become more and more monstrous the more they make prank calls in Cthulu's realm.

Real Life

  • Places with high radioactive contamination exists in the world, with unpleasant mental and physical effect.
  • Jerusalem is known to affect susceptible visitors on a regular basis. Details on the other wiki. Also mentions of similar observations in other places, including Paris syndrome as a non-religious version.
Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Fisher_Kingdom?oldid=2007478"