A Decent Self-Insert, Probably (FFN
, AO3) is a Kingdom Hearts fanfic by wingedcatgirl. Tempest, a fictionalized version of the author, finds herself thrust into the Kingdom Hearts multiverse when Earth falls to darkness and she gets a Keyblade because of course she does, Keyblades stopped being special in canon like seven entries ago. Organization XIII has inexplicably come back, a whole generation of Original Character antagonists (and allies) is suddenly active again after in-universe decades, and Xehanort is still planning to Xehanort it up (even if he's taking a pause to reevaluate these new circumstances). Because why would a small number of easily-handled plots ever happen in the Kingdom Hearts multiverse?
The fic is currently "Deprioritized but not cancelled (I promise!!)" (according to the AO3 tags) while the author focuses on its Spiritual Successor, Beyond the Borders.
This fanfic contains examples of
- Accidental Misnaming: Only mentioned in passing, but Tempest and Lea get a bonding moment over their shared experience with people being unable to get their names right.
- Adaptational Gender Identity:
- It is heavily implied in the text (and explicitly stated in the AO3 tags) that Marco Diaz is a closeted trans girl in this continuity.
- When asked whether he is, in fact, "a guy", Demyx gives a Non-Answer, implying he's not exactly cis, but is too much of a Lazy Bum to put more thought into it than that.
- Always Need What You Gave Up: Shortly after temporarily lending her Keyblade to Naminé, Tempest finds herself in several scenarios where having a weapon would have come in handy.
- Animated Armor: A boss Heartless called Assault Armor shows up in Radiant Garden — it is, yes, a giant set of animated armor, with the pieces connected to each other by magical tethers. Sora, presumably recalling Guard/Opposite Armor and Trinity Armor, laments that there's always one of those.
- Applied Phlebotinum: "Flux", a substance released when light clashes with darkness, has high magical energy and is therefore very desirable. It doesn't seem to serve much narrative purpose beyond being desirable.
- Blatant Lies: Roxas and Xion plan to report that Tempest's escape was entirely unexpected, and their absence was because they spent that time in "hot pursuit". Tempest gets a brief Imagine Spot of Xigbar shrugging and saying "okay I believe you".
- Call-Back: When Tempest first summons her Keyblade in the waking world, she starts to repeat her Magic A Is Magic A rant from the first chapter, before getting deja vu and yelling about that instead.
- Color-Coded Speech: One character speaks in purple text, to more easily distinguish them from Tempest's own thoughts and words. This only shows through on the AO3 mirror, since FFN doesn't allow authors to color their text.
- Commonality Connection: Tempest and Lea get a bonding moment over having to deal with people getting their names wrong.
- Complexity Addiction: Tempest has a tendency to make unnecessarily complicated plans on the spur of the moment. She even resists Marco's suggestion to just ask Demyx what he's doing specifically because it's simple and to the point.
- Crossover: It's Kingdom Hearts, so naturally crossing-over happens. So far, Tempest has traveled to the worlds of Fallen London, Star vs. the Forces of Evil, and Final Fantasy XIV. A non-canon interlude focuses on a hypothetical RWBY crossover as well.
- Doppelmerger: Lea and his Nobody, Axel, merge back into a single person when they happen to run across each other and make physical contact. Curiously, Kairi and her Nobody, Naminé, do not merge under the same circumstances, for reasons still unclear.
- Dramatic Irony: Tempest forgets her entire Dive to the Heart, since it's a dream, and spends several chapters unaware that she has a Keyblade.
- Ensemble Cast: Of a sort. While Tempest is the protagonist, she spends her time in the company of a rotating selection of secondary characters.
- Exact Words: When Star asks how Tempest knows who Eclipsa is despite not being from Mewni, Tempest's response is "You think they didn't give us any reference material?" As another character immediately notes, despite this sounding like an answer to Star's question, a rhetorical question doesn't actually make any claims of fact — Tempest knows who Eclipsa is because she watched Star vs. the Forces of Evil, but for obvious reasons she hardly wants to tell Star that.
- Fictional Color: Fallen London's Irrigo (the color of forgetting) and Violant (the color of troublesome connections) show up. A random merchant lady claims Tempest and Riku have traces of Irrigo on them implied to have something to do with Xion and sells them a pot of Violant ink to counteract it. Assuming they ever figure out how.
- Fourth-Wall Observer: After a certain point, Tempest starts directly acknowledging things like scene breaks and chapter numbers.
- Hand Wave: The reason Organization XIII is back turns out to be the Kingdom Hearts Encoder did it. Remember, that device Ansem said "anything could happen" when it exploded? Well, turns out "resurrecting several antagonists" is a subset of "anything".
- Hypocrisy Nod: Vanitas describes an Ascian as a "smug bastard". When Tempest laughs at that, he admits it's "rich coming from me" but insists the Ascian is worse.
- Hypocritical Humor: Luke warns Tempest, Sora, and Kairi not to forget about Xehanort to fixate on the Points of Shadow. He then immediately declares his intention to forget about Xehanort and fixate on the Points of Shadow for a while.
- I Do Not Own: The first chapter's author notes contain a fairly standard "Kingdom Hearts belongs to Disney" disclaimer, as well as a note that the author is aware it isn't legally meaningful to say so but is doing so anyway because it's part of the FanFiction.Net culture. The second chapter repeats it with "still" added a bunch of times, and the third chapter states that the only reason the disclaimer was present at all was for the gag in the second chapter and it's not going to appear again. The Archive of Our Own mirror makes a different joke, lampshading that the culture on that site doesn't demand unnecessary disclaimers in the first place.
- Magic A Is Magic A: Discussed in the first chapter. When Tempest realizes that she has a Keyblade, she immediately goes into a rant about how she can't just have a Keyblade. "The tutorial voice" suggests that she could be the progenitor of a new line of Keyblades, since that's something that necessarily must happen from time to time, but admits when pressed that this isn't actually the case. The answer turns out to be that Sora and Tempest did an accidental Bequeathing, along the same lines as Aqua and Kairi did in Birth by Sleep.
- Narrative Profanity Filter: "The word I used was not 'hell', but there are language standards in this medium, so that's the word I'm writing."
- Narnia Time: As in canon, time between worlds isn't synced, or even particularly predictable. Tempest figures that this is how Luke had enough time to transition that she couldn't recognize him at all, when from Tempest's perspective she last saw him twelve days ago and he hadn't even come out as trans.
- Oddly Common Rarity: Keyblades, as per canon. Tempest and Luke have one, and Naminé eventually gets one. Tempest ends up lampshading this."What do you people even want from me? I'm at least 60% sure I have no particular significance - and having a Keyblade doesn't count anymore."
- People Jars: In Vexen's lab, related to the Replica Project. Described eloquently as "those people-holding tubes iconic of a mad scientist's lair".
- Power-Strain Blackout: At the end of the first chapter, Tempest unleashes a ridiculous amount of magic without really controlling it, resulting in her passing out.
- Precision F-Strike: In chapter 24, Tempest tells someone to "stop fucking with me", the first time the word is used in the fic. The recipient lampshades the trope, noting that a "full-on uncensored F-bomb" implies she's "right at the end of [her] rope".
- Punctuated! For! Emphasis!: In chapter 24, someone responds to Tempest being arbitrarily dismissive of a potential magical solution to a problem by reminding her that "You. Are. Literally. A. Primary. Spellcaster."
- Rule #1: Yuffie insists her Rule One is "constant vigilance", though the others don't recall her ever saying that, and Cid claims she's changed it at least three times. Rule zero is, of course, "Sensei is always right".
- Rule of Drama: Discussed — Luke's theory for why every world mentioned so far is one Tempest was already familiar with is that the Kingdom Hearts multiverse has a sense of drama.
- Self-Deprecation: One non-canon interlude is titled "What If? the fic was a bajillion times more pointlessly self-indulgent", subtly implying that the author considers the fic to already be pointlessly self-indulgent.
- Self-Insert Fic: It is called A Decent Self-Insert, Probably. Tempest is a loosely fictionalized version of the author.
- Shout-Out:
- The author's notes usually open with "ATUHOR'S NOSE".
- Chapter 17 is titled "I am an ENDLESS BARREL of exposition!"
- Suspiciously Specific Denial: Invoked by Tempest; when a cat in the Fifth City asks her if she's an "outsider", she doesn't really want to deny it but feels obligated to make a token attempt to uphold The Masquerade. So she says "I believe I'm contractually obligated to answer that question with a 'no'."
- That Man Is Dead: DiZ is back to being DiZ, on the grounds that "Ansem the Wise" fully intended to die in the explosion of the Kingdom Hearts Encoder.
- Training from Hell: Yuffie puts Tempest through Yuffie's Secret Ninja Training™, a grueling regimen taking up several hours a day. This is partly because Tempest would otherwise have no combat skills at all (notwithstanding Tempest's Keyblade, which neither of them knew about at the time), and partly because she was annoyed that Tempest expected her to do this.Everything I knew about "ninja training" led me to expect comical injuries, constant exhaustion, and only a 50/50 chance of actually gaining any kind of skill from it. Doubly so for "secret" training, training named for the trainer, and training spoken in title case with a trademark symbol.
- Undisclosed Funds: The price of assembling a Gummi Ship isn't stated directly, only scribbled by Cid on a piece of paper, but Tempest estimates that it'd take her a month of non-stop Heartless-slaying without spending time or money on anything else.
- Uniqueness Decay: The decay of Keyblades that canon started is wholeheartedly embraced in this fic; any character with even the flimsiest excuse to end up a Bearer ends up getting one.
- Weaponized Teleportation: Tempest learns Exit instead of Teleport specifically because the former can be cast on adversaries, which seemed like a useful option to have on hand. Not long after mentioning this, she ends up casting it on Vanitas to non-lethally remove her Friendly Enemy when he's spying on her.
- Who Writes This Crap?!: A non-canon interlude joking about a "more pointlessly self-indulgent" hypothetical alternate version of the fic gets derailed when Sora and Tempest complain that "I am super jealous of your amazing rack" is a terrible line. The author is perplexed by this, mainly because Tempest is siding against her when they're literally the same person.
- Wrong Context Magic: Tempest complains that the return of Organization XIII makes no sense, since among other oddities it has resulted in Axel and Lea walking around at the same time, despite the fact that there should only be one body between them. The explosion of the Kingdom Hearts Encoder was not, strictly speaking, "wrong context", but it certainly didn't follow any of the other rules of magic in the setting.
- Yin-Yang Bomb: Light clashing with darkness releases phlebotinum called "flux". Points of Shadow are naturally-occurring oddities in the fabric of spacetime that amplify this effect up to potentially causing a localized Reality-Breaking Paradox.
