The weird girl from Wartwoodnote
Medicated is an Amphibia fanfic where the Calamity Trio, Anne, Sasha and Marcy, arrived in Amphibia as infants. Split up as they were in the show, they were adopted by families of frogs, toads and newts respectively. Having no idea how to raise human children, their new families instead got potions that would turn the children into one of their kind, calling it medicine and teaching them to take it each morning. That is, until Anne Plantar refuses to take it in an act of teenage rebellion.
The fic can be found here
on Archive of Our Own. It was completed on 10th May 2023. The authors have also written a series of side-stories called Supplements.
This fanfic provides examples of:
- Abusive Parents: When revealed he's to be Evil All Along, King Andrias acts like this to poor Marcy. The Core is even worse despite claiming to consider Marcy as part of their family when they've taken over her body and gaslight her.
- Adaptation Name Change:
- The girls all have different surnames to reflect their different upbringings; Anne's is Plantar (Plantar-Boonchuy by the end of the story), Sasha's is Vors, and Marcy's is Leviathan.
- Domino 2 is named Charlie2 after Charlie Bigbottom the spider, because Anne hadn't met Domino on Earth when she adopted her.
- Adaptation Species Change: Justified. Anne, Sasha and Marcy are originally humans, like in the show, but they have spent their entire lives as a frog, a toad and a newt thanks to a kind of potion.
- Adaptational Angst Upgrade:
- Marcy being unwillingly turned into the Core is even worse than canon because it's not just her father figure, King Andrias, forcing her into it but the only parent she's ever known.
- The Boonchuys had to cope with their daughter being kidnapped as an infant for 13 years, robbing them of the chance of raising her as their parents and seeing her grow up. They also witness Anne's Heroic Sacrifice in the Final Battle and she dies in their arms. Luckily, she gets better.
- Adaptational Relationship Overhaul:
- In the show, Anne, Sasha, and Marcy were Childhood Friends, with Anne and Marcy having been friends long before meeting Sasha, with the moment where they met Sasha being shown in "The Second Temple". As the premise of the fic though is that the girls arrived in Amphibia as infants, none of them actually know each other before the present events of the fic.
- In the show, Braddock and Percy are close friends of Sasha, and some of the first friends she made in Amphibia. Here, they are her adopted parents.
- Anne has known the Plantars her whole life and is closer to them than her birth parents, who she just met.
- As long as she cooperates and continues to study hard, the Core is willing to view Marcy as a Leviathan and even give her limited control during her possession. All niceties get revoked the second Marcy starts to rebel and stand up for herself, though.
- Adaptational Upbringing Change: Anne, Sasha, and Marcy were transported to Amphibia as babies and temporarily transformed into a frog, toad, and newt respectively. As a result, they're familiar with Amphibian customs, don't even know what humans are called, make a lot of wrong assumptions about their true forms, and met each other later in life.
- Adoption Angst: Largely averted with Anne, who knew she was adopted from an early age and didn't mind (at least not until she learned she wasn't even a frog, and even that didn't last) and Marcy, who is also quite aware she is King Andrias's adopted daughter. Played straighter for Sasha, who never suspected she was adopted, and is devastated upon learning the truth. She eventually gets over it with some coaching from Grime, though only to some extent.
- Alien Catnip: When Anne drinks an energy drink from the Boonchuys' cupboard in her frog form, she ends up having hallucinations and a Freak Out.
- Alpha and Beta Wolves: Due to Sasha's manipulative nature intimidating Anne, they both assume that their species (ie: humans) have a hierarchal pack structure, and Sasha is an "alpha".
- Anger Born of Worry: Hop Pop is furious when he learns that Anne disobeyed him and has been neglecting her potions because she wants to try out her human form. He later admits that he is mostly just scared of Anne turning into some savage beast and hurting someone in the family. He lost his daughter and her husband to wild animals, and he doesn't want to lose his grandkids. Especially not if one of those grandkids turns into a wild animal.
- Ascended Extra: In canon, Percy and Braddock disappeared halfway through season 2. Here, they have a bigger role as Sasha's adoptive parents, so they return near the end and join the final battle.
- Babies Ever After: In the epilogue, Oum and Bee have a new son just starting school.
- Baffled by Own Biology: Anne, Sasha, and Marcy were transformed into and raised as a frog, toad, and newt respectively and started turning back into humans as teenagers. Since they have no idea what they are, they have to figure things out by trial and error. For example:
- Anne's adoptive parents decided to get transformation potions because as a baby, she "developed a taste for frog flesh." Turns out she was just teething.
- Polly sticks her hands into Anne's mouth, and Anne reflectively spits her slime coat out. Some of the spit gets on Polly and makes her feel numb, so they assume it's poisonous, but it turns out that human saliva contains a mild painkiller.
- A flood of saltwater sweeps through Wartwood, giving amphibians it touches burn-like injuries. Everyone panics when Anne falls in, but she's fine.
- Bittersweet Ending: Earth and Amphibia are saved, and Oum and Bee were able to spend a precious few months with their long-lost daughter, but Anne decides to stay in Amphibia while they return to Earth. They won't meet again until Anne becomes the new Guardian, but the epilogue shows that they've moved on with their lives ten years later with their new son.
- Bizarre Alien Biology: Human biology to frogs is weird. To them they are a species that both needs to ingest and extrude poison (salt) for one particular example.
- Blue Is Heroic: Anne's frog form is light blue, fittingly, just like her Calamity gem.
- Broken Pedestal: Both King Andrias and the Core become this to Marcy after they are revealed to be Evil All Along and have been lying to her for her entire life since they kidnapped her, Anne and Sasha as babies about how the Core wants to "save" Amphibia from the prophecy.
- Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp": Since nobody in Amphibia knows what humans are called, the girls' true forms are usually called "monsters".
- Calling the Old Man Out:
- Anne calls Hop Pop out in the earlier chapters for not helping her find out what species she is or where she came from, out of fear.
- Marcy does this to the Core when it tries a We Can Rule Together plea in the Final Battle. She calls them out for pulling a Demonic Possession on her and locked her away in her own mind and that at the end of the day the Mind Hive is a Sore Loser that cares only for itself.
Marcy: All you want is death and destruction for so many innocent people! And when you lose, you completely destroy the playing field instead of just taking the loss as it is. You don’t care about anyone besides yourselves, least of all me! I know I've made some mistakes in the past, but I’ve learned since then. You had a thousand years to learn and despite being a hivemind of the most intelligent people Amphibia has ever seen, you never learned a thing! So I think it’s finally time for you to learn something new! I’m a person! And so is everyone else down on that planet you’re trying to destroy. I’m a HUMAN !! And so is everyone in that world you just tried to invade! You need to know that you can’t treat people like this and WE ARE GOING TO STOP YOU!! - Death of Personality: Since Hop Pop doesn't know if Anne's true form is sapient, he's terrified that she'll revert to some savage state if she stays in human form for too long. Worries of this are eventually subsided as it is proven pretty clearly that the true forms are also sapient, too.
- Determinator: Mr. and Mrs. Boonchuy never gave up on finding Anne after she was kidnapped from them as an infant after 13 years, pressuring the cops to find her, especially Oum.
- Died in Your Arms Tonight: After using the Dangerous Forbidden Technique to destroy the Core, Anne dies in her birth parents' arms.
- Double-Blind What-If: After learning about the prophecy in chapter 35, Anne and Sasha wonder what they and Marcy would be like if they'd grown up on Earth — would they have been childhood friends? Would they have always had their powers? Would they still care about Amphibia if they didn't always live there? Canon already has the answers: Yes, no, and yes.
- Entertainingly Wrong:
- The Plantars try to study Anne's human form to discover what species she is. They correctly deduce that she's a mammal, but most of their other conclusions are just slightly off, though still based on logical evidence. Since she's warm-blooded, they think she's native to colder climatesnote , that she's arboreal due to her natural climbing skillsnote , and that she's primarily a herbivore since she prefers fruits to insects.note
- Like in the show, Anne can gain superhuman powers from her connection to the Calamity gem. Since she first does this in human form, she assumes it's a common trait of her species.
- Oum admits to the Plantars that when they told her they were farmers, she thought that they fed the vegetables solely to their insect livestock, not knowing that the Frog Men of Amphibia can eat plants as well as bugs, unlike the frogs on Earth.
- Face of a Thug: One of the most common things noted by frogs that scare them about the human form is the eyes, which are more set in front of the head like a predator than the more spread out frog eyes. This effect is amplified if they are ever angry or agitated.
- Fish out of Water: Not only are Planters this but so is Anne, having never been on Earth, let alone LA, since she was a baby.
- Freaky Is Cool: Naturally, Polly is quick to find Anne's human abilities, like eating poison (salt) to be the coolest thing ever.
- Gaslighting: The Core does this Marcy a lot when it has control of her body and mess with her memories. Even Mr. X is appalled by this when he hears about it.
- Gruesome Grandparent: Aldrich is an adopted version of this to Marcy, since he's part of the Core's Mind Hive when it possesses her and is manipulating the girl.
- Hand Holding: Oum and Bee each take the hand of their long-lost daughter and escort her out of the police station into their car so they can go back to their family home together.
- Hands Looking Wrong: When Anne's transformation potion wears off for the first time, the first change she notices is that her arm is changing colour.
- Happily Adopted: Anne has known in some level that she's not biologically related to the Plantars, but she isn't completely upset over it and is mainly content with the fact, and is only curious about the circumstances behind it and is weirded out over the fact that she is the only one who has to take a special medicine every day.
- Humans Through Alien Eyes: Since no one, not even the trio themselves, have seen a human before in Amphibia, they tend to get described as alien and strange. Anne's human form is frequently called hideous, and she finds a lot of aspects of human biology weird, such as being warm-blooded, having only her nose to smell through, and weaker night vision.
- I Choose to Stay: At the end of the story, the Calamity girls choose to stay in Amphibia with Anne and her biological parents having a tearful goodbye.
- "I Know You're in There Somewhere" Fight: The first time Anne transforms into a human, Sprig pleads with her to remember who she is because he thinks she's become a mindless beast. She then reveals to him that her intelligence is still intact.
- Improperly Paranoid: After hearing that her birth parents have eaten frogs before, Anne is afraid they will try to eat her adopted family despite their claims that they have no intention of doing that. Hop Pop explains to his granddaughter that the frogs on earth aren't like the sapient Frog Men that live in Amphibia.
- In Spite of a Nail: Anne's birth parents still get Domino the cat as a pet, to help them (particularly Bee) cope with Anne's abduction.
- Interspecies Adoption: Zig-Zagged. Anne, Sasha, and Marcy (all humans) were raised by frogs, toads, and newts respectively since they were babies, but their adoptive parents gave them potions to turn them into their respective species to make them easier to raise.
- Is This a Joke?: After the story's equivalent of "True Colors", when Anne returns to the human world, her parents' reaction to when the police found her and called them is initially one of bafflement. They quickly rush down to station when the cop confirms to them that they found her after 13 years.
- Karmic Jackpot: Yunan gets elevated from somewhat struggling future military cadet to the General she is in canon in large part to helping defend Marcy from bullies, all without knowing she's the adopted daughter of King Andrias. Her complete unawareness of this actually got her an even bigger boon from Andrias than if she had known Marcy's identity at the time.
- Leaning on the Fourth Wall: While they're waiting for the portal to Amphibia to activate, some of the humans pass the time by talking about how someone's fanfic was reposted on another website without the authors' permission and they should address it by making the characters talk about it, which happened to this fanfic.
- Legally Dead: Due to being gone from Earth as an infant for 13 years, Anne was this until she was found by the LAPD and returned to her birth parents.
- Long-Lost Relative: Anne is this to Oum and Bee, her birth parents, as she was kidnapped from her home and Trapped in Another World when she was just a baby.
- Mama Bear: Oum Boonchuy never gave up her search for Anne for 13 years, organizing movements with other parents with missing kids to pressure the cops into finding them. After King Andrias has been defeated, she wastes no time hitting him and calling him out on how his actions have caused her family's suffering.
- Meaningful Echo: Anne learns what humans are called when her father says "you're only human." Near the end, Anne says "you're only human" to Marcy when she's freed from the Core.
- Mentor Archetype: Grime is this to Sasha, after being impressed by her fighting prowess and leadership advice.
- Multiform Balance: Changing to and from human form gives various boons and weaknesses. As a frog for example Anne is a better jumper, can hear better, is able to move about incognito in Amphibia without being chased by mobs, and is a far better swimmer, but as a human Anne is stronger, faster, immune to salt and far more resistant to cold, and has better color perception.
- Mythology Gag: While testing out her human form, Anne gets some branches stuck in her hair just like in the show.
- Name-Meaning Change:
- Marcy's nickname 'Mar-Mar' is improvised in a moment of panic when Anne realizes her friend doesn't want the citizens of Wartwood to know her true name.
- In canon, Polly named Frobo after the robots in a game Anne was playing on her phone. Here, she originally named him "Frobro", but kept mispronouncing it.
- No Biochemical Barriers: Averted. In her human form, Anne is disgusted by the taste of frog slime, which she takes as a sign that she's not a frog-eater. She is also immune to touching or eating salt, which would usually be very dangerous in her frog form.
- Oblivious Adoption: Unlike the other two former-humans, Sasha had no idea she was adopted until she overheard her adoptive parents talking about it with Grime. She doesn't take it well at first. This was because she looks a lot like them.
- Obliviously Evil: Marcy knows about the Core and is helping it and King Andrias's plans, even knowing it will use her as a host eventually. However, the fact the Core is evil isn't something she knows, and was told it is benevolent and trying to save Amphibia as part of the prophecy. Otherwise Marcy is as friendly and genuine as she is in the show.
- Orphan's Plot Trinket: The only thing Anne has from her birth parents is a blanket with her name embroidered on it. Hop Pop had initially assumed it belonged to whoever abandoned her there, but figures it might have been her birth mother after learning that Anne is still sapient in her human form on its own.
- Parental Substitute: Lady Olivia is the closest Marcy has to a mother in her entire life and recognizes as such.
- Police Are Useless: Oum has this opinion on the cops after failing to find her kidnapped baby for 13 years. Once she learns the circumstances of Anne's abduction, she admits that there's no way the police could have realistically found her and brought her home.
- Princess Protagonist: Marcy is heir to the Leviathan throne.
- Pushover Parents: Grime's opinion on Percy and Braddock's parenting of Sasha is...not great.
- Raised by Natives: The Calamity Trio are this in Amphibia.
- The Reveal: King Andrias reveals in "True Colors" that he was the one that had the three girls kidnapped from Earth to Amphibia when they were babies, before losing them not long after.
- Right Behind Me: Percy and Braddock explain to Grime that Sasha is not only not their biological daughter but not even a toad... only for them to notice a shocked Sasha at the door who then runs away in tears. Grime laments this was NOT the best way for her to hear the truth from them.
- A Rotten Time to Revert:
- Anne fully reverts back into a human for the first time when the tax collector toads slap her vial of potion out of her hands before she can drink it. Fortunately, she uses her human form to scare them away.
- Marcy first reverted when she lost track of time while in the library and forgot to drink her potion. She's so horrified by the experience that she refuses to go back to the library for years, and the incident becomes an urban legend.
- Sadistic Choice: Anne considers choosing between spending the rest of her life on either Earth or Amphibia without ever seeing one family or the other again to be this.
- Sapient Eat Sapient: While this is a thing on Amphibia (albeit rare), humanity frowns upon this trope, even if they're not human as Anne's parents explain to her.
- Strong Family Resemblance:
- Inverted. Sasha never suspected that she was adopted because she does genuinely look like her parents, having pink skin and blonde hair like Braddock, and a lighter hue like Percy.
- When Oum first lays eyes on Anne, she notes that she looks like her when she was a teenager, with some of her father's features e.g. hair.
- Static Stun Gun: Anne gets threatened with one these when a cop confronts her.
- Super Mode: Grime is quick to realize that Anne and Sasha's true forms are basically this compared to Frogs and Toads, being taller, stronger and faster, and intends to take advantage of it.
- Tears of Joy: Oum and Bee have these when they're reunited with their daughter after 13 years at the police station and can finally bring her home.
- Terror Hero: Anne is very much capable of being this as her human form is so strange that it can make a very good psychological weapon even before her physical attributes come into play.
- Token Good Teammate: Marcy is this to the Leviathan family, being the only one not on board with multiversal conquest once she finds out.
- Tomato in the Mirror: Each of the girls reacts to learning they're not really an amphibian in a different way; Anne wants to learn more about her species (because no-one in Amphibia knows what a human is), Sasha feels betrayed by her adoptive parents, and Marcy is horrified by the transformation process.
- Tomato Surprise: The reveal in chapter 7 that the "poison" in the water is actually salt, meaning Anne's human form is unaffected. Until Anne falls in and finds out she's immune, it's referred to exclusively as "poison" or "poisonous water", but everyone present knows exactly what kind of poison it is.
- Torches and Pitchforks: When Wally spots Anne testing out her human form, he runs off to round up a mob of villagers. Subverted when it turns out that they only intended to carefully subdue Anne and return her to the Plantars, since they know she's still the girl they've known for years.
- Trademark Favorite Food: Anne's favorite food is pillbug pancakes, which surprisingly goes for both her frog and human form, despite her human form usually preferring fruit to insects. In the show, Anne does mention that pillbug pancakes are her favorite while in Amphibia.
- Transformation Horror:
- While it gets easier each time, the first few times Anne turns into a human are immensely painful, as her skin dries out, her bones lengthen, and her entire biology rewires. She also feels extremely hot due to shifting from being cold-blooded to warm-blooded.
- Mr. X gets temporarily turned into one of the Frog Men when Anne forces him to drink a potion. He freaks out about how wrong everything feels.
- Unskilled, but Strong: King Andrias points out to Anne in their Final Battle that despite having her Calamity powers her whole life, she was never once trained on how to use them properly.
- Uplifted Animal: Discussed. After Anne reverts into a human for the first time, Hop Pop assumes that she gained her sapience from being a frog for most of her life, and she'll lose it eventually. Turns out that's not the case. Much later, it turns out that Marcy believes this as well. She tells Anne and Sasha that Andrias is invading Earth to uplift humans. Since Anne has spent months on Earth and taught the entire resistance the truth about humans, they don't buy it, telling her it's a lie.
- Verbal Tic: Just like in the show, Loggle pauses at odd places, making it sound like he's saying something different than what he is.Monthy: But you’re sure that when she smells newt children she won’t just be compelled to, ya know… eat them?
Loggle: Oh she absolutely wiiiiiiiiiill not. She won’t. - We Can Rule Together: The Core tries to sell this to Marcy in the Final Battle. Naturally, it doesn't work.
- What the Hell, Hero?: Oum has this reaction to the Mother of Olms when she finds out that the prophecy involving the trio is more of a cry for help than anything set in stone. In her eyes, her daughter's kidnapping 13 years ago could very well have been All for Nothing.
- Xenofiction: While most of the chapters are from the perspectives of characters with human-level intelligence, chapter 36 is almost entirely told from the perspective of Charlie2 (Domino 2).
