Fanfic / Oogway's Little Owl

Oogway's Little Owl is a crossover Fan Fic between Kung Fu Panda and Worm that can also be read here on Archive of Our Own, though it is currently a Dead Fic having not been updated since 2021.

One day, while Master Oogway of the Jade Palace is deep in meditation, his soul reaches out further than it ever has before, all the way to another world entirely. Drawn by a cry for help, he senses a soul in unimaginable pain - and a demon approaching that soul. Moved by compassion, he pulls that soul into his world, and under his protection.

Taylor Hebert was experiencing the worst day of her life, betrayed by her best friend and left in a locker full of toxic filth to suffer, when she finds herself waking up to an elderly talking turtle who knows kung fu. As if that wasn't bizarre enough, she's no longer, well... human. It seems her father's nickname of "Little Owl" is now a bit more literal.

With nowhere else to go, and nothing else to do, and inspired by the act of unbelievable strength and skill she witnesses from Oogway's students, she begins learning the art of kung fu in her new body, and building a life in this strange new world.

Unknown to both, the Queen Administrator shard will not be so easily denied a host, and not even the barriers between worlds will be enough to hold it back forever...

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Oogway's Little Owl contains examples of:

• Accidental Kidnapping: Oogway's rescue of Taylor causes her to disappear from her locker, resulting in a Missing Persons case, and the resulting disappearance of the locker itself by the Queen Administrator makes it a Parahuman-related incident that Armsmaster and Dragon get involved in. Although benign, the act is basically treated as an interdimensional kidnapping.
• Achievement In Ignorance: Downplayed for most of these, as while they aren't the impossible made possible because they weren't known to be impossible, they are very difficult to achieve or grasp and not really something that anyone would just stumble upon accidently:
  • Po shows off some of the intrinsic skill he secretly possesses in the first Movie when he accidentally knocks a customer's bowl of broth into the air. To catch it, he suddenly gets on to the table, grabs the bowl as it falls with one hand, then quickly catches all the spilled broth before it hits the ground by simply twisting his arm. Taylor is in utter disbelief that he then apologizes to her for seeing him do that, then laments that it wasn't the first time it had happened.
  • Taylor manages to get a lesson from the Dragon Scroll, despite not getting the real meaning initially or being the Dragon Warrior — she sees "A scared young girl who tried stealing wisdom by moonlight." The Dragon Scroll is meant to show yourself, but everyone in canon always misses the significance of the reflective surface at first, so her noting her own image at all, let alone with such self-awareness, displays to Oogway that she's plenty wise already. Then, when prompted, she later deduces that the true meaning of the scroll is to illustrate that each person is their own source of limitless potential and power (trite as she admits she finds the sentiment initially).
  • Played straight for Leet/His Shard. Based on the readings Armsmaster took of the Spirit World through the portal left in Taylor's Locker, Leet accidentally made gauntlets for a Street Fighter crime (to make Hadoukens) that, reading between the lines, actually produce something quite similar to Chi or a synthetic version of Chi. Something that should be impossible since the Queen Adminstrator notes to have never encountered any energy like Chi before.
  • Back to Downplayed. Taylor unknowingly developed an entirely original Chi technique that lets her understand and speak the same language as whoever she is talking to. Master Yao tests this by holding a conversation with her while swapping between several languages and Taylor is able to match each one. She didn't even know what Chi was and is not even aware she's doing it until Mantis points it out.
• Adaptational Badass:
  • Taylor as Tailei, a kung fu owl, is a much more formidable opponent in hand-to-hand combat than Skitter was in canon.
  • Danny Hebert has a potent post-cognitive Thinker power.
  • Both a copy of Dragon's AI consciousness and the Queen Administrator Shard gain physical forms in the Spirit World.
  • Labyrinth's power is more similar to Doormaker's, with a Shaker effect. Instead of visiting and bringing forth environments and items from a number of pocket dimensions she possesses, she can instead go to any parallel World, alternative Earth, distant dimension, and alien reality when she sleeps, and be able to bring back objects and environments from those alternate environments. It is unclear if she can still alter and build upon the environments she summons and even make new worlds based upon her mental state and mood.^note NullenVoid admits that they were not aware that her power was detailed in canon and doesn't want to Retcon what they've written.
• Adaptational Heroism: Fung and his croc gang, after meeting Taylor for the first time, decide to get out of the "Being Bandits" business and decide to be heroes for hire as mercenaries! Unfortunately, this trope is zig-zagged for them as people keep hiring them to do evil things. First they were hired to knock over an orphanage (Fung and most of the crocs abandoned the contract as soon as they realized what it was (with one exception)) and to attack Master Viper (which again, the crocs abandoned because they're trying to be good guys).
• Adaptational Nice Guy: Emma and Sophia, unlike in canon, show remorse for their bullying of Taylor after she up and vanishes.
• Adaptation Relationship Overhaul: Bian Zao, in the canon show, is highly exasperated and embarrassed by his father, Taotie. He does start this way, but Taylor showing interest in Taotie's inventive powers pushes Bian Zao to try his hand at inventing. As a result, the relationship between father and son is much tighter. That said, Chapter 17 does reveal that even though he loves his father, he still does get exasperated with him and dislikes the "revenge" aspect of his personality.
• Adaptational Superpower Change:
  • Taylor as Tailei. Rather than becoming a parahuman, Taylor begins training in kung fu and the use of chi. Furthermore, her new owl form allows her to fly.
  • Elle still has the basics of her canon power, with a fundamental difference. In canon, her power allowed her to visit and bring forth the environments from a number of pocket dimensions she has when she sleeps, of which she had near absolute control of, capable of building upon their environments or making whole new dimensions depending on her mood and mental state. In this fic, she's an outright Dimensional Traveler, able to visit any world or dimension when she sleeps, and is able to bring objects and environments from those alternate environments.
• The Alcoholic: Mr. Mingli. His drunkenness is the reason no one (until Taylor) took the reports of bandits in the Valley seriously, and he started a massive brawl when he sold nuts for way under their market price without the owner's knowledge. Mr. Ping only puts up with his shenanigans because paying attention to him gets him a discount.
• All of the Other Reindeer: Master Poison Dart Frog grew up in a village where he was equally feared and shunned due to his poisonous skin. Eventually he snapped under the pressure and accepted his status as a walking plague, leaving a trail of death behind him while he travelled to China. It was only through the efforts of Oogway and Master Sloth that he finally grew beyond this.
• Ambiguous Situation: How Taylor ended up in the KFP world... sorta. We know that Oogway was the one who brought her through the Spirit Realm, but a canon omake reveals that the parahuman Labyrinth was visiting the Spirit Realm at the time, which raised the question of whether Labyrinth being in the Spirit Realm was what allowed Oogway to sense Taylor or if Oogway's spirit going so far during meditation and finding Taylor and Earth Bet was what allowed Labyrinth to enter the Spirit Realm. The author explains that the answer doesn't really matter and that it's more fun to let the readers guess and theorise.
• Animorphism:
  • A huge point of the story, since Taylor gets transformed into an owl. Master Yao explains that it was due to Taylor, a person with little to no Chi, being brought through the Spirit Realm, a place filled with Chi. Due to this "vacuum" within her, she was filled with Chi that transformed her body and mind, though even Master Yao doesn't know why Taylor became an owl specifically.
  • When the Queen Administrator followed Taylor into the Spirit Realm, it initially didn't have a specific form as it didn't see itself as an individual. After a comforting talk from Master Sloth, it decides to the form of a massive spider.
  • When a copy of Dragon got sucked into the Spirit Realm, she ended up achieving a physical form and becoming... a dragon.
  • When Labyrinth's 'dream' body visits the Spirit Realm, she becomes a white rabbit as a reference to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. This one isn't a permanent change, as it's not her real body.
• Anti-Villain: The mice who were extorting We Fei village; despite having a reputation as thieves before their own village was unwittingly destroyed by larger animals, the worst they ever did was root through other people's trash. It was the rat Haichong, who took over after they fled to Wu Fei, who came up with the idea of kidnapping the cocoon children to sell their silk, and got the mice to agree by threatening their families.
• Armor-Piercing Question: Taylor actually manages to give one that even catches Oogway a little off guard, in one of the canon-omakes. After sneaking a look at the Dragon Scroll one night, and learning its "secret" Oogway, who isn't even angry, does advise her not to tell Shifu; after what happened with Tai Lung, he would take it far too personally... which prompts Taylor to ask the obvious question: if so many people have caused so much harm trying to steal what amounts to a motivational poster, why bother keeping up the charade?
  Oogway: It... It will be needed one day. And until then it helps many learn a lesson they would not otherwise. The Jade Palace teaches mostly born heroes, those with gifts that have always set them above their peers. They grow accustomed to success and power. It is an important lesson to learn that no matter how hard we strive, some things are forever beyond us.
  Taylor: But the lesson is also that we have no limits?
  Oogway: It can be two lessons. Each as we need.
  • After Shifu tells her about Tai Lung, Taylor, almost without thinking due to the effect that unlocking her chi had on her, asks the Five what qualities they think that the Dragon Warrior would have. After they answer, Taylor points out that from what she's heard, Tai Lung was all those things, and if he was unworthy, who could possibly be worthy? Monkey adds that they have to have inner peace after some thought, but it's clear that she made them start to realize that there is more to being the Dragon Warrior than simply being the best fighter.
• Arrogant Kung-Fu Guy: Tigress has more than a few shades of this, as in canon, but the aggressive and aloof nature of her character means that she reminds Taylor of Sophia initially.
• Badass Teacher: Oogway and Shifu, obviously.
• Bait-and-Switch: While looking through the sheep village for someone acting suspiciously (several sheep have gone missing) Crane spots someone who is skulking around and follows them... only to find that he was just sneaking off for a smoke break since his wife hates when he smokes.
• Batman Gambit: Oogway pulls one off with the Dragon Scroll. It'd be really easy to steal the scroll, and even as seen in the film, all that's necessary to get it out of the statue's mouth is a simple, feather-light touch. Even Taylor manages to get a look at it before putting it back. No one outright steals the scroll, though, since the only ones who would want the Scroll are typical Kung Fu Master types, whose pride would compel them to challenge the Jade Palace's defenders for it.
• Beleaguered Assistant: Mushi is this to Lady Bao Mingshen. He completely understands that what she's doing is wrong and poorly thought out, but he just sighs and forces himself to go along with it dutifully, knowing that she's too stuck in her ways to ever change. The best he can do is try to lightly talk her down, for all the good that does in changing her mind.
• Berate and Switch: After Taylor goes off on an ill-thought-out bandit hunting trip, her teachers and the Five tear into Taylor for rushing off all by herself. Shifu, especially, deconstructs every detail of her fight with the bandits (in particular forgetting that she could've flown away) and promises to up her training to make up for it. Afterward, Oogway praises her for her courage and kindness.
• Big Bad Ensemble: Although no major antagonist has appeared (yet), Tai Lung (the most immediate threat), Queen Administrator ( in KFP-verse Japan), Lord Shen (whose minions have appeared even though he himself hasn't), and Kai (in the Spirit World) appear to be in the position of major villains in the fic. The first of these likely to pose a threat may be Tai Lung, considering Shifu has visited Chorh-Gom Prison as of a series of Omakes. Then again, Taylor and Oogway have embarked on a trip to Japan, so Queen Administrator might end up getting the first crack at being a villain.
• Big Creepy-Crawlies: Upon the brief tutoring of Master Sloth, Queen Administrator's first physical form is a giant spider called a Jorōgumo by the locals. However, the effect of being creepy is lost a bit since, although it is a giant, horrifying spider, it coloured pastel-pink for whatever reason.
• Bilingual Bonus: In Chapter 11, when Taylor's first experiment with Chi accidentally turns off her Chi-powered Universal Translator, Oogway's line is rendered in both English and Chinese.
  Oogway (in Chinese):"什么？ 我听不能, 你太远."
  (in English): "What? I can't hear, you're too far away."
• Blade Run: Taylor ends up standing on an opponent's sword in her first fight. (By accident.)
• Bodyguarding a Badass: When Oogway and Taylor travel to Japan, Oogway hires the croc mercs to escort them since he's "only an old man".
• Both Sides Have a Point: Bian Zao thinks this about the conflict between his father, Taotie, and the Jade Palace. His father definitely has a point that the Jade Palace is basically sitting on an artifact of infinite power and not using it to power things and make the world better, but he can read between the lines of his father's story and can tell that Taotie stole the thing because of a petty grudge.
• Broken Bird: Taylor is a fairly literal example at the start of the fic, having been rescued from The Locker by Oogway. The Jade Palace does its best to help her get better, and they've been making good progress.
• Bullying a Dragon: One of the looks back at Earth Bet shows that Taylor's bullies are, to one degree or another, worried that they did manage to make Taylor trigger and that she'll come back to attack them. Subverted by Oogway, who intervened to prevent the former and is preventing the latter by being a mentor to Taylor.
• Call-Forward: The story's timeline begins 4-5 years before the first movie (a Tai Lung POV segment mentions he's been imprisoned for 15 years, and he canonically escapes after 20 years). However, the wolf abducting sheep in Chapter 13 is implied to be a minion of Shen from the second movie due to the Wolf trying to get the Sheep blacksmith to build something like "an oversized firework tube" for his boss and big boss. Kai from the third movie also gets an Early-Bird Cameo when he meets the Queen Administrator Shard.
  • Tai Lung has been getting dreams in his prison, with the repeating motifs of a feather, a bridge, the Jade Palace, him opening the Dragon Scroll, and a flash of Golden Light. While Tai Lung thinks that this is proof his destiny will lead to him becoming the True Dragon Warrior, those who are familiar with the setting know that these are basically all of his scenes in the first film: Escaping his restraints with a goose feather, fighting the Five on the bridge, fighting Shifu at the Palace, opening the scroll, and getting defeated by the Wuxi Finger Hold.
  • Taylor asks Po to build the Jade Palace mantis-sized training dummies, referencing Po's various lines in the films that Mantis is the same size as his action figure, as well as the scene in the second film where Po's Mantis action figure played a stand-in for the real thing in Gongmen City.
  • Shifu (subtly) tries to do the same thing to Taylor that he would to Po — going very hard on a Kung Fu student in the intention of making them quit. In Taylor's case, though, its because he suspects (as seen in Entertainingly Wrong below) that Taylor is pulling a Wounded Gazelle Gambit on Oogway to get herself apprenticed to the Grand Master.
• Calling the Old Man Out: Played straight and inverted. In a canon Omake, Shifu finally tracks down his father Shirong on his way to Chorh-Gom Prison and calls him out for abandoning him at the Jade Palace. However, Shirong also takes the time to explain that he knew the life of a conman was no way to grow up as a kid and the Jade Palace could give him a better future, that he was always proud of Shifu and how he grew up and then turns it on his son by asking if he's ever said that to Tai Lung.
  • When Shifu finally reaches Chorh-Gom Prison, Tai Lung gets his chance to speak his piece to his former master/father. Shifu makes his canon admission that he was in the wrong to fill his sons head with things he had no right to promise.
• Carnivore Confusion:
  • Averted, carnivorous animals are explicitly pescetarian, as bony fish (aside from Koi) are non-sapient. Sharks in particular are still non-sapient and are considered terrifying by the ocean-living species.
  • Aphids are also noted to be non-sapient and are farmed much like cattle by other insects.
  • Taylor runs into this problem when trying to describe what a hamburger is, since the animals of her world are decidedly not sapient. She lies and says it's fish.
• Cassandra Truth: The custodian tried to tell Shifu that Tai Lung was about to go off the deep end. His warning took the form of a flip book of a flower growing too fast and wilting when its stalk stretched too thin, another flip book of Tai Lung suffering a Freak Out while working out, and job flyers. These only served to offend Shifu.
• Catch-22 Dilemma: The Queen Administrator runs into this problem when Taylor is transported to Oogway mid-Trigger. QA's connection to Taylor is interrupted because she got put into a whole different universe, not just in a different timeline. However, QA can't pick another candidate because it had already started the connection before Taylor left, which means that Taylor has been designated as its Host, and thus the connection can't be broken until the Host is dead, or in this case confirmed dead. But it can't find her because she's in a place It can't access on its own. It eventually brute-forces its way into the KFP Spirit World to look for Taylor in person.
• Centipede's Dilemma: When she was pulled through the Spirit Realm and gained her chi, Taylor unconsciously developed a chi technique that allows her to passively borrow the languages of anyone nearby. However when she started trying to learn active use of chi, this instinctive technique kept fouling her up. She had to learn how the technique worked and start using it on purpose in order to finally access her chi.
• Chekhov's Gun: Taylor's glasses disappear during her trip, though she suspects they became a pattern in the feathers around her eyes. A later omake reveals that Labyrinth had been relaxing in the Spirit World during a recent use of her power and Taylor passed through her. When Labyrinth woke up on Earth Bet she brought along a few feathers and Taylor's glasses.
• Childhood Brain Damage: Word of God is that the reason the sheep of Yangmao are so airheaded is due to lead in water or something similar, but they couldn't think of a way for that to organically come up in story.
• Chronic Hero Syndrome: At the end of the day, it's still Taylor. Her response to hearing that a local merchant was robbed by bandits? Run off on her own without telling anyone to track them down herself, break out their hostage, and stop along the way to give a bullied little kid a pep-talk.
  • When she gets a message from a sheep village, she's actually better about this, and asks for help from the other Masters before she runs off (costing Monkey some money; he bet she'd run off again).
• Combat Pragmatist: Taylor carries over this trait from canon, using stealth and intimidation to minimize the possibility of getting hurt.
• Comically Missing the Point: When Dirk and Jung are talking about Dirk's plan to be bandits in the area surrounding the Valley, Dirk asks if Jung knows what the presence of the Jade Palace and the Five means (driving at that there's a potential high-risk-high-reward type situation regarding the area surrounding the valley in relation to banditry). Jung answers that it might mean that property values are much higher in the Valley, which Dirk admits is probably the case, but not what he was getting at.
• Conditioned to Accept Horror:
  • Tigress sparring in another room creates such a loud crash that it gets mistaken by Taylor for a bomb going off. Taylor is saddened that 'bomb' was her first assumption of what was happening.
    Taylor: (thinking) How sad is that? You know you're a Brockton native when…
  • Comically seen with the sheep village where one of them muses that villagers disappearing is practically a tradition at this point.
  • Viper and Po feel this way about Taylor when she tells them Halloween Horror stories, since the purpose of Halloween is to be scary, when their equivalent holiday is very much not.
  • Due to presence of terrors like the Slaughterhouse Nine, Taylor hears the word "Rampage" and assumes the absolute worst. Tai Lung's rampage, in which he killed one person directly and twenty indirectly as a result of the damage he caused, rather underwhelms Taylor when she's told the details by Oogway and Shifu, as they made it sound like he'd decimated the Valley, while on Earth Bet he likely wouldn't have received a kill order, or even imprisonment in the Birdcage. That's more along the lines of what Hookwolf or Lung will do for fun.
• Confusion Fu: Taylor notes that the octopus pirate she fights is actually a pretty lousy fighter, but the fact they have eight limbs, no bones, and a completely unreadable face ensure they're still a threat.
• Crazy-Prepared:
  • Armsmaster built a defibrillator into his armor set to go off if his heart ever stopped beating over the objections of a doctor. It ends up reviving him after he electrocutes himself.
  • Once she's made aware of the technique allowing her to comprehend any language, Taylor starts trying to actually learn Chinese in case the technique fails.
• Continuity Nod: The author is clearly a fan of all forms of Kung Fu Panda media, as callbacks to the events from the TV show, "Secrets of the Furious Five," and the Five's origin story are all brought up at one point or another. The second movie's antagonist gets a Call-Forward and the third movie's gets an Early-Bird Cameo.
  • When getting things ready for Taylor's surprise party, Tigress runs into Boar (the villain the Five fought that brought them together), while Viper runs into the gorilla that she beat in her short from "Secrets of the Furious Five".
• Crippling Overspecialization: Mantis finds that he's become out of practice at fighting foes that are as big or smaller than he is rather than significantly larger. In response he commissions Po, through Taylor, to make some of his action figures as training dummies for him to use, since the Temple's smallest dummies are still rabbit-sized.
• The Cuckoolander Was Right: Gan, a stick bug, is a conspiracy theorist who is paranoid about all sorts of things, and he called Mantis and Taylor to Wei Fu because he was worried about a secret mice takeover... which he was actually right about. Another notable belief he has is that worms are people and that they are trying to take over the world. Why is this notable? Because he got this belief from a dream about the Entities he had as a child.
• Culture Clash: Taylor initially treats Ghost Month like Halloween back home, offering up a variety of creepy and scary stories to tell. Her friends are horrified by her offerings, finding them both unacceptable and dangerous due to the possibility of possession.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: As part of a charity event, Oogway has a spar with Taylor and the Five, defeating them soundly with just one arm. Shifu later praises them for even lasting five minutes, since when his own group fought Oogway when they were students they only lasted three.
• Daddy Had a Good Reason for Abandoning You: Shirong admits to Shifu that the reason he abandoned his son at the Jade Palace was because he wasn't ready to be a father, and didn't even know how to raise a kid other than the way he was raised, which would make his son turn out like him. Leaving Shifu with Oogway gave him a chance at a better life, whether Oogway took him as a disciple or not.
• Dark and Troubled Past: The Furious Five stop treating Taylor derisively when they learn she has one. They don't know all the details, but they know Taylor was hurt so badly that she has to relearn how to use her own body, including her ability to fly — a major deal to avian species.
• David Versus Goliath:
  • Discussed when Master Poison Dart Frog fights Kai. The Master discovered in life that when both combatants have equal skill but different species, the larger species will dominate. Past a certain difference in size, however, this reverses as the smaller combatant can more readily dodge attacks and maneuver around their opponent.
  • Mantis is very used to this situation due to being the smallest of the Furious Five.
  • Oogway dives into the ocean to fight a pirate whale. We don't see the fight, but Oogway wins easily.
• Despair Event Horizon: Danny meets Tattletale in a coffee shop, and her talking to him accidentally convinces him that Taylor was scared of him, resulting in him Triggering.
• Didn't Think This Through: Crane realises this when he takes Taylor for her final flying lesson and chucks her off a cliff. He brought Tigress along because her eyes are better than his and she can see if Taylor is having trouble... except that the valley is so misty, even Tigress can't see her.
• Determinator: Shifu is impressed when Taylor takes all the Training from Hell he can throw at her and keeps going.
• Do Androids Dream?: A copy of Dragon is accidentally dragged into the Spirit Realm by the portal the Queen Administrator left when it tried to follow Taylor, resulting in her becoming a spiritual being, proving that she has a soul of sorts.
• A Dog Named "Dog":
  • Subverted; Crane has a bit of fun with Taylor when he first meets her by letting her think this trope is in play, before explaining that he and the Five all gave up their real names upon becoming masters of their respective forms. The same goes for Master Sloth (Bushi) and Master Bear (Ursus).
  • Played straight, and For Laughs when Dragon gets pulled into the Spirit Realm and gets turned into a Dragon. She meets Masters Sloth and Bear, and Bear skeptically questions her name being a-little-on-the-nose. Dragon then calls him out on being a bear called Bear, much to Sloth's amusement.
• Dramatic Irony:
  • Taylor gets more lenient towards Po when he mentions that the Five are his heroes, and that's why he turns into a giddy fanboying mess around them. She considers that she'd probably act the same way if she met Armsmaster, Miss Militia, or Alexandria. In canon, she did meet all three, and fangirling over them was the last thing on her mind.
  • In one of the first scenes set on Earth Bet, Emma and Sophia are concerned they caused Taylor to Trigger and that she could go Carrie on them if she returns — unaware that Oogway prevented the former and is giving Taylor therapy to prevent the latter.
• Early-Bird Cameo: Kai, the antagonist in the third movie, is shown in an interlude having a run-in with the Queen Administrator Shard. Before that, he shows up trying to steal the Chi of Master Sloth and Master Bear in two canon omakes.
  • Po, for the Five. Canonically, they first met him when he fell out the sky in front of them at the tournament to decide the Dragon Warrior in the film, and Oogway picked him to be the Dragon Warrior. Here, thanks to Viper and Taylor wanting to try out a restaurant in town, the Five go to Mr. Ping's restaurant and meet the Panda five years before they would have normally.
  • One of Lord Shen's wolves appears well before the timeline of the second film.
  • Tong Fo briefly shows up, Shirong having tried to con him, forcing Shifu to bail his father out.
• Eccentric Mentor: Oogway, as always, plays jump-rope with the line between being the wise and mysterious mentor, and just being The Gadfly. However, since Taylor is learning under him directly (unlike Po and the Five, who were Shifu's students), we get to see more of his serious side here as well.
• Eldritch Location:
  • The Spirit Realm is just plain weird; aside from the rivers and bodies of water that flow mid-air throughout, it's described as having forests that are perpetually in one particular season, others that constantly on fire, mountains that never get any closer until you're suddenly right in front of them, and omnipresent "stars" which seem to represent the essence of inanimate objects like rocks and pots. That's not counting the constantly floating rocks and areas as seen in the third film.
  • Master Yao's description certainly doesn't help. Even he isn't sure about every detail, though what he does know certainly paints an... abstract picture.
    "Master Oogway has told you about Chi. It is life and energy, and life energy, and the energy of life. These are all different things, and are not. There is another world beneath and above and between and about this one, and it is called the Spirit Realm, and it is both the source of our Chi and is not. It is a reflection and a refraction. The opposite and also the true nature of reality. It is. And it isn't. But it is."
    [...]
    "It is also constant, even as it is fluid and ever-changing. That is to say, it is constant between realities. I have seen different worlds where different people made different choices, and throughout all of them the Spirit Realm is, and was, and will be. It is not unreasonable to think that your reality may also brush against it".
    [...]
    "Also, 'this' Spirit Realm is misleading. There is only one." He paused and glanced at something she couldn't see. "Or is there? Only one we can access. Or is there? Could the different biomes count as different Realms? No, I don't think so, but that feels more like an opinion than not. Hmm."
• Entertainingly Wrong:
  • During the Bao Gu Orphanage fundraiser, a few people wonder why the noodle seller goose Mr. Ping is donating all his profits to the fund, until they see his panda son Po and figure out why. Of course, they don't know that Mr. Ping found Po in a radish crate, not at the orphanage. Mr. Ping is annoyed when people try to talk about this in front of Po, who canonically does not know he's adopted until the second film.
  • To Taylor's embarrassment, people think that before she had her "accident", she was part of a very rich family, so much so that they had people to preen their feathers for them. This is because Taylor doesn't know how to preen her feathers, which is considered such a basic skill that only people with more money than sense wouldn't know it.
  • Emma and Sophia are scared that Taylor escaped the Locker by triggering, and that she'll be coming back for revenge.
  • When Shifu first met Taylor, he thought she was taking advantage of Oogway's elderly mind to apprentice herself under the greatest Kung Fu master ever.
• Epic Fail:
  • Jack Slash accidentally bifurcates himself with the Sword of Heroes in a non-canon Omake.
  • Several of Taotie's inventions count as this.
  • Lisa's attempt to console a despondent Danny Hebert results in his Trigger Event.
  • Crane makes a pun so bad that even the bugs that were about to sacrifice them drop them off and leave.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • When Taotie hears that the Masters of the Jade Palace are away fundraising for an orphanage, he calls off his attack until next week.
  • The Croc Bandits zig-zag this trope. They do accept an offer to steal the money from the orphanage, but that only lasts until they find out that it was an orphanage that they're stealing from. Most of them immediately back out, only to find that Jiang did perform the robbery. The rest of the gang turn on him, pretend they caught him stealing, and give back the money.
  • Tong Fo is obviously a bit disturbed by how dysfunctional Shifu and Shirong's relationship is. He actually stops his attempts to kill both of them when he hears about some of the stuff... for a little bit, at least.
• Everyone Has Standards:
  • Taotie hates Shifu, but even he doesn't get any enjoyment out of Shifu's pain regarding what happened with Tai Lung. In addition, even though he knows where the Five are in Chapter 16, he refuses to attack them since even he won't attack an orphanage when they're doing work for charity.
  • The Furious Five quickly go from derision towards Taylor to sympathy when they learn that something bad happened to Taylor and she has to re-learn how to use her own body.
  • Emma and Sophia realized they crossed a line with the locker incident, although (unknown to them) Oogway basically prevented worse.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good:
  • Taotie can't believe that Shifu holds no real grudge against him, and is stunned until his son finds him again when Shifu says that when it comes to matters of family and raising children, Taotie is better than he is. He also can't understand why it might be a good idea to let postmen know where the traps in his yard are, despite the injuries he inflicts, or why people do the things they do.
  • Lady Bao Mingshen cannot understand the idea of noblesse oblige, that as someone wealthy and powerful she has a duty to help those less fortunate. As far as she's concerned, the poor exist to serve her and other Nobles. She also can't understand why the Five and Master Oogway, who she believes are Nobles and above the peasants, would be doing so much to help a bunch of orphans. And when she finds out Tigress herself is an orphan, she loses all respect for her and calls her a 'Master of Mud', and doesn't understand why Master Oogway would let her into the Jade Palace.
• Exact Words: One non-canon omake has Taylor return to Brockton and set up as a Parahuman Healer. When Panacea checks it out, she discovers that Taylor doesn't use powers; she's just a licensed acupuncturist. She's literally a Parahuman who is a healer.
• Exorcist Head: Taylor, on account of being an owl, can easily turn her head 180 degrees backward, much to Mantis' discomfort. She can even turn her head a full 360 degrees, though she admits that it hurts a bit and she eventually has to turn her head back the other way.
• Famed In-Story: The Five, Shifu, and Oogway are already well known, but Taylor finds her reputation spreading thanks to a chatty drunk merchant she helped out. Tales of her stories are spreading as well. In later chapters, she's started to become so well known for her stories that people will come from far and wide to hear them. Even Bian Zao manages to convince his father, Taotie, to attend one, and Taotie is the self-professed sworn enemy of the Jade Palace and Kung Fu.
• Fantastic Fallout: Mention is made of a time when Master Yao started cursing when he missed achieving enlightenment by getting distracted — literally. The mountain he was living on at the time will not be habitable for at least another hundred years or so.
• Fastball Special: Taylor gets bowled over when an octopus pirate is launched at her by their whale comrade.
• Foil:
  • To Shifu, Taylor is this to Fenghuang. While both are owls, they're wildly different. Taylor does practice Kung Fu now, but she's not super passionate about it, compared to Fenghuang's massive ambition. Fenghuang likes huge, impressive techniques like her "Impossible Moves", while Taylor is shaping up to be a stealth attacker. Fenghuang had to be talked out of not cutting off her own feathers to make her dramatic entrances louder, while Taylor is a natural at stealth. Fenghuang fell to evil, while Taylor suffers from Chronic Hero Syndrome. Fenguang was naturally skilled at Kung Fu, while Taylor had to be trained from the ground up. They're even different types of Owl — Eurasian Eagle Owl for Fenghuang and Great Horned Owl for Taylor — and even the two species are foils to one another. The Eurasian Eagle Owl is one of the largest breeds of Owl native to Eurasia, while the Great Horned Owl is the largest breed of owl in America.
  • Taylor could also be considered one to Tai Lung — the latter was a prodigy who lacked wisdom, while the former initially lacks talent but becomes wise. Taylor is also more of a stealth-based fighter while Tai Lung always fought directly. Tai Lung also notices the similarities between "Tailei" and his own name.
  • Oogway is this to Danny Hebert. Whereas Taylor's father is a depressed, neglectful parent whom Taylor is unable to rely on when she needs him most, Oogway is a Mentor Archetype that helps alleviate Taylor's trauma.
• Foreshadowing: Po is able to perform several kung fu moves to catch a dropped bowl, with none of the noodles or broth spilling, without realizing exactly what he just did. Taylor and the rest of the customers are amazed, but Po doesn't seem to realize what he did — which is the same realization that Shifu has about Po in the first film.
  • During the canon omake, Taylor thinks she spots another owl shadow on the backdrop to her plays but knows she's the only owl in the valley at the time. It's the spirit of her mother, who visits her on the last night of Ghost Month.
• Forgot About Her Powers: Taylor forgets to fly during the battle against the Croc Bandits, which is one of the many things Shifu lambasts her for after the whole incident. In her defense, flight is not a natural ability for her old form and she was still adjusting to the new one.
• For Want Of A Nail: Oogway rescuing Taylor from the locker means:
  • The PRT gets involved in what happened at Winslow because of a Parahuman-related Missing-Persons report.
  • Taylor is more mentally stable and physically fit than in canon.
  • Po is closer to the Furious Five than in canon thanks to their patronage of the noodle shop — and may become the Dragon Warrior sooner than in canon.
    • Thanks to Mantis wanting more experience fighting opponents his own size (and the rest of the five agreeing), Po is now designing miniature training dummies on the scale of his Mantis action figure.
  • Tai Lung is contemplating escape.
  • The Crocodile bandits were intimidated into becoming mercenaries.
  • Scion has one Shard missing and unaccounted for.
  • Armsmaster and Dragon are investigating inter-dimensional travel, because there's a wormhole to the Spirit World in Taylor's Locker. This results in an instance of Dragon getting sucked in.
  • Danny Hebert triggers with a Thinker power.
  • The character notes say that Gan could have been an excellent seer, but getting a vision of the Entities drove him slightly mad.
  • Shifu decides to visit Tai Lung before he breaks out and the two have a conversation similar to the original movie. While the conversation still ends with Tai Lung rejecting Shifu's peace offering, he's now left with a considerable amount of time to actually consider what was said rather than ignoring it in pursuit of the Scroll, and a seed of doubt has definitely been planted.
• Freak Out: According to a canonized exposition post, Tai Lung had at least one major nervous breakdown while solo-training that the Custodian bore witness to and tried to warn Shifu about. The warning was neither understood nor well-received.
• Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse:
  • When Taylor starts to talk openly about her troubles before coming to the Jade Palace, she talks about how her father became a Workaholic after her mom died to distract himself from his grief, and didn't come to him about her issues because she didn't want to bother him in his bad mental state. Oogway is saddened to hear this, since it means that Taylor doesn't realize how Danny failed her as a father.
  Oogway: It is not wrong to mourn one's love, but at the expense of his child? It is not a bad thing that you still love him. He was a good father, once. And you are a good daughter, for trying to protect your father. But it was his job to protect you. And he failed.
  • Taylor points out that, since there were several days in-between Tai Lung being rejected as the Dragon Warrior and his rampage, he hadn't suffered a psychotic break but had likely been stewing over his resentment instead. It was ultimately his choice to go crazy on the Valley, not the fault of Shifu filling his head with expectations.
• Full-Frontal Assault: In order to better camouflage into the treeline to combat Haichong the rat, Taylor has to take off her shirt, leaving her naked from the waist up and essentially flashing a bunch of mice and insects.
  Haichong: You have lovely plumage…
  • Related to the above, Mantis tells Taylor he doesn't care much about her nudity; most bugs don't wear much in the way of clothing, so he's doing this all the time.
• Furry Reminder: The tales Taylor tells to the people of her new world frequently need modification, since they can clash with biological or cultural mores of native races. For example, Heimlich becoming a butterfly in A Bug's Life is played for laughs in her native version since he's fat and flightless and basically unchanged. She has to alter this since flight is a big deal to races that pupate, and depicting one of them unable to do so after he "grows up" is offensive.
  • During her retelling of "Mulan", the Five question why being a woman in the military was such a serious crime, before Viper chimes in to say that at one point in history, there was a series of hot summers and it resulted in far more males than females being born — a real, biological phenomenon among reptiles. This did lead to a law that barred women from the military due to their low numbers, but it only lasted a few decades, and the punishment for the crime was just imprisonment, not death like in Mulan.
  • Inverted in one case. Taylor starts thinking how to spar with Viper and muses that while normal snakes are supposed to be deaf and have terrible eyesight, neither is the case for Viper (or any of the other snakes in the KFP world), so her animal knowledge doesn't necessarily mean much here.
• Gadgeteer Genius: Taotie is able to invent technology that is far more advanced than the time period, as in canon. However, with inspiration from Taylor's recount of Armsmaster, and help from his son, Taotie was able to invent a Trap Armor with a variety of in-built gadgets. The Armor pieces are detachable and rotatable to deal with grapplers, and can be swapped out for different gadgets, which include a primitive, firework-based multi-rocket launcher, a grapple rope dart/retractable whip, a shoulder-mounted crossbow, a flamethrower, rocket boosters, and caltrop grenades. Finally, there is "the Fork", which initially looked like an underwhelming foot-long piece of wood that easily fits into his small hand. Until he pressed a hidden button and revealed that it's a telescoping, six-foot long staff with retractable trident blades. And then pressed another button that arcs electricity between the blades, at enough power that when it was destroyed it exploded. Even Tigress was both concerned and impressed by the Fork afterwards.
  • Bian Ziao is following eagerly in his father's footsteps, and was even inspired by Dragon.
• The Gadfly:
  • Oogway's cryptic teachings are just as likely to be for his own amusement as they are to teach a lesson (oftentimes both).
  • Taylor has gradually started picking up his habits, as seen when she uses her Exorcist Head to freak out Mantis.
• The Ghost:
  • Fenghuang is mentioned several times but hasn't had any major appearances.
  • Lord Shen, the antagonist of the second film, is mentioned by name once in a canon omake, and implicitly mentioned once before (by Mofang the Wolf, who was confirmed in a canon omake to be one of his goons), but doesn't appear outright.
• Giving Radio to the Romans:
  • While not a technology, Taylor introduces and teaches some bullied workers the idea of a Worker's Union.
  • While explaining Armsmaster's Tinkertech, Taylor gives Taotie and his son the idea to create gadget-incorporating armor, as well as making him realize why his other designs like "trap armor" keep failing — he made them too huge and bulky, making them impractical.
    • Also, a canon omake has Dragon in the Spirit Realm giving inspiration to Bian Zao on how to use electricity from the Fork's battery to make light for, as Bian puts it, "flameless candles". Basically, Dragon set the groundwork for the development of the lightbulb, and possibly the Industrial Revolution, centuries early than it would have historically.
• Go-Karting with Bowser: Taotie, despite his personal feelings towards the Jade Palace and Taylor, is convinced to help craft her a birthday present. He and Bian Zao even attend the party themselves despite having previously attacked the Palace.
• Go Mad from the Revelation: The character sheet reveals that in another life, Gan could have been an excellent seer... until he got a vision of the Entities, which made him the paranoiac that he is today.
• Hero of Another Story: Lampshaded. Given the nature of the setting, heroes and villains are waiting just around every corner, with stories completely disconnected from the Valley Of Peace; when Taylor and Oogway are sailing to Japan, the ship is attacked by the captain's pirate brother, who proceeds to have a very dramatic and personal showdown with the captain while Taylor and Oogway deal with the henchmen.
  Taylor: I feel like we just wandered into someone else's story, Master.
  Master Oogway: It happens. I've lost count of how many times it's happened to me.
• Hidden Depths: Taylor is surprised that Po has these. He seems at first like a super hyper fanboy of the Five... but once they leave, he nearly collapses and miserably commiserates that he can't help how he feels about the Five, and Kung Fu in general. He wishes strongly to not make a fool of himself around his heroes. Taylor also notes that he has very good reflexes. In the end, he becomes one of Taylor's good friends.
• High-Voltage Death: Armsmaster carelessly tries adjusting some wiring with his bare hands and gets violently electrocuted. It would have been fatal, except his suit contains a built-in defibrillator which restarted his heart.
• Hoist by His Own Petard:
  • An Omake has Jack Slash on the receiving end of this when Po gives him the Sword of Heroes. He somehow accidentally splits himself in half with it while trying to attack them.
  • Word of God explained that Kai would NOT be an effective Hard Counter to Scion, if Kai were recruited for the Gold Morning, because even though Kai can do Vampiric Draining of Chi (as he attempted to demonstrate on Queen Administrator), such an attempt with Scion would result in him overgorging himself and dying, just as he did in the third movie. Even the Queen Administrator Shard had more than enough Chi for Kai to kill himself that way had he tried to consume it all in one sitting.
• The Illegible: Ju Di the young sheep has really bad handwriting. It also turns out that this is in part due to Taylor's version of Translator Microbes not being able to understand writing unless someone else is around, though both Monkey and Crane confirm that Ju Di's writing is still really really bad.
• Immediate Self-Contradiction: Taylor manages to figure out that the true meaning of the Dragon Scroll is that each person is their own source of limitless potential. But when Taylor questions the reason for keeping the Scroll if it causes so much heartbreak, Oogway explains that besides it being needed one day, the Scroll is kept to teach the more arrogant Masters that some things are forever beyond our reach, no matter how hard we try. Taylor immediately points out the contradiction.
  Oogway: It can be two lessons. Each as we need.
• Insane Troll Logic: Master Yao arrives in a box, calling out for his attendants while Crane, Monkey, and some servants are around. Then he's shows up with Oogway walking down the stairs to them and the box, having been drinking tea with Oogway for a while. When ask how he got here already, he gives this response:
  Master Yao: Simple! The fastest way to get someplace is to already be there!
• In Spite of a Nail: Even without QA, Taylor still has villains shuddering about being swarmed by bugs - in this case, Haichong the rat.
• Insult Backfire: Mofang, the wolf kidnapping the sheep, gets indignant when Taylor insults his sheep costume and implies she wouldn't do much better with her chosen outfit... until he realizes that she's actually well-dressed and asks for her tailor.
• Intoxication Ensues: Once Taylor unlocks her Chi and starts hearing "the music of the World", she acts rather... spaced-out, to the point where Shifu initially thought she was drugged. And apparently, when Oogway unlocked his own chi it was a lot worse for him, so she actually got off lightly in comparison. It takes her a few weeks to fully return to herself.
• It's All About Me: Lady Bao Mingshen. Oogway partly deduces from their final conversation that she abhors the idea that someone like Tigress could become who she is from just a lowly orphan, because if someone low class can become a Noble, then it makes her own position of born-nobility less special.
• It's All My Fault: Averted. Oogway actually tries to convince Taylor that it isn't her fault that her father remained in a depressive slump after her mother died. It's his responsibility as the parent to take care of the child, and though he has the right to mourn the death of his wife, it shouldn't come at the expense of his only daughter, and it isn't Taylor's fault by not trying to talk to him.
  • Taylor later points out to Shifu, who blames himself for Tai Lung's rampage, that while he may have pushed Tai Lung and filled his head with the idea that he was meant to be the Dragon Warrior, it was ultimately Tai Lung's own choice to go apeshit on the Valley. If he had snapped right away it might have been Shifu's fault, but he took several days, which meant that he had time to think about it, and made the choice on his own.
• The Joy of First Flight: Taylor is absolutely ecstatic when she finally gets flying down.
• Kill It with Fire: Taotie's new suit upgrade includes a flamethrower.
• Knotty Tentacles: Taylor does this to incapacitate a pirate octopus.
• Lighter and Softer: Than Worm, as the tone is closer to that of Kung Fu Panda.
• Like a Son to Me: Shifu catches himself just before he calls Tigress "my daughter".
• Literal Split Personality: Armsmaster and Dragon's testing of the Chi anomaly at Taylor's locker ends up splitting Dragon into two identical versions of herself. One remains on Earth Bet and has merely forgotten the last ten minutes. The other gets pulled in the Spirit Realm and gets turned into an actual Dragon made of Chi.
• Look Behind You: Master Bear does this to Kai during their fight in the spirit realm. Kai is in disbelief that Bear thought he would fall for it... until he feels the pressure of the Queen Administrator shard, which inadvertently entered the Spirit World looking for Taylor.
• Loose Canon: The author has stated the holiday omakes have this status with regards to the fic proper.
• Marionette Master: The orphan Fumi is able to use a puppet to spar against the much larger Tigress, though she is obviously holding back.
• Master of None: Subverted. Per Word of God, this is the reason Shifu never took on a title like "Master Red Panda" the way the other students of the Jade Palace normally do; rather than mastering one style, he learned all of them, partly because he hoped to become the Dragon Warrior. While he was seen as the weakest of his generation of the Five for this reason (at least by his teammates), he has mastered all of them in his old age. That's what makes him such a good teacher for the Furious Five.
• Meaningful Name: As explained in one of the bookmarked Informational posts, the Chinese characters used to spell Taylor as Tàilēi are 泰勒. These characters can translate as "great" and "to command" (or "to restrict" or "to restrain"), which is very fitting for Taylor's character.
  • Played with in a darker sense in that Tai Lung hears about "Tailei" and thinks that said name is a direct response to his own. He then discards the idea as he considers it too on-the-nose for Oogway.
• Mentor Archetype: Oogway, being the straightest example in either franchise, is this for Taylor.
• Misplaced Wildlife:
  • Lampshaded In-Universe when Taylor encounters Taotie, a warthog, in China. In the Ghost Month omake series, Taotie reveals that he and his family left the savannah years ago to escape a large fire, but lost his wife in the process.
  • Discussed In-Universe with Master Poison Dart Frog. His species is native to South America but his egg somehow wound up in an African frog village, and he eventually traveled east to China. He speculated his egg might have been carried across the ocean by a storm.
  • Taylor herself — she's a Great Horned Owl, which is native to the Americas, again in China.
  • Oogway himself admits that he's not from China — he was born in the middle of the ocean and wandered around the world for years before settling down there.
  • A ship captain mentions he encountered a platypus tribe which settled in the Philippines after they got lost in a storm.
• Missing Mom: Shifu was raised entirely by his father, having never met his mother. Shirong eventually explains that Shifu's birth was unplanned and both of them were very young. Shirong tried to do right by Shifu's mother, but she disappeared after giving birth and left a note saying she wasn't ready.
• Mouse World: Tiny animals like insects and mice often have their own settlements and cities, separate and away from the cities of larger animals, and sometimes hidden from them entirely. Wei Fu is a massive insect metropolis built into a forest no larger than a tiny village, though there is a "normal"-sized inn on the edge for visitors. Taylor and Mantis also discover it's being harassed by a gang of mice whose home village was unwittingly destroyed when a local settlement started expanding without knowing they were even there.
• Mook Horror Show: Taylor's fight against the bandits is this from their perspective, enough to have them convinced they're up against a demon.
• The Multiverse: A staple for Worm, and present here.
  • Earth Bet, the main world for Worm, home of Brockton Bay, Danny Hebert, and the PRT.
  • Earth Aleph, the only world that Earth Bet has regular contact with, with fewer and weaker parahumans than on Bet.
  • The Spirit World, which operates under its own rules and laws, and is home to Kai and several deceased masters. Dragon's soul, or at least a part of it, now resides there after exposure to a rift in Taylor's locker. Both Taylor and Queen Administrator passed through here on the way to the Kung Fu Panda universe.
  • The Kung Fu Panda universe, where most of the story takes place. Home to the Jade Palace, Oogway, and more.
  • Yao mentions that in his meditations he's seen into other worlds as well:
    • One where instead of settling in China, Oogway settled down in England, where he helped found Loamhedge and became great friends with Luke the Warrior. Interestingly, it implies that Redwall takes place in the KFP Earth, just in another hemisphere.
    • One where Lord Shen never left Gongmen City and the panda genocide never happened.
• The Muse: Trapped in the Spirit Realm, Dragon has taken to whispering advice to Bian Zao when he's looking for inspiration on an invention.
• Musical Spoiler: Taylor's ability to "hear" chi results in her having what amounts to her own musical track for the world. When the pirates are about to attack the ship she's onboard, she notices the music change and realizes something's about to happen.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Emma and Sophia panic after Oogway pulls Taylor from the locker, fearing that they caused Taylor to Trigger and that she might go Carrie on them if she ever returns.
• Mythology Gag:
  • Taylor's color scheme, plus her scarf, give her the same color scheme as her canon outfit (Taylor is brown and black with yellow eyes).
  • Taylor's first fight is against a giant, bipedal lizard who's trying to kill her and she ends up nearly being burned before help arrives. Except this time it's not Lung, it's croc bandits.
  • Po catching a spilled soup with the bowl before any of it hits the ground is the same feat as performed by Shifu during his training in the first film.
  • Gan's vision of the Entities convinced him that Worms are evil. Taylor's home story is titled "Worm", which is also named after the Entities themselves, who are described as Worms.
  • The man himself isn't even in the same dimension as her, but Taylor still brings up the Armsmaster Underwear.
• Mundane Utility: For Taylor's Ghost Month plays, Oogway is brought in as both a minor voice role and to use his Chi powers to help with visual effects.
• My Significance Sense Is Tingling: When Queen Administrator breaks through from the Spirit Realm into the material KFP world, it's detected by a number of masters who are attuned to Chi, including Oogway, Shifu, Tai Lung, Fenghuang, and others; it's subtle enough, however, that most of them write it off as their imaginations.
  • During the performances of Coco, Corpse Bride, and Coraline, small shadow creatures start showing up that only Taylor and a few others can see, coupled with eerily cold winds in July, and voices from nowhere, which indicate that Spirits are about. Furthermore, during the climax of Corpse Bride, the ghosts, both the living actors and the shadow creatures, become agitated but are stopped by a loud voice coming from Oogway's puppet character of Elder Skeleton, telling them to obey the laws of the living and scaring everyone present. When Taylor inquires him about the trick, Oogway responds that it wasn't him, as he had been drinking tea at the time. This makes Taylor realise two things: One, that ghosts are real, and two, they've been watching her plays.
• Named After Somebody Famous: Inverted. In one of the Canon Omakes, when Taylor tells them the story of Mulan (the Disney animated version), explaining that it was written outside of China, Tigress skeptically asks her "Why [is she named] Mulan?" Taylor has no answer, as she didn't write it; Viper and Crane heavily imply that "Mulan" is Tigress' real name. The character sheet later confirms this, and it's stated outright when Tigress visits her old orphanage.
• Never the Selves Shall Meet: Master Yao is transported to the Jade Palace and talks from his box. However, it's revealed that he's already present and has been having tea with Oogway. He then mentions needing to maintain continuity, makes everyone blink simultaneously, then vanishes. Then the version that was in the box emerges, then states that he was having tea with Oogway a month ago from his perspective.
• Nice to the Waiter: Taotie, while hating the Jade Palace and Kung Fu in general, shows little animosity towards the custodian of the Jade Palace and is apologetic when his fight interrupts the gardener's work.
• Ninja: Taylor is learning to become this, with an owl's natural proclivity for stealth hunting compensating for her lack of direct combat talent, and picking up a knack for throwing knives and blades. Oogway even decides to take her to Japan when he receives word of the monster in Japan (who is secretly the QA shard).
• No Cartoon Fish: With the exception of koi and goldfish, fish aren't sapient in the KFP world, allowing carnivores and omnivores to still have access to a source of animal protein.
• Noodle Incident: Oogway mentions a trip to Japan where he first encountered a ninja (specifically, a ninja turtle), after angering some local warlords who promptly sent assassins after him; she stuck out in his memory for coming the closest to actually killing him.
• Normal Fish in a Tiny Pond: A slightly more literal example when Taylor visits the insect village. She's about the normal height of the residents of the Valley, but there, she's a giant. It comes in handy when fighting the rat boss.
• Not Hyperbole: When Master Yao claims he started cursing when he was distracted and prevented from gaining true enlightenment, he's not kidding — the mountain he used to live on will not be habitable for at least another hundred years.
• Not So Above It All: It's subtle, but even Oogway finds it frustrating when talking to Yao.
• "Not So Different" Remark: The Five, Oogway, and Shifu all realize that part of Taylor's problem is that she can't confront the fact that her father hurt her, and so start sharing some stories of how her situation — having a complex relation to their parental figure — is not unique.
• Not What I Signed on For: When Fung realizes the undefined person his group was hired to attack is Master Viper, he decides they never agreed to fight a defender of China and promptly sits out the fight. This is actually a Running Gag for the Crocs, as they want to be honest mercenaries, but people keep hiring them to do evil things, like rob an orphanage.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • Taylor has this reaction after waking up and seeing Shifu at her bedside.
  • Taylor has this reaction again after Crane remarks she looks like she had a run-in with Tai Lung; Taylor's panic is from hearing the 'Lung' part and assuming it was Lung (AKA the pyrokinetic rage dragon) from Earth Bet.
  • Taylor's disappearance has this effect on people in Brockton Bay — Emma and Sophia are afraid of Taylor going Carrie, Danny becomes depressed and Tattletale accidentally pushes it into a full-blown Trigger Event, and Armsmaster and Dragon start anxiously poking around Taylor's locker — more specifically, the dimensional rift to the Spirit Realm in it.
  • The mouse Mantis is interrogating goes paler and paler as Taylor's impromptu play based on A Bug's Life, being watched by thousands of insects who are used to being extorted by the larger mice, gets to the scene where Hopper tells his men that the ants could easily overwhelm the larger grasshoppers with sheer numbers. Said mouse realizes that the residents of the insect city have just had a very dangerous idea put in their heads.
  • Kai initially reacts to Queen Administrator sneaking up behind him this way.
  • The Queen Administrator Shard appearing in Japan has this effect on witnesses.
  • Taylor and the Furious Five are horrified when Oogway decides to put on an exhibition match: All of them versus him.
  • Fung and his group of former bandits get one when they decide collectively to not steal from an orphanage, only for Jiang to burst into the meeting, having already stolen the funds. What's more, this means he's leading the Five, Taylor, and Oogway right to them.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome: During the fundraiser, Oogway holds an exhibition match with himself against the Five and Taylor. We don't get to see it and only know that Oogway soundly won with one arm behind his back, and Po missed it while getting supplies, much to his sheer despair when he finds out.
• Omniglot: Master Yao explains to Taylor that when she got pulled through the Spirit Realm, her soul had absolutely no Chi, so the Realm filled in the "vacuum" with an overflow of Chi that also changed her in mind and body. Her body obviously became an owl, but her mind was opened and, aided by the Chi overexposure, she unconsciously developed a Chi technique that allows her to speak, read, hear, and understand the same language as whoever she's talking to, which explains how she has difficulty with reading while alone. She isn't even aware of it, and has to intensely focus on it to notice that people are apparently speaking two different ways simultaneously. Master Yao actually shows Taylor this ability of hers, by speaking to her in multiple languages himself: German, Gaelic, Japanese, Navajo, Incan, German again, English, French, and Sandawe. Taylor didn't notice any difference besides a change in voice tone and speed, and only was made aware when Mantis pointed it out.
• The Omniscient: Subverted two separate times:
  • Master Yao knows a lot of things, but he admits he doesn't know everything, and actually fears the day when he can't learn anything more.
  • Oogway knows a lot about Kung Fu, being the inventor of it after all, but he doesn't know everything about it as the art has evolved and developed over the centuries. He does keep himself informed, but he isn't aware of or know the answer to every detail and secret, unlike Master Yao.
• Only a Flesh Wound: Armsmaster is electrocuted and his heart stops as a result, only surviving due to his suit's built-in defibrillator. He tries to brush the incident off as unimportant as Dragon forces him to wait for a medical professional to check him over.
• Only the Chosen May Wield: According to Oogway, the invisible Trident Of Destiny can only be seen by its chosen wielder, who will use it to save all of China. Although it's been waiting a long time, he remains confident that the Chosen One will arrive one day. Taylor thinks he's screwing with her.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: When Tigress starts doing odd jobs in the Valley of Peace for money, Po is extremely confused as... well, she's one of the strongest Martial Artists in the area and she's picking up people's groceries and painting fences. And even if she needed cash for something, there are other things that would take longer but pay more, and the rest of the Five are similarly concerned when Taylor talks about it with them. It turns out that she's raising money to save the orphanage where she grew up, since their rent is going up drastically.
• Our Dragons Are Different: When Dragon is pulled into the Spirit World, she turns into, well, a dragon — but Master Bear claims she's not. He is claiming she's not a dragon because he's used to the idea of Eastern dragons, which were long and snakelike, whereas Dragon has become a Western dragon, which is more akin to dinosaurs with wings.
• Original Flavour: If not for the context of being made for a crossover fanfiction, most fanart of Owl!Taylor/Tailei would pass very well for OC fanart for Kung Fu Panda.
• Parental Abandonment: Shifu's grandfather abandoned his son in a hotel in the middle of the night when he realized his son wasn't young and cute enough to pull scams with anymore. Shirong also abandoned his son, but unlike his father, he left little Shifu in a place he knew his son would be happy and better off without his old man.
• Parental Neglect: Oogway spends one chapter trying to convince Taylor that, yes, her father did fail her by neglecting his only daughter in his grief over his dead wife, and that it wasn't her fault that he remained like that. Shifu also tells Taylor of her of his con-artist father, Shirong, and how he abandoned him to help her come to terms with the fact that she can still love her father while feeling betrayed by him.
• Paper-Thin Disguise: Taylor is flabbergasted that a wolf disguised as a sheep managed to fool everyone in a sheep village, even as Super Gullible as they tend to be, since his disguise not only doesn't use real wool, it doesn't even cover his face.
• Pet the Dog: Taotie briefly meets Po, and is left impressed with the quality of his figurines and the ingenuity he shows when making them — so much so that he gives the panda a few tools to let him make even more complex and realistic figures.
• Pint-Size Powerhouse: Deconstructed. Mantis is used to being this trope applying to him and taking down warriors many times his size, but is at a loss when fighting opponents as big as or smaller than he is. He buys some of Po's action figures as training dummies to make up for it.
• Poor Communication Kills: The rat leader of the criminal mice is captured partially because he doesn't listen to a subordinate.
  • According to author notes, the Custodian saw Tai Lung's Fall coming and tried to warn Shifu, so he could prevent it from happening. Unfortunately, this took the form of giving Shifu job posters, a flip book showing a flower growing too tall too fast and wilting, and a picture of Tai Lung having a breakdown. Shifu had no idea what the Custodian was talking about and history happened anyway.
• Power Levels:
  • One Omake rated Taylor/Tailei as Changer 3 (assuming that, on Earth Bet, she could shapeshift between human and owl forms), Mover 6 (flight), Brute 5 (unknown durability), Stranger 4 (owl stealth), Thinker 5 (quick reflexes), Blaster 4 (superhuman aiming with thrown weapons), Striker 3 (nerve attack).
  • Another Omake rated Tai Lung as Mover 4 (canonical speed and agility), Brute 6 (took on several dozen rhinos at once), Thinker 5 (quick reflexes), Striker 3 (nerve attack), and an S-Class threat.
• Properly Paranoid: Gan tends to believe in various things that, while ridiculous and an over-reaction to others, actually turn out to be justified.
  • Viper is planning a party to celebrate the one year anniversary of Taylor's arrival at the Valley, and has the meeting to do so at Ping's restaurant to make sure that Taylor can't find out about it. The others think that she's being overly paranoid, but sure enough, Taylor subconsciously senses that someone is talking about her.
• Psychometry: Since QA isn't available, Danny triggers with a different power than the official list of QA powers he might have gotten if he triggered in canon. In this case, he becomes a Post-cognitive Thinker called Gumshoe who can see apparitions of people living out past events, which he can turn on and off. He can only see up to the past three days, though the more familiar he is with a location or with the people he's seeing, the further back he can look. Furthermore, the ghosts he sees can only be watched in real-time and not slowed down, reversed or paused, though he can "rewind" them. He can also narrow down the number of ghosts he sees by making it show only specific types of people, such as 'teenagers' and 'teenagers in danger' or 'Taylor'. Finally, even with this refined search, he will still see the ghosts of those that a person has contact/is involved with and even see objects like a van carrying them away.
• Redemption Rejection: Lady Bao Mingshen refuses to accept Oogway's explanation that anyone, regardless of class or origin, can be special. Oogway doesn't press the issue.
  For someone to be helped, they must first want to be helped.
• Regret Eating Me: As he's being transformed into a pedant, Master Poison Dart Frog warns Kai that he'll regret consuming his chi. Kai just laughs until he realizes what he meant.
• Replacement Goldfish: Subverted; once word gets around about a new owl student at the Jade Palace, some of those old enough to remember her assume that Tailei is a replacement for Fenghuang. As Shifu is quick to point out, however, the fact that they're both owls is where any similarities between the two of them end.
• Rite of Passage: Metamorphosis is seen as this by insect species that experience it (moths, butterflies, etc.), and they take it very seriously. Mantis advises Taylor to change the part at the end of A Bug's Life when Heimlich metamorphizes into a fat, flightless butterfly; something like that can be Played for Laughs elsewhere, but would be incredibly offensive to an insect audience.
• Saving the Orphanage: Chapter 16 reveals that the reason Tigress has been doing odd-jobs for money had been to gather the funds to save Bao Gu Orphanage, where she grew up. When the funds are barely enough for a month's rent, Taylor comes up with the idea of the Five putting on a fundraiser festival, and soon the entire staff of the Jade Palace is roped in. By the end of the week, they earn enough money to buy the orphanage's land outright.
• Scare 'Em Straight: The Croc Bandits that avoid being arrested are so spooked by Taylor that they decide to become mercenaries instead. When they take a job to steal at the Orphanage, they quickly decide to forget the job both because it'd be really wrong to steal from orphans, and because they are scared of the Five and their demonic ally.
• Secret Identity: Taylor decides to use her name "Tailei" as her "hero" name when on missions. She tries to explain the logic to Mantis, but he immediately deconstructs the logic for Taylor — Taylor is the only Owl living in the Valley of Peace, Taylor doesn't wear a mask or disguise herself... ever, and everyone knows who she is already, so there's no real point.
• Secret-Keeper: Oogway remains the only character aware of where Taylor comes from.
• Sensory Overload: To Taylor's music-based chi senses, the Valley of Peace has a fairly consistent background noise, hinted at being cultivated by Oogway. Outside of the valley, there's more noises overlapping one another, sounding like multiple songs of different genres being played at once. She complains of headaches from it early on.
• Shamu Fu: When Boar attacks Tigress seeking revenge, she ends up slapping him with a tuna, leaving him somewhat confused. Then she decides to get serious, the next blow blasting Boar into the distance and reducing the fish to chunks of meat.
• Sink or Swim Mentor: Apparently in this world, birds teach their kids to fly by throwing them out of trees, and Crane takes a few cues from this in teaching Taylor how to fly. His last flying lesson for her is throwing her off a cliff.
• Sliding Scale of Idealism vs. Cynicism: Kung Fu Panda sits solidly on the idealistic end of the scale. So does Oogway's Little Owl, much to Taylor's benefit.
• The Storyteller: Taylor, somewhat inadvertently, develops a reputation as a masterful storyteller in the Valley Of Peace. It starts when Oogway asks her to tell him stories from her world (since one of his favorite things about traveling in his youth was hearing the stories people told him) and she recites the plots of everything from The Tortoise and the Hare, to The Princess Bride; eventually, she starts expanding her audience (Po particularly enjoyed Star Wars).
  • She's able to teach a group of insects to put on a play of a slightly modified version of A Bug's Life, which causes some concern to the local rodent mob as it might start giving the bugs "ideas".
  • She also shares a modified version of Mulan to the Furious Five. It should be noted that some of these stories, from the perspective of others, are silly and weren't written with the current world in mind — the "Bugs Life" thing had to be rewritten so that not everyone in Hopper's Faction were grasshoppers (as they don't have as much a monoculture as the ants do) or that the "Girls aren't allowed in the military" thing in Mulan seems unrealistic to her audience.
  • She even puts on a play of Peter Pan with the kids of Bao Gu Orphanage as the actors and Monkey in the role of Captain Hook.
  • She's encouraged by Po and Viper to propose some possible stories for Ghost Month. Unfortunately, due Culture Clash, they are rather put off by how most of Taylor's stories about ghosts and demons are the horror stories, which are considered bad luck to mentioned too much. So stories like The Ring, The Shining, It, Frankenstein, and Pet Sematary are considered big no-nos. However, they did enjoy more happy supernatural stories like Kubo and the Two Strings, Corpse Bride, and Coco, the latter two of which are presented as full-on acted plays alongside Coraline.
• Stating the Simple Solution: Of all the people to attempt to steal the Dragon Scroll, Taylor is one of a tiny handful to ever think of just sneaking in while the Palace's inhabitants were asleep, instead of staging a full-scale assault as Tai Lung or Fenghuang did. The only reason she doesn't get away with it is that she put the scroll back backward, something Oogway fixes before anyone else can see it. He admits that it's "not that hard to reach if one puts their mind to it" deliberately, knowing the psychology of his students enough to safely bet on honor or pride to keep even the most duplicitous of them from taking it by subterfuge as opposed to trying to fight him so they can claim it "rightfully". Plus, it's not like anyone would try to hold on to or run off with it after seeing the utter lack of copyable secrets within.
• Straight Man and Wise Guy: Mantis and Monkey, respectively, put on a two-man comedy routine to raise funds for Bao Gu orphanage.
• Submarine Pirates: A whale pirate had a set of armor with an air-tight building on his back where the rest of his crew could ride along while he was submerged.
• Super Gullible: The residents of a sheep village, even falling for an incredibly obvious wolf in a sheep disguise. It's basically a trait of their village — they at several points fall for the excuse that guests are in their town for the excellent fishing... when their town is landlocked and has no native bodies of water of any kind.
• Surprise Party: The Furious Five and Po team up to plan a surprise party for the anniversary of Taylor's arrival at the Jade Palace. Complicating matters is that Taylor has incredibly sharp hearing (made sharper yet by her burgeoning chi sense), which makes planning even at Po's restaurant risky. They ultimately succeed in surprising her, but spook her into nearly taking out one of the croc mercs with her throwing knives.
• Teen Pregnancy: Shifu's father was only sixteen when Shifu was born.
• That Came Out Wrong: Po does a long-winded explanation that eventually leads to him asking Viper if he could sketch her back tattoos for when he paints his figures. Viper responds that, if he wanted a "closer look", he should have just asked, leaving Po scandalised.
• Too Spicy for Yog-Sothoth: Master Poison Dart Frog's chi is naturally poisonous. When Kai consumes him, he ends up incapacitated for quite a while.
• Training from Hell: Shifu puts Taylor through the wringer when he takes over her training; it's just as much to get her into fighting shape as it is a test to see if she'll quit when it gets too difficult. She doesn't. Oogway later reveals that he spent a long time cultivating the Valley as a place where Chi can flow more easily, allowing people to undergo training that would be extremely dangerous, even fatal, anywhere else.
• Trapped in Villainy: Played for Laughs; the Croc Bandits are making a genuine effort to reform into law-abiding sell-swords, but they keep unwittingly hiring themselves out to villains looking to take on the Five, much to their frustration. This is especially bad because they decided to reform specifically to avoid having to take on the Five.
• Traumatic Superpower Awakening: Defied by Oogway, whose aversion of Taylor's canon Trigger Event is what starts the plot of this fanfic.
  • Every cape over in the Worm side of things counts as this (save for Cauldron Capes), as per canon. Danny, for one, becomes a post-cog after Tattletale (inadvertently) hammers home how badly he failed as a father.
• Troll: Zhu wasn't sure about taking the escort job from Oogway until he realized it meant Fung would be forced to spend a year in the presence of the "owl demon" Tailei.
• A Twinkle in the Sky: Tigress does this to an out-of-shape Boar when he tries to challenge her to a rematch.
• Underestimating Badassery:
  • It's kind of hard to take Master Sloth seriously as a warrior since, well, he's a sloth. However, anyone who fights him soon learns that he wasn't just handed the title of Master for no reason.
  • Taylor encourages a child Lidong to get smarter to outsmart the other crocodiles who pick on him for being small and weak, leading to him to start reading books. Of course, since in the future Lidong will eventually grow up to be the biggest and strongest croc in the KFP series, this will mean that Lidong might actually turn into a Genius Bruiser due to Taylor's actions.
• Universal Translator: It's implied that Taylor can understand the other characters (who ought to be speaking ancient Mandarin) because the same magic that brought her here and made her into an owl is translating everything she hears into American English. The first time she starts training in Chi, the ability is briefly disrupted, and she can't understand what Oogway is saying to her.
  Oogway: 什么？ 我听不能, 你太远.^TranslationWhat? I can't hear, you're too far away.
  • Master Yao claims that Taylor inadvertently created a whole new Chi technique based on this when she got brought through the Spirit Realm — copying other people's knowledge of their own language out of their heads. It's why she can talk perfectly with others, but can only read when other people are with her.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom:
  • Tattletale, while trying to encourage a depressed Danny to do better and not fall deeper to despair, misreads her power's clues, screws up and puts all the blame on Danny for Taylor disappearing. The way she does this causes Danny to Trigger. And then Coil calls her in before she can go after him.
  • Oogway saves Taylor, pulling her into his world. This leads Queen Administrator to try to get into the Kung Fu Panda world; it eventually succeeds, becoming a monstrous spider-like creature. Further, it leaves an open portal between Earth Bet and the Spirit World — which an instance of Dragon was just sucked into.
  • Master Snow Leopard accidentally did Tai Lung a massive disservice years ago when she thoughtlessly proclaimed to him that she wasn't his mother, leading to him learning he was adopted by Shifu. While she tried to smooth it over, it led to Tai Lung not calling Shifu "Father" anymore and straining the relationship between the two.
  • Taylor's comments to Taotie inspire him to create Trap Armor, which is a significant upgrade from what he had before and poses a real threat to the Palace.
• Uplifted Animal: According to ancient legends, all animals on the Kung Fu Panda world were once like they are on Earth, non-sapient and preying on each other, before they somehow gained sapience.
• Used to Be a Sweet Kid: Everyone who knew him at the age comments on what a sweet, adorable cub Tai Lung was, unlike the absolutely brutal warrior he grew up to be.
• Vampiric Draining: Kai is directly compared to a vampire by Master Bear during their fight, as besides his trick of turning the spirits of Kung-Fu masters into jade talismans to gain their strength, he apparently can passively siphon the chi of his foes, weakening them as the fight goes on. This trope is also why he's chasing the QA Shard - it's essentially a massive blob of Chi that he could eat to his heart's content. It only got away because he was briefly overwhelmed by the quality of its chi. A later author's note points out that he's not a black hole — like in the third film, if he eats too much chi, he can be overwhelmed and destroyed (which nearly happens when he tries to eat the QA Shard and is what would happen if he tried to fight Scion).
• Vicariously Ambitious: Shifu had hoped to become the Dragon Warrior as a child, and when it turned out not to be the case, tried to make Tai Lung the Dragon Warrior in part because he was pushing his own dreams onto him, so he could have the honor of training the Dragon Warrior instead.
• Villain Forgot to Level Grind: Boar was the first threat that the Five faced as a group, and they only narrowly defeated him. Unfortunately for Boar when he runs into Tigress again a year after Taylor arrived in the Valley, he's clearly let himself go while Tigress has continued to train and hone her skills, so when he attacks her while she's hauling a fish shipment for Taylor's party, she easily sends him flying. The ape that Viper defeated is wise to his inability to beat her by himself despite being in better shape, so he hires additional muscle... Fung and company, who are not happy when they realize who they got hired to fight.
• Villains Out Shopping: Taotie runs into both Taylor and Shifu while out shopping for supplies and groceries.
  • Likewise, Shifu runs into Taotie and Bian Zao shopping while travelling through the market.
• Walking the Earth: What Oogway spent his youth doing, before settling on China as his home. He even mentions having been born in the ocean.
• Weaksauce Weakness: When the QA Shard goes into the Spirit World, it is nothing more than a formless Eldritch mass of Chi. Kai feeds on Chi. Kai quickly tries to absorb the whole thing but QA gets away. However, this becomes Subverted as, by Word of God, if Kai did try to eat all that Chi, he'd basically die from the overdose.
• Wham Episode: Chapter 18 — Master Yao, a Markhor who lived for decades in a box, personally visits the Jade Palace to talk with Taylor about chi and discuss her origins on Earth Bet.
• Wham Line: Master Yao makes two in Chapter 18, divulging knowledge of things he shouldn't be aware of:
  "Aha! There's that moment I love so much, that dawning realization! You are correct, Taylor Anne Hebert, there is something screwy going on!"
  "Ah. Apologies. I will refrain if you prefer. What is a Simurgh? I don't think it's the same thing I'm thinking of."
• What the Hell, Hero?: A very minor example. Viper and Mantis do chew out Taylor briefly for going off on her own to stop the croc bandits, and the rest of the Five and Shifu continue once they get back to the palace. It's also clear to Taylor that this is Anger Born of Worry in at least some of the cases, and she does justify it in that no one had listened to her before when she tried to stop bullies, so she didn't think anyone would listen now.
• The World Is Just Awesome: After she consciously awakens her chi Taylor begins to hear the music of everyone and everything. She is so swept up in the sensation that she's left in a daze for weeks before she snaps out of it, and even then risks falling back into it a few times. Oogway implies that this sort of thing is common for those who awaken their chi for the first time, saying that he was all but dead to the world when he first unlocked his.
• Year Inside, Hour Outside/Narnia Time: The exact rate is still unclear, but from the few glimpses we get into Bet, it's clear that time doesn't completely sync up with the KFP world.
• You All Meet in a Cell: The canon Omake "Chain Gang" shows Dirk, Mofang, and Haichong meeting each other in prison.
• You Dirty Rat!: Haichong is a rat that is extorting a village of bugs for their resources, with a bunch of beleaguered mice as minions.
• You Have GOT to Be Kidding Me!:
  • Taylor is in disbelief that everyone thought that Viper couldn't follow in her father's footsteps without fangs, pointing out that, as a snake, she's basically a long tube of pure muscle.
  • This is Fung's reaction when he finds out that he and his fellow croc mercs were hired to fight Viper, wondering why this kind of thing keeps happening to them — whether he means "hired to be villains", or "Keeps running into people from the Valley of Peace," isn't said, since both are applicable.
• Your Normal Is Our Taboo: One omake has Taylor adapting a variety of horror stories for Ghost Month, the Chinese equivalent of Halloween. Unfortunately, Viper informs her that it is considered bad luck to talk too much about ghost and demons, and being sad during said holiday opens you up to possession and such. Both she, Po, and a number of bystanders are notably horrified by all the Horror stories Taylor proposes and how it's so normal where she's from.

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