Fanfic / Snuggles the Symbiote

Snuggles the Symbiote by Rater202 is a Worm/Marvel Universe crossover fanfiction.

Spacebattles link

Side story content is published on FFN here

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Tropes:

Tropes A through M

• Abusive Parents: according to Yuki, Ashley's racist aunt, Ashley's maternal grandmother trained Yuri and Yuki to be ninjas... Until their teen years when Tanshin, Ashley's maternal grandfather, divorced her with Yuri testifying about the abuse... Though, based on how Yuki says it, she doesn't agree.
  • When Ashley is talking to her resurrected mother later, she elaborates; at first the training wasn't that bad, even exciting and interesting, but the pace picked up as time went on. They started at eight, and by the time they were in middle school they were dueling with lethal bladed weapons three times a week. Not only that, but she was trying to indoctrinate them, even giving them "herbal health" smoothies with alchemical drugs in them... without telling the twins what was in them. This is in contrast to Yuri's own treatment of Ashley, as she and her husband always told her what the medication she was taking did and made sure that she understood to the best of their ability.
• Addictive Magic: Taking codices is seemingly this for Ashley but, strangely, not Mister Snuggles based on how he tries to discourage her from taking more after they're healed at first. To the point that she licks her lips when she realizes she's fighting someone with two symbiote codices. After she finds out that Sinister was connected to her parents being attacked and her being kidnapped, she starts going after every codice she can, especially when she finds a way to take them out painlessly, in order to both get powerful enough to stop the Endbringers and to prepare for "God" while making it abundantly clear that taking codices from particularly powerful people like Omega Level Mutants or people with Cosmic Power feels good, without even getting to her drive to get stronger because she feels like a failure. After adsorbing the Carnage and Grendel symbiotes in Doverton, she even starts to feel diminishing returns, wondering where the good feeling is and why the rush faded so fast. Doctor Strange even calls it an addiction after he talks her down, saying that she had a dopamine spike every time she absorbed a codex, and talks to her about addiction in general, recommending that she not eat any codices for now and to contact him if she does need to eat a codex for some reason.
• A Form You Are Comfortable With: The One Above All uses Stan Lee as a representative/avatar when Ashley has a Near-Death Experience.
• Afraid of Needles: Implied in the first chapter and confirmed in the Spacebattles thread, Ashley has a crippling fear of needles after spending a year being fed intravenously and having her hormones siphoned out to make narcotics, and denies it despite her fear being obvious. Ms. Mystic claims that it's not something that Ashley ever grows out of, at least by her point in the timeline. Later still, Mister Snuggles has to physically prevent Ashley from ripping out an IV when Ashley wakes up in the hospital and she agrees to something risky to get her healed faster because it'll man the needle comes out faster. Her narration reveals that she's deeply ashamed of being afraid of needles, considering it unheroic.
• A God I Am Not: When some of the members of the Order of X show up by where the group from Bet is, Ashley takes offense at the idea that mutants could be considered gods, and makes the Order members leave when they see her skin and try to start worshipping her. When Doctor Strange tells her that she's technically an Elder God Godling now due to all of Knull's essence (as well as the various other powers and essences enhancing the symbiotes and codices), in the same manner that an average Asgardian is a god, she immediately rejects the idea. She slowly starts coming around thanks to therapy, with her first real acknowledgment being when giving a Stealth Insult to Lung.
• Alternate Self:
  • In chapter 9 Ashley discovers a villain has the Worm-verse Mjolnir, which makes her realize that Thor once existed on Earth Bet.
  • In the Spacebattles thread, the author has mentioned to various degrees of detail various alternate Ashleys, as Ashley was originally meant for freeform roleplaying and thus there are multiple variations on her at various ages and power levels. Most of them are based on the main Marvel universe but some of them are translations of Ashley's concept to other settings.
  • The New Poison Hive that shows up has alternate versions of several Earth-Bet capes, including Panacea and Bonesaw, the seeming leader of the group being a Taylor/Skitter alternate who had bonded to Venom before being consumed.
  • Ashley initially assumes that Luke Lafayette, a lawyer who helped with her and Taylor’s contracts, is the Bet version of Loki. He convinced her otherwise, but never actually denied it...
  • Dean turns out to be Thor’s Reincarnation, and Luke is Loki’s.
• All Your Powers Combined:
  • Ashley develops reasonable facsimiles of all of her Genetic donor's powers, as well as Ms. Marvel and Spider-Man's full ranges of abilities, and a handful of extras from a combination of Mister Snuggles absorbing a few symbiote codices, which temporarily enhanced his ability to adapt, and undergoing Terrigensis while trying to resurrect a mortally wounded Ashley whose body was saturated with synthetic terrigen
  • Bonesaw gives herself the combined powers of several Marvel villains and anti-heroes with a serum she retronegineered from the DNA of their clones.
• Amazing Technicolor Population: After her death and resurrection, Ashley has pale, greyish, purplish-blue skin, dark blue lips, and red eyes.
• Amazonian Beauty: According to Tattletale's future self, the future version of Ashley will be six-foot-four with a six-pack of abs by the time she's sixteen, something that will apparently make her popular among teenage boys. WoG is that it's because of SSS from Mister Snuggles, inherited from Captain America's genetic sample, building up in her body over the course of years. Not enough to give her the full effect, but enough that puberty was really good for her.
• Ambiguously Gay: In the conversation where she mentions Future Ashley's figure, Future Lisa also mentions that Ashley spends her turns on movie night with Gremlin, a teammate referred to with female pronouns, taking up the whole couch and gives two-of-three odds that the teenage boys that appreciate future Cuddlebug's muscles are gonna be disappointed. A canon side-story has Ashley flat out say that she doesn't know if she likes boys or girls yet. Word of God eventually clarifies that Ashley is and always will be asexual and aromantic.
• And I Must Scream: Bonesaw does this to a clone of Maximus the Mad in the Gabriel Stacy potion of the Goblins' interlude, having hooked his head up to some spare organs and locked him in a tube to see how long it would take him to die again after having accidentally reanimated his head while studying his anatomy.
• Anti-Nihilist: In One Chapter, Ashley responds to a rant with Straw Nihilist leanings by spelling out how she has every right to give up on life and moan and complained due to her crippling illness and the fact that she's probably living on borrowed time but that the heroes of her world inspired her to try and be her best self and do something meaningful as much as she can even if it ultimately turns out to be pointless.
• Arbitrary Skepticism: When on a trip to Ashley's world to deal with her aunt's control over her parent's graves, Taylor expresses disbelief that, with all the other stuff she believes in and accepts as normal, that she thought that Howard the Duck was an urban legend.
• Armor-Piercing Question: When Ashley asks Bonesaw if she's happy, and if she likes killing because she actually likes it or because Jack Slash told her that she likes it, Taylor's Spider-Sense actually stops going off. Her following questions about her agency nearly seem to work too, but Jack's conditioning keeps it from working, though the last round of them clearly has an effect on her.
• A Round of Drinks for the House: In an early chapter, Ashley makes note that her Grandfather was once in a bar when Thor came in and bought a round and that's why they were Thorites. In Interlude 6, it's elaborated on that Thor and implicitly Hercules and Wolverine were coming to try the pub's craft beer and Thor was impressed with how the regular patrons handled themselves when a Friend of Humanity got drunk and violent and ranted about mutants in a bar owned and run by an open mutant.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: Among the other, more serious benefits of manipulating when Ashley went over the edge, Dr. Strange lists her "yeeting" Apocalypse over the horizon to deflate his ego a bit.
• Artistic License – Biology: In-Universe, Ashley thinks that qualifying mutants as a separate species/subspecies and/or stage of evolution from normal humans just because of a Superpower Russian Roulette gene complex is bad science, and thinks that the "Homo Superior" term is just inaccurate in addition because she doesn't believe that mutants are inherently superior to normal humans or other types of superhumans, in addition to the bad science of calling them a separate species.
• Ascended Fangirl: Ashley was a big fan of her Earth's heroes, especially Spider-Man since he saved her when she fell out of the window as a child (and geeks out the most when she finds a power similar to his), though she also seems to like the Thing and Captain America a lot. Taylor levels her status as a cross-dimensional cape geek, as the PRT wants that info.
• Asshole Victim: Absolutely no one is shedding tears after Ashley kills Kletus Cassidy and eats his soul.
• The Assimilator: Mister Snuggles nonlethally harvests the symbiote codices from Ms. Marvel, Deadpool, and X-23 in order to be able to manifest a physical form and better heal Ashley if she needs it when they get to her. He mentions that the only reason he didn't take Spider-Man's, which he notes to be powerful, is because Ashley wouldn't forgive him for hurting or discomforting Spider-Man.
  • Later, Ashley is convinced to do the same to Reed Richard's and Beast so that they and Doctor Strange can study how it affects her to see if they can use it to completely cure the genetic instability caused by Mister Snuggle's genetic instability, which could potentially kill it and, due to their molecular fusion, Ashley. The following Chapter, Ashley is given codices harvested from the Spider-Elves/Svartalvenom from War of the Realms
  • After losing a fight to Taskmaster, Ashley becomes convinced that she needs to be stronger and more skilled. First she discretely steals a codex from the Human Torch while he's sleeping, then she violently extracts the Venom and Mania codices from the Scorpion when it turns out that he's piloting a giant Robot modeled on Metal Gear RAY as the final boss of Murderworld, which startles the other Wards. She puts collecting more on hold when picking a fight with Apocalypse results in him agreeing to teach her magic, but the combination of realizing that she can't connect to the rest of the mutants on Krakoa, a prerequisite for Mutant Magic, and Mister Sinister being Mister Sinister makes Ashley snap and decide to take Codices by force, starting with Wolverine's. The following chapter she chases it with Archangel and Colossus, drains skills from Apocalypse, and then after almost being talked down she goes on to take the Codices from Nightcrawler, Magick, Eye-Boy, Iceman, Storm, Jean Grey, Cyclopes, and five Extras from Venomized.
• As You Know: Lampshaded by Lisa when Jo and Nikki do this, asking them if they make a habit of repeating things that they both are more than aware of when talking to each other. Jo gets aggressively defensive, stating that their status as living archives of galactic history should be a fact of pride.
• Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!: Ashley is distracted from a rant on adjectival superhero titles by the smell of cooking bacon.
• Audible Sharpness: Averted, Cuddlebug's claws don't make a sound when they form. Ashley says "snikt" instead. Until Ashley's powers get an upgrade, that is.
• Backup from Otherworld: Clonepool aids Grace when her Shadow-self is attacking her in Arcade's death game, having apparently pulled some strings to help her, and even before then he'd been hanging around her head giving her advice.
• Badass Boast:
  • Mister Snuggles, when separated from Ashley, explains exactly what it is, what purpose it was created for, and what it's theoretically capable of to explain exactly why Alexandria was going to let it try to rescue Ashley or else it would kill her.
  • A few chapters later, Ashley herself has one regarding how she and Mister Snuggles are a Heinz Hybrid of several races and power sources following her death and resurrection before declaring herself The First One of a new type of Superhuman and a Superior Apocalypse.
  • She can't think of one a little later, so she paraphrases Smaug.
  • Reed Richards of the Fantastic Four boasts about himself and his family when asked who he is when he's explaining exactly why the PRT's response to Ashley's growing independence was inappropriate and trying to nip an interdimensional conflict in the bud.
• Batman Gambit:
  • Dr. Strange, in part following some advice Ms. Mystic gave him, manipulated things so that Ashley would go over the edge under controlled circumstances, then snap her back to her senses before she goes too far, thus making her aware of her issues and willing to deal with them, stop Knull's Avatar from killing thousands, remove any traces of All-Black, the Grendel, and the Carnage symbiote, remove many things that could grant dangerous levels of power in the wrong hands from the reach of said hands, delay Knull's return indefinitely, possibly kill Cletus Kassady for good (although he didn't plan for that), deflated Apocalypse's ego a bit via Ashley "yeeting" him over the horizon, and place phenomenal cosmic power and knowledge in the hands of someone who can and will use it responsibly and for the greater good after Ashley develops the necessary emotional maturity to handle it.
  • In chapter 66, Ashley plays Sauron's Ego Tolkien Fanboyism against him to make him waste time on a riddle contest.
• Berserk Button: Do not call Ashley "mutie."
  • In general, she seems to be upset in by racism, fantastic or otherwise, and dehumanization. She threatens to kill Quentin Quire when he calls Taylor a "Flatscan."
  • She thinks that the whole "Homo Superior" terminology and the idea that they're the next stage in human evolution is inaccurate and bad science, and isn't afraid to say it.
  • When Bloodbath says that he's not quite Cletus or Carnage, and that he doesn't have anyone else in there with him, Ashley notes that he must be lonely, which pisses him off.
  • Ashley flies into a brief Unstoppable Rage that triggers a temporary activation of her Hell-Mark after she sees how many unrepentant sins Alexandria's committed of her own will.
  • When members of the Order of X see her skin and realize her relationship to Apocalypse, she gets pissed off when they try to worship her, and she lost the focus to keep her new skin color hidden because she got mad at the idea of mutants being considered gods.
  • Ashley becomes violently enraged when she realizes that 1: Mister Sinister is directly responsible for the deaths of her parents and 2: His position in Krakoa means that he's going to get away with it and all the other horrible things he's done, to the point of becoming disillusioned with the X-Men and deciding to take their Symbiote codices by force.
• Beyond the Impossible: Concentrated Terrigen is lethal to mutants, and all attempts to make a mutant-Inhuman hybrid have failed due to terminal genetic incompatibilities. In Chapter 27, after recovering from a terminal case of M-Pox by being given a medicine made from the blood of Apocalypse, and being mortally wounded by a Bonesaw trap, Ashley goes through Terrigenisis. The next chapter clarifies that this is possible because Mr. Snuggles has absorbed enough Inhuman DNA that he went through Terrigenisis when he came into contact with Ashley's body, which still had insane amounts of artificial Terrigen, causing them to merge permanently.
  • The teleporter mishap that sent her to the Savage Lands actually knocked Miss Militia unconcious.
• Big Sister Instinct: Taylor develops this for Ashley after learning of the younger girl's Dark and Troubled Past. It's what ultimately leads her to decide to join the Wards.
  • A canon side story has Taylor declare that the only way Ashley is ever going back to her world is if Taylor goes with her and brings literally all of the guns in response to Ashley casually mentioning Wendigos while explaining to Mister Snuggles how her love of anchovies is not the same as his love of brains.
  • A later chapter has Taylor initially declare her thoughts that it's too dangerous for Ashley back home... But later reconsider when she learns about Krakoa and realizes that people keep targeting Ashley.
  • When the Marquis shows up in Brockton, going after Ashley for revenge regarding Panacea's death, Taylor kills him to protect her, since he's shown that the Birdcage can't hold him.
• Big Damn Heroes: Klara Prast and a clone of Groot do this off screen, saving Peat and Fen from a Fallen affiliated Biker Gang who butchered them in canon.
  • The Marvel-verse heroes who were investigating the cloning group arrive just in time to save Ashley from Bloodbath.
• Big Eater: Ashley is quite fond of a sandwich from Fugly Bob's called The Count of Monte Fatso, a combination of a Monte Cristo and a Fool's Gold Loaf, albeit somewhat more reasonable portioned than the latter. In a later chapter, Taylor comments on Ashley's appetite and it's shown that it's part of her mutation—she needs to eat more to compensate for her body's heightened chemical production.
• Bilingual Bonus: Ashley tells Lung, roughly, "fuck off, fat ass" in Gaelic at the end of chapter 10
  • Chapter 21 has her tell Bloodbath the Carnage Clone "go fuck yourself sideways, dickhead" which she follows up with a rough translation of "and your horse too" because she wasn't fluent enough to know the equivalent of "and the horse you rode in on."
  • While having a near-death experience, Ashley uses an Irish curse that translates as "may the Devil break the bones of your back and use them to build a ladder with which to pick apples in the Gardens of Hell." She tells this to Mephisto, who snarks that it doesn't work when it's the Devil you're cursing. Ashley then says it wasn't a curse, it was a threat.
• Birthmark of Destiny: Vista’s description of Ashley’s birthmark, as well as the fact that her great, great grandfather Slade apparently had a similar marking, implies that it is the ‘’Clan Akkaba’’ symbol, meaning that Ashley is related to Apocalypse. It's confirmed in a flashback Interlude from her grandfather's perspective, which also established that Ashley's grandfather knew exactly what it meant. It grows to cover her entire upper back after her death and resurrection..
• Blackmail Is Such An Uglyword: Ashley threatens to leak the details of how Riley Davis was given a kill order at the age f six for the crime of being kidnapped by the people who murdered her family and trying not to die and also explain how kill orders in general and Riley's in particular are super illegal(including which amendments they violate) and how Riley's murders were the direct result of nobody bothering to try and save her, just sentencing her to death without trial at six in order to manipulate public sentiment (citing the anti-death penalty crowd) into "tearing down a corrupt but useful system" if Alexandria doesn't give Riley a fair chance ("do the right thing.") She denies that this counts as blackmail because "Blackmail is wrong."
• Blessed with Suck: Ashley's mutant "power" basically makes her produce a lot of extra hormones that make her sick and keeps drugs, especially those that could treat it, from working. The only upside is that they provide a steady food source for Mister Snuggles after they bond. A flashback established that the physician handling her case was pretty sure that taking away her powers with one of the "cures" would trigger a fatal overdose on the hormones already in her system.
• Blunt "Yes": Mister Snuggles' response when Ashley asks if absorbing a piece of another symbiote to get memories counts as cannibalism.
• Body Horror: The author doesn't pull punches when it comes to Bonesaw's art projects.
  • Sauron has a room full of people who were apparently his early test subjects, their human and dinosaur parts all mashed together unnaturally.
• Borrowed Catchphrase: a running theme with Ashley is that she tends to quote the catchphrases of well-known heroes from her world. Notably, she's used the Thing's, Wolverine's, and The Hulk's in appropriate contexts. She also uses Ms. Marvel's "Embiggen" when using symbiote shapeshifting to stretch.
• Boxing Lessons for Superman: After returning to Earth-Bet with her powers largely sealed, Ashley starts practicing capoeira on the advice of a PRT CQC instructor so she can get her form down with her codice-granted martial arts skills.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall:
  • In Bonesaw's interlude, Clonepool does this repeatedly, to Riley's bafflement.
  • Deadpool Himself to a minor degree in Val Richards' interlude and much more extremely in a semi-canon side-story that recaps some of the recent events in Marvel Comics and explains differences between them and Ashley's homeworld of Earth 727.
  • Chapter 23 has a bit from Gwenpool and Deadpool, which leads Taylor to conclude that Gwen is mentally ill.
• Brick Joke: At the beginning of chapter 10, Ashley laments that she knows nothing of her East-Asian heritage, not even what kind she is, then notes that she can at least cuss in Gaelic for her Irish side. She demonstrates this at the end of the chapter when Lung asks for her last words.
  • Ms. Mystic is annoyed when Ashley figures out that she's Tattletale's Future Badass self because her anti-Thinker charm didn't include scents, and mentions that she's going to be rather mad at the future Ashley for not giving her a heads-up. When she returns to her own time, Vista, Ashley, and a mutate teammate of theirs named Grace are waiting because they wanted to see her show up pissed because of that, though the latter two fell asleep before she got back.
  • Early on, Ashley mentions a story she wrote called "The Champions Meet The Crystal Gems". Ms. Marvel brings it up while they're searching for Sophia during the Nine's attack. There's also a mention of Ashley's previously mentioned dislike of the Spider-Marvel ship.
  • When talking about her world's heroes, Ashley mentions that Iron Man licensed a certain Black Sabbath song. When at Avengers Mountain, Tony plays an instrumental version of said song as he suits up to leave to a board meeting after briefly meeting with the group from Bet.
  • When arriving back on the Marvel Earth, Ashley gets mad at some cultists who think that mutants are divine, expressing disgust at the idea of being worshipped as a god. After absorbing Storm's symbiote codice, she finds out that there is a mutant who count as a god due to some bloodline magic and being worshipped by an entire country.
  • Mister Snuggles brought up the Grendel Symbiote Dragon when Ashley was talking to Vista early on, and Ashley only realizes what he was talking about when she absorbs the Grendel symbiote Carnage.
  • In chapter 44, Doctor Strange warns Ashley not to say 'Cthulhu' out loud because it could wake him up due to her new status as an Elder God and he doesn't want to have to beat him back into a coma again. In Interlude 10, it turns out that he'd just beaten Cthulhu into a coma a day or so before and apparently has to do so regularly because people keep waking him up.
  • Val Richards gets annoyed that no one on Earth Bet besides Dragon has any real idea of how Tinkertech works, and in chapter 52 she grabs Ashley in the hopes that she can help crack the mystery.
• Broken Pedestal: Miss Militia thoroughly smashes any respect that Taylor had left for her when she tries to not only threaten and blackmail her, Lisa, and Ashley, but turns her weapon into a pistol and points it in her face.
• Brown Note: Ms. Mystic had an effect that would cause this to Thinkers trying to assess her identity during her temporal trip, but Ashley was able to break past it because it didn't work on scents. Present-day Lisa also realizes her identity after she forcibly stuffs the Symbiosis Staff into her as part of the Stable Time Loop (Ms. Mystic presumably remembering having figured it out) after mentioning that she had one like it already.
• But for Me, It Was Tuesday:
  • When Ashley realizes that the people who kidnapped her and killed her parents were working for Mister Sinister and thus that it's his fault they're dead, he replies that its his fault that a lot of people are dead and she's going to be disappointed if she wants him to feel bad about it.
  • When trying to steal the piece of Carnage, Ashley runs into the Invisible Woman, who's experienced or heard of so many different ways that super kids have shown up older than they should be that she takes a minute to try and guess the specific reason Ashley looks older after recognizing her.
  • Fighting off existential supernatural threats to humanity, the earth, or reality itself is a weekly occurrence for any Sorcerer Supreme who lives up to the title. Doctor Strange illustrates this point by bringing Lisa along while he beats Cthulhu into a coma.
  • Ashley name-drops the trope when talking about The Marquis escaping from the Birdcage, saying that while something like that is literally unheard of on Earth-Bet, it's this on her Earth, then gets distracted wondering what day of the week it actually is.
  • After everything that happened in the past month, including absorbing the memories and knowledge of thousands of people, several of which have lived for thousands of years, Ashley has to be reminded who Lung is at one point, despite him having had two fights with him, including the one where she met Taylor.
  • In the week in-between two of Ashley's therapy sessions, an absolutely crazy sequence of events occurs on Marvel-Earth, which Ashley describes as "a typical week in New York City".
• Came Back Strong: In chapter 27, a mortally wounded Ashley goes through Terrigenisis.
  • Ashley’s mother is a lot stronger after her surprise resurrection.
• Came Back Wrong: On the other hand, she also hams it up while declaring herself a new Apocalypse and smiling sadistically.
  • While the above was revealed to just be Ashley hamming it up to mess with the Nine's heads, if Ashley had decided against returning to life, Mr. Snuggles would have simply merged with her permanently. He wouldn't need a host anymore, but while Ashley'd body would have been alive, it would have simply been an empty shell. Mr. Snuggles would have tried to act the way she would have acted, but everyone would have been able to tell the difference.
  • Ashley's mother is accidentally revived by the Lazarus formula, which results in this.
• The Cameo: Stan Lee makes his customary appearance to Ashley when she's briefly dead in Chapter 28, having been a man in Ashley's world who did comic books based on the exploits of real superheroes, and acting as an avatar of The One Above All.
• Cannibalism Superpower: Discussed in chapter 19 when Mister Snuggles explains the concept of symbiote codices to Ashley. Ashley asks if absorbing them to gain their power and knowledge counts as cannibalism. Mister Snuggles agrees that it does, just before harvesting the codex from the remains of the Bonesaw Poison to get the answer to a question Ashley had about Bonesaw.
  • Later on, Doctor Strange mentions Kulan Gath and his ability to gain the power of other sorcerers by eating them, and that Ashley has the potential to develop a more proper version of this trope, while explaining why he did the above Batman Gambit
• Chekhov's Gun: Three Samples of the Blood of Apocalypse are collected for use in upcoming conflicts. One is used to immunize Mike Hayes/Bruiser but the others are saved for later. The second is used many chapers later to cure a nasty case of terminal M-Pox.
  • Some of the massive amounts of MGH extracted from Ashley during her time in captivity ended up in the hands of the Hydra cell who resurrected her mother by mistake, and when the leader tries to use it to get an edge on the heroes attacking their base he ends up taking himself out of the fight.
• Cloudcuckoolander: Gabby Kinney/Scout/Honey Badger, as per canon and lampshaded.
• The Conspiracy: Cauldron is doing something in the background with the Marvel-end. In Bonesaw's Interlude, the newspaper clipping that leads Bloodbath to want to go to Chicago also makes mention of a woman in a Fedora and an outfit strongly reminiscent of Comic Book/Captain Universe talking to Scion. Much later, when Vista tries to cheer up Cuddlebug with stuff about Peat and Fen, it's revealed that Klara Prast of The Runaways was kidnapped from her foster parents, given M-Pox, and then had her M-Pox cured by making her an Anti-Venom all to get a translator for a clone of Groot, with both her and Groot Two being stranded on Earth Bet afterward. In Val Ricard's Interlude, people implied to be Contessa and Number Man attacked Agent Anti-Venom and Mania, "accidentally" gave Mania her symbiote back, and stole a sample of the Anti-Venom, and someone stole two of the hybrid clones that the cloning facility made as part of phase three, with all records of what went into them and the security tapes from what happened the day after the breakout being erased.
• Cool Sword: Ashley thinks this of the sword she eventually gains the power to summon from Mister Snuggles' mass, naming it All-Love.
  • Morph Weapon: All-Love defaults to a Viking sword but can become any melee weapon Ashley wants it to be.
• Cruel Mercy: Instead of killing Jack, knowing that in his twisted Straw Nihilist worldview, him making a hero a killer means that he'd "win", Ashley arrests him, making sure that he's taken alive and expressing a hope that he'd be sentenced to the Birdcage, where he'd spend the rest of his days in a tiny cell, watching the world heal and forget about him.
• Cry Laughing: Ashley's reaction to learning she's related to Apocalypse, due to realizing the irony.
  • Bonesaw starts doing this when she has a breakdown when Ashley finally starts to get through to her.
• Cuddle Bug: Take a wild guess.
• Curbstomp Battle: One occurs offscreen when Ashley spars with Fat Cobra.
  • The Punisher doesn't fare well against the Ressurection Corps
• Cutting the Knot: When Arcade has Tattletale participate in a deathtrap based on Ace Attorney, her powers allow her to quickly figure out that a (robotic) witness was the actual killer, so she just blasted their head off.
• Dare to Be Badass: Mister Snuggles to Ashley, by simply asking her what would Spider-Man do when she's pinned beneath a collapsed building.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Ashley, after suffering from a mutant "power" that made her constantly sick, had her parents killed in front of her and she was abducted and used in experiments.
• Deader than Dead: Ashley, after absorbing the Cletus Cassidy's symbiote, symbiote codices, life force, and Cthonic magic, feeds his soul to her Hell-Mark, destroying it utterly.
• Decapitation Presentation: Emma and Madison's heads are cut off and left on Ashley's bed while she's in it in chapter 20, apparently by Bloodbath.
• Declaration of Protection: Mister Snuggles, silently, upon bonding to Ashley. Rater has described his motivation as boiling down to "Protect the Cinnamon Roll."
  • Ashley declares that she won't let anyone hurt "Grace" after she's lost and scared following her trauma-induced amnesia and keeps it up when the memories come back.
• Defiant Captive: Ashley tends to be this when in danger, even cussing in Gaelic to Lung.
• Dedication: Chapter 11 is dedicated to Steve Ditko
  • Chapter 28 is decided to Stan Lee, any other writers & artists, alive or dead, who create stories of heroes and wonder, and anyone who has ever done the right thing because it was the right thing.
• Demon Lordsand Arch Devils: Andrea "Mania" Benton can turn into one at will thanks to her Hell-Mark and is "first in line to be Queen of Hell", as per canon. A casual demonstration of this power is used as an attempt to prove that Ashley isn't lying when she claims to be able to see sins. When that plan goes horribly off the rails, being in Demon form at the time let's Andi force the Hell-Mark that Ashley accidentally stole back into it's dormant state.
• Detect Evil: In her spar with Sophia, Ashley sees what appears to be blood on her hands and a dark spot in her heart.
• The Devil Is a Loser: Mephisto does not get a favorable treatment in this fic. When he appears in Chapter 28 in an attempt to regain the dormant Hell-Mark Mr. Snuggles inadvertently absorbed, Ashley surprises him with the fact that there's a song about one of his deals, she gets a "Stronger Than You" zinger on him when he says that its like Ashley is made of love, outright calls him the biggest loser in the multiverse, and blatantly threatens him in Gaelic.
• Disability Immunity: In one chapter, Ashley remembers the smell of Terrigen Mist from when they went through Manhattan and notes that her chemical resistance preventing her from getting M-Pox was the one time her powers were beneficial. It doesn't protect her when Bonesaw pumps her full of enough concentrated synthetic Terrigen to make her blood vessels bulge and press up against her skin, however, and even then it was apparently taking a while to kill her.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: A literal and figurative part of Doctor Strange's job.
• Driven to Suicide: Jack Slash hung himself on his first night in the Birdcage. The author has confirmed that to was done out of spite.
• Drunk On The Darkside: Ashley starts getting here after taking a symbiote codex from Archangel, due to time-travel shenanigans meaning that the Codex was in his spine adapting to every power-up he's ever had. Archangel flat out says that this is an effect of the Black Vortex, which he had when he wore his symbiote and technically never lost.
• Drunk with Power: Doctor Strange name-drops the trope regarding Ashley's symbiote-codex collection trip.
• Early-Bird Cameo: In one chapter, Taylor takes Ashley to the public library and notes a white guy with cornrows is at one of the computers. In the fourth Interlude, this is revealed to have been a clone of Norman Osborn.
• Easily Forgiven: Averted, it's mostly offscreen but Ashley has to fight and blackmail and explain exactly how it's illegal to punish Bonesaw and get them a second chance after their face turn and a few chapters later it's made clear that most people don't trust them and are are only barely tolerating their existence. Even Riley, or 'Grace,' thinks that there's something wrong with Ashley.
• Eye Scream: In Chapter 21, Ashley gouges Bloodbath's eyes with her claws when he has her in a Neck Lift, only for him to later return the favor by stabbing her in the left eye with his tongue and, implicitly, plucking it out and eating it, though between all the pain she's in and the fact that she's crashing on an Adrnaline OD mean she can't tell for sure.
• Eldritch Abomination: Mister Snuggles spells out that this is the most accurate descriptor for what he is when Alexandria suggests leaving Ashley to Bonesaw's not-so-tender mercies.
• Eloquent in My Native Tongue: "Super-Skrull" apparently sounds a lot less pretentious in the native Skrull language.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: Riley genuinely doesn't comprehend why Ashley is so insistent on saving her.
• Evil Counterpart: Bloodbath, a clone of Carnage, is set up to be this to Ashley. Subverted in that they fight once and then he's unceremoniously killed by Vista. Even still, he was only interested in Ashley becuase he wanted to steal Bonesaw's kill.
• Evil Lawyer Joke: Lampshaded playfully by Luke Lafayette when Ashley asks if he’s Loki.
• Expendable Clone: Invoked by the Carnage clone Bloodbath to justify killing a Deadpool clone who Bonesaw was both vivisecting and having an odd but pleasant conversation with.
• Experimented in College: Ashley's mother dated a woman named Monique in college, but when she wanted to give her a key to her apartment Monique dumped her using this as a justification, having even been cheating on Yuri with a guy for two weeks. Yuri was apparently not experimenting, and ended up Drowning His Sorrows at a frat party... that somehow ended up with her in an underground cage fight across town.
• Failure Hero: Ashley's rat on Krakoa after finding out Sinister's involvement in what happened to her reveals that this is a big part of why she wants to get stronger so badly, she's sick of people, especially Panacea dying because of her, of struggling with bad guys, even ones like Arcade, and having to fight tooth and nail, with blackmail and Penance Stare, to get Grace a second chance and Jack Slash a trial instead of just being offed on the spot...
• Fainting: Ashley tends to pass out from exhaustion after a hard fight, especially when coming down from an Adrenaline Rush due to the crash afterward. She also faints from emotional exhaustion after inheriting the alternate Riley's memories.
• Fair-Play Villain: Mentally lampshaded by Ashley about Arcade.
• Fantastic Racism: Ashley is somewhat confused that this is Averted on the wide-scale on Earth Bet, with no open/violent discrimination against Case 53s, unlike the anti-mutant attitudes common on her Earth.
• Fastball Special: Ashley does this with Vista in a non-canon side-story when a drunk Hookwolf crashes the Thanksgiving parade, even using the trope name.
• Fetal Position Rebirth: Ashley is initially sitting in the fetal position when she hatches from her terrigensis cocoon following her death and resurrection.
• Fireball Eyeballs: Ashley appears to sport them in her spar with Sophia. They're a feature of her Detect Evil ability.
• Fluffy the Terrible: Klyntar Symbiotes are Eldritch Abominations literally forged from shadow-made-flesh by a Primordial Elder God of the most primal Abyss to kill the other Gods and the Celestials for the crime of tainting space with light and life and to corrupt and destroy their creations. One of them was enhanced with the DNA and powers of over a dozen superhumans and bonded to a small child who named it "Mister Snuggles". A later chapter clarifies that he likes this name.
• Forgiveness: Ashley knows exactly what happened to make Riley act the way she does, and can even see that Riley's sins are not truly her own with her Ghost Rider powers, as they take the form of chains connected to Jack instead of staining her. Thus, she can't be angry with her and forgives her for the torture (which was especially bad considering Ashley is Afraid Of Needless) and killing her. This just confuses and frightens Riley at first.
• For Want Of A Nail: A minor case, because of slight differences in how Secret Empire played out in Ashley's universe, the "Despicable Deadpool" Storyline didn't happen, which meant that the friendship he formed with Spider-Man in Spider-Man/Deadpool wasn't strained, meaning that Deadpool was in the initial confrontation between Peter's friends and allies and the Red Goblin in Go Down Swinging, meaning that the others werne't as injured and the Anti-Venom symbiote wasn't completely burnt out allowing Flash Thomspon to just barely pull through.
  • Taylor, meanwhile, has not forgiven nor forgotten what Bonesaw did to Ashley. She tolerates 'Grace's' presense, but in her own narration alternates between ignoring her and scorn.
• From a Single Cell: All but name-dropped after Bonesaw becomes Grace, with it being said that, with the Healing Factor-possessing Marvel capes she'd enhanced herself with, including Deadpool himself, it might not be possible to kill her anymore.
• Funetik Aksent: Donar, a Gesselscraft cape, has a thick German accent in his first appearance. The author has stated the intent to tone it down later as the generator used for it was less accurate than advertised and some people expressed difficulty understanding it. The in-universe explanation for the change is that the Empire is making him take English phonics classes becuase the grunts can't understand him. Averted Trope with Ashley, who is mentioned to have a Manhattan accent but that is not represented in the text.
• Fusion Dance: Upon their revival and Terrigenesis, Ashley and Mr. Snuggles end up merging permanently.
• Future Badass: Ms. Mystic, the Sorceress Supreme of Bet in the future, is an older version of Lisa/Tattetale.
  • While she doesn't directly appear, the crux of the Poison's Evil Plan is to assimilate the present Ashley and Snuggles because the version of them from Ms. Mystic's time was too powerful for them to defeat, so they went back in time to assimilate the weaker Ashley of their past, allowing them to gain her potential.
• Ghost Memory: Ashley and Mister Snuggles get the memories of an Alternate Bonesaw after harvesting the symbiote codex from the Poison that consumed her. Ashley is traumatized by it, deciding she never wants to absorb another Codex, but at the same time feels it's important to share what she learned, which she does in the following chapter.
• In later chapters, Ashley gains more ghost memories after taking codices from Beast, Mister Fantastic, and several dark elf warriors.
• Glowing Eyes of Doom: When unmasked, Ashley's eyes glow red and catch fire when she uses her ability to Detect Evil.
• Grave Robbing: Bonesaw went to Panacea's grave after arriving in the Bay, but someone had already taken her body, coffin and all, maybe about an hour before she arrived.
• Gray-and-Grey Morality: Wolverine explains that a lot of this is necessary when forging a country from scratch and that he's not exactly happy with some of it. Mister Sinister being part of the Government, for one.
• Groin Attack: Ashley's role in taking down Lung apparently involved her punching him in the groin repeatedly.
  • She later expresses a desire to punch the Magneto clone in the groin if he starts going on a "Mutants are superior tirade," and claims to be the best there is at punching jerks in the groin while paraphrasing Wolverine's catchphrase.
  • She tries again when Bloodbath attacks her, but since he's basically a skeleton wrapped in symbiote goo, it fails to do anything.
  • She claims that punching people in the groin is her signature move.
• Hates Baths: Ashley went through a phase of this when she was six. Despite her weakness from her condition, she grabbed onto a door frame with such an iron grip that her mother had to use a pressure point to get her to let go.
• Heh Heh, You Said "X": Missy has the expected reaction to the mention of Man-Thing
• Hearing Voices: Ashley starts hearing a voice that is encouraging her to collect codices while saying that she deserves power and that Mister Snuggles has gone dormant. It claims to be talking to Ashley through the symbiote hivemind and that they've been in the same place before. It later claims to be All-Black.
• Heel–Face Turn: Riley, from a combination of Ashley finally getting through to her and her healing factor healing her psychological damage. She comments about having intrusive thoughts about the people she hurt and feeling physically ill at the thought of hurting other people.
• Hellfire: Ms. Mystic can use it, though she apparently has to use it sparingly or Mephisto will get on her ass. This causes Lisa to have a minor breakdown upon realizing that Hell is real.
  • Ashley's Detect Evil power works by channeling Hellfire into her eyes.
• Heinz Hybrid: Ashley lampshades that she's basically this following her terrigenisis.
  • The modified formula Skull-face used to accidentally revive Ashley's mother gave her DNA from several animals that are naturally long-lived, along with various DNA recovered from the War of the Realms.
• Heroes Prefer Swords: After learning that her symbiote Shapeshifter Weapon powers let her produce a sword of living Abyss, Ashley's first response to to tell Mister Snuggles that they could have done that sooner and then to find someone to have a practice fight with.
• Heterosexual Life-Partners: Ashley is apparently this with a mutate named Grace in the future. Grace is Riley Davis, and the foundations of it start in the modern day with Ashley going to extreme lengths to save Riley Davis from Jack Slash's control, because Grace is the name Riley takes after her heel/face turn.
• Hiding Your Heritage: Ashley is part Asian, part Irish. It is later clarified that she's Irish and Chinese on her father's side and mostly Japanese on her mother's side, though Ashley doesn't know this as her parents didn't consider it important and it never came up before they died. Chapter 16 further clarifies that her Grandfather's Grandfather was the "bastard son of an Englishman," and is himself strongly implied to have traces of ancient Egyptian, which is later confirmed.
• Hidden Depths: Chapter 25 shows that Ashley has a decent understanding of philosophy, knows what kind of wine pairs with what, and isn't afraid to read potentially frightening novels that are above her age range.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Skullface tries to gain an edge over the heroes by deliberately overdosing himself on MGH... that turns out to have come from Ashley's time as a captive of bad people. He promptly falls over, unable to stand, and given the germ-ridden environment Ashley is fairly certain that the poor condition of his immune system means that he's not long for this world.
• Homage: Chapters 8-11 parallel a certain storyline from The Amazing Spider-Man, especially Chapter 11 which is dedicated to Ditko.
• Homeschooled Kids: Ashley was homeschooled before due to her health issues. Currently, the PRT's hiring a tutor since she's way behind on history by Earth Bet standards. She's not happy about it, having been looking forward to going to school.
• Horrible Judge of Character: Ashley's aunt Yuki has a habit of falling in with horrible people, oblivious to their intentions on her, forcing her sister to bail her out. Case in point, in high school she was dating an older guy who turned out to be a human trafficker, and despite the age difference and the fact that he never wanted to go out in public with her she didn't notice the obvious red flags, and even when Yuri followed them to his warehouse and saved her twin by beating him up, despite the sketchiness of the whole situation she still complained to Yuri about how she didn't trust her until she saw the girls in cages. She thought that she'd taught Yuki to better recognize toxicity after that, but after they split up for college Yuki ended up hanging out with people who were fiercely anti-mutant, and hated her sweet and kind niece immediately once her being a mutant came out.
• How Do I Shot Web?: Even Snuggles isn't 100% clear on what powers he and Ashley can use, thanks to all the modifications that were done to him.
  • As an aside, Ashley is rather disappointed that they can't shoot web.
• Humanoid Abomination: Not yet relevant in story, but in the Spacebattles thread the author has pointed out that following the reveals in the 2018 Avengers series, that all humans and humanoid lifeforms native to Marvel's Earth, especially those with Superpowers and 'especially' mutants and Inhumans are basically this compared to humans from more grounded settings. He's gone on to describe Ashley as "Lovecraftian as Fuck" because not only is she a mutant but she's knowingly and willingly harboring a genuine Eldritch Abomination in her body.
  • Bloodbath is basically a skeleton covered in symbiote goo.
  • Following her death and resurrection by Mister Snuggles' Terrigensis, Ashley and Mister Snuggles are permanently fused at the molecular level. So everything that makes Mister Snuggles an Eldritch Abomination now applies to Ashley, in addition to the above.
• Human Resources: The organization that kidnapped Ashley used her superhuman hormone production to produce drugs, namely enough Mutant Growth Hormone to fill an entire storage room, Val calculating that even under ideal conditions and daily extractions of the maximum amount that could be taken while keeping them alive, a healthy adult man would take at least ten years to produce that much.
• Hypocrite: Ashley tells Vista off for swearing despite knowing and using some nasty Irish curses. especially in chapter 13: she told Vista off for calling Shadow Stalker a bitch but later uses 'soith' to refer to her, which literally translates as 'female dog.' (Bitch as a swear is "bitseach")
  • More seriously, Alexandria accuses Ashley of arbitrarily deciding what right and wrong are and trying to brute force the world into going her way when Alexandria herself is doing just that both as a member of Cauldron and on her own time. All Ashley was doing was making sure that a brainwashed child soldier got a fair chance while Alexandria has, going by Ashley's Detect Evil power, committed more sins than Bonesaw had and of her own free will.
  • Sauron goes on a rant about how cancer only still exists on the Marvel Earth despite all the various cures due to Status Quo Is God not wanting happy endings, but he himself has some imprisoned failed test subjects with horrific tumors that he admits in his notes that he could cure but doesn't want to.
• Hypocritical Humor: Bonesaw thinks it's weird that Ashley read Silence of the Lambs despite she herself being the type of prolific, specialized killer you'd see in one of those novels and having watched the film herself, though she has the self awareness to lampshade her 'excuse'.
  • A few chapters later she complains about Ashley paraphrasing The Hobbit to intimidate people even though she did the above.
  • Earlier, Taylor notes that Donar, given his attempt to cyberbully Ashley, has no grounds to complain about The Poison Red Queen being petty by damaging one of his weapons.
• I Ate WHAT?!:
  • Mike after the Blood of Apocalypse is used to immunize him from someone (presumably Bonesaw), unleashing synthetic Terrigen on Brockton, not realizing that M-Pox only affects mutants and that the other mutants in the town at the time would have other abilities protecting them. He didn't know what it was until after he drank it and was sickened to learn that it was mostly actual human blood until Ms. Mystic clarified.
  • Much Later, Apocalypse himself tricks Ashley into drinking synthetic blood derived from the DNA of the other members of his Sorcerer's Coven by hiding it in a mixture of infusions and juices from Krakoa's native flora. She threatens him by pointing out that this was a very dangerous thing to do to someone who doesn't trust him and has symbiote powers.
• Identity Amnesia: Riley loses her memory after her cybernetics are purged by her healing factor. She remembers the next day, but by then her psychological conditioning is slipping because her healing factor also heals her mind.
• If You Ever Do Anything to Hurt Her...: Snuggles regarding Ashley. Brain-eating is involved.
• I Hate Past Me: Subdued, but Ms. Mystic is rather coarse in her handling of Tattletale, mentioning that her head needs deflating and implicitly giving her a Dope Slape when Lisa had an existential crisis due to realizing that Hell exists.
• I Have No Son!: Twice in Interlude 6
  • A mutual case between Patrick O'Learys senior and junior, Ashley's Great Grandfather and paternal grandfather respectively, over Patrick junior marrying a Chinese woman.
  • Ashley's mother Yuri had a sister named Yuki. They had some kind of falling out the day Ashley was confirmed to be a mutant and Yuri declared that Yuki was dead to her and that hopefully, Ashley would forget that Yuki even exists. The fact that she's later confirmed to have joined the Friends of Humanity indicates that Yuki had a bigoted reaction to Ashley being a mutant, and she reveals to Ashley when they meet at her mother's grave that she told Yuri that she should have smothered Ashley when she was diagnosed as a mutant.
• I Need to Go Iron My Dog: Dragon does this after Ashley figures out that Dragon is an Artificial Intelligence from context clues.
• I'm a Humanitarian: Downplayed: Bonesaw claims to have imitated Hannibal Lecter's murder of the census taker with the last person who tried to screw with her head in order to try and intimidate Ashley but gets side tracked in how disgusting it was and how honestly it's for the best that she gave up on it after that one experience.
• Immunity Disability: Ashley's chemical resistance works on all drugs and chemical toxins, including beneficial medications—Ashley can't benefit from medicine to regulate her hormones, nor pain-killers. Not even antibiotics or other treatments for infection work, which is bad because she has a very weak immune system.
• Immunity Attrition: Ashley's chemical resistance, while normally detrimental to her for the reasons mentioned above, is strong enough to allow her to resist Terrigen, which is normally highly toxic to mutants, though she's not 100% immune. While Bonesaw is able to poison her with synthetic Terrigen later on, it took enough of the stuff being injected into her to make her veins bulge, and was still taking long enough to kill her that Bonesaw just decided to use a trap instead.
• Inkblot Test: Doc Sampson gives Ashley one of these for her first therapy session, mainly because most people expect it and to try and relax her a bit.
• In Medias Res: The story opens up with Taylor and Ashley in the infirmary at PRT HQ after having fought Lung off-screen.
• I Need a Freaking Drink: Ashley's mother 'borrowed' her father-in-law's flask and downed the whole thing after coming home pissed about her falling out with her sister and worry about Ashley's condition. The interlude ends with Patrick heading to his favorite pub to drown his worries in craft beer.
• Innocently Insensitive: A PRT intern innocently asked why Ashley, who is playing her cape ID for cuteness and a mutant "theme", doesn't do by "Cutie Mutie", not knowing that the latter word is a Fantastic Slur in her world.
  • After meeting Ms. Marvel, Ashley admits that she doesn't like to associate Ms. Marvel with The Inhumans despite Kamala being an Inhuman-Hybrid because she hates the Inhuman Royals for not doing anything about the Terrigen mists killing mutants until the last minute, prompting Ms. Marvel to change the subject away from the awkward conversation. The following chapter has Ashley insult a fanfic author called Slothbaby for shipping Spider-Man with Captain Marvel, not knowing that Ms. Marvel, who she was talking to, is Slothbaby.
• Instantly Proven Wrong: Alexandria is initially reluctant to give Riley a fair chance and cites that even if Riley isn't responsible for her actions she's been committing them so long and done so much that there's no chance that she can be rehabilitated and that she's past the point where she has to be treated like an adult serial killer instead of a brainwashed child. Immediately Kinney explains how she was raised from birth to be an even worse monster with a body-count comparable to or even worse than Bonesaw's and that she was about Riley's age when she finally got away from the Facility but now she's a hero because she was given the chance to be better. She then goes on to explain how Riley would probably have an easier time than she did due to having less brainwashing to overcome. This was, of course, what Ashley had in mind when she asked Laura to the meeting.
  • When Miss Militia calls Ashley, Taylor, and Lisa "arrogant children who don't know a damn thing about how the world really works", Ashley interrupts her to mention the mutant genocides in her lifetime alone, Lisa points out how she ran rom her Abusive Parents only to get forced into a life of crime by Coil, a PRT member, and Taylor brings up the locker incident (prompting Ashley to say that unless a Holocaust survivor somehow showed up, she thinks that Taylor wins the round of misery poker).
• Internal Reveal: In Chapter 22, Ashley learns of her blood connection to Apocalypse. She doesn't take it well.
  • In the following chapter, she more happily learn the details of the modifications made to Mister Snuggles, at least four of which she's quite happy about.
• I Reject Your Reality: Name-dropped by Ashley when she's told that she qualifies as an Elder God now.
  • She does it again when she finds out that she's not only a descendant of Apocalypse on her father's side, but from the Hand on her mother's side, saying that she could accept one or the other, but not both, that she's not a Mary Sue in someone's fanfic, and that she's going to pretend that her racist aunt's ninjutsu skills are just her being Inexplicably Awesome.
• Irony: Ashley spells out the irony of her relationship to Apocalypse while having a breakdown over it, even comparing it to a Jewish person who finds out that they're related to the Red Skull.
  • When Taylor wishes that a situation would deescalate, she notes that it feels like she's rolling over in her grave.
• "It" Is Dehumanizing: Why Ashley refers to Snuggles with male pronouns. Snuggles is confused by it but doesn't seem to particularly care. Bloodbath the Carnage Clone, meanwhile, seems to prefer it in Bonesaw's interlude.
• I Warned You: Ms. Mystic told the PRT not to deploy agents against the Poisons, but when questioned about sending Agents to back them up, Miss Milita says that the PRT's tacticians felt they knew better, prompting Ms. Mystic to deny all responsibility for their deaths. Sure enough, they all get slaughtered by the Poisons.
• Juggling Loaded Guns: Deadpool is playing with one of his guns when he hears that the cloning operation's base has at least a couple million dollars worth of Mutant Growth Hormone stored, dropping it and shooting Honey Badger in the shin.
• Kirby Krackle: Vista's energy powers are described in such a way to invoke this aesthetic when used at a high enough level.
• Last Disrespects: When Ashley's paternal great grandfather died, her grandfather spat on his grave and sold his house and vintage car to a couple in need of a good home and a collector, respectively.
• LEGO Genetics: Snuggles has the genetic profiles, and powers to some degree, of several superhumans inserted into him. Confirmed so far are the Thing and the Scorpion.
• Let's You and Him Fight: What happened that allowed Ashley, Mr. Snuggles, and the various clones that survived to escape, was that one clone woke up, freaked out and escaped, prompting a massive brawl between the other clones that woke up, ending when a Mister Franklin and Nate Grey clone's battle tore reality a new one and sucked the survivors into the Worm-verse.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall:
  • Ms. Mystic, while ranting about how the PRT treats the Wards and operates in general, metaphorically explains that kind of behavior isn't part of the plot of the story.
  • After Ashley's racist aunt reveals that she's descended from members of the Hand that left when the society took a darker direction, Ashley gets annoyed, saying that she's not a Mary Sue in someone's fanfiction story. She then feels a sudden urge to watch out for Deadpool.
  • When Ashley tells Taylor about Sauron, the older girl remarks that Ashley's whole universe is "just a bunch of comic book nonsense", and Ashley retorts that Earth Bet is "dark and dreary and way too darn serious", so it balances out.
• Little Miss Badass: Ashley, obviously enough. She's about nine or ten and punched Lung in the groin. Repeatedly.
• Little Professor Dialog: Ashley sometimes sounds or acts older than she is, once even being compared to a snarky teenager.
• Logical Weakness: Inhumans and Mutants are biologically incompatible—hybrids cancel out, resulting in what is functionally a normal human, while Mister Sinister's attempts at using Inhuman DNA to make stronger mutants proved that an active Inhuman Gene is actively hostile to an active X-Gene, resulting in severe and ultimately terminal genetic instability. Because Mister Snuggles was spliced with the DNA of both Mutants and Inhumans, a significant amount of its genetic adaptability is spent finding ways to reconcile its hostile genes, preventing it from getting the most out of the other superhuman genes that were given to it.
• Lovecraftian Superpower: Ashley gets here eventually, par the course for symbiotes.
• Magic Staff: The Symbiosis Staff, the cloning group's attempt to mimic the Staff of One. Ms. Mystic forcibly gives it to her younger self Tattletale as part of the Stable Time Loop.
• It Makes Just As Much Sense In Context: Taylor is genuinely confused about how Ashley attacking Apocalypse ended with him offering to teach her sorcery.
• The Maiden Name Debate: After Ashley's parents died her maternal aunt Yuki, a raging anti-mutant bigot who told her sister Yuri that should have smothered Ashley after her diagnosis, and hated Ashley's father, blaming him for Ashley being a mutant, refused to allow her sister to have her married name on her headstone.
• Mama Bear: Ashley's revived mother bursts out of frozen prison when she hears her daughter calling out for help.
• Martial Pacifist: By chapter 29, Ashley is more than established as this. She believes that heroes should never kill and always tries to do a proportionate amount of harm when fighting and notably tries Talking the Monster to Death with enemies she perceives as a victim.
• Meaningful Name: Chapter 39 opens with a short monolog about how "Ashley Tan-Shin O'Leary" and "Cuddlebug" are this for Ashley.
• Meaningful Rename: Ashley eventually rebrands her hero identity as "Menace".
• Money, Dear Boy: Scorpion's given reason for why he's working for Arcade when Ashley asks.
• Morality Pet: A chapter from his perspective reveals that Ashley is basically this to Mister Snuggles. Mister Snuggles even stops to intervene when the Siberian, Mannequinn, and Bloodbath are attacking the remaining Undersiders and some civilians when looking for Ashley and Bonesaw, noting that, even if it was to save Ashley from mortal danger, Ashley would never forgive him for not helping, and if Ashley had decided against returning to life, Mister Snuggles would have mimicked her the best that they could, even if everyone else could tell the difference.
  • "Grace" feels sick at the thought of getting Ashley in trouble after her heal/face turn and explicitly states that she's worried about her.
• More than Mind Control: Discussed between Grace and Ashley about Jack and All-Black's respective manipulations of them.
  • AS it turns out, Miss Militia's antagonistic behavior in recent chapters is partly because someone had her under an effect that amplified her negative personality traits and undermined her positive ones.
• Most Fanfic Writers Are Girls: Ashley has written fanfiction about superheroes from her home universe.
• Mouthful of Pi: Val Richards has apparently memorized pi out to a million digits.
• Mundane Utility: Interlude 6 makes note of a mutant with an inherent affinity for chemistry using it to run a pub that serves a really good microbrew.
  • Chapter 48 has Ashley using her shapeshifting capabilities to just play with various outfits and costumes.
• My Greatest Failure: Ashley's is failing to prevent Panacea's death. The author has said that it's going to be as significant to Ashley as The Night Gwen Stacy Died is to Spider-Man, albeit for different reasons. Taylor nor being fully healed from the venom in Jorōgumo's bite certainly didn't help things, though she thankfully recovered later.
  • Ashley's mother Yuri tried to protect her younger twin sister Yuki from being exploited or corrupted by toxic and horrible people her whole life. Unfortunately, despite her best efforts to teach her not to be a Horrible Judge of Character, Yuki ended up in the anti-mutant crowd when they went to different colleges and fell out of touch for a while. When Ashley was diagnosed as a mutant and Yui revealed her bigotry, all her affection for her niece disappearing like a flipped switch, Yuri was horrified to realize that she'd failed to protect her.
• My Significance Sense Is Tingling: In her fight with Sophia/Shadow Stalker, Ashley discovers that they have a Spider-Sense.
• Mythology Gag:
  • Glory Girl tells Taylor to work on a less edgy costume as if she'd seen Taylor's original canon costume and hadn't known that she was a hero she'd have assumed that she was a villain, which could have led to awkwardness. Taylor getting beaten up by Glory Girl for that exact reason when showing up to help the authorities deal with some villains happened in one of the early drafts of what became Worm.
  • Molly's Opposite-Sex Clone introduces himself as "King Kickass" before Tattletale forcibly corrects it to "Bruiser." Bruiser is Molly Hayes' official Super name despite her preference for Princess Powerful.
  • After Gwenpool's status as a refugee from a world where Marvel Comics exists as works of fiction is revealed to Spider-Man, she casually informs him of the events of Spider-Man: The Animated Series' Series Finale where his counterpart met Stan Lee. She then tries to tell him about One More Day but Deadpool stops her.
    • Shortly before, Deadpool mentions the time that Honey Badger cut off her finger and gave it to him. Later, Energizer mentions how her older sister is dating one of the Runaways.
  • An interlude has Bonesaw consider using tinker-tech to cure cancer instead of turning people into dinosaurs to be wasted potential. This is an inverted reference to Spider-Man stating the opposite to X-Men villain Sauron, complete with the Tinker having given an inverted version of Sauron's response.
  • One of the areas on Krakoa is Bar Sinister.
  • The fact that Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and Marvel Comics exist in the Marvel Universe and publish licensed comics about various Marvel Heroes(particularly that Steve Rogers used to draw the Captain America comics and that they're so accurate that She-Hulk was able to submit them as evidence in court) is mentioned in chapter 28. As is the fact that Stan Lee and Jack Kirby couldn't get into the Wedding of Reed Richards and Susan Storm.
• Never Gets Drunk: A side effect of Ashley’s powers is that she is effectively immune to alcohol, which only comes up because she mentions an ancestor who couldn't have had her powers because he hung out in bars, and she only knows about the resistance a rather thorough doctor gave her some as a test.
  • A more mundane version of this is mentioned in an interlude from Ashley's grandfather's perspective. Apparently, Ashley's mother could hold her liquor very well. This is because her own mother had her pick up an Acquired Poison Immunity.

Combo Platter Powers

• Combo Platter Powers:
  • Snuggles has more than the normal assortment of symbiote powers. In addition to enhanced strength, speed, durability, reflexes, and a Healing Factor common to symbiotes or multiple Superhumans, Cuddlebug possess the following powers, from various sources that were revealed in Val Richards' interlude.:
    • The ability to Wall Crawl, derived from multiple sources.
    • Limited ability to stretch her tissues. In-Universe, Ashley speculates that they come from Ms. Marvel's DNA as Mister Snuggles claims that the DNA that grants them this power is hostile to the X-Gene, and Ashley can only think of Mister Fantastic and Ms. Marvel and Mister Fantastic's son is a mutant so his DNA messing with Mutant DNA doesn't make sense. Mister Snuggles thinks that speculating from a pool of two samples is irresponsible, but she's right. After absorbing Ms. Marvel's Symbiote Codex, they become a full-fledged Rubber Man and Mister Snuggles gains the power to assume humanoid form.
    • A long, reptilian tail from The Lizard. She later upgrades it with her Thing powers
    • The ability to produce Wolverine Claws via symbiote shapeshifting and a genetic template from Sabretooth. Exaggerated after further adaptation combined with Laura's Venom Codex and Deadpool's Phage Codex.
    • Thanks to Captain America's DNA Ashley has Ideal Illness Immunity and good health beyond the normal symbiote benefits for as long as she and Mister Snuggles are properly bonded. Her future self is an Amazonian Beauty because the buildup of serum in her body over time was, if not enough to give her the full effect, made it so puberty was very generous to her.
    • Unique to Mister Snuggles is a partially organic Uru bio-mass derived from a combination of Colossus' DNA and divine energy from the Asgardians. The Uru is charged with Hellfire and Spider-Magic.
    • Enhanced senses, especially smell, from Kraven the Hunter, later further augmented with Sabretooth, X-23, Phage, and Lasher... And much later, Eye-Boy's symbiote codex brings this in regards to vision up to eleven.
    • Biomechanical versions of Doc Ock's Combat Tentacles scaled to Ashley's frail ten-year-old frame. by word of god, Deadpool's Lasher Codex means she can make as many as she wants now instead of just four.
    • A Spider-Sense derived from OG Spider-Man, thanks to the Uru absorbing totemic energy from his DNA sample. Word of God is that Ashley developed the full range of Spider-Man;'s abilities, among other things, after taking the Toxin codex from Poison Bonesaw's corpse but that Mister Snuggles dind't tell her becuase of how upsetting she found Bonesaw's memories and didn't want to remind her, which she becomes aware of in Chapter 29
    • A pair of draconic wings that Ashley notes look familiar, allowing her to glide, from Lockheed. They become full-sized and fully functional after she Comes Back Strong and get paired with a Breath Weapon and resistance to fire. Later still they become much bigger and stronger, and gain a smaller supporting pair, after she absorbs Archangel's symbiote codex.
    • An ability to hover about an inch off the ground Which is a degraded version of Carol Danvers' powers of flight. Later it becomes true flight, and she demonstrates a low powered variation of her photonic blasts when scaring off cultists.
    • Power Pincers derived from a bio-mechanical version of one of the Scorpion's powered armors, which contained his DNA in the organic parts. Or rather, that's what Ashley assumes them to be when Mister Snuggles explains it, but she's right.
    • Mister Snuggles' ability to disguise itself as mundane clothing is augmented by being infused with metamorphic cells that contain an X-Gene. Ashley guesses that that means that he's part Mystique. She's right.
    • Enlarged, rocklike PowerFists that prompt Ashley to quote the Thing's catchphrase the first time she uses them from Benjamin "The Thing" Grimm of the Fantastic Four. Later on, they take on more of the Thing's unique properties, and a little later Ashley is able to use it on other parts of her body and enhance it with Deadpool's Riot codex.
    • A Detect Evil ability derived from Hellfire from an unknown Ghost Rider Chapter 11 establishes that Mister Snuggles got this from essentially being set ablaze with Hellfire, some of which was absorbed by its Uru metal biomass, with Interlude 3 confirming that the Hellfire exposure was done by the scientists deliberately to test the Uru's properties. She gains the Penance Stare when the Hell-Mark activates, after having been explicitly confirmed not to have it before gaining the mark. According to Doctor Strange after some research, unless something major happens, the worst-case-scenario if the Hell-Mark becomes permanently active is that she'll become a full Ghost Rider, with her symbiote taking the place of a Spirit of Vengeance.
    • Ashley has also implied Super-Intelligence or enhanced memory Which comes from The Leader. It later develops to encompass genuine psychic powers, and after adapting to the DNA of Psylocke and Exodus her psychic powers are vastly enhanced... And then she absorbs Jean Grey's symbiote codex.
    • In Chapter 11, Mister Snuggles comments that Ashley's enhanced strength has increased disproportionately to her base when she's experiencing a rush of adrenaline. He claims to feel unusually warm and states that he'd only felt like that previously when Ashley sparred with Sophia. it's from She-Hulk, and its existence was foreshadowed by Armmsmater pulling a Geiger-meter on Ashley when her spare with Sophia got heated.
    • More humorously, Interlude 3 states that Squirrel Girl's friend/sidekick/pet Tippy Toe was a donor but whose sample didn't seem to do anything. Word of God is that it provides Cuddlebug with extra adorableness.
    • After absorbing the codex from the Poison Bonesaw, she uses it against Bloodbath to form the blades and tendrils she can't on her own in addition to her more specialized uses of Shapeshifter Weapon.
    • After consuming seven codices from Ms. Marvel, X-23, and Deadpool, Mister Snuggles has the full extent of Ms. Marvel's powers, a much stronger healing factor, and all the unique adaptions that the venom, Riot, Agony, Phage, and Lasher symbiotes had at the time they were bonded to X-23 and Deadpool as well as a small fraction of power from each.
    • Mephisto reveals in Chapter 28 that, while it's currently dormant, Ashley and Mr. Snuggles also inherited a Hell-Mark from the symbiote codices. Ashley gets "heartburn" around Mania who also has Mephisto's Hell-Mark and it temporarily activates when Ashley is enraged by using her detect evil on Alexandria.
    • Mister Snuggles uses the memories from the Bonesaw codex to create bio-mechanical versions of Bonesaw's cybernetic enhancements to better protect Ashley's bones and organs going forward in chapter 29.
    • Deadpool's Agony Codex makes Ashley immune to Hollywood Acid and by WoG makes her a Poisonous Person able to produce the same as an Acid Attack.
    • after absorbing remnants of the Blood of Apocalypse from Ashley's system, Mister Snuggles comments on it's adaptive nature and how he could easily replicate its abilities to make Ashley The Needless, let her replicate the technology integrated into his body, and enhance all of her existing powers, but Ashley doesn't want to be any more like Apocalypse than she already is for he time being and puts it on the backburner. She eventually adapts to it in Murderworld, which gives her {Technopathy} and gives minor enhancements to Ashley's other powers.
    • Ashley steals the Dreadface codex from The Human Torch in the hopes that his powers will upgrade her dragon breath, but it doesn't do much dueto the symbiotes lack of ability to adapt to him... Until Ashley starts rapidly adapting to every bit of DNA she has after taking Archangel's codex.
    • She absorbs several more DNA samples(from Krakoa the living Island, the current Excaliber Roster,) and three codices from Wolverine on Krakoa. The following chapter, the combination of taking in symbiote codices from symbiotes that were modified to adapt rapidly and redisual Black Vortex energy from Archangel means that Ashley gets all of these powers and then some all at once.
    • In the following chapter, she absorbs codices from Colossus and Archangel, a number of Apocalypse's skills, and more codices from Magick, Nightcrawler, Eye-Boy, Iceman, Storm, Jean Grey, and Cyclops, along with a few that only give her minor benefits. Notably, in he cases of Cyclopes, Jean Grey, and Archangel since they wore their symbiotes as Time Traveling Teenagers, it comes with their temporary power ups like Cosmic Power, life-force manipulation, and the time that Cyclops was a Hulk. In archangel's case, the Black vortex powers latent in his body for the last thirteen years mean that his Codex brings out all of Ashley's powers to their full potential.
    • In the next chapter she absorbs the codices from Devil Dinosaur (gaining knowledge from Moon Girl due to her Inhuman power to "Freaky Friday" Flip with the Dinosaur), the Invisible Woman's codex, and the piece of the Carnage symbiote that Taskmaster had tried to steal.
    • Next, she grabs the codices from She-Hulk, Captain Marvel, Iron Man's Endo-Sym codex, and a codex from Thor, which not only grants her power from Thor, but also traces of the many gods and other beings killed by Gorr the God-Butcher, and allows her to turn All-Love into All-Black.
    • She then absorbs Cletus Cassidy's symbiote, Cthonic magic, and codices, fed his soul to her Hell-Mark, and absorbed the codices of Shriek, the Grendel offshoots and codices in the Doverton citizens and cultists, and the Carnage codice from John Jonah Jameson III.
    • After absorbing more Grendel symbiote masses and codices, Doctor Strange manages to get Ashley to agree to stop for a while by offering the Scream symbiote, four other comatose offspring of Venom, several dozen mindless synthetic symbiotes and their codices, several hundred other codices, the Mania codices, the bio-mechanical constructs made by the people that experimented on her, the codices from the Elderly version of Wolverine who was a Horseman of the Apocalypse, Hercules, Drax, Groot, Rocket Raccoon, some Skrull soldiers, a Ghost Rider from South America, a former Sorcerer Supreme, Conan of Cimmeria, Iron Heart, Nova, Valkyrie, and a few other heroes, including some Anti-Venom from Klara and the right memories to help snap her out of it.
  • Klara Prast from Comic Book/Runaways was kidnapped from her foster parents and stranded on Earth Bet. In addition to her canon Green Thumb powers, she's also been given a duplicate of the Anti-Venom symbiote and thus Healing Hands.
  • As a Cosmic Ray Augmented Gamma-Ray Mutate, Missy/Vista gains a brute package and the ability to fire blasts of heat and radiation from her hands in addition to her already powerful Space Master powers.
  • Taylor gains the power to summon magic Spiders from vents on and in her body as well as moderately enhanced physical attributes and a low-level Wolverine-style Healing Factor after Jorogumo's venom puts her in a coma and a mischievous spider-God takes an interest and hijacks her dream. A later chapter confirms that she's developing a Spider-Sense as well.
  • As the new Thor, Dean is a Physical God with power over storms and some access to magic in addition to his canonical Empath and Emotion altering concussive blast powers.
  • Bonesaw gives herself the combined powers of Deadpool, Komodo, Stegron, Gabriel Stacy, Phil Urich, and Morbius the Living Vampire with a Tinker-Tech mutagen she retroengineered from the DNA of their clones, in addition to her Mad Doctor themed The Spark of Genius. The new Healing Factor doesn't play well with her extensive cybernetics, however...

Tropes N Through Z

• Nervous Wreck: Downplayed. Normally, Ashley is cheerful, confident, and assertive. But she tends to become full of nerves, shame, or guilt when she thinks she's made a mistake. Best shown with her reaction to her Akkabaan ancestry: Initially, after Terrigensis makes her look like Apocalypse, she decides to 'own' her ancestry... But when plans are made for them all to go visit Marvel earth for a bit she puts a lot of effort into disguising herself so she won't be judged against him and when her losing her temper ruins the disguise not only is she ashamed of losing her temper but she practically has a panic attack over the thought of bad things happening to her friends or to the Fantastic Four (who are hosting them) because of her obvious ancestry and wants to go back to Earth Bet immediately. After her codice-eating trip, which was partially due to her feeling like a Failure Hero, Doc Samson notes that she has issues with anxiety and stress.
• Never Heard That One Before: Sauron is rather ticked when the captive Miss Militia starts saying something about how he's using genetic-alteration technology to turn people into dinosaur-hybrids instead of curing cancer, going on a rant.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: Poison!Panacea/Red Queen’s attack on Gallant causes him to pick up Mjolnir, which was on the ground because she had cut through Donar’s staff earlier to be petty, leading to him becoming the new Thor.
  • Skull-face's formula ends up reviving Ashley's mother and makes her immortal when the Punisher intervenes in his attempt to revive Hydra agents.
• Noble Demon: The One Above All's representative says that a literal interpretation of this trope this is the worst case scenario if the Hell-Mark Mister Snuggles accidentally stole activates.
• No Body Left Behind: Vista hits Bloodbath with a fire blast so powerful it apparently completely obliterates him, leaving nothing but a field of molten asphalt.
• No Navel, Novel Birth: The Magneto clone has no belly button. Amy erroneously attributes it to him having a potent Healing Factor. It seems to be a consistent trait across clones.
• Non Sequitur, *Thud*: Ashley sings a line of Captain America's theme song after a particularly heavily hit.
• Noodle Incident: At somepoint, Weapon X tried to do something with "cyborg-vampire-Wolverine-dinosaurs." Blade took care of it.
  • After killing the Marquis, Taylor goes to pick up Ashley from her therapy session, the Leader is in a full nelson and getting repeatedly punched in the stomach by Bruce Banner's "Joe" personality, while Ashley and Missy eat popcorn and watch. All Ashley gets out about what happened is that someone who appeared to be Rick Jones took an interest in Missy, Ashley's Spider-Sense started tingling, and Missy accidentally opened a portal to "Cosmic Mega Hell" before Taylor stops her.
  • Ashley's resurrected mother tells her of several, like what messes her sister Yuki got into or her misadvetures in college.
• No-Sell: Ashley realizes that her Detect Evil power is somehow related to the Ghost Riders and tries to use the Penance Stare on Bloodbath, who simply points out the foolishness of assuming she has every Ghost Rider power just because she has one of them and explains that the Penance Stare doesn't work on Symbiotes.
  • Mike is somehow able to keep the Siberian from just yanking her arm out of his grip, and she completely disappears when he punches her, flabbergasting Tattletale.
  • Ashley shrugs off a Pumpkin bomb, Shatterbird and Burnscar's best efforts, and two different kinds of acid from Bonesaw after she Came Back Strong.
  • Ashley has a ludicrous resistance to telepathy due to having the DNA and powers of several people who are resistant to it.
• "Not Making This Up" Disclaimer: People often initially assume that Ashley is pulling their leg when she tells them about some of the more outlandish happenings from her world, requiring this.
• Obstructive Bureaucrat: Piggot harshly enforces one of the clauses of Ashley's contract out of spite to keep the Marvel Team occupied.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome: The fight with Lung and a multi-armed woman crony vs. Ashely and Taylor.
  • Right after returning from Ashley's Earth, Missy and Dean drive off Leviathan from Miami almost single-handed. Missy even has a poster of it made.
• Omniglot: Ashley knows something around a dozen languages thanks to knowledge from symbiote codices.
• One Hero, Hold the Weaksauce: After Terrigenesis, Ashley and Mr. Snuggles are now resistant to fire.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: You know Ashley is frustrated when she actually swears twice during Arcade's Bloodborne-based trial, the first time after she turns out to have wasted her time and effort fighting a bonus boss, the second when another difficult boss turns out to have a stage two.
• Opposite-Sex Clone: The cloning techs goofed and made one of these of Molly Hayes, who joins the Undersiders after ending up on Earth Bet. A later chapter reveals that he answers to Mike.
• Organic Technology: Something the people who kidnapped Ashley were working on, derived from Symbiote Biomass. The author explicitly compares it to Superior Ironman's Endo-Sym armor or Hall Industries' tech in the Spacebattles thread.
• Painting the Medium: Gwenpool's dialog is in pink text in Val Richard's interlude, to represent her dimensional accent, but only in the Spacebattles version due to formatting limitations.
• Parental Marriage Veto: An Interlude focusing on Ashley's grandfather Patrick reveals that Patrick Senior disapproved of his son Patrick Jr.'s marriage to Ashley's grandmother because she was Chinese, and they never reconciled before he died.
  • Ashley's maternal grandfather tried to pull this with her parent's relationship for similar reasons, a traditionalist Japanese man who didn't want his daughter marrying a man who was half-white and half-Chinese, but Patrick talked to him. Then they argued. Then they got drunk. After that, they fought over who would pay for the wedding and all problems were resolved.
• Perfectly Cromulent Word: There's a Shout-Out to the Trope Namer early on.
• Pet the Dog: Even on her symbiote-codice eating power trip, Ashley takes the time to heal Storm before moving on. She also rejects the idea of taking Franklin's, since it could be used to heal his power-loss issues.
• Platonic Declaration of Love: "As you wish" is used as such a few times, even once being immediately answered with "love you, too."
• Plot-Relevant Age-Up: Ashley uses her powers to age herself to twenty-five when told that someone her age can't handle something like the Black Vortex. It doesn't convince anyone and the author confirmed that she's still mentally a child.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: When calling back to his Early-Bird Cameo, Norman Osborn's clone displays some of the misogyny and mild racism Norman is known for in the comics. Osborn also engages in a spot of Fantastic Racism when the topic of mutants comes up, which is again consistent with his canonical anti-mutant leanings.
• Power Limiter: After her symbiote-codice eating trip, Mr. Snuggles agrees to have Doctor Strange temporarily seal most of Ashley's powers so that she can better acclimate to the power and learn to handle it properly and responsibly.
• Pragmatic Villainy: Lung wants to kill Ashley for her Groin Attack on him, while Bakuda wants to use her... until Ashley insults her bomb skills.
• Pronoun Trouble: Ashley refers to Snuggles with male pronouns despite symbiotes lacking biological sex or gender identities. Mister snuggles legitimately doesn't understand why humans think that pronouns are such a big deal.
• Protagonist-Centered Morality: In-Universe Alexandria accuses Ashley of this, arbitrarily deciding what right and wrong are and trying to brute force the world into going her way after Ashley spells out all the reasons why Riley deserves a fair chance and blackmails (and later Penance Stares) her into submission. Though considering what Alexandria does on a daily basis, she's kind of a hypocrite.
• Psychic Block Defense: One of Ashley's powers is psychic resistance, which, at least after All-Black is purged from her and Doctor Strange limits her connection to the hive-mind, is capable of protecting her, Mr. Snuggles, and the Scream Symbiote from Knull.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • Piggot has this reaction when Danny mentions bringing his friend Alan Barnes to help negotiate contracts for Taylor and Ashley.
  • more seriously, Ashley's reaction to learning that a clone of Carnage who killed two people and put their heads in her bed had been there the whole time when he reveals himself is "oh fuck."
  • This is Leet's reaction when she learns that Mike punched out the Siberian, and that his originator Molly, who is possibly even stronger than he is, already has a beef with Arcade and will go after him, Uber, and Leet if they hurt Klara.
  • Spidr-Man explains who Excalibur are when he's been tapped to be th line of communication between Earth Bet and Marvel Earth, only to have this reaction when he remembers that Apocalypse is part of the team.
• Precision F-Strike: Ashley, who normally doesn't swear in English, says "oh fuck" when confronted by Bloodbath the Carnage clone.
• Racist Grandpa: Ashley assumes this about her grandfather's grandfather, noting that all she knows about him is that he had a birthmark like hers, he's the bastard son of an Englishman and that he used to get drunk and rant about Egyptians. She thinks he meant Romani people based on the origin of the term 'gypsy.' However, considering the implication that they're descended from Apocalypse...
  • Her grandfather's father plays this straight, having disinherited his son for marrying a Chinese woman, while Patrick Jr. averted this, and thought that prejudice, in general, was just plain stupid. Patrick senior is noted, in Patrick junior's narration, to have died alone and bitter.
• Rape as Backstory: Klara Prast, as per canon. It's not really dwelled upon except for brief mentions in her introductory chapter and in a side story.
• Reed Richards Is Useless: Discussed in Chapter 31. Basically, the problem is that Reed is too far ahead of his time, only a few people can properly understand his more impressive inventions, many are too time-consuming and costly to mass-produce himself, and too sensitive to trust to automated processes. The best he can do is publish his research in the hopes that other researchers can improve the general technology level enough that mass production will eventually become possible.
• Refusing Paradise: Ashley could have gone to Valhalla or Heaven after her death at Bonesaw's hands, but ultimately chose to return.
• Reincarnation: Dean turns out to be Earth-Bet's Thor reincarnated, and the lawyer Luke, who helped Ashley with her contract, is Loki reincarnated.
• Religious and Mythological Theme Naming: While the literal translation of the Krakoan language "Sorcerer's name" that Apocalypse give Ashley when she's initiated into his Coven is "Good News," Angel translates it as Evangelion based on Apoclypse's penchant for Biblical Greek.
• Required Secondary Powers: Played With in that Ashley's superhuman hormones come with a superhuman chemical resistance but that her resistance doesn't line up with her hormones properly, resulting in a hormonal imbalance that functionally cripples her and leaves her prone to infection. The resistance applies just fine to most medications, however, so Ashley is basically screwed if she gets sick and can't take medicine to help the hormonal imbalance.
  • This comes up again later, where it’s noted that since her powers came in so early with no apparent cause, it’s possible that she could develop a secondary mutation and control it.
• Restoration of Sanity: After Bonesaw injects herself with a mutagen derived from the DNA of several marvel supers, the Healing Factor she gains at first damages her body, including her brain, by purging her cybernetics but she fully recovers and her repaired brain regains the capability for remorse and empathy.
• Running Gag:
  • Ashley getting mad at Mr. Snuggles not telling her that she can do things.
  • People from Earth-Bet expressing disbelief at all the stuff Ashley tell them about her Earth.
• Saying Sound Effects Outloud: Ashley vocalizes Wolverine's "snikt" because her claws don't make a sound when she forms them.
• Schizo Tech: Ashley lampshades this with Sauron in the Savage Lands, pointing out that it's probably not a good idea to extend this to weaponry.
• Screaming at Squick: Ashley reacts... Poorly when she encounters the Orphan of Kos in a Bloodborne inspired Murderworld simulation. More specifically, its introduction.
• Shipper on Deck: Ashley is a big Spiderman/Black Cat fan, and isn't much a fan of Silk for that reason. Word of God is that she's also fond of Cyclops/Jean.
• Shout-Out: Marvel Earth and Earth Bet don't line up, temporally just right, and Marvel's pop-culture is nearly identical to the real world's despite the presence of superhumans for over a century in in-universe time. The author has capitalized on this for the purposes of culture clash jokes regarding Earth Bet's deviated popular culture.
  • When figuring out how symbiote powers work, Ashley imitates Ms. Marvel's use of 'Embiggen' when she figures out the can stretch. Taylor comments on it and Ashley replies that it's a perfectly cromulent word.
  • There have been multiple hints that Ashley is a fan of Steven Universe, including a mention that she likes Estelle's music because of it, but Taylor has no idea who that is.
  • Ashley mentions Michael Jackson being alive and still black as one of the reasons why Earth Bet sounds crazy to her.
  • Ashley mentions that, according to an Avengers trivia website, her world's Iron Man permanently licensed a certain Black Sabbath song.
  • Ashley and Chitter get into a brief argument about Pokémon and Digimon when Ashley doesn't get the clone's reference. None of the Earth Bet Natives understand what they're talking about.
  • Later in the same Chapter, Ashley mentions having gotten the True Pacifist Ending in Undertale as evidence that she's got determination.
  • After getting a look at herself in the mirror with her mask off and using her detect evil ability, she describes the flaming eyes it gives her as looking like a picture of a CGI Anime Girl she saw once.
  • Ashley herself is named after the Ashley in El Goonish Shive, due to some similarities between the two characters that Rater noticed when finalizing the concept, though those similarities are only superficial.
    • Mr. Snuggles having Tippy-Toe's DNA is apparently a reference to Grace from the same comic.
    • When talking to Lisa about the ways that magic can pose a threat, Dr. Strange seemingly references an event from the comic about a group of teens being physically and mentally transformed by a sociopath who found an easy way to gain magical power.
  • While showing off for an audience, Ashley prompts Mister Snuggles to shift through the colors of the troll Hemospectrum from Homestuck
  • to another Wormfic: In chapter two there's an allusion to Constellations.
  • Uber and Leet somehow built a fully functional Metal Gear (specifically the TX-55 from the original Metal Gear) and used it (specifically it's nuclear weapons) during an allegedly peaceful demonstration at city Hall while dressed as Ghandi. The following chapter mentions the TX-55's weakness and states that the Poisons helped Uber and Leet do it as a distraction.
  • The spell that brings Ms. Mystic back to her own time is activated by clicking the heels of her formal slippers, and takes her to the place she thinks of as home, just like in The Wizard of Oz
  • Bonesaw apparently ate someone's liver with fava beans and chianti... Then threw it up and complained about how nasty it was and about Hannibal Lecter's taste. Ashley corrects her that it was Amarone in the novel, which pairs better with liver.
  • Ashley paraphrases Smaug at one point.
  • In chapter 30, Deadpool refers to Narwhal as a Kyle's Mom and Ashley refers to the Canadian Ninja Syndicate as The Village Hidden in The Mapple Leaves in a continuation of the shoutout in the source material.
  • Reed Richards contrasts his teleporter with the one from Star Trek.
  • When they reappear on the Marvel Earth, Uber and Leet are dressed like the Dungeon Master from the Dungeons & Dragons (1983) cartoon.
  • Arcade's Murderworld scenario for Tattletale was based on Ace Attorney. Taylor's on Super Mario Bros., with a hub based on Shenmue and poor Ashley gets stuck in Bloodborne. Grace's scenario is based on Persona, Drean's on The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Vista's is from Fallout.
  • In a side-story, Ashley sings a tweaked version of the song "The List" from The Mikado.
  • A non-canon side-story has Taylor refer to a Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl as "Ring-Grudge-Japanese Stringy-Haired-Ghost-Bullshit."
  • One of Hydra's revived soldiers apparently got a wire crossed, so it says "fuck the police", apparently a reference to N.W.A., rather than "Hail Hydra".
  • after being revived, Ashley's mother quotes Aliens, which is lampshaded the next chapter, and in the following chapter states 'omae wa mou shinderu' which she admits is a gratuitous reference.
  • A made-up story meant to deflect blame for poor judgment involves a woman in Tokyo getting blackout drunk, climbing a mountain, and now she's dating a dragon
  • Ashley name drops Harry Potter when mentioning the dinosaur Dracorex hogswartsia... Which is named Dracorex jacobsbellsia on Earth Bet.
  • A virus being part of a serum meant to raise the dead reminds Ashley of Resident Evil
  • "I'm not blue. I'm periwinkle. It's prettier."
• Sidetracked by the Analogy: When making a But for Me, It Was Tuesday comment, Ashley gets distracted wondering if it's actually Tuesday or not.
• Signature Move: Ashley claims that punching people in the groin is hers.
• Single Specimen Species: Ashley after her fusion with Mr. Snuggles.
• Silly Rabbit, Idealism Is for Kids!: Bonesaw rants along these lines, dipping into Straw Nihilist in the process, when Ashley keeps trying to talk her down without fighting her.
  • Silly Rabbit, Cynicism Is for Losers!: Ashley's rebuttal to the above.
• Sleep Cute: Ashley and Grace(a member of the future Avengers of Earth Bet) are described as doing this on the couch when Ms. Mystic returns to her own time. In the modern day, Ashley ends up sleeping with Grace/Riley when she initially loses her memory and the phrase 'say goodbye' triggers unpleasant feelings in Grace's subconscious
• Smash Cut: Chapter 32 ends with arrangements being made for Ashley to spar with someone after she discovers that she can make a sword. There's a scene transition to Ashley in an infirmary after getting curbstomped by her sparring partner.
• Squee: Ashley does this internally when Spider-Man agrees to do a selfie with her at the end of Chapter 22 She makes sounds not unlike a rubber duck four times while reading the documents about the modifications made to Mister Snuggles. Considering that this includes the DNA of her four favorite superheroes...
• The Sociopath: A clone of Roderick Kingsley. Clones of Norman Osborn and his bastard son Gabriel are demonstrably psychopaths, and as is typical for Carnage his Hybrid Clone Bloodbath is gleeful in his violent tendencies and lack of empathy.
• Stable Time Loop: Ms. Mystic confirms that this is the case for the time-traveling Poison Hive.
• The Starscream: Roderick Kingsley/the Hobgoblin manages to get a job for Accord, then takes advantage of his neuroses to assassinate him and take over his operation, while making it look like someone else pulled it off.
  • It's implied that the Norman Osborne clone gave Dinah the Goblin formula, allowing her to escape and kill Coil.
• Straw Nihilist: Ashley accuses Jack Slash of being this when Bonesaw's argument dips into this logic, which she credits to Jack. Ashley goes as far as to have accused Jack of reading one of Nietzche's books but misunderstanding it.
• Superpower Russian Roulette: How Ashley describes the X-Gene as working here. Basically, it codes for a protein that acts as a mutagen, with results ranging from the Superpower Lottery jackpot winners, the Omegas, and the more normal winners, the Alphas, all the way down to Epsilons like her, whose powers are effectively useless and/or actually harmful. She even directly compares it to Russian Roulette in a later chapter.
• Super-Empowering: In episode 12, Taylor is somehow connected to the Great Web and develops new powers, being able to secrete spiders out of herself, with later chapters revealing that she's got a healing factor and the typical Spider physical boosts and wall-crawling. Chapter 14 has Vista become a Red Hulk as a delayed result of Cosmic and Gamma-Ray exposure..
  • Gallant becomes the next Thor of Earth-Bet.
  • Because of the Nine's attack and Emma and Madison's disappearance, Sophia second triggers, with her breaker form becoming more combat-worthy at the cost of her apparently being always semi-transformed.
  • Mr. Snuggles inadvertently gained a Hell-Mark when he absorbed the symbiote codices from the Marvel heroes.
• Superhuman Transfusion: As in Marvel canon, transferring Wolverine's or one of his clone's blood into someone temporarily gives him their healing factor. Gabby Kinney exploits this to help Ashley recover from some particularly bad wounds, in part to circumvent some Obstructive Bureaucrat stuff the PRT was doing to protest Ashley's contract.
• Super-Senses: Ashley's senses are enhanced.
• Super Soldiers: By Word of God, the ultimate goal of the people who kidnapped Ashley. Details are fuzzy, but it involved Symbiote derived biotechnology, Cloning, Occultism, and Mutant Growth Hormone. Mister Snuggles was experimented in part to provide better samples of symbiote bio-mass for that Bio-Tech.
• Super-Strong Child: Ashley, when wearing Mister Snuggles, can lift roughly five US tons^note That's 4.53592 in Imperial tons, 4.46429 in Metric, and roughly 10,000 pounds and 4535.92 kilograms overhead.
• Stealth Pun: Ashley's Blood type is B+.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: When questioned about being a mutant, Gwenpool recaps the events of Gwenpool Strikes Back by denying that she warped reality to become a mutant or that the events of it were a comic book.
• Sympathy for the Devil: Ashley's response to learning about the possibility that Bonesaw was Forced into Evil but that they can't know for sure because she's too dangerous to bring in alive was a quiet "that's sad." She has nothing but sympathy after learning Riley's backstory from the Ghost Memory of the alt-Riley who became Poison Bonesaw, going so far as to compare Riley/Bonesaw to Bucky/Winter Soldier.
• Taking the Bullet: The Earth-Bet version of Loki died taking a blow meant for Thor.
• Taking You with Me: When Bakuda and Oni Lee are captured, the former set off all of her grenades on Oni Lee at one, tearing a portal into the world Ashley came from, but in space, with Vista getting a near-fatal dose of cosmic rays when she used her powers to close it.
• Take That!:
  • There's a brief mention of a child claiming to be a genius being thrown out of a library when Taylor takes Ashley there. This was Rater having a bit of fun with the behavior of certain Self Insert protagonists, though in-story it's just a random crazy.
  • In chapter 48, Ashley compares the stupidity of someone picking a fight with a team that had Thor to a horror movie about The Banana Splits
• Talking the Monster to Death: Having the memories of an alternate Riley, Ashley refuses to fight Bonesaw and repeatedly tries to talk her down. The first time all it does is piss Bonesaw off, but after her death and rebirth Ashley manages to get through enough to shake Riley into a Villainous Breakdown.
• That Man Is Dead: As much as they might claim otherwise to mess with people, those absorbed by the Poisons are dead and gone, even if the Poisons have their memories, knowledge, and powers.
  • Riley Grace Davis is declared legally dead around the time that Grace O'Reilly joins the Wards.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech:
  • Miss Militia notes some hostility from Ms. Mystic after the sorceress gives an unsubtle warning to the Wards not to follow her advice, as they're not meant to be soldiers and she thinks that Taylor, Vista, and Gallant have better judgment than Miss Militia does. Ms. Mystic replies by explaining how Miss Militia is a hypocrite who cares more about rules and regulations that doing the right thing with enough venom that Taylor wonders what was going to happen in the future to make Ms. Mystic hate Miss Militia that much.
  • She does another in a following chapter, primarily at Director Piggot but taking shots at Miss Militia and PRT ENE as a whole but while she succeeds in cowing Director Piggot she also frightens Ashley, leading to her apologizing and saying that, while everything she said stood, she didn't say it in the best way and claims that the stress and lack of sleep since coming back in time is making her slip into old bad habits. Director Piggot begrudgingly accepts the apology and they continue with business shortly after.
  • Spider-Man gives one to Mannequin when he's giving him an epic beatdown.
  • Ashley gives one to Mephisto when she's briefly dead.
  • Ashley and Tattletale each give one to Arcade in Chapter 35.
  • Miss Militia gets one when she tries to intimidate Taylor, Ashley, and Lisa into obedience.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: In addition to the fire, a scene of Ashley playing with her Detect Evil power shows that it makes her irises glow red.
  • Her eyes become a "malevolent red" after her death and resurrection.
• Tainted Veins: Ashley sports these after Bonesaw pumps her full of enough concentrated synthetic terrigen to overcome her chemical resistance. In this case, from the sheer amount of it in her bloodstream.
• Teleporter Accident: Miss Militia ends up causing herself, Ashley, Taylor, and Ashley's revived mother to be sent to the Savage Land.
• The Man in the Mirror Talks Back: After Riley's transformation into "Grace", an image of her Bonesaw self shows up replacing her reflection. She chalks it up to having enhanced herself with the genetics of three lunatics. Thanks to somekind of mind scanning technology, the Bonesaw in the mirror becomes very real in a Persona themed Murderwrld simulation.
• Theme Song: In a non-canon side-story, Ashley tries to write her own, set to the music of Spider-Man's iconic theme, but ran out of steam towards the end. Vista threatens to kill her if Image finds out.
  • She later tries to write a version of "Stronger Than You" with lyrics changed to suit her. This time Vista wants her to sing it when sparring with Sophia to piss her off.
• This Cannot Be!: The Red Queen’s reaction when she realizes that she just allowed Dean to become the new Thor.
• Trigger Phrase: When Taylor encounters a dinosaur-ified Miss Militia in Sauron's lab, she says a Master/Stranger code phrase and the latter almost immediately fires at her, and when she avoids the bullets due to Spider-Sense, she just tries to club Taylor to death in a rage.
• Troubled Fetal Position: Discussed in Taylor's narration in one chapter, where she wonders if she should be concerned about Ashley sleeping in the fetal position.
• Trauma-Induced Amnesia: Riley, after her Healing Factor messily purges her extensive cybernetics.
• Traumatic Superpower Awakening: It's implied that Ashley being one of the victims of the time that Thanos temporarily wiped out half the universe and then returning is what caused her powers to come in so early.
• Ultimate Job Security: Towards the end of chapter 12, Taylor mentions that the custom contracts she and Ashley have regarding the information Ashley can provide means that they can quit at any time with no penalty and can only be punished if they break the contract or violate the law. Piggot isn't exactly happy when she discovers this.
  • Piggot isn't any more pleased when, after complaining that Ashley's lecture on mutants in a canon omake wasn't immediately useful, she threatens to dock part of Ashley's consultation fee and is informed by Taylor that the contract doesn't allow that either.
  • It's eventually revealed that Ashley's contract specifically comes with perks such as the right to refuse direct orders for any reason, the PRT absolutely having to consult Ashley first on anything to do with her world, being able to override Ward transfers if the Ward doesn't want to leave Brockton Bay, and being able to buy out a Ward's contract for a pittance and make them her direct subordinates, granting them the same immunities as Ashley. Ms. Mystic lampshades that it's blatantly one-sided in Ashley's favor. Luke Lafayette, who is Loki reincarnated, claims he deliberately gave a bunch of ridiculous but legal and value-proportionate concessions to Ashley and Taylor to teach Director Piggot a lesson, while Ms. Mystic claims it's to stop 'bullshit' from interfering in Ashley's 'destiny' by giving her the ability to shut it down.
  • Comes back to bite Ashley in the butt when Piggot enforces the "Ashley must be consulted" clause of Ashley's contract to essentially imprison the Marvel Team while Ashley was in the hospital.
  • Ashley uses this to her advantage to force the PRT to bring Jack in alive and try him properly, and later arranges for this to apply to Riley(by buying out her contract) because as far as Ashley sees it, Riley's a victim who Ashley explains probably never would have been brainwashed into hurting those people if someone had tried to rescue her when she was first inducted into the nine.
  • Lafayette also got himself a severance package so big that if Piggot fires him in a way that triggers it, the entire department would be bankrupted.
• The Unmasking: Ashley and Taylor's identities are revealed to the Wards and vice versa The Ward's Identities at various times for various reasons over the course of the story. And Ashley and Taylor's identities are leaked to the public by a neighbor when they're targetted during the Nine's attack. Taylor's putting off dealing with it and Ashley takes advantage of it to look Bonesaw in the eye when trying to talk her down.
• Vagueness Is Coming: When absorbing symbiote codices on the Marvel Earth, Ashley keeps hearing that "God is Coming", possibly a reference to Knull.
• Weak, but Skilled: Snuggles is a young symbiote who doesn't have the experience and power of older ones like Venom ( as well as dealing with conflicting Inhuman and mutant genetics that were added during the experiments on them), but makes up for it with the use of the various genetic sequences and other modifications made to him. For example, using genetic information acquired from Mystique to shapeshift into clothes despite not knowing how to do it the symbiote way yet, as well as using other DNA to compensate for an otherwise limited ability to shapeshift compared to more powerful symbiotes. This becomes a key point when a group of Poisons travels back in time in an attempt to assimilate her while she's still weak.
• Wham Episode:
  • In chapter 7, Amy is Killed Off for Real by an ABB member during the Bank.
  • In chapter 9, Ashley intervenes in a fight between the Magneto clone and a cape the Empire called in from Germany to deal with him, an electromagnetism Tinker named Donar, who has the Worm universe's version of Mjolnir, using gravity tech to get around the worthiness requirement, which makes Ashley realize that something must have happened to the Worm Thor, since Donar has apparently had the hammer since the eighties.
  • In chapter 12, Taylor has a dream where we learn that she's been connected to the Great Web somehow, wakes up to find that Vista was exposed to Marvel-verse cosmic rays closing a breach Bakuda's bombs made, and discovers that she has a newly-expanded powerset.
  • We learn that in addition to being able to create spiders from her body will, Taylor has most of the typical Spider powers (save a spider-sense). Later, at the press conference introducing Cuddlebug and Weaver, several members of a "New Poison Hive" show up, one looking like she's wearing a twisted version of Taylor's first costume.
  • Chapter 16 reveals that Ashley has a red "birthmark" on her back and Vista, who saw it in the Girls locker room in Wards HQ, describes it as triangles around an oval from a brief glimpse—in other words, it's the Clan Akkaba symbol.
  • In chapter 18, the Poison Panacea and Skitter are killed due to Gallant becoming the new Thor.
  • In chapter 20, someone cuts off Emma and Madison's heads, which are then left in Ashley's bed by Bloodbath, who writes "Carnage Rules" on the wall in blood, then appears out of nowhere at the end of the chapter.
  • Chapter 25 ends with Bonesaw separating Mister Snuggles from Ashley and carrying her off while Taylor and the other heroes with them are rendered helpless by a sonic weapon.
  • In the Spider-Man interlude, Vista incinerates Bloodbath, Spider-Man defeats Mannequin, whose brain is then squished by Mister Snuggles, and Mike turns out to be able to No-Sell the Siberian's powers.
  • Chapter 27 has Ashely getting killed by a Bonesaw boobytrap and her resurrecting and literally calling herself "A Superior Apocalypse!"
  • In Chapter 33 Ashley starts actively seeking out symbiote codices, to the point of stealing them in secret, after being rattled by a fight with Taskmaster, and hears the words "God is Coming", possibly a reference to Knull, when consuming the one left in the Human Torch.
  • Chapter 34 has Uber and Leet, working with Arcade, hijack the Richards' teleporter and teleport Ashley, Vista, Taylor, Dean, Lisa, and Grace to Murderworld, where they've teamed up with Arcade.
  • Chapter 42 has Ashley wielding All-Black.
  • Chapter 47 ends with the reveal that Marquis escaped from the Birdcage.
  • Chapter 54 ends with the reveal that something to do with HYDRA's infinitas agenda was spilled on Ashley's mother's grave, which is now empty, having been busted open from the inside.
  • Chapter 68 has Taylor become the new host of Scream in order to allow them to beat Sauron.
  • In Chapter 69, we learn that Miss Militia's been under a Master effect for the last few weeks.
• What Kind of Lame Power Is Heart, Anyway?: Ashley's "power" made her produce a harmful excess of hormones and a chemical resistance that kept medicine for it from working. When Mr. Snuggles has his bond with her momentarily disrupted, she can barely stand.
  • Heart Is an Awesome Power: However, while utterly useless in most circumstances it makes her a perfect host for a Klyntar Symbiote. And then there's what happens when she gets an adrenaline rush.
  • Chapter 11 implies that it may have some other benefits though, as she is able to escape from the building Lung collapsed on top of her in part due to an unnaturally large surge of adrenaline, though that may have just been the Gamma component, and she apparently actually OD'd on it after the fight was over.
• Vomit Discretion Shot: A variation, Ashley throws up but doesn't realize it until after the fact.
• What the Hell, Hero?: The Marvel heroes aren't very happy with Alexandria when she suggests leaving Ashley in Bonesaw's clutches.
  • Ashley is not happy with the whole concept of Kill Orders, especially since it means that no one tried to rescue Riley after she was kidnapped by the Nine (beyond it being a violation of several constitutional rights), and when her Detect Evil power sees that Alexandria has committed more sins than Riley has, and that, unlike with Riley, no one forced her or tricked her into murdering and worse, she lets her have it, her Hell-Mark briefly activating before she gives Alexandria a Penance Stare.
• What Would X Do?: When Ashley is trapped under a collapsed building by Lung, Mr. Snuggles is unable to convince her to put in the effort to try and escape until it asks her what Spider-Man would do, prompting an adrenaline surge.
• With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: Spider-Man mentions this to Weaver when searching for Ashley and Bonesaw.
• Wrong Assumption: in chapter 34, Taylor has a brief bit of panic when she thinks that Ashley might have a Precocious Crush on the now teenaged Franklin Richards. But by this point, Ashley's started actively taking symbiote codices to get stronger and more skilled, and the story had previously mentioned that he'd briefly been possessed by the Venom symbiote. It's never said outright, but since Franklin is a nigh-omnipotent Reality Warper with The Power of Creation sufficient to spawn entire inhabited universes and it's clear what Ashley was really thinking when she gave that "hungry" glance.
• Wrong Context Magic: Mutant powers and the like are completely different from parahuman powers.
• You Are Better Than You Think You Are: Mister Snuggles to Ashley when she thinks she's not strong enough to escape a collapsed building that has her pinned. It's only when she asks her What Would Spider-Man Do that he convinces her
• You Are What You Hate: Chapter 70 reveals that Ashley's anti-mutant aunt Yuki has the mutant gene herself, but denies it even as she's dying from M-Pox before Ashley cures her.
• You're Insane!: Bonesaw to Ashley, after Ashley forgives her and keeps trying to talk Riley down.
• Your Approval Fills Me with Shame: When Taylor/Weaver threatens Sophia with black widows in her underwear if she does anything to Cuddlebug again, Sophia compliments her for having the guts. Not even the locker made her feel that slimy.
• You Have GOT to Be Kidding Me!: Vista when Ashley implies that Dracula is real in her world. Ashley responds by confirming that he's real where she's from, prompting Vista to deadpan that Ashley's world is terrifying.

Side Story Tropes

• Accidental Truth: Vista inadvertently references the connection Gamma mutants have to the One Below All when talking to Ashley in one chapter.
• Adaptive Ability: In Marvelous Miracles, the Akumatized Ashley was constantly growing stronger as a result of a feedback loop between the power of her Akuma and the Spider-Totem power that Hawk Moth inadvertently tapped into when empowering her.
• All Your Powers Combined:
  • As there isn't a Noir Venom, Rater had to make something up. Based on the Hybrid Theme of the main Cuddlebug, Rater decided that The Venom(here applying to all Symbiotes) were spiritual practices born from the combined hate and bile of a number of mystical beasts that were all trapped in the same container, in this case, a Puzzle Box that had belonged to a Sorcerer ancestor of Ashley's who wondered Asia and parts of Europe centuries ago. After bringing the Venom under her control, Ashley gains fractions of the powers of these beings But the assumption that she had all the power of each of them almost leads to her getting killed when she got cocky.
  • Andrea X's Mister Snuggles is a straighter example, being an offspring of a post-Red Goblin Carnage after it was absorbed a couple of weapons, armors, viruses, and blood samples. It's noted to be able to create Biomechanical Goblin Gear and an Iron Patriot suit.
  • In Bad End Mephisto offers to cure Ashley's sickness, fix her power, give her Apocalypse's powers, give Mister Snuggles the full powers of the energies and DNA he's absorbed, and then give them an even greater power not connected to himself, which turns out to be the Phoenix Force. It's justified since he wants her to kill Scion for him.
  • Spider-Ashley's Mister Snuggles is another subversion—despite having the DNA and memories of every spider-themed superbeing that The Jackal could get his hands on, The Unseen clarifies that he'd put far too many genomes into the symbiote and diluted it's power so that at present it could only manifest common, minor spider-powers.
  • "Weapon Cute" Ashley's symbiote is a Weapon V symbiote modified with several Codices, including an anti-Venom one. She's also received several other Weapon Plus treatments and described herself as having "Wolverine, Hulk, Luke Cage, Captain America, and Venom powers" once she's out of danger and of her right mind. On a personal Level, Ashley is best described as a combination of Weapon H, Luke Cage, and Captain America, her symbiote a combination of a Weapon V Grendel clone and anti-venom with traces of power from the symbiotes that Captain America, Flash Thompson, and Wolverine had worn as well as the Life Foundation symbiotes, and tactically symbiote genetic memory was exploited to give her the combined skills of Captain America, Wolverine, Agent Anti-Venom, Deadpool, and the Anti-Symbiote Task Force's Mercury Team.
  • The "Absolute Menace" Ashley is permanently bonded to a Weapon V symbiote treated with Calypso Serum, synthetic Wakandan herb, and Hobgoblin's version of the Goblin formula, greatly increasing their power and allowing her to breathe flaming sulfur.
    • A sequel to this side-story establishes that this briefly had the combined powers of Captain America, Wolverine, Hawkeye, and Th Thing along with a few extras due to accidentally derailing(and taking Eddie Brock's Place) in her world's timeline's version of Absolute Carnage. Unlike the main Ashley, she doesn't retain the power she gets from Codices or assimilated Symbiotes, or at least can't access it at that point in time, though she suspects she might have Super Soldier Serum now, and she's immune to fire.
  • In "Good Parents Go To Extremes", Ashley's parents, still alive in this reality, talk with their doctor and, in the hopes that at least one of the superpower inducing agents will overcome Ashley's resistance, manage to track down and give her a combination of infinity formula, regen serum, Skrull adrenaline compound, Apocalypse's blood, a serum made from one of the mutant spiders from Captain America being turned into one, a piece of the Toxin symbiote, a dose of the Conners Formula, and the goblin formula, which apparently gives her all of the related powers.
• Alternate Self:
  • Ashley Noir is a clear-cut one to the main Cuddlebug, being from a reality based on the Marvel Noir Universe. Andrea X mentions a Doctor Cuddle, a Cuddle Cosmic, and a Cuddlekitten are also around.
  • Andrea is a subversion, being from the 2099 timeline, or at least one similar, and being of no relation to Ashley. She doesn't even go by Cuddlebug and her only connection to the rest of them is that she's a mutant with chemical-related powers and coincidentally has a Symbiote that she named Mister Snuggles.
  • The Ashley from "What If Mister Snuggles was created by The Jackal" is a pretty clear cut alt-alternate of the main story Ashley, barring that her timeline is a few months to a year earlier than the main Ashley's, but Mister Snuggles in this timeline is a clone of Venom that was modified with the DNA of every Spider-Totem and other spider-themed super that The Jackal could get his hands on.
  • The Ashley from The Intern is a translation of her concept to a Dungeons & Dragons setting: A Mongrelfolk Sorceress interning for Acquisitions Incorporated.
  • The Ashley in Marvelous Miracles managed to escape the cloning facility without running into Mister Snuggles when the brawl went down, only to be recaptured just outside, where a guard tearing up her Spider-Man plushie just to hurt her allows Hawk Moth to akumatize her, turning her into a copy of Spidercide called Menace (Hawk Moth wanted to call her Itsy, but she felt differently), and because he was deliberately emulating a Spider-Totem he inadvertently made Ashley a Totem herself, and awakening her Clan Akkaba bloodline as a result of the reactions between the Totemic magic, the Akuma, and her mutant nature.
  • The Ashley in "Weapon Cute" was kidnapped by a "Weapon Plus" group, and given an Adamantium skeleton and claws like Wolverine, among with various other enhancements like becoming a Hulk, and a modified Anti-Venom-like symbiote.
  • Menace from "An Absolute Menace" is described as the "Ultimate Ashley" in that she's streamlined and somewhat edgier. This Ashley is fourteen and was kidnapped by Weapon V to serve as a host in experiments to create stronger symbiotes. In the process, both she and a weapon V symbiote were repeatedly treated with the Calypso Serum, Killmonger's synthetic version of Wakandan Herb, and the Hobgoblin's version of the Goblin formula. This results in an older, much stronger Ashley permanently bonded to a very powerful symbiote that can breathe flaming sulfur.
  • The Ashley in the "Good Parents Go To Extremes" universe is one where her parents were never killed, and, in a desperate attempt to heal her as her condition got worse, managed to obtain and give her infinity formula, regen serum, Skrull adrenaline compound, Apocalypse's blood, a serum made from one of the mutant spiders from Captain America being turned into one, a piece of the Toxin symbiote, a dose of the Conners Formula, and the goblin formula, among possibly others.
• ...And That Would Be Wrong: Shadow Stalker starts checking the time when Cuddlebug mentions Apocalypse's Social Darwinist outlook and how it makes him evil.
• Angst? What Angst?: The Ashley in Weapon Cute is pretty chill after being freed from mind control and rescued from the Government conspiracy that preformed many, many incredibly painful medical procedures to turn her into a Super-Soldier Tyke Bomb. Justified in that the mind control means she doesn't remember most of it, though Wolverine's narration indicates that she cried offscreen when she realized that other people had died and she was the only survivor of the experiments.
• Are You Sure You Want to Do That?: Weapon Cute has an entire scene that amounts to Logan trying to talk Ashley out of becoming a superhero before she's an adult. It starts with him pointing out that she's too young, while Ashley cites numerous heroes who were about her age or younger before Logan starts explaining the danger. When he brings up the risk of a Fate Worse than Death, she changes the subject and points out that his daughter doesn't make excuses to keep her teen side-kick from fighting, which leads to him to talk Ashley into agreeing to talk to it with her parents. He makes plans to have Spider-Man try to talk some sense into her.
• Bait-and-Switch: When The Cryptdoor's Creak opens with Taylor searching the empty and quarantined PRT HQ(quickly evacuated becuase the building was "haunted") for Ashley and getting a Jump Scare from a Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl, causing Tayor to panic and plan to find Ashley and get the hell out of there. She finds Ashley and the Ghost. Playing tag. The ghost was Erma.
• Batman Gambit: The entire plot of Weapon Cute was proceeded by the various Weapon Plus divisions collaborating on Weapon XVII deliberately letting information leak so that Captain America, Wolverine, and Agent Anti-Venom would be lured to their facility so that the Anti-Venom symbiote and traces of symbiote in Captain America and Wolverine's bodies could be used to strengthen "Weapon XVII's" symbiote.
• Batter Up!: Ashley's mother uses a bat as a weapon in the "Good Parents Go To Extremes" universe. She's so skilled at beating through villains with it to find super serums to save Ashley with that she becomes known as "Lady Punisher" by the end of the segment, having apparently killed the Jackal with it. Ashley takes the canon variant of the bat from her aunt in order to track down her reanimated mother's corpse.
• Bizarre Taste in Food: When Ashley was younger, she had anemia and had to eat raw liver. She loved it so much that she licked the plate clean.
• Break the Cutie: The 2019 Halloween special was not kind to Ashley. Or anyone else, for that matter.
• Brick Joke: Weapon Cute has a Weapon V Soldier comment that Deadpool had been captured by their facility and escaped a week earlier using an inflatable raft he'd acquired through unknown means. The side-story ends with him in Logan's apartment wearing nothing but a kilt made out of an inflatable raft to tell him about the Weapon Plus facility.
  • A few chapters after a side-story of Ashley making Italian food with her tentacles, the Wards stage an intervention about the garlic breath she's gotten as a result of her Italian food kick.
• Call-Back: In The Livestream, Ashley comments that Earth Bet doesn't have a preserve of Dinosaurs in the south pole to counter the claim that her universe sounds like a bad comic book. (believing that a universe without live dinosaurs is bad.)
• Changing The Uncomfortable Subject: When Ashley asks about the Fallen group in town during the Easter special^note The Excuse Plot of the special being that the Wards were being kept sequestered and supervised in their headquarters because the Fallen are known to do unspeakable things to Wards in expanded universe materials, prompting Ashley to buy a crapload of chocolate since they'll be cooped up for Easter, the other Wards ask her what her favorite movie is.
• Christmas Songs: An early Christmas special in 2019 has the Wards record a Christmas Album
• Christmas Special: An early one in 2019 has Ashley, Missy, and Klara in an audio booth about to record songs for the Wards' novelty Christmas Album and talking about religion and Christmas celebrations.
• Crossover: All of them count, since they spinoff of the main crossover story, but The Intern replaces the Marvel Elements with Elements from Acquisitions Incorporated.
  • The Marvelous Miracles chapter is a crossover with Miraculous Ladybug where Hawk Moth (on a trip to New York) akumatized Ashley into a copy of Spidercide as she's recaptured right after she'd managed to escape the cloning facility and a guard destroyed her Spider-Man plushy just to hurt her, inadvertently turning her into a Spider-Totem and awakening her Clan Akkaba bloodline in the process.
  • When The Crypt-Doors Creak has Ashley hanging out with Erma.
• Deadpan Snarker: Wolverine, in Weapon Cute.
• Deal with the Devil: Ashley makes one with Mephisto in an AU where she was captured by the Nine after a devastating attack by the Nine on the Bay, the only cost, or so Mephisto claims, being to kill Scion. It involves her becoming Dark Phoenix.
• Didn't Think This Through: The PRT PR guys had Ashley drinking something during the second livestream, but the grape juice looks like wine at first glance.
  • Gabby invited Ashley, Grace, Missy, Klara, and Molly Hayes to a sleepover (on an artificial rose island just outside of Krakoa) but forgot to bring sleeping bags. Ashley then uses Mr. Snuggles to make a blanket fort, but realized after doing so that she can't make beds that way, so they'd still have to sleep in a pile.
• Downer Ending: The 2019 Halloween special, titled Bad End, depicts a scenario where the Slaughterhouse Nine get a serious boost in effectiveness and kill almost everyone in Brockton Bay before being killed themselves by Ashley, who has become Dark Phoenix as a result of making a Deal with the Devil. The Author implied that Mephisto did it because in this timeline he and the Phoenix force were collaborating with the intent to kill the Entities and they weren't satisfied with Captain Universe and Contessa social-fuing Scion into a permeant coma.
• Dramatic Irony: The Canon Side-Story "Cuddlebug explains mutants" has Ashley go into detail on Apocalypse when discussing mutant history, then admitting that he finds herself drawn to information on him when she finds something when researching Heroes and Villains but she states that she's not sure why. The main story shows that she's his unknowing descendant.
• Else World: All of the major side-stories are this, but "What If Mister Snuggles was created by The Jackal" goes the extra mile and followed the format of Marvel's What Ifs, complete with narration by The Unseen.
• Evil Is Petty: Donar, as Ashley lampshades, apparently doesn't have anything better to do than hang out in Ashley's PRT Q&A Livestream and troll and insult her.
  • In the "Absolute Menace" AU, a guard eats a sandwich in front of Ashley solely to be a dick, whcih she lampshades.
• Flower Motif: A canon side-story that has Ashley bonding with Klara has Klara use plant cultivation as a metaphor for getting better, noting that even a plant that didn't have such a good start can grow big and strong if it's put in the right environment and taken care off, and then gifts a miniature rose bush she created with her powers to Ashley with the offer of teaching her how to take care of plants.
• Food Porn: Side-Stories about Ashley learning to cook or trying recipes usually come with detailed descriptions of how the food is made and what it's made of.
• Forced to Watch: Andrea was helpless to do anything but watch while carnage made her kill and eat the gang that had recruited her, her best friend last.
• For Halloween, I Am Going as Myself: In the first Halloween special, Ashley has Mister Snuggles shapeshift into a what appears to be a zipper-backed, felt and cotton superhero Halloween costume modeled on her own Superhero outfit.
• Freudian Excuse: To the point of He Who Fights Monsters in Weapon Cute: The leader of the Weapon V soldiers explains how, while he was stationed overseas, a neighbor of his who turned out o be a mutant with a fixation on Apocalypse shot up the entire neighborhood. His three-year-old daughter was killed and his wife left him because he wasn't there to keep them safe, and now he works with Weapon Plus because he believes that they have the best chances of taking out the mutant supremacists and their ideology, but despite pushing from Wolverine and Captain America he dismisses all of the innocent people he's actively helping to hurt. Logan guesses that it's about revenge when he sees Ashley's Clan Akkaba mark later in the story.
• Genetic Memory: An Exploited Trope in Weapon Cute, where symbiote genetic memory is exploited to educate "Weapon XVII" at a rapid pace: See Instant Expert.
• Good Hurts Evil: In Bad end, Mephisto states that he doesn't want Ashley's soul as payment for a deal because its purity would hurt him if he tried to claim it.
• Head Desk: Ashley makes a joke about a PRT PR guy doing this when she mentions using a Groin Attack, and promising more, but he's really just glaring at her.
• Heinz Hybrid:
  • In one AU Ashley is a D&D Mongrelfolk, who takes a bit of pride in being a bit of everything, including God.
  • In Weapon Cute, Ashley was subject to treatments from multiple Weapon Plus Programs, including the procedures that turned Clay Cortez into Weapon H, being given a Weapon V symbiote, A Super Soldier Serum variant (implied to be the variant given to Isaiah Bradly), treated with MGH, being regularly fed Nuke's Red Adrenaline Pills, and given a variation of the "Project Power" treatments that gave Luke Cage his bulletproof skin.
• The Hermit: "After The End" is an AU that takes place during the events of Literature/Ward, where a now teenage Ashley has been living by herself in the woods ever since the Golden Morning, even having Mr. Snuggles take on the form of a dirty-looking robe because she feels that, as a "crazy hermit living alone" she should look the part.
• "I Know You're in There Somewhere" Fight:
  • In "Marvelous Miracles", Spider-Man manages to calm down an enraged and akumatized Ashley, in part using a picture of her family before she was kidnapped, so that Ladybug can get her Akuma away from her and cure her.
  • In "Weapon Cute", a Brainwashed and Crazy Ashley, who'd been enhanced by a Weapon Plus project, stops trying to attack Agent Anti-Venom when he grabs a captured Captain America's Shield to defend himself. When the doctor controlling her uses the word "Responsibility", and she reacts to it, Logan, involved because he'd been looking for missing Mutant children and had spoken to the parents of all of them, remembers how she practically worships Spider-Man, he uses that, as well as her name, to get through to her, upon which she hits her head on the shield enough to break the helmet being used to control her.
• Instant Expert: The Weapon Plus Scientist in charge of the facility in Weapon Cute exploits Symbiote Codices to give "Weapon XVII" literal centuries worth of training in military tactics, martial arts, weapon use, vehicle use survivalism, espionage, and assassination overnight. When freed from mind control and safe, Ashley even lampshades that she's suddenly a master of basically every martial art and that she didn't even know what some of them existed.
• Internal Reveal: Grace shares her backstory with Dr. Richards in "Okay, but why though?".
• Implied Death Threat: Ashley goes "fang face" and comments about being really tempted to eat a brain just so Mister Snuggles will shut up about it after Shadow Stalker presses one of her Berserk Buttons.
• Insane Troll Logic: according to Ashley, because Hawaiian Pizza was invented in Canada, and because Canada has mutant concentration camps and Wendigoes, that makes pineapple a terrible pizza topping,
• The Insomniac: After Ashley replicated Apocalypse's ability to be The Sleepless, she reflects in a semi-canonical side-story that not needing to sleep makes it harder to go to sleep at all, since a normal person would eventually just become tired enough that their restless thoughts wouldn't be able to keep them awake anymore.
• It Makes Just As Much Sense In Context: After Cuddlebug gives The Whizzer as an example of a latent mutant's powers being activated, Clockbcloker has questions about the whole "mongoose blood" thing. All Ashley can think of to say is that people did stupid things in the forties.
• Kick the Dog:
  • In "Marvelous Miracles", a guard destroys Ashley's Spider-Man plush out of cruelty.
  • In "An Absolute Menace", a captive alternate and older Ashley is promised a sandwich if she cooperates for some tests. Once she completes them, a guard eats the sandwich in front of her just to be petty.
• Left the Background Music On: When Ashley is singing to Vista, the latter briefly wonders where the background voices came from.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: Two in Ashley's Livestream Chapter.
  • Greg Vader leaves a comment stating that Ashley's reality sounds like a bad comic book.
  • when a commenter on the stream asks if Ashley's ever had a crush on someone, she points out that she's ten and tells them to ask again in five years. Spacebattles, the forum the story is primarily published on, sets fifteen as the minimum age for depicting serious romantic relationships.
  • When talking to Reed, Grace lampshades on how it seems like all the research done on mutants is focused on killing them or pulling a De-power on them.
• Lecture as Exposition:
  • A more or less canon side-story consists of Ashley giving a lecture on Mutants. She even dresses up for it and uses a pool cue from the rec room as a pointer.
  • A separate side story is a lecture on the specific individuals who got cloned with known clones in Brockton Bay
• Long Game: There are some theories that Apocalypse is doing this, with Ashley herself noting how it's odd that, with all his powers and resources, he never eliminated humanity like he claims that he desires centuries ago.
• Made of Good: Mephisto describes Ashley's soul, even after the events of Bad End, as being good and pure, explicitly saying it's made of love and sugar, which is a major reason why he doesn't want it.
• Mafia Princess: In "Good Parents Go To Extremes", Sean repeatedly suspects, in part from the leads his wife Yuri gets on superpower agents in their quest to save their version of Ashley by using them to trigger a secondary mutation, that her family has organized crime ties.
• Magic A Is Magic A: In Marvelous Miracles, Doctor Strange clarifies that the powers of the Kwami do not normally overlap with the magic of a Spider-Totem and that an inadvertent mixture of the two results in a feedback loop that constantly grows stronger and results in unpredictable effects. In the case of an Akumatized Ashley, her enhanced attributes continually grew stronger and the chaotic effect awakened latent bits of hr mutant bloodline that weren't present before, with changes to her physiology being permanent.
• Magically-Binding Contract: Doctor Strange drops the trope name in Marvelous Miracles, as one of his predecessors made one with the magician who made the Miraculous, which apparently prevents him directly interfering with their wielders.
• Mama Bear: In "Good Parents Go To Extremes", the local version of Ashley's mother Yuri is willing to beat up supervillains with a bat if it will help save Ashley's life.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: In-Universe, Ashley Noir isn't sure if The Venom being forced under her control was leftover magic from her sorcerer ancestor, divine intervention triggered by her holding her grandfather's lucky crucifix, or just pure dumb luck. She makes a habit of leaving change in church collection boxes just in case.
• Medical Horror: The 2019 Halloween special has a non-graphic description of Bonesaw's work from the PoV of the victim.
• Misery Poker: Defied in Friendly Misery Poker, when Klara mentioning her backstory initially causes Ashley to reevaluate how bad her life's been, only for Klara to shoot it down and insist that Ashley shouldn't feel bad that bad things have happened to her no matter what and gives her some advice on coping with her trauma after getting Ashley to share the details.
• Mundane Luxury: Ashley, due to being sick enough that being able to stand on her own was a rarity before bonding to Mr. Snuggles, is still getting used to the idea that she can do things for herself that she had previously thought that she would never be capable of doing, like learning to cook or, after Taylor brings it up, simply going outside whenever she wants to.
  • The 2018 Halloween special draws attention to the fact that this is Ashley's first-ever time Trick or Treating because, on the off chance that she was feeling okay enough to go, there was no guarantee that she'd stay okay enough to go and if she did go she'd probably get an infection.
• Mundane Utility: Ashley uses the fact that, as a Symbiote host, she doesn't need to really breathe in order to win a bet by singing a song without taking a breath and get seven bucks from the other Wards.
  • Later, she turns her sword All-Love into a guitar.
  • In another sidestory, she creates multiple tendrils/"arms" in order to make Italian food for a dinner with Grace and Taylor.
• Mythology Gag:
  • One of The Venom's meals is a man by the Surname Prast who came to America from Switzerland around the turn of the century with a child bride who he forced to work in factories while he sat around all day drinking and beat regularly, noting that the girl had vanished in 1907. This was Klara's backstory in Runaways, down to the abusive husband's name.
  • Andrea X's side story makes numerous references to Spider-Man 2099 and Go Down Swinging.
• No Kill like Overkill: In "Good Parents Go To Extremes" universe, Ashley's parents find like a dozen superpower-granting agents and give them to her in order to try and trigger a secondary mutation.
• "Not Making This Up" Disclaimer: Ashley at one point.
• Not So Above It All: A non-canon side-story has Vista briefly revert to acting her age when Ashly implies that Santa Claus is real in her world.
• Once Done, Never Forgotten: Andrea X tells Ashley Noir not to let it get out that she almost got killed by a Mysterio because of this trope.
• One-Man Army: Vista in one omake.
• Playing with Fire: Andrea's Mutant power is vomiting up small globs of organic napalm.
• Royal Blood: Besides the royal blood that she gets from being related to Apocalypse, Ashley is descended from two kings of Ireland on her grandfather's side, and on her mother's side she's descended from a family that was the power behind the throne for Imperial Japan.
• Semi-Divine: Ashley Axebeard Beestinger from 'The Intern' is, in D&D Next Terms, a Divine Soul Sorcerer, due to being descended from a demigod.
• The Sociopath: Ashley Noir is implied to be this in her side story and speculated to be such by Andrea in Andrea's side story, confirmed in the Spacebattles by the author to be such in accordance with the depictions of Mutants in X-Men: Noir, though Ashley Noir claims to know right from wrong, enjoys affection, and Andrea seems to think she'll be high functioning.
• Something Only They Would Say: Ashley is able to guess that a poster in her Q&A Livestream is Donar because he used the exact same insult that Donar used in their fight.
• Soundtrack Dissonance: Ashley turns All-Love into a guitar and ends up playing a song about ghosts warning an cowboy that unless he immediately repents, he'll go to Hell. Taylor can only think about how her singing is way too upbeat for such a morbid song.
• Staging an Intervention: Parodied. After days of Italian food, Ashley has severe garlic breath, so the Wards have an intervention with her.
• Stock "Yuck!": Ashley loves anchovies on her pizza, though she hates pineapple.
• Take That!: To the obsession with shipping, especially of Underage characters, in some fandoms at the beginning of Friendly Misery Poker
• Throw It In!:
  • The Intern was inspired by a conversation about translating Ashley's concept to other settings, a periodic topic in the thread, with the discussion of a D&D version leading into the suggestion that the D&D Ashley Intern for Acquisitions Incorporated and be one of Rosie Beestinger's many adoptees.
  • Likewise with Marvelous Miracles, which is based on a conversation about an Akumatized Ashley.
• Title Drop: Weapon Cute has Ashley claim that Weapon XVII is a dumb name and decides to call herself Weapon Cute.
• Trauma Button: Only implied in the text: In the Snuggles Noir side story, Andrea states that she hasn't eaten meat in six years. In her own side story, we learn that six years ago she was possessed by her world's Carnage and forced to kill and eat her friends. One reader in the Spacebattlesthredad guessed that the taste of meat served as a PTSD trigger and Rater confirmed in-thread that Andrea's vegetarianism was directly linked to being forced to engage in cannibalism.
• Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: It doesn't take long for Ashley Noir to decide to murder criminals, jerks, and corrupt city officials to sate The Venom's hunger. She also takes up Smoking and Drinking because her models for vigilantism are The Punisher and Spider-Man and The Spider-Man Noir seems to be modeled on "The detectives in the Talkies." She doesn't even like it, though luckily for her she Never Gets Drunk due to her symbiote, though it complains about having to purge the toxins.
• The Worf Effect: The Fantastic Four are the first heroes to engage with Menace in Marvelous Miracles, and the magically empowered and Brainwashed Ashley wiped the floor with them. Downplayed in that they were clearly not intending to harm a small child, but she still tanked a blast from Franklin Richards. Spider-Man comments on how unusual it is, since the child's powers resembled his own and, while he'd defeated the Fantastic Four handily once, that was over a decade ago and the Fantastic Four had become far, far more powerful in the interim while his powers had plateaued. Doctor Strange reveals that it's because of the magic of the Akuma interacting with and creating a feedback loop with Ashley's mutation and the Spider-Totem power Hawk Moth inadvertently gave her by mimicking one.
• Worth It: In Weapon Cute, Ashley declares that getting kidnapped, losing a few weeks out of her memory, and being subjected to painful Super Soldier Experiments was worth it when she realizes that her symbiote gives her web-slinging and wall-crawling powers.
• You Have GOT to Be Kidding Me!: Clockblocker in the Easter Special, after Ashley mentions the God Squad heading out to kill the Skrull Gods and Reed Richards proving the existence of the Abrahamic God when questioned why she, as a Pagan(she worships Thor,)observes Easter.
• You Need a Breath Mint: Ashley due to making a lot of Italian dishes.

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