Fanfic / Street Sharks Redux

One Madman with schemes to rule a city and recreate the human race, and the ragged group of not quite heroes with the knowledge and power to stop him.

Street Sharks Redux is a reimagining of the show Street Sharks, as told by DarkLightShades (with collaboration with Luna Tiger). As per their explanation, the venture is an attempt at rewriting the series, focusing on the good and bad points and thinking about how to improve it. The end result is a somewhat Darker and Edgier Deconstruction Fic that is a lot of fun to read.

It's sadly a Dead Fic, seeing as the author has left the fandom. What's up is well worth a look, though!

See also Heroes for Earth, another example of a nostalgic cheesy kid's show being rewritten in a more mature and complex way.

Tropes include:

• Big Brother Instinct: All three of the older brothers panic when Slammu is kidnapped by Paradigm, with the narrative even noting that their desire to protect one another is strongest for the youngest of them.
• Brainwashed and Crazy: Slammu, after Paradigm tests his mind controlling device on him.
• Butt-Monkey: Poor Gabrielle is a quiet, insecure girl who gets knocked around (literally) by Bends, twice (albeit by accident).
• Chivalrous Pervert: Streex.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive:
• Darker and Edgier: Not as extreme as some examples, but the threats are considerably more dangerous than in the cartoon and more emphasis is placed on the emotional strain of everything the characters go through.
• Deconstruction Fic: A lot of elements that are glossed over in the cartoon are made more prominent or examined more. For example, Slammu being kidnapped and brainwashed by Paradigm leaves him a withdrawn mess after he's rescued.
• Girl Friday: Lena is a more casual version of this. While she's not officially the assistant or sidekick of any of the heroes, her main strength is being able to provide information, namely through serving as The Mole when Paradigm hires her for his new research group.
• Heroic Blue Screen of Death: Slammu suffers something like this after he's rescued from being tortured and brainwashed by Paradigm.
• Intelligence Equals Isolation: Implied to be the case with Gabrielle.
• Noodle Incident: Not played for laughs, but there are two things in Paradigm's history that nobody seems to know anything about - exactly what happened to cause him to need an eye patch (all that's known is that it's some sort of war injury) and what exactly he was doing on his travels during a stretch of time when his family members died in various ways (Ripster notes that it's almost certainly too much to be purely coincidence, but can think of no way any of the deaths, which were all accidents and the like, tied to him).
• Painful Transformation: The fic manages to make the mutation process, already pretty creepy in the cartoon, worse. There's considerably more build-up as all are exhausted, confused, and left with jumbled memories, which manage to piece themselves together as their entire bodies become increasingly sore. When Bends witnesses John's transformation, it involves John collapsed on the floor, gasping in pain, before he actually changes. A later comment by Paradigm suggests that it's even worse for older test subjects and that the brothers' transformations were remarkably smooth and painless.
• Pet the Dog: Paradigm's an insane scientist, but he seems to genuinely appreciate Gabrielle's intelligence and gives her his business card and an offer to meet with her to discuss future opportunities. He even keeps his word when the sharks destroy his lab shortly before their arranged meeting time.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: The resolution of the information Ripster stole from Paradigm's computer. There's a lot of build-up about how it could potentially hold incriminating information that could put Paradigm away, but it's so heavily-encrypted that no one can figure out how to break in. Then, it turns out that they tried to work around the issue by posting the encrypted information online with dares for hackers to break in. The ones who did so just found a virus that wiped out everything. Given that we see one really good hacker accessing the information and passing it to their dad, it's likely that this would have been more of a Chekhov's Gun had the fic continued.
• Ship Tease: There's a bit between Lena and Detective Michael Brock.
• The Charmer: Melvin comes across as this when he arrives at the concert auditions. Streex is not happy about it.
• The Smurfette Principle: Discussed by the author and averted. One of the things the fic set out to correct was the lack of female characters. This time, besides Lena, there's also a student named Gabrielle and an unnamed female hacker who cracks the encrypted data the heroes post online and sends it to their dad.