Dying With Her Cheer Pants On: Stories of the Fighting Pumpkins is a 2020 fantasy short story collection by Seanan McGuire about a cheerleading squad called the Fighting Pumpkins.
Dying With Her Cheer Pants On contains examples of:
- Academic Athlete: Amy (a member of the Decoy Protagonist squad in the first chapter) is the only cheerleader who can always land a perfect back handspring. She also helps her squadmates study for exams and is hinted to like classical literature.
- Back from the Dead: Heather, twice. The first time, Kelly resurrects her as a zombie with dark magic—Heather retains her intelligence and free will because she was buried as a Pumpkin and keeps the protections accorded to the squad. The second time, Steph/Persephone resurrects her properly as a goodbye present.
- The Call Knows Where You Live: The squad handbook chooses the captain. And sure, you don't have to take it up, but if you don't, there's nobody to defend the school when, say, the mud puddle the chemistry class has been dumping their waste in tries to eat the student body. Jude, whose mother was a Pumpkin, spent her entire life before the events of the book dreading the day it would turn up under her bed.
- The Chains of Commanding: Jude knows it's her responsibility to get all her girls to graduation in one piece, and she also knows how unlikely that is. Even worse? There have never been two surviving squads in a row—if she succeeds, Junior Varsity is doomed.
- Compelling Voice: Whenever Laurie gives a direct order, people have to obey. Luckily for everyone, she's too sweet and spacey to use it for evil ends.
- Consummate Liar: Also part of Laurie's powers. Even if she's not giving a direct order, it's still difficult for people to disagree with her, so whatever lies she tells are instantly believed.
- Cruel Cheerleader: The trope is discussed, averted, and backflipped over all through the book. Heather mentions that she thought she was going to be a stereotypical Alpha Bitch cheerleader when she transferred to Johnson's Crossing, but she was turned away from the first Pumpkins squad she tried out for because of exactly that attitude, and eventually she realized that she didn't actually like being an Alpha Bitch anyway.
- Foreshadowing: When the team reads the name on the tag in the back of Steph's uniform, they note that it's really smudged and Stephanie is the best they can make out. Steph herself notes that Stephanie only sort of sounds right. It's not Stephanie. It's Persephone, as the story blurb implies, "Steph, who may or may not be the goddess of the harvest".
- Free-Range Children: The Pumpkins have no coach, due to budget cuts (although even when they did have one, a little vampiric mind-clouding courtesy of Jude's mother meant she wasn't actually in charge), and normally no adult supervision whatsoever. Their parents aren't that involved either—Justified, as part of what makes the Pumpkins the Pumpkins also prevents bystanders from realizing anything strange is going on. (Or, in Jude's case, her mom was a Pumkpkin and so knows she can't protect the squad.)
- Hero of Another Story: Several other teams, such as the Goblin Sharks, attend the cheerleading tournament and clearly have knowledge of the supernatural (and implicitly supernatural members) themselves. Unusually for the trope, at least some of them hate the heroes of the main story due to blaming them for having to compete in the tournament (where the lowest scoring squad never gets to go home).
- Hidden Depths: Laurie, initially introduced as a Dumb Blonde with mind control powers, proves to be a lot more insightful than some of her stupid questions would suggest.
- Hive Mind: JV is captained by 3/4 of the Emmas, a quadruplet hive mind. (#4 does all their homework.)
- Horror Doesn't Settle for Simple Tuesday: In a cheer-focused example of the trope, you can almost guarantee that Homecoming will attract the forces of evil.
- Human Sacrifice:
- Jude strongly suspects that the Pumpkins' mortality rate is high not just because the job is so dangerous, but because in some way the bargain that created the Pumpkins trades their deaths for the town's safety.
- The Black Goats attempt to sacrifice the Pumpkins as well as their football team to their dark god.
- Limited Wardrobe: Downplayed. Jude insists that the squad not always wear their uniforms, so they remember they have lives outside of cheering, but even out of uniform they gravitate towards orange and green.
- Our Vampires Are Different: Vampirism is a symbiote that can be passed from parent to child. Because of her human father, Jude's symbiote is weak and underdeveloped, so she doesn't have most of her powers or weaknesses yet. (She's deliberately stunting it, because at full strength it will make her immortal, and looking like a high school student forever would be really inconvenient. Even then, she's still going to have to repeat senior year a couple times.) Vampires require blood and are allergic to UV light, but they can eat most food (except garlic) and are fine with going out in the day as long as they're really careful about sunscreen.
- Ret-Gone: After every apocalypse the Fighting Pumpkins avert, reality rearranges itself so that it never happened at all. If the squad happens to have died in the process, they get erased too; only the next squad will remember them, and then only if they can find the logbook. After the short story of the same title, there's no evidence of a massive alien invasion except for a few scorch marks and the fact cheer tryouts are open again. Steph is removed from everyone but the squad's memories after she burns, and Marti forgot her own sister before she spent enough time as a Pumpkin.
- Sound-Only Death: Most of the members of the Decoy Protagonist first squad charge onto the field during the alien invasion to provide a distraction, and their presumed deaths are signaled when, one by one, they stop chanting the Bloody Mary summons.
- Summon Bigger Fish: In "Dying With Her Cheer Pants On", the Fighting Pumpkins, faced with an unstoppable alien invasion, summon Bloody Mary. They add "I killed your son", which, according to Urban Legend, will get Mary to kill everyone. Including them, but they don't care.
