Website / The Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids

To stamp out war and strife from the multiverse using cunning, numbers, and liberal amounts of Love Potion — such is the creed of the Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids, a race of diminutive clockwork cherubs, whose continuing adventures can be found on their Wordpress blog through a variety of media, from comics to video games by way of a large number of prose stories.

The Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids is a collaborative mythos dealing in an off-kilter sci-fi concept owing a significant debt to Douglas Adams's Dirk Gently, Terry Pratchett, L. Frank Baum, and certain branches of Doctor Who. (And also Disney comics, as you will see below.)

The Copper-Colored Cupids have a bit of an interesting creative history, as they were originally created as a "guest feature" for the comments section of the (non-narrative) blog of comics historian and translator Joe Torcivia, before their two original creators decided there was more in the concepts than a few jokes on Valentine's Day. These origins technically make them a spin-off of the Disney Comics universe, though this has little bearing on the characters per se, being that they are by nature multiversal travelers and can crash into any fictional universe they bloody well like, and that, away from Disney censors, the writers are free to explore Darker and Edgier themes than Disney would approve of (though they never treat it in a very serious way). Still, the Cupids' oft-referenced nemeses, the Gang of the Green Gorilla, are a direct lift from another "story fragment" developed in Torcivia's comments section, and their backstory is safely rooted in the Duckburg & Mouseton mythos — make of that what you will.

Frequently features guest appearances by Public Domain Characters, including Jenny Everywhere.

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The Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids includes examples of:

• Age Without Youth: The Wellsians are able to stay alive in a state of hibernation for over a century, but are little more than mummies by the end of this (until Mandragora uses alchemy to revive them).
• Alchemy Is Magic: Master Mandragora has all the trappings of an Evil Sorcerer, and is able to use alchemy to achieve such things as to bring half-dead monsters back to life, although his alchemy still seems fundamentally rooted in real-life alchemy, specifically in the associations of various concepts with specific metals. (Being a robot, he ought to know.)
• Amazing Technicolor Population: The series features a variety of Humanoid Aliens with strangely-coloured skin. The Queen of the Black Market is "a slightly wrong shade of pink", Madame Tarsa has bubblegum-pink skin with purple hair, Sneernobiel has light blue skin, and one illustration depicted Alistair Neezley with bluish-white skin.
• Amazing Technicolor Wildlife: The "strangely-colored," anthropomorphic animals resulting from Professor Scarper's experiments are a Running Gag. Most notably, "the Gang of the Green Gorillas," who are not only green gorillas themselves, but want to brainwash all of humanity into believing that all gorillas are green.
• Amicable Exes: Jenny Everywhere and Madame Tarsa are revealed to be this in The Time of the Toymaker — they were happily married once, "millions of years ago", but the particular incarnation of Jenny whom Tarsa had fallen in love with died; Tarsa elected to consider herself widowed, but remain friends with other versions of Jenny.
• And That's Terrible: After Loki escapes in The Winter Quests, Pythe feels the need to remark to Juliet:
  Pythagoras-858: "Oh, this is very bad. This is very very bad. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you how bad this is, but it bears repeating."
• Arbitrary Skepticism:
  • In one comic, it transpires that the Wellsians — an alien race of telepathic octopi — don't believe in... oceans. In fairness they do come from a desert planet where such things are unheard-of.
  • Conspiracy-1263 is permanently convinced that various supernatural things the Crew deals with are actually hoaxes, despite himself being a sentient automaton and often using interdimensional ships himself.
• Awesome, but Impractical: The series makes a point of noting that the tachyonic sailing ships are an impractical, unreliable and obsolete way to travel The Multiverse, only ever used by eccentrics who but aesthetics before safety and accuracy. The ships do occasionally present advantages in specific circumstances, mostly sneaking around defences built for regular Void Ships in mind.
• Bag of Kidnapping: An oft-lampshaded Running Gag; the Cupids both often use this tactic (with Larrikin once noting that he always carries a burlap sack with him for just such an occasion) and on the receiving end of it from various villains.
• Bastard Understudy: In The Trial of a Dark Lord'', Lord Nefarious's lawyer Sebastian Steer covertly learned magic and highjacked his empire. He planned to use mind-control magic to completely switch parts and make Nefarious his faithful servant, although it didn't exactly shake out that way.
• Beast Man: In The End of the Homeworld, War, of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, is explicitly described as a "beast-man", looking like something "somewhere between a werewolf and a bear".
• Beneath the Earth: The Worlds Below, the network of magical caves beneath the Prime Earth, appear in The Winter Quests.
• Big Bad Wannabe: Director Darius's grand revenge in The Frost King's Treasure falls apart because he didn't think far enough ahead to think of a way to dispatch his assembled enemies once he had "lured them to exactly where [he] wants them". Consequently, things go about as well for him as you'd expect them to go for a normal person who has gotten himself surrounded by all his worst enemies and spent half an hour gloating about how much he wants to murder them.
• The Big Race: The short story The Multi-Dimensional Race obviously features such a race as its main showpiece; it is, in this case, organized by the respective Sole Survivors of two races of aliens who have been at war for generations, as a way to finally, finally have a winner and call it a day. The protagonist is drafted in by the two as the judge.
• Black Market: The short story Misadventures in the Inderdimensional Black Market focuses on, well, what it says on the tin: a black market for Dimensional Travelers, in which to purchase supernatural items or advanced technology away from the prying eyes of the various authorities which attempt to regulate interdimensional travel.
• Blind and the Beast: Herodotus-724's eyesight is too poor for him to notice King Hastur's ambiguously inhuman face at all. Hastur, who appears to quite like to spook people by revealing it's Not a Mask, is quite rather disconcerted.
• Bloodbath Villain Origin: Mandragora is established in his first appearance to have (accidentally?) killed several Cupids with a backfiring experiment, leading to his original banishment from the Homeworld.
• Born of Magic: Madame Tarsa's Living Toys are created through her magic — specifically, through "the Power of Creation" she possesses, making them truly alive rather than simply objects with enchantments on them. This is apparently a very rare and powerful ability, which Sebastian Steer covets; he tries and fails to replicate Tarsa's technique to give life to a toy clown, and ends up sacrificing part of his own soul to give the clown life, which is obviously not something he can do too many times.
• Camp Gay: Doctor Curious is already somewhat campy in his dress sense and manner as well as being officially gay — but far stronger an example still is his former fiancé Flim Flam as seen in Revenge of the Old Queen, who is so literally camp as to sing part of his dialogue (even though he does not otherwise live in a Musical World).
• Captain Ersatz:
  • Horatio Topper is blatantly the Hatbox Ghost, or at least a parallel-universe version thereof.
  • "The Creature" in ''''The Verses of Samhain'' continues the tradition of Monster Mash stories with no legal ties to Universal Horror using very blatant stand-ins for the Creature from the Black Lagoon.
• Cartoon Bomb: One is used in the Mini-Game Cupid Christmas Tree, where it is hidden among the Christmas ornaments. If it is added to the tree in place of a real ornament, the tree will explode, though the Cupid character will be unharmed.
• Characterization Marches On: In her first appearance in Jenny Everywhere and the Master of Monsters, Laura Drake was somewhat bemused by Jenny's casual refusal to treat their rivalry seriously. By the time of Family Business, this was quietly retooled to Laura being just as much "in" on the joke of their simultaneously being girlfriends and enemies as Jenny herself, with other characters like Thymon taking the role of baffled straight-man instead.
• Character Name and the Noun Phrase: The first short story is entitled Lord Thymon and the Department of Problem-Solving. Amusingly, Lord Thymon is actually the villain of the piece while the Department are the heroes. Later examples include Marksmanship-526 and the Multi-Dimensional Race and Acquaintanceship-982 and the Missing Mail Mystery.
• Clockpunk: The Cupids themselves, and the rest of their offscreen Creator's technology, definitely fall within the aesthetic. As common in Clockpunk and Steampunk, of course, more is achieved with it than should be considered possible — but, of course, the Cupid Homeworld has a good relationship with its laws of physics, so who knows.
• Clockwork Creature: “Copper-Colored Cupids” may be the moniker chosen for their society, but the Cupids more scientifically refer to themselves as "Clockwork Cherubs”, and have a certain Clock Punk aesthetic to them, although there is clearly more going than mere springs to keep them running; one is mentioned to possess a positronic brain.
• Clown-Car Base: The leader of the Interdimensional Black Market somehow keeps a dozen wraiths under her throne at all time, just in case they might come in handy.
• Cool Ship: Most every Void Ship introduced in the series so far qualifies, with it even being lampshaded that some of them seem like they were designed more to look the part than to actually be comfortable forms of transportation.
• Color-Coded Wizardry: Spellcasters in the series tend to have a 'main' colour to their magic, often also showing up as Technicolor Eyes:
  • Emperor Steer's magic is a light purple. His eyes glow mauve, and his robes are a dark violet hue.
  • Mandragora, being an alchemist, fittingly has a golden theming: his eyes glow gold in whatever body he's occupying, the magical sigils he use in his Wizard Duel with Steer glow yellow, and his human form even has blond hair.
  • More subtly, Lord Nefarious in The Trial of a Dark Lord seems to have green magic: the magical lightning he uses on Conquest-932 is green, and his eyes (though black) briefly flash green when he's angry.
• Continuity Cavalcade: In Multiverse Mayhem, the interactive first anniversary special, not only does the player character visit the locations of several previous stories, but basically all of the Cupids' allies introduced thus far (including ones from stories not otherwise referenced in the story) are mentioned to be present at the Dance Party Ending.
• Crossover Cosmology: The series is about The Multiverse, so obviously different deities exist as reality in some universes while being fictional or unheard-of in others. However, the Prime Universe itself has a kitchen-sink cosmology all on its own: so far, Greek Gods, Norse Gods, Christian-style Demons and Angels have all appeared in the series.
• Cupid's Arrow: The titular Copper-Colored Cupids a race of artificial, clockwork cherubs, created in the likeness of the classic Cupid figure, who believe it is their sacred duty to make everyone in the multiverse fall in love with someone, or, failing that, something. And pesky things like "free will" aren't going to stop them as they go about their work. (True to the trope name, the Cupids usually use Love Potion-coated arrows, though they have other methods of brainwashing at their disposal if necessary.)
• Cut Phone Lines: The Governor in The Resurrection of the Wellsians completely emptied the Communications Room to prevent anyone from reporting his abusive rule to the Cupid Homeworld.
• Cyclops: Lord Thymon has only one eye, as does Lilathia from The Multi-Dimensional Race.
• Deceptive Disciple: In the short story The Resurrection of the Wellsians, the alchemist Mandragora is quite dismayed to realize that Digger, whom he humored by calling him his "apprentice" but always thought too stupid to be a danger to him, has been feigning stupidity and, once he's figured out all his secrets betrayed him to the rebels.
• Defeat Equals Explosion: In The Trial of a Dark Lord, Lord Nefarious unexpectedly explodes when he is hit by a Cupid Arrow (which normally result in Getting Smilies Painted on Your Soul, not any physical damage). Characters eventually realise that this was a Yin-Yang Bomb-type of reaction due to Nefarious's magic being rooted in hatred.
• Demonic Dummy: Downplayed, but still substantially creepy: in a bit of a supernatural hustle, some of Madame Tarsa's wares are ventriloquist's dummies which steal your ''voice'' to speak with; you can only get it back by buying the God-forsaken thing.
• Desert Skull: One is seen in the opening illustration of The Labors of Juliet.
• Did We Just Have Tea with Cthulhu?: The series is largely built on this trope; the titular Crew recruited Lord Thymon, Embodiment of Time in the Void Between Worlds as their mail-sorter (because he has so many handy tentacles, you see) and the most trouble he causes is order large shipments of plush toys in his own likeness. Justified in that the Crew had to turn him from a wrathful monster into this more benign persona by using Aphrodite's love potion on him — but no such specific reason exists for why Thymon's friends (an array including the Audient Vrullu, Nyarlathotep and more) are so friendly when they come round to the Cupid Homeworld for his birthday party in Lord Thymon and the Impossible Guests.
• Dimensional Travelers:
  • The Cupids are based in a dimension all of their own (known only as the Cupid Homeworld) created when they outgrew their Creator's garage and, in retaliation, told physical reality to bugger off. Hence, all their forays into other universe are examples of dimension-traveling. There is a universe (Like Reality Unless Otherwise Noted) which they designate as “Prime” and have as their main target, presumably because it's where the aforementioned Creator's garage was located, but they have been shown to invade many other, weirder worlds as well.
  • After stealing a Cupid interdimensional craft, several villains, including Darius and the Wellsians, have become malevolent variants of this as well.
• Dimension Lord: Various individuals own or rule pocket dimensions: the Queen of the Black Market rules the Interdimensional Black Market, Madame Tarsa has godlike power over an entire set of mini-worlds in a dimensionally-transcendental toy chest, and Cupida Hartnell is arguably this to the Cupid Homeworld itself. There are also the three Embodiments, Lord Thymon, Lady Spatium and Squire Psykha, who rule/protect/embody the Void Between the Worlds.
• Dr. Fakenstein: The 2019 Halloween Special The Ghosts and the Machine introduced the android Mad Scientist Frankenstein-818. At least one version of the original Frankenstein has also been established to exist in the series, hailing from a parallel universe.
• Dug Too Deep: In The Resurrection of the Wellsians, Digger accidentally unearths an ancient crashed Martian spaceship on Venus while trying to dig a personal swimming pool for the Governor.
• Dying Race: The Wellsians in are a version of H. G. Wells's Martians, whose civilization was already crumbling before they set their views on Earth. When we meet them in The Resurrection of the Wellsians, only seven of them shave urvived the Earth plague and escaped to Venus, where they encounter the Cupids and scheme to restore their empire.
  "We are the Wellsians! We are the last embers of the Martian Empire! And now we shall rise again!"
• Early-Installment Weirdness:
  • The Cupids seemed to talk in rhyme in their first appearance in the comments section of The Issue At Hand. This trait was carried over into the online game Cupid Chaos! — and no further.
  • In her first appearance, the Queen of the Black Market was an outright antagonist, and came very close to stabbing Tracker on a whim. In later appearances, she became a more sympathetic character — still morally gray at best, but a practical-minded criminal rather than someone liable to personally stab someone For the Evulz. Her bone armour was also originally implied to be made of real bones (given that she jokes about using Darius's spine to add to it), but was revealed in The Grand Multiverse Hotel to largely be fake.
  • How the Departments work subtly shifted over time. An early story saw Edwin mentioning that he was part of the Department of Zoology despite having already been established as a member of the Department of Problem-Solving, suggesting that Cupids could be members of several Departments at once, something which was never shown again. Additionally, Lord Thymon and the Department and Problem-Solving and The Resurrection of the Wellsians seem to have been written under the assumption that there were more, off-screen members of the Department of Problem-Solving than just Pythe, Juliet, Carter, Edwin and Valerius, and any given story could thus have a different combination of characters — so that Valerius is absent from Resurrection without even a handwave about what he's up to. This became considerably odder in hindsight as it became more clearly established that the Department was limited to the five original members seen in Lord Thymon….
• Earth-Shattering Kaboom:
  • Zaroff-024 in Under the Sea intends to launch the planet Earth at the planet Mars.
  • It seems Mars can't catch a break in the Cupids 'verse, as the very next story revealed that (in an alternate universe) the Director had destroyed Mars to avert a human/Martian war.
• Eldritch Abomination: Being Dimensional Travelers, the Cupids often encounter such beings, and are extremely blasé about them. After trapping one (a temporal demon known as Thymon), they even set him to work in their post office, as all the tentacles come in handy.
• Evil Is Hammy:
  • Sebastian Steer, who was The Stoic when he was The Dragon to Lord Nefarious starts ranting and raving and cackling once he becomes an Evil Overlord himself.
  • Doctor Curious's Ax-Crazy Evil Ex is noted as being even more theatrical than the Doctor himself to the point that he actually sings most of his dialogue (in prose).
  • The Director's manner in The City of Peace is described as theatrical and overdramatic. He's not overplaying the villain, however, but overplaying the Tragic Hero to try and make Atoma feel guilty about her part in his Freudian Excuse. She is unimpressed.
• Evil Sorcerer:
  • The Dark Lords of Shenanig, a centuries-old dynasty of proudly evil sorcerers whose magic is powered by The Power of Hate. The line culminates in Emperor Steer, who is both the most powerful and the most unstable holder of the title in recorded history, much unlike his predecessor Lord Nefarious, a Noble Demon who was "a good ruler — albeit not a good man".
  • Mandragora, Pythe's Arch-Enemy, is an alchemist who went mad in his quest for ultimate enlightenment, and has also used other schools of magic to achieve his ends, including demon-summoning.
• Eye Scream: Madame Tarsa gets one of her eyes shot out by Pessimist's Fog Ship's defensive laser bolt in her debut, although it regenerates within four minutes (and she expresses annoyance at how slow the process was).
• Fair-Play Whodunnit: The low-stakes mystery story Acquaintanceship-982 and the Missing Mail Mystery doles out all the clues necessary to figure out who stole the mail-bag, why, and even where is it (when the characters visit Philatel's office very early on, they take note of a "cushion" in a corner that seems somewhat plain compared to the rest of the furniture — later revealed to actually be the mailbag draped in a blanket).
• Fantasy Pantheon: The series prominently features deities from classic mythologies, but it also has the three Embodiments of the Void, (not-so-)Anthropomorphic Personifications of the fundamental concepts of reality: Lord Thymon (the Embodiment of Time), Lady Spatium (the Embodiment of Space), and Squire Psykha (the Embodiment of Thought). Some characters are shown to worship one or all three of them, such as the Collective of the Retconning Crocodiles, who worship Thymon (or at any rate, used to until they met him in person and he turned out to be less than sympathetic to their aims).
• Fictional Province: The series's primary incarnation of Jenny Everywhere was eventually shown to originate from the city of New Flaversham in the American state of Wintlevania (named for Jenny's creator, Steven Wintle).
• Flaming Sword: Sneernobiel owns one, and is of the clear opinion that it's cooler than Cupids' bows and arrows.
• Foreshadowing: Frequently used, both within individual stories and across several stories. For example, Darius and Tracker spot a Wellsian among the patrons the Interdimensional Black Market in the short story of the same name, which makes no sense with regards to their original appearance in The Wellsians (where they have relatively low levels of technology and are all but wiped-out) but is later revealed to be a direct consequence of the ending of Resurrection of the Wellsians (and The Grand Multiverse Hotel).
• Funetik Aksent: Doctor Sigma's dialogue writes out his comedy Austrian accent with Vs standing in for Ws, Ds for THs, and so on.
• Gambit Pileup: The climax of The Resurrection of the Wellsians ends up devolving into this. To wit: the Deputy Governor reveals that he has been planning a rebellion against the tyrannical rule of the Governor. The Governor, meanwhile, has secretly been planning a coup against the wider Parliament with the help of Mandragora, except Mandragora is actually The Starscream and betrays him, briefly to the benefit the rebellion but in the end for his own purposes only. Then Mandragora's minion Digger reveals he was The Mole for the rebellion all along. Finally Mandragora, the Governor and the rebellion are all trying to use the Wellsians as weapons, only for the Wellsians to reveal they've been playing everyone else from the beginning (including the heroes).
• Gamebooks: Multiverse Mayhem, subtitled A Multiple-Choice Cupid Caper!, the 1st anniversary special, was a choose-your-own-adventure story in second-person narrative.
• Gem Heart: The Cupids have "crystalline hearts" whose purpose is, well, dubious to say the least — we do know that having a diamond one makes you smarter, or at least better at outside-the-box thinking, than the rank-and-file quartz ones, but it does not seem to be a Heart Drive per se, as the Cupids also have "positronic brains".
• Getting Smilies Painted on Your Soul: As they cheerfully boast, the Cupids "override free will" to make people fall in love.
• Great Big Library of Everything: The Interdimensional Library, or simply "the Library", allegedly contains a copy of every book ever published anywhere in The Multiverse (although Century Smith thinks the librarians may be exaggerating a bit). It is poorly organised, but spawns living projections of fictional characters who can instinctively navigate its strange logic and guide browsers to the books they need. Entry into the Library is not free: you have to pay by gifting them a new narrative, the stronger and truer the better.
• Great Gazoo:
  • Madame Tarsa, the Interdimensional Toymaker, is a variation on the trope — she's an arbitrarily powerful interdimensional being who dresses like a jester and frequently engages in eccentric and tricksterish behaviour, but she has never dropped down on the protagonists, only considering them "fair game" if they barge into her home. She also knows perfectly well what she's doing at all times; her eccentricities are a mark of hedonism, not cluelessness.
  • On the occasions that the narrative shifts to the Geometrons' perspective, the Cupids are collectively this trope to them, being interdimensional beings who occasionally show up out of nowhere in their world to cause mayhem without seeming to fully realise that's what they're doing.
• Griping About Gremlins: Two show up to vex Doctor Sigma in Doctor Sigma Meets The Gremlins. They describe themselves as "wee sprites of mischief-making", with a predilection for dismantling aircraft. They are physically described as somewhat bird-like, but without any beak or nose, instead having big, toothy grins.
• Hammerspace: The Cupids' bows are rarely visible until they're plot-relevant, as seen most clearly in the Phantom of Flatwoods cartoon.
  • Hyperspace Mallet: One of the Orange-Bearded Gnomes pulls out a classic one to whack Darius in Pessimist and the Dromedaries.
• Have You Seen My God?: It is hinted in The Dark Cabaret that God is no longer around in the Prime Universe, as the biblical Angels glimpsed in that story appear to be taking orders not from Him, but from "Lord Samiel".
• Hell Invades Heaven: Discussed in The Dark Cabaret when the characters learn that the angels are fighting in some sort of supernatural war. Sneernobiel, however, cryptically states that they're fighting something worse than demons.
• Herr Doktor: The Crew's Absent-Minded Professor and inventor-of-everything, Doctor Sigma, speaks in a comedy Austrian Funetik Aksent reminiscent of Paul Frees’ Ludwig von Drake. Why this is the case remains somewhat obscure in light of the fact that he is in fact a robot, who was, as far as anybody knows, built and programmed by the same inventor as all the other Mark 1 Clockwork Cherubs. Maybe he just does it because it's funny.
• Hitman with a Heart: Interdimensional assassin Lainya Vantrik has a code of honor from which she is quite vocal that she "will not swerve". Most notably, it includes not harming or endangering children (where "children" is defined generously enough to also include teenagers).
• Horrifying the Horror: When Lord Nachtos materialises in the Cupid Homeworld, his fellow Eldritch Abomination Lord Thymon locks himself in the nearest building without so much as a by-your-leave.
• Horsemen of the Apocalypse: A version of the oldest of fearsome foursomes appears in The End of the Homeworld. They are initially trapped in a scroll until Conquest makes a deal with Gorbazaglaz for a way to destroy the Cupid Homeworld, and summons them. The original line-up is Death, War, Famine and Pestilence, but Pestilence gets taken out by Juliet and Sneernobiel. When Pythe casts a reverse spell to bind them again and save the day, the magic, being designed for four Horsemen, makes up the numbers by grabbing Conquest to be the new Fourth Horseman — and banished with them.
• Humanoid Abomination: When visiting Thymon's birthday party, Nyarlathotep appears as a perfectly ordinary-looking human man wearing a Panama hat, principally referred to in narration as "the Man in the Panama Hat". He doesn't blink enough, though, and there's something disconcerting about him besides, albeit not necessarily scary.
• I Know Your True Name: The Queen of the Black Market fears this trope, for which reason she hides her own name under a Curse of Silence. She does not even reveal it to her lover Wendy.
• Inn Between the Worlds: The Interdimensional Tavern, one of the only landmarks to exist in the Void Between the Worlds (and yes, that is every bit as paradoxical as it sounds, sorry), is a fairly standard example. The owner is a golf ball and Eldritch Abominations often stop by to bully him into giving them free drinks. One would like to say you get used to it, but no, you don't.
• In-Series Nickname:
  • Pythagoras-858 is frequently called “Pythe”, including in narration.
  • Gorbazaglaz is sometimes referred to as “Gorby” by Doctor Sigma.
• In Their Own Image: Stated by Mandragora as his plan for after he destroys the Multiverse, as revealed in The Fall of the Consistency Palatium (although he's more interested in becoming all-powerful and omniscient for its own sake, and creating a new cosmos afterwards appears to be an afterthought).
• Intangible Theft: Madame Tarsa's ventriloquist dummies can steal someone's voice and speak with it.
• Interdimensional Travel Device: The various dimension-spanning organizations have different means of crossing the barriers between world, but the most common are small ships with traverse the Void on their way to their destination. This includes the Cupids' own vehicles, the Fog Ships, which are stated to be top-of-the-line when it comes to interdimensional vehicle, although that might just be the Cupids' own propaganda.
• It Runs on Nonsensoleum: The Department of Problem-Solving once stopped time inside a warehouse by filling it with clocks, the idea being that, just like you have to remove a bit of a chemical substance to analyze it, or draw a bit of blood to perform a blood test, clocks only get a reading on time by absorbing and consuming a little bit of time — so put enough clocks in one place and they'll absorb ''all' the time and there won't be any left.
• Killed Off for Real:
  • In The Fall of the Consistency Palatium, Mandragora-257, who had previously come Back from the Dead through such methods as creating a new body from himself through alchemy or making a deal with powerful spirits in the Afterlife, is finally killed off for good at the end of The Fall of the Consistency Palatium: he attempts to put his last contingency (uploading his consciousness into an indestructible crystal) but is unable to do so in time, and is stuck inside his exploding Supervillain Lair after it has sealed itself from all other dimension, including the Afterlife.
  • In Under the Sea, it is Zaroff who ends up getting the axe, or rather, sinking to the bottom of the sea alongside his private island as Marksmanship looks on helplessly. The narration makes it clear that he's gone for good.
• Kill the God: Sebastian Steer boasts, in a throwaway line, of having killed the Old God Nyarlathotep. Of course, The Multiverse is in effect, allowing a different version of Nyarlathotep to show up in a later, perfectly fine, to attend Thymon's birthday party, but it's still viewed as a rather impressive feat.
• King of Thieves: The Queen of the Black Market, of course. She's the crime-boss type, owning and ruling over the Interdimensional Black Market with an iron fist, exacting the respect and obedience of the fences and patrons who visit the Market.
• Leprechaun: In The Interlude of Jenny Everywhere, Jenny tracks down her old friend, the Lurigadawne of Tipperary, an authentic specific Leprechaun of pre-20th century Irish folklore. He's identified as a member of The Fair Folk and the Little People. In an aversion of the modern stereotypes, his jacket is red, and he's not a shoemaker by trade, although he's capable of crafting magic shoes if called upon.
• Love Potion: The Copper-Colored Cupids dip their arrows in Love Potion to make people fall in love whether they like it or not. The original formula of Love Potion was created by the Cupids' own Mad Scientist creator, but they then lost the formula and thus get their supplies directly from the goddess Aphrodite instead as "the next best thing".
• Magic Librarian: The Interdimensional Library generates its own Librarians from the books: sentient projections of fictional characters, from Robin Hood to Captain Ahab (not forgetting various characters from the fiction of other dimensions). The Librarians have an innate sense for where various shelves or reading rooms in the infinite Library are to be found.
• Magic Mushroom: Toadstools with various supernatural effects are among the products on sale in the Interdimensional Black Market. The white-colored ones can turn people into obedient wraiths, and are employed by the local crime boss to keep herself supplied with minions.
• Magic Staff: In The Trial of a Dark Lord, a nameless scepter topped with an intricate batlike design seems to be magically keyed to the position of rightful Dark Lord of Shenanig. Lord Nefarious used it as a Magic Focus Object, but after stealing it and taking over the throne, Emperor Steer instead casts magic bare-handed, showing it's not inherently necessary.
• Manchurian Agent: As revealed in Family Business, Jimmy Anytime was originally a variant of this, a clone of the original Jimmy Wherever hypnotised to believe he was the real deal until Jenny Nowhere switched that part of his conditioning off at a crucial moment. However, he turned out to have developed real feelings for Jenny Everywhere and (seemingly) killed Nowhere instead.
• Man in the Machine: The Detraxxi are an entire humanoid alien species who survive inside clunky robot-suits. Exactly what they look like in there is unclear.
• Meaningful Rename: Sharpshooter changed his name to Zaroff as part of his Start of Darkness.
• Mechanical Lifeforms: Though identifying as a species in their own right, the Cupids are robots, the last and greatest work of a long-gone human Creator. New 'generations' of Cupids are created every year in the Great Foundries.
• Medium Awareness: One of the main tricks in the Retconning Crocodiles' arsenal is a “metafictional awareness” that allows them to divine some things about the direction events are likely to take based on what would make a good story.
• Modernized God:
  • In the Prime Universe, the Greek God retired when they lost any hope of people starting to believe in them in numbers anymore. However, some of them can't help but continue to preside over their "essence" to some degree. In Aphrodite's case, she's been satisfying the urge by binging romance-focused Soap Operas.
  • Cybele, meanwhile, has decided to completely rebrand, embracing the similarity in names to become the patron goddess of Cyborgs. As such, she serves as a patron to the Detraxxi.
• Multiversal Conqueror:
  • The Cupids are very intently not this, spreading their "gift" in various dimensions but refusing to take over any of them. This is because various extant multiversal authorities (such as the offscreen Council of Frogs) would not take it kindly.
  • The Governor and Mandragora in The Resurrection of the Wellsians, however, have no such qualms, and plan to build an entire fleet of Fog Ships with which to branch out of the 97th Cosmos and conquer as much of the multiverse as they can. This plan is quickly highjacked by the Wellsians, who get away in the end, although there's only five of them, which ought to somewhat delay them.
  • The Detraxxi are your classic warmongnering alien conquerors (and not very good at it).
• Mummy: One appears in Conspiracy Exchanges Some Words With A Mummy, a riff on Edgar Allan Poe's Some Words With A Mummy. He's called Mistakeo and claims to have been dead for "five-thousand two-hundred twenty-six years". Carter brings him back to the Homeworld from the Prime Earth and tries to revive him via electrical current, but doesn't stick around long enough to find that it worked. Mistakeo's first talk, as the title stats, end up being with Conspiracy, who of course doesn't believe in undead mummies.
• Mundane Utility: When Doctor Sigma has the opportunity to ask any question in the world to a trapped Eldritch Abomination in this comic, he simply asks for what the correct plural of "octopus" is. He explains that as a scientist, it would spoil his fun to have all of the actually important questions answered with zero effort.
• Mutually Exclusive Magic: It surfaces that the hate-based magic of the Dark Lords of Shenanig is naturally opposed to the love-based magic with which the Clockwork Cherubs' Arrows are imbued. When Lord Nefarious is hit with a Cupid Arrow, instead of being romanticised, he explodes.
• Mutually Fictional: Played for Laughs in The Time of the Toymaker. After Pythe takes Sherlock Holmes across the dimensional barrier to meet Frankenstein, it transpires that Holmes thinks Frankenstein is fictional, and Frankenstein thinks Holmes is fictional.
• Narrative Poem: The series' 2020 Halloween special was a collection of short tales entitled The Verses of Samhain, being Exactly What It Says on the Tin: Halloween-themed Cupid stories in verse.
• Negative Space Wedgie: Various Rifts between universes appear. Though some parties (like the Faction of the Fooling Fish) use them to cross from one world to the next, they can also prevent other types of dimensional transportation; when a massive Rift appears over the Homeworld in The Arena of the Detraxxi, it prevents anyone from entering or leaving the Homeworld.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Towards the beginning of The Resurrection of the Wellsians, Edwin has some trouble fastening the hatch of the Fog Ship and eventually runs along to follow the others, leaving it open. This allows the Wellsians to steal it and obtain interdimensional travel, also seemingly stranding the rest of the cast on Venus, though that they quickly find a way around.
• Noble Wolf: Fenrir gets this characterisation when he pops up in The Winter Quests, being aware that he and Loki need to remain imprisoned until Ragnarök for the greater good, and not allowing his brother Jörmungandir's schemes to release their father "ahead of schedule".
• Noodle Incident:
  • Lots of people fought in, or refer back to, "the Spaghetti Wars". Good luck figuring out who was fighting who, for what, where. The one detail ever given was a Noodle Incident in itself: in Peace and Quiet, Marksmanship-522 recalls how he managed to "sneak the entire royal family of the Zorkal Realm out of enemy territory disguised as a simple orange salesman and his pack of enormous oranges" during the "Second Great Noodle War".
  • In Lord Thymon and the Department of Problem-Solving, Edwin wants to get done with the monster of the week quickly so he can get to "the Tasmanian Tiger case".
  • Prior to Sigyn's scheme in The Winter Quests, Jörmungandir apparently once tried to free Loki using an improbable scheme that involved smuggling "a crate of monstrous mice" into Loki's cavern.
• No Transhumanism Allowed: The Cupids aren't allowed to learn robotics, let alone alter themselves — a rule clearly put in place to avert The Singularity. Juliet-178 keeps breaking the rule, though.
• Now I Know What to Name Him: Inverted in Family Business: faced with their daughter from the future who is temporarily mute, Jenny and Thymon figure out her name simply by deciding on a name for their as-yet-unborn child.
• Octopoid Aliens: The Wellsians are, as their name not-so-subtly suggests, versions of H. G. Wells's Martians (their name comes from the name they give their own planet, "Wellsia"). They are frequently described as "vampire octopuses", but look somewhat less like cephalopods than Wells's originals: their flesh is chalk-white, their tentacles are numerous and uneven (with some forking once or even twice like roots), and instead of beaks, they have almost human-like faces.
• Oh, My Gods!: The Cupids often swear by their patron goddess Aphrodite, with several variations: "By Aphrodite!", "Great Goddess!" and "By the Goddess!" are the most common.
• Only Mostly Dead: In The Grand Multiverse Hotel, the Queen of the Black Market bound her soul to her body, so that she could be easily resurrected even if her body physically died. A slightly more lively form of Only-Mostly-Deadness comes in when characters attempt a resurrection on her body but don't quite manage it, resulting in her spending the climax as a mostly still presence who can barely manage to whisper. (She eventually gets better.)
• Our Gnomes Are Weirder: The Secret League of the Oranged-Bearded Gnomes are a recurring background gag, often popping up or being mentioned in unexpected places. Even the Cupids themselves don't understand how they fit into the wider mythos of the series. They are, at any rate, extremely short humanoids, they all wear pointed red hats, and, of course, they all have red beards. They appear to possess interdimensional travel as well as undisclosed magical powers, and have the Weaksauce Weakness to chicken-eggs of their L. Frank Baum counterparts but are immune to all other otherwise-deadly attacks.
• Our Ghosts Are Different: Ghosts manifest out of the Spirit Realm, and even a physical being trapped in the Spirit Realm will be able to "cast" a ghostly image of themselves onto places they visited before in the flesh.
• Person with the Clothing: One of the more humanoid guests at Lord Thymon's eldritch birthday party in Lord Thymon and the Impossible Guests is referred to as "the Man with the Panama Hat" (that is, until Pythe figures out he is a (benign) version of Nyarlathotep).
• Plunger Detonator: A green one, helpfully labeled "detonator", was memorably used by Conquest-932 to destroy the Cupid Parliament building.
• Professional Killer: Lainya Vantrik is an interdimensional assassin. Proficient in the use of most weapons, can travel from universe to universe at will thanks to a device she wears on her wrist, and is also capable of erasing specific timelines of an individual's life, rather than physically killing them. She is grimly professional but with a strict code of "off-limits" targets, including children.
• Professor Guinea Pig: It is revealed in Revenge of the Old Queen that Doctor Curious, amateur mad scientist and Crown Prince of Triskadeckia, experimented on himself and ended up accidentally mutating himself into a half-snake humanoid, forcing him to flee the palace in disgrace.
• Public Domain Character:
  • The Flatwoods Monster, a cryptid from 1950's urban legends, has met the Cupids on several occasions.
  • Sherlock Holmes showed up in the 2020 Christmas special, alongside Mrs Hudson and mentions of Doctor Watson, Professor Moriarty, Mycroft Holmes, and even SextonBlake.
  • Several classic monsters, or expies thereof, appeared in The Verses of Samhain, most notably including Doctor Frankenstein (who also popped up in the aforementioned special) and Count Orlok.
  • And then, of course, there's the whole Land of Oz cast in The Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids in Oz (and later stories)…
  • Nyarlathotep and The King in Yellow are among the Eldritch Abominations invited to Lord Thymon's birthday party in Lord Thymon and the Impossible Guests.
  • The City of Peace sees Wendy interacting with the world and cast of the infamous 1940s public domain comic "Atoma", including the titular character.
  • The End of the Homeworld brings in the Biblical Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
  • The Interlude of Jenny Everywhere prominently features the magic-sword-wielding Lurigadawne of Tipperary, a Leprechaun from authentic Irish folklore.
• Rat Men: In The End of the Homeworld, Famine, from the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, looks a bipedal, sapient, "hunched, mangy-looking gray rat".
• Really 700 Years Old: The sorcerous Queen of the Black Market looks around 30, but is in actuality around 520 years old. She's a Humanoid Alien, however, and by her people's standards she's "just" Older Than She Looks: 520 is still well within her expected lifespan, but without her magic she'd been showing signs of physical aging by now.
• Red Herring: Genesis of the Cupids, advertised as revealing the identity of the Clockwork Cherubs’ mysterious Creator at long last, sees various villains travelling back in Time to a Clock Punk-themed Planet of Hats intent on erasing the Cupids from history by killing the Creator before her time. While this is going on, it spends a lot of time on a new POV character, a young woman native to the clock-punk world, called Evangeline Forger, who is shown to have discovered the mysterious ability to give clockwork robots human-like personalities and free will. However, by the story's end, it turns out Evangeline is not the Creator — the Creator was instead the mysterious “special guest” of the Workshops, Professor Hartnell, whom Evangeline was trying to reach. When the two finally meet in the Epilogue, however, Evangeline does pass on the secret of robotic sentience to Hartnell, meaning Evangeline's discovery was still involved in the Cupids' creation even if she isn't the Creator.
• Refugee from TV Land: The Librarians of the Library are sentient projections of iconic fictional characters, such as Robin Hood or Jack Pumpkinhead. This is specifically stated to be a different phenomenon to the fact that everything that's fictional in a given universe will, due to the Multiverse being infinite, also happen to be real in a different universe or seven. When meeting the Library's Jack Pumpkinhead, Century Smith tells him that he actually met the "real" Jack in the actual Land of Oz, which Pumpkinhead finds quite fascinating, asking to know more about his "model".
• Resurgent Empire: The Wellsians were reduced to just seven survivors hibernating on Venus following the debacle that was their invasion of Earth. However, getting access to one of the Cupids' Void Ships soon leads to the survivors (albeit reduced to five) becoming a major interdimensional threat and taking over a new planet to oppress.
• Ret-Gone: The Collective of the Retconning Crocodiles' favorite modus operandi for dealing with people who inconvenience them. Other beings and entities, such as Chronon Fleas, the Decade Stone or the Imperium, are also capable of this, with different rules depending on the source and circumstances. However, despite appearances, individuals who are retconned out of existence don't completely cease to exist, as their consciousnesses reemerge in the Oblivion, from which, with considerable effort, it is possible to retrieve them.
• Retro Rocket: The Green Gorillas have a green rocketship with red fins.
• Revenant Zombie: The Beastmaster is revealed to be one at the end of his introductory story. He appears as a man with pale-green skin but no other obvious tells of his true nature. As a revenant, he is inedible and essentially unkillable, which is how he became so successful at taming monsters.
• Rhymes on a Dime: The defining trait of the Society of the Rhyming Dove is that they constantly speak in rhyme. Indeed, they seem to perceive other people's dialogue in rhyme too, or else to have an irresistible compulsion to render it as such even if asked to write it down exactly as said. There is much in-universe speculation on whether they're just very good at improvising poetry, or if there's a genuine supernatural element to what they do.
• Robot Hair: Various kinds are displayed depending on the Cupid model. Mark 1s like the Colonel have an inverted metal bowl with ridges on the side, of a darker colour than their "skin", giving the vague appearance of a bowl cut, though it can also look reminiscent of a WWI helmet; later models including Juliet, Marksmanship, Edwin and Pessimist have actual hair made of metal wire, in various colours including golden, silver, electric-blue, and black. A few including Mandragora and Zaroff even have beards, though this doesn't seem to be standard for any Mark.
• Robot Republic: The Cupids have an independent government in the Homeworld, which includes the ‘Cupid Parliament’.
• Santabomination: Cupid Fact File #1225: Father Christmas parodied the Santa's Existence Clause by proposing that Father Christmas is actually a sentient interdimensional meme which infects as many worlds as it can; belief in a fictional Santa is the first stage of contamination, after which a real, physical Santa Claus will gradually begin to coalesce until he was always there as far as anyone can tell. The individual Santas aren't actually malevolent, but the Cupids are still quite keen to not let this happen to their world.
• Santa's Existence Clause: Parodied in Cupid Fact File #1225 - see Santabomination above.
• Shock and Awe: Lord Nefarious can shoot short, painful blasts of green lightning using his staff. After coming into his power as an evil sorcerer in his own right, his Bastard Understudy Sebastian Steer displays the ability to shoot similar, but more powerful, purple bolts from his bare hands, Palpatine-style, demonstrating how he is in actuality more powerful (and also less controlled) than Nefarious was. Steer's son ( sort of), Joybuzzer, inherits the ability to project small electrical bursts, though nothing lethal.
• Shown Their Work: The End of the World starts out with the now-"traditional" line-up of Death, War, Famine and Pestilence when the Horsemen of the Apocalypse appear. However, the story's resolution relies on knowledge that Pestilence is something of a Word of Saint Paul Canon Immigrant, and most serious exegesis of the original Biblical text identify the Horseman commonly called "War" as "Civil War", and the one modern fiction interprets as Pestilence as "War of Conquest" (or simply "Conquest"). By the story's end, the preexisting, Pestilence gets killed and the coincidentally-named preexisting Cupid character of Conquest-932 ends up becoming the Fourth Horseman instead.
• Skeletons in the Coat Closet: The Queen of the Interdimensional Black Market wears bone armor, the weirdness of which does not go uncommented-upon.
• Sluggish Sloths: In The Resurrection of the Wellsians, it is mentioned that zoologist Edwin-750 somehow succeeded in creating a psychic link between himself and a sloth in an effort to study them better. Inevitably, he ends up sleepy to the point of uselessness.
• Sorcerous Overlord: The planet Shenanig has been ruled by those for several hundred years — specifically, a dynasty known as the Dark Lords of Shenanig, Wielders of the Legacy of the Nameless Overlord. The Queen of the Black Market is also a mild example, even if she's not depicted as villainous past her debut, and her domain is not really a self-sufficient realm.
• Soul Power: One of the aspects of Emperor Steer's powers, although he has many others. His supernatural hold over his subjects is voiced as his being "the Sovereign of the Souls", although quite how this works has yet to be revealed; he was also revealed in The Time of the Toymaker to have the ability to tear off part of his own soul and use it to grant sentience to inanimate objects, although this evidently comes at a price.
• Space Sailing: The Tachyonic Sailing Ships are interdimensional vessels that just so happen to look like 18th century sailing ships. They are lampshaded as Awesome, but Impractical, with only eccentrics using them anymore, while most dimensional travellers use less overdesigned Void Ships.
• Spell My Name with a "The":
  • Madame Tarsa is sometimes known as just "the Interdimensional Toymaker" or "the Toymaker". The Time of the Toymaker acknowledges that "although some called her the Toymaker, there were other claimants to the title across the omniverse".
  • The revenant hired by Laura Drake in Jenny Everywhere and the Master of Monsters is known as simply "The Beastmaster".
  • The Director of the City of Peace, or simply "the Director". His birth name ( Dustin Rhodes) was a secret and he eventually renounced it.
  • The Interlude of Jenny Everywhere introduces a ghost principally known as "the Mad Marquess", although his birth name is also given (Marin Mausdorf), as well as the Lurigadawne of Tipperary.
  • There are also "the Imperial Imperator" and "the Frost King," for whom no other names are ever mentioned, although it is less clear that they see these monikers as names rather than titles.
• Starter Villain:
  • Within the series, Lord Thymon was the first foe taken on, on-screen, by the Department of Problem-Solving, in the appropriately-titled Lord Thymon and the Department of Problem-Solving. In his subsequent appearances, Thymon had become a good guy, so this was his one and only outing as an antagonist. Despite being a relatively low-risk mission within the story, it also had profound unforeseen consequences in future stories.
  • In-universe, the Gang of the Green Gorillas were stated to be among the first enemies the Crew as a whole had to face, back in the 1970s. Back in the present day, the Crew pretty firmly outclass the Gorillas who are more of a background comic relief than a threat. (Their bionically-augmented descendants the Detraxxi are perhaps another matter.)
• Start of Darkness: In The Arena of the Detraxxi, Tracker, Bibliophile and Marksmanship, catapulted back in time, come across Sharpshooter-024 and witness his rejection of the Crew's ideal and transformation into the murderous Zaroff-024 that Marksmanship met in The Most Dangerous Reveal.
• Story Arc: The series usually runs more on standalone stories with Character Development carrying over from one to the other, instead of full-on story arcs. However, this only serves to make the exceptions more momentous:
  • The "Mandragora arc" dealt with the aftermath of the Downer Ending of The Resurrection of the Wellsians, with Pythe travelling the multiverse trying to catch up to the extremely slippery Evil Sorcerer Mandragora.
  • The "Rifts Saga", seeds for which were planted as early as the sixth story in the series, but which more properly refers to Lupan Evezan's 2020 prose stories from Planet of the Shapeshifters onwards, dealing with the consequences of mysterious Rifts spreading across dimensions and hindering the Cupids' ability to travel across the Void.
• Supernatural Gold Eyes: The first thing Pythe notices about Mandragora-257 in his debut in The Resurrection of the Wellsians is the strange golden glow of his eyes, presumably a side-effect of Mandragora's alchemical pursuits. The glowing golden eyes remain a tell-tale sign of Mandragora's identity after he starts body-surfing following the destruction of his original body.
• Tertiary Sexual Characteristics: Parodied with Juliet-178, the only known female Cupid (seemingly created by a quirk of the Great Foundries)… the only practical consequences of which fact are that she has long eyelashes, a high-pitched voice, and wears a bow. Also Justified, of course, in that the Cupids are clockwork beings who are only very stylized representations of humanoid figures.
• That Man Is Dead: Dustin Rhodes renounces his former identity after Atoma declares that she hates him, becoming only "the Director".
  "Very well," he said theatrically. "Good-bye, forever, Atoma. My love for you transcended centuries… but nothing can pierce a callous, thankless heart. The purest passion dies on the harsh, rocky banks of insensitivity. So, good-bye, for with these words you have killed Dustin Rhodes, and we shall not meet again."
• The Armies of Heaven: The angel Sneernobiel is described as "Lieutenant of the Second Division of the Heavenly Host".
• The Bad Guy Wins: The Resurrection of the Wellsians ends with the reveal that everyone else in the plot has been the Wellsians' Unwitting Pawn this entire time: even the heroes come to investigate were actually called by them so that they could make their escape aboard the heroes' own spaceship. Which they do.
• The Beastmaster: A villainous example, known simply as the Beastmaster, is the titular antagonist of Jenny Everywhere and the Master of Monsters. He's a Revenant who exploits his inedibility and relative invulnerability to tame monsters to do his bidding.
• The Blank: The Wraiths employed as security in the Interdimensional Black Market are the enslaved remnants of people who ran afoul of the Market's boss, and lost their face along with their personhood.
• The Butler Did It: In The Grand Multiverse Hotel. Or, rather, someone disguised as the butler.
• The Earth-Prime Theory: Subverted. There is a universe called "the Prime Universe" — but it doesn't actually have any cosmic or causal significance. It's called that because it happened to be the first universe to be registered when the Council of Frogs put together a numbering scheme for all universes in the Multiverse.
• The End... Or Is It?: Used verbatim at the end of The Resurrection of the Wellsians, which ends with the entire cast (save the villains) stranded on Venus. There's room for them to find a way to make an uneventful return offscreen, but…
• The Farmer and the Viper: In the 'short story The Resurrection of the Wellsians, the alchemist Mandragora revives six hibernating Martians, only for them to (try to) kill him as soon as it suits them.
  Mandragora: "Have pity! I gave you life!"
  Wellsian: "You did give us life. And see how we repay you. Now, Master, we give you death!"
• The Multiverse: Here meaning all realities, not simply one particular cluster of universes. Many groups and agents travel the Multiverse; the Cupids themselves are based in a pocket dimension all their own, and thus all of their missions involve dimensional travel.
• The Older Immortal: The Time of the Toymaker revealed Madame Tarsa to be this among the recurring cast. Though the Queen of the Black Market is a 400-year-old immortal, she considers Tarsa on a completely different level from her, and it is believed that she is older than Lord Thymon himself, who is the Anthropomorphic Personification of Time itself in the Void Between the Worlds.
• The Revolution Will Not Be Civilized: The rebellion against the tyrannical Governor in The Resurrection of the Wellsians turns out to be planning to use the (insanely dangerous) resurrected aliens to aid their cause, just like the Governor's side which they criticize for doing so.
• Sanity Slippage: Hiding out for years in a flawed golem body seems to have taken a toll on Mandragora's psyche by The Dark Cabaret, making him more obsessive and egomaniac than ever before.
• Significant Reference Date: Lord Thymon and the Impossible Guests established that Thymon's birthday was March 30th, also the date of release of his debut in the real world. (Impossible Guest was released on the same date, serving as an anniversary special for the character as well as featuring his in-universe birthday.)
• The Smurfette Principle:
  • Juliet-178, a Copper-Colored Cupid who somehow turned out a girl even though Cupids are normally Always Male, is a parodic subversion of the trope, in that she has plenty of (not in any way stereotypically-feminine) character besides being "the girl one" and the other Cupids don't treat her any differently than they would a male Cupid.
  • Subverted again in 2020 by Stranded at Memory's End, which revealed that there were originally two female Cupids, Juliet and Lethe, before Lethe was erased from Time by the Decade Stone.
• Superficial Suggestion Box: Downplayed in The Cupid Suggestion Box, a short side-story told in the form of a series of suggestions placed in the titular Box and the Copper-Colored Council's comments on them. The Council initially institute the Box in good faith, but the suggestions range from ill-advised to ludicrous and they are soon reduced to making weary comment after weary comment, until one of the Councilmembers puts in one final request that the others immediately approve: getting rid of the Suggestion Box itself.
• The X of Y:
  • The Labors of Juliet
  • The Toymaker's Labyrinth
  • The Resurrection of the Wellsians
• There Is Another: Juliet was originally introduced as the only female Clockwork Cherub. However, in 2020, Stranded at Memory's End revealed the existence of another, Lethe, who had been trapped in a Ret-Gone limbo state since the 1990's.
• The Worf Effect: Emperor Steer casually mentions having single-handedly destroyed "several unrelated versions of the enchanter Merlin, a number of so-called legions of so-called superheroes, two different Void Armadas, and the Old God Nyarlathotep" while trying to break into the Consistency Imperium.
• Time Abyss: Tarsa is older than even Lord Thymon, so much so that there are no records widely available in the Multiverse which explain where she came from — she's been a fixture of the interdimensional "scene" literally as far back as anyone can remember. She once described herself as "several septendecillion years old".
• Time Stands Still: In one short story, the Cupids stopped time within the confines of a warehouse by filling it with clocks. See It Runs on Nonsensoleum above for why this works.
• Tiny Tim Template: A Copper-Colored Christmas Carol managed to cast a baby Eldritch Abomination in this role, as "Tiny Thymon". Complete with a crutch, or, rather, some extra-dimensional object filtered to its nearest equivalent in our perception range, which is a crutch. It should be stressed that despite some tongue-in-cheek framing about the sheer use of the "Christmas Carol homage" trope, this story is not a parody, and Tiny Thymon manages to be genuinely endearing.
• Today, X. Tomorrow, the World!: The Governor and Mandragora's evil monologue in The Resurrection of the Wellsians boils down to "today, the Earth, tomorrow, the multiverse!".
• Tripod Terror: The Wellsians are shown in their debut to have devised the Tripods on Earth as a last-minute solution when they realized Earth's gravity made it nearly impossible for them to move on foot. This might explain the rather slapdash engineering.
• True Love's Kiss: In The Grand Multiverse Hotel, Wendy tries to invoke this to bring the Queen of the Black Market Back from the Dead. Because Wendy hasn't known the Queen that long, her kiss turns out to be a "Kiss of Mild Infatuation" which only brings the Queen back to Only Mostly Dead status. Undeterred, Wendy eventually opts to "trick out" the magic by drinking a Love Potion which enables her to perform the real deal, fully resurrecting the Queen.
• Unconventional Formatting: Lord Thymon's speech is rendered in bold and alternating lower- and uppercase, LiKe ThIs, in order to emphasises his eldritch nature. On a few occasions, other "interdimensional" sounds or happenings have been marked out by typographical oddities, such as enormous, rainbow-coloured text to render the "sound" of something ripping through the fabric of reality.
• Undeathly Pallor: The Beastmaster, a Revenant, sports pale green skin.
• Unwitting Pawn: In The Resurrection of the Wellsians, all of the schemes and counter-schemes of the characters turn out to have been furthering the aims of the Wellsians themselves.
• Vast Bureaucracy: Oh boy. The Crew is ruled by a Parliament, whose approach to any hard problem is to create a new commission or subgroup that will take care of it for them, meaning there are a lot of weird, nigh-useless government agencies running around — from relatively obvious ones like the Cupid Tax Department to bizarre, abstract ones like the Cupid Logic Commission. And in parallel to all that, there is the sprawling Cupid Intelligence Institute, the primary research center of the Cupids, which has a Vast Bureaucracy all of its own, mostly composed of a lot of very specialized Departments. (The Departments spend most of their time bickering about which problems fall into whose area of expertise, as opposed to actually solving the problems, for which reason they ended up creating a Department of Problem-Solving that actually does most of the work.)
• Villain Episode: The 2020 side-story Darius and the Discordias saw the villainous Director Darius encounter the Drove of the Discordias, eventually enacting a reluctant team-up with Blackheart. The story mostly pulls this off because as callous and egotistical as Darius might be, the Discordias are worse.
• Villain: Exit, Stage Left:
  • Pythe is almost certain that Mandragora survives the explosion at the end of The Resurrection of the Wellsians, though he cannot be sure. And, of course, the Wellsians themselves (or, at least, the five surviving ones) run away in their stolen Fog Ship, which was their plan all along.
  • He is revealed to have been correct in The Dark Cabaret only for Mandragora to slip away again, leaving his artificial human body behind.
  • However, this is averted in their third and final encounter in The Fall of the Consistency Palatium; Mandragora attempts to slip away again using a contingency plan he'd set up, but ends up getting the timing wrong due to slipping on a banana peel on the way and getting Killed Off for Real.
• Visionary Villain: Conquest-932 is primarily motivated by a belief that the Crew have the capacity to reform into a glorious interdimensional empire, and that they should. It is unclear if he believes that this would make it more efficient at achieving its ultimate goal in the long run, or if he simply thinks it would be cool, but it is a vision he has come very far in pursuing, although he is not really a big threat in the grand scheme of things despite his big talk.
• Void Between the Worlds: The Void, or Void Between Worlds, is inhabited by a large number of Eldritch Abominations banished there from their home universes. As a result, it contains something like a sense of Time and Space, but they are keyed to, and subject to the whims of, the entity enforcing them, such as Lord Thymon, who controlled Time in the Void until the Cupids captured him. At any rate, travel between dimensions is achieved via Void Ships, and the Void contains at least one perennial landmark, the Interdimensional Tavern.
• Was It All a Lie?: Mandragora seems genuinely hurt when his assistant Digger reveals his stupidity was feigned in a effort to get him to reveal his secrets, and asks him if any of it was real. Yes, Digger answers; he really does like to dig holes in the ground to keep himself entertained. No reason.
• Weaksauce Weakness: The Salamandyrs are deathly afraid of lavender, even trace amounts of which cause them to turn from humanoid Frog Men back into normal, harmless, tiny salamanders.
• Weather-Control Machine: As per The Ghosts and the Machine, the Homeworld's Department of Meteorology doesn't predict the weather in the Homeworld, it creates it.
• Wight in a Wedding Dress: The Epilogue to The Time of the Toymaker mentions that classical Victorian ghost Horatio Topper's wife is an equally-classic Lady in White.
• Withholding Their Name: The Queen of the Black Market placed her real name under a Curse of Silence: it can only be revealed to those she wish, otherwise people's minds will simply not retain the name even if they see it written down. She explains that she underwent the costly procedure to protect herself against I Know Your True Name-type attacks, although she is also observed to keep other private details about herself, such as her species and world of origin, a secret.
• Wizard Duel: At the climax of the Story Arc Grand Finale The Fall of the Consistency Palatium, the series' two recurring Evil Sorcerer villains, Emperor Steer and Mandragora, ended up fighting over who would get to reap the rewards of the latter's masterplan and ascend to Godhood. The fight starts out as a classic Wizard's Duel, with Steer employing brute attacks of bolts of energy, while Mandragora draw glowing sigils in the air as protections and counters; however, when it becomes apparent their magics are evenly matched, the fight soon devolves into a schoolyard scuffle with kicks to the shins and even, at one point, Steer biting Mandragora's nose.
• Wouldn't Hurt a Child: Lainya Vantrik's "code of honour" includes never killing or endangering kids — and killing any would-be clients who try to trick her into doing so. She's got quite a generous definition of "children" too, objecting to being made to assassinate a 19-year-old in Century Smith and the Time Terror.
• Yet Another Christmas Carol: The series did a very direct take-off on the classic plot as A Copper-Colored Christmas Carol, casting Philatel-426 in the Scrooge role. It poked fun at the trope without being a parody of it, notably including lines which implies that the same three Ghosts of Christmas, being interdimensional travellers, have already gone through this exact plot multiple times.

  Ghost of Christmas Past: "To your past I must take you, Ebenezer!"
  Philatel: "…Who is Ebenezer?"
  The Ghost of Christmas Past takes out a notepad, mildly puzzled.
  Ghost of Christmas Past: "“Are – are you not named Ebenezer Scrooge? (…) Ah. Sorry. It’s just – most of them are named Ebenezer, you know. Not that we haven’t had others, of course, it’s just a tad unusual."

• Zeppelins from Another World: The intentionally-clichéd Steampunk parallel world seen in Genesis of the Cupids prominently includes airships. One particularly large one is stolen by the Imperial Imperator and crashed into the great Clock-Tower in the climax.

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