Basic Trope: A story setting in which any number of fantastic creatures exist despite the fact they come from different cultural settings.
- Straight: Chi-Lin the Chinese peasant lives in a world with Eastern dragons, unicorns, Anansi the trickster god, and has an eagle as her spirit totem.
- Exaggerated: Chi-Lin routinely encounters Loki, Coyote, Enki-du, and Anansi, whereupon they fight over who gets to be the Trickster.
- Downplayed: All Myths Are True
- Justified:
- Chi-Lin isn't in the real world, but in Another Dimension where the beliefs held by people in the real world (even those long dead) have made every mythic figure real.
- Or it's just a universe not related to ours where the creatures do not have to follow the same mythology as in our world, just borrowing look, name and possibly skills. In fact, say, a gorgon could be a fairly common monster in the wilderness.
- Jac o'Naley the Leprechaun works for the NYPD and Mei Lin the Chinese Dragon lives in New York's ChinaTown.
- Inverted: Dozens of cultures exist at varying levels of technology, but all share pretty much every other aspect of their way of life.
- Subverted: After meeting with beings from various mythologies, Chi-Lin discovers there was really only one true cosmology, and a race of shapeshifters has been pretending to be creatures from other mythologies to spice things up.
- Double Subverted:
- Except, those shapeshifters liked it to so much they became the mask quite literally.
- Alternatively: They're shapeshifters from a different cosmology.
- Alternatively: ...Except for the vampires. The shape-shifters have no clue where those guys came from.
- Parodied:
- Naiads fight Puca for control of river-turf, minotaur-centaur crosses become a public hazard, Chinese and Western vampires routinely have your-sire-is-so-fat joke bouts, werewolves are often sued for chasing bakeneko and nekomatas up trees, Quetzalcoatl, Zeus and Thor spend every Saturday seeing who can prank the most mortals with lightning bolts, and Satan and Cthulhu can often be found having staring contests.
- Kids trap a Spaghetti Monster and a Shoggoth in the same bottle, then shake it to see who wins the fight.
- Zig Zagged: Everything is real! Except it was just a guy in a mask. But he was part of a double-masquerade, designed to distract from there actually being plenty of weird stuff. But then it turns out that Chi-Lin was having a fever dream. Only then she learns she was in a Lotus-Eater Machine, then learning that she was in an experiment being conducted by Aliens from the 30th century. Said aliens turn out to be props in a 30th century amusement park.
- Averted: Chi-Lin encounters only those fantastic beasts and other figures which belong to her cultural setting.
- Enforced: "We're going to run out of mythical creatures eventually, plus we don't want to seem culturally insensitive. I know! Lets make every mythology true!"
- Lampshaded: "I wonder if we'll see a spaghetti-monster
fly by soon?" - Invoked: Chi-Lin is in a world of Chinese Cosmology, but she really likes unicorns (stereotypical as that is) so she reasons that "if dragons are real, why not unicorns?"
- Exploited: Gods are powered by belief. Chi-Lin sells her worship to the highest bidder.
- Defied: Realizing that Your Mind Makes It Real, and that there are a lot of unpleasant things in the world's varied cosmologies, Chi-Lin forcibly denies the existence of these to limit the potential danger.
- Discussed: "So, every myth is true? Wow, I guess I really should give our ancestors credit for being on the ball with all those legends they passed down."
- Conversed: "So, if all of these cosmologies are real, how come all the leprechauns stayed in Ireland and the Kraken only attacked Greece?" "Eh. They may be magical, but I'm guessing they live in ecosystems and don't like to wander. Still, it'd be awesome if Satyrs opened a Hydra-Head-Burger in Dublin."
- Deconstructed: Chi-Lin has a crisis of faith. If everything is real, can anything be true? She questions all the varied creatures and deities, but even they have no clue on the true workings of the cosmos.
- Reconstructed:
- In the end, faced with the fact that faith may well be creating an incredibly diverse spirit world, she resolves that though Atheism is probably the easiest choice, she'll instead turn her and others' faith into creating a new cosmology of mankind's conscious choosing.
- Alternately, a world where anything and everything is possible is just that...a world of infinite possibility, and therefore one demanding infinite optimism.
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