Recap / Dice Funk Season 4 Valentine

Laura: "Someone's disgusted by capitalism." (Ep 9, 0:34:48)

Season 4 Valentine Tropes

• Aborted Arc: The team's attempts to find someone to buy the computer parts they stole ends up not being resolved because they began working for the Administration Branch and no longer needed the money.
• Agent Peacock: Beatrice Beauregard is a David Bowie, Annie Lennox, Janelle Monáe, and Marlene Dietrich blend who should not be messed with.
• Arc Hero: An odd example, Austin explained that the heists the party went on, except the first and last ones, were each made to give one of the party members some time to shine in their own element.
  • The Wrestling Heist is for the local championship belt where Catarina is a wrestler, with the wrinkle that successfully pulling off the heist will likely get her fired. Catarina ends up convincing the owner to let her win the championship, getting her the belt and saving her job.
  • The Sharp Financial Heist starts off as a seemingly normal heist but changes when Frank's card playing rival Algernon transports the group into a Holodeck video game. Frank ends up almost defeating Algernon but forfeits the last match to help him out instead.
  • The Military Base Heist is set on a holiday that entails a huge party and Lenora gets the group in by claiming to be the entertainment. When the soldiers are close to finding the group out, she drugs all of them to cover the group's escape.
  • The Harker's Casino heist is Ed's old place of work and they go there to track down one of his old coworkers. Ed uses his connections with his other old coworkers to get into Harker's office to negotiate.
• Audience Surrogate: Catarina & Lenora are both young broke millennials who got to know each other on the internet, desperate for a buck whether it's to rise up from poverty, finance their consumerist lifestyle, or realize their lifelong ambition.
• Brain Uploading:
  • Skel, a chairholder of the Crown Corporation, was uploaded to a private network at his home.
  • This is also how Project Eternity works, it uploads a person's mind into a new body, effectively granting immortality. However it actually kills the original person and the new body is The Souless and the process can also cause people to undergo shifts in personality (Beau, for instance, starts caring less and less about her job and more about her fashion endeavors). This downside is kept under wraps and Luna is planning to release it to the public as a form of immortality at such a high price that anyone who uses it will be stuck in debt to him forever. Luna has also discovered that he can upload his own mind into multiple bodies to give himself loyal henchmen, and can combine people's minds, such as his "Krakenbane" clones which have his personality but the fighting skills and memories of Catarina. Also he can effectively brainwash anyone who uses it and is planning to make anyone who uses it subservient and incapable of turning on him.
• The Caper: The first arc is our impoverished protagonists attempting to dig their way into North Valentine to steal whatever they can from the wealthy.
• Cards of Power: Hollodeck playing was popularized by Frank, but he was kind of left by the waysides as the game became bigger than him and he was largely uncredited.
• Computer Virus: Skel effectively becomes one of these when the players use a drone to broadcast him to the internet, and he decides to upload his poetry by force to every computer.
• Death of the Old Gods: The Gods aren't remembered in any significant way, and they certainly aren't the gateway to magic the way they used to be.
• Fantastic Drug: One of the drugs mentioned is Nox or Equinox.
• Fictional Holiday: Solstice, the day of the year to celebrate the arrival of a new form intersecting with the world and being thankful that it either did not happen this year or was not a catastrophic disaster if it did.
• Hangover Sensitivity: Besides being in awful pain, Nox withdrawal leaves Lenora whining at people talking. She already wears sunglasses all the time, so one can assume she'd be incredibly sensitive to light in this situation.
• Karmic Thief: The team steals for their own benefit, or that of their immediate entourage, but steal from the obscenely wealthy in North Val.
• MegaCorp: Corporations have effectively become the intermediaries between the Forms and magic users, replacing gods. Apparently, government is also a corporatocracy, with each city having its own governing corporation and its own Game.
• Our Werebeasts Are Different: Reese, Catarina's best friend, is a wererat who takes medication for her condition.
• Punny Name:
  • Droney Maloney is already a good pun but it's doubly funny when it turns out they are guarding the house of a character partially voice by Johnny Maloney.
  • A completely unintentional one but Skel, one of the heads of Crown Corp. has had his brain uploaded into a computer with his body being only a skeleton
• Replaced the Theme Tune: At episode 17, the intro becomes Trance Version from OverClocked ReMix while the outro becomes Redesign Your Logo from Neil Cicierega.
  • At episode 30, the intro and outro respectively become Phoniks' remixes of C.R.E.A.M. and Back in the Game, both originally by the Wu-Tang Clan.
• The Rival: Algernon acts specifically to thwart Frank, and Frank's first instinct when he gets downtime is to confront Algernon.
• Sadistic Choice: Catarina is presented with one: she can cooperate with Beatrice's plans to perform a heist on her wrestling venue and risk her dream job, or she can refuse and lose the protection afforded by the Crown Corporation which is the only thing keeping Graves from murdering the team. She goes along with the heist, but, fortunately for her, she manages to do it in a way that not only prevents her from losing her day job, but may have actually helped her career— however, she quits her job by her own choice a few episodes later.
  • Catarina literally hands Frank one when she arrives in the courtroom in which the party is selling her out. Shoot her in the head, saving the Administrative Branch executive she'd come to assassinate, or he'll never see his family again. However, Catarina planned him to shoot her, which he does. Just according to plan.
• Super Serum: When Lenora uses Nox, she gains advantage on everything and becomes preternaturally strong.
• Theme Tune: Intially, the intro is New Jack Mantle while the outro is Linear Groove, both from OverClocked ReMix.
• Time Skip: Valentine is much more distant from Ilium than Ilium was from Lorelei. Technology has developed to the point that we are at a fairly 2017 standard of living.
• Toxic Phlebotinum: Nox provides Super-Strength and, from a gameplay perspective, gives the user an advantage on every dice roll while they're under the influence. However, it's incredibly addictive (and expensive) and comes with crippling withdrawal symptoms that kick in immediately after it wears off (depicted in gameplay as a disadvantage on every dice roll). It's also hinted that sustained use is incredibly dangerous.
  • Turns out that (with the assistance of lycanthropic DNA at least) longterm use has effectively altered Lenora's cellular structure. In her own words, she's now made of drugs, and can get a hit of Nox in the same way a lycanthrope would turn into a werewolf. It's not too much of a problem for Lenora (yet) but it's easy to see how this kind of effect could be incredibly dangerous.
  • It turns out that Nox is actually the blood of a god. This god takes advantage of Lenora's heavy use of Nox to briefly take control of her— however, because Lenora took Beguiling Defenses as part of one of her level ups, it doesn't work and actually backfires, letting her take control of the god long enough to hit Luna with a giant claw.
• Urban Fantasy: Without any hint of masquerade. Everyone is aware of magic, werebeasts and medusas are medicated, the conspiracy that links their world with the world of forms is common knowledge, yet still Valentine resembles contemporary earth a lot.
• Vitriolic Best Buds: Reese is the one person that Catarina genuinely cares for, and the first time we see them interact, Cat threatens to steal Reese's ice tea by wrestling her for it, and Reese threatens to turn into a rat and bite her tit off.
• Wrong Genre Savvy: The party interprets Beatrice sending them on a heist against the leader of Valentine's military as a Uriah Gambit as a result of them getting too close to Crown Corporation secrets. It's revealed in the following episode that, while Beatrice did intend the heist to be the final job the party would do for him, it wasn't an attempt to have them killed. Rather, it was an attempt to build the party's notoriety so that, when Beatrice traded their services to a different executive (similar to trading players to a different team in a sports league) he would be able to get a higher price.
• Xanatos Gambit: Catarina's Indy Ploy to kill Justice Alistair: She makes Frank shoot her so he can see his family again, so the bullet will get ricocheted with her Victory Itself powers. The bullet got deflected again by Frank, and redirected at Catarina, who loses an arm. Before she loses consciousness, she uses a grenade to attempt Taking You with Me on the party.
• You All Meet in an Inn: The party meets in a club, after discussing the possibility of a heist in the tunnels to each other on the internet.