Roleplay / We Could Be Round Three

Round 3 of We Could Be started on July 17th, 2021.

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Round 3 of We Could Be provides examples of:

• Achievements in Ignorance: While trying to cut out fabric during the third team challenge, Serizawa inexplicably manages to cut out the shape of the Oxygen Destroyer instead and has no idea how he did it.
• Acme Products: Hyperion seems to produce just about everything on the station, especially the worthless stuff.
• Affectionate Nickname: Since they have so much in common, Red calls Ruby "Little Red". She also takes to calling Ryoko "Ryo".
  • Rex has both affectionate and less affectionate nicknames for everyone as well.
• Air-Vent Passageway: How Gamzee gets around the space station. Ryoko and Marcy also end up picking up the habit and exploring the vents on each new floor, as they're the only ones small enough to fit.
• All Anime Is Naughty Tentacles: Rex turns out to think this, acting shocked about random anime discs available in the entertainment room.
• Amusing Injuries: Most of the injuries suffered during the second team challenge, a sack race across a virtual intersection with Hard Light cars zooming by, are Played for Laughs as several characters wipe out dramatically.
  • Happens again with the fourth challenge which is more or less just a life-sized game of Monkey Ball in which multiple characters are subjected to extreme slapstick humiliation.
• And This Is for...: A lot of characters say this to Jack and his army of Jacks in the final battle, citing the many, many dead Angels from their universes and destroyed Claptraps on the station as well as everything the party themselves went through.
• Animal Assassin: When setting the petting zoo aliens on a Brainwashed and Crazy Murderbot, Emma is marked as a culprit even if she didn't do the dirty work.
• Appropriated Appellation: Gwen meant "Mr. Borderlands" as an insult, but Jack proceeds to proudly call himself that anyway.
• Arc Words: "Wait and hope," a refrain often shared between the characters to pull someone out of their Darkest Hour and eventually towards everyone multiple times.
• Assimilation Plot: It turns out that Jack's plan all along was to implant his consciousness into the bodies of each student. Slowly, but surely making the multiverse more 'handsome'.
• Badass Boast: Ryoko piloting Claptrap in the final investigation, when she comes to the rescue of half the survivor pool with an electro blaster.

What? Is that supposed to intimidate me? Are you forgetting who's piloting this Sentinel? You're all just small fry to me!

• Bad People Abuse Animals: The "petting zoo" on the space station has an assortment of dangerous alien wildlife, none of which have proper enclosures or enrichment; most of them are aggressive as a result. It's implied that Jack intended this to facilitate murders or alibis. Emma takes it upon herself to try and improve the animals' conditions, but she doesn't actually know what they need and just tries everything she can think of.
• Bait-and-Switch: A meta example. A character appears hiding under a box during the first afterparty, and greets Marcy with a "Salutations!" Everyone immediately assumed OOC it was Penny due to one of the mods having her as a main muse (and her major role in Round 1), but it turns out to be Claptrap instead.
  • Zigzagged with Claptrap when the remains of a destroyed robot show up on the station, leading Marcy to believe he'd been killed. He turns out to be fine... only for it to later be revealed that not only is every single Claptrap that appears from a different universe, but the Claptrap Marcy originally befriended ended up as the destroyed unit who became Clapdrone.
• Bland-Name Product: Anime standby WcDonald's (which Lala actually recognizes), Spacebucks, Uncle Anne's, and Sbjarro (those latter two don't appear to be references to any other work that's used them as stand-ins for the real restaurants).
• Blood Transfusion Plot: Serizawa sets up a blood-typing clinic in the infirmary and gathers data to avert any problems because he anticipates one of these. The usual problems pop up (Columbo turns out to be Afraid of Needles, Majima doesn't know his blood type so he just says "red," and Libra hasn't even heard of blood typing), and Alien Blood becomes an issue for the nonhumans.
• Boy Meets Ghoul: Cryptid enthusiast Emma ends up dating alien Lala.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: Gwen, of course. Marcy also does a bit of this when interacting with Handsome Jack in particular.
• Break the Cutie: Marcy was taken from her Darkest Hour, and while she's initially excited to be isekaied into a beloved game franchise, she goes through a lot. As does Ruby, for whom the first trial seemed like a specially designed wringer, as she loses both her canonmate who's just come Back from the Dead and a close friend who shared a lot of similarities with her, and blames herself for not doing more.
• Broad Strokes: Serizawa is written with a mix of the 1954 (JP original) and 1956 (US revised dub) versions of his canon in mind; Steve Martin still exists, but so does the sympathetic take on Godzilla as a fellow victim.
• Broken Bird: Harumi may look like The Ingenue, but as time goes on, we see she's actually bitter and pained from losing her parents, being not so much adopted by the Emperor and Empress but picked up as a mascot in a publicity stunt, and never being able to show how she truly feels about anything. As we learn, this extends further; she's actually been taken in by a usurper who got her to put a hit out on her adoptive "parents," killed her Only Friend, and shaped her into a murderous cult leader with abuse and constant threats.
• Cat Scare: On Wednesday of Week 1, the characters hear honking in the vents. When they go to investigate it, after a long period of suspense it turns out to be just a honking Roomba. Of course, soon after everyone is acting relieved about it Gamzee does appear.
• Cluster F-Bomb: Gwen lets loose every swear in the book when she realizes that, now that she's no longer in an all-ages comic, she can swear without it being cosmically censored.
• Colour-Coded for Your Convenience: Team Razzle and Team Dazzle are colour-coded to gold and purple, with jumpsuits and map labelling to match.
• Comically Missing the Point: Cal looks at the bad end screen when Jared plays Hatoful Boyfriend and takes what's meant to be a chilling Yandere line as a genuine compliment to the player.
• The Comically Serious: Serizawa generally remains stoic in the face of ridiculous situations, from vibrating in a massage chair with a milkshake to bouncing balls and chickens falling from the vents.
• Commonality Connection: Ruby and Red turn out to have a lot in common (due to being based on the same Public Domain Character), which they comment on and bond over. Ryoko and Rex later start to understand each other when it comes out that they were both manipulated by toxic mentors. Several characters also bond over having Kaiju-related trauma.
• Continuity Nod: During the seance, Emma and Lala discuss whether turning out to be AI copies of their original selves (the ending twist in Round 2) would be cool or provoke a horrifying existential crisis.
• Cool Toy: The "Butt Stallion Figure" item is presumably supposed to be this in-universe, but everyone thinks it's stupid.
• Crossover Punchline: In the endgame investigation log, a line of dialogue implies that the Disc-One Final Boss from Unknown Seas Round 2 was scouted by the legion of alternate-universe Jacks from this round but turned them down.
• The Cuckoolander Was Right: During Trial 1, Jared suggests the evidence fits a werewolf. It turns out that Red's berserker state is pretty close.
• Dad the Veteran: While Serizawa isn't literally anybody's father, he's enough of a Team Dad to fit this. His trauma from the war followed by being forced to go to extremes to save the city from a kaiju attack haunt him throughout the story.
• Darkest Hour: In the last week, after barely escaping a mass execution, being left for dead, and having to deal with the fallout of the last trial, everyone seems worn out and desperate. Ruby describes it best.

"I just... I thought I had lost about everything I could before I got here. And then — then it turned out that I had no idea how much could get dug back up to get ripped away or just plain old built up and shattered again."

• Deal with the Devil: Ryoko tries to make one with the Shepherdess, invoking the phrase by name. Unfortunately, she doesn't actually have the power to do that.
• Death by Irony: The Quiet One, Harumi's true personality, can't understand Tyzias' thought process and claims that she "likes to cling to absurd theories until someone else does the work for her." This overlooking is exactly what gets Harumi cornered in her trial by Tyzias herself.
• Descent into Addiction: Played for Laughs when Crea, missing home, gets addicted to Minecraft.
• Digging Yourself Deeper: Rex manages to do this constantly, and only once due to being near-blackout drunk.
• Discontinuity Nod: The multiple references to Priss understanding that not all Ridiculously Human Robots are evil and remembering the ones she cared about, often strongly denying that she assumes any robot or cyborg is automatically a bad person, were in part a refutation of her Character Derailment in Bubblegum Crash.
• Door Stopper: In-universe, Gwen's ship fic, 42 chapters and still incomplete.
• Do Wrong, Right: Downplayed since most people don't really consider it "wrong," but Majima gives Ryoko advice on throwing punches and holding herself in a fight after she beats up Simon during the second trial and gets her own hands bruised because of it.
• Dramatic Irony: After some discussion in the fourth trial, everyone concludes that Fjord and Marcy both accidentally killed their victims. However, in truth Fjord tried to shoot Marcy on purpose and Crea got in the way. Even Simon doesn't consider Fjord being an intentional culprit as a possibility.
• Dress-Coded for Your Convenience: Teams Razzle and Dazzle get default outfits in their respective team colours. Somewhat an aversion as most generally don't wear their ugly team jumpsuits outside of laundry day.
• Drives Like Crazy: Cal gets Priss' motorcycle from the regain gacha and proceeds to joyride around the hallways.
• Drowning My Sorrows: Serizawa gets monumentally wasted at the third afterparty, shutting down any attempt by anyone to get him anywhere near sober.
• Dumped via Text Message: Rex and Parker both call out Gwen for doing this.
• Entertainingly Wrong: Both Serizawa and Rex assume Simon has been indoctrinated by a cult leader of some sort because of how he talks about numbers and the "True Conductor." They're very close, but in truth he himself is the cult leader.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Jack may be a jerk, but he's willing to do things like change Murderbot/Rin's name on the profiles for privacy reasons. His personal notes on the cast mentions offhandedly tracking down Tetsuya Ida to kill him, also showing that he feels offended and disgusted by kids being manipulated and used (but it's okay when he does it).
• Even the Girls Want Her: Calypso shows off her muscles in the first trial, leading to most of the female characters swooning over her.
• Even the Guys Want Him: Libra is very pretty and Rex is uselessly flirting with him within seconds of meeting.
• Everybody Must Get Stoned: During Week 6, Parker ends up hosting a weed party for the teens/young adults by hotboxing the infirmary, due to it having been decorated in black light psychedelic style as a punishment.
• Evil Is Petty: After Lala tells him to stop using her "-lun" Verbal Tic, Jack edits the rules to say that he can use whatever speech patterns or quirks he wants. Also, when delivering the hair dye that Gwen requested, none of the pink dyes match the shade she's currently using.
• Expendable Clone: The real reason the captives can't just kill Jack, aside from the rules and the security: there are too many of him. An army of hundreds of alternate-universe Jacks, that is.
• Faint in Shock: A variation, where Tyzias faints in relief after the honking coming from the vent is revealed to just be a Roomba. Of course, this means she misses the actual Gamzee showing up.
• Fan Fiction: Along with, you know, the game basically being fanfiction, Gwen's smutty Marvel Cinematic Universe fanfic is a renewable regain.
• Fantastic Racism: Simon shows some disdain for the various nonhumans, including Butt Stallion the diamond horse, and catches some fire from the group when he lets his prejudice slip. Priss is also distrustful of Murderbot, calling it a "Boomer" based on her own canon knowledge of cyborgs and robots, but eventually develops somewhat of a rapport with it and brings up Cynthia and Sylvie, Boomers she'd cared about in the past.
• Felony Misdemeanor: While everyone is confessing their shameful past secrets at the case 3 afterparty, Emma confesses hesitantly that she stood up her prom date, honestly believing that it was just as bad as all the crime and murder everyone else was owning up to.
• Fighting from the Inside: While Murderbot is helpless to resist the virus controlling it during the last case, in the final battle, it levels up — specifically thanks to The Power of Friendship, at that — and deletes the Jack AI trying to control it again with a very satisfying friendship montage and F-bomb.
• Fisticuff-Provoking Comment: Simon referring to Red as a 'null' during the second trial and clarifying its meaning results in Ryoko climbing over his podium to launch herself at him for the comment.
• Five-Second Foreshadowing: In the Case 4 trial, the characters try to ask Jack what he intends to do in the case's unusual circumstances, which he carelessly dodges. Avenger realizes that Jack has probably found Claptrap and intends to execute him as The Scapegoat seconds before it happens.
  • Again with Claptrap - when the characters find him during the final investigation, he refers to himself as "Sentinel Unit Claptrap" just prior to revealing that Ryoko and the rest of the dead have been uploaded into him.
• Foe Romance Subtext: When Rex gets a love letter supposedly from Fjord, his assumption is that he's hateflirting, rather than (as Ruby intended) that he secretly loves him.
• Friend to All Living Things: Jared is immediately enamored with all the animal regains that show up, and even brings Plato the chicken into the first trial as a sort of comfort object.
• Fun with Homophones: During the third trial, when asking about what weapons everyone can use, Marissa says that her only weapon is her sun. Multiple characters hear this as "son" and conclude that she fights by throwing her kid at her enemies.
• Genre Savvy: Gwen and Marcy are both fairly aware of the various tropes of the scenario. Jared also has some awareness about how certain things work, although in some cases it's closer to Wrong Genre Savvy.
• Genre Shift: After following the murdergame formula for the majority of the round, the endgame is more of the exploration-and-combat type than more investigations and trials.
• Gossipy Hens: Parker lives for drama, which is why she wants to know everyone's secrets.
• Hates Being Touched: Libra. Though he'll make some exceptions for Rex, who's a flirty Cuddle Bug around him.
• Heads I Win, Tails You Lose: The way Jack sets up the game, with himself as the winner, naturally. In the last player trial, Jack gleefully lets slip that a successful culprit wouldn't be freed, but instead be killed alongside everyone else.
• Hero Academy: What the space station supposedly is, only with Jack's warped definition of a hero.
• Heroic BSoD: Ryoko in week 4 after a regain gives her a trauma flashback. She shuts herself up in her room, not even showing up to the team challenge when Jack calls her out in public about it.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Tyzias is totally ready to perform one of the You Shall Not Pass! variety when she hears honking in the vents. Luckily it just turns out to be Gamzee the merchant, as in the two previous rounds. She eventually does sacrifice herself to discover Jack's secrets and try to pass them on to the living, and even manages to broker a deal with Gamzee for his help.
  • During Trial 1, Rex reveals he was also thinking about doing this by making a deal with Jack to die.
  • The case 3 victim, Jared, was also doing something like this by luring the killer away from two kids (or so he thought), and also by smashing his own ID so his roommate wouldn't be attacked too.
  • During case 5, Serizawa voluntarily lets Majima kill him to prevent the secret of the Oxygen Destroyer from being revealed to everyone's worlds.
• Hidden Depths: Despite his fratboy-type behavior, Rex actually cares a lot about protecting everyone and making sure no one dies, and tries to temper the worst of his behavior around the younger members of the group.
• High-Voltage Death: The case 2 victim is found electrocuted in the power station, made worse by her being a cyborg.
• Hopeless Suitor: Rex tells Simon he's this after figuring that impressing Parker was the only reason Simon bothered to bathe. He does have a point, though; she is hung up on her dead boyfriend, and when Parker finally gets over that and moves on to a Second Love, it's not with Simon.
• Horrifying the Horror: When both of Ryoko's father figures die, she pushes the others away, turning on them all with a Thousand-Yard Stare and a mirthless Slasher Smile. Avenger, more than familiar with the feeling and expression where he is concerned, is more than mildly put it off to see it on someone else.
• I Can't Believe a Guy Like You Would Notice Me: Rex starts out flirting with Libra mostly as a joke, not thinking he would seriously reciprocate, and is shocked when the priest actually expresses feelings for him as well.
• I Did What I Had to Do: Tyzias sees nothing wrong with pressuring Serizawa to reveal classified medical information to solve a case, or framing Rex as part of that pressure.
• I Don't Want to Ruin Our Friendship: Simon's approach to his crush on Parker, as not only has he internalized Rex saying he doesn't have a chance, Parker is one of the only friends he's still got in a Closed Circle with death around every corner; thus, ruining this friendship not only seems inevitable to him but would be a colossal bad move.
• I Have Your Wife: The losing team's version of the week 1 motive is a hostage motive. The inverse of the motive given to the winning team is an incentive to bring someone back from the dead/back into their lives instead.
• I'm Taking Her Home with Me!: Both Marcy and Lala abduct a Roomba that they find cleaning the station. Lala even keeps hers despite it constantly demanding that it be released to return to its duties.
• I Owe You My Life: Gamzee leaves a note to Serizawa thanking him for causing the infirmary vandalism that Jack did to spite him, which gave the mysterious clown something he'd found hard to find. Serizawa is less than impressed. In the final battle, though, Gamzee is true to his word, emerging from the vents just long enough to kill a Jack who was about to snipe Serizawa.
• I Should Have Been Better: Ruby blames herself for not saving Pyrrha or Red during the first trial.
  • Whenever someone dies, Serizawa updates their entry in his journal to say "Failed to aid in patient's needs."
• "It" Is Dehumanizing: Discussed by Jared and Rex about Murderbot and which pronouns to use for it.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Rex, Parker, and Murderbot/Rin especially start out hard to get along with but end up bonding with the rest of the game less than halfway through after all they've gone through.
• Kiss of Distraction: While he doesn't go as far as actual kissing, Rex hits on Murderbot in the middle of a spar so that it'll be so disgusted that it's thrown off its game enough for Rex to get the upper hand.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: The final motive has everyone forgetting someone or something important to them.
• Let's Get Dangerous!: Claptrap attempts to make the move from comic relief to serious fighter a few times, which usually doesn't go well for him. In the end, though, the particular Claptrap whose hard drive doubled as deadland gets some impressive kills while piloted by Ryoko and again on his own in the final boss fight, shouting vengeance for his many, many counterparts who died over the course of the game.
• Let's Split Up, Gang!: As is usual for final investigations, the party splits in half when the Shepherdess activates the elevator to herald the endgame. One party takes the rescue operation and the other goes to sabotage the Assimilation Plot, both going through and learning from Jack's files and belongings; this leads to split miniboss fights (Control Core Elizabeth and the Loaderbots, respectively). They reunite just in time for the final boss.
• Literal-Minded: A drunk Serizawa takes Marcy's declaration of being "ride or die" for him too seriously and earnestly tells her not to die for his sake, making the whole thing just kind of depressing.
• Loophole Abuse: During the second team challenge, the only requirement is for the characters to stay inside their sack and not get hit by a car. Murderbot proceeds to grab a go-cart and drive Lala across before throwing her to Avenger, although Jack says he'll only let that slide once. Later on, Murderbot walks on its hands across the course instead of trying to hop with its legs inside the sack.
• The Lost Lenore: Parker, Emma, and Priss (twice over) all have trauma related to dead partners. Rex's girlfriend isn't dead, but he regrets messing things up in their relationship. And while Ruby never crossed the subtext ceiling with Penny, she's treated about the same.
• Love Dodecahedron: Most, if not all, of the teenagers are crushing on each other in a tangled web, with special mention going to Ryoko having attracted a harem of other girls.
• Love Letter Lunacy: Ruby's ill-fated plan to set up Fjord and Rex by forging love letters to them from each other.
• The Makeover: Gwen holds a party for everyone to dye their hair pink like hers, or other colors if they choose. Some actually take her up on it. Later, Parker forcibly switches out people's clothes as half a prank, half an earnest attempt to get them to dress nicer.
• Make the Dog Testify: During the first trial, Tyzias decides that if Jared brought Plato the chicken into the courtroom, she might as well pass him around to see if he reacts to anyone in a traumatized manner. The results are inconclusive because Plato doesn't appear to recognize Red out of her berserker state.
• The Matchmaker: Ruby takes it upon herself to distract herself from the wringer the first few weeks put her through by secretly trying to set up Fjord and Rex, writing them both love letters purporting to be from each other.
• Mustache Vandalism: Rex plots to hack the video display to draw on Jack's face.
• My Greatest Second Chance: Variant where it isn't projection but actually the same person. Ruby sees Pyrrha being Back from the Dead as a chance to make things right and keep her safe in a dangerous situation. Pyrrha being a mod character makes Ruby's failure a Foregone Conclusion, but it still hurts.
• Nothing Is the Same Anymore: Most of the characters express this after the first trial, many finding it hard to continue to trust the others.
• Noticing the Fourth Wall: A variation. She doesn't realize they're in a roleplay, but Tyzias realizes her original canon was a visual novel and has a freakout over it. Gwen mentions that she was trying not to discuss the fourth wall precisely to prevent meltdowns like this.
• The Not-Love Interest: Jared and Rex kind of have this vibe, due to constantly being very physically affectionate around each other, but Jared isn't Rex's type and also has a girlfriend back home.
• Oblivious to Love: Ryoko is picking up a veritable harem of other girls, but she doesn't seem to notice at all.
• Only Friend: Parker (and, to an extent, Rex) to Simon after he throws everyone else's goodwill in an incinerator thanks to his Fantastic Racism. Parker's convinced herself that he didn't mean it, while Rex concludes that he's Brainwashed and Crazy and might not be that bad if he gets back to normal.
• Overdrawn at the Blood Bank: Trolls naturally have more blood in their bodies than humans. Tyzias exploits this during the first trial when Red's Superpowered Evil Side activates, distracting the Wolf with her own arm because she can lose more blood without dying.
• Parental Substitute: Serizawa basically becomes one towards Ryoko. During week 4, while under the influence of a hallucination motive, he even momentarily hallucinates that he's married to Emiko and Ryoko is their daughter.
• Parting-Words Regret: Parker becomes angry and depressed when she realizes that the last thing she said to Tyzias before she died was call her a bitch.
• Perpetual Smiler: Claptrap doesn't have a face, but his dialogue delivery gives a similar effect, which he acknowledges.

"If I sound happy about that, that’s just the way my voice is designed. It’s actually really depressing!"

• Percussive Maintenance: Fjord manages to wake up an unconscious Murderbot by smacking it, and later on, Sprinkle manages to get the radio working more clearly after knocking it onto the floor while freaking out.
• Personality Blood Types: For lack of canon blood type information, Avenger gets the blood type O, with his player noting it's "the anime thing" to assign a blood type by personality... O being "the bitchy type."
• Post-Stress Overeating: Parker's habit of indulging in nachos when she's having a bad day. Ryoko does the same with a massive pile of junk food after realizing her DD-426 is getting worse.
• Precision F-Strike: After witnessing Ryoko have a Heroic BSoD and run horrified as a result of it giving her one of her regains back, Murderbot stares for a long time and gives one single F-bomb.
• Real Life Writes the Plot: Lala's brain works differently enough from a human's that she's almost entirely unaffected by the hallucinogen in week 4, because her player spent most of that week at a Star Trek convention and didn't want to make the task of trying to follow the game on a cellphone in short bursts between panels even more complicated.
• Relative Error: Gwen's hostage for the first motive is her brother, but Rex mistakenly assumes he's her boyfriend upon seeing the picture. He then proceeds to make it worse by making incest jokes.
• Repower: In the absence of a team challenge for which to declare a winner and loser, in Week 5, Jack just gives everyone the same incentive: not only will a successful culprit get their old powers back, they'll be granted a new one. Unless it sucks.
• Revealing Continuity Lapse: The information Jack has on the characters seems occasionally inconsistent with him, once or twice forgetting information or events he previously had full knowledge of. This is one of the earliest clues that there are multiple Handsome Jacks.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: Avenger tries to launch into one after Tyzias is killed in a punishment, and while Murderbot and Libra stop him, he struggles with the declaration that this is all he's good for.
• Robot Buddy: Claptrap, the world's least helpful allied NPC and self-declared best friend to Marcy (because she actually likes having him around). Murderbot later assembles Clapdrone from scrapped parts and while it doesn't really have much of a brain or personality to speak of, some of the group treat it like a Companion Cube.
• Rule of Three: During her trial, Priss gives Jack the finger three separate times.
• Running Gag: A very dark one, but each investigation ends up having the infirmary be messed up in some way, to Serizawa's increasing displeasure. This only stops after Serizawa himself dies.
• Screw Yourself: The army of alternate universe Jacks are the ultimate narcissists, so of course. A few lines of endgame investigation dialogue have Jacks flirting with one another and imply more, disgusting the survivor pool.
• Second Love: After finally getting over the last people they loved, who died in their respective canons, Parker and Ruby end up hooking up near the end of the game.
• Seinfeldian Conversation: Several happen over the course of the game, such as a meeting notice devolving into discussion of Kirby and hair dye, and Gwen and Jared discussing Frogger during the second team challenge.
• A Shared Suffering: During the third afterparty, a lot of the characters, mostly the teen girls, open up about their various traumas and come to recognize that some of them have very similar sorts of trauma.
• Skewed Priorities: Emma immediately lights up during Trial 1, despite the horror of it all, when Lala reveals that she is an alien and thus technically a cryptid.
• Speak Ill of the Dead: Simon's Fantastic Racism really sets off the cast when he calls the deceased case 1 culprit, Red a "null." Later, Rex says that "dead people can still be assholes" when Emma hesitates to speak ill about her dead friend.
• Sucky School: Despite apparently being a prestigious prep school, Parker's school not only had a Serial Killer problem, it didn't exactly teach her much, either. When asked what she knew about World War II, her response is, "...We won?"
• Take That!: Against the American dub of Godzilla (1954), where Serizawa has an angry breakdown at finding a book written by Steve Martin about how the Oxygen Destroyer could have done good in the "right hands."
  • Shots are also taken at Tetsuya Ida's status as a relative Karma Houdini in 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim, with most characters expressing a strong desire to beat him up if they ever see him.
• Team Dad: Serizawa seems to be becoming this due to him trying to keep up with everyone's health and making sure they're getting proper treatment. Columbo also has some shades of this with how he cooks for everyone and tries to keep them organized.
• Team Pet: Butt Stallion is sort of this for Team Dazzle, since they are ones with the permissions to access her stable.
• That Man Is Dead: Avenger sees himself as only the Count identity, completely separate from the man who created it, and gets upset when it's theorized that he might have reverted after the power nerfing took away what made him an Avenger-class Servant.
• Trauma Button: Creating things turns out to be one for Serizawa, and during the third team challenge when he's trying to cut out a pattern for the dress design he ends up cutting out a design in the shape of the Oxygen Destroyer instead.
  • Explosions for Parker, as she shares to Simon.
  • The Week 4 motive, which is hallucinations, proceeds to hit a lot of characters' buttons as well.
• Villainous Breakdown: Jack at the Week 7 motive, after Avenger pushes his biggest Berserk Button, absolutely loses it on the captives before handing down an especially cruel motive to everyone regardless of team.
• Withholding Their Name: Murderbot doesn't want anyone else to call it that or know it calls itself that, so it has its name changed to "Rin" on the profile, and others end up calling it either "Rin" or "the SecUnit" as a result.
• Wouldn't Hurt a Child: Avenger doesn't harm innocents or children as a rule.
• Wrong Genre Savvy: During the first afterparty, upon encountering someone hiding under a cardboard box and trying to sneak around, Marcy's first assumption is that it is Snake, but it turns out to be Claptrap instead.
  • While Gwen realizes quickly that she's no longer in a comic book, at least not one she has her usual medium control over, she starts wondering if she's in a one-shot that cost a lot of money to get crossover rights to. Fanwork doesn't even occur to her.
• Your Tomcat Is Pregnant: Despite being called Butt Stallion, the horse in Team Dazzle's stables is referred to as female.