- Actor Allusion: There are countless examples of this in the Loops:
- After Ember loops into the FiM loops and meets Twilight, after a bit of talking Twilight notes how Ember's voice sounds oddly familiar to her. Tara Strong, Twilight's voice actor, also did Ember's voice in the games she appeared in.
- During a loop into the 2003 Clone Wars, Anakin notes that Padme sounds like Azula.
- It's denoted in the list of known looping worlds that Jason Bourne loops in as Spirit regularly. Both are played by Matt Damon.
- Simon suggests he and Viral go out for smoothies after destroying the Anti-Spiral Homeworld with a Death Star. Simon's English VA, Yuri Lowenthal, voiced Ben Tennyson in his teenage years, who has a fondness for them.
- Mace Windu's alternate loop Sith counterpart is Darth Fury, after his actor's later role as Nick Fury in the MCU.
- In the Digimon Loops, Takato notes his teacher Ms. Asagi sounds like Kari Kamiya. In the dub, they were played by the same actress.
- For the Attack on Titan Loops, Carla Yeager replaced Trisha Elric in her first fused loop. Both were voiced by Yoshino Takamori, which gives the double allusion as both died to initiate the plot.
- Deliberately invoked for The Land Before Time Loops, when Momma Longneck was activated it was found by the Admins that her name was 'Helen'. This being a direct reference to Helen Shaver, Momma Longneck's voice actress in the first movie.
- Marinette and Shantae are revealed to be friends during a salt loop and hint they replace each other on a regular basis. Cristina Valenzuela voices both of them.
- In the Fate/Grand Order activation loop, Sigurd ends up with Kaiba's personality (they're voiced by Kenjiro Tsuda), while Qin Shi Huang is replaced by Lelouch (Jun Fukuyama).
- Approval of God: Innortal himself, having last posted a Loops compilation on fanfiction.net in 2012, made his awareness and approval of the expanded Loops and their community known in a post on Spacebattles on October 8, 2015.
- Ascended Fanon: In a way. When Sith Jar Jar Binks was originally written, he was simply an alternate Sidious. However, people began to refer to him as Darth Charybdis, and the name was eventually used by the author for him in later appearances or discussions.
- Due to the very strong writer-reader relationship of the looping community (that is to say, many readers also write the stories that go into the compilations) it is incredibly easy for fanon to ascend, simply requiring someone to sustain its presence in the compilation until it's common enough for everyone to know.
- Ascended Meme: Evilhumour's potato joke. Originally it was just a voting gag, but it stuck around.
- Creator's Favorite:
- Probably Ranma in Innortal's loops, given that he generally comes out on top during Looper vs Looper battles, tends to be the most knowledgeable when it comes to Fused Loops, due to having adventures in those universes off-screen, and is able to defeat things ranging from Darkseid (possible with enough power, but still improbable) to The Gate Of Truth (downright impossible unless the user admits they were wrong to play God, which Ranma most certainly didn't). This is not a good thing for him, as it means he is subject to most of what's under Author Appeal.
- It was near impossible during the mid-to-early Saph era loops to find a loop series that didn't have the FiM Loopers frequently popping in. Part of the reason there was a minor backlash against them mid-to-late-era was mostly fueled by this. note
- And, of course, thanks to the multiple authors, this is a pretty common occurrence when just about any character. It's especially notable with people who only write for one compilation, as most of their cross-posts to other threads involve that character in some way.
- Executive Veto: More then a few characters have been struck from ever looping by the thread heads.
- Springtrap/The Purple Guy/William Afton as he is a child murdering psychopath who is a possible MLE.
- Dimentio as he would be all too happy to Ascend to wreck havoc on both the Nintendo cluster and the rest of Yggdrasil. Hades is in the same boat.
- Dr. Wily's dangerous enough even without his code being broken.
- Dr. Eggman for the fact that his desire to beat Sonic would make him more then happy to Ascend.
- Kirei Kotomine for being an utter psychopath universally hated by everyone and responsible for just about half the bad things that happen in baseline.
- Both Junko Enoshima and Nagito Komaeda, due to the fact their personal philosophies as well as mental states would make both easy MLEs.
- Fandom Life Cycle: Thanks to the Spacebattles communities, and the rock solid base of Saphroneth's MLP Loops series, the fandom currently sits at stage two.
- He Also Did: Several writers of the Loops are known for other Trope-worthy works. The writers of Ashes of the Past and Pokémon Reset Bloodlines are among the loop writers.
- Loads and Loads of Writers: Hoo boy. Even if we don't count the Loops as a whole, even most specific loop compilations have at least three-to-five writers working on it, and even more people leaving suggestions and stuff. Put that all together...
- Mutually Fictional: Not always the case, but often. The more forward-thinking Loopers tend to collect large stashes of fiction from many different loops, so that they are as certain as possible to have an effective "guidebook" to wherever they end up next. Some even carry copies of their own stories to give out during fused loops.
- Revealed in the MLP Loops to be deliberate — since there is only one Yggdrasil system in the multiverse, a full independent system backup is not possible as they have only one server cluster to store the multiverse on. So as a partial solution they use a RAID-esque data striping technique, deliberately caching information about each Loop in redundant chunks spread out as background data amongst other Loops. Or: Fiction exists about the setting of Loop A as books/movies/etc. available to be read in Loop B because that's how the backup archive of Loop A manifests when its copied over into Loop B's assigned partition as inactive files. Not every Loop contains fiction about every other Loop, though, with the exception of the "Hub Loop" (our own real world), the master backup archive, which has an in-setting fictional work of some kind for every existing Loop.
- To an extent, the meta-narrative of the story is that everything happening within the Loops really is happening and the writers are just cataloging the occurrences.
- Playing Against Type: Can happen when writers decide to write fluffier or darker pieces than they usually do.
- Schedule Slip: The Pokémon Loops are supposed to be compiled and posted every other Sunday... but since compilation set 6, they have been on a compilation hiatus.
- And this assumes that the respective thread has a schedule. Given the hectic and contribution dependent method of the loops a schedule is rarely used.
- Shout-Out: Depending on your mileage, this is either subverted with every shout out really being a reference to another canonical event, or so thoroughly taken up to eleven that it would be almost physically impossible to list them all.
- Throw It In!:
- A pretty common occurrence, give the strong writer and reader relationships in the loops community.
- Occurs in the Star Wars loops with Revan. The head author there admits to having no personal reason to even have him Looping, but took him on regardless due to him already existing in loop canon. A similar case occurred with HK-47 and Kyle Katarn.
- What Could Have Been: Just read the threads often enough for dropped or forgotten ideas and you'll find tons of these cases. For some solid examples....
- The possibility of Tarkin looping after the Star Wars Elevator Saga was brought up and did have supporters. However, the idea was eventually dropped due to the point of having a mentally broken shell of a man Looping instead of the actual man.
- Numerous different attempts at getting the Doctor Who verse were tried out before the eventual one was adopted into use.
- A planned reveal of the looping cache file/limbo was attempted at several points, but was rejected by the overall writing population due to Fridge Horror. The concept would have delved into a world comprised of all remains of past loops, including characters.
- The Attack on Titan anchors were originally planned to suffer from Sakura Syndrome, however the author was overruled by the Misc Thread.
- By the same writer as the above idea, Lapis Lazuli was almost temporarily relocated to the Attack on Titan universe, before being vetoed again. In a mild subversion though, the idea of moving her stuck, and she ended up in Adventure Time.
- Why the Fandom Can't Have Nice Things: Very nearly became this on Spacebattles when a Mod had finally gotten sick of all the infighting the Loops tended to cause and threatened to put the Loops on indefinite hiatus unless the writers could get their acts together. After several quick rewrites and ironing out of details among the loops, the writer managed to save the Loops, though said Mod is still keeping a wary eye on the Loops if it gets out of hand again.
- Writer Revolt:
- The writers do not always get along, particularly when it comes to idea quality and character usage. It can get nasty at times.
- One instance involved the idea of Dolores Umbridge as a Looper. This led to massive and lopsided refusal from almost all of the other writers. It was only recently that the suggestion of a proof of concept snippet was agreed upon, letting a snip of the event be posted, though it is an uphill battle from there.
- Really, whenever a villain Looper is suggested without said villain redeeming themselves first, expect torches and pitchforks from all sides of the spectrum. One author was even threatened to have her Loop compilation completely Retconned out of the Loops for attempting this. note
- The public "trial" and scourging of TricksterPriest for attempting to activate Senator Armstrong from Metal Gear. This divided the community as some believed him to be unfairly crucified, whereas others blamed him as a symptom of problematic writers in the Loops.
- GioGio's very loud and public exit from the Infinite Loops after being thwarted in his attempts to create a more balanced storyline by making villains part of the overall story. There was a massive Writer Revolt after he left and more than one person has taken up his cause of pushing for villains as meaningful characters. He left behind a legacy in the snips he wrote for Jojo and other works, including being the one to first acvitate Dio Brando aka DIO as a looper/MLE.
Syndrome descriptions
In the Loops, it is common to hear about "X syndrome" affecting one character or another. Here is a short description of these various mental disorders.
- Sakura Syndrome. Named after Sakura Haruno, this mental disorder settles when a Looper believes that they can do virtually anything with zero regards for morality because looping effectively renders all decisions moot. This attitude can severely damage a loop and trigger early crashes.
- Chrysalis Syndrome. Named after Queen Chrysalis, this refers to a character that began Looping after a Variant Loop, where their character deviated from baseline. So when the character regains memories in a baseline loop, they instead have memories of their lives in the variant loop. This can be very disorienting and result in further trauma depending on the character's original role compared to the variant.
- Setsuna Syndrome. Named after Setsuna Meio, the afflicted believes that every Loop must play out as the original baseline events did and deeply abhor other loopers who would rather do what they want.
- A lesser known one that defies the naming convention is Dissociative Loop Identity Disorder (DLID) which is typically a result of a Loop having multiple baselines (i.e. adaptations) to choose from to the point that even Yggdrasil doesn’t know the “true” baseline. This can result in loopers acting on the wrong baseline memories at best or suffering severe personality shifts at worst.
