Our reluctant hero, Litho.
Audience! is the second web series from Run To the Battle Productions. This show is incredibly ambitious for an independent project, with a full voice cast, and original soundtrack.
The stage is a land of talking quadrupeds and feudal kingdoms upturned two decades ago by "seams" in reality splitting apart, unraveling logic and order. Litho is a young loner whose only friend is his sister, Rags. He lives in the Quasar Kingdom, ruled by King Oxymoron, though everyone calls him Oxy. Even for The Stage this kingdom is quite peculiar, and circumstances can only grow more curious, as the villainous Showtime has arrived, and he intends to throw quite a party!
It can be watched on Youtube
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It is something of a Spiritual Successor to RTTBP's previous series, The Birds Are Working. This series is technically a Continuity Reboot that subjected a large amount of that series to Canon Discontinuity to the point of being an entirely new series altogether.
Audience contains examples of the following tropes:
- All There in the Manual: The better part of what the fandom knows comes from
Word of God or brief shorts. - Amazing Technicolor Wildlife: This series has strong ties to the Furry Fandom and the feral oc fandom. Naturally, some of the character designs are quite vibrant. The creator has a lot of skill with color theory and a deep understanding of aesthetics, so it's never egregious. Also, all the character's with prominently unnatural colour schemes are supernatural in nature. Parti, for instance, is a Piñata.
- An Arm and a Leg: Litho's right leg was lost in an "incident". He doesn't like to talk about it.
- Anthropomorphic Food: One of the Darkkies, Sugar Rush, is made of what appears to be classic candy treats including candy cane and sour tape.
- Art Evolution:
- Many characters have drastically changed since the original shorts and game.
- Litho's design has changed four times.
- Ascended Extra: Please began as a female background character to balance out the cast's gender distribution. She's now in possession of a complex origin story and Character Development.
- Backstory: Life's a stage. Everyone has a story. Everyone.
- Bag of Kidnapping: The fake guards put Oxy into one.
- Beleaguered Assistant: Toonny is this to Showtime. Showtime is regularly seen using him as furniture.
- Blessed with Suck: Litho's life was magically saved at one time. The downside? He turns to stone in the moonlight without a special gem.
- Cursed with Awesome: It did manage to prevent Showtimes mind-control from working, though.
- Brooding Boy, Gentle Girl: Litho and his sister Rags
- Card-Carrying Villain: Showtime didn't have a problem revealing his motives in his villain song.
- Showtime: (to Litho)"You're the hero. I'm the villain."
- Crapsack World: In the early years of his reign, Oxy has a 0% Approval Rating. Things aren't much better after Showtime shows up.
- Dances and Balls: Oxy's castle is host to ones in the parody "Oh Queen Paint!" and the MAP music video "The Bidding".
- Driven to Villainy: Toonny falls to the dark side when Showtime promises to give him a real voice in exchange for his loyalty. The revelation is even accompanied by some good old-fashioned Dramatic Thunder.
- Evil-Detecting Dog: Considering that almost all the characters are dogs, this is hilarious, but yes, characters do this sometimes. Sentient or not, an evil detecting dog is an evil detecting dog.
- Evil Laugh: Oxy, isn't he a good guy?
- Fantasy Kitchen Sink: You'd be surprised by the variety of creatures you would meet in the Quasar Kingdom if you spent enough time there. The main cast contains a water monster, a ghost, and two ghouls. This diversity is afforded by seams in reality that import oddities.
- Fisher King: Oxy, according to this.
- Good Cop/Bad Cop: Leaders of The Dark Guard, Day and First, respectively. Day is an exhausted optimist with insomnia and First is an implacably austere authoritarian that never sleeps, literally.
- Magic Mirror: Literally every mirror in the world because a being called Toshie lives in all mirrors and can interact with regular people by controlling their reflections.
- Mister Strangenoun: Many members of the Audience! cast have rather arbitrary names, such as All, First, Day, Odd, X, 19, Writer, and Please. You know, to name a few.
- Named After Somebody Famous: Brighting, a butler, is named after the voice actor Kevan Brighting, who plays one of the creators favourite characters, The Narrator, from The Stanley Parable, who is often mistaken for Stephen Fry, who plays Jeeves, a famous butler.
- Real Life Writes the Plot: The character of Darkky is actually the fursona of the series creator. The different forms of Darkky come from phases when she entered new fandoms or felt like reinventing the character on a whim. There were so many forms that it became a "thing" and their existence was implemented by a writer as a major facet of the plot. In the show,unlike real life, the Darkkies are dissociated stages of the character's personal development.
- Rightful King Returns: ...sorta.
- Right-Hand Cat: Oxy has Brighting, his cat butler.
- Schizo Tech: This is a world featuring technological marvels such as robots on the verge of singularity and dirt caves. You better believe it.
- Sealed Evil in a Can: Tenebris Arx Turrim is ostensibly a prison for supernatural beings, however it's original purpose was to keep All from interacting with the other Darkkies.
- Sliding Scale of Animal Cast: A type 1. This is a world ruled by talking dogs and cats. Though the seams open the potential for anything.
- Solid Gold Poop: Word of Lupis says Toonny poops marshmallows. No word on whether he marks his trees with apple juice, but we can imagine his farts are minty fresh.
- Stalker with a Crush: Most definitely represented by Please, who is shown to have an obsessive infatuation with Litho.
- Even King Oxy is (not surprisingly) guilty of this when he, in the aforementioned parody "Oh Queen Paint!", creeps over to Queen Paint's castle and admires her from the bushes while sending her photos of his abs.
- Even King Oxy is (not surprisingly) guilty of this when he, in the aforementioned parody "Oh Queen Paint!
- There Are No Therapists: Several characters are described as mad or insane. No characters are described as psychiatric health professionals.
- Tyrant Takes the Helm: Oxy's parents are benevolent rulers. Oxy... not so much.
- Weirdness Magnet: The Quasar Kingdom is noticeably more prone to seams and the oddities that emerge from them than other kingdoms.
- World of Funny Animals
- Young and in Charge: Subverted. Oxy was meant to have his coronation as a puppy. Things didn't go as planned. When he returns from imprisonment, he is changed.
