Cat-Tales

So I've got the trinkets. Brunhilda is still snoring away. Cujo, the killer schnauzer, is still locked in the bathroom. I close the safe, restore the power, slide the window back exactly the way it was – 8 minutes flat. Personal best for a private residence where I didn't have the floorplan going in. I drop down to the alley – and there… he… is…The Batman. Caped Crusader. Dark Knight. Guardian of Gotham. Crime Fighter extraordinaire. I am Vengeance, I am Justice, I am in desperate need of a personality transplant… Batman.
In full regalia – looking like Sir Lancelot dipped in tar but not yet feathered.
And he speaks: "I don't think those jewels belong to you."
I salute you, World's Greatest Detective.

A fascinating collection of fan fictions, centering around the original and most widely known Catwoman incarnation, Selina Kyle, and her evolving relationship with Batman, both when masked and not. The series started in 2000. It all begins when Selina, fed up with the Gotham Post's continual smearing of her good name, starts up a stage show at the Hijinx Playhouse, named Cat-Tales. Things really take off when Bruce Wayne hears about the show, and decides to go see it, supposedly just to see if it "really is her". Humiliated by her accusations that he is an uptight prig, he decides to prove her wrong. Things snowball from there.

Can be found here. Many of the older stories can be found on Fanfiction.net, but the collection there was essentially abandoned years ago because of the author's disagreement with some of their policies.

Tropes used in Cat-Tales include:

• Action Girl: Catwoman, every female superhero or former superhero.
• A God Am I: Ivy is convinced of this, which is why she suffers a Villainous Breakdown after the world decides to prove her wrong.
• Archive Panic: The series has been running for over 15 years now, and the 60+ stories don't shirk on length.
• Artifact Title: The title was derived from the name of Selina's stage show, which closed two or three stories in.
• Author Appeal: "Trick Or Treat" shows that Chris Dee knows quite a bit about Sherlock Holmes.
• Awesomeness By Analysis
• Bad Guy Bar: The Ice Berg Lounge. Also, they have instant messaging.
  • When the Iceberg gets burned to the ground, The Vault quickly becomes the Rogues' new watering hole.
• Batman Cold Open
• Batman Gambit: Pretty much a given.
• Battle Couple: Tim (Robin III) and Cassandra Cain (Batgirl II) are dating. Mind you she could probably snap his back over her knee.
• Berserk Button: Any reference to Bruce being accepted as part of the Rogues' extended family usually sends him into a roaring case of Psychobat.
• Beta Couple: Lois and Clark... In Clark's ideal world, Lois would be his wingman on getting the whole Bruce/Selina marriage thing happening. Unfortunately for him, Lois has got good survival instincts and knows not to tempt cat claws...
  • Dick and Barbara are also this, after they get married. They're basically an example of what Bruce and Selina could be, if they weren't both so neurotic.
• Black Widow: The Penguin picks one up through an ad in the Personals. The Huntress recognizes her, though, and warns the rogues. Knowing that if Oswald dies, The Iceberg falls down around their heads, Two-Face and Mad Hatter take matters into their own hands.
• Cats Are Snarkers: This is Catwoman we're talking about... Though Whiskers and Nutmeg, her two cats, also count.
• Chickification: Poison Ivy. In almost every single Post-Crisis depiction of her character, she has a poisonous kiss, is a skilled chemist, and, while less common, is able to psionically control all plant life. here, however, she's pretty much just a gardener with pheromones, a weak control of plants, and a massive ego. She needs to take magical steroids in order to pull off any large-scale manipulation of plants.
  • Talia is equally de-badassed. Master of armed and unarmed combat? Nope, can't even get into a non-lethal catfight with Selina without tripping over her own two feet. Genius-level intellect? Nuh-uh, can't even plan out something more complicated than a Step Three: Profit. Skilled in Managerial tasks and has helped keep both the League of Assassins and DEMON in the black for decades? No way, she can't even balance her checkbook and provide for her own welfare without daddy's credit card, let alone anybody else. Secretly undermined LexCorp during Luthor's stint as president, leaked Luthor's under-the-table dealings to Superman and blew the whole company out to Wayne Enterprises when the time came to take him down? HAH! She tanked that multi-billion-dollar, Multinational company all by herself, no motivation necessary!
• Classy Cat Burglar: As opposed to that tramp from the Gotham Post.
• Clingy Jealous Girl: Talia to Batman, hard. also, Ivy to Harvey/Two-Face, even though she'll never admit she actually wants him.
• Crossover: ...with other fanfictions hosted by the same site.
  • It's not immediately obvious, but the Selina Kyle involved in the Mega Crossover The League of Extraordinary Women is the Cat-Tales version.
• Crowning Moment of Awesome
• Crowning Moment of Funny
• Crowning Moment of Heartwarming
• Dating Catwoman: Duh.
  • Surprisingly deconstructed. Selina balks heavily at every instance of Batman asserting that things have to be done his way, and Bruce slips into an Ax Crazy Knight Templar version of himself, dubbed "Psychobat" by just about everybody, whenever Selina's criminal past comes around and flaunts its presence in front of him. They considered breaking up once or twice during some of the harsher episodes. They're still absurdly in love with each other, but it's not all rainbows and kittens after they hook up.
• Disproportionate Retribution: Clayface getting Poison Ivy a Christmas gift of potpourri (dead and dried-out flowers meant to smell good) resulted in him blackballed from the Iceberg for years so they didn't have to deal with Ivy freaking out and destroying the bar.
• Dropped a Bridge on Him: Stephanie Brown is murdered offscreen by a serial killer between two chapters of "Polishing Silver."
• First-Person Smartass: Selina slips into this.
• Flanderization: Pretty much any woman Batman has ever been hinted at romantically besides Selina has had their negative personality characteristics played Up to Eleven so that they are nothing but annoying self-absorbed harpies or immature, irresponsible idiots; there is little doubt that this is entirely intentional. Character development eventually brings (some, but not all of) them out of this, but the fact that they were in this at all is so disappointing from an otherwise amazing author.
• Functional Magic: Rule Magic; specifically, anything you do gets paid back threefold. Doesn't work out so well for Zatanna when she tried to mind-wipe Batman.
• Gay Paree: Selina trained there.
• Got Me Doing It: At one point, much to his consternation, Batman catches himself following Catwoman's lead in referring to Two-Face and the Riddler as Harvey and Eddie.
• Green-Eyed Monster: All over the damn place. You can probably count the characters that get any amount of screen time and are never jealous of somebody's romantic entanglements on one hand.
• Hard Work Hardly Works: Averted hard. Anybody who uses magic to do what regular hard work would also do gets a blast of Laser-Guided Karma to the face. Batman is quite aware of this, which is one of the reasons that he really hates magic.
• Heel Realization: Talia Al Ghul's messy breakup with Greg Brady, she actually realizes how neurotic and obsessed she's gotten about Batman, and actually begins a slow process of shaping up her life so she can get Greg back.
• Humiliation Conga: Arranged for F. Miller.
• Just Friends: Eddie/The Riddler and Selina/Catwoman. Asking the former if it's really more than friends leads to bouts of She Is Not My Girlfriend, as described below.
• Legacy Character: Clayface disguises himself as the Monarch of Menace, an old Silver Age villain, to get around the unofficial ban from the Iceberg that Poison Ivy's freak-out about a bad Christmas present caused. he later decided he didn't even care and returned as himself.
• Love Redeems: Catwoman stops stealing a short while after hooking up with Batman, though it's slightly subverted by how she keeps up pretenses in front of other Rogues.
• Magic A Is Magic A: Zatanna learns the hard way that the universe really doesn't like it when you use White Magic to do undeniably evil things...
• Magical Database: Well, it is the Batcomputer...
• Magic Versus Science: Given that this is a Superhero series, both have their merits and are given their due, but Batman's dislike of magic is proven valid more than once via Laser-Guided Karma: whatever you do with magic gets returned to you three-fold, generally in the most inconvenient time possible.
• Monster Clown: J-O-K-E-R.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Miriam, the owner of the local magic goods shop, has one of these when she realizes that Poison Ivy, the woman she just sold power-enhancing magic rituals to, is the same person that caused the forest trees to attack the Highland Games.
• Never Recycle Your Schemes: Lampshaded by the Rogues: 'Writer's Block' hits them all from time to time in creating new themed crimes.
• The Neidermeyer: Ulstarn, Ra's Al Ghul's regional leader in Gotham, is a huge ass-kissing paranoid Jerkass. even Ra's can't stand him, which is why he sent him halfway across the world.
• Noodle Incident: Superman's bachelor party.
• Not So Different: Batman does not take it well when Superman points out that both he and The Riddler, by Batman's own description, are motivated by injustice: Batman by the fact that crime exists in his city, and Riddler by the fact that the idiots and bullies of the world are the ones who always succeed over genuinely smart people.
• Parody Sue: Nocturna seems to be Chris Dee's take on this trope. Making her debut by robbing Batman and getting away with it? Check. "Enthralling" the male half of the Iceberg with heady monologues about the night? Check. Obsession with seducing Batman with a wave of her arm and a monologue, ignoring the fact that the other villainesses, sans Catwoman, have tried and failed dozens of times? Natch. What makes her this instead of a bad Mary Sue is that she has absolutely no respect from the Rogues and is captured, literally, by being duped by the other villainesses into thinking Azrael was the better seduction target, with absolutely no effort expended by the Bat-crew. Her own husband even thinks she's a nutcase and wishes she'd never talked him into the Thief Of The Night/Nocturna gig, instead wanting to tour Gotham like a normal person.
  • Since Nocturna/Natalia Knight is a canon character, it can also be read as another giant Take That.
• Put on a Bus: More than a few characters have been more or less written out over the course of the series: Clayface, Talia, Greg Brady, etc. Characters subjected to this have been known to reappear again, though, so it's hard to tell if something will stick.
• Refuge in Audacity: Catwoman doesn't like her press. What does she do? Opens up an off-Broadway show where she riffs on her negative publicity.
• Retcon: Everything about Catwoman ever written by Frank Miller and his spiritual descendants has been eviscerated, through the above concept: it's all published in a skanky newspaper (or a trashy biography) and not "real".
• Secret Keeper: Eddie/The Riddler figures out that Bruce Wayne is Batman once Selina starts seeing him seriously. He refuses to reveal this to the other Rogues because a) it would validate Hugo Strange, who's always claimed this was the case but who is despised by the other Rogues as a nutjob, and b) more importantly, it would ruin Selina's happiness. And he tells Bruce this to his face in the middle of a "Psychobat" attack over his knowledge.
• Servile Snarker: Alfred, as always.
• She Is Not My Girlfriend: Eddie is horrified when people suggest that he's in love with Selina; not because of the woman herself (he does get rather flustered when that conversation comes up), but because they are Just Friends (and he's terrified Batman will hear about it and break his legs for casting eyes at his woman).
• Silk Hiding Steel: This trope is used by generations of Wayne women to...influence their husbands.
• Sitcom Arch Nemesis: Alfred and the neighbor's French chef, Anatole.
• Spin-Off: Fans of the universe have created more than a few side-stories to the main universe. They're all listed here.
• Take That: "Pussywhipped" makes it abundantly clear that Chris Dee does not like Frank Miller's take on Batman.
  • Canon developments the author doesn't like tend to be portrayed as more tabloid lies. These range from the existence of Nyssa Raatko to Killer Croc's cannibalism to Renee Montoya being a lesbian.
• Team Mom: Slowly but surely, Catwoman is becoming this to the Bat Family, after being with Bruce for the last three years in-universe. This is most apparent by how she's mentoring Cassie in both relationships with boys and sneaking into buildings.
• Urban Legend Love Life: Invoked by Bruce: he can't be the Fop without some sex exploits, but he can't let the "bimbos" he dates see all the scars he's gotten from fighting crime. Solution? Get them drunk, lay them out in the manor, and let them fill in the blanks for themselves.
• Villain Protagonist: A large portion of the stories are primarily written from Catwoman's point of view, not that she acts particularly villainous.
  • Except when committing robberies just to show that she can, providing a location for the worst criminal element to congregate and lay their plans, or convincing Batman to funnel more crime into the poorest part of town while rationalizing that it's not like she has anything against orphans or anything.
• Villainous Harlequin: Guess who, puddin'?
• "Well Done, Son" Guy: Dick, until he gets over it.
• X Meets Y: Batman meets Rom Com.