Fanfic/Fridge

A reminder of the rules of Fridge Brilliance:

This is a personal moment for the viewer, so every example is signed by the contributor. If you start off with "This Troper", really, you have no excuse. We're going to hit you on the head.

This revelation can come from anywhere, even from this very page.

Also, this page is of a generally positive nature, and a Fridge Brilliance does not have to be Word of God. In fact, it usually isn't, and the viewer might be putting more thought into it than the creator ever did. This is not a place for personal commentary on another's remark or arguing without adding a Fridge Brilliance comment of your own. If the show in question already has an article, please consider placing that in a Fridge page for that show, and not here.

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• Its Own Place
• My Immortal
• Empatheia uses this to justify her sublime House / Doctor Who crossover, As the Crow Flies. The story asserts that House is a later incarnation of the Doctor, born after the Doctor died while in human form. This is one of those "yeah, sure, I can roll with that things, until the fact of all the impossible things House has done with his brain - he makes impossible leaps of logic on a regular basis, he's communicated directly with his own subconscious, and so on - is brought up. - Maxwel Edison
  • I've noticed that a lot of Doctor Who fanfics seem to employ this trope in order to deal with the... Inconsistencies in canon. A good example is Light Bending Backwards in which they theorise that Jack is the thirteenth, and final, incarnation of the Doctor. Seems improbable, but they use this trope to make it work.
• After reading most of Peter Chimeara's works as well My Immortal, I've come to realize that even horrible fiction can be deep and meaningful upon drunken nights and deep consideration. Doom: Repercussions of Evil, itself a parody of twist-heavy pretentious faux-deep fiction, has deep insight into the motives and drive of the human race. Don't get me started on analogues to racism. Then there's Batman: Nemesis Fight, which if played straight and filmed, would be BY FAR the best batman movie ever made. Why does Robin leave batman? Because, Batman has broke his own rules after losing everything. Robin loses the will to fight. Regarding My Immortal, Tara Gilesbie creates a fictional world so completely bizarre and surreal that it's hard to call it anything but original. Put simply, gay vampire witch goffs go to a magic school, split on West Side Story style grounds.
• After The Reveal in ToyHammer, a fic about Warhammer 40,000 factions being transported to Terra in the year 2009 and then shrunk down to Fun Size proportions (albeit with functional weapons), we see that the God-Emperor of Mankind is now a cute albeit creepy young girl, who is 10 years old at most. Fridge Brilliance occurs when you realize that ALL characters from the Warhammer 40,000 setting have been shrunken down to Fun Size; even the great Emperor, Lord of Terra (AKA The Emma-peror.
  • A smaller double-dose is taken from Ishabeth exorcising the Sorcerer. Michael is there, with her, when she recites a 'Litany of Exorcism' that resembles a child's rhyming poem. Fridge Brilliance hits you when you realize a possible cause for this: Wouldn't reciting a child's poem invoke memories of one's own childhood? Those times where there were little cares in the world (relatively speaking. This is Warhammer 40k we're talking about here), and from which one could logically draw strength? The second dose is taken when things suddenly cut from Ishabeth back to the in-between Void. Why? Because she just auto-exorcised. That would mean that EVERY foreign entity would be purged, including Michael.
  • Or because shes immortal she could just be young.
• At first, One Of These Dispensers Is Not Like The Others, it's just a gag video, which it is, but then, one of the comments points out one thing:

Engineer has a 6th sense when it comes to things he built. After all, he solves practical problems.

• Watching AMV Hell 5, I was amused by the pairing of Gantz with the song Singing in the Rain, thinking it a matter of Lyrical Dissonance of a lighthearted song paired with violence. Then I remembered A Clockwork Orange...
• Embers originally had me quite annoyed. It was loaded Fire Nation apologetics, used to paint literally the whole Fire Nation - every single one of them, even Sozin, as innocent victims of a ruthless Avatar Kyoshi off on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge. At the same time, Katara and Aang were mysteriously transmogrified into Idiot Ball carriers with one-dimensional, mind-numbingly ridiculous takes on life that were completely contrary to the personalities established over Season One's canon (which the fanfic claimed to be adhering to). Throw in Dragon!Zuko the fire-water dual-wielding reincarnation of Kuzon, erase every single bad decision he made in canon and make him a self-flagellating noble hero who can do no wrong, add awesome into everything Zuko does and have the multitudes of Original Characters taking his side, reminding the reader in stylized "monologues" of exactly how fantastic Zuko is, hide behind a variety of excuses ranging from everyone being an Unreliable Narrator to "There are no excuses, only reasons" (suspending this rule if your name is Zuko or Iroh or you're Fire Nation)... this is officially the most brilliant satire/trollfic of all the hundreds of less well-presented fanfics with similar plotlines. Realizing all that, then going back and reading Embers from the start... Vathara is a genius. A genius..
  • Apologetics for the Fire Nation, you say? You're forgetting about the Air Nomads. The latest chapter shows what the Air Nomads were like, and how Xiangchen put together his grand scheme for "world peace" which included kidnapping the new Avatar, Yangchen, shutting her away from the world, targeting Air Nomads, especially the healers, and folding them into the Temples, thus helping Skylord Subodei conquer, rape and pillage everywhere. Aang will have to invent a new religion to justify what his great hero did. Killing may be wrong, but erasing one's individuality should be a violation of human rights. What reason is there for that?
    • "The latest chapter shows what the Air Nomads were like" - in her fanfic. There's nothing in canon that hints at this, so the OP has a good point about the Fire Nation apologism and Embers being potential trollfic/satire.
• After reading Chapter 23 of Kyo Kara Maoh fanfic Whispers from the Rye, when Wolfram and Yuuri finally have sex, Yuuri remarks that Wolfram is "so quiet." At first, I didn't think anything of it, until I realized that Wolfram is afraid that Yuuri will remember he's a boy and be disgusted all over again.
• The Spike/Xander fic "Nothing The Same" features the premise that the change to the series occurs when Xander doesn't handle Jessie's death as well as he did in the series, and everything changes. However, when Spike comes to Sunnydale, Drucilla is already dead. At first, I thought, as the author personally claimed, that Drucilla had just been ruthlessly killed off to better arrange the pairing. Than I read the bits about Drucilla's prophecies about Spike's destiny and the "wounded kitten" he was to care for. Not to mention musings on how Drucilla and a court of other vampires never did mix well, it dawned on me that Dru probably let go of her will to continue so Spike could go be Master of the Hellmouth with Xander at his side!
• According to Nounai Kanojo's Touhou-related doujins, Cirno knows more about sex than Marisa.
• This can occur quite a lot in Hetalia Axis Powers AU fanfiction. They'll be the obvious relations there, but sometimes you look back at a situation and realise that the author has written the entire base outline of WW 2 in the form of a soccer game.
• The Fruits Basket fanfic "Eyes of the Cat" is known for a few things - but two of those things are a lot of filler chapters, and having one of the only likable Original Characters in all of fanfiction - the second is because Kyo and the OC mesh well together (and, thankfully, purely in a platonic sense). Its only if you reread the fanfic from the beginning, and read it all the way through in one sitting that you realize those filler chapters are designed solely to alter Kyo's character in a believable way. Each of those chapters describes events which, on their own, are humorous but plotless; its only when read together that you realize you are actually watching Kyo's character evolve and change in a realistic fashion because of those events while still keeping the main attributes of his original character.
  • A possible second fridge brilliance is these chapters in relation to the OC. The OC is a ghost, and in the very early chapters it is stated that she gains power by being around people who acknowledge her existance - specifically, Kyo. As the plot progresses, Eris shows increasingly more and more abilities - and its those abilities that give her the ability to aid in the final fight against Akito, aka the Big Bad.
• A Harry Potter / Rurouni Kenshin crossover fic, RuroKen and the Philosophers Stone had Dumbledore talk to Hiko about letting his apprentice Kenshin go to Hogwarts (and that it would be dangerous if he remain untrained in regards to magic). Later, Kenshin (unaware of the 'danger' part) wonders how a headmaster has time to go out of his way to do that, figuring he has to be a busy guy. Then I remembered that not even Harry was personally seen to by Dumbledore before he went off the school, hinting at something a little more worrisome than what's being let on.
• There was a Harry Potter fanfic (sadly, now deleted) in which the main character used a Time-Turner to go back and change history, sacrificing her life so that another would live. I wasn't happy about this at the time, because in HP canon we are told that Time-Turners cannot be used that way; the version of Time Travel they use always creates Stable Time Loops and those who tried to alter things often get themselves killed. It wasn't upon re-reading that I recognized the Fridge Brilliance: the character got herself killed when trying to change history. So, yes, it was an actually canon-compliant use of Time Travel.
• It took me reading The Trouble with Weather (an AU X-Men fic) about three times before I had a moment of Fridge Brilliance. In chapter twenty-one, Ororo tells Logan that humans had put her in a cage; Logan then wonders if there was some kind of hidden meaning or test in what she'd said, since her expression to his reaction is described as "disappointment," and "her eyes had been searching" as she'd told him about being in a cage. Here's where the Fridge Brilliance kicks in: in the very next chapter, Logan has a dream/flashback of rescuing an eight-year-old Ororo from a cage, and it's revealed later in the fic that Ororo hadn't forgotten that incident. Ororo was hoping that Logan would've remembered it, too!