La Belle

La Belle is a Super Smash Bros. murder mystery. It was a collaboration written by Herr Wozzeck, Royal Fanatic, BabyGurl278, and KILL THE EMPIRE. It is currently completed, although the collaboration element was ditched after a very long stretch of time due to the myriad scheduling conflicts that eventually arose.

The smashers are invited to a tournament; however, before long people begn turning up dead all around the smashers. And it's left to the smashers to figure out what is going on before everybody winds up dead. Do they succeed? Only time tells.

Tropes used in La Belle include:
  • Acquitted Too Late: Ganondorf.
  • Anyone Can Die: Including Bowser.
  • Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: All of the victims when the murderer finally gets his due.
  • Asshole Victim: Master Hand. That's what he gets for locking up people without even giving them a trial.
  • Breaking Speech: Bowser gets two. The second one comes right before he dies.
  • Black Dude Dies First: A meta subversion occurs with Falco. While Falco isn't exactly a black character, he was a popular first victim in the Super Smash Brothers murder mystery fanfiction written at the time La Belle was started.
  • Brainwashed: Roy.
  • Chivalrous Pervert: Falco hits on Isolde pretty frequently before he's killed off.
  • Dead Person Impersonation: Sergio is living both as himself and as Albrecht.
  • Death Is Dramatic: Bowser. Oh dear Lord, Bowser.
  • Development Hell: The fact that it was a collaboration led to this; BabyGurl278 and RoyalFanatic both ran into major scheduling conflicts, and then KILL THE EMPIRE didn't update his chapters after a while. It would have become a Dead Fic if not for the fact that Herr Wozzeck finally took matters into his own hands and finished it.
  • Driven to Suicide: Roy, upon finding out that he was an unwilling pawn in someone else's murder scheme.
  • Evil Plan and Gambit Roulette: The murderer killed the head of the tournament so he could supervise all of the murders. He then cast a ton of magic to live his double life, hide bombs, open gateways to alternate dimensions, and make sure the Smashers couldn't escape. And on top of that, he hypnotized Roy into doing his bidding. He even finds ways around the characters' various attempts to break the order. The only reason he's stopped is because other characters come onto the scene, which did not go according to plan. The fact that Fox, Isolde, and Peach manage to come up with a way to Out Gambit him helps, too.
  • Failure Is the Only Option: Played with; Bowser tries to disrupt the order during one of his matches by forcing a draw. It doesn't work.
  • Five-Man Band: With the investigation:
  • Foreshadowing: Quite a bit.
    • Before one of the murders, Popo's CD player goes missing. When the footage of Link's death is viewed one chapter later, Bowser comments that the CD player is playing opera and that the murderer has 'nice taste'. Which doesn't help Albrecht thanks to a long-standing European tradition of classical music.
    • Roy goes into a lot of pain when he first meets Sergio, then feels easy enough. Is it any wonder, then, that he winds up being a tool for the murderer to kill people?
    • Albrecht's smirk after Pichu tells him about Master Hand violating his orders.
      • On a side note, Word of God has stated that Royal Fanatic almost put too much foreshadowing in that scene. There was a line that Albrecht said that Herr Wozzeck asked her to remove due to it making it far too obvious at that point in the fiction.
    • The Evil Plan has hints all before Fox and Peach reappear. "Peach" is oddly quiet just before her match, she doesn't seem to know her own moveset, Fox tells Marth he believes his claim that Isolde isn't the murderer, he goes missing right after his match, and the static seems to come in conveniently in the middle of that match.
    • Albrecht states that Sergio knows dark magic and is studying what is keeping the smashers inside. Of course, we all know how that came to be after The Summation...
  • Freudian Excuse: Sergio was a victim of his village, who did nothing good to him. The survivors don't buy it.
  • Gas Chamber: Luigi's death.
  • Green Lantern Ring: The killer's magic is this for the victims.
  • Gut Feeling: This is used to explain why Jigglypuff doesn't take part in the tournament.
  • Heroic Sacrifice: Isolde, as part of a plan from Fox to save whatever smashers are left.
  • Hidden Villain: The murderer is really good at hiding within the same track of land. It turns out he's Hidden in Plain Sight.
  • Infant Immortality: Heavily averted, and subverted very often. Especially when Bowser attempted to stop the order with a draw.
  • Invisible Wall: It's implied very late in the fic that even if the Smashers left the mansion, this would be keeping them all from escaping.
  • It Got Worse: Basically every event leading up to Bowser's death. The murders begin getting broadcasted outside of the mansion, the black magic at work is revealed, Roy paralyzes Bowser when he tries to kill Sergio, the investigation falls apart, and what makes it all worse is that by the time Samus dies the only characters left are those that have been developed through the entire fic.
  • It's Personal: It gets very personal by the time the fic reaches its final chapter.
  • Just One Little Mistake: Sergio should probably have not brought Albrecht's body with him for Peach to see at one point.
  • Kangaroo Court: Almost subverted; Ganondorf was given a fair trial to test the red herrings against him. It's ultimately all rendered useless by the fact that one of the members of the jury was hypnotized by the killer, which worked perfectly to the murderer's advantage when the jury ended up in a tie.
  • Kill'Em All: Of the 25 competitors at the start of the fic, only five eventually make it out alive. And then there's the fact that three of the victims of the killer aren't even competitors!
  • The Killer Becomes the Killed: Sergio's ultimate fate.
  • Let Me At Him: Happens pretty often. A given when the murderer loves toying with them.
  • Ludicrous Gibs: Samus' death.
  • Magic-Powered Pseudoscience: The murderer's method of killing people, whereupon he uses magic to send them to an alternate dimension with traps that are designed to kill the victims.
  • Meaningful Name: Word of God has stated that the title of the fic refers to the match point of a fencing match.
  • The Meddling Kids Are Useless: The impromptu investigation that Bowser puts together starts off solid enough, but it crumbles under the combined weight of stress, the lack of any real evidence that can convict people after Ganondorf's death, finger-pointing, and Bowser being paralyzed by Roy. However, Soren and some of the Brawl newcomers come to the mansion and eventually help Fox with new insights into the murderer's magic.
  • Men Are the Expendable Gender: Played with. Most of the victims are men. However, this is a given since there are only five women amongst all the men around them, thus resulting in fewer opportunities to see them killed off. Also, since Peach is the only survivor amongst the women it technically means the men get off relatively lucky.
  • Mind Rape: The murderer really loves to toy with his potential victims, and it only gets worse as the murders progress and especially when he starts broadcasting the murders very late in the story. It gets especially bad on Bowser's end once the investigation starts to crumble.
  • Murder by Cremation: Donkey Kong.
  • Never One Murder: It takes the Smashers a few murders to realize they're getting killed off systematically.
  • No Kill Like Overkill: The murderer himself.
  • Private Detective: Bowser becomes this after the first few murders. He even gets together a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits to attempt to solve the murder.
  • Rabid Cop: Master Hand, who jumps to all kind of conclusions when he looks into the murders. It's what causes Bowser to open his own investigation separate from Master Hand. Predictably, Master Hand gets himself killed.
  • Red Herring: A few are played to get Ganondorf killed. For a murder mystery, however, these are surprisingly few and far between.
  • The Reveal: The murderer's idenity.
  • Rube Goldberg Hates Your Guts: Oh, dear. Let's just begin with the fact that most of the murders don't even happen in the same dimension and we'll leave the rest up to your imagination.
  • Sadistic Choice: Well, almost like one. For the first few murders, it operates very randomly. As victims get killed off, however, the Smashers find themselves having to make extremely difficult decisions on who should live and who should die. It doesn't help that most of the later murders relish in Squick.
  • Serial Killer: The murderer kills the next person who loses the match.
  • The Summation: How the murderer was able to kill everyone.
  • Summoning Ritual: The murders were made for a ritual that would help Sergio get revenge on the world.
  • Suspect Existence Failure: Happens to Master Hand and then very briefly to Isolde.
  • Suspiciously Cracked Wall: There are "white screens" throughout the mansion that serve as portals to the dimension that people are killed in. They tend to solidify when a murder isn't happening or if someone isn't exherting extreme physical pressure on it, though.
  • Ten Little Murder Victims: Obviously.
  • Throw It In: Jigglypuff was forgotten when the brackets for who would be killed off were first written. This gets a Hand Wave in the fic with the instance of Gut Feeling above as the story had already been started by the time someone pointed it out.
  • Unresolved Sexual Tension: Marth and Isolde; the two get rather comfortable around each other, to the point where it seems they fall in love. Neither one really acts on their feelings. It doesn't help that Isolde eventually becomes a victim herself.
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