Subeta

Hello, I'm Titania McGee with Channel 5 Action News, your best source for Subetan tropes!

Subeta was created in 2004 by teenager Keith Kurson (he was 14 at the time) as a retaliation against the strict rules Viacom was imposing on Neopets and because he failed in finding a better pet site. Like Neopets, people can play games and quests, buy and sell items, and adopt pets. But unlike Neopets, which is aimed at a wider audience, Subeta strives for an older, more niche audience and focuses more on customizing your human avatar than on customizing the pets themselves.

To this day, the site has over 100,000 members, with an average of 900 online at the same time, with peaks at 2,000.

Subeta can be accessed here.

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Subeta provides examples of the following tropes:

• Allegedly Free Game: Like most pet sites, Subeta has a Cash Shop, where you can buy account upgrades and special items with real money.
• Anyone Can Die: See Killed Off for Real example.
• Author Avatar: Besides King Keith (that was the King of Subeta in the beginning), Sebastian Phoenix and Calvin Blackmoon (the Chancellor of Subeta and the Governor of Atebus respectively), were based (at least partially) on Keith.
• Awesome but Impractical: So many items that can't even be counted. But then, they are going to avert this in the future with the items that already didn't escape from this trope.
• Barbie Doll Anatomy: Human avatars have no underwear or censorship when naked, but there's nothing interesting drawn.
• Body Horror:
  • The zombie epidemics.
  • Certain pet colors fit this, especially Experiments and Graveyard pets.
• Camp Cook: Pete just looks like one.
• Chained by Fashion: Mori. Goddamn Mori.
• Clockwork Creature: The Steamworks pet color, as well as a few minions.
• Cosmetic Award: The Avatars, then, the Achievements, and then, the new Achievements, that subvert this by giving prizes when people reach a certain difficulty (which is, generally, really... Difficult).
• Cosplay: Often done with the Human Avatars in the forums, for contests or just for fun. EPI Con, an event that took place in August 2010 had a full out public contest to go with the other activities and Fan Convention-like like feel.
• Crack Pairing: JaxIan, Calvin x Sebastian, Shinwa x Maleria, Nico x Manwar... The list doesn't have an end.
• Cute Monster Girl: Merana speaks for herself.
• Cuteness Proximity: Spoofed by the many minion descriptions.
• Dark Is Not Evil: Despite the white and black magic practitioners being mostly aligned where they would supposed to, the Element Mage doesn't care about studying Darkness magic, despite being an awfully kind Chai.
• Dirty Old Man: The Wizard. He even has a book called "The Joys of Bra Collecting"!
• Double Entendre: Elwood is basically a walking That's What She Said joke.
• Drill Sergeant Nasty: Questgiver/NPC, Major Drills.
• Early-Bird Cameo: Several of the NPCs involved in the 2010 Masquerade plot showed up in the 2009 Masquerade shop as cute little plushies.
• Eccentric Millionaire: Saggitarius and Blake Steele, though none of these two are exactly nice.
• Energy Weapons: Certain items of both the Laser Blade and Ray Gun variety.
• Ensemble Darkhorse: The witchdoctor Matlal basically stole the show for the 2009 Omen Islands Plot with his all-caps posts and sexual innuendo.
• Everything's Better with Plushies: To unimaginable, physics-challenging extents (after all, they are pixel plushies). Also, beanbags. Plushie pets, plushie food, plushie torture implements...
• Evil Is Sexy: Somehow or another, it manages to be self-explanatory.
• Evil Weapon: There are a lot of them.
• Eye Scream: Darkside Eye Burrowers.
• Face Full of Alien Wingwong: The "Cranial Crustacean" avatar item.
• Fantastic Racism: The Living and the Unliving minority do not get on. This is what prompted the Feb '10 plot: when the Living started putting on crude Unliving masks in an attempt to celebrate the anniversary of the Great Epidemic, the Unliving thought they were being racist and attacked anyone who came to Shadowglen Graveyard wearing a mask.
• Fair Play Whodunnit: March's plot (the murder of Vernon Yun) was designed as a classic whodunnit for the userbase to solve.
• Forgets to Eat: Dr. Asmodeus. When he does remember, he's partial to cheeseburgers and key lime soda.
• Gag Boobs: Poor Titania. All she wants is to be taken seriously as the best source for Subetan news, but her... unfortunate name has lead to plenty of teasing from the user base. Mature? No. Hilarious? Of course.
• Gone Horribly Wrong: The Experiment pets. Could be Gone Horribly Right instead if you actually wanted your pet to look like that.
• Hey, It's That Guy!: Recently-introduced NPC Jules Yun is a fairly-obvious Expy of Kit Stølen.
• Ho Yay: Plenty. Given that Keith Kurson is openly gay, and there's no objections against sexuality, it's natural.
  • Where does he even admit to being gay? He seems to actively counter this idea, and never answers it if asked live. Troper would link to source?
    • Here for starters. And also on Subeta. And in his blog. And on Facebook. And on Twitter. And if you ask him. And regularly in Livestream.
• Hustler: Quite literally.
• Internet Backdraft: After the release of a Longcat themed item and subsequent sporadic attacks by angry channers, Keith put an insulting message in the comment tags of the Subeta HTML. This led to the Longcat Crusade. He eventually replaced Longcat with a generic eastern dragon.
• Killed Off for Real: Amy. As of the masquerade Vernon Yun. Marcel as well.
• Mad Scientist and Hot Scientist: Two of them, Ian and Euclid, that happen to hate each other to the guts.
• Money for Nothing: While not completely worthless, sP is very easy to make. It got to the point where the staff had to create Meat Sinks to drain it out of the economy.
• Mutants: Experiment pets.
• Nerds Are Sexy: Played straight with Nico and the two aforementioned scientists, but averted with the Computer Quests NPC. Or not.
• Nightmare Fuel: The Graveyard, Experiment, and Nightmare pets.
• Our Zombies Are Different: Subetan zombies are Type P, but they're all sentient (albeit not too eloquent) and call themselves the Unliving. They live in the Shadowglen Graveyard and resent the Living.
• Papa Wolf: Dr. Asmodeus apparently does this for Quentin.
• Promoted Fanboy: Subeta gives that chance every time they give applications. And people are paid for it, too.
• Rage Against the Mentor: A lot. Subeta was created to succeed where Neopets have failed, according to Word of God.
• Rich Idiot With No Day Job: Saggitarius, although he isn't much of a hero as he is someone that loves to slay dragons and draconic-like pets.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: Maleria, sort of, as she can't really use her powers like she did in her glory times.
• Split Personality Takeover: Mori / Nori, every single day, as soon as the sun rises or sets.
• Sorry, I'm Gay: Not only Jaxon Skelly, but Keith himself.
• Star-Spangled Spandex: A clothing in the Sun/Moon themed Costume Trunk is literally this.
• Steampunk: The moon colony of Atebus runs entirely on Steampunk technology. Technology strong enough to make an AI so real it passes for human. Daaaamn, Vernon!
• Sure Why Not: A couple of users tried to make up a fake holiday on April Fools' Day, and the staff picked up on it... and made it official. Happy Elwood Day, kids!
• The Artifact: There are many items which seem to be nonsensical, even by Subeta standards- i.e, the Bomb-Disguised Surfboard. These were actually 'custom items' thought up by and named after popular Subeta users in '04/'05, which had to be quickly renamed when the user left. Some of these artifact custom items are still floating around with their original names intact, although they're hard to find.
• We Help the Helpless: Amy Sarah and her Newbie Quests. Although sometimes, it is more of a nuisance than a help.
• Yaoi Fangirl: Plenty. It became a Halloween tradition to fawn over Jaxon and see which other NPC he would bang, to the staff's despair.
• Zombie Apocalypse: The plot of Feb '09 involved people's avatars randomly catching viral strains and turning into horrific zombies. There was no way to reverse the change- the news played it up as a full on disaster, complete with increasingly crazed posts from Titania. A cure was released on Valentine's Day, much to the relief of dedicated avatar fashionistas, but many users chose to keep their zombie skins.