Superego
Everyone has their bad days.
-MSPAFA description for Superego
Superego is another MSPA Fan Adventure by Jovian, who's also the creator of Godquest. Ten individuals, each designated by a numeral and a color, are trapped in a hospital and must work together to get out. But what surprises does the building have in store for them? And what deep, dark secrets lay within their minds?
Not to be confused with The Superego, the former name of a trope about logical, calculated men.
- Original forum threads: Thread I Thread II Thread III
- Mirror
- Info Database (contains spoilers)
Tropes used in Superego include:
- Abandoned Hospital
- All Asians Are Alike: Louis invokes this, referring to Cherry as Japanese (she's Chinese).
- All There in the Manual: The author's Tumblr tag for Superego has many doodles and tidbits that aren't in the threads.
- All Work vs. All Play: Percy and Ava, respectively.
- Amazing Technicolor Population/Distinctive Appearances: Everyone looks pretty distinct to begin with, but their colors make them almost impossible to confuse.
- Ambidextrous Sprite: Occurs as instances of hairstyle flipping (noticeably with Ava and Rick).
- Arc Numbers: 301 and 10, not to mention the numbers on the characters' hands.
- Arc Symbol: The circle and variations of it.
- Bigger on the Inside
- Big "Shut Up!": Louis delivers one to Ava. It seems to have affected her.
- ...and then delivers a Noisy Shut Up later.
- Big, Flat What: Rick has one when Percy has to tell Louis that he (Rick) left a bad impression.
- Breaking the Fourth Wall: For a period of time beginning on February 11, 2012, Percy's shadow had gotten its hands on the Info Database that Percy was so meticulously keeping up-to-date and pretty much trashed it. At first, it was simply a black-out of the information (which copy-pasting into a text editor could easily undo), but then his edits started getting...nightmarish.
- Closed Circle
- Color Coded for Your Convenience
- Conveniently Interrupted Document: The papers Percy finds.
- Deliberately Monochrome: The hospital.
- The Door Slams You: Juliet does this accidentally to Sam.
- Dysfunction Junction
- Eldritch Location: The hospital, natch. Through the course of the story, it gets worse, containing Bizarrchitecture and Gravity Screw.
- Elevator Escape: Sam employs this to get away from Percy and Ava.
- Escape From the Crazy Place
- Enemy Without: Also happens to be the Shadow Archetype.
- Extremely Short Timespan: The hours passed can be counted on one hand.
- Five Temperament Ensemble: Ava and Juliet are sanguine; Rick and Quin are choleric; Sam and Percy are melancholic; Louis and Grey are phlegmatic; Cherry and Helen are supine.
- Freudian Trio: The first three characters introduced. Percy is the Superego (logical, perceptive), Sam the Ego (doesn't care about others and wants to get out as soon as possible), and Ava the Id (excitable, loves chatting and getting people's attention).
- Genius Loci: The hospital appears to have elements of this. For example, one room traps Ava and Cherry within it.
- Hearing Voices: Mystery flavor.
- Hollywood Personality Disorders
- A House Divided
- Incoming Ham: YOU THERE!
- Laser-Guided Amnesia: See Ontological Mystery below.
- Let's Split Up, Gang!: Done between Percy and Rick, and Cherry and Ava.
- Mad Eye: Vivian.
- Minimalist Cast
- Missing Floor: Sam is surprised to discover a basement. So far, only one elevator leads to it.
- Mobile Maze
- Neck Lift: Inverted. A shadowy hand restrains Sam onto the ground by the neck while he's in the black room with the mirrored floor.
- The Nineties: According to Word of God, the story takes place in 1995.
- No Antagonist: Currently, the hospital itself, along with the demonic voices and tentacles of darkness, seems to be the best candidate for one.
- Oh Crap: Sam, meet Rick.
- Ontological Mystery: Everyone has woken up in a room with no memory of what happened prior to their incarceration other than that they were leaving home for something.
- Painting the Fourth Wall: Everyone and their dialog is colored a different hue while the demonic voices have black backgrounds in their text. As things get weirder, filter effects such as smudging and pixellizing are used as well.
- Plummet Perspective: A variation occurs at the end of the prologue.
- Pre-lap: In visual form!
- And also a postlap.
- Punch-Punch-Punch Uh-Oh: Rick lands a hell of a beatdown on Louis to avenge his graduation invitation, but the most that he suffers is a slight nosebleed. Louis then does a big right jab on the coach's face, knocking off his glasses in the process. Even Rick's inner demon knew this right from the start.
- Rotating Protagonist: You could easily divide the story into scenes with certain characters as focus.
- Rule of Symbolism: Rick is one of the only people of the other hospital inhabitants that Cherry seems comfortable being around and talking to due to her rather shy and skittish personality. At one point they get separated after Cherry has a meltdown when he and Louis start fighting; she goes to search for Rick a few minutes later, only to see another woman now following him around. Feeling replaced, she runs away heartbroken and several walls come jutting up from the floor behind her to prevent them from following. In other words, her barriers just went back up.
- Sanity Slippage
- Shout-Out: The fact that all of the characters trapped in the hospital have numbers on their hands is very reminiscent of Nine Hours Nine Persons Nine Doors.
- Word of God also confirms that House of Leaves is another inspiration for this work.
- Simultaneous Arcs: To lead up to the light flicker. Mini Rotating Arcs also occur since the cast doesn't exactly like to stick together.
- Skintone Sclerae: a good chunk of the cast.
- Soaperizing
- Soft Glass: The entire floor of the black room, as a shadowy girl who may or may not be Quin demonstrates; Sam ends up on a hospital bed without so much as a scratch.
- Subliminal Seduction: During Sam's stay in the White Void Room, censored messages start to obscure his train of thought. When highlighted, they appear to be gibberish. However, if you get rid of the non-alphabetic characters, separate the letters into caps and lowercase, and reverse both strings, you will get two messages. The lowercase one reads, "run boy you should run they are going to get you you do not realize what you have done they want to kill you from the inside out they are the most terrifying things you will ever experience because they are you and only you alone can defeat them sam you better get out of here and quickly quickly," and the all-caps one reads, "I CANNOT POSSIBLY FATHOM TO TELL YOU THE FULL RAMIFICATIONS OF WHAT YOU HAVE DONE HERE YOU HAVE DONE SOMETHING DEMONIC AND YOU WILL REGRET IT SECONDS AFTER YOU LEAVE THIS ROOM I HOPE YOU ENJOY THE FATE YOU HAVE PUT UPON YOURSELF BECAUSE YOU WILL BE LIVING IT FOR EVERY SECOND FROM NOW ON."
- This happens again after Sam gets struck by lightning, although the text is in Shadow Sam's color and it doesn't need to be highlighted. Although the capital letters don't seem to have a message, the lowercase ones spell out "sam im very disappointed in you/you have been rude and disruptive and entirely unhelpful/sam theres something you should do this is your last chance/it will help you will be fixed you can live normally sign here/sam sign here sam sam sam sign here sam sam sign sam" over the course of five pages.
- Theme Naming: Not including full names (as the cast is rarely called by them in-story), they're ten letters long. Even including aliases (Red Diamond) and initials (Rick L. Worth).
- Troubled Backstory Flashback: Sam is reminded of "someone" (with a censor bar over the eyes no less) later revealed to be his mom and tries to drop the subject ASAP.
- Unreliable Narrator: Despite being written in second person, the narration varies depending on the character in focus. Considering the characters' mannerisms...
- Even the character's recollections vary stylistically. Compare how Ava sees Sam and how Sam sees Ava.
- Unsound Effect: EJECT.
- Wall of Blather: Percy is prone to these.
- What the Hell, Hero?: Quin pulls this on Rick after he shrugs off Cherry running away from them in tears, despite the fact that they'd been trying to find her.
Quin: Did you even notice she was crying? Did you even care? You said you were specifically looking for her!
- White Void Room: Sam ends up in one. And immediately gets assaulted by a mass of dark tentacles that may or may not be his inner demon.
- X Meets Y: So far, this is shaping up to be "Nine Hours Nine Persons Nine Doors meets House of Leaves meets the Persona series", the last part due to the presence of Shadow-like demon voices roaming the halls.
- You Are Number Six: Everyone has a numeral on their left hand which designates their personality disorders according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th Edition. Read more about it here.
- Your Princess Is in Another Castle: In only a week's worth of updates, Sam, Percy, and Ava find the exit to the hospital which leads to a cliff that leads to an abyss. END OF PROLOGUE.
What it mean?
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