Survival of the Fittest: Difference between revisions

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=== This roleplay provides examples of the following: ===
=== This roleplay provides examples of the following: ===


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== General ==
* [[Abandoned Hospital]]: Every island used in the four seasons have had an abandoned clinic, usually small buildings. The location name on the forum is usually some variation of "[[Abandoned Hospital]]".
* [[Aborted Arc]]: Considering the [[Anyone Can Die|nature]] of the game, it's to be expected that a lot of storylines will be left hanging or unfinished.
* [[Abusive Parents]]: This occurs very often, although most of the more obvious examples can be found within the first two games. For some, such as Mariavel Varella, this is a defining part of their [[Backstory]].
* [[All There in the Manual]]: A lot of extra information about the students, including their background and even appearance, is included in their profiles.
* [[Anti Hero]]: Many, the most notable being Bryan Calvert, Hawley Faust, {{spoiler|and as of V3, Adam Dodd.}}
* [[Anti Villain]]: Just as many. Bobby Jacks and Aaron Hughes are examples of this trope:
** For Bobby, whilst he does play the game, he is constantly plagued by his guilty conscience, being painfully aware of everything he is doing.
** Aaron Hughes, on the other hand, is a plain [[Manipulative Bastard]], given the perfect opportunity to kill Nick Reid, a known killer, but leaves him alive [[Batman Gambit|to kill one of his former friends and use his death to turn him into a martyr. And just so he can eliminate the competition.]]
* [[Anyone Can Die]]
* [[Art Evolution]]: Newer readers are regularly amazed when they see the writing... er, ''quality''... back in V1, considering where the game is now.
* [[Big Bad]]: Victor Danya, head of the terrorist group behind SOTF. {{spoiler|At least until v4's Day Ten...}}
* [[Bloodstained Glass Windows]]: In each version there is always a church of some kind on the island.
* [[Break the Cutie]]/[[Break the Haughty|Haughty]]: This happens ''a lot...'' Though given the nature of the story and the game, is that really so surprising?
* [[Bulletproof Vest]]: Subverted for the most part - in SOTF, these tend to be treated very realistically. However, this is also played straight in the case of Shannon McLocke, who takes a close range shotgun blast to the chest and gets up with barely a scratch.
* [[Chekhov's Skill]]: This sometimes happens with the profiles of the characters. Newbies often try to cram in as many potentially useful skills as possible (such as survival training, firearm proficiency and martial arts. Made ridiculous when you consider that the characters are ''supposed'' to be [[Ordinary High School Student|Ordinary High School Students]].
* [[Cloudcuckoolander]]: Mitch Gunther, Anna Kateridge, Cisco Vasquez, Lily Ainsworth, Maria Graham, and Annaliese Hanson are definitely this:
** Mitch:
{{quote| '''Mitch:''' Dog eat dog. Dogs don't eat dogs, they eat birds and cats and Kibblebits if they have a family. Those words are silly. But I would have gotten that right if that silly glasses boy hadn't answered before me. Yes, I would have gotten it right.}}
** Anna:
{{quote| '''Anna:''' Oh dear... I regret to say this, but I feel as though I'm in the uncanny valley right now... oh my, did that inside joke come out alright? I hope I did... }}
** Cisco:
{{quote| '''Cisco:''' Are...are you going to kill me?<br />
'''George Leidman:''' What? No, no. Not at all! Why would I?<br />
'''Cisco:''' Oh...that's...a bit disappointing. }}
** Lily:
{{quote| '''Lily:''' Blimey! I love watching the figure skaters twirl on the ice, they look so nice. Did you know that the figure skating dates back to prehistoric times? The first actual account of it was written by a monk in cantebury...}}
** Maria:
{{quote| '''Maria:''' ''(thinking)'' [[Painting the Fourth Wall|I wonder what happened? I'll have to ask him about it later...what, why am I still thinking in blue?]] Oh, there we go.}}
** Annaliese:
{{quote| '''Annaliese:''' Ray, there’s a zombie in our yard.}}
* [[Cluster F Bomb]]: Adam Dodd in V1, Dorian Sanders in V3 and Kris Hartmann in V4, the lattermost in three different languages. Jimmy Brennan, on the other hand, should get points for sheer ''density''.
* [[Co Dragons]]: Steven Wilson, Jim Greynolds, Melvin Carter and Sonia Ngyuen, collectively known as the Big Four. {{spoiler|As of Day 8 in v4, it's more like the Big ''Three''.}}
* [[Deserted Island]]: The main stage of ''Survival of the Fittest''.
* [[Disc One Final Boss]]: Players or villains who are killed off either before the halfway mark or before the story really kicks into high gear fall into this category - Jacob Starr in v1, Blood Boy in v3, Clio Gabriella in v4, and Cristo Ruiz in SOTF: Evolution.
* [[Downer Ending]]: All the versions by default - when the game has only one survivor, there's going to be precious little to smile about.
* [[Explosive Leash]]: Following the story of [[Battle Royale]], collars are fitted to every character. They go off if they are in a dangerzone, if attempts are made to remove them, if the character attempts to escape, if they piss off [[Big Bad|Danya]]...
* [[Expy]]: Some of the characters are blatant clones of either past SOTF characters (such as Gabriel Theobaldt for Oliver Dodd) or characters from Battle Royale (such as Mariavel Varela for Mitsuko Souma).
* [[Flash Back|Flashbacks]]: Loads of them.
* [[From Nobody to Nightmare]]: Take an entire senior class of normal high school students, trap them in a last man standing fight to the death with (supposedly) no chance of escape, and see how many psychos and mass murderers you get.
* [[Genre Busting]]: In many ways; on one hand, like the [[Battle Royale|source material]], it is pretty difficult to define what kind of genre it is. On the other, with so many different writing styles across so many characters in one place, the final product of Survival of the Fittest is downright impossible to define as a single genre.
* [[Handguns]]: A common weapon.
* [[Heroic Sacrifice]]: Notably, ''handlers'' can do this, using their 'Hero Card' to have their own character killed off in order to save someone else's.
** It can easily stray into [[Senseless Sacrifice]] territory however if the character who is saved then goes and dies soon after, e.g. through inactivity or being rolled again right away.
* [[He Who Fights Monsters]]: The entire concept of player-killers is based in this. They're targeting people who are playing the game, but in doing so are becoming players themselves.
** The scope of their player targeting can help this along, too. Sure, that girl who killed 6 people probably deserves it, but how do they know that guy who killed 1 didn't do it in self-defense?
* [[Hidden Agenda Villain]]: Danya's agenda is so well hidden that even most of the handlers don't know what it is, let alone the characters. This is a bigger deal than it sounds when you take into account that the handlers are the ones who write the plot. After six years and four versions of the game, with a fifth on the way, only a few hints have been shown.
* [[High School]]: Since the involved characters are high school students, the pregames versions two, three, four, and five, as well as spinoff seasons The Program, SOTF-TV and Second Chances, took place in the schools the characters attended (Bathurst, Hobbsborough, Franklyn Senior, and PJ Gilroy Academy in v2, Southridge in v3, Bayview Secondary in v4, Aurora High for v5, General’s Pride in The Program v1, Detroit Central High and Silver Dragon Academy in SOTF-TV v1, and Colehurst for Second Chances) and the cities they lived in ([[Wretched Hive|Denton]] for v2, Highland Beach for v3 and Second Chances, St. Paul for v4, Seattle for v5, Pittsburgh for The Program v1, and Detroit and Bryan, Texas, for SOTF-TV v1).
* [[Improbable Weapon User]]: Due to the sick sense of humour of [[Big Bad|Danya]] in ''[[Survival of the Fittest]]'', bobble-head dolls and plastic hammers have been known to come into play as assigned weapons.
* [[Killed Off for Real]]: Subverted in the case of the v3 escapees and Burton Harris (the ''first'' time each of them were 'killed', that is)
* [[Kill Em All]]: The whole point of the game, being based on [[Battle Royale]], is to force the involved students to kill each other off until there is only one survivor.
* [[Kill the Cutie]]: Hey! Is there a character you like in ''[[Survival of the Fittest]]''? It's almost definite they won't make it to the end, thanks to the [[Kill Em All|premise]].
* [[Lampshade Hanging]]: Has proven to be quite common. For example:
{{quote| '''Melina Frost''': Go on then... show him why we're called the Poison Angles [sic]. <br />
'''Jeff Marontate''': Poison Angles, huh? Oh, I'll give you a whole new set of angles in a minute, my darling. }}
* [[Loads and Loads of Characters]]: Each game has over one hundred students, and one of the test runs had two hundred, as did v3. V4 had ''276'' characters altogether. These character counts aren't including the terrorists themselves, adults, or side characters who don't make it into the games.
* [[Made of Explodium]]: [[Every Car Is a Pinto|Cars]] and [[Your Head Asplode|heads]] (the collars, so [[Justified Trope|justified]]) are included in ''[[Survival of the Fittest]]''. In the case of the exploding car, (in particular one in v1 with Jeremy Torres at the wheel) this causes an entire ''building'' to go up in a huge fireball too.
* [[The Mole]]: Steven Wilson, aka. Principal Wilson, for Bathurst in v2, {{spoiler|Sparky, aka Brynn Lovell}} for the terrorists in v4.
* [[Mutual Kill]]: Kiyoko Asakawa vs. Cassandra Roivas in v1, Sera Wingfield vs. Gail Smith in v2, Melina Frost vs. Beth Vandelinder in v3, Jaclyn Kusche vs. Charlotte Cave and Alex White vs. Jimmy Brennan in v4.
* [[One of Us]]: Many of the members of the site, and even one of the admins, frequent [[TV Tropes]] and can consider themselves avid tropers. Even without [[TV Tropes]] as a criteria, you'd be hard pressed to find a member or handler who doesn't have some sort of interest that puts them square in this category.
* [[The Power of Friendship]]: Subverted to hell in many, many instances. Sydney Morvran, winner of V0 (the final 'test run') is the most prominent example of this. He ends up being the sole survivor of his first game by using his best friend as a human shield after all the rest of his friends started attacking one another in a paranoid fit. Then Syd was put into the next game as punishment for not killing anybody.
* [[Out With a Bang]]: Happens to a few characters in V1 and in V2. As Mr. Danya put it during his announcement of Matt Drew's death at the hands of [[Femme Fatale|Sera Wingfeld]]:
{{quote| '''Danya:''' "Let's just say that Sera Wingfield took him to heaven before she sent him to hell. Hey, she was good to the man."}}
* [[Rare Guns]]: The SPAS-12, Auto-Mag, Desert Eagle, and even the two-of-a-kind full-auto Pancor Jackhammer, all make multiple appearances.
* [[Realism]]: The ultimate direction SOTF has been trying to take as of late. It serves as a double-edged sword a lot of the time, though; realism for the characters is the biggest focus, as it eliminates common [[Mary Sue]] traits and focuses more on the concept that any ''normal'' high-schooler, rather than the kid with an explicably good reason, can start killing their friends, but when it's applied to the setting and possible storylines, the whole thing starts to fall apart...
* [[Schedule Slip]]: Every version has had the occasional slip in schedule, but this is most prevalent in v3, where there was a 5-month hiatus in between Eddie Sullivan's death (7th place), and James Brown and Alexis Machina's death (6th and 5th place), then a seven-month hiatus between then and endgame being released. This extended period of time allowed for ''one-and-a-half-years'' of [[Developing Doomed Characters|pre-game]].
* [[Sinister Surveillance]]: The cameras all around the Island, along with the collars track everything the students are doing.
* [[Sure Why Not]]: A staff member once joked that one of the terrorist programmers Dennis Lourvey paid his way through MIT by being a male stripper. This was quickly accepted as canon. Similar 'throw it in' moments happen at a startling rate.
* [[Web Original]]: The RP is based on Koshun Takami's [[Battle Royale]], but it has entirely original characters and a very different setting and plot; it started out being set in the [[Battle Royale]] universe, but was eventually retconned into an original world.
* [[Write Who You Know]]: There are a large number of self insert characters or characters who are basically people each handler knows in real life. These characters are typically portrayed realistically, however.
* [[Your Head Asplode]]: Collar detonation. Stay in a danger zone too long, try to remove the collar, suffer an unfortunate impact, get used as an example by Danya to try to scare off SADD or Liz Polanski...

Revision as of 09:26, 4 December 2013

The game takes all kinds
"Look around. Look at your classmates. How many of them do you truly know? How many would you trust with your life?"
—Danya, V4 Prologue

Survival of the Fittest is a roleplaying board based on Battle Royale, which began in June 2005.

The premise is simple: a class of high-school students are abducted on the way to their end-of-year trip, fitted with collars, given randomly distributed weapons and are dropped onto an unknown island to fight their former peers until one remains alive. What ensues is drama, action, comedy, and most important, tragedy all rolled into a single RP. Gradually, over each "season", more and more secrets are revealed behind Danya and the terrorist organization which has managed to keep this twisted act running for over three years.

The roleplay is geared primarily towards intermediate-advanced level writers. SOTF is open for anyone to join - although there is a member approval process in place, as well as a rigorous character acceptance system.

Version 4 of SOTF has reached its conclusion, and the Pre-Game for Version 5 is now in progress.

SOTF can be found here. The wiki can be found here. Unfortunately, this recently suffered an error which cost it significant amounts of data, including a large number of student profiles. Board members are currently concentrating on wiki updates for version 4.

As of March 2010, SOTF also has a spin off site, known as SOTF Mini, geared towards faster games and newer writers, as well as being the site for 'official' larger-scale Alternate Universe RPs. All three of the games, The Program, SOTF-TV, and Virtua-SOTF, are nearing their conclusions. Meanwhile, a "Second Chances" edition has started up, exclusive to characters from previous games who have died before.

For reference, those RPing characters are called 'handlers' on the board, so if you see SotF examples using the word, this is what is meant by it.

If you thought this page was about the slogan used to summarise the theory of evolution and later appropriated by people who consider themselves fit, you're looking for The Social Darwinist.


This roleplay provides examples of the following:

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