ok nerd time
I finally managed to put a name on my favorite trope in fiction. It's the Interloper.
A trope that is central to most of my creations, Horribunnies included.
--This thread is going to spoil Kill la Kill and Outer Wilds, you've been warnededed--
Let's go

An interloper is "a person who becomes involved in a place or situation where they are not wanted or are considered not to belong"
What I'm going to coin as the "interloper trope" shouldn't be confused with the "initiating event" of a story (even if it can be both)

I figure there may already be a different name for that specific trope, but do i look like a tropes scholar to you?? Feel free to send me the appropriate TVTropes page if you can find a relevant one

The picture I used in that first tweet was that of the Interloper () from Outer Wilds, a comet which happens to be the body that spread the "ghost matter" in the game's whole solar system, which in turn brought the end of all Nomai life.

The Interloper doesn't serve as the game's initiating event (that's the supernova and the time loop), but it *is* the Interloper that caused the Nomai to flee, leaving the Ash Twin Project unattented, resulting in the time loop.

The Interloper trope serves as the "true" over-arching initiating event, which triggers the actual low-hanging one. And I love that.

It puts in perspective the public's knowledge of the world by twisting the very event that got the public hooked to the story in the first place.

Another example I LOVE, which heavily inspires most of my works to this day, is Harime Nui from Kill la Kill.

Similarly to the Interloper from Outer Wilds, she's the "true" initiating event, as she's revealed mid-series to be the one who killed Ryuko's father. She now possesses the second scissor Ryuko has been looking for the whole time.

Her introduction is incredibly clever as her character is fully absent from the first half of the series. The viewer is even tricked, like Ryuko, to think they already know the character who killed Ryuko's dad and that's it's only a matter of time before the series reveals it.

BUT Harime Nui's character goes deeper than that. She is *designed* as an interference in every aspect:
- she's the true initiator of the story
- she constantly interferes with the very series by jokingly breaking the 4th wall, interacting with/through extra-diegetic elements

Here she is just casually leaning on her own name or interacting with an out-of-reach Satsuki (breaking both the 4th wall and the series power dynamics at the same time)

- she's a surprise in every scene she appears in:
--> she falls out of the sky in her reveal scene
--> she is revealed to be piloting Satsuki's helicoper when convenient
--> when Ryuko returns to face her alone, Nui claps and spawns from a corner of the screen

- she has her own animation style that somehow makes invulnerable in most fights as she can just clip away from damage ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

There are many more aspects to her that further caracterizes her as an "interloper" but you get my point. She's a character acting independently and interfering with both the story and the media she's part of in many many ways.

Did I make this thread just to stan Nui? You bet!
That character really created an itch for me and that's definitely a trope I want to iterate on and adapt in video games. I have various interloper designs of my own, may I someday make a character as amazing as Nui.

That's where I come in with Horribunnies. One of my own Interlopers is Ophéline.
She's the one responsible for the game's signature approach:
- She's the source of conflict, having a sense of ethics that doesn't sit with Pâquerette AND that of the player

- She's the one introducing the player to mechanics and themes that are subversive/unique to the pet game genre: genetics/eugenics, treating pets as objects rather beings, prioritizing money making...

I designed Ophéline as an intriguing character that doesn't belong as main cast in a pet game / simulation game, will that turn out to be interesting to the players ? Who knows !

Interlopers are fascinating to me and I hope to make some fine ones in my career ! If you have any art piece (anime, vidya, book...) that features such characters, please tell me about it, this is my jam