Characters / Amphibia: Leviathan Family

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Plantar Family | Wartwood | Toads | Newtopia (Leviathan Family) | Earth | Other Antagonists | Other Characters

All spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned.

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King Andrias Leviathan

King Andrias Leviathan

"The prophecy is being undone as we speak, my lord. Soon, we will have our revenge."

^{Click here to see young Andrias}

^{Click here to see him in the epilogue}

Voiced by: Keith David, Zeno Robinson (young)

Andrias Leviathan, Lord of Amphibia, Peacekeeper of a Thousand Years, and the First of his Name.

The colossal ruler of Newtopia and all of Amphibia. He debuts in the second season, becoming the Big Good to the heroes and helping them out on their quest to get Anne and her friends back home, while looking to solve the mysteries of Amphibia and the Calamity Box with the help of Marcy, Anne's friend who was lost alongside her and Sasha and who has become a close confidant and his personal pupil... or so Anne is led to believe.

Andrias eventually turns out to be far more sinister than he let on, and reveals in the season 2 finale that he had been manipulating everyone else to further his plans to conquer the multiverse with the power of the Box after Anne and friends helped to renew its powers; charging the stones at the three temples caused the girls to lose their connections with them, leaving them useless against him... except, as he realizes too late, Anne didn't charge her stone fully. After Anne and the Plantars escape his grasp by the skin of their teeth and Marcy's sacrifice, he sends his forces to Earth steadily to hunt down Anne and kill her, because Anne is the only one who still has her connection with the stone and is thus the main threat to his conquest, while he and his master, the Core, start to rebuild their armies to finally conquer the multiverse. Anne must get back to Amphibia to defeat him once and for all.

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• 0% Approval Rating: After King Andrias' true intentions have been revealed, it seems no one in Amphibia will willingly serve him after that. The citizens of Wartwood aren't going to stop until the tyrant is brought down, especially after he destroyed their homes, and have installed a piñata in his image in the meeting room, ready to be lowered at a moment's notice for them to beat him up in effigy. In "Olivia & Yunan", there's almost not a single loyal newt around the capital, not to mention his Dragon and royal advisor have rescinded their fealty to their king out of disgust for his horrible actions and his strip-mining and destruction of Amphibia's natural ecosystem. Bartley, Branson, and Blair do show up later on serving him, but given everything he does and their reactions to his possible wrath/annoyance, it's apparently only because they're too afraid of him to defect. Any newts and toads serving him were likely coerced under the threat of being brainwashed, which is what will happen to those who are noncompliant. Everyone on Earth cheers when Anne finally defeats him.
• 11th-Hour Ranger: He joins the heroes and pulls an Heel–Face Turn during the Grand Finale, following his Heel Realization in the previous episode.
• Acrofatic: While he's not actually fat, Andrias is still massive, yet he has enough agility to outmaneuver smaller opponents.
• Actor Allusion: Keith David played a frog king in the titular 2013 film "The Frog Kingdom''. Here, he is cast as the king of a newt kingdom.
• Adipose Rex: Again, while he isn't actually fat, he's quite large compared to any other Amphibians, and he also happens to be their king.
• Affably Evil: He juggles with this, Faux Affably Evil and being a stoic villain, as his true personality is a fun goofball. However, thanks to the Core manipulating him into becoming evil, he's forced to put on a much more detached, aloof persona. His presentation before Marcy, and later Anne, is his more genuine side, although he is still using the girls to get the Calamity Box back in his hands. Sometimes, he instinctively acts courteous to his enemies, such as wishing Anne a merry Christmas as she uses the phrase as a Pre-Mortem One-Liner, whereas other times it's much more clearly skin-deep. The "evil" part was averted before his friends' betrayal, where he was actually disturbed to learn the true extent of what Amphibia's royalty does to keep the empire afloat, and after his Heel–Face Turn in the finale, after which he now strives to restore the nature of Amphibia that was destroyed by him and his ancestors.
• Agonizing Stomach Wound: Played With. In addition to losing his left arm and leg, and the tip of his tail, he also gets a massive hole in the left side of his belly where Anne rammed throught him, exposing his cybernetic insides. Although he survives the blow without any lasting pain, the damage to his body does take its toll on him as the gap in his stomach is still there, and it causes him to lose his eyesight by the 9 month timeskip in Amphibia because he refused to get it repaired. Matt Braly later confirmed that his injuries have left his days numbered.
• Alas, Poor Villain: Despite being an evil, power-crazed tyrant, his defeat at Anne's hands is downright brutal, dark, and sad. She strikes him at the exact moment he decides to repent and open himself up to defeat. Whilst Andrias does survive Anne's finishing blow and later cement his repentance, Word of God confirms that the damage has numbered his days.
• Always a Bigger Fish: To every other threat in the show. Most of them were wild animals who follow their instincts whose threat only encompassed their territories who he proceeded to brainwash into his armies per the Core's order, others were Villains of the Week who didn't make it past their spotlight episode. and Grime and Sasha want to conquer Amphibia but don't show a desire to go beyond; Andrias has higher ambitions and eviler plots than them, planning to conquer the multiverse. When Grime's rebellion is thwarted, Andrias immediately sets his own plans into motion, even pacifying the militant toads, proving Sasha and Grime who's the biggest evil around. However, most of the scale of his villainy is actually demanded by the Core.
• Ambiguously Evil: He doesn't do anything evil onscreen until season 2's finale, but there are hints dropped throughout the second season that something is... off... about him. He claims that his ancestors that used the box were "scientists and peaceful explorers" while looking away from the camera, and his last scene in "A Day at the Aquarium" has him making a "proposition" to Marcy with an ominous musical cue. "The First Temple" ends with him reporting to some enigmatic being underneath Newtopia that "the prophecy" is being undone, and they will have their revenge. All and any ambiguity gets thrown out the window in the season 2 finale once Andrias makes it clear that his ancestors were not "frail explorers" but violent conquerors of worlds, and he will continue that legacy at any cost.
• Ambiguous Situation: While he mentions that his ancestors were proud conquerors and that he plans to continue that legacy, he either didn't have that ambition in the past before his friends' betrayal, or something held him back from performing his conquests. Notably, Newtopia in his story is depicted as thriving with technology and robots, yet there is no sign that Andrias is performing mass conquest, despite him ruling Newtopia for centuries, which would be odd given how he had everything he needed to commit massive conquests for a long time, yet showed no signs of doing so. "The Core & The King" ultimately clarifies that invasions were happening at the time of each king's rule and Andrias was meant to spearhead Earth's invasion per orders from his father, and it was Leif seeing the future consequences of the misuse of the Calamity Box and the conquests that led to her betraying Andrias and unintentionally making him far worse than he already was set to be.
• Amphibian Assault: In the season 2 finale, "True Colors", he shows his more ferocious side, at one point outright crawling on all fours to fight Grime while baring his sharp teeth and letting out a loud and fearsome growl.
• An Arm and a Leg: After his defeat at Anne's hands after giving up, Andrias loses both his left arm and leg, which carries over even into the future without him apparently bothering to (or perhaps being given the choice to) repair them, using Barrel's hammer instead to walk around.
• Arch-Enemy: He becomes this to Anne once his true colors are revealed. He earns her ire by threatening to drop Sprig from the flying castle, only to do so anyway when his demands are met, and he takes it a step further by stabbing Marcy. He only makes it clearer when he sends Cloak-Bot to Earth and threatens not just Anne herself but her human family as well.
• The Atoner: Downplayed, as Andrias himself bemoans after having a Heel Realization from Sprig reading Leif's letter at the climax of the Earth invasion that he has done too much and crossed too many lines to make up for it all. He does, however, deliberately leave himself open for Anne to defeat him rather than continue to fight. This is played much straighter in the series finale when, after the moon is hijacked by the Core and plummets to the planet below, Andrias commands his remaining frobots to fly up to the moon and help Anne, Sasha, and Marcy push the moon back into space -— right before crushing his crown, through which the Core controlled him. He, along with his newt advisors Bartley, Branson, and Blair, is last seen in the series having taken up farming in Amphibia’s future, a punishment from the people for his crimes against the land, but is now much more serene and has reminders of his old friends as a symbolic show of his attempts to do better.
• Asskicking Leads to Leadership:
  • "True Colors" shows that he is not only the ruler of Amphibia, but also a fearsome fighter. Grime manages to subdue him with a sneak attack during the toad rebellion, but when Andrias is armed and prepared, he can fight off Sasha and Grime simultaneously, destroy Frobo in a single hit, and even withstand a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown from a gem-empowered Anne.
  • In "The Beginning of the End", he makes a Big Entrance in the midst of the chaotic battle that the Resistance are having with his forces, draws his sword, and basically tells their entire army to come at him all at once. He then proceeds to hold them all off with just his Laser Blade for an extended amount of time without a scratch on him, and mocks the retreating army after Darcy exposes the failure of their strike team that he didn't even find their efforts much of a challenge at all.
  • In " All In", he takes Anne on her Super Mode with a Humongous Mecha that proves capable of fighting her on even terms for an extended period, even if it starts to break down towards the end. Ultimately, Andrias isn't counting on the suit to outright overcome Anne directly, though he comes close to pummelling her unconscious several times, but to outlast her time limit for using her powers, which he does just as the suit is reaching its limits. Though Anne recovers for one last activation to launch a final attack on him, Leif's letter that Sprig delivers to him manages to get through to Andrias despite his cynicism and understanding that he's crossed too many lines to make up for it now, convincing him to lower the suit's defences and let Anne strike him down, effectively being defeated on his own terms rather than overcome by a superior opponent.
• Ax-Crazy: When Anne and Sasha say they'll stop him, he decides to demonstrate his power by blowing Toad Tower and all of its occupants sky-high.
• Bad Boss:
  • When the Cloak-Bot fails to kill Anne after several days of trying its hardest, he decides to pressure it to do so quicker by activating a hidden bomb in its mechanisms and giving it an hour to kill Anne before it explodes. It's mainly for pragmatic reasons, as the blast is shown to be big enough that it stood a good chance of wiping out a significant portion of the city and catching Anne in it even if the robot failed to find her, ensuring that Anne would be killed regardless of what happened (though Anne luckily launches Cloak-Bot into the sky where its explosion can't reach Earth).
  • In "Froggy Little Christmas", his new underlings give him a drone as a present. He then uses it to fire missiles at them for fun, commenting about how fast they are for their small legs.
• The Bad Guy Wins: He comes out of season 2 with everything he needs to start his plans of multiversal conquest, two of his foes (Frobo and Marcy) taken out by his hands (Frobo is destroyed save for his head and Marcy is severely wounded before Andrias patches her up for the Core's plans), others at his mercy (Sasha and Grime), and many (the Plantars and Anne) stranded on Earth with no known way to stop him or even a way back to Amphibia.
• Baritone of Strength: It's a given, since he's voiced by Keith David. King Andrias can absolutely wipe the floor with anyone short of a superpowered Anne, and he has a very deep voice.
• Barrier Warrior: he summons some type of shield-barrier-thing to stop Anne in her Super Mode from finishing him off.
• Beard of Evil: He has a beard of white hair, stemming from having lived for a thousand years, and is one of the more evil characters on the show, plotting to finish the multiversal conquest his ancestors started.
• Being Evil Sucks:
  • Downplayed. He is shown taking some enjoyment in the minor acts of evils he commits, like attacking Triple B with a prototype drone to test out its controls and also enjoying breaking Marcy's bonds of friendship and trust with the other girls by revealing her Dark Secret, but it's heavily implied these are all to distract himself from the immense pain and loneliness caused by his own broken friendship and the 1,000 years he's spent isolated and emotionally alone. He's greatly implied to actually regret breaking Marcy's trust and turning her into a vessel for the Core, and his act as The Good King is implied to not be entirely a facade he used to gain her trust, but in fact him finally opening up to an equal and a real friend, but his regrets over his past 'failures' and devotion to his duties to the Core make him bury these feelings and recommit himself to making his ancestors proud of him as a loyal servant to the Core's ambitions of becoming a Multiversal Conqueror every chance he gets, out of a twisted desire to 'redeem himself' no matter how unhappy it makes him personally.
  • At the climax of the Earth invasion in "All In", Sprig reading him Leif's last letter beseeching her old friend not to close his heart off to others because of their broken friendship manages to sincerely get through to him, bringing him to tears in pain over what he's lost as well as his sincere regret for only having received her message now, as by that point he's well aware that he's crossed far too many lines on both Earth and Amphibia to possibly make up for it, even though his heart is no longer in finishing the invasion and serving the Core's ambitions. At the end, he allows Anne to strike him down, despite holding the advantage over her, as his own small form of atonement for his sins, aware that the world will only ever see him as a monster even if he no longer desires to follow that path, and having literally no other option if he no longer wishes to continue the invasion due to the ability of the Core to pull a Villain Override on him.
• Berserk Button:
  • He despises the idea of "friendship" due to how a thousand years ago, Leif, who was one of his best friends, stole the Calamity Box from him, and then Barrel, his other best friend, refused to help him punish her, causing him to exile him once Leif had escaped. When holding Sprig hostage, he only decides to drop him when Anne notes that Sprig is her best friend in any world, wanting her to go through the same pain he went through.
  • When Marcy defies his conquest and uses the box to help Anne and the Plantars escape, he stabs her in fury.
  • Whenever Andrias learns Anne is still alive, meaning his plans were ruined by either her destroying the Cloak-Bot or another deadly weapon of his, he gets gradually more furious.
• BFS: His Laser Blade is almost as tall as he is, an impressive feat considering he's two stories tall.
• Big Fun: He's gigantic, and he acts very cheerful and cordial with Anne, the Plantars, and all of Newtopia. At least, that's how he acts to gain their trust. Later on, it's shown that he genuinely is a cordial and kind-hearted guy deep down, but unfortunately years of indoctrination and grooming has hardened his heart to most things.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Subverted. When Andrias is first introduced, he's a goofy, fun-loving sweetheart with a penchant for dorky pranks. Then, in "True Colors", he seemingly reveals this as an act, turning into a cruel and pragmatic villain whose jokes become a lot more sadistic. Throughout season 3, however, it's slowly revealed that the cruel and sadistic tyrant is the mask he wears because it's what the Core wants from him, whereas the dorky goofball is who he actually wants to be when free of its influence.
• Blood Knight: When Anne and her friends prepare to fight, he asks if they're serious before pulling out a massive energy sword and saying, "Let's have some fun." He also singlehandedly holds back the Alliance at the end, having the time of his life while doing so.
• Blue Is Heroic: Subverted at first. He's primarily blue in color, and initially seems like a kindly old ruler who befriends Anne and co. But then the show slowly reveals his true colors, culminating in the season 2 finale, "True Colors", revealing that he's a Multiversal Conqueror in the making... Or at least that's the path the Core and his father chose and groomed him for, it soon becomes clear that he's not quite as bad as his ancestors and there's still a shred of decency deep inside of him, in the finale he ends up pulling a genuine Heel–Face Turn after facing the guilt of his actions and seeking to atone for them.
• Bond One-Liner: "Now look what you've made me do...", immediately after stabbing Marcy in the back.
• Calling the Old Man Out: When it's starting to lose its fight against the Calamity Trio, the Core speaks to Andrias through his crown using the voice of his father Aldrich, ordering him to help it. Andrias instead orders his robots to assist the Calamity Trio, before telling the Core, and through it Aldrich, that he should have stood up to them years ago and crushing the crown in his one remaining hand.
  Core/Aldrich: You fool! You could've been immortal! WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!
  Andrias: Something I should have done a long time ago: STANDING UP TO YOU! [crushes crown]
• Call to Agriculture: As a condition of his atonement, he is made to contribute to replanting Amphibia's flora and agriculture.
• Chessmaster Sidekick: His Establishing Character Moment certainly sets him up to be The Chessmaster, plotting from within his palace and having a literal chessboard containing figures carved to resemble Marcy and Anne. The crux of his Evil Plan throughout season 2 involves manipulating the girls into finding out enough information about the Calamity Box to discover the way to recharge it, whilst underplaying his own knowledge of the Box's full capabilities so they won't suspect that it's a bad idea to do so, while also simultaneously using the cracks in the girls' relationship to manipulate Marcy into helping return the Box to him fully-charged without using her own knowledge of how it works to open a portal home the second they complete the temples. Finally, once they hand the box to him, he uses Marcy's Dark Secret to try and get the girls to turn on each other, since they need to stand united against him and the Core, according to the prophecy glimpsed briefly in "A Day at the Aquarium". When that fails, he shrugs it off, because he's already tricked the girls into unwittingly de-powering themselves by charging the Calamity Box, and thus there was no way for them to realistically beat a 10-ft tall Lightning Bruiser like himself armed with Magitek in direct combat. Really, it's telling that the only reason he doesn't win outright by the end of "True Colors" was due to a simple accident he couldn't have predicted. His master, the Core, is much less capable of making and following through such plans, being constantly distracted by its own megalomania and sadism and ending up easily beaten and destroyed by Anne's fully powered attack at the end of the series.
• Combat Pragmatist: Downplayed. Andrias never exactly fights dirty, and is shown to be an absolute beast of a fighter in direct combat, able to basically take on the united group of heroes by himself and win handily, but he has no problems attacking his enemies when they're distracted or disoriented, and generally has little wind-up when launching lethal attacks when trying to kill them as efficiently as possible. Not to mention, once he reactivates the extent of Newtopia's Magitek devices with the charged Calamity Box, he shows a penchant for using excessive force to put down his enemies, leaving any confrontation heavily slanted in his favor.
• Conflict Killer: Anne puts aside her anger toward Sasha manipulating and betraying her once it becomes clear that Sasha really was telling the truth about Andrias not being as good-intentioned as he seemed, and the Plantars also end up cooperating with Grime. Andrias also ends up destroying Toad Tower to display how powerful his fortress is, cementing himself as the most major threat to Amphibia as a whole... Until the Core makes itself known, that is.
• Contrasting Sequel Antagonist: Grime is an aristocratic thug who mellows out due to his friendship with Sasha, who he also genuinely cares about, and whose goals were primarily oriented around subjugating the frogs, generally utilizing brute force. King Andrias, however, is a king who relies primarily upon manipulating his subjects, won't let even buried-down care for others deter him, and whose goals are oriented around conquering the multiverse, utilizing futuristic technology to overpower any opposition. Similarly, Grime redeems himself at the beginning of the third Season and atones by fighting the Core's forces, while Andrias redeems himself at the tail end of the series, and atones by replanting the vast plant life he decimated.
• Cool Crown: One that's as cool as he's big, and he's very big. "Olivia & Yunan" reveals that the crown actually contains a device that allows direct communication with the Core, and apparently allows it to spy on those around Andrias as well. It seems like the Core can speak directly into his mind, but Andrias himself has to verbally talk back to communicate.
• Corrupted Character Copy: King Andrias Leviathan is a morally-inverted version of King Asgore. Both have very similar designs, being Large and in Charge monster kings wearing All-Encompassing Mantles and ruling over kingdoms of monsters in parallel dimensions. While Asgore is initially set up to be the Big Bad (he wants to kill the protagonist and take their soul so that he can wage war on mankind), he is ultimately revealed to be driven out of grief over the death of his children, is regretful of his actions, and can eventually be spared and redeemed should the protagonist choose to do so (and that is if he is not upstaged and killed by some of the bigger villains in the game). Andrias is the opposite: he is set up to be a potential ally to the protagonist Anne as he seems to be a Reasonable Authority Figure and seems willing to help her return home, but at the end of the second season is exposed as a megalomaniacal conqueror bent on conquering other dimensions. The third season even shows him experimenting on Marcy as part of his goals much like how Asgore harvested human souls in his bid to conquer the human world.
  • However, much like Asgore, Andrias is revealed to be regretful of his actions throughout that season, and he serves as the public figurehead to the real ruler of Amphibia, the Core, a Mind Hive of scholars and monarchs, Amphibia's greatest minds, who wanted nothing but to expand their empire and gain as much knowledge as possible and refused to let even death stop them. One of the minds that had become part of the Core upon death, Andrias' own father and previous ruler of Newtopia Aldrich Leviathan, in particular was a power-hungry megalomaniac who was when alive, and still is as part of the Core, perfectly willing to go to truly heinous extremes that even his own son is hesitant to cross. This helps spark Andrias' eventual redemption in the final two episodes, when he allows Anne to strike him down, begs her to save Marcy, and sends his remaining Frobots to help the Calamity Girls push back the Core-controlled moon, defying his master after centuries of emotional abuse.
• Cryptic Background Reference: He mentions a prophecy and how Marcy and the girls are undoing it as they charge the gems once more. Given the events of "True Colors", it's implied he's referring to how the girls are unknowingly weakening themselves by severing their connection to the Calamity Box and returning the powers they'd gained from it.
• Curb Stomp Cushion: Once the heroes decide to try and fight him, they find themselves severely outmatched. Nothing short of Barrel's warhammer or Super Anne does any significant damage to him, and even those two don't defeat him, just hurt him.
• Cyborg: "All In" reveals him to be at least partly biomechanical, with his left arm, leg, and part of his chest getting torn apart at the finishing climax of his and Anne's fight, exposing the wiring underneath. He attributes this to him living for 1,000 years and needing to keep his body in fighting shape to serve the Core whenever the prophecy was finally fulfilled.
• Deal with the Devil: His proposition to Marcy at the end of "A Day at the Aquarium" involves promising to take Marcy and her friends with him when he "explores" other worlds so they can have infinite adventures. As with any of these deals, he clearly had no intention of carrying out his part of the bargain.
• Death Equals Redemption: Subverted, but the intent is still there. After receiving Leif's final letter and realising how much he's lost following the Core's orders, not to mention getting subjected to a Villain Override to force him to keep fighting even when his heart's no longer in the invasion, Andrias decides the only way to stop himself from committing any more sins is to be stopped, opening up his Powered Armour's defences to allow Anne to strike him full-force with her Super Mode before she can stop herself. It doesn't prove fatal thanks to his Robotic Reveal, but it certainly would have otherwise, and Andrias is demonstrably uncaring if the people of Amphibia choose to execute him for his crimes or not afterwards.
• Demoted to Dragon: Zigzagged. By the end of season 2 and for most of season 3, from the heroes' perspective, he is the Big Bad aiming to become a Multiversal Conqueror, starting with Earth, but various episodes from his perspective throughout the season show that he's actually just The Heavy for the Core, which needs a physical agent like himself to act through because it's confirmed to the secret room under the royal palace... until it downloads itself into Marcy and becomes capable of taking direct action and the role of Big Bad by the day of the invasion. "The Core and the King" makes it clear that the position of 'king' of Amphibia is little more than that of a figurehead for the Core to rule through, and that Andrias and his forbears before him have actually always been The Dragon for the Core's ambitions. However, none of the heroes are aware of the Core's existence up until the last episodes, save through Mother Olm's vague allusions to it when outlining how Andrias's predecessors misused the Calamity Gems' powers for their own benefit, clearly not able to fully understand what the Core is at that point, and as a result, the resistance's plan to steal the music box from Andrias fails, because they were unaware of another threat to be wary of while he engaged their armies in battle.
• Detrimental Determination: Andrias is hellbent on making amends in his and the Core's eyes, no matter the cost. He turns his kingdom into a wasteland whilst enslaving his people in order to fuel Newtopia's ascension back to multiversal conquest, and not even forming genuine affection for Marcy is enough to sway Andrias from his intended course, stabbing the girl when she almost undoes all of his millennium-long waiting and hard work in one fell swoop during "True Colors". By the time Andrias realizes he's been fighting to gain the forgiveness of a monster which is not worth the sacrifices he's making, and that his driving belief that Leif forgot about him was not true, he's burned almost all his bridges: his kingdom has been ecologically devastated and his former-subjects all now view him as a despot, Earth sees him as nothing more than a tyrannical alien conqueror, and the first true friend he made in a thousand years is the only one not to show any hatred towards him despite what he did to her. But after she has left Amphibia for good, he is left with nothing and his misdeeds cause him to become a shell of his former self who now wanders and heals the land he once destroyed with some keepsakes of his past friendships.
• Didn't See That Coming: He doesn't know Anne only charged her gem partway, thus retaining her connection with it and being granted a Super Mode so she can fight him, until she activates that Super Mode to defeat him; this leaves her as the sole threat to his plans.
• The Dog Bites Back: After a thousand years of emotional abuse and manipulation, Andrias finally stands up to the Core by forfeiting and even actively defying them when they try to manipulate him to help during their greatest hour of need.
• A Dog Named "Dog": He is a giant salamander named Andrias, which is the name of a genus of giant salamander.
• Don't You Dare Pity Me!: When Anne says she pities Andrias for cutting himself off from everyone and hiding alone in a castle, this sets him off even more.
• The Dragon: For all intents and purposes, he's the second-in-command to the Core and submits to its every order, referring to it as "My lord" and being willing to stand down and obey it even for orders he's hesitant to carry out, such as using Marcy as its vessel. The position of 'king' of Amphibia is eventually revealed to be little more than a title inherited by those who become the Core's physical agent and foremost devoted servant, and it is otherwise the true, immortal, and eternal ruler of Amphibia, with Andrias little more than its public figurehead and occasional enforcer.
• Dragon-in-Chief: Since the Core lacks a good host to move around before it takes over Marcy, Andrias takes center stage as the out-and-out main threat. In the lead-up to the final battle with him and his army, none of the heroes are aware of the Core's existence beyond Mother's Olm's vague explanations to Sasha and Anne, because she herself doesn't fully understand what it is, and as far as everybody outside his palace knows, Andrias is the main threat and driving force behind the invasion, when in actuality, he's merely the physical agent of the Core's will before it becomes Darcy.
• Dragon Their Feet: He outlasts the Core by a mere 29 seconds before being taken out by Anne.
• Driven to Suicide: After hearing Leif's message, with his own desire for the invasion dwindling and the Core no longer enforcing its will on him, he opens up his armor and allows Anne to strike him down with the full intent of accepting the consequences, even if it means killing him.
• Easily Forgiven: Heavily downplayed. In the end, the only person who shows him the slightest bit of forgiveness is Marcy, who suffered the most at his hands, and she only gives him an awkward but genuine "goodbye" when they part ways. Andrias' reaction shows that even that was much more than he felt he deserves. The epilogue shows that he has been put to work in the fields of Amphibia, undoing the damage he caused.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones:
  • In his youth, he genuinely cherished the friendships he had with Barrel and Leif, and was distraught when Leif stole the Calamity Box and when Barrel ultimately couldn't bring himself to assist him in punishing her, and even then he only went as far as exiling Barrel once Leif was out of sight. He went as far as destroying a painting of the three in grief and anger, while the mere mention of a genuine friendship seems to rile him up as a result of his friendship's end.
  • Though it initially seems like he only regarded Marcy as a disposable pawn for his plans, he eventually does show he genuinely has some fondness for her. His flashback in "All In" to their first meeting has him genuinely amused by her antics and going out of his way to talk the Core out of having her killed, "Olivia and Yunan" shows that he tried to talk the Core out of using her as the entity's host even if he caved in to his superior's demands, and then when Marcy is being possessed by the Core he looks away in what appears to be some genuine regret or guilt at what he's allowed to happen. In "The Core & The King", while the Core optimizes its control over Marcy and locks her further within her own mind, he glances at Darcy with a remorseful expression and reflects on Leif urging him to use his powers for good, but allows the process to complete itself instead of sabotaging it. In "All In", as Darcy is gloating, Andrias solemnly reminisces about his first encounter with her, and after his defeat he's practically begging Anne to save Marcy.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • Played with, as while he admits he did try to talk the Core out of turning Marcy into its host and when it's actually doing so he looks not triumphant but solemn and even a bit regretful as he averts his eyes from the scene, he ultimiately did go through with it, regardless of whatever his actual feelings are on the subject. By his own admission, it's just business to be done. That said, he's also shown to have to force himself to comply with some of the Core's more evil orders so as to serve it, such as mistreating Marcy and letting the Core subdue her personality for their own sake, showing that he naturally has some hang-ups and issues with the lengths it's willing to go to, but his devotion to his family legacy and desire to atone for his past mistakes override these standards in the end, something the Core is clearly pushing him towards with hollow praise and emotional manipulation.
  • While in his youth he was excited to lead the invasion of Earth in medieval times, even he found himself shocked when his father, King Aldrich, ordered him to wipe out the natives of the planet to strip-mine their resources.
• Evil All Along: He turns out to be the Arc Villain of season 2, secretly planning to use the Calamity Box to take over all the dimensions in the universe, including Earth.
• Evil Counterpart: He is what Anne might have ended up as if she allowed the grief of being betrayed by her friends to get to her in a darker show, which is not helped by the fact that they share blue as a color motif. Even more than that, his desire to live up to his ancestors' legacy and make his father's mind contained within the Core proud of him at long last after he lost the music box and doomed their advanced civilisation to gradual decay is a clear parallel to Anne's own desire to make her parents proud of her, fuelling her own positive Character Development through staying with the Plantars. The difference is that Andrias' family were evil conquering tyrants who cared nothing for other people, and Aldrich was an Abusive Parent who poisoned his son's mind against his friends and groomed him to be little more the next loyal servant of the Core after his passing, whereas the Boonchuys are Good Parents who want the best for Anne as an individual, and support her in her own choices.
• Evil Has a Bad Sense of Humor: In "Olivia & Yunan", Andrias hammers home his Faux Affably Evil nature by cheerfully telling Yunan to give the frogs a stern talking-to if they refuse to be used as slave labor... and as she lets out a sigh of relief, he casually adds that he was joking and orders her to kill everyone who resists.
• Eviler than Thou:
  • "True Colors" demonstrates that he is this to Grime and Sasha. While Grime wishes to conquer the land of Amphibia, King Andrias sets out to become a Multiversal Conqueror and sees Amphibia as completely disposable. Also, while Grime and Sasha come to see one another as genuine friends, Andrias only saw Marcy as a pawn to his grand scheme, and both figuratively and literally backstabs her when she repents and tries to amend for her mistake.
  • His master, the Core, is explicitly this to him, being the driving force behind the planetary invasions that ravaged other worlds for their resources, with it being greatly hinted that Andrias himself doesn't really want to be a Multiversal Conqueror, but commits to that path as his ancestors once did in order to make their preserved selves within the Core proud of him. The Core's treatment of Marcy showcases that it lacks even the small shreds of empathy that Andrias himself still possesses, and it explicitly looks down on him for naturally possessing a disposition unsuited to being the ruthless tyrant it needs to rule through. Several of Andrias' more ruthless atrocities after he reveals himself as a villain are him going out of his way to act in line with the Core's expectations of its most devoted servant, so as to convince it that he isn't an Inadequate Inheritor of the throne compared to his forebears.
• Evil Is Bigger: He's the Arc Villain of season 2 and Dragon of the Core (the overall true Big Bad), and is far larger than any of the heroic characters in the series.
• Evil Is Petty: He resents the betrayal of his friends so much that he decides to kill Sprig even when his demands were met because he wants Anne to go through the same pain he did. The fact that Sprig bears a Strong Family Resemblance to Leif, his ancestor and the one who actually betrayed Andrias' trust and stole the Calamity Box all those years ago, likely played a big part in his snap decision as well.
• Evil Laugh: He has a rather deep and commanding one, which he begins using after his true self is revealed.
• Evil Plan: He plans to use the power of the Calamity Box to take over all dimensions, even Anne's. The gems getting recharged also drains the girls of their powers, rendering them useless and unable to stop him. "The Core & The King" shows that this was actually his ancestors and the Core's plan, due to needing the resources from other planets to sustain their way of life on Amphibia. The rulers of Amphibia traditionally invaded other worlds, starting when they came of age, as a kind of rite of passage, and it was widely seen as a noble duty by the populace, with Andrias ignorant that he would also be required to exterminate or enslave the sapient lifeforms in those other worlds until the day before he was due to inherit the duty. Earth was to be Andrias' first conquest, and after 1,000 years of waiting to uphold his ancestor's legacy and finally redeem his 'mistake', Andrias is eager to finish what he was meant to do all those years ago.
• Evil Sounds Deep: Double Subverted. Andrias initially appears to be a subversion, seeming to be a jovial, friendly king with the deep voice that comes with being played by perpetually-typecast-as-villain Keith David. However, when his true nature is revealed in "True Colors", he becomes a played-straight example. However, he eventually undergoes a Heel–Face Turn.
• Expy:
  • To Darth Vader. They're both Fallen Heroes who had a loved one who meant everything to them, and when they left them, it utterly destroyed their faith in humanity. This led to them being manipulated by the true Big Bad of their respective works, although they would be the main leader of their evil groups. Their loved one would eventually prove that they didn't want them to become evil, and after hearing the truth, they would end up performing a Heel–Face Turn to stand up for the evil being that once controlled them. Andrias even has an appearance akin to Vader, with his black armor and cape, and he even wields a glowing red sword. They both even became cyborgs to artificially extent their lifespan.
  • According to the creators, Andrias was inspired by Vendrick, king of Drangleic, and there are some notable similarities between them; Both are giant-sized, extremely old monarchs, both wear crowns that are eventually revealed to be significant to the plot, and both are set up as the Big Bad of the story, only for it to be revealed that their most villainous actions were undertaken due to the manipulations of a Transhuman Abomination that stood them near (Nashandra, Vendrick's wife, is an Undead Abomination made from the soul of the first human, while the Core is a Mind Hive made from Andrias' ancestors).
• Face Death with Dignity: According to Matt Braly, during the Time Skip, Andrias actively refuses to have his life-extending cybernetics repaired and has dedicated himself to using the time he has left the heal the land he damaged.
• Failure Hero: What he sees himself as. He was meant to inherit the duty of invading other worlds as his ancestors had traditionally done for centuries to sustain their way of life on Amphibia, something widely seen as an honourable and noble duty by the populace, but after Leif got an ominous prophecy about Amphiba being destroyed if they continued to abuse the music box, she reluctantly used his trust in a moment of vulnerability to steal the box and eventually send it to Earth. Andrias inherited the throne aware that both his father and the preserved minds of his ancestors contained within the Core were contemptuous of him for his mistake costing them their empire, and had to spend 1,000 years mentally connected to them through the device hidden in his Cool Crown as the advanced technology of Newtopia gradually withered away. By the present day, Andrias' driving motive is to atone for his mistakes and successfully continue his ancestors' ways under the Core's direction, implicitly hoping to become the kind of ruler that would make his forebears proud of him, particularly his father's mind still contained within the Core, driving his more ruthless actions as a result.
• Fantastic Racism: It's all but confirmed in "The Core and the King" that the Fantastic Caste System in Amphibia — newts at the top, frogs at the bottom, with toads meant to keep the frogs in line — was all him, born from him becoming paranoid of his frog and toad friends' (his frog friend Leif in particular) entire species after their perceived betrayals of him, and personally venting his rage and pain.
• Fate Worse than Death: Played with. Rather than dying like he fully intended and expected to in "All In", he is forced to live in a crippled state, with his internal robotics that have kept him alive damaged so that the effects of aging catch up to him again, losing his sight as one effect. He then receives a life sentence for his crimes and is made to do community service through farming across Amphibia, restoring the environment he had so severely damaged, all while in chains and shackles. While this is a humiliating fate for a former king to meet, Andrias is quite visibly happier and more at peace with this state of existence compared to when he was a king and burdened with the Core's expectations of him for over 1,000 years. He also keeps mementos of his old friends Leif and Barrel with him at all times now, which shows that he carries their memory with him at all times and is likely looking forward to eventually being Together in Death with them.
• Faux Affably Evil: He hides his cruel nature and desire for multiversal conquest behind a warm, jovial facade. Even when his true colors are revealed, he still maintains a condescendingly chatty tone. Furthermore, later episodes show that his goofy and dorky personality are not an act, and he really is that wacky — but it doesn't stop him from being an absolute total jerkass, to say the least. At least part of this is because he's intentionally complying with some of the Core's more immoral and evil plans despite not naturally being quite as evil as his predecessors, and genuinely being somebody who cherished friendship in his youth, before Leif's betrayal convinced him that it was nothing but an unnecessary distraction from his true destiny. Therefore, he intentionally goes out of his way to act as a 'fitting' tyrannical conqueror of worlds in order to impress the preserved minds of his ancestors contained within the Core, desperate to live up to their prior example and show that he's not an Inadequate Inheritor even as his natural quirky personality runs counter to that.
• Foil: He turns out to be this to both of the first season's main antagonists, Mayor Toadstool and Captain Grime. All three are the Arc Villains of their respective debut season (S1 for Toadstool and Grime, S2 for Andrias).
  • Like Toadstool, Andrias is Large and in Charge, but to a greater extent, as while Toadstool is merely a mayor, Andrias is a king. Both are just full of comedic moments as well. Toadstool, however, is not as good a fighter as he'd like to be due to being Formerly Fit, has his schemes constantly thrown off the rails by events he didn't expect, and makes his corruption known to Anne from the get-go. On the flipside, Andrias is Acrofatic and still in his physical prime (despite being much older than Toadstool), which when combined with his much larger size, means he can curbstomp entire armies with little effort. He's a textbook example of The Chessmaster, constantly finding ways to adapt to situations he didn't expect and manipulate them to his advantage, and worst of all, he puts on an eerily convincing façade of The Good King to Anne and the Plantars, making sure to keep up his act until he has the Calamity Box back in his hands.
  • Like Grime, Andrias formed an alliance with one of Anne's friends from Earth and took her under his wing; however, while Grime eventually comes to legitimately care for Sasha beyond the use she has in his army, going as far as saving her life when she falls from Toad Tower, Andrias' "friendship" with Marcy is a massive ruse that lasts as long as she complies to his plans, and he ends up fatally stabbing her when she repents from her actions and tries to send Anne back home. Even when "Olivia and Yunan" shows that he legitimately cares about Marcy in some way and even initially tried to talk the Core out of using her as a host body, he still won't let that sentimentality get in the way, even if he shows some guilt about it.
  • He's one to each of the Calamity Girls:
    • Like Anne, he was betrayed by both of his closest friends, Leif and Barrel, who each had good intentions for their respective actions. While Anne wants to mend her friendship with Sasha and Marcy and rescue them no matter what, Andrias let himself be embittered by his friends' betrayal, banishing Barrel to the northern lands in anger over his compliance and destroying a painting he had made as a tribute of their friendship, as well as coming to believe that getting attached to someone will only get you hurt when they inevitably leave you. They also have a similar color scheme, being associated with purple (her school uniform and his armor) and the blue of the heart Calamity Gem. Also, like Anne, they are both submissive to a person with power over them, the Core and Sasha respectively, and will put away their feelings in order to please their respective people, but while Anne grows to stand up against Sasha, Andrias is stuck under the influence of the Core and obeys its every whim, even if it's against what he feels.
    • Like Sasha, he is controlling and puts his personal goals above others' well-being. Sasha does it out of misguided but genuine belief she is making the right decisions for everyone involved, and when faced with the consequences of her behavior (Anne declaring their friendship over and then getting sent away, Marcy possibly dying) she resolves to become a better person. However, Andrias, while he cares about Marcy, still uses her as a host for the Core and simply turns away as she's stripped of her own free will, showing he's too focused and afraid to change.
    • Like Marcy, he is highly intelligent and cultured, and wants to gain access to other worlds. Marcy does so to escape her daily life, satisfy her boundless curiosity, and go on never-ending adventures with Anne and Sasha. Andrias uses his intelligence to manipulate others and further the Core's legacy of invading the multiverse.
• Foreshadowing: Throughout season 2, there are several signs that Andrias is a villain. For example:
  • On the poster for season 2, Andrias is far in the background, and is noticeably much more darkly shadowed than the others. He also seems to look sinisterly at Anne with interest.
  • When Andrias is properly introduced in "The Plantars Check In", his entire body is darkly shadowed against the sunlight and has a sinister expression, followed by jovially leaning out and coming into the full light.
  • When first meeting Anne, Andrias seems to laugh before each sentence, and when greeting her, he asks himself if he's saying it right. At the same time, he seems to purposefully calm himself down when getting down to business, as if trying to hide his intentions.
  • When Lady Olivia reminds Andrias of his "proper castle etiquette", he just playfully waves her off.
  • Upon discovering the Calamity Box is powerless, this line comes up.
    Andrias: This will require further study in the deepest of our archives. Give me a few days to work with this information. At that time, we shall reconvene and set a glorious plan in motion.
  • At the end of "Lost in Newtopia", when he and Marcy find the secret library wing, Andrias has a smirk on his face when Marcy runs down the stairs before following her. It turns out that it leads to the room where the Core is kept.
  • In "A Day at the Aquarium", while explaining to Anne and the Plantars about how his ancestors who used the Calamity Box were "peaceful explorers and scientists", Andrias looks away for a brief moment while speaking in a suspicious tone. At the end of the episode, when he approaches Marcy with a proposition for her, ominous music is heard playing.
  • The scars in his 24-Hour Armor hint that despite his appearance and Big Fun personality, he's a lot more competent in combat than he initially appears to be.
  • Despite his Modest Royalty status and disdain for royal etiquette, he's constantly wearing his Cool Crown as a symbol of authority as the ruler of Amphibia, only removing it when speaking to his master, placing it before him in the room the Core is contained in as a gesture of submission to him, and when Anne smacks it off his head during her No-Holds-Barred Beatdown of him, he makes a point of retrieving it afterwards. In "Olivia and Yunan", it turns out that the crown contains a device that mentally connects him to the Core at all times, allowing it to beam instructions into his brain and share in its Sinister Surveillance of Newtopia.
  • When he reveals himself as a villain in "True Colours", he speaks of fulfilling his family legacy of becoming a Multiversal Conqueror with reverence, like it was a sacred duty he has to fulfill, and his devotion to the Core showcased in "Olivia & Yunan" has him state it would 'lead them to their destiny', showing that he's relying on it to be a guide for how his multiversal invasion should progress. This hints at The Reveal in "The Core & the King" that, at heart, Andrias honestly doesn't want to be a multiversal-conquering tyrant, but is instead brainwashed through years of indoctrination by the Core, which does have grander ambitions, and has him serving as its physical agent to enact said ambitions in its stead, with Andrias complying out of a desire to live up to his twisted family legacy.
• Freudian Excuse Denial: Andrias implicitly inflicts this on himself when he learns his millennium-long hatred of Leif, and his belief that his father and the Core were right about his friendships' worthlessness, were all for nothing. He flat-out admits that regardless of the rather tragic reasons he had for becoming the evil tyrant, he's caused far too much suffering (to all of Amphibia and to a girl who genuinely cared about him) and has crossed too many moral boundaries to just be forgiven.
• Genius Bruiser: He's fully adept in combat despite his huge frame, and is knowledgeable on how the Calamity Box works.
• The Good King: This is pretty much his public persona, acting like a jolly big fellow when he meets the Plantars. In private, however, he's a ruthless tyrant in the making waiting for the chance to conquer everything and rule it with an iron fist. Later revelations muddy this, as it's shown that he used to be a genuinely kind individual in his youth, but his guilt over losing the music box and the centuries he spent alone with only the Core as his closest confidant gradually twisted him into a devoted servant of its will, willing to do anything to earn its approval and live up to the legacy of his ancestors.
• Heel–Face Turn: He redeems himself during the penultimate episode after reading Leif's letter and realizing his megalomaniacal goals in the Core's name were All for Nothing, allowing Anne to finish him off once he's free of his master's control and begging her to save Marcy. He later aids the Calamity girls by sending the Frobots to help them push back the moon, and willingly accepts his sentence of community service and exile from Newtopia.
• Hero Killer: After he reveals his true colors to the Plantars, he kills both Frobo and seemingly Marcy, though the former is repaired (and later upgraded by Polly) and he ends up keeping the latter alive to make her into a suitable vessel for the Core. He then starts sending various weapons to Earth to kill Anne, because she is the only one left with the power to defeat him and thus the main threat to his conquest.
• Hidden Agenda Villain: Given the Stalker Shot at the end of "Marcy at the Gates" being a stark contrast with his first full appearance in "The Plantars Check In", which portrays him as boisterous and friendly, exactly where he falls on the moral spectrum was unclear until "The First Temple". That said, he seems to have something big planned involving Anne and Marcy (and possibly Sasha) if his Establishing Character Moment is any indicator... And it seems to involve an enigmatic being who is plotting revenge from the shadows. "True Colors" finally reveals his true goals: to reactivate the Calamity Box, drain the girls of their connections with their stones so they can't stop him, create an army of robot-frog warriors, and then take over the multiverse as his ancestors had begun, though where his master and the revenge scheme fit in is so far still unknown. The Core is eventually revealed to be the ultimate instigator of his family legacy of invading other worlds to sustain the advanced Newtopian society through looting their resources, and for Andrias himself, it would appear he still desires metaphorical revenge against Leif for thwarting his planed invasion of Earth centuries ago, aiming to finish what he was meant to do as the first step in him upholding his family legacy.
• Hidden Heart of Gold: Despite all his actions, Andrias does have some semblance of goodness within him, as he feels some regret and guilt for his actions, but the Core's manipulation and his own desire to make amends for his failure has caused him to bury this heart deep down.
• Hidden Villain: He actually invokes this towards Anne, Marcy, and the various allies they make. The audience is given their first hint of Andrias' less than benevolent intentions straight away before the girls ever meet him, but he goes out of his way to cultivate the image of a Big Fun ruler whenever interacting with them, underplaying his understanding of the Calamity Box and the reasons for the girls being in Amphibia, subtly guiding them to recharge the Gems on the box to return home, which will also deprive them of the various abilities they received from the box without knowing about it (but Anne only charges her gem partially, and thus she retains hers). He makes certain to manipulate Marcy in particular subtly whenever they're alone, such as allowing her to 'discover' the secret room containing the information about the Calamity Box, or approaching her with his offer to continue having adventures with Anne and Sasha once Anne's run off after the Plantars. The closest they get to seeing that something's off about him is his loss of composure when Grime and Sasha interfere before he's able to hold the charged Calamity Box, but even then, he maintains his pretensions of being on the heroes' side until they literally hand him the Box themselves, whereupon he finally lets the act drop, having been cautious up to that point because the girls' powers held a good chance of upsetting his plans, so he made certain to not let them even suspect him of being duplicitous until he was sure that they'd cast away the best chance they had of stopping him.
• Horrifying the Horror:
  • The Shadowfish are depicted as nigh-unstoppable, intangible threats to Marcy, Anne, and the Plantars, at least until they discover their weakness to mirrors. In "The First Temple", Andrias heads down a secret passageway to meet his master to discuss their plans, coming across a couple of the otherworldly horrors, who move out of his way despite Andrias not having any mirrors on him, showing that he's worse than them underneath his jocular exterior.
  • Grime and Sasha end up outright horrified when they see Andrias' true goals of conquering every dimension by discovering his hidden tapestry and eventually seeing Andrias himself declare his intent. This prompts the duo to turn over a new leaf and help the Plantars and their allies stop him.
  • Andrias himself shortly thereafter ends up on the other end of this trope, when his sadistic attempted murder of Sprig causes Anne to tap into her Calamity Box powers against his expectations, being aware that, for all his advantages, Anne's Super Mode is something he can't hope to overcome on his own, though he still does his damnedest to fight her off as best he can, even as she's handing him and his assembled robot mooks their behinds.
  • The Core possessing Marcy unsettles even him, as he can't bring himself to watch the conversion process, and is shown afterwards to be uncomfortable interacting with 'Darcy', unnerved by how his master is now mimicking many of Marcy's habits and personality traits mixed with its own malice.
• Hyper-Competent Sidekick: Ironically, while the Core frequently degrades and mocks him for being weak and useless, the vast majority of the villains' successes are a result of Andrias' actions and not the Core's:
  • Andrias spends the entire course of the show up until "True Colors" playing Marcy and Anne like a fiddle, easily making them believe in his facade of The Good King and nearly destroying any chance they had of resisting him without even lifting a finger himself. The only reason Anne retains her powers and thus ability to resist him is because of a coincidence completely beyond his control. Even after he reveals his true nature, he still sows discord between the girls by revealing the Awful Truth. By contrast, when the Core tries to manipulate the girls, it falls flat each time due to their Character Development.
  • While the Core is a good fighter, it has to rely on dirty tricks, lets itself get distracted by sadism, and is ultimately beaten by a teenage girl with no powers to speak of. Andrias is a far greater warrior who prefers to go directly for the kill with no dilly-dallying and wins without using dirty tricks. The only two times Andrias can be considered to have lost a fight, it's against a Calamity-enhanced Anne whom he was completely unprepared for; and during their rematch a season later, when he initally beats her, but has his fighting spirit broken by Sprig reading Leif's letter and is beaten by her again, this time on his own accord.
• Hypocrite: He has a dim opinion of his old friends, Leif and Barrel, who both betrayed him in some way, but he himself will lie and go back on his word if it will get him closer to his goals. It's showcased that this is more due to him being contemptuous of the idea of friendship due to their past 'betrayals', and thus, as he sees nobody else around him as a true friend and confidant besides the Core, he has no issues lying to others in order to forward his master's goals.
• The Heavy: King Andrias drove the series' plot (Him trying to take the music box away from Leif is the reason why Leif hid the music box in a more severe way and being the cause of the three girls to be at Amphibia in the first place and he purely plan to have toads keep frogs in line) and he's the series' most active threat.
• "I Can't Look!" Gesture: He has this reaction when Marcy gets possessed by the Core, implying some guilt at what he's allowing to happen to someone he has some care for.
• I Let You Win: In “All In”, after listening to Leif's last letter, in which she asks him to open up his heart to new friends despite his fallout with her, he loses his will to fight and stands down while lamenting all the atrocities he's caused, but then the Core mind-controls him into keeping up the fight. When he is ultimately freed, he decides to not fight at his full capacity, and opens upon a weak point as Anne charges with the last bits of her power so as to let her deliver a decisive blow to him, so he won’t be able to hurt anyone anymore.
• I Lied: King Andrias tells Marcy the truth about the Calamity Box being able to open portals to other worlds, but assures her he only wants it to explore other worlds peacefully, knowing Marcy was desperate not to be separated from her friends and absolutely adores going on adventures. Marcy is horrified when she realizes he lied to her.
• I Should Have Done This Years Ago: He admits as such when he finally stands up to Aldrich and the Core by crushing his crown in his hand and sending the Frobots up to help the Calamity Trio.
• If You Won't, I Will: In "True Colors", after revealing his true intentions, he tells Marcy that if she doesn't tell her friends why she conspired with him to ensure the Calamity trio never returned to Earth, he'll tell them himself. In Season 3, upon discovering the Cloak-Bot has failed and Anne is still alive, he resorts to trying to kill her himself, no matter how many times she's out to defeat him.
• Implied Death Threat: King Andrias tells Olivia and Yunan if anyone resists, they are to be eliminated. It’s clear by "anyone" that he also means they’re not exempt from this either.
• Inferiority Superiority Complex: He acts in a prideful manner befitting a king, but only to distract from the fact that he hates himself and has no sense of self-worth unless he achieves what the Core wants him to.
• Insult Backfire: He expresses mild annoyance at being called "evil" by Anne.
• Interclass Friendship: Growing up, his two closest friends were a gardener, Leif the frog, and one of the castle guards, Barrel the toad. His father didn't approve, although it's more that he didn't approve of Andrias having friends at all, rather than specifically not wanting him to befriend the common folk.
• Interspecies Friendship: In his youth, he (a newt) had a frog and a toad as his two best friends until Aldrich broke them apart through gaslighting and manipulation. He also befriends Marcy a millennium later, although that is also broken when the Core forces him to betray her.
• Intergenerational Friendship: He's well over a thousand years older than Marcy. Even after his betrayal, it's evident his fondness for her wasn't entirely an act, and the first thing he does after his defeat is beg Anne to save Marcy despite being severely wounded and crippled from Anne's finishing blow.
• It's All About Me: Ultimately subverted. Andrias at first is presented as an egomaniac who wants to rule everything for himself, but it's soon revealed that he truly doesn't like to conquer except for the sake of making his family proud, and any accomplishments in the war are for the Core's sake rather than his own. His excessive pride is instead driven by a deep-seated sense of self-loathing.
• It's All My Fault: Andrias feels this way towards the decline of Newtopia to its current state, being the only one who remembers the city at the height of its glory when powered by Magitek, and feeling guilt for trusting those he considered his friends, Leif in particular, which then led to the box being stolen and the legacy of his ancestors steadily crumbling away as the years passed and the technology of Amphibia stagnated. On the other hand, rather than consider that the box was stolen from him for a morally good reason, Andrias instead sees the problem as being him putting his trust in others in the first place, and is thusly determined to undo his mistake and restore his city to its former glory and more, hence why he plans to become a Multiversal Conqueror like his ancestors before him. It's shown later on that this mentality isn't really one he had from within his own being but rather the kind of mentality his ancestors drilled on him, with his father doing most of the job.
• I've Come Too Far: Once Sprig reads Leif's letter to him, he realizes that his course of action for the last 1,000 years was a mistake, but he's come too far to stop now, so he lowers his defenses to let Anne strike him down in her Super Mode so he won't have a choice.
• Jerk with a Heart of Jerk: Oh dear Lord, he is a jerk. He's kept his playful childishness, but is now filled with malice and cruel mockery, especially towards Marcy. Though, it is shown later on that he is genuinely fond of Marcy and didn't want to put her through so much hell at first until the time drew near for him to restart the Core's conquests. Addditionally, when he is giving orders to the titular characters of "Olivia & Yunan", he has Yunan round up innocent villagers to work in his factories, and when he mentions that if they refuse…
  Andrias: Give them a stern talking to?
  Olivia: Phew.
  Yunan: Not too bad.
  Andrias: Just kidding! Terminate them!
• Just Between You and Me: Once he has the fully-charged Calamity Box, Andrias then drops his façade of The Good King and gives a Motive Rant explaining his true motivations to Anne and the others rather than sending them home and preparing his invasion once they'd left. It's implied to be Invoked however, as Andrias only tells the girls information that will demoralize or turn them against each other, so as to ensure they won't unite against him and to avoid losing track of them on Earth, and he keeps totally silent about the implications that the girls are The Chosen One destined to interfere somehow with his and his Master's plans, leaving Anne and the others equally confused once she unlocks her Super Mode, against Andrias' expectations, as he thought that she would have fully drained her Calamity Gem and thus lost access to her gem abilities.
• Kick the Dog: From Jumping Off the Slippery Slope onward, he indulges in a lot of this.
  • He tells Anne and Sasha that Marcy has a Dark Secret, which he'll share if she doesn't. Before she can work up the nerve, he spills the beans and mocks her for getting chatty over Flipwart.
  • He then destroys Frobo with his fist for protecting Polly without any remorse. And this is after calling Frobo a defect.
  • After that, he threatens to drop Sprig to his death unless Polly puts the Calamity Box back, then does it anyway because Anne called Sprig her best friend and he wants her to feel the pain of that loss.
  • He ends "True Colors" by fatally injuring Marcy, coldly stabbing her through the back and blaming her for it.
  • In "Anne-sterminator", he sets off a bomb in his assassin's chest when he hears that it has failed to kill Anne so far with a one-hour countdown, while implying that he'll turn it off only if it kills Anne within that timeframe.
  • He also has no qualms with evil-doing, including attempted murder, on Christmas despite knowing of the holiday from Marcy.
• Knight of Cerebus: Once he drops his façade, he shows he means business by instantly kicking off the darkest arc yet of the show, topping it all off by killing Frobo and stabbing Marcy, coming out of season 2 victorious. Season 3 has his looming threat darken the mood and put Anne and friends into a serious tight spot by sending an extremely deadly assassin to kill Anne on Earth, with multiple near-misses due to luck, and then has their capacity to stay hidden being slowly undone thanks to Andrias' actions. Every appearance he makes has him bringing some kind of direct threat to the heroes' lives that is brutally efficient and pragmatic, as well as usually involving excessive force, just to give no illusions about how far he's willing to go to ultimately win. However this status, is soon taken out from him and given to the Core/Darcy once Andrias starts to hesitate and half-reforms in the finale, with the Core proving worse than Andrias could ever be.
• Lack of Empathy:
  • He pretends to understand Marcy's plight, and plays along until he gets everything that he's ever wanted, at which point he literally and figuratively backstabs her.
  • Zigzagged later on. Andrias shows absolutely no remorse for the mass deforestation his robots are causing to Amphibia, his ancestors' traditional home, even looking forward to draining "this pitiful mud ball" of all its remaining resources, and tasks Yunan with conscripting frogs to build more factories to produce his robots, even outright telling her to terminate any dissenters. However, he does show genuine fondness for Marcy after the Core chooses her as its suitable host and tries to dissuade it from that course of action, even being unwilling to watch as she's possessed in the end. That said, he still helps the Core take her over, showing how sentimental feelings aren't enough to dissuade him from his course of action.
  • The reveal of his past and that the minds of the previous kings of Amphibia are preserved within the Core gives a new dimension to Andrias' actions. He does have the capacity to care about others, but his guilt over his 'mistake' of trusting his friends, costing them the music box and the power of the gems, and the fact that the Core is actually the true ruler of Amphibia with the 'king' merely being its foremost devoted servant to enact its will, means that he refuses to makes the same mistake twice, following every order and task it gives him despite his personal misgivings in order to make the preserved minds of his forebears within it proud of him. It's made clear that the Core itself is aware of this, and actively encourages Andrias to his Blind Obedience, 'rewarding' him by having the preserved mind of his father congratulate him as he burns the portrait of himself, Leif, and Barrel together.
• Large and in Charge: He is the biggest non-monster character in the show, and he rules Newtopia and the rest of the world of Amphibia. Or so it seems... It turns out he's just a figurehead for the true ruler of the land, the Core, and in its first form the Core dwarfed him by a ton.
• Laser-Guided Karma: Though a kinder display of the trope than usual. To accomplish his plans, Andrias destroyed Amphibia's forests. The epilogue shows that his punishment is to help replant the vegetation destroyed in his deforestation.
• Let's Get Dangerous!: Realizing that Anne and the gang are serious in their vows of stopping him, he draws his sword and gets ready to engage them in battle.
• Lineage Comes from the Father: We only see Andrias's father, and it's through him that Andrias inherited the duty of being the Core's Puppet King over Amphibia. His mother is never shown nor mentioned at all.
• Love Makes You Evil: Played with. It’s not love that turns King Andrias evil, but rather, friendship. He once had two incredibly close friends, those being Leif and Barrel. However, their friendship would be strained, as Leif would end up betraying Andrias by stealing the Calamity Box (she foresaw that it was bad news and wanted to prevent it from getting into the wrong hands). Barrel ends up siding with Leif and helps her get away. Completely devastated by the loss of the two people he could trust most, Andrias ultimately decided to follow through with his father’s plans to make him a tyrant.
  King Andrias: That’s the thing about friends, isn’t it? The more you love them, the more it hurts when they go. Allow me to demonstrate [drops Sprig].
• Manchild: He is very excited to meet the Plantars, hugging them tightly and squeeing when Anne shares a fist bump with him. This becomes less endearing when he reveals his true nature, and not only mocks Marcy for trusting him by telling Anne and Sasha she knew what the box did all along, but drops Sprig out a window in what seems to be an act of childish gloating, the implication being he wants them all to feel the pain he felt in the past. Later on, he keeps this attitude even when not committing atrocities, now firmly a Psychopathic Manchild. Part of it stems from him still being deeply hurt by the unfortunate ending of his own childhood friendships as well as the fact he was left emotionally alone over 1,000 years after his father passed on, living with the condemnations of his ancestors preserved within the Core for his 'mistake', and unable to move past it because he could no longer trust anybody besides the Core, which encouraged his worst traits to make him more mindlessly loyal to it.
• Meaningful Name: Andrias is a genus of giant salamanders, the largest amphibians in the world. His surname, Leviathan, refers to a dreaded monster of the seas, usually depicted as either a serpent or a whale.
• Made of Iron: Andrias is tough enough to tank hits from anything short of Barrel's warhammer, a Magitek weapon powerful enough to cause mini-quakes when slammed on the ground and crush robots in a single swing. Andrias does get hurt when attacked with it, but not meaningfully incapacitated. When Anne unlocks her Super Mode and goes berserk on him and his robots, she vaporizes the metal minions with the aftershocks of her attacks, yet Andrias is still able to move after she blasts through his defenses with a direct punch and knocks him down, though he's obviously winded and hurt in the aftermath. He's shown later on to be a cyborg, revealing just how he got so tough.
• Manipulative Bastard: He takes full advantage of Marcy's desperation to not be separated from her friends to manipulate her into delivering him a charged Calamity Box, simultaneously eliminating one of the few things capable of stopping him (though this plan was his alternative to outright killing her as the Core wanted).
• Modest Royalty: To Lady Olivia's dismay, who tries to remind him of "royal etiquette". This trait remains with a dark twist even after he reveals himself as a villain to the heroes, incorporating a lot of Earth slang into his communication with Cloak-Bot and demonstrating an interest in Marcy's favorite book series, along with wanting to try out some potato chips from Earth — none of which detracts from the fact that he's a ruthless conqueror planning to invade the planet and rule it with an iron fist.
• Multiversal Conqueror: His ancestors were ruthless conquerors, and he plans to carry their legacy on by ruling all dimensions with the Calamity Box — starting with Earth. In fact, Earth was originally supposed to be the first planet he would've invaded when he inherited the family legacy during his youth, and his current planned invasion is partially about finishing what he was meant to start all those years ago.
• My Instincts Are Showing: In "True Colors", he gives off animalistic roars when angry at Grime's coup. He also charges at Grime on all fours, something none of the other newts have done.
• Myopic Conqueror: He is extremely disinterested in the day-to-day ruling of his kingdom, and his only reaction to finding out there is a growing rebellion is a bored expression while calling it "disappointing". Given the sheer power he can wield through Newtopian Magitek powered by the charged Calamity Box, it makes sense he'd be disinterested with a challenge he can easily brush aside once he has the box. That said, he also has a tendency to favor using excessive force to remove any challenges in his way, leaving any conflict with him extremely one-sided in his favor.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Having Leif's letter read to him at the climax of the Earth invasion by Sprig leads him to realise that his actions in the last one thousand years were mistakes, and he collapses on his knees bemoaning that he has simply gone too far and done too much to redeem himself.
• Never My Fault:
  • Coldly, the only thing King Andrias says after fatally stabbing Marcy is "Now look what you've made me do."
  • Leif might've betrayed him and stolen the Calamity Box before getting it lost, and Barrel also sort of betrayed him by ultimately not helping him out in punishing their friend for her betrayal, but she only did so due to seeing that the continuous use of the Box would lead to disaster. Despite all that, Andrias only sees the problem as being him trusting anybody else in the first place, rather than any issue with his invading and enslaving the inhabitants of other dimensions, partly because of how his father instilled that kind of mentality in him.
  • Played for Laughs in the Christmas Special, where upon failing to kill Anne with a drone commandeering a Santa float, he chooses to blame the controller for failing to kill Anne and destroys it.
• Never Say "Die": Zigzagged. Andrias usually mentions Anne has to be "destroyed" or "eliminated" because he doesn't want her to ruin his plans, but can use the term "kill" when he wants to, implying that it's more out of faux-politeness than anything else.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: All his attempted murder of Sprig accomplishes is Anne awakening her powers because he didn't realize her gem wasn't completely charged.
• No-Nonsense Nemesis: Say what you will about him, but Andrias does not mess around with his enemies. First, he demonstrates the capabilities of his army with the charged Calamity Box by blasting the North Toad Tower to rubble with a Wave-Motion Gun, when beforehand all creatures of Amphibia have been restricted to swords and bows to fight with, has a Laser Blade and Energy Shield as his personal armaments, immediately knocks his enemies down with a Sword Beam when they seem to be making headway against his robot army, and tries to squash the weakest and most vulnerable one of them when they're still disoriented. He instantly crushes Frobo when he gets in his way and resumes trying to kill Polly without missing a beat, and when Polly makes a beeline for the music box to shut down his castle, he instead grabs the nearby Sprig to use as a hostage to force her to surrender rather than pursue her himself. He tosses Sprig out the window to a Disney Death without blinking, instantly attempts to kill Anne upon realizing she can't control her powers and is weakened from beating him, and when it looks like Anne and the Plantars are going to escape with the Calamity Box, he stabs Marcy straight through the chest to stop the box from being lost again without a word. Andrias doesn't pull any punches trying to take out those who stand against him.
  • When Anne escapes to Earth, rather than risk her running around and mastering her Calamity Box abilities in preparation for his invasion, and wanting to ensure that she'll face the full force of his army on the day of the attack, Andrias builds a super-advanced robot assassin and has it discreetly transported to Earth under strict orders to remain hidden at all costs when eliminating Anne to limit the number of witnesses who could find out about his plans, while also removing his greatest obstacle well before he's ready to set foot on Earth. Anne doesn't suspect that Andrias is targeting her ahead of schedule, and with the assassin's Invisibility, it comes dangerously close to killing her within minutes of sneaking up on her, and would have succeeded if not for a lucky accident giving Sprig forewarning of its attack.
  • When Sasha and Grime manage to escape his throne room, beaten, bereft of their toad army, and unlikely to be able to upset his future plans, rather than let them flee, he has them tracked down and sends what is basically a robotic armored tank after them, along with a battalion of Mecha-Mooks to eliminate all loose ends. Said robot's go-to tactics involve rendering the target helpless and immobilized in front of it before shooting them point-blank in the face with its BFG Arm Cannon at a distance of about 10 feet. Sasha and Grime have to rely on the Wartwood villagers' aid to fight its support off, and even then must resort to using the bigger robot's own armaments against it to defeat it, rather than overpowering it in a head-on fight.
  • In "Anne-sterminator", his immediate reaction to being told Anne's still alive is to arm the assassin's self-destruct function in its chest with a one-hour deadline, telling it to kill her within that timeframe or be vaporized by the blast. Notably, he's already wearing the activation remote on his wrist when he contacts Cloak-Bot, implying that he was prepared to detonate it from the very beginning if it didn't give him good news. Once the bomb does go off, it turns out to be powerful enough that it could have taken out a significant portion of the city, if not the whole thing and beyond, and had a chance of catching Anne in its radius regardless of the robot's proximity to her, meaning that she'd be killed even if the assassin failed to physically do her in or find her before the deadline. The only reason she's spared is that the assassin makes the mistake of spitefully taunting her with their impending demise once it's mortally wounded by the family, motivating Anne to use her Calamity Box powers despite the cost to kick the assassin far enough away from them that nobody would be hurt — and she still needed to kick it into the stratosphere to keep them all safe from the blast.
  • In "Froggy Little Christmas", he decides to take action himself to kill Anne with a prototype remote-control drone his advisors gift him, using it to transform a nearby parade float in the area he locates Anne into a Humongous Mecha. Not only is the float so large that fighting it hand-to-hand is an unrealistic possibility, the drone also contains Nanotech that allows Andrias to reconfigure the float's interior to gift it advanced weaponry, ranging from laser eyes to flamethrowers and energy shields. The Boonchuy-Plantar family's only option is to flee from it at high speed, and Andrias' rampage runs the very real risk of dragging innocent bystanders into his attempts to kill Anne. The robot is only stopped at the end by the family's last-ditch plan of turning their Christmas tree into an impromptu projectile, and even then, it is only due to the stroke of luck that the tree happens to stab the drone on the float's back by chance that his efforts are thwarted. If not for that, it's greatly implied that Andrias could have chosen another float to continue attacking Anne when she'd run out of ways to fight his machine.
  • When Anne finally returns to Amphibia, she discovers that Andrias has been creating a mind-control formula to turn the indigenous wildlife of Amphibia more aggressive and dangerous to the population, has set up checkpoints overseen by shield-protected energy cannons between towns, regularly blasts large settlements to pieces with the BFG energy cannon atop his Ominous Floating Castle, has small dragonfly spy cameras monitoring the areas for resistance forces that it can then track back to their base discreetly and summon extermination squads to obliterate everything in sight, and is making deals with the Marauders to sell him slaves or resistance members they capture. These all help keep the population of Amphibia cowed and fragmented, preventing them from uniting against him as a common foe while his forces increase daily despite the efforts of the resistance to pick them off. Even with a string of successful counterattacks, Andrias' forces control 99% of Amphibia, and the resistance are forced to use guerrilla tactics against his army to avoid being wiped out.
  • In "Olm Town Road", he's revealed to be using a massive mining drill to breach the subterranean Hidden Elf Village of Proteus, apparently to gain access to the iron ore deposits underneath the city for his robot factories. However, this also has the dual purpose of wiping out the olms, who burn in natural sunlight, and especially Mother Olm, the keeper of the prophecy regarding the music box, the gems, and the girls' destiny in Amphibia. Whilst the majority of the olms want nothing to do with the conflict on the surface, they have been long opposed to Andrias' family's abuse of the Calamity Box to become Planet Looters, and Andrias is intimately aware of the details of their prophecy, having based his plan to eventually resume his family legacy and become a Multiversal Conqueror on the fact the box was fated to return to Amphibia eventually, and manipulated the girls specifically based on their ignorance of their true purpose in Amphibia. By destroying the olms, Andrias gains valuable resources, wipes out a potential allied force for the resistance, and helps keep the girls in the dark without a plan to confront him efficiently, something they are demonstrated to be struggling with despite a string of successful attacks. Indeed, the only reason that part of his plan fails is due to the secret message in Amphibian script Anne discovered on Earth directing the heroes to the location on time, something Andrias had no way of knowing about, and otherwise he would have successfully removed a troublesome enemy faction and source of valuable information to the heroes without any forewarning.
  • When it comes time for the invasion, Andrias has misinformation spread around that his forces are mobilizing to leave in a few days, when they're really planning on leaving that same day, before the various toad, newt, and frog armies are ready to fight them. If not for Mother Olm, who can sense the movements of his army through the tremors in the earth, giving the resistance forewarning, Andrias would have left Amphibia before anyone could stop him. While he cedes all authority to Darcy during the invasion, he is fully on board with her plans to anticipate the Resistance's battle strategy to isolate their most capable leaders, exploiting their ignorance of Darcy's presence to capture them, use their failure to disperse the resistance, and then just gut Anne the second that's done to reclaim the Calamity Gem energy that powers her. Only some last-minute thinking from Anne prevents a total victory for Andrias and his master, and she's still left in no position to stop the invasion of Earth by the end.
  • This gets Zigzagged in the Final Battle with him. When Anne escapes and the heroes start counterattacking his forces, he suits up in a combination of Humongous Mecha and Powered Armor suit to face her, calling her out for Combat by Champion before the whole city and using the Wave-Motion Gun atop the castle to blow up the Hollywood sign as a demonstration of what will happen if she refuses to fight him. This forces the biggest variable that could upset their plans to come to him on his terms, and he makes it clear before they start that he's not aiming to overcome her with the suit's immense might, but rather outlast her by aiming for her Hour of Power weakness, seemingly accepting that he's got no hope of handling the overwhelming powers of Anne's Super Mode in a prolonged fight. However he actually does fight her fair and square one-on-one with no dirty tricks or outside interference, which is implied to be a combination of him relishing the challenge of a Worthy Opponent and also being aware that nothing else can stand up to Anne's powers but him. Despite taking some damage, the suit ultimately outlasts Anne's beatdown, and he is seconds from finishing her off before Sprig delivers Leif's letter to him.
  • His overall adherence to this trope gets massively deconstructed, however, as he laments upon receiving Leif's message that it doesn't matter how much he now wants to quit becoming a Multiversal Conqueror and stop the Earth invasion, as the atrocities and pain he's inflicted on both Earth and Amphibia have left him with nothing to gain by stopping anymore, and he's effectively trapped as the villain of the story for everybody now, no matter how much he regrets it.
• Non-Standard Character Design: He has a larger build than any other newt or other Amphibian on the show.
• Not So Above It All: Even after revealing his true colors, he still has a bit of a Manchild side to him that genuinely appreciates Earth culture, such as still using a bit of Earth slang and doing selfie poses, and asking his robotic assassin to bring him the next book in an Earthen series Marcy got him hooked on, along with potato chips.
• Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist: Zig-zagged. He might put on airs of looking out for Amphibia's interests in using the Calamity Box's powers to invade other worlds and harvest the resources for their own use, but it's clear the resource-harvesting is just a cover for being and continuing to be a Multiversal Conqueror, lording over all others. And then it becomes clear that while that is indeed the goal of the Core, Andrias himself is just a tool to carry out their will. Deep down, he's really more ambivalent on the whole thing, and hates what he's lost in pursuit of it, but continues to spout all of his propaganda off because he still wants the Core's (i.e. his ancestors' and especially his father's) approval, and trying to go against it after so long is meaningless. He only relents when he hears Leif's last letter to him, as all the remorse he's buried for a thousand years comes crashing down on him, making him lose the will to fight or even do evil anymore.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: When the Plantars meet him, he acts friendly and casual, towards them to the point where Lady Olivia tells him to behave, in contrast to his brief appearance two episodes earlier. This is because he's trying to keep his true nature suppressed until he has everything he needs. That said, later episodes show that he's just as immature even long after his true personality has been revealed, it's just that this immaturity now translates into a darker self than he showed at first glance.
• Oh, Crap!: Subtle, but in "The Beginning of the End", when the Amphibian army is raiding his forces, he watches over the war where it seems like he might make a cliché statement about his inevitable victory — except he actually takes a moment to realize it's a lot larger than he expected, undermining his entire invasion plan. Of course, he's immediately ready to jump into the battle as a One-Man Army in his own right.
• Pet the Dog:
  • A REALLY downplayed example comes from him trying to convince the Core not to use Marcy as its host body, despite her being suitable and the Core's chosen one, before he gives in to its demands.
  • A more genuine example is shown in "All In" in a flashback to when he first met Marcy. The Core tried to get him to kill her outright so she wouldn't threaten their plans, but Andrias insisted that she was "just a child" and instead opted to drain her powers so she would be spared from being killed.
• Planet Looters: Under the Core's directive, Andrias intends to strip the whole of Amphibia of all its resources before moving on, and the implication is that the same fate fate awaits Earth if he gets his way.
• Powered Armor: In "All In" he trades his medieval-style armor for a suit of mechanized armor powerful enough to stop Anne's Super Mode with one punch, and is able to keep up with her power blow-for-blow, even outlasting it.
• Power Echoes: King Andrias is so large that his voice naturally echoes whenever he speaks. However, in his first speaking role at the end of "Marcy at the Gates", he speaks normally without an echo, in an example of Vocal Evolution.
• Pragmatic Villainy: His conversation with his master and the events of "True Colors" show that he was aware of the girls' powers from the start, alongside their arrival apparently being prophesied in some manner that is apparently disadvantageous to the both of them. Rather than trying to preemptively remove them as a threat, he instead puts on the façade of The Good King around them, befriending Marcy and learning to enjoy what aspects of Earth culture she brought with her, making her into a Hero of Another Story by putting her smarts to use in improving Newtopia, building up her trust in him, and underplaying his own understanding of the Calamity Box and its history to trick her, and by extension, Anne and Sasha, into recharging the Box and then returning it to him under the belief that he'd use it to send them home — or in Marcy's case, let her and her friends continue to explore the multiverse and continue having adventures together. This allows him to reawaken Newtopia's lost Magitek and reactivate his robot army, letting him begin preparations to be a Multiversal Conqueror, while also tricking the girls into unwittingly draining their powers into the Calamity Box at the same time, de-powering them and leaving them defenseless when he reveals the truth. Indeed, if not for Anne retaining her connection to the blue gem by sheer accident, Andrias would have completely won when he revealed his true nature to them, and given the massive power Anne wields with only a partial connection to her Gem, Andrias was rightfully concerned that he wouldn't be able to handle the girls in a straight fight with their full powers if he made an enemy of them from the start.
  • A brutal example of this is him impaling Marcy to stop her from fully activating a portal to Earth for Anne to flee from him and potentially losing the box again. His choice of words and the fact he immediately has her put in a Healing Vat to prevent her from dying shows that his master still had plans for her that required her alive, but once she got close to derailing their plans, Andrias needed to both incapacitate her and prevent her from interfering further than she had, and taking her out with a single move that would have been lethal if not for his intervention was the most efficient method of doing so.
• Prehensile Tail: Like all other newts, he can use his tail to do different tasks, such as fighting others.
• Promotion to Opening Titles: He appears in the season 3 opening wielding his Laser Blade while Marcy is in the tube behind him.
• Puppet King: This king is actually the public figurehead to the Core, the real tyrannical ruler of Amphibia. Justified since it cannot carry out its own orders without a host.
• Purple Is Powerful: Has a purple armour and is one of the largest amphibians seen on the show, on top of being the ruler and most powerful fighter in Amphibia. Taken further with his Dyoplosaurus, which lets him match Anne in her Super Mode, and would have won if not for his Heel–Face Turn.
• Really 700 Years Old: When he explains the Calamity Box's past and how it was stolen from him, he says it happened about a thousand years ago.
• Redemption Earns Life: Ultimately, his decision to let Anne win against him and stop his invasion is what keeps her from going all out to kill him. Heavily damaged as he is afterwards, he continues to do what was right whenever he can, such as helping aid the girls against the Core's Colony Drop gambit and ridding himself of its influence on him once and for all. He is shown to have lived all the way up to the series finale, living life as a simple and happy (albeit imprisoned) farmer.
• Redemption Equals Affliction: As a result of allowing Anne to knock him out, he loses his left arm and leg, the tip of his tail, and a huge chunk of his chest. He continues doing whatever he can to right his wrongs despite this.
• Rewatch Bonus: Once you find out Andrias wants to use the Calamity Box to take over all worlds, it casts all of his earlier season 2 appearances in a new light. And another new light when you find out his backstory and when he first met Marcy, foreshadowing his redemption.
• Riches to Rags: In the series finale, where he's serving a prison sentence and doing work as a farmer. All things considered, he's a lot happier like this.
• Robotic Reveal: After being defeated by Anne, it's revealed that most of his body has been augmented with cybernetics, explaining his longevity and incredible fighting prowess. He notes that living for 1,000 years requires a few sacrifices.
• Sadist: He very much likes to hurt others, whether physically (going into battle with a smile on his face) or mentally (spilling the beans about what Marcy did and laughing about it). It gets more complicated when it's revealed in various scenes that he's not as comfortable with causing pain upon others as he appears to be, implying that it could had been partly an act to distract himself from his own sorrows, or even the malignance of the Core influencing his actions through the crown he wears.
• Secret-Keeper: A dark variant. He knew all along about Marcy's Dark Secret — of having intentionally marooned her friends in Amphibia, after she told him about it over a game of Flipwart due to implicit guilt over losing Anne and Sasha during the teleportation. But he keeps totally quiet about it around Anne... just so he can use the information to turn the girls against each other once they've handed him the recharged Calamity Box, since he needed them to cooperate together to recharge the gems and unknowingly drain themselves of the associated abilities they gained from it, but he also needs them divided against each other to prevent them from mounting a defense against him and avert the Olms' prophecy. Andrias is also one of the only beings in Amphibia who's aware of the full details of said prophecy, but he remains completely tight-lipped about the whole topic unless speaking in private to his master, leaving the heroes dumbfounded and confused when Anne unexpectedly retains and unlocks her Calamity Box abilities against his expectations, as Andrias never intended to let them find out about their abilities and the Core until it was far too late.
• Shadow Archetype: Surprisingly, he is one to Sasha Waybright, a character he shares almost no interactions with. Sasha and Andrias were both the de facto "leaders" of their friend groups. Both suffered a perceived betrayal by one of their friends, who actually had the best of intentions and never really wanted to betray their friend's trust, but circumstances forced them to. Both let the bitterness of that betrayal turn them more aggressive and cruel, which led them to destroying their relationship to their remaining friends. The difference between them is that Sasha realized she was wrong after losing Marcy and vowed to do better, whereas Andrias took a thousand years to realize he was wrong, at which point it was too late to make amends.
• Skewed Priorities: In "Anne-sterminator", his first question to his robot assassin is to know if it secured the second Cynthia Coven book. His second question is to know if the robot succeeded in killing Anne, phrased in such a way that he clearly considers it a done deal by that point.
• The Sociopath: While he seems at first to be childish and friendly, this is all one big act; he's a vicious, manipulative would-be conqueror who hides his true intentions for Marcy and the entire kingdom behind a smokescreen. Subverted in Season 3, as it's revealed that Andrias is a lifelong victim of monstrous abuse and grooming by his father/predecessor King Aldrich which has made him completely reliant on the far more genuinely-malevolent Core, he's been further traumatized by his friend Leif's betrayal and has allowed his pain to fester for centuries, he's a lot more conflicted and remorseful about the worst crimes he's committed (not least the pain he's caused Marcy) than he lets on, and he's ambivalent about the Earth invasion.
• Spanner in the Works: "All In" reveals Andrias inadvertently sabotaged himself and the Core when he prevented the latter from killing Marcy right out the gate to avert the prophecy, due to being touched by her cheer and kindness, instead arguing for the befriending of Marcy and luring her friends in to DePower them and restore the Calamity Box. This in turn basically sets the stage for most of the series.
• Stout Strength: Not fat in any sense of the word, but her is clearly beefier and much stronger than any other newt seen in the series by a wide margin.
• Stronger with Age: A flashback in "The Core & The King" shows that, a thousand years prior, Andrias was only slightly taller than a Frobot, having grown into the giant he is today over the intervening millennium.
• Sunk Cost Fallacy: Why he views himself as Beyond Redemption. Leif's message finally gets through to him and gets him to surrender, but he still sees the cost of his actions as too much:
  "But you're too late. The things I've done, the pain I've caused...there's no going back!"
• Third Eye: His crown actually functions as some kind of telepathic communicator when a small central eye resembling the eyes on the Core opens up in the middle of it. It's used to speak to his master, the Core.
• This Cannot Be!: He is taken aback when discovering that Anne hadn't completely drained her gem and still has access to part of its power.
• Time-Passage Beard: Downplayed. Over the nine months that pass in Amphibia, Andrias' beard has grown a little and even has leaves in it, similar to Anne's hair.
• Totally Radical: He indulges in this a lot when playing the fatherly king in front of Marcy. Although, even after he shows his true colors, he makes a lot of attempts at teenage slang that he presumably picked up from Marcy, including sticking out his tongue while giving orders to his robot assassin to kill Anne lest he blows it up to take everything down with it.
  "Whoops! Looks like I 'spilled the tea', as you kids say."
  "You must be Anne. Sup. Am I saying it right? 'Ssssup'?"
• Tragic Keepsake: Barrel's warhammer becomes this to him, as nine months after the series proper ends, he uses it to help him perform community service replanting and repairing Amphibia's ravaged environment.
• Tragic Villain: Andrias has committed a lot of unspeakable atrocities and shockingly violent actions against both the people he's meant to rule over and his enemies, but The Reveal of his past in "The Core & The King" makes it clear that he's the way he is because he was raised to be. The 'king' of Amphibia is merely a Puppet King for the Core's commands and orders, with each successive generation being raised to follow its commands and plans for their society without question before the previous king is merged into the true ruler upon their passing. Andrias was supposed to inherit the duty of invading other worlds to sustain their way of life, being ignorant of the fact he would be required to enslave or exterminate the native populations until the day before he left, but Leif received a vague prophecy that their actions would eventually destroy Amphibia after coming into contact with the music box. Unable to convince anybody of the truth of her words thanks to the Core's lack of care for anything beyond itself, Leif reluctantly stole the key to the music box from Andrias in a moment of emotional vulnerability and sent the Box to earth to stop their people's self-destructive way of life. Andrias was devastated by her betrayal and his father's condemnation of him for his 'mistake' in trusting others, making it clear that Andrias could never make up for such a colossal error. Andrias then spent 1,000 years mentally connected to the Core after becoming king, which actively encouraged his guilt and regrets to make him absolutely loyal to it despite his emotional misgivings about some of its actions. By the present day, it's greatly implied that whilst Andrias might take some amusement from the small-scale acts of evil he commits, he's not truly happy about betraying Marcy and using her as a vessel for the Core, and isn't really interested in becoming a Multiversal Conqueror, but he's so determined to live up to his ancestor's legacy that he refuses to allow any emotional misgivings to dissuade him from his path. This forms a dark parallel to Anne's own positive Character Development born from wanting to make her biological parents proud of her, showing how Andrias honestly could have been a good and noble ally to the heroes, but has become twisted over time into 'the worst version of himself' due to the type of family legacy he was born into. When he receives Leif's final letter through Sprig, he laments that he's come too far to stop, and in order to keep the Core from performing any more Villain Overrides on him, he lowers his defenses and lets Anne strike him down so he's no longer able to continue the invasion, because he sees no other option.
• Try to Fit That on a Business Card: Not egregiously so, but he has four known titles; King of Newtopia, Lord of Amphibia, Peacekeeper of a Thousand Years, and the first of his name.
• Uncertain Doom: While Anne manages to severely wound him in "All In", he's revealed to be still alive in the aftermath. The preview for the finale shows he was still alive after that but it also frames it as if he would be dying off slowly. Averted in the finale, where he not only lives long enough to do the right thing not once but twice, we last see him alive months later having become a farmer as his means of community service, repairing all the damage he had done to Amphibia's environment. However, per Matt Braly, he's refused to get his life-extending cybernetics fixed and doesn't have much time left, using what little time he has to atone. He's even started to go blind in the nine months that have passed, cementing that he's not long for this world.
• Underestimating Badassery: Inverted. The season 2 finale makes it clear that he's the only one who actually knows what the girls are fully capable of with the powers they've received from the Calamity Box, and part of his Evil Plan is making sure that they don't find out about his true intentions until after they've charged the Box, which would also drain them of their gifts in the process, rather than risk openly confronting them while they still possess them. His horrified reaction to realizing Anne still has her connection to the box shortly after he's pushed her way past her Rage Breaking Point with his attempted murder of Sprig makes it clear that he knows that her sheer power is too much for him to handle, and he's left thoroughly on the back foot in their ensuring fight despite his best efforts. Just about the only thing that saves him is that Anne isn't capable of controlling her powers yet, and his attempt to immediately kill her afterwards shows that he knows she's Too Powerful to Live.
• Ungrateful Bastard: In spite of being saved by the heroes from the toad rebellion and given the Calamity Box back with no strings attached, the second he reveals his true intentions to them, he tries to kill them in order to keep them quiet about his plans.
• Used to Be a Sweet Kid: "The Core & The King" reveals that in his youth, Andrias was once a far more noble individual who valued his friendship with Leif and Barrel, but his father's gaslighting and Leif's theft of the music box hardened him into a ruthless tyrant.
• Villainous BSoD: Reading Leif's letter brings him to realize that he spent a millennium trying to forget his friends and close himself off from everyone but the Core, and has caused an unforgivable amount of agony and destruction to himself, Marcy and countless others, all for nothing, as Leif never forgot him or stopped loving him after betraying him, and her very last wish was for him to not let her betrayal drive him to shut his heart away from everyone. The realization completely breaks Andrias there and then, causing him to collapse on his knees weeping over the knowledge that he can never completely take back all that he's done and has gone too far to turn back. This ultimately leads Andrias to cede victory to the heroes and aid them against his evil digitized ancestors.
• Villainous Breakdown: He briefly goes through this when Grime and Sasha reveal their coup, getting on all fours and roaring at them for interfering in his plans before he's subdued and imprisoned. Later on, when Anne unlocks her Super Mode and starts gaining the upper hand on him, he starts to lose his mostly calm behavior. By the time he's forced to break out his Energy Shield, Andrias is literally roaring at Anne in a rage.
• Villains Out Shopping: In addition to killing Anne, he gives two more orders to the robot assassin — procure the next novel in the Cynthia Coven series, and get potato chips. Andrias drops the last order, since the robot isn't sure if he wants it to eliminate potato chips.
• Visual Pun: As Anne points out, he is literally "king-sized".
• Walking Spoiler: His true plans for Anne and the girls, the Calamity Box, and Amphibia as a whole are more complex than what was initially believed. The season 2 finale, "True Colors", reveals the full ramifications of his true goals.
• "Well Done, Son" Guy: Above all things, he wants to impress his father, King Aldrich, and make him proud by continuing the Leviathan bloodline's long-standing tradition of conquering worlds. His failure at protecting the Box causes him to grow ever more desperate, as his father grew even more disappointed and dismissive of him after becoming part of the Core. It's greatly deconstructed, as said attitude is the main reason behind Andrias' more heinous actions, committing atrocity after atrocity in order to prove to his father that he is a worthy heir to the duty of serving the Core, even as said actions only make him further isolated from those around him, which is hinted to be what Andrias really wants deep down, and Andrias is too blinded by his indoctrination to see or recognize all that he's losing in his attempts to gain the respect of someone who isn't worth what he's sacrificing. For its part, the Core is fully aware of this, and intentionally uses his emotional dependence on it to further twist Andrias into a mindlessly loyal servant to it, even while it clearly looks down on him for possessing such 'weak' emotions in the first place. When Andrias burns the portrait of him, Leif, and Barrel together, the preserved consciousness of his father briefly surfaces from the Core to says how he's 'almost' proud of him for the act, still withholding the approval Andrias so desperately craves for his actions. During the finale, when the Core urges him to act in their defense and save them from the three superpowered girls bearing down on its forces, he commands his frobots to fly up to the moon...and aid the girls instead of attacking them. The Core demands to know why Andrias would do such a thing, and Andrias responds by finally standing up to his father and the Core and smashing his crown, ridding himself of this trope for good.
• We Used to Be Friends: "The Core & The King" reveals that he used to be friends with Leif and Barrel in his youth. However, his maladaptive reaction to Leif's theft of the music box and his upbringing twisted him into the dark tyrant he is in the present.
• White Hair, Black Heart: Every hair on his head is white, and he's a selfish, petty, cruel, and arrogant tyrant who plots to conquer every world in existence. At least, until his Heel Realization. His hair was white even when he was younger, during when the trope was inverted up until Leif stole the music box.
• Why Did You Make Me Hit You?: He coldly scolds Marcy for "forcing" him to backstab and kill her to stop Anne from going back home.
• Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?: Defied constantly after he reveals himself as a villain and the heroes make it clear they won't surrender to him and his overwhelming forces. He blows up the North Toad Tower with a Wave-Motion Gun as a demonstration of might, summons laser-toting robots to fight opponents who are armed only with medieval weaponry, knocks his enemies down with a Sword Beam when they seem to be making headway regardless, and immediately tries to crush the weakest member of the opposing force with his bare hands, with only Frobo's Heroic Sacrifice preventing Polly getting killed. He drops Sprig to his death when he has the frog at his mercy rather than spare his life, even after his demands were met ^note though it's made clear that a major motivating factor was Anne referring to Sprig as her 'best friend', tries to just kill Anne when she suffers a Power-Strain Blackout, and, despite needing her for his plans, unhesitatingly mortally wounds Marcy to prevent her from using the Calamity Box to upset his schemes. When Anne and Sasha both escape his castle in the aftermath, rather than ignoring Sasha because her army is broken and she has no allies or resources besides Grime to work with, he has her immediately tracked down and sends the equivalent of a robotic armored tank with a small battalion of Mecha-Mooks to make sure she's dead, and if not for the aid of the Wartwood villagers, Sasha would have been killed. He then immediately creates an advanced robotic assassin and has it transported to Earth to quietly kill Anne when she least expects it, with said machine coming close to killing Anne three times over, only failing due to luck and circumstance. To top it off, he reveals that he's equipped said assassin with a Self-Destruct Mechanism that, once detonated, would have been powerful enough to wipe out a good chunk of the city and catch Anne in the blast so long as she's in its general vicinity — something he tries to do the instant he gets an update from Cloak-Bot that she's still alive. Andrias refuses to tolerate any potential threat to his plans, and is shockingly direct and brutal in the ways he attempts to remove said obstacles the second he's confronted with them.
• With Us or Against Us: What he seemingly gives to Yunan and Olivia when the latter two try to sneak away from his castle. He asks them if they're with him after the reveal of his true nature, and lets them be without trouble once both fearfully claim they still are loyal to him.
• World's Best Warrior: Handily establishes himself as this by never losing a battle in the entire show, and a Calamity-empowered Anne is the only one who can even keep up with him. Even his fights against her result in him winning by simply outlasting her, while his finaly defeat is a matter of him accepting defeat.
• Would Hit a Girl: His three main targets (Anne, Sasha, and Marcy) are all female teenagers, and he comes this close to squashing Polly under his fist.
• Would Hurt a Child: He has no qualms with harming children if they get in his way, such as trying to kill Polly, dropping Sprig to his death despite the Plantars complying with his terms, or outright attempting to kill Marcy when she repents and tries to help Anne return home. In "The New Normal", he keeps his streak going, building a robot assassin to send to Earth after Anne escapes him there, and outright telling it to 'kill the girl' — indeed, if not for a lucky accident, the assassin would have killed Anne within minutes of approaching her. In "Turning Point", he has Sasha and Grime tracked down and sends the robotic equivalent of an armored tank after the pair of them to eliminate them as potential obstacles. In "Anne-sterminator", he unhesitatingly activates Cloak-Bot's Self-Destruct Mechanism when it reluctantly admits Anne's still alive, the blast from which proves powerful enough that, if Anne hadn't kicked the assassin's torso into space, it could have vaporized a good portion of the city, which would have included an untold number of casualties, young and old. However, he's revealed to have saved Marcy from the seemingly-fatal injuries he inflicted on her due to a combination of fondness for her and being forced to do it by the Core so she would be their vessel. Later on, it is shown that he doesn't actually like harming children, even if it's necessary for his goals, at least when he's thinking straight and not blinded by anger or desperate to impress his ancestors.
• Wham Line:
  • He delivers one of the biggest of the series, completely changing everything:
    Andrias: Did it ever occur to you — Anne, Sasha — that one of you knew more than she was letting on? That one of you might've gotten you stranded in Amphibia... on purpose?
  • Before that moment, when Andrias reveals his true nature:
    Andrias: For you see, my ancestors weren't frail explorers, they were glorious conquerors!
• Yellow Eyes of Sneakiness: His eyes are yellow, and he's secretly plotting a multiversal conquest behind his Good King persona.
• You Have Failed Me:
  • He stabs Marcy through her chest in fury for her saving Sprig and taking the Calamity Box to send Anne home safely. Though, later on it's implied that it was more of a reckless and unintentional act in which he tried to keep the Box from being taken away, as he intended to keep Marcy alive and tried to dissuade the Core from using her as a hostage.
  • He later activates a time bomb on the robot assassin he dispatched to the human world when it fails one time too many times to kill Anne, though he claims it's to 'motivate' it to succeed immediately and does give it a one-hour grace period before its imminent destruction, with the implication that he'd turn off the countdown if it succeeded by then.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: It's only implied, but since his loyal second-in-command and royal advisor are among those who find out his secret, that means he’d have to off them too, and he orders his robots to fire on everyone in the room to ensure they don't leave with that knowledge alive, though later on he's shown to be willing to let them live as long as they stand with him. But, the jig was up, and he seems to have already known they were planning to commit treason against him. It's Inverted with Marcy though, as he saves her from her wounds and hooks her into a medical vat to recover, if only because he still has plans that require her to be alive, and later on does show some legitimate fondness for her.
• You Remind Me of X: "All In" reveals that part of the reason he started to become fond of Marcy is that she reminded him of his old friend Leif before her "betrayal".
• Your Days Are Numbered: Matt Braly confirmed that the destruction of Andrias' cybernetics will allow the natural aging process to catch up to him, and he doesn't have that much longer to live as a result. When last seen after the finale's nine-month Time Skip, his eyesight has already started to fade.

King Aldrich

King Aldrich Leviathan

"Don't you think it's time to say goodbye to those childhood friends of yours, son?"

^{Click here to see his digital avatar in the Core's mind}
"Fool. The only thing waiting for you out there is rejection and misery! Even if your friends win, your parents will still tear the three of you apart."

Voiced by: William Houston

King Aldrich, the previous ruler of Newtopia before his son Andrias, serves as a guiding example as to the kind of ruler Andrias should strive to be.

This is not a good thing.

---

• Abusive Dad: He raised his only known son as a mere cog in the imperialist machine while distancing him from his friends, and despite his son's attempts to please him, he barely has anything resembling pride or even cares for him, only slightly praising Andrias when he continues to unquestioningly help the Core's plans.
• Aliens Are Bastards: He implicitly invaded other dimensions and siphoned off resources on their planets to provide for the next conquests and exterminated or enslaved entire species such as Shadowfish and Moss Men and performed experiments on them. He also wanted to do the same with Earth from the Middle Ages.
• Beard of Evil: Has a long beard just like his son, and is even more evil than he is.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: He initially comes off as a wise and kindly figure, but is actually nothing more than a manipulative, abusive, death-fearing genocider.
• Brain Uploading: He made it clear his mind was going to be uploaded into the Core as his natural death drew near. In the present day, his mind is still very much alive amongst the Core's Mind Hive, giving his son a chilling declaration through Darcy that he is almost proud.
• Casting Gag: This isn't the first time that William Houston has voiced an evil king who serves as one of the overarching villains of the story, though, unlike Vendrick, Aldrich is actively malevolent instead of just foolish. This is even more of a gag since King Vendrick was confirmed via Word of God to be the inspiration for Andrias.
• The Chain of Harm: He implicitly grooms Andrias to serve the Core as unquestioningly as he does with no friends or others around who can distract him from serving it, with his statements about how it contains the minds of Andrias' ancestors as well in its multitude greatly implying that he was also similarly groomed from a young age by his own father. His assimilation into the Core is even perceived by him as a suitable reward for a literal lifetime of service to the Mind Hive, as all kings of Amphibia have done before him.
• Cool Old Guy: As part of his Bitch in Sheep's Clothing act, he plays the role of a kindly grandfather when interracting with Marcy, giving hearty laughs and giving her what she wants. It's all an act, though, as he's actually one of the Evil Old Folks.
• The Corrupter: In Andrias' youth, he actively groomed his son to be the next servant of the Core (furthering The Chain of Harm which Aldrich was presumably raised in and has fully embraced), and Aldrich was all too happy to use careful psychological and emotional manipulation to poison Andrias against his childhood friends and turn him into a desperate, emotionally-scarred "Well Done, Son" Guy with barely any agency of his own. A thousand years after his assimilation, the Aldrich aspect is tasked by the rest of the Core with getting Marcy's consciousness ready to be assimilated herself via using a Lotus-Eater Machine to appeal to her superficial wants and hobbies — and he loses his shit once she breaks through his manipulations and rejects the Core. Unlike his son, Aldrich remains spiteful, megalomaniacal, and incapable of comprehending good to the end.
• Deader than Dead: His mind lives on for one thousand years in the Core after his physical body expired of old age, preying on his son's insecurities. King Andrias finally rejects his terms for being "immortal," however, and when Anne uses the Calamity Gems to annihilate the Core, his claims of "immortality" are truly rendered hollow; every trace of Aldrich is now gone, along with all those whose minds made up the Core's consciousness.
• The Dragon: With the power dynamics of the Core made apparent, it becomes clear that whoever becomes 'king' of Amphibia basically becomes the Core's right-hand servant, its physical agent to enact its will upon the land, due to it being contained in a secret room below the palace. Aldrich was the previous ruler and loyal servant to the Core before Andrias, and with his passing imminent, he prepares to hand the position of a ruler and the duty of servitude to the Core over to his son before he assimilates into the collective to become a part of the true ruler of Amphibia at long last.
• Dragon Ascendant: Zig-Zagged. He eventually became part of the Core, the series' Big Bad that he had been serving before it assimilated him, allowing him to join the many minds of his ancestors as their presumed equal, and it's implied that his specific presence in the Core is one of the main reasons why the Mind Hive has such a powerful grip on Andrias.
• Equal-Opportunity Evil: In comparison to his son, who only has newts in his court except when he's carrying out a plan, he has no problem with having newts, toads, and frogs in Newtopia together. Justified, since the Fantastic Caste System wasn't put in place until shortly before Aldrich's passing, by Andrias himself.
• Establishing Character Moment: He literally stands between Andrias and his friends as he's playing with them in the palace corridors and summons him to his royal duties, criticizing his friendship with them as a distraction and that it will ultimately not last, before showing him the Core as something that will last. This shows that he's ultimately the major reason why Andrias' friendships soured, both through his poisoning of his son's mind as well as his absolute adherence to the Core's will above the wellbeing of others, though it was still ultimately Leif who chose to betray Andrias' trust in the end. His callousness towards the lifeforms on Earth that they're planning to invade next also showcases where Andrias gets his more ruthless qualities from, as well as him implicitly using his son's need for approval to convince him to follow the Core's wishes over his own.
• Evil Brit: Speaks with his voice actor's natural British accent and is a genocidal conqueror who turned Andrias into the tyrant he is today.
• Evil Is Bigger: Both in life and within the Core, this monster of a newt-man towers over almost anyone he talks to, including (a younger) Andrias. And unlike Andrias and many of the show's other villains and former-antagonists, Aldrich has no redeeming qualities: he's rotten all the way to the Core.
• Evil Old Folks: Like present-day Andrias, he was a vile and ruthless conqueror, except even worse than Andrias, as he lacks even the slight humanizing traits his son has. The latter is accentuated by the fact that when we see Aldrich, he looks even older than the present Andrias, and is quite decrepit.
• Evil Sounds Deep: His voice is quite deep, and he is absolutely ruthless and tyrannical.
• Evil Sounds Raspy: He talks with a low and whispery voice, which immediately signals that he's pure evil.
• The Face: The Core consists of countless minds of Amphibia's past rulers. However, Aldrich is the only one with an established name, personality, and history. This makes him the de facto "face" of the collective whenever one of them needs to interact with a character, and a Hate Sink for the audience to latch onto instead of an otherwise impersonal group.
• Facial Horror: The virtual avatar constructed of him in the Core's Mind Hive in "All In" sometimes sports the Core's thirteen orange eyes where his normal ones would be, indicating when it's talking through him and selling how he's little more than an illusionary avatar serving as its mouthpiece, rather than a purely individual mind within it.
• Faux Affably Evil: Particularly to Marcy when she's presented the fantasy world of her dreams within her mental prison, though even then he drops the facade when she rejects it all.
• A Form You Are Comfortable With: He's the form in this case, as the Core uses him as an avatar and a representative of the Mind Hive when interacting with Marcy, hoping that she'll be receptive to a grandfatherly old man who looks like her friend Andrias. It works, until Marcy rejects it. When mentally communing with Andrias, the Core usually takes the form of its thirteen eyes in a black void, but it at one point briefly summons a projection of Aldrich seemingly just to screw with Andrias and maintain its hold over him. The post-assimilation Aldrich avatar has the Core's thirteen eyes, to an extremely unsettling effect, but he can hide them behind his massive eyebrows.
• Hate Sink: He serves as the Core's most despicable persona. Even before he assimilates into the Core, he's shown to have no positive traits whatsoever. He's a horrible excuse of a father who constantly gaslights his son Andrias into serving him, such as suggesting that his friendship with Leif and Barrel is an illusion and that they are going to betray him. He even plans to exterminate humanity to gather resources to continue conquering the multiverse, something even Andrias sees as extreme. Later on, he refuses to listen to Leif's warnings about the Calamity Box, because it is revealed later that he and the Core were the ones behind the possible demise of Amphibia she saw. His influence on his son indirectly makes him the reason for Andrias' turn to evil, and his words about how Andrias almost made him proud of him implicitly show he has no good intentions for him.
• Hidden Eyes: Aldrich's eyes are hidden as a sign of his age and closed-off nature to his subjects, keeping the secrets of the Core and the truth of their invasions of other worlds from people until he can reveal them to a 'trusted' few.
• Hypocrite: He claims to Andrias that his friends Leif and Barrel are manipulating him for their own selfish desires, except that's exactly what he has been doing to Andrias to groom him into loyalty. He also calls the olms cowards in his rant about why Newtopia shouldn't stop using the Gems, but when faced with true death in the finale, he shows his true colors.
• Kill All Humans: After introducing Andrias to the Core, Aldrich tries to get him to invade the Earth and eradicate the human race to strip-mine the planet for its resources.
• Knight of Cerebus: His presence causes any scene to become much more serious, and unlike practically all the other antagonists, he has no humorous or light-hearted moments whatsoever. Even Andrias and Darcy (who he's a part of) have more comedic beats than this guy. Anytime he resurfaces, the Core's dark intentions will always be emphasized, and its serious psychological hold over Andrias is not downplayed nor de-emphasized in the slightest.
• Manipulative Bastard:
  • He subtly gaslit his son to convince him of the folly of having friends, all to make him a more compliant servant to the Core when he eventually came of age and avoid having 'distractions' around that would prevent him being its loyal servant. This played a major role in Andrias deciding to sever his friendship with Barrel despite the latter not explicitly betraying him like Leif did, and it's clear that his presence within the Core is a major reason why Andrias is so mindlessly loyal to it. To Andrias, following the Core's commands is the only way he can atone for his 'mistake' and make his father proud of him, and the portion of the Core that contains Aldrich's mind is well aware of how to use this to convince Andrias to commit atrocity after atrocity against Amphibia in the hope of gaining his family's respect.
  • He's less effective here, but this is present in his interactions with Marcy in "All In", offering her everything he thinks she wants, and whenever she starts realizing something is wrong, he hands her something else to distract her.
• Meaningful Name: Aldrich is two letters off from "Eldritch", meaning something strange and unnatural, which certainly fits as a description for the Core. It may also be a Shout-Out to Dark Souls III, where Aldrich, Devourer of Gods, is a main boss who fights by puppetting around the body of another character, much like how the Core fights by puppetting Marcy's body.
• Mouth of Sauron: As the Core is less an individual character and more an anonymous collective of Amphibia's greatest minds, Aldrich serves as the "face" of the Core and its primary mouthpiece, as well as the only member of the Core's Mind Hive who is individually characterized in his own right.
• Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist: He claims to his son Andrias that his conquest of other universes is to preserve Amphibia's way of life... which happens to be the continued conquest of the multiverse. He also refuses to listen to Leif when she warns him about the disastrous consequences of continuing to use the Calamity Box, and it's heavily implied he knew of the consequences all along due to being a willing servant of the Core and the Core's knowledge of the Olm Prophecy. Ultimately, all his claims of "preserving [their] way of life" proved to be moot as he collaborates with the other members of the Core's Mind Hive in their efforts to ram the moon into Amphibia, annihilating all life in it as a last resort.
• Predecessor Villain: To King Andrias, as the King of Newtopia before him and the previous link in the long chain of harm that has upheld the Core's rule over Amphibia. Interestingly, he's not quite a Posthumous Character, as he's still able to interact with and manipulate his son, as well as directly confront the heroes, as a part of the Core's Mind Hive.
• Puppet King: Like his son after him, he served as little more than the Core's main enforcer and public figurehead.
• The Right of a Superior Species: He saw no issue with committing genocide against humanity to strip-mine their planet of resources since he considers giant salamanders to be the "superior" species and all others to be mere obstacles to the development of their civilization.
• Slasher Smile: When Andrias reconfirms his commitment to invading and subjugating Earth, Darcy pulls a smug/satisfied smile as Aldrich's mind briefly surfaces from the collective, commenting that he's almost proud.
• The Sociopath: He's a cold, abusive, and genocidal monster who only cares about his power.
• So Proud of You: Downplayed. His personality surfaces from the Core's Mind Hive for one last line in "The Core & The King": to tell his son how almost proud he is of him for following the Core's interests over his own.
• Villain Has a Point: Upon being rejected by Marcy (who refuses to have herself fully assimilated in the Core), Aldrich scolds Marcy by pointing out that even if her friends would defeat the Core and its armies to save both Amphibia and Earth, it won't change the fact that Marcy's parents still want to move away due to new careers, thus Marcy would still be separated from both Anne and Sasha. However, while admitting that her parents' decision is inevitable and cannot be challenged, Marcy admits that she's willing to live with it rather than submit herself to the Core's whim.
• Villains Want Mercy: As the three girls are beating the crap out of the Core's minions, Aldrich quickly begs his son to save him and his fellow assimilees, and promised him he could join them if he does this. It is strange how he is suddenly big on wanting him by his side when all he's done is deride Andrias for weakness. Andrias has none of it and tells him to suck it.
• We Can Rule Together: He's sent by the rest of the Core's mind hive to befriend and act as a companion for Marcy's mind, trying to butter her up so she can be assimilated and become his and the other assimilees' equal within the Core. However, once Marcy sees through his Lotus-Eater Machine, he impatiently tries to assimilate her anyway, only for her to reject the Core.
• Yellow Eyes of Sneakiness: His eyes are a vivid yellow, and he's keeping the truth about the Core a secret from his subjects, only revealing them to a select few. We see them a few times, mainly when he's punctuating his statements.
• You See, I'm Dying: When we first see him, he reveals to his son that his mortal life is almost up. It doesn't really matter, though, because being a part of the Core ensures he will always be in his son's life.
• You Fool!: He yells "Fool!" at Marcy in outrage and bewilderment when she directly and fully refuses to be assimilated into the Core by him, and then later at Andrias during the Core's second Villainous Breakdown as he openly defies them and orders the Frobots to help the girls destroy the Moon.
• You Will Be Assimilated: His fate, though done voluntarily — in fact, he's implicitly looking forward to joining the Core's collective, after serving it faithfully for years. By the present day, his mind and personality briefly surface underneath the 'Darcy' persona when Andrias reconfirms his absolute commitment to fulfilling his ancestor's legacy of being a Multiversal Conqueror.
  Darcy/Aldrich: Why, son... I think I'm almost proud of you.

The Core

The Core

"And restore our legacy, all in one fell swoop. Well done, Andrias."

^{Click here to see Darcy}
"We're not Marcy, not anymore."

^{Click here to see the Core's moon form}
"FOOLS! You cannot stop... a GOD!"

"Behold! Our ultimate creation. A collection of Amphibia's greatest minds, preserved for all eternity."

— King Andrias

Voiced by: Haley Tju (as Darcy), William Houston (as Aldrich and as its final form)

A mysterious entity that resides underneath Newtopia and whom Andrias serves. It turns out to be a collection of some of the greatest minds in Amphibia, and they're now seeking a host.

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• 0% Approval Rating: After the Core's true nature and intentions have been revealed, it seems no one in Amphibia will willingly serve it after that; even King Andrias himself started to develop second thoughts during the Core's invasion of Earth. Following its failure to conquer Earth and being severed of its link with Marcy, the Core furiously plans to destroy Amphibia out of spite against everyone (including King Andrias) for their defiance against it. In the end, everyone in Amphibia cheers when Anne finally destroys the Core; even Andrias himself is relieved by this, considering the fact that it has been gaslighting him into the tyrant that he was known to all of Amphibia.
• 13 Is Unlucky: It has 13 eyes (ten when using Marcy's body and countlessly many in its moon form), and it's the most dangerous and depraved antagonist of the show.
• Abusive Precursors: An entire Mind Hive of them, as they're a collection of all of Newtopia's previous rulers, and as the series goes on, it becomes clear they couldn't care less about their descendants; not only do they show complete disinterest in the damage they cause to Amphibia and its inhabitants, but they treat King Andrias, the latest king and their most trustworthy servant in the present, like a tool to be used and discarded.
• Achilles' Power Cord: The Core is often attached to at least one cable. These cables, when connected to the castle, allow it to control and oversee its minions. But, once it's severed, they lose all the power they once had, and are trapped inside of the helmet that allowed them to puppet Marcy.
• The Ageless: Their mechanical body has stayed the same for millennia, not even getting rusty from the time Andrias was a young boy until he became an adult.
• Allegorical Character:
  • The Core embodies the cycle of abuse, how abusers turn their victims into yet more abusers. The Core is quite literally hundreds of Abusive Parents turned into one cohesive entity, one that molds each of its successive generations into yet another abuser. "The Core & The King" shows how Aldrich, its latest assimilee, groomed Andrias to become yet another of the Core's victims, something that presumably happened to Aldrich himself too. Andrias treatment of Marcy is also done on the Core's orders, showing how abuse leads to more abuse down the line. The Core can speak to Andrias through his crown, meaning that he has had the voice of his ancestors constantly telling him what to do for a thousand years, which is a literal version of how children of abusive parents often find themselves pressured to do what their parents wanted even when they escape their grasp. The Core is only defeated when Marcy Wu, its latest victim, defies it and breaks the cycle by refusing to let Aldrich manipulate her, which in turn gives Andrias the strength he needs to defy it himself.
  • As well, the Core serves as one for colonialism and its legacy. The Core is quite literally the embodiment of Newtopia's prior colonialism, an amalgamation of the minds of numerous leaders and scholars who had pushed and continue to push for an agenda of expansion across the multiverse. The Core views newts as inherently superior to all others and much of its stated goals heavily resemble Manifest Destiny: expanding to new territories and consuming their resources with complete disregard for the native population.
• Almighty Idiot: In their huge robot form, the only thing the Core can do is move around and emit a horrible screech. Then it takes over Marcy's body...
• Ambition Is Evil: They wish to foil the prophecy about the Calamity Stones in order to keep using them to continue their conquest of the multiverse forever.
• Ancient Evil: They were around back when Andrias was still young, at least a millennium ago, and are even older than that, given they've assimilated the minds of most, if not all, of Newtopia's former rulers up to that point.
• Animal Motif: Cephalopods, specifically octopuses. The Core has a spherical body (or rather head) with six to eight tentacles protruding from it and huge eyes. Then it's revealed that the thing is not a singular consciousness, but a collective of genius-level minds preserved in a cybernetic shell, not unlike how a single octopus is essentially a Mind Hive whose tentacles think and act semi-independently.
• Arch-Enemy: While initially completely unknown to the girls, once they take over Marcy's body, the Core becomes a VIP on their hitlist; Marcy due to it taking over her body, and Anne and Sasha as a consequence of that.
• Art Evolution: In "Olivia & Yunan" and "Froggy Little Christmas", the eyes of Darcy's helmet closely resemble the Core's original body. From "The Core & The King" onwards, the eyes are now rhombus-shaped and a darker red, and the main three eyes have pupils.
• The Assimilator: It assimilates the mind of whoever is currently ruling Newtopia to add it to its mind hive as they hand the throne to the next generation. They eventually decide to add Marcy to said hive due to her valued intelligence.
• Assimilation Backfire: Taking over Marcy's body and becoming Darcy does allow the Core to become more mobile than before and actually speak for once, but they traded what was possibly a Nigh-Invulnerable metallic body for Marcy's weak, nerdy one, not to mention that the tube connected to them becomes much easier to slice, since Marcy's much smaller than their previous form.
• Asskicking Leads to Leadership: You would think that inhabiting a frail, nerdy body with an extremely obvious weak spot would make them an easy target, right? Wrong. Just like Andrias, they are a surprisingly good fighter, as they're able to hold their own against Sasha and Grime. It even has various tricks at its disposal that it can use, like an energy scythe, combat tentacles, and even illusions.
• Ax-Crazy: A blood crazed Sadist who openly relishes hurting, tormenting, and killing anyone around it plus an Omnicidal Maniac who's default policy for planetary conquests is to wipe out all sentient life.
• Bad Boss: It forces Andrias to use his somewhat genuine friend Marcy as its vessel, and later on in "Froggy Little Christmas", it calls him a pathetic excuse of a king when he throws a hissy fit following his latest plan failing to kill Anne. It’s not helped by the fact that one of those minds is his father. In "All In", it outright tells Andrias he can forget about joining his father and his ancestors should he fail to capture Anne.
• Beware the Silly Ones: In "The Core and the King", Darcy acts like an evil version of Marcy with all that entails, supposedly due to unintentionally assimilating her autistic traits as a side-effect of the possession. Darcy's next and last two appearances involve them dropping the goofiness and engaging in serious depravities with psychopathic glee: viciously deconstructing Anne and Sasha's shortcomings when it came to being Marcy's friends on Earth, turning into a hooting maniac when personally conducting the carnage of the Earth invasion, and engaging both Sasha and Grime in a two-on-one duel in which they claim Grime's arm.
• Big Bad: The Core is the main antagonist of the series, being the overarching source of the conflict throughout the first two seasons before it finally makes its physical presence known as a direct threat and the main villains' leader in Season 3. Having governed Amphibia's dimension-looting empire from behind the scenes for many centuries before the Music Box was lost, the Core is responsible for King Andrias being the threat he is today; having groomed and emotionally abused him for years via his father Aldrich whom it has since assimilated, pressuring Andrias into taking the extreme actions that he does which manipulate the Calamity Trio in order to reclaim the Music Box and restore their interdimensional war machine. An allegory for colonialism, the cycle of abuse in families, and the dangers to oneself and others of remaining too defiant to change and growth; the Core, unlike Andrias, remains an evil and unrepentant threat to Earth, Amphibia, and all the inhabitants therein all the way to the end, and the series' conflict is only resolved when the Core is finally destroyed.
• Brain Uploading: Its consciousness is made up of an untold number of "Amphibia's greatest minds", including the previous monarchs before Andrias, having their minds digitized and uploaded into a shared Mind Hive before their natural deaths, as a way to preserve Amphibia's intelligentsia and as a way for Amphibia's despots to escape death forever. Being essentially digital in nature, the Core can transfer its consciousness from its original shell into Darcy's helmet, and can in turn puppeteer any vessel that the helmet was designed to be compatible with (Marcy's body and Amphibia's moon).
• Break Them by Talking: This is a favored tactic of its, especially using Marcy's memories to call Anne and Sasha out on their toxic behavior and tell them every dark thought Marcy ever had about them. During its final duel with Sasha, it tries to knock her off her game, though at that point Sasha has gone through enough Character Development and is too hyperfocused on saving Marcy to be affected.
• Bright Is Not Good: "All In" shows that the Core's "inner sanctum" within the mindscape of that black-and-red Mechanical Abomination is a well-lit, brightly-colored, gigantic grand library with grand golden statues, and with dozens of ghostly past assimilees organizing and reading through the Core's stores of information. It brings to mind the Light Bringer more than anything else.
• Bring It: It's all too eager to battle Sasha and Grime.
  Darcy: Let's rumble, girlfriend.
• The Chain of Harm: With the implication that it holds the minds of all of Amphibia's past rulers, it's possible to interpret that the monarchy has been nothing but grooming future monarchs to act as figureheads for their rule before uploading them to their collective.
• Cheated Death, Died Anyway: The Core's entire existence is supposed to allow the greatest minds and rulers of Newtopia to exist beyond death and rule forever, but once Anne uses all of the Calamity Stones' powers at once against it, they are destroyed for good.
• Control Freak: They admit to being one in "All In"; they want everything to go exactly as they want, and once they see even the slightest deviation, they try to put things back in order. "The Hardest Thing" makes it even more notable by having them grow beyond pissed when their plans are completely derailed.
• Cool Helmet: As Darcy, their helmet has mechanical branches that look similar to the tentacles from their original form. The helmet also has a very long wire that can stretch for long distances. Once it's severed from Marcy's head and the Core (as Darcy) is seemingly vanquished, it secretly takes the time to escape by having the helmet grow spider legs and scuttle off to plan a counterattack while the heroes are distracted. It even has rocket thrusters, which is revealed in "The Hardest Thing".
• Combat Pragmatist: When Sasha starts beating it, it resorts to using dirty tricks, like using its illusions to blind her and strike from behind.
• Combat Tentacles: It has mechanical tentacles, which it uses to maneuver and grapple its victims. They're part of their body in their huge robot form, and it telekinetically manipulates them in their Darcy form.
• Crazy-Prepared: During the peak of Amphibian civilization, it finished a project on the moon to enable it to crash the moon into Amphibia’s surface and steal the stones as a last resort if it could not keep control over Amphibia’s people.
• Cutting the Knot: When they meet Marcy for the first time, they tell Andrias to kill her before she can become a thorn on their side. However, Andrias convinces them to spare her for another purpose...
• Death by Irony: The Core and Amphibia's royalty have used the Calamity Gems, "Amphibia's greatest treasure", for generations to invade other worlds across the multiverse. It believes the Gems are proof of their divine right to conquer, with the Core eventually developing a god complex. It is only fitting that Anne uses the full, godlike power of the stones to annihilate it and every evil mind making up its Mind Hive, forever.
• Demonic Possession: After Marcy is recaptured by Andrias, following Yunan and Olivia's failed rescue attempt, it proceeds to upload itself into Marcy's body, taking it over to continue their plans.
• Despotism Justifies the Means: Ultimately, the Core doesn't give a crap about anyone or anything except for itself and getting to reign supreme forever. It initially kept Amphibia running from behind the scenes during its era of world-looting, but when Amphibia's magitek is reactivated in the present day, it doesn't hesitate to turn its ancestral homeland into a polluted wasteland and become the biggest threat around to its own people so that it can rebuild its war machine and return to the good ol' days of pillaging and looting every other dimension within reach. When the Core's Earth invasion fails and it's been successfully dethroned by its enemies, it defies any opportunity to change itself for the better by taking control of Amphibia's moon and attempting to ram it into the planet in a Suicidal Cosmic Temper Tantrum, rather than admit defeat.
• Detrimental Determination: The Core will not accept defeat nor that its time of pillaging and conquering is over for anything, standing in contrast to the show's overarching themes about the necessity of change and growth. It's been waiting for a thousand years to regain the Calamity Box, reactivate Amphibia's lost warmongering magitek and target Earth as its army's next conquest. And in order to build its army back up, the Core has Andrias strip-mine Amphibia's resources ahead of the invasion and turn their homeland into a polluted wasteland, turning many of Andrias and the Core's own subjects against them. When the Core is dethroned, it's so unwilling to admit defeat and change for the better that it tries to destroy itself and Amphibia in a Suicidal Cosmic Temper Tantrum — this last act ultimately secures the Core's total destruction when the Calamity Trio act in defence of Amphibia, the very fate which the Core explicitly feared the most and wanted to stave off forever.
• Digital Abomination: While it appears to be a robot, that part is only a shell. The real Core is actually the combined intellects of the various rulers and brightest minds of Amphibia preserved in Cyberspace. It demonstrates this when it transfers from a robotic body to one that was mostly organic — i.e., Marcy's body.
• Dirty Coward: Downplayed. As can be expected of a being made from the minds of a bunch of impossibly old tyrants scared of their impending mortality. The Core practically begs Andrias to help when the tide of battle turns for the worse against it. We even see this fear of death in the episode before; when Sasha cuts its connection with Marcy, it thinks she slashed its chest, and all that smugness is replaced with panic when this was realized too late. However, the Core is more than willing to stand its ground if necessary, as even with the combined efforts of the Calamity Trio and the Frobots, the Core is still too powerful for all of them to defeat, even managing to destroy the Frobots and wearing out Sasha and Marcy's powers in retaliation. It's only when Anne combined the Calamity Gems in herself to destroy the moon, that the Core becomes terrified before it is finally destroyed.
• The Dividual: With the exception of Aldrich(and technically Marcy) none of the minds within the Core are given individual focus or characterization. They largely act as one entity to show how those assimilated have lost their free will and individuality.
• The Dreaded: The Core is one of the (if not the) most feared entities in Amphibia. Even the toads are wary of it, despite their usual lack of fear towards the dangerous wildlife.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: They seem unable to get what makes people tick on an emotional level, which plays a not-insignificant role in its defeat. They especially seem unable to get that the three girls have undergone Character Development, like Sasha moving past her Control Freak tendencies, and they're genuinely bewildered that a post-Heel Realization Andrias would turn down immortality and find the strength to defy his digitized father in favor of doing the right thing. It says a lot that during Sasha's Exactly What I Aimed At, Darcy actually thought when patting their vessel over in panic that Sasha would dare harm Marcy just to take them down.
• Evil Counterpart: As the main villain, it serves as an antithesis to the heroes, and especially Anne.
  • Whereas Anne, Sasha, and Marcy fear change, but eventually embrace it, the Core was so fearful of death (a type of change it couldn't control) that it turned itself into a Transhuman Abomination. Marcy explains that the Core, above all else, fears irrelevancy, so scared of being small and forgettable that it claims itself to be a god, in sharp contrast to Anne, who is offered a chance at godhood, but turns it down in favor of becoming a perfectly average human on Earth.
  • Adding to the above, it should also be noted that the Core is so stuck in their ways that they would not even consider any other way of life for Amphibia other than to be imperialist conquerors, plundering and committing genocide across the worlds of the multiverse, even though with the Calamity Box they could easily have found new sources of power, new resources, and better living conditions for the Amphibians, with plenty to spare for sharing with other peoples they meet across time and space and creating a Utopia for everyone.
  • To get their way, the Core manipulates, grooms, and gaslights everyone in Amphibia for centuries, especially Andrias, and has everything that goes against its ideas destroyed through their plots and pawns. And when it can't get its way, it throws a petulant tantrum like a Psychopathic Manchild or Entitled Bastard, and tries to wipe the board out of sheer spite rather than accept defeat or change.
• Evil Genius: It is quite literally made up entirely of evil geniuses, and it chooses Marcy as its host specifically because she's the "genius" of the three girls.
• Evil Has a Bad Sense of Humor: After managing to slice Grime's arm off, Darcy makes a very dark joke about him being "disarmed".
• Evil Is Bigger: To give you an idea of how big their robotic body is, Andrias, who is a literal giant compared to everybody else in the show's proportions, is dwarfed by this thing, at least in its initial mechanical body. Their later forms zigzag the trope, however; their form as Darcy is an inversion, given Marcy's tiny stature compared to King Andrias, but their planetoid form dwarfs their other bigger form by a mile, being an entire moon. Oh, and they're just about the only antagonist in the series who is completely evil, being behind some of the most heinous atrocities and attempted atrocities in the series and exhibiting none of the other major antagonists' redeeming qualities.
• Evil Is Petty: The Core throws a Suicidal Cosmic Temper Tantrum in the Grand Finale and tries to wipe out all life on Amphibia simply because it can't handle losing. Sasha and Andrias outright state that the Core is just being a Sore Loser on a massive and omnicidal scale.
• Evil Old Folks: The Core turns out to be an entire Mind Hive of elderly scholars and monarchs who attempted to escape death. Beneath their attempts at appearing to be an all-knowing machine, they're ultimately a megalomaniacal entity seeking complete domination over Amphibia.
• Evil Reactionary: Standing as the antagonist of a story with an aesop about ultimately accepting change and growth, the Core wants to bring back the good ol' days of using its old magitek to massacre and plunder other worlds which would cyclically fuel its war machine so it can repeat the process, forever. The Core is so incapable of accepting change that it flies into a Suicidal Cosmic Temper Tantrum after it's defeated.
• Expy: Its sinister Demonic Possession of Marcy using a mask-like helmet, the Psychopathic Manchild thought process as a result, Eldritch Abomination vibes, extremely Sadistic tendencies, and association with a falling Weird Moon bring to mind a mechanical Majora's Mask.
• Extra Eyes: Nearly each form it takes, minus Andrias' crown, has multiple eyes, with the number ranging from nine to thirteen. In its moon form in "The Hardest Thing", it has at least thirty-five eyes.
• Eye Motifs: The Core's most prominent feature has to be its eyes, not only because of their sinister shape and color, but also because each eye represents a single mind in its collective. Additionally, it has eyes all over the place, from the walls of the castle to the ends of its tendrils. It even has one in Andrias's crown which allows it to communicate with him. Its eye also serves as the insignia of the Leviathan army, shaped like a diamond with two black rhombuses on either side giving the illusion that it is a crown.
• Fatal Flaw: Its sadism, its arrogance, and its inability to change its ways whilst overwhelmingly fearing the prospect of becoming meaningless. Darcy ends up getting their connection severed by Sasha because they were too busy delighting in tormenting their victims twice during the same battle rather than focusing on neutralizing them thoroughly when they had the chance. The Core's entire evil plan is influenced by an inability to move past its own millennia-old perception of what Amphibia was and what it had, and as noted by Marcy, underneath it all the Core is actually terrified of death and being obsolete — these two things lead the Core to excessively reject any opportunity to make a Heel–Face Turn in favor of trying to destroy Amphibia in a (literally and proverbially) cosmic hissy fit, which in turn ultimately seals the Core's fate to certain destruction.
• Faux Affably Evil: While possessing Marcy, as it shares a lot of her particular personality traits and general demeanor. All this does is make it immensely creepier.
• Final Boss: The Core serves as the final obstacle for the Calamity Trio to take on by the show's end.
• Fisher King: When Andrias has done away with his benevolent public image to further the Core's plan and the Core is actively enacting its malevolent will so it can return to multiversal conquest, just about all of Amphibia is reduced to an apocalyptic, smog-skied Polluted Wasteland as Newtopia's magitek strip-mines the continent and multiplies, showing how the Core acting through Andrias cares nothing about its subjects or the welfare of its homeland at all when weighed against the Core's ambitions to be a Myopic Conqueror. A more direct example occurs when Anne and Sasha confront Darcy for the first time in Andrias' throne room shortly before Darcy reveals theirself to the entire Resistance: the once-beautiful throne room is now infested with the Core's eye-studded cables, and the throne's center has been hollowed out and replaced with a gigantic Core eye: symbolizing that the Core as Darcy has done away with the illusion of benevolent monarchy that Aldrich and pre-"True Colors" Andrias projected, and that Darcy has stopped controlling things from the shadows via the King of Amphibia in favor of openly revealing theirself as the true despotic ruler of Amphibia.
• Genius Loci: It becomes this after it has successfully taken complete control over Amphibia's red moon.
• God-Emperor: They are the true ruler of Amphibia, murals imply they were worshiped like some sort of deity, and they claim to be a god. Aldrich and his forebears implicitly treated the Core as akin to a living god, and the position of 'King' of Amphibia is revealed to be little more than a false premise to hide the fact that the Core is, and always has been, ruling through them, with the previous kings eventually becoming part of the true ruler of Amphibia upon their passing.
• A God Am I: When fighting the girls in "The Hardest Thing", they claim to be a god.
  The Core: FOOLS! You cannot stop... A GOD!
• Gone Horribly Right: Implied. From what Andrias, Aldrich and Darcy respectively say when introducing the Core, it sounds like the Core was originally created partly to preserve the knowledge, culture and way of life from Amphibia's now-lost civilization. In the present, the Core is hellbent on resurrecting Amphibia's old way of life even when it's to a changed Amphibia's complete detriment.
• Grand Theft Me: The Core uploads itself into Marcy to have a living host in order to progress its plans, though it was apparently created in the first place precisely to avoid its individual minds' natural death.
• He Was Right There All Along: The seemingly ordinary moon is the very first thing we see and it is shown on countless occasions throughout the series. In the finale, the Core takes control of it and tries to crash it into Amphibia.
• Hidden Agenda Villain: While we know that its primary goal is subverting a prophecy regarding the three girls, season 3 shows that it still has plans for Marcy, starting with taking over her body to regain an organic form for itself, though it's still unknown what the exact end purpose of this action is.
• Hidden in Plain Sight:
  • King Andrias' crown isn't an ordinary object but a device that allows the Core to see what Andrias sees and communicate with him.
  • Its moon form is shown many times throughout the whole series, starting from the very first scene. It just looks like an ordinary moon.
• Hypocrite: Darcy mocks Andrias for his tantrum when his drone fails to kill Anne in "Froggy Little Christmas", but later, Darcy proves they're just as petulant if not more when they get the short stick and their ego is feeling bruised: snapping at Andrias to shut up when he's unintentionally rubbing salt in Darcy's wound by scorning the notion that the Core didn't think through the consequences of killing a Calamity-empowered Anne, and responding to the failure of their Earth invasion at the heroes' hands by trying to destroy all of Amphibia via Colony Drop in one gigantic hissy fit.
• Immortality Immorality: How immoral, you ask? How about enslaving and then brutally experimenting on an entire race of peaceful Plant Aliens in order to learn the secret to their healing powers in order to advance their medicine and extend their own lives? Then, of course, there's abusing their descendants and taking over the body of an innocent 13-year-old girl without so much as batting an eye(s), something that even Andrias himself shows hesitation to do. Mother Olm's prophecy outright calls it an "unnatural thing that does not sleep and will not die".
• Immortal Ruler: This thing is the true ruler of Newtopia, if not all of Amphibia, and they exist as an ageless, mechanical monstrosity that assimilates whichever figurehead is at the head of Newtopia into their hive once their service comes to an end.
• Immortality Seeker: A successful case of this. Thanks to their technological advancement, the discovery of the Shadowfishes, and the enslavement of the Moss People, Andrias' ancestors were able to develop the necessary knowledge to transcend death through merging their disembodied minds with the Core as their new vessel. In an interesting twist to this, the collective willingly forsakes their immortal and much more durable vessel in favor of Marcy's very mortal form in order to forward its plans, possibly because they need one with greater mobility.
• Immortals Fear Death: They uploaded themselves into a mechanical Mind Hive in order to avoid death, and have spent a thousand years hiding in the royal castle in Newtopia to preserve themselves until the Box returned.
• Irony:
  • Whilst the Core is the bigger threat and more dangerous villain than even Andrias, there are several points throughout the climatic episodes that make it clear that despite their overall position of superiorly over him, and the fact that they constantly mock him for his emotional attachments out of an implied perception that Andrias is an Inadequate Inheritor of the position of 'King', the Core would not be nearly as effective a villain without Andrias' aid.
  • Upon first meeting Marcy, once they're alone, the Core orders Andrias to immediately kill her to avert the olm prophecy, disregarding her age in favor of the threat she might pose. Not only is Andrias' suggestion of befriending Marcy and her friends and tricking them into de-powering themselves and charging the Calamity Box a far more pragmatic and effective solution, causing multiple problems for the girls and nearly securing their complete victory if not for Anne's Lifesaving Misfortune, when Darcy later has Anne at their mercy and intends to actually kill her themselves this time, Anne points out that their lack of understanding about the Calamity Gems and their powers mean that they can't guarantee that killing her won't erase the energy they hope to restore to the Box, a point that Darcy eventually concedes. If the Core had had their way from the start, it's very likely that they could have sabotaged themselves and their eventual plans by killing Marcy outright.
  • The Core is effective at manipulating Andrias into embracing his worst actions to become a fitting enforcer of their will, but he's the only one it's capable of influencing, and even that is mainly due to his centuries-long guilt over having lost the Calamity Box and doomed their once-mighty civilisation to gradual decay. When it tries to get underneath the girls' skin using Marcy's memories of them, it fails due to it's inability to grasp their Character Development, with Anne turning their claims that she's 'dumber than a bag of rocks' back on it with a point it can't refute, and its attempts to break Sasha's resolve over how similar they are as fellow manipulators only further motivate her to keep fighting back harder because of how she's no longer that person. Contrast this with Andrias, who does manage to effectively manipulate the girls into achieving his goals for him, especially Marcy, who could have sent them all home once they'd completed the third temple, by appealing to her desire to keep having fantastical adventures with her friends.
  • When fighting as Darcy, they prove to be surprisingly competent at hand-to-hand combat with a Sinister Scythe, but are clearly inferior compared to Andrias' own combat prowesss, needing to use their Home Field Advantage inside the shield generator room several times and relying heavily upon pragmatism to overcome their foes, even going down in a single hit in the end, compared to Andrias' own fight, which sees him basically win a Victory by Endurance despite facing an opponent who can ragdoll him normally. And, while Andrias tends to go straight for the killing blow with little wind-up, Darcy clearly enjoys prolonging the deaths of their victims, allowing Anne Any Last Words? before they kill her, which she uses to delay her execution instead, and they refrain from finishing off Sasha when they sense Andrias losing the will to fight in Anne's battle, attempting to enact a Villain Override on him to finish off Anne, believing that Sasha is too badly wounded to do anything more than helplessly watch her friend die, which only allows her to recover and put Darcy down.
  • In "Froggy Little Christmas", they mock Andrias' Villainous Breakdown over failing to kill Anne again as 'pathetic' and unbecoming of a king, but upon their own defeat and the thwarting of the Earth invasion, they proceed to do the exact same thing, but on a grander scale, showing how they're Not So Above It All from their servant, and are even more petty and malicious than he could ever be.
  • Unrelated to Andrias, the Core exists solely to ensure immortality for its assimilees. Despite this, it is effectively killed twice, first by Sasha and then by Anne.
• It's All About Me: Beneath its claims of trying to preserve Amphibia's way of life and prosperity, it ultimately only cares about itself and its own power and immortality. It all culminates in the Core trying to wipe out all life on Amphibia simply because it can't handle losing and not having control over the planet, proving its goals are more about satisfying its own rampant egomania than anything else.
• Jerkass: The Core can certainly put up an amiable front, but everything it says drips with condescension and it treats everyone horribly, even Andrias, one of the very few to actually be loyal to it.
• Knight Templar: Subverted. The Core pays lip service to being dedicated to restoring the glory of Newtopia but over time, it becomes very clear that what the Core really cares about is power. While it does view newts as the superior species, it's very much just to fuel the Core's own ego.
• Lack of Empathy: More so than even Andrias himself. Whereas Andrias is implied to have some genuine guilt over what he's been doing, the Core expresses no such reservations. Darcy's immediate response to catching Andrias staring forlornly at his friendship portrait is to smirk slyly and passive-aggressively mock him over what happened between him and his friends, and Darcy is eagerly looking forward to their invasion of Earth.
• Laser Blade: They have both a laser dagger and a laser scythe, both of which are used against Sasha in their final duel. When she gives Sasha a large slash across the back, the wound is visibly cauterized.
• Laughably Evil: "The Core & The King" reveals it to be this, being the head of a genocidal empire made up of the greatest minds of said empire... while also possessing Marcy, which makes it inherit some of her quirks (e.g. choosing a name based off of her favorite video game, stuffing its mouth with red velvet cupcakes, and even falling flat on its face at one point). Once she's freed, however, it throws out this trope and becomes completely serious and threatening.
• Light Is Not Good: Aldrich and other newts whom were presumably assimilated by the Core in the past at first manifest in the "inner sanctum" as translucent, glowing golden figures. It reminds one of how the Core's stated purpose was to preserve Amphibia's intelligentsia despite its demonstrated function being a mere cheat against death for Andrias' despotic predecessors, and contrasted against the Core's usual Red and Black and Evil All Over, the aesthetic really brings the Light Bringer to mind. The Core shows these forms to Marcy just before Aldrich sets about manipulating the girl into embracing a Lotus-Eater Machine with the aim of permanently assimilating her mind into the collective.
• Look on My Works, Ye Mighty, and Despair: The Core was built by Amphibia's lost civilization as a way to preserve their knowledge and their evil rulers forever. Andrias boasts that the Core is a conquest of death itself, whilst Aldrich boasts that the Core is something which truly lasts, and the Core considers itself a god outright. Though the Core endured for a millennium after most of Amphibia's old magitek was shut down, it's completely obliterated (along with its lunar vessel) by the power of the Calamity Gems and nothing remains of it but the fragments of Amphibia's destroyed moon, disproving the villains' claims that it would last forever.
• Lotus-Eater Machine: It is revealed that they locked Marcy in one inside of her own mind while they're busy puppeting her body, first as a small room filled with puzzles, then a giant library, then a fantasy world where she can go on adventures with Sasha and Anne. An avatar of Aldrich is in charge of keeping her focused on it instead of her fractured memories.
• The Man Behind the Man: It's the true ruler of Amphibia, the one pulling the strings behind the Leviathan dynasty and their multiversal conquests.
• Master Computer: They were created by converting the minds of Amphibia's previous rulers and thinkers into data and storing it in one large Mind Hive.
• Mechanical Abomination: The room it resides in is filled with computer sounds, and you can see giant wires attached to the creature when it opens its glowing eyes. Alhough, this turns out to just be the current vessel of the Core, which is more like a technological Mind Hive than some kind of incomprehensible machine.
• Mind Hive: Andrias, and later Aldrich and Darcy reveal that the Core's consciousness within its metal shell is actually comprised of a fusion of "Amphibia's greatest minds, [which have been] preserved for all eternity" via Brain Uploading with pre-shutdown Newtopia's advanced ancient technology. It's later revealed that these so-called "great" minds include the previous monarchs before Andrias. As a result, the Core whenever it has a voice (in its Darcy form and moon form) almost-exclusively refers to itself in the plural. "The Beginning of the End" shows that the Core can enter a brief trance, during which it draws on its individual assimilated components to "reach a consensus" on how to resolve a problem, while "The Core and the King" shows that the Core's assimilated minds can speak individually of the collective when the Core wants them to (as Aldrich briefly does).
• The Mind Is a Plaything of the Body: As Darcy, they've picked up some of Marcy's personality traits and mannerisms, like her klutzy nature. The name is even short for "Dark Marcy" and is a reference to one of Marcy's favorite video games.
• Mind Rape: It uses a combination of laser projectors and fog to create projections based on Marcy, Yunan, and Olivia's pasts to torment and distract them when the latter two try to break Marcy out of her Healing Vat and escape. Disturbingly, it doesn't seem to be able to draw the images directly from their minds, meaning it must have created them based on the observations it made watching them the entire time they've been in Amphibia.
• Misanthrope Supreme: The Core's superiority complex is so great it regards all other life as worthless savages only fit to be conquered and exterminated. It does claim to view newts as superior, but over time it becomes very clear the Core only cares about newts that share it's viewpoint - and even then, it proves willing to kill everyone on Amphibia indiscriminately if the Core can't have total control.
• Multiversal Conqueror: It was the true power behind Amphibia's throne in the days when Amphibia's now-lost civilization was using the Music Box to constantly conquer and pillage other dimensions for resources and research materials, perpetuating an endless cycle of interdimensional warmongering — and "The Core and the King" reveals that what no-one in the empire except for Amphibia's king knew was that the Core was having their frobot armies outright exterminate any sapient life they found on these invaded worlds. And the Core very much wants to resume its campaign of endlessly conquering and stripping other worlds, treating the sheer carnage it commits during the Earth invasion like a dearly-missed pasttime.
• Murder Is the Best Solution: Whereas Andrias prefers a ruthlessly pragmatic and decently thought-out approach to neutralizing any obstacle in his and the Core's way, the Core's go-to solution is to just kill the problem without thinking any further beyond that. The Core initially intends to return Anne's Calamity power to the otherwise-volatile Heart Gem by just killing her, until Anne points out that they have no way of knowing what'll happen to her sample of the Gem's power if she dies with it still inside her. "All In" reveals that when Marcy first came to Andrias and the Core's attention, the Core wanted Andrias to immediately kill her, and the Season 2-spanning gambit to manipulate Marcy and her friends into delivering the Music Box and de-powering themselves was actually all Andrias' idea. This goes to show that the Core is a lot more evil than Andrias, and that it isn't nearly as smart as it thinks it is for a mind hive of Amphibia's so-called "greatest minds".
• Myopic Conqueror: Their "conquering" of other worlds is more of a raiding, giving an impression that they're less a Multiversal Conqueror and more of a Multiversal Pirate or Bandit. As far as we see, they have no interest in other worlds beyond the resources and rare specimens they can provide for their own research and furthering their power, strip-mining them bare and moving on to the next in a Vicious Cycle, exterminating any native sapient life in the process.
• Near-Villain Victory: It comes very close to killing Sasha, at least until they realize Andrias no longer wishes to keep fighting.
  • In the series finale, the Core (in its ultimate moon form) is too strong for combined armies to stop; even when the Calamity Trio and the reformed Frobots worked together using their powers to fight back, the Core easily wards them all off with its super-strength. It would've succeeded in destroying Amphibia and murdering all of its inhabitants (including a reformed Andrias) in it, that is if Anne didn't choose to sacrifice herself in using the Calamity Gems to get the job done.
• Nerd in Evil's Helmet: Quite literally, as they are the evil helmet possessing the nerdy Marcy, and after the unnerving impression the Core gives off in their first few appearances, "The Core & The King" reveals Darcy has taken on some of Marcy's personality quirks and clumsiness.
• No-Nonsense Nemesis: When they first meet Marcy and realize she's part of the prophecy foretelling their doom, they tell Andrias point-blank to kill her on the spot. They drop this trait once they become Darcy, taking on Marcy's quirks and becoming more of a Psychopathic Manchild.
• No Sense of Personal Space: The Core and respect for personal boundaries are not on speaking terms. When it was first introduced to a young Andrias, it immediately got right up in his personal space to get a closer look at the young prince despite this clearly making him uncomfortable, and it didn't bother to give Andrias and his father any personal space during their subsequent one-on-one exchange. In the present, Darcy gets right up in Anne and Sasha's personal space while taunting them and trying to break their resolve, even lightly slapping Anne across the chin.
• Not Quite Dead: They are seemingly defeated when Sasha cuts the cord on Darcy's helmet in "All In", but then the helmet later sprouts legs and crawls off.
• Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist: Although in the past it and Aldrich claimed that their Multiversal Conqueror actions were merely to preserve the Amphibian way of life, especially since it's implied that Amphibia is a Metal-Poor Planet, planning to exterminate humanity just to gain easy access to Earth's resources to continue their conquering ways, with the heavy implication that they've done the same thing on other worlds before and kept the full truth from their subjects, along with mistreating Amphibian citizens in the present as they drain Amphibia dry of its own resources, proves that they ultimately only care about their own power and immortality. Their actions in "All In" and "The Hardest Thing" reiterate this; not only are they very clearly enjoying the pain and destruction that they cause during their invasion but after the said invasion is foiled, putting an end to their world-conquering ways for good, and they're trapped in Darcy's helmet, rather than try and change, or hide and plot their comeback for another day, their fear of obsolescence or death means that they try to ram Amphibia's moon into the planet as one final attempt to either reclaim the stones or screw over the heroes.
• Obviously Evil: Oh yes it is. This being has a color scheme of mainly black, red, and orange; multiple red-orange eyes with Hellish Pupils; mind-control capabilites; and can even summon its assimilees as avatars with Facial Horror. Plus, it painfully subjects poor Marcy to mind-control procedures and gleefully abuses Andrias to do whatever it wants to, even if it goes against his will.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • In "Olivia and Yunan", when one of the Core's hologram-projecting eyes realizes it's been spotted by Marcy and the heroes are now onto the illusion, the eye hilariously widens, then the iris reshapes itself in an Expressive Mask manner to convey nervousness while looking around in a way that clearly says, "Shit, the jig is up, I've gotta hide!"
  • Darcy has an epic one in "All In" when she realizes that Sasha just cut their Achilles' Power Cord: first screaming in horror at the top of their lungs, then briefly ranting at Sasha that she's a fool for doing this to them, then helplessly wailing and screaming in denial and dismay as every part of the Core except their Darcy helmet shuts down and the helmet loses control of Marcy's body.
  • Finally, the look on all the Core's eyes screams this as it's being vaporized for good: the eyes on both its moon form and the attached helmet are wide and the pupils shrunken in shock and terror.
• Omnicidal Maniac: Its modus operandi during invasions of other worlds and what it plans to do to Amphibia should it ever lose control make the Core this trope at its absolute worst. Seeking everlasting power for itself, the Core solely cares about using Amphibia's magitek to invade other worlds, stripping them bare of their resources and actively exterminating any sentient life on them it doesn't deem worthy of study back on Amphibia, so that the Core will have enough resources and powers to expand its war machine for conquering more challenging worlds, ad infinitum. The series finale also reveals that the Core's "final gambit" if it can't have what it wants is to destroy all life on Amphibia as the inhabitants know it via ramming Amphibia's moon into the planet.
• One-Man Army:
  • Downplayed. In its literal moon form, the Core is able to power through the empowered Calamity Trio's efforts to hold back its Colony Drop and even destroy the dozens of frobots that are helping them, after its "space bug" defensive has been wiped out. It takes Anne taking on the combined power of all three Calamity Gems to destroy the Core's moon form.
  • Subverted with its Darcy form. While Darcy is certainly skilled with a scythe, they're a rather poor fighter overall, especially compared to Sasha.
• Orcus on His Throne: For the majority of the series, the Core spends its time hidden beneath the castle, manipulating things from the shadows while Andrias carries out its will. However, this is justified, since it is connected to many cables that are integrated with the inner chambers of the castle. This ends up working in its favor, as nobody outside of the castle even knows it exists, meaning the resistance believes that Andrias is the top dog and that distracting him and his army will leave the castle free for a smaller strike team to sabotage his plans, unaware that Darcy is waiting for them.
• Promotion to Opening Titles: Its eyes can be seen overlooking Marcy's pod in the season 3 opening's first version and after becoming "Darcy", it appears front and center alongside Andrias, indicating its promotion to the main antagonist.
• Psychopathic Manchild: Possibly even more so than Andrias after possessing Marcy. As a result of absorbing some of Marcy's quirks and using her body, Darcy acts like a goofy autistic teenage girl that just so happens to be a collection of the minds of a brutal empire that wants to exterminate humanity.
• Punny Name: In Marcy's body, the Core calls themself "Darcy", an apparent combination of "Dark" and "Marcy" as a way of calling itself "Dark Marcy" (instead of Andrias' suggestion, "Mar-Core").
• Rasputinian Death: Each individual member of the Core has died once of old age already. In the modern day, it is first defeated in single combat by Sasha who severs its connection to its host, then utterly obliterated by Anne using the full power of the calamity gems.
• Red and Black and Evil All Over: Their initial form is a pitch-black machine with over thirteen orange eyes, and when they become Darcy, they put her in an all-black outfit with a matching helmet. This becomes more played straight for the final battle, as the Core's orange eyes turn red in sheer rage at their foiled invasion, not to mention their planetoid form being almost entirely red.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: Downplayed. It has multiple hellishly reddish-orange eyes on its spherical body. It gets worse when said eyes are shown on the face-obscuring helm that Marcy wears as its current vessel.
• Royal "We": Darcy refers to themself as "we", which makes sense given they are an amalgam of various different beings. But the minds within are also capable of speaking individually, as Andrias' father does so at the end of "The Core and the King" and seemingly also when he acted as the Core's avatar for communicating.
• Sadist: Despite the Core's almost purely mechanical and data-based nature before possessing Marcy, the Mind Hive is still very much capable of feeling emotions, and there are many occasions when they take great pleasure in hurting others.
  • The elaborate illusions it crafts against Marcy and Olivia contain details that serve no purpose beyond mocking them for how badly they feel they've failed at protecting what matters most to them. Olivia's mother turns into a machine-newt hybrid monster belching factory smoke, whose lower half is comprised of polluted earth and strewn with Amphibian bones, symbolizing how the environmental devastation will kill not only the creatures of Amphibia but the people as well, something that clearly upsets her. The two-headed Anne/Sasha fusion that mocks Marcy for selfishly betraying them and claims her friends want nothing to do with her anymore has the St James emblem on their chest turn into a heart as they do so, symbolizing how much Marcy loves her friendship with the duo and how awful she feels for metaphorically breaking their hearts with her Dark Secret. And, while it's not necessary for its plans for Marcy, it has Andrias outline exactly what's about to happen to her before it begins the conversion process, and keeps itself hidden inside the room for the entirety of Olivia and Yunan's attempted rescue apparently out of amusement at their futile efforts, when it could have physically interfered at any point.
  • When Andrias suffers a Villainous Breakdown and throws a childish tantrum over failing to kill Anne again, Darcy mocks him for his 'unkingly' conduct, calling his reaction 'pathetic'. This is despite his emotional outburst being born from the same negative traits the Core itself explicitly encouraged in Andrias over the course of 1,000 years in order to make him a more compliant servant to it, essentially mocking him for not acting more mature when it itself encouraged his emotional immaturity as a means of controlling him. The fact that one of the Core's collective minds is Aldrich, Andrias' father and the one he explicitly seeks to impress through the Core, gives another cruel twist to it expressing contempt for him not acting like a proper king would.
  • When Darcy sees Andrias shooting a pained glance at the portrait of him, Leif, and Barrel together in his childhood, it snidely mocks him that it's not the only one that needs to let go of old memories, explicitly Gaslighting him for his still-painful regret over the implosion of his childhood friendships and how it's still distracting him from his duties as the Core's loyal servant. Darcy's smug grin explicitly shows it knows this hurts Andrias and that it takes amusement in his emotional turmoil, aware that he's too devoted to it now to do anything but loyally serve it, and finds twisted fun in how he's still hurting after all those years. When Andrias burns the portrait to help re-commit himself towards serving the Core, it adopts a smug Slasher Smile and briefly lets Aldrich's personality surface from the collective in order to tell Andrias how he's almost proud of him for doing so, explicitly withholding the approval for his actions that Andrias so craves from the Core even as he acts in line with its wishes.
  • While it admits that inhabiting Marcy's body caused the Core to start exhibiting some of her quirks and mannerisms, it's implied that it's also deliberately emulating Marcy at times to mock Andrias for his suppressed guilt over making her into the Core's vessel, at one point making it clear to him that Marcy's still around, but trapped inside her own mind because of what he did.
  • In "The Beginning of the End", when Darcy reveals themself before Anne and Sasha, they mock both the girls' failure to stop it as well as their claims that they're still friends with Marcy despite her stranding them in Amphibia, pointing out that from browsing Marcy's memories, it can tell they weren't the most supportive friends to her back on Earth, even though neither was actively malicious towards her, pointing out that they ignored or overlooked Marcy's needs and interests and treated her as 'the friend that was just there', which fuelled her poorly thought-out decision to use the Calamity Box. Having more or less already won at that point, it has no logical reason to taunt the girls with their past failings beyond its sadistic pleasure at their regret. It even specifically taunts Anne's intelligence, calling her 'dumber than a bag of rocks' because Anne previously admitted to Marcy her insecurities with being 'the dumb one' of their trio and it wanted to rub that in her face. It clearly relishes broadcasting the strike team's failure to disperse the resistance, and when they decide to kill Anne to retrieve the Calamity Gem energy powering her, they're clearly enjoying the chance to gut her with a laser knife. They even allow Anne the opportunity for Any Last Words? before they start cutting into her, clearly not intending to honour any pleas for mercy, doing it just to enjoy the moment more, and while Anne manages to successfully reason that they can't afford to kill her just yet, they're displeased that they've been forced to delay her demise and make it clear that they will finish the job later.
  Darcy: You only bought enough time to watch your planet fall. We look forward to dissecting you. Alive.
  • This ends up being a major component of its downfall in "All In", where it allows itself to be distracted by tormenting its victims, ultimately allowing Sasha to cut the cable on Darcy's helmet.
• Satanic Archetype: A monstrous being which dwells "below" in a dark basement, holds domain over another dimension separate from Earth, and seeks to escape from its confinement in the borders of its own world so it can reach the Earth with a legion of inhuman minions of a similar nature (mechanical for the Core, demonic for Satan), conquer and ruin our world as we know it and ultimately do the same to the whole of creation. The Core usually has a Red and Black and Evil All Over appearance, yet its assimilee-populated inner mindscape contrasts this image with a grand and Light Is Not Good aesthetic, bringing to mind Satan's origins as a bright angel. It prefers to use trickery and deceit over a direct confrontation with the heroes in order to get its own way with them, and in Marcy's case it tries to tempt her with superficial gifts into being assimilated (essentially selling her soul and becoming damned). The Core's tentacles carrying the previously-assimilated Aldrich into the darkness after he's finished talking with Andrias in their mindscape gives the impression that he's being dragged off to Hell. The Core is also responsible for playing The Corrupter to Andrias to make him the very worst version of himself who then acts as the Core's servant, and the revelation that the position of king and the title's past holders are nothing more than figureheads for the Core's will brings to mind the kings of Revelation whom serve the Beast. The Core's forcible possession of Marcy's body to act as its vessel has demonic connotations, often moving in a jerky, almost puppet-like manner and outright making her bones pop when it first took possession.
• Sense Freak: The Core, having spent over a thousand years (if not more) in a robotic shell, yearns for the ability to touch, smell, taste, and experience life again, which is why it possesses Marcy Wu.
• Seven Deadly Sins:
  • Lust: Apparently, it forcibly body-jacks Marcy at least in part because the transhuman minds composing it yearn to have an organic body through which they can experience living sensations like taste and touch again. It's also made very clear when Darcy is directing the frobots' invasion on Earth that they've always gotten a kick out of using the frobots to obliterate things during past invasions, and that they've missed their barbaric pastimes in the thousand years since the Music Box was lost.
  • Gluttony: As a Multiversal Conqueror, the Core is basically just an interdimensional pirate or bandit, having no interest in the worlds it attacks beyond greedily pillaging and pilfering them for all their resources. And when another dimension's resources aren't readily available, the Core instead turns its appetite for war machine-fueling resources onto Amphibia itself, unsustainably over-consuming and polluting the environment.
  • Greed: All the Core cares about is getting to maintain its power and continue expanding its multiversal empire forever, to the detriment of all life.
  • Sloth: It leaves all the dirty to work to the current living king or to the frobot army unless the Core's personal intervention is very necessary, and it continues this habit even after it's gained a mobile body for itself in Darcy.
  • Wrath: It repeatedly browbeats its servant Andrias, and when stressed, Darcy threatens Andrias that he'll never get to rejoin his father in the Core's Mind Hive, even though it's pretty much only through Andrias that the Core has managed to pose so much of a threat or accomplish much of anything during the series. In the face of being defeated, the Core retaliates by attempting to wipe out all life on Amphibia as the inhabitants know it via a Colony Drop which could kill the Core as well.
  • Envy: Deep down, the Core is terrified of being obsolete, and when the far younger heroes who welcome change and grow with change defeat it, the Core's last gambit is to go on a Suicidal Cosmic Temper Tantrum just to deny them their victory.
  • Pride: It's an egotistical, self-absorbed Smug Snake who isn't half as smart or intelligent on its own as it thinks it is, and it considers itself the master of the Music Box despite the latter ultimately being a Black Box which it has no real understanding of even after thousands of years exploiting it.
• Shadow Archetype: To Sasha Waybright. The Core is a Control Freak spent years prior to the show manipulating and gaslighting Andrias (and presumably every king before him) into following it obediently, belittling him and convincing him that he's nothing without it. Similarily, Sasha is also a Control Freak who orders her friends around, acting like their leader and insisting that they'll be completely lost without her. Darcy even gives Sasha a "Not So Different" Remark during their duel. The difference is that Sasha genuinely cares about her friends despite her manipulative tendencies and eventually grows out of them, whereas the Core only ever saw Andrias as a tool and never moves past its cruel ways.
• Silent Antagonist: When we are first introduced to the Core, it is a mostly silent and the only sounds it can make are mechanical screeches and roars. However, this becomes subverted when it takes over Marcy's body, and from there on out it now has a voice.
• Sinister Scythe: Darcy wields one with an energy blade in the battle against Sasha and Grime.
  Darcy: Let's rumble, girlfriend.
• Sinister Surveillance: The Core turns out to be capable of communicating directly with Andrias through a device hidden in his Cool Crown, allowing it to warn him when Yunan and Olivia attempt to rescue Marcy. Disturbingly, since it doesn't seem to scan their minds to create the projections it uses to Mind Rape and distract them, it seems like the Core has somehow always been doing this to the inhabitants of Newtopia, even being able to bring up Yunan's childhood Trauma Button to distract her.
• Slasher Smile: Well, not the Core itself exactly, but rather Marcy, once it assumes direct control of her body.
• The Sleepless: In "Mother of Olms", Mother Olm when trying to describe the Core calls it "an unnatural thing that does not sleep and will not die". That being said, it did appear to be "resting" before Andrias spoke to it during its first appearance at the end of "The First Temple".
• Smug Snake: The Core treats everyone else, from its enemies to Andrias alike, with smug disdain, especially when it possesses Marcy; yet it becomes increasingly clear towards the series' end that for all its boastings that the Core is made up of "Amphibia's greatest minds," the Core itself isn't half as smart or capable as it thinks it is, and it likely wouldn't have gotten nearly as far as it did without Andrias' aid. The villains' gambit to manipulate Marcy and trick the Calamity Trio into unwittingly de-powering themselves to derail the prophecy was actually all Andrias' idea, and the Core twice gets called out on its Murder Is the Best Solution tendencies causing it to overlook more pragmatic and fruitful alternatives until others point them out for it. When faced with a duel with Sasha, it seems to sake sadistic glee in causing her and Grime pain, but ultimately proves to be a poor fighter compared to Sasha, and has to rely on dirty tricks and homefield advantage to get the upper hand. The Core also outright proves towards the end that it suffers from a blatant god complex and hubris due to its history of possessing and using the Calamity Gems despite not really understanding them, and it proves to be a gigantic Sore Loser when it responds to being dethroned by attempting to destroy Amphibia entirely in a last-ditch effort to deny its enemies their victory. Word of God is that the Core may have started out as a collection of the wisest minds, but over time it became essentially an elitist club for Amphibia's kings, regardless of actual intellect.
• The Sociopath: While it wasn't clear if they were even sentient in their giant robot form, once they take over Marcy and become Darcy, they become a textbook example of this trope. Any niceness they display is nothing more than a calculated act, they treat even their most trustworthy subordinates as expendable tools, couldn't care less about any lasting damage they do with their actions, gaslight and manipulate everybody they meet in order to get what they want, sadistically destroy any chance of joy the other characters have with a big smile, and completely lose their shit once their plan has actually been foiled.
• Sore Loser: Sasha sums it up as one, since, when its plans to conquer Earth are thwarted, the Core decides to ram Amphibia's moon into the planet to wipe out all life rather than face obsolescence or destruction.
• Suddenly Voiced: It speaks for the first time after possessing Marcy in "Olivia & Yunan". Prior to then, it appears it could only communicate to Andrias telepathically through the device hidden in his Cool Crown, and its machine form can only produce a horrific screech.
• Suicidal Cosmic Temper Tantrum: After its invasion is thwarted in "All In", it takes control of the moon and decides to crash itself into Amphibia out of spite.
  Sasha: (after Andrias explains the Core's plans) So what you're saying is this thing's a giant sore loser?!
  Andrias: More or less.
• Taking You with Me: After the invasion of Earth fails, the Core, now trapped in Darcy's helmet, takes control of Amphibia's moon for one final gambit to get the Calamity stones: slam itself into the planet, even if it means destroying itself in the process, all out of spite.
• Terms of Endangerment: It uses Marcy's favorite affectionate terms when referring to Sasha and Anne, like "girls" and "girlfriend". It's incredibly creepy and unsettling.
• That's No Moon: Turns out the red moon orbiting Amphibia was actually another form of the Core the whole time.
• Took a Level in Jerkass: Downplayed. The Core was always a monster, but it was quite Faux Affably Evil and tried to come across as well-intentioned. After the invasion of Earth fails and the Core suffers a Villainous Breakdown, it completely eschews any pretensions of civility and throws a Suicidal Cosmic Temper Tantrum out of spite, all the while revealing it’s utter contempt for all life besides itself.
• Transhuman Abomination: That bizarre mechanical body is the shell for the minds of the intelligentsia of Amphibia's lost civilization, including the previous monarchs before Andrias. "The Core & The King" indicates that it's more or less standard practice for the monarchs of Amphibia to have their minds uploaded into the Core when they die, if they've proven themselves faithful and capable servants during their life.
• The Unfettered: Did you just lose your chokehold over Amphibia? Destroy it and take the stones to start all over.
• Vile Villain, Saccharine Show: Its introduction serves to subtly indicate things are going to get really bad from here on out. Sure enough, its first direct interaction with the heroes ends with it puppeteering Marcy's body after she's been revived and modified into a suitable vessel for it, directly tying it to one of the most shockingly violent scenes in the show, with said possession being both painful and likely permanently damaging to Marcy's mind. Even Andrias is reluctant to go as far as the Core does, trying to talk it out of doing the deed, and it's made clear that as cruel and bitter as Andrias himself is, the Core doesn't have a shred of empathy or remorse within its cold shell, but it does understand people well enough to gain pleasure from hurting others.
• Villainous Breakdown:
  • In “The Beginning Of The End”, it loses its smug composure once Anne points out a flaw in its logic — namely, that it just assumes that killing her would restore the Calamity Box powers when it might be the other way around (that the power would die with her). This forces the Core to give her a stay of execution, although it makes it clear it would painfully drain her powers and kill her afterward.
  • In “All In”, it has an epic one once Sasha manages to cut the wire that allows it to puppet Marcy, freeing the latter and deactivating its control over the castle in the process. It goes further when its reaction to this is to possess the moon and attempt to destroy everything as one last act of spite. When Andrias rejects its offer of immortality and instead helps fight it, it becomes clearly furious and screams vitriol at him. Its last moments are spent staring in wide-eyed shock as it's being obliterated.
• Villain Has a Point:
  • They're only saying it in order to break the girls' will, but the Core isn't exactly wrong in calling out Sasha and Anne over not being the best of friends to Marcy, especially upon seeing her memories about how their dynamic worked back on Earth.
  • It doesn't mince its words in the slightest when it criticizes Andrias' un-kingly behavior in "Froggy Little Christmas" after he fails to kill Anne, twisting the verbal knife in, and it's overall implied to be a Bad Boss towards him. Considering all of the utterly heinous acts Andrias has committed up to this point, it's easy to feel he deserves every second of it. On the other hand, "The Core & The King" makes it clear that the 1,000 years Andrias has spent connected to the Core have enabled it to encourage his worst traits to make him more mindlessly loyal to it and its orders, meaning Darcy is criticizing him for flaws in his attitude that they enabled in the first place. The fact that Andrias' father is part of the collective also gives another dimension to Darcy's critique.
• Villain Takes an Interest: Double Subversion. The Core initially doesn't care about Marcy whatsoever, only recognizing her as being spoken of in the prophecy and ordering Andrias to kill her. However, once Marcy proves herself to be actually quite smart, the Core starts to become interested in her, eventually deciding to make her their newest host in order to foil the prophecy.
• The Voiceless: While Andrias speaks to it in season 2, it doesn't respond out loud, and it goes the whole season without making another direct appearance, leaving it unclear how it communicates with Andrias, until "Olivia & Yunan" where it speaks through Marcy after uploading its Mind Hive to her. Said episode also reveals that it was communicating with Andrias telepathically through a device hidden in his Cool Crown, making it clear that it can't talk directly, at least not in its machine form. By its next appearance, it starts speaking full sentences after possessing Marcy, fully averting the trope.
• Voice of the Legion: When the Core speaks through Marcy's body after possessing her, her voice echoes with a mixture of male and female voices, which is fitting since the Core is a Mind Hive. It especially helps that one of the Core's minds is Andrias' father, making it seem like his voice is interspersed with Marcy's.
• Walking Spoiler: Its first appearance shows that Andrias isn't the only fish in the pond (as he calls it "my lord"), and is a clear hint that the king has more sinister motivations and that his master is a far greater threat than him. A lot of its true nature, revealed in the Core's next few appearances, consists of major spoilers for Andrias' plans and motivations and the past of Amphibia's Multiversal Conqueror civilization.
• What the Hell, Hero?: When 'Darcy' reveals itself to Anne and Sasha, it mocks their demands to 'let their friend go', pointing out that it has access to all of Marcy's memories, and perusing them, it can tell that despite what they claim, they weren't actually the best of friends towards her, not showing an interest in her nerdy hobbies or being supportive towards her, which is partly what fuelled Marcy's decision to transport them to Amphibia in the first place. Anne and Sasha even discuss this very point beforehand, admitting it was a legitimate failing on their behalf. However, it's clear that the Core is doing this to mock them and scorn their failings both at stopping it and being proper friends to Marcy, rather than taking any moral issue with their actions.
• Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?: Double Subverted.
  • Once Darcy has Anne in their clutches, they quickly try to kill the girl for good to avoid the threat that her powers pose. They only stay their hand because Anne manages to successfully argue that they don't know what her death will do to the Gem she's connected with, prompting Darcy to decide to instead vivisect Anne in order to safely extract her power. That being said, Darcy also for no apparent reason decides in this moment to forego their initial intention to deal with Anne immediately, in favor of locking her up in a dungeon to be dealt with later whilst the invasion of Earth begins (naturally, this enables Anne to escape).
  • It's also revealed in "All In" that the Core wanted Andrias to murder Marcy pronto when she first came to their attention, and it only changed its mind to manipulating her over the course of Season 2 because Andrias proposed an even more beneficial solution to the threat Marcy and the other Calamity girls pose to their plans.
• Would Hurt a Child: Its first appearance with the heroes has it implicitly performing Mind Rape on Marcy, alongside Yunan and Olivia, using the young girl's guilt about her mistake in tricking her friends into getting Trapped in Another World to keep her occupied in the room until Andrias can arrive and corner them. When it shows itself to the trio, it immediately grabs Marcy by the face and straps her into the chair to allow it to download itself into her, something that is shown to be extremely painful for Marcy.
• Xanatos Gambit: When the Core senses Yunan and Olivia trying to rescue Marcy, it traps them in their worst nightmares to stop them in their tracks for quick capture, but even if that were to fail, it had already summoned King Andrias to the room to take care of them himself.
• You Fool!: Darcy shouts "You fool!" at Sasha in the midst of their Villainous Breakdown, when they realize that she's severed their Achilles' Power Cord and thus they've officially lost. See Aldrich's folder for another example.

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