Fanfic / Sonic X: Dark Chaos

A fanfiction by Eric Neo Matrix. It can be found here at ff.net and on the author's DeviantArt page. Originally titled The Mystery of Tsali, the story was revised several times over the next few years and eventually renamed Dark Chaos. It is currently in the middle of another revision, which the author has stated will be the final and definitive version on the story.

The story is a full remake of the third and final season of Sonic X. When a young alien girl crashes on their world, Sonic and his friends discover that she is being hunted by a powerful new foe; an android fox known as Tsali the Ultimate Weapon, who has declared genocide on her people and hunted them down to extinction for reasons unknown. Our heroes go into space to stop this new enemy and find the Chaos Emeralds.

And from there, things get From Bad to Worse. Much, much worse.

Sonic and his friends find themselves in a galaxy engulfed in a cruel civil war between an enormous empire of demons led by Lord Maledict and the Metarex, and threatened by invasion from the ancient enemies of the Demons, the Angel Federation. But as Sonic and friends soon discover, there are far greater horrors than mere demons and angels beyond the void.

What makes it somewhat unique among Sonic fanfiction is its complex, extremely dark, and Troperiffic Science Fantasy setting.

Now has a work-in-progress character sheet.

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This story contains examples of:

A — C

• Abusive Precursors: The Forerunners were an alien collective charged by Maledict and Allysion to populate the new universe 500 trillion years in the past, but they rebelled and were sealed beyond the realms of time and space. Ancient prophecy says that they will return and bring about the end times. In Ending A, they succeed.
• Adaptational Badass: Several characters receive this treatment.
  • Tails goes from being a weak, shy Gadgeteer Genius into a Magnificent Bastard captain who gains a Lovecraftian Superpower and ends up saving the entire universe from an Eldritch Abomination at the cost of his own life.
  • Cream stays with Sonic and friends to the end, even after seeing things that would make most adults break down. In Episode 66, she and her chao Cheese ends up beating Astorath the Prince of Darkness on her own.
  • Cosmo saves several planets before becoming acting captain of the Blue Typhoon, and she is also appointed leader of the Metarex during the final battle. And in the rewrite, when Astorath and Beelzebub land on her ship, she runs out onto the flight deck with Venus' demon scythe and rips them a new one.
  • Chris Thorndyke goes from being a whiny, dependent brat to a Genius Bruiser, pulls off a Big Damn Heroes and unleashes Death from Above with the Typhoon in the rewrite of Episode 69, and later on fights Beelzebub and Astorath alongside Cosmo during the final battle.
• Adaptational Heroism: The Metarex were changed from a group of faceless robots trying to destroy the galaxy to a group of Well Intentioned Extremists who want to kill Tsali and rebuild the Seedrian species by any means necessary.
• After the End: This fanfic is this for most of the Milky Way Galaxy, largely devastated by thirty years of the Metarex War and Shroud infestation. Most of the worlds in the galaxy are either lifeless or actively malevolent too, with Demons and Angels fighting over the scraps that still remain.
• Alternate Universe: This fanfic is this to Sonic X, thanks to a few points of divergence in the back story of Sonic X Season 3. The biggest change is that Cosmo's race was destroyed by their own creations rather than by the Metarex. This ultimately causes several more outside factions to get involved in the Metarex arc, with very bad consequences for the galaxy.

• Alien Catnip: fertilizer is revealed to be the equivalent of cocaine and steroids combined for Cosmo's race.
• Alien Non-Interference Clause: The Angels have a strong non-interference policy regarding Demon border galaxies in general and the Milky Way (and Earth) in particular. It's only when the Demons start moving in and curb-stomping the Metarex that they take action and invade the galaxy in retaliation.
• All Myths Are True: The story takes the idea of biblical literalism and turns it completely on its head.
• Alternate Continuity: This fanfic is basically this trope to the third season of Sonic X. According to Word of God, the events of the Dark Chaos backstory took place in canon too. However, there are several key differences in the canon timeline according to the author. Most notably, Tsali's homeworld is never destroyed and he never becomes the Ultimate Weapon and Maledict doesn't get involved in the Metarex War at all due to the Demon Empire falling into an economic depression after his war with Cosmo's race (which in turn stops the Angels from invading the galaxy in retaliation). Thanks to these key differences, the canon Sonic X events happened in the show rather than the events of Dark Chaos.
• An Aesop: The system is broken and needs to be replaced by something better. Also, religion is bad.
• Ancient Astronauts: Humans were descended from Angels who originally colonized Earth as an outpost on the Federation border. They were nearly wiped out by a Demon attack, which caused them to lose their technology and regress. Some of them switched sides and worshiped their Demon invaders; many older pagan religions were based on Maledict.
• And I Must Scream: This is the result of hearing the voice of Dark Tails or being killed by him. He completely hijacks their bodies while the victim is aware and Forced to Watch the whole time. And then, when they die, he takes their souls and assimilates them into his own, using their screams of eternal torment as conduits of Dark Chaos Energy. Both Venus the Seedrian and Trinity suffer this fate.
  • If you're a woman in the Emirate of Mecca, the Muslims turn you into a living broodmother and force you to constantly give birth after being raped by impregnation machines - and make you nearly immortal so you won't die in childbirth.
  • Tails ends up in this fate during the final battle. Dark Tails possessed him and rapidly mutates his body, causing his limbs and body parts to start rotting off. Then they begin to regrow and fall off again and again and again. And for bonus points his jaw falls off, leaving him unable to even scream. Thankfully, Cosmo gives him a Mercy Kill.
  • Interestingly, this trope could describe Maledict himself; he's a Humanoid Abomination trapped in a decaying physical body for the past five hundred trillion years, slowly watching his empire and the universe come to ruin - and if he dies, it'll spell the end of everything he's worked for.
  • Tsali's body never physically accepted his Unwilling Roboticisation; his remaining biological parts are completely infected and gangrenous, keeping him in constant agony. He never grows or ages either, and he's nearly impossible to destroy. Of course, this simply causes him to unleash his terrible pain and rage upon others instead.
    • The Episode 71 rewrite reveals he was awake and aware the entire time during his roboticisation by the Seedrians. No wonder he murdered the entire Seedrian race when he finally freed himself...
• Ancient Conspiracy: Both played straight and subverted. The backstory runs on the idea that both Christianity and Islam are nothing more than fronts for the Angel Federation. However,  Maledict's gigantic "Ultimate Weapon" gambit to defeat the Angels is less than a century old.
• Anguished Declaration of Love: Just like in canon, this occurs between Tails and Cosmo, only this time, it's Cosmo who screams it while shooting Tails.
• The Antichrist: Sonic the Hedgehog himself and Shadow the Hedgehog are both revealed to be this, as they were literally created by Maledict to be "Ultimate" creatures who would defeat the Angels and cement his rule. Neither of them accept it.
• Anti-Climax: Venus's death in Episode 66. Tsali and Venus had been hunting each other and battling for three decades; when Tsali finally finds and kills her, she's half-dead and completely insane thanks to Dark Tails possessing her. Tsali himself lampshades this and muses his disappointment that they couldn't have a climactic final battle.
  • Episode 63 subverts this. Sonic, Shadow, and Eric end up defeating Tsali fairly easily thanks to their Super forms. Then Tsali summons Maledict himself for aid, beginning the actual climactic fight.
  • The ending is a lesser example. Sure Sonic and friends get their Planet Egg back and save the galaxy, but none of the villains get any sort of retribution for their crimes. Instead, they all make tenuous cease-fires with each other and leave quietly.
• The Anti-Nihilist: This is the primary aesop of the story. Despite the extreme Crapsack World and Jerkass Gods around them, Sonic and friends decide that helping others is the only hope to make things better.
• Anti-Villain: Lord Maledict from is definitely this, mostly due to his strong Pragmatic Villain tendencies. In fact, most of the "villain" characters in the story are this, minus some of the obvious evil characters like Beelzebub and Muhammad.
• Archangel Gabriel: Gabriel is referenced as one of four Archangels (himself, Raphael, Michael, and Tephiroth) who lead the military forces of the Angel Federation. Gabriel is a diplomat and negotiator at heart who forges alliances between the Federation and other anti-Demon elements.
• Archangel Michael: Michael is referenced as one of four Archangels (himself, Gabriel, Raphael, and Tephiroth) who lead the military forces of the Angel Federation. An attache of Metatron, he is a hotheaded and aggressive berserker who personally leads the armies of the Angel rebellion against the Demon Empire. He is willing to exterminate entire galaxies if the Demons control them.
• Archangel Raphael: Raphael is referenced as one of four Archangels (himself, Gabriel, Michael, and Tephiroth) who lead the military forces of the Angel Federation. Because of his pacifistic nature, he is in charge of civil engineering and the federal economy.
• Artistic License – Biology: Zigzagged. Most of the biology behind the Shroud and the resulting Body Horror they cause on their victims are physically and anatomically impossible. It doesn't make them any less gross and terrifying though, and is entirely done for Rule of Scary. Lampshaded by Chris in the rewrite, who states that everything about the Shroud goes against every biological law as humans understand them, and it's the reason he's utterly terrified of them.
• Artistic License – Religion: This fanfic has this trope in numerous places, mostly because of its intentionally exaggerated Darker and Edgier look at Judeo-Christian religions in the setting and backstory. Lampshaded by Chris, who explains to Sonic that the Judaism/Christianity/Islam equivalents in the Sonic universe are basically nothing like the ones on Earth.
• Author Tract: This story is pretty much an anti-religious, anti-right wing tract wrapped in a Darker and Edgier Sonic the Hedgehog fanfic story.
• Awesome, but Impractical: The Galaxy Crusher is a Demon superweapon the size of a red giant that's capable of erasing an entire galaxy (and the ones around it) with a single shot. However, the sheer collateral damage it causes, mind-boggling logistic requirements, and the threat of it being hijacked led Maledict to deactivate it after it was only used once.
• Ax-Crazy: Tsali. While moderately calm and even somewhat civil when he's not in battle, all bets are off in a fight. His greatest joy is murdering Seedrians in the most gory ways he can think of; everyone else is fair game too. And as the story goes on, the "Crazy" part comes to the forefront.
  • The Muslims are basically an entire faction of violently insane pedophile fundamentalists.
• Badass Army: The Hell Knights/Nephilim are essentially the Hell Knights from Doom crossed with Chaos Space Marines from Warhammer 40,000. A small group of them led by their leader Astorath nearly defeats the entire Metarex armada and the Blue Typhoon during the final battle. Sonic and his friends pretty much fit this trope too, as they manage to beat back said Hell Knights and severely damage the Demon fleet.
• Bad Boss: Surprisingly, Maledict mostly subverts this. Despite his manipulative tendencies, he genuinely cares about the people he rules over and has great fondness for his servants. Just don't attempt to betray his trust.
• Badass Boast:
  • Maledict introduces himself with an epic one in Episode 63.
    "I am who I AM. I am the Master of the Emeralds. I am the god of this world, the Evil One, prince of the powers of the air. My eyes bring perdition, my hands reap what is sown. My words strike fear into the hearts of mortals. I am Lord of the Demons, Conqueror and Unifier of the universe. I am the roaring lion that devours the souls of my enemies! I am the Old Serpent, the Dragon that cleanses the stars, maker of all the dark places of creation. I am the devil, the one called Satan!
  • In Episode 75, Jesus gets an awesome one too;
  "The Son of Man didn't come to be served... but to serve up your ass on a platter!"
• Be Careful What You Wish For: This story has some particularly disturbing examples, most of them combined with a Deal with the Devil. Venus the Seedrian wished for the power to kill Tsali and prevent the destruction of her race. Not only did she fail to save her people, but her wish doomed her to slowly turn into a robot and damn her soul forever. Tsali made a similar wish for the power to get revenge on the Seedrian race for what they did to him. He got what he wanted - at the cost of his soul, sanity, and the utter destruction of most of the galaxy.
• Been There, Shaped History: Maledict - and considering he's the biblical Satan, it's very understandable. Not only is he behind various events in the Sonic series such as the release of Chaos, the creation of Shadow, the Black Arms invasion, and the Metarex War, he's also been involved in actual human history numerous times. The supplemental materials reveal that he established the Roman Empire as a Demon proxy state and manipulated the world into fighting the World Wars.
• Belief Makes You Stupid: This story could probably be called Belief Makes You Stupid: The Fanfic with its Anvilicious skewering of religious faith. Although, since All Myths Are True and are out to get you in the story's universe, this may actually be a prudent suggestion.
• Beware the Silly Ones: Eric the Hedgehog is definitely this. Sure, he seems like a harmless crazy version of Sonic at first glance... until he unleashes his machines. And his starships. And his Super form -which allows him to create huge guns from thin air. Oh, and it's implied he's far more than just a loony on top of that.
• Big Bad Ensemble: Tsali, Maledict, and Dark Tails. Jesus and Allysion could also possibly be counted.
• Big Damn Heroes: Several times throughout the series.
  • Venus the Seedrian fends off Dark Tails and rescues Tails and Cosmo in Episode 62.
  • Eggman distracts Beelzebub in Episode 67, allowing the heroes to escape with Cosmo and Chris in tow.
• Bittersweet Ending: Two of the alternate endings for the rewrite are this. Ending A has Tails dying to stop Dark Tails, the galaxy left in ruins and the Forerunners invading the universe... but Sonic and his friends got their Planet Egg back and everyone joins forces to stop them. Ending D is the "happiest" of the endings - the above still happens, except Tails doesn't die which (while leaving Dark Tails alive) stops the Forerunner invasion entirely.
• Black Comedy: This fanfic is dripping with dark comedy, as the extreme Darker and Edgier nature of the setting is combined with the typical cheesy humor of the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise. And the rewrite goes all out. The background materials have so much scathing satire that they become more funny than scary.
  • Episode 67 is filled with so much dark humor - from its Accidental Innuendo title to pretty much everything Beelzebub says - that its Nightmare Fuel-riffic premise involving Cold-Blooded Torture and male-on-male demon pedophilia becomes Nightmare Retardant to some readers. The last line in particular qualifies as either hilarious or horrific depending on the reader;
    Chris: Why... Why does my butt hurt so much...?
  • In the rewrite of Episode 73, Tails refuses to hand Cosmo over to Tsali. Tsali responds by throwing Tails to the floor, opening his ribcage, and ripping his heart and lungs from his chest with his bare hands. Complete with a Bond One-Liner;
    Tsali: I guess you didn't open your heart enough!
• Blessed with Suck: Tails gets infected by Shroud, which ends up giving him a Lovecraftian Superpower and makes him immune to the influence of Dark Tails. Except he still feels the corrupting influence of Dark Tails at every moment, and he starts to gain Bizarre Alien Biology by the bucketload. And his temper gives him the chance of losing control of said superpower at any moment - he nearly destroys the Blue Typhoon and devours his friends at the end of Episode 73.
  • Venus the Seedrian gains nearly divine power from a literal Deal with the Devil. Except she's slowly being turned into a robot - and she's been rendered nearly immortal.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality:
  • Maledict the Devil literally does not understand why Sonic and his friends want to stop him, nor does he see anything wrong in manipulating mortals to do horrific acts in his name, and he's obsessed with secretly interfering in events. Being a Physical God slash Humanoid Abomination who is over five hundred trillion years old and using cybernetics to keep himself from physically disintegrating has something to do with it. Allysion, Maledict's archenemy, is even more odd. Her entire belief system revolves around "Demon=bad" and she also sees nothing wrong in manipulating mortals to defeat the Demons by any means necessary. She is also completely fine with exterminating innocent Demon subjects. She believes they are "living in sin" and therefore need to be shown "Christian love" (read: planetary annihilation). She cannot fathom why any mortal would follow Maledict, even though she is not so different.
  • Downplayed considerably in the rewrite, which depicts Allysion as being simply batshit insane from several trillion years of being a ghost and Maledict as a Faux Affably Evil tyrant with semi-good intentions.
• Body Horror: The story is filled to the brim with this. The Shroud in particular live and breathe this trope, with Tails' Shroud infection taking it up a notch as it radically changes his biology. And then there's Dark Chaos Energy and its Squicky effects on the body.
  • Thanks to the story's deconstruction of Unwilling Roboticization, Tsali and Venus take this trope to a whole new level. Especially Venus, being cursed to have all of her body parts slowly transform into machines.
  • Actually Played for Laughs in Episode 74 - when Tails discovers he can dislodge his eyes from his sockets and move them around, one of the first things he does is use it to look up Amy's skirt.
• Beethoven Was an Alien Spy: A core trope of the story. Not only Jesus, but Satan, Muhammed, all the angels, and a large majority of the Jewish prophets from the Old Testament were as well.
• Brain in a Jar:
  • Lord Maledict. Despite being a Physical God, he's actually little more than a skull attached to a suit of power armor filled with liquid and rotting organs, and he has to use his powers to make himself look like a hedgehog to others.
  • Maledict's counterpart Allysion is an Altus Emerald in a Jar, holding her ghost inside it.
• Bread and Circuses: This trope is actually referenced as the sole reason the Demon Empire is so powerful, despite its corruption and despotism. As long as worlds follow Demon law and (publicly) worship Maledict, they are showered with wealth and riches from across the universe. Even slaves are kept pacified through this trope, and this trope is explicitly referenced as the primary deterrent against slave rebellions.
• Break the Cutie: Pretty much everyone from are either pre-broken before the story even begins or become this. There are some particularly dramatic and heartbreaking examples though;
  • Cosmo is left even worse off than the original Sonic X show. Killing Tails at the end certainly didn't help.
  • Cream is utterly traumatized early on and eventually refuses to go to sleep because of nightmares.
  • Tsali's backstory/Start of Darkness was pretty much the mother of all cutie-breaking stories - he watched his family die and his entire world destroyed, lived through the Demon-Seedrian War, got roboticized into an android by his own adopted father Luke, committed genocide on the Seedrians, made a Deal with the Devil, fought a thirty-year galactic civil war, and then got betrayed by his closest friends. All at the age of ten. Needless to say, by the time the story begins, he's barely even remotely sane anymore.
• Black-and-Gray Morality: On one side you have a slave-holding, repressive, reactionary empire run by The Legions of Hell — that nonetheless does many good things for its people. On the other side are the Angels, who are The Revolution Will Not Be Civilized at best. And God and Satan Are Both Jerks, "Satan" being a scheming chessmaster, and "God" being a fundamentalist Ax-Crazy sociopath. And then there's the malevolent Eldritch Abomination, the genocidal two-tailed android fox (and his legion of cannibalistic android clones), omnicidal Abusive Precursors, the Metarex, and of course Dr. Eggman just to make things even more shitty. Even several of the lighter characters are quite grey—Eric and his friends eventually resort to piracy in order to replenish their supplies. Several of the saner Angel leaders aren't clean either; Jesus holds some very...questionable views on homosexuals, though he's depicted more sympathetically than his fellow Angels.
• Bloodier and Gorier: Where to begin with in this fanfic? All of the battles (especially the ones against Shroud, which take Body Horror to the next level) in the series feature copious amounts of blood and gore. Episode 73 takes the cake when Tsali storms through the Blue Typhoon - Tsali almost fatally stabs Sonic and Amy, shatters Cream's arms, blasts Chris with a radioactive blast of Dark Chaos Energy and finally opens up Tails' ribcage and tears his still-beating heart and lungs from his chest. The story is rated M for a very good reason.

• Brainwashed and Crazy: Dark Tails can turn sentient beings mad by speaking to them. This is also a side effect of exposure to Dark Chaos Energy.
• Broken Aesop: This fanfic emphasizes with the Angels that Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are bad. Really, really bad. However, compared with the Demons, they were portrayed as the more honorable and nicer faction overall. The rewrite fixes this somewhat by making the Angels far more morally gray than the original, even with some of more sympathetic Angel characters like Jesus. It also makes the Demons more gray too, to emphasize the fact that both sides are flawed and similar.

• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: This trope is the pretty much the only reason Sonic and friends even let Eric anywhere near them. Despite being an Idiot Savant Cloud Cuckoolander, he's got the technical skills of Tails with the fighting skills of Sonic - and he's genuinely good (most of the time) under all his insanity. This is also the reason why Sonya deeply loves him despite his craziness.
• But for Me, It Was Tuesday: In Episode 75, Cosmo calls Maledict out on all the people he's killed and the horrible things he's done, including slaughtering the Seedrians and ruining Tsali's life. After a moment of silence, Maledict openly admits that for him, the Seedrians' extinction and the slaughter of Tsali's family was "just another day", before following up with a Hannibal Lecture.
  Maledict: Do you know what I have seen in my immortal lifetime? I have watched the Big Bang scatter all the matter through the canvas of creation. I have seen whole galaxies collapse into oblivion. I have watched time itself expand and shrink in its eternity. I have seen countless civilizations rise and fall. And you think you are unique in your suffering? I have stood knee-deep in mud and bone. I have seen murdered dissidents and masses starved into faith. The innocent, the innocent, Sonic- trod and bled and starved and beaten and killed! This is your galaxy! This is the lawlessness of nature!
• The Caligula: The rewrite depicts The Prophet Muhammad (yeah, that one) as a sadistic demagogue with a penchant for slaughtering infidels and pedophilia. The background material expands on him; he tried to irrigate fields with vats of human blood, ordered every dog in the universe to be strangled because one barked at him, and invaded a galaxy based on the commands of a palm tree. It's rather telling that many characters — including his own Muslim followers — fear him more than they fear Maledict and the Demons. Even Jesus and the Angels consider him The Friend Nobody Likes and are planning on quietly assassinating him the first chance they get.
  • Beelzebub is a more straight example; though he isn't a monarch, his Psychopathic Manchild personality and disturbing sexual fetishes make him this trope. He's despised by pretty much all the other Demon leadership — even Maledict thinks his cruelty goes too far but keeps him around for his sheer intelligence.
• Canon Discontinuity: The author had started writing a prequel story at one point, but later decided to go and rewrite the original story. The changes made to Dark Chaos ended up contradicting the prequel so much that the prequel was discontinued altogether.
• Cassandra Truth:
  • It's revealed that Astorath originally told Maledict to his face that his Gambit Roulette would backfire spectacularly, but Maledict ignored him.
  • Nobody believes any of Eric's ramblings about Maledict's cloning process or his Ultimate Weapon plan, even though he was entirely right.
• Cerebus Rollercoaster: The story starts out lighthearted like the original series. Starting with Episode 55, it slowly gets darker and darker until the lighthearted Episode 65. Then the gloves come off and it gets really, REALLY dark. Although the tone is rather consistent from that point, Episodes 67 and 73 are easily the most violent and horrific chapters in the saga.
• Cerebus Syndrome: The story starts a lot like the original third season of Sonic X. It doesn't take long before the heroes realize just how messed up the galaxy really is. And then there's Episode 74...
• Christianity is Catholic: Zigzagged. The Christian sect of Marmolims in Episode 69 is pretty clearly Catholic. However, the Angel Federation itself is rather anviliciously based on right-wing evangelical Christianity.
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: Eggman saves Sonic's life, then he betrays Sonic, then he teams up with and betrays Sonic again, then he saves several of Sonic's friends from Beelzebub, he briefly joins with Maledict, and then he attempts to betray Maledict and gets himself captured in the process before once more teaming up with Sonic.
  • Rouge pretty much doesn't care what side she's on. She originally helps Eggman, then she betrays him to serve Maledict for jewel payments, then she helps Sonic and friends before betraying them to Maledict, then she betrays Maledict and joins with Eggman again.
• Clarke's Third Law: In the science fiction universe of Sonic X: Dark Chaos, it turns out this trope is why Jesus Christ was able to perform miracles in the Bible. He discovered a forgotten cache of insanely advanced Angel technology in a desert cave, which he was able to use thanks to his mutated genetics.
• Cold-Blooded Torture: A good portion of Episode 67 is Beelzebub torturing Cosmo after luring her into his base by shattering her eardrums with extremely loud rock music and drugging her with neurotoxins (and — in the rewrite — electrocuting her before stripping her naked and tying her to his chair with razor wire). Then when Chris goes in to save her, he is captured and suffers even worse torture, eventually ending in Black Comedy Rape via giant acid-covered stinger.
• Cloudcuckoolander: Eric the Hedgehog from embodies this trope. He's an Idiot Savant Talkative Loon who loves breaking the fourth wall and talks to his weapons like they have personalities. Deconstructed later on - not only is it revealed that he's physically brain-damaged due to imperfections in Maledict's cloning process, but he's fully aware that his thoughts aren't entirely normal and has hidden crippling depression as a result.
• Combat Pragmatist: Beelzebub is one of these. Rather than using a gigantic continent-sized flagship like Astorath, he uses a small battleship armed with a cloaking device so he can surprise foes.
• Comically Missing the Point: The rewrite of Episode 68 gives us this gem when Jesus starts angsting about all the people killed in the Angel invasion of the galaxy. Two of his fellow Angel leaders try to reassure him;
  al-Walim: Look on the bright side, at least they weren't aborted.
  Tobit: And you got rid of the gays. I mean, you know how much Allysion hates fags.
• Contrived Coincidence: A common event in this story. The characters (especially Knuckles) frequently lampshade it.
• The Corruption: Dark Chaos Energy. The negative energy of the Emeralds of Power given physical form, it is a highly toxic blue substance that is extremely radioactive, highly corrosive, and mutagenic. It is capable of corrupting and twisting anything.
• Cool Starship: Both the Blue Typhoon and the Dreadnought, but many Demon warships are described in detail as as well.
• Cosmic Horror Story: There are vast empires beyond the galaxy led by omnipotent and unfettered Physical Gods. Maledict and Allysion use the entire universe as their sandbox, waging the Eternal War against each other while concocting up schemes alien to human minds and regarding their creations as their playthings. Between them is the Shroud, a sentient all-consuming and intelligent parasitic virus that devours worlds on a regular basis. And then there's the Forerunners, an entire race of Eldritch Abominations prophesied to return and destroy the entire universe which is exactly what happens in the epilogue. The background lore takes this even further - Judaism, Christianity, and Islam were apparently founded due to the influence of said Lovecraftian horrors on humanity.
• Crapsaccharine World: Sonic's home planet is a nice and rather peaceful place to live. The rest of the galaxy? NOPE.
  • Episode 69 has Marmolim. A planet inhabited by cute beady-eyed aliens with a penchant for magic. Sounds great — except for the fact that they've nearly been wiped out by Shroud, and are torn in a religious civil war between Christians and Maledict-worshipers.
  • New Jerusalem, the Angel capitol city, is subtly implied to be this with the Big Brother Is Watching You and Happiness Is Mandatory overtones.
• Crapsack World: The bleak Dark Science Fantasy setting of this fanfic could possibly give Warhammer 40,000 a run for its money - the Milky Way Galaxy is not a nice place. A civil war between the Metarex and Tsali the Ultimate Weapon has decimated countless worlds and murdered billions of people. Meanwhile, God and Satan Are Both Jerks who wage eternal cold war on each other and are responsible for most of the bleakness, manipulating and dooming whole galaxies to annihilation in order to further their plans. A corrupt and repressive autocratic empire of Demons and a divided federation of Angels battle in a Forever War across the whole universe, with genocide and Rape, Pillage, and Burn being the rule rather than the exception. Shroud parasites, led by their Primes, devour entire worlds on a regular basis. Torture, rape, starvation and disease run rampant, forcing innocents such as Molly and Leon's refugee group to resort to cannibalism to survive. By the end of the story, it's implied that the galaxy has been depopulated so much that it may never recover. And that's all before Dark Tails and the Forerunners enter the fray...
  • Zigzagged with the alternate endings. Ending B manages to top even that where The Bad Guy Wins and opens up a supercluster-sized Negative Space Wedgie, with the resulting Shroud invasion bringing about a universe-wide dark age. However, Ending D is notably more hopeful and upbeat on a small scale.
  • The author's background materials makes it worse. One of the most sacred traditions of the Angels is ritual child molestation. The Jews and their society are obsessed with racial purity and genocide, and often exterminate worlds with toxic gas. The Muslims routinely inflict And I Must Scream on their women and female captives. And so on.
• Crazy-Prepared: In Episode 67, Beelzebub put a shield over himself in case Tails tried to attack him, planted a self destruct mechanism in his lair in case Sonic and friends tried to free the slaves there, and installed an escape pod - complete with Warp drive and communications - in his chamber in case Sonic and his friends attacked him directly and he was forced to flee.
  • Maledict doesn't pull any punches in the Episode 75 rewrite either. He puts a Warpspace jamming field to prevent the heroes from fleeing and summons the Galaxy Crusher to take the entire Milky Way Galaxy hostage and bully Sonic into submission. He also was prepared to change his master plan if something failed - when Tsali betrayed him, Maledict shut his body down with a reset phrase he programmed into Tsali years before. He also knew exactly where the Metarex were if needed, in case his pawns ever found out the true identity of his "M" alter ego.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: In Episode 73, Tsali rampages through the Blue Typhoon searching for Tails and Cosmo. When he corners them and Tails tries to stop him, Tsali throws the fox to the floor and graphically rips his heart and lungs from his chest. With his bare hands.
  • The death of Cosmo's sister Galaxina is shown this time around in Episode 62. Tsali grabs her head and shoves it into a ruptured fuel line. The result is not for the faint of heart.
  • Chris gets impaled through the chest by Beelzebub's stinger in Episode 67, which injects corrosive acid into his body with very Squick-y effects. He gets better when Beelzebub saves him with Chaos Regeneration - so Beelzebub can torture him some more.
  • Episode 68 reveals what the the Demons do to runaway slaves; the women and children are nailed to crosses and the men are hanged by their ribs before being lashed to the outside hulls of Demon warships.
  • The Muslims are pretty much the king of this trope - among other barbaric punishments, they often rend non-Muslims down in flesh troughs for construction material, or strap them into literal mechanical rape spiders called ankaboot that slowly molest them to death with pistons.
• Cruel Twist Ending: Sonic and his friends defeat Dark Tails and save the galaxy. JUST KIDDING! Dark Tails' death allows an entire race of even worse Lovecraftian horrors to finally escape. Which they do - and then promptly exterminate nearly all life in the universe.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: In Episode 64, Lord Maledict himself appears to challenge Sonic and take the Chaos Emeralds. When Sonic and his friends refuse, Maledict promptly stomps Super Sonic, Super Shadow, and Super Eric into the floor at the same time. He also obliterates the Tryphon station and the entire Metarex fleet with a single attack.
  • In Episode 73, Tsali kills Tails and is about to kill Cosmo. Then Tails turns into Shroud Tails, regenerates himself, sucks out all of Tsali's Dark Chaos Energy reserves, and throws Tsali into space through a window.
• Cybernetics Eat Your Soul: Tsali is this trope to the point of Deconstruction.
  • Venus the Seedrian is a literal example. Maledict takes her soul as part of an actual Deal with the Devil. Although he gives her great power in exchange, he curses her to slowly and painfully become a machine just like Tsali.
• Cycle of Revenge: The Metarex War is basically a hugely-escalated version of this trope between Tsali and the Metarex. Also deconstructed as both sides are getting increasingly exhausted of the endless fighting. They finally break the cycle at the end thanks to Cosmo's intervention.

D — F

• Dark Is Not Evil: This story has several examples.
  • Venus the Seedrian; a scarred cybrog Seedrian wearing a black leather combat outfit and armed with a Sinister Scythe. She has made it her mission to protect the remaining members of her race from Tsali at all costs. Subverted when she's possessed by Dark Tails.
  • Tsali and Maledict are deconstructions of this trope. Tsali is more brainwashed by his programming than truly evil and Maledict is basically a Well-Intentioned Extremist taken to its extreme.
  • The Marmolims who worship Maledict dress up in black robes and perform satanic rituals in his name. Despite that, they are all actually quite reasonable and friendly, and they immediately come to Sonic's aid.
• Darker and Edgier: This story is a full remake and Deconstruction Fic of the third season of Sonic X. While the original season was quite dark on its own for a Sonic the Hedgehog series, this fic takes the grim elements to the extreme. The galaxy is a war-torn Crapsack World ruled by demons and infested with Shroud parasites, graphic violence and Nightmare Fuel abound, numerous characters die, and the ending is bittersweet at best and full non-comedic "Shaggy Dog" Story at worst. And the rewrite is often even darker that the original, featuring such pleasent themes as near-galactic destruction, cannibalism, horrific science experiments, fundamentalism, religiously-forced pregnancy, and children being sexually assaulted.
• Darkest Hour: Episode 75 is even titled "Resurrection of Darkness". The final battle between the Angels and Demons begins, with both Maledict and Jesus Christ battling each other. The entire Milky Way Galaxy is in ruins, Sonic's allies have been wiped out, the Blue Typhoon has been wrecked, and the Galaxy Crusher is about to wipe out the remnants of Milky Way in an instant. And just to top it all off, Dark Tails appears and uses the Chaos Emeralds to become a god - putting the fate of the entire universe on the line.
• Deal with the Devil: This story has quite a few from Lord Maledict;
  • Tsali vowed to serve and follow Maledict if he would help the fox get revenge on the Seedrians. The Devil promptly turned him into a Demon Lord and revived him in exchange for eternal servitude. Also, Venus ritually sacrificed several of her fellow Seedrians to Maledict for the power to protect her people from Tsali. He answered, although not in the way she expected.
  • The rewrite implies that Dr. Eggman made one with Maledict as well, after Maria and Gerald Robotnik were killed by GUN. Eggman wanted to get revenge on humanity for destroying his family; Satan gave him a genius-level IQ and affinity towards machines, in exchange for commanding him to hunt down the Chaos Emeralds and helping to conquer the universe.
• Death World: Exaggerated. This fanfic pretty much takes place in an entire death galaxy in general, but special mention goes to worlds that lose their Planet Eggs (which lose their power to sustain life and become barren rocks) or get infested with Shroud parasites (which are the very definition of Body Horror and Fate Worse than Death rolled into one). Combined with the insane robot armies, demons, and Lovecraftian horrors everywhere, its amazing there's life in the Milky Way at all. And by the end, there isn't very much.
  • A more straight example is Hell, the Demon homeworld, which is basically Mustafar on steroids... and the Angel homeworld Heaven, which is basically Jupiter on steroids.
• Deconstruction Fic: Particularly in the rewrite, the story heavily deconstructs many religion and Sonic-related tropes.
  • Eric the Hedgehog is a walking, talking deconstruction of Sonic fancharacters in general and Sonic the Hedgehog himself in particular. He's incredibly powerful, but he's so impulsive and such a massive Cloud Cuckoolander that not many others take him seriously despite his occasional badass moments. There may or may not be a reason for this, although considering he knows he's in a fanfiction and Maledict himself fears him as "unnatural"...
  • The typical "Find the Chaos Emeralds" Sonic plot. Maledict doesn't really need the Chaos Emeralds at all. He only wants them to make sure the Metarex and Dark Tails don't get them.
  • The fic as a whole deconstructs what really happens when anthropomorphic creatures are given power beyond reckoning and let loose with no limitations, and the kind of person who would knowingly give power like that to them.
    • It also deconstructs the Serial Escalation nature of the Sonic franchise by quickly introducing numerous Invincible Villains and demonstrating that the heroes are surviving not because of their power, but because the villains keep getting in each other's way or aren't really "villains". And the heroes are affected by the seeming hopelessness of their situation, even though they keep helping as many people as they can.
  • Tsali is a near-perfect deconstruction of The Sociopath and Cybernetics Eat Your Soul. Thanks to Maledict altering numerous core programs, he would never feel remorse or pity for the atrocities he unleashed upon the galaxy. But when those programs become damaged...
    • He also pretty clearly deconstructs "edgy" Sonic OCs in general (he makes a number of subtle jabs towards the "Coldsteel the Hedgehog" meme) Sue tropes.
  • Along the way, the story also takes time to deconstruct elements of the video games; the Chaos Emeralds are literal Satanic artifacts that slowly corrupt their users and Sonic and friends are largely Late to the Tragedy rather than saving everyone in the nick of time.
• Decon-Recon Switch: The story rewrites the third season of Sonic X into a hellish Cosmic Horror Story. It deconstructs both the origin of the Chaos Emeralds (created by the devil himself) and the characters. Sonic's whole self-image as an Invincible Hero and The Ace is quickly shattered and the characters - especially the younger ones like Cream - are visibly affected by the horrors around them. However, the heroes know that they can't give up, so they keep going regardless. The rewrite makes the switch even more blatant, emphasizing The Power of Friendship and hope even in the face of cosmic terror.
• Demoted to Extra: The Metarex are just one of the many different factions fighting over the galaxy. The Chaotix, Dr. Eggman, and even Sonic himself are hit badly with this, although the rewrite is adding many more scenes with them and developing them a bit more. Justified in the case of the Metarex; after Episode 64, their military power has been completely shattered and their leaders go into hiding.
• Despair Event Horizon: In Episode 74, it's revealed that Tsali crossed the horizon when he was forcibly roboticized by his adopted father Luke the Seedrian to cap off his Break the Cutie backstory. This torture broke what little was left of his sanity and hope; he slaughtered the entire Seedrian race in revenge, made a literal Deal with the Devil, and started the Metarex War.
  • All of the main characters pretty much hit this after Episode 73, especially Knuckles and Cosmo. Only Tails regenerating himself with his Shroud parasites pulls them back.
  • Dark Oak crosses this in Episode 64 after his fleet is utterly annihilated and his primary command center is destroyed. He spends the rest of the story in a drawn-out Villainous Breakdown until he meets Sonic in Episode 72.
• Deus ex Machina: * Episode 75 has a big one. Maledict has lured the heroes into his trap and takes the entire galaxy hostage with the Galaxy Crusher in exchange for the Chaos Emeralds, leaving the heroes in a literally hopeless situation. Suddenly, a gigantic Angel fleet led by Jesus Christ himself suddenly shuts down Maledict's trap and ambushes his fleet.
• Diabolus ex Machina:
  • Episode 75. Two fleets - a Demon fleet and a Metarex fleet led by the Blue Typhoon - are facing off. Maledict and the heroes are about to have their final climactic showdown. And then Dark Tails suddenly appears, steals all the Chaos Emeralds, and uses them to fully manifest himself in the physical universe, beginning the real final battle.
  • The ending is one of these; Dark Tails' defeat allows the Forerunners to escape - and it's implied that they quickly devastate the entire universe.
• Didn't See That Coming: Maledict is a Chessmaster who created an extremely elaborate Gambit Roulette to defeat the Angels and conquer the universe. However, he didn't expect Sonic the Hedgehog to get pulled into the fray by mistake. Nor did he expect his gambit to create a malevolent Eldritch Abomination by mistake.
• Disproportionate Retribution: Tsali was tortuously turned into a combat android by Cosmo's father Luke in order to stop the Demon invasion of the Seedrian homeworld. His response? Exterminating the entire Seedrian race and hunting the survivors across the galaxy, starting the Metarex War.
  • Live on a planet controlled by the Demon Empire? If the Angels attack your world, they exterminate you and the entire population outright simply because you're "living in sin" according to them.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?:
  • The Jewish Republic and the Emirate of Mecca are ancient enemies and are constantly at each other's throats despite being technical political allies in the Angel Federation. The fact that both sides are blatently in the wrong just makes it even more Anvilicious.
  • A superpower gets involved in a foreign civil war that it partially started in the first place and invades the galaxy, prompting another major superpower to invade in response, and the conflict quickly bogs down into bloody stalemate. Korea? Nope, definitely not.
  • According to Word of God, the Jewish Republic is a far right wing society obsessed with Jewish racial purity and often exterminates worlds with toxic gas. What major world event could that be an ironic reference to?
• Do Not Taunt Cthulhu: Episode 64 is basically this trope in episode form. Super Sonic, Super Shadow, and Super Eric all run afoul of Lord Maledict himself, and Sonic ramps his cocky confidence to the max before attacking Satan, believing that they're invincible. Cue villainous Curb-Stomp Battle.
• Doomsday Device: The Galaxy Crusher, a Demon super weapon capable of obliterating whole galaxies by collapsing the black holes forming their centers. Although mothballed by Maledict long ago, Beelzebub reactivates it without his permission.
• Downer Ending: The original version ends with a race of Eldritch Abominations called the Forerunners returning after trillions of years of imprisonment, and eventually devastating most of the universe in the process.
  • The author created four alternate endings for the rewrite on his DeviantArt page, with two of them being this trope and the other two bittersweet. Ending B has Dark Tails detonating the Dark Planet Egg, killing the entire cast and turning the entire Virgo Supercluster into a hellish warped nightmare. Ending C is the Forerunner ending above.
• The Dreaded: Tsali. According to Cosmo, a large group of the Seedrian refugees actually turned their fear of him into a Evil Luddite religion that considered Tsali divine punishment from Tryphon herself for their use of technology. It's taken to the point where when Cosmo first met Tails, she nearly voided her bowels on the spot simply because she mistook him for Tsali.
  • The Shroud. They're not called The Great Devourer for nothing. The fact that they regularly eat galaxies is just the icing on the cake. Both Jesus and Maledict alike consider them the number-one threat to the universe even more than each other. Even the Prophet Muhammad of all people is utterly terrified of Shroud and Shroud infestation, and Tsali also secretly fears them.
• Driven to Suicide:
  • In the rewrite, it's heavily implied that Cosmo's crash in the first episode was actually her trying to commit suicide by destroying her pod after learning she was being followed by Tsali. However, by sheer luck, she found Sonic's world in the process.
  • Talia/Limit tried to kill herself after she betrayed Tsali to try and end the Metarex War, hating what both herself and her older brother became - and trying to escape Tsali's retribution. Unfortunately, Hertia captured her and had other plans.
  • Venus the Seedrian kills herself to break Dark Tails' control on her.
  • Following Tails' death, along with the fact that she was the one to do the act, Cosmo is so distraught that she actually grabs a blaster and nearly shoots herself in the head. The others manage to talk her out of it by saying it's not what Tails would've wanted.
• Dystopia: The whole galaxy has been torn apart by religion, greed, and the pursuit of power — embodied by the countless factions and figures bringing the galaxy to ruin. The Emirate of Mecca is easily the most brutal example — a totalitarian Muslim theocracy Recycled In Space, ruled by the iron fist of the Prophet Muhammad. Muslim women are turned into literal baby factories, rape and murder are legal, free speech is literally an alien concept, nearly the entire population are brainwashed fanatics, and typical living conditions range from barely livable to total hellholes. The entire Muslim leadership are also complete hypocrites, flagrantly sinning and breaking their own laws with impunity.
• Dystopia Is Hard: Although the Demon Empire seems to be stable on the surface, the endless warfare and the insane logistical and economic nightmare of running such a gigantic empire is slowly weakening it. Indeed, it is strongly implied that Maledict's will and leadership is one of the only things still keeping it together.
  • The Emirate of Mecca is basically a totalitarian Muslim theocracy Recycled In Space — as Word of God put it, its "if ISIS and al-Qaeda got together and made their own version of the Imperium of Man.'' However, though it's the youngest Angel nation, it's already starting to crumble under its barbaric religious cruelty, devotion to martyrdom, internal contradictions, extreme corruption, and ethnic conflicts.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: Ending D: Tails survives the final battle and manages to cripple Dark Tails by successfully destroying the Dark Planet Egg, allowing Maledict and Jesus to depower him and seal him in Warpspace forever. Maledict and Jesus agree to a temporary ceasefire and Maledict gives Sonic his Planet Egg back. The galaxy slowly starts to rebuild and Sonic and friends return home.
• Eaten Alive: In Episode 71, Trinity finds a recording of Tsali torturing a little Seedrian girl to death by slowly feeding her to his Tsali Endoskeletons.
• Eldritch Abomination:
  • Dark Tails, the Greater-Scope Villain, is a physical manifestation of the Seedrians' collective terror of Tsali and strongly implied to be a Forerunner in the rewrite. He begins to spread Dark Chaos Energy across the galaxy and is literally Made of Evil. During the final battle, he transforms from a gigantic multi-headed space dragon to an entire sentient planet. And then he mutates into a literally incomprehensible mass of tentacles, eyes, mouths, and voices crying in eternal agony. It's rather telling that it eventually took three Hyper-powered hedgehogs and both Satan and Jesus Christ in person (combined) to finally beat him which ends up backfiring horribly.
  • The Forerunners are an entire race of these, sealed deep inside the depths of Warpspace long ago. And it turns out they're not all evil either. And it turns out Sonic and friends have already seen some - the Chao from the games are actually infant Forerunners.
• The Empire: The Demon Empire is an autocratic and top-heavy Hegemonic Empire that rules half of the entire universe. The Angel Federation is the only thing keeping the Empire from ruling all of it. Slavery is legal (although heavily regulated) and Demon law is both harsh and unbending. Despite all of it, it's considered the closest thing to a unified culture the universe has; nearly every world uses Demon kredits, even if they live far on the frontiers.
• Enemy Mine: Tsali betrays Maledict and teams up with Sonic when he finds out Maledict had been manipulating him from the start and ordered the destruction of his original homeworld.
• Eternal Recurrence: The Eternal War between the Demon Empire and Angel Federation always flares up periodically, decimating galaxies before both sides eventually fight each other to exhaustion and temporarily stop fighting to rebuild, before going to war again. Maledict's entire grand plan was to end the cycle by creating the "Ultimate Weapon" to permanently defeat Allysion and her Angels [[spoiler: which eventually resulted in him creating Sonic, Shadow, Eric, and Tsali].
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Tsali deeply cared about the mercenaries he hired to aid him with exterminating the Seedrians - to the point when they betrayed him to try to end the Metarex War, he was so devastated that he suffered a slight Villainous Breakdown. Especially Talia, as she was madly in love with Tsali and only reluctantly turned against him which is probably why he gave her a Mercy Kill.
• Even Evil Has Standards: In Episode 67, Eggman and his crew end up stumbling upon Beelzebub's lair, where they decide to eavesdrop in order to find the Chaos Emeralds. Then they hear the screams from Beelzebub torturing Cosmo, and then they find Chris unconscious and bleeding from his anus after being nearly raped to death by Beelzebub. Eggman is so shocked and horrified - and utterly furious - that he flat out tells Sonic and his friends to leave with the Chaos Emerald so they don't have to watch him beat the Demon to a bloody pulp. Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil, indeed.
  • This trope is also the reason Tsali's mercenaries betrayed him; they eventually became exhausted and distraught from the endless killing of innocent people.
  • Interestingly, Tsali of all people has standards too - despite his penchant for mass murder, he's uncomfortable with slavery and immediately freed the slaves Maledict gave him as a gift when he became a Demon Lord.
• "Everybody Dies" Ending: This story begins like the original series, with the entire Seedrian refugee fleet dead and Cosmo as the only survivor. Also Ending B.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: Allysion is such a depraved fundamentalist sociopath that she doesn't understand how Sonic could be a potential ally. Maledict suffers this too to a lsser extent, as he he is utterly baffled that Sonic is fighting him despite Sonic being his "son". Also becomes a plot point in Episode 74; when Cosmo forgives Tsali for the things he did to her and her people, the resulting literal Logic Bomb in his programming causes him to do a Heel–Face Turn.
• Evil Luddite: Cosmo dimly remembers the Ironwood, a powerful religious cult in the Seedrian fleet which blamed technology for the destruction of their race because of Tsali (who they saw as divine punishment for their sins) and regarded all technology as evil. They ended up influencing Hertia and becoming a powerful political force.
• Evil Versus Evil: Metarex versus Tsali, Maledict versus the Metarex, and Dark Tails against everyone. The overarching conflict between Maledict and Allysion can be seen as this too, Maledict is the biblical Satan and all-around Manipulative Bastard, while Allysion is a crazed psychopath who wants to watch the universe burn and torture everything For the Evulz.
• Evil Versus Oblivion: The crux of the fanfic is the final battle between Maledict and Dark Tails. One is a ruthless but principled Humanoid Abomination who wants to rule the entire universe, the other is an incomprehensible Omnicidal Maniac.
• Expy: The story has a very large number of them, and Word of God has confirmed that many of the non-canon characters were based on others in at least some form.
  • Dark Tails is an expy of Dark Samus. Also, the Quadraxis robot is basically the same as the boss from the same game, except massively upgraded and far more powerful (and vicious). Dark Chaos Energy is also a pretty clear expy of Phazon.
  • Along with his obvious parallels to Shadow, Tsali is essentially a more-humanlike Terminator. In a similar vein, the armies of flesh-eating Tsali Androids he once controlled are rather suspiciously similar to Necron Flayed Ones.
  • According to the author, Venus the Seedrian is a gender-flipped version of Guts from Berserk, with several parallels in their back stories.
  • Tephiroth is the most blatantly obvious one, except his character and personality are entirely different. And he's not evil.
  • Even the ships are expies according to Word of God — the Dreadnought is based on the Machariel from EVE Online, and Maledict's Leviathan-class ships are based on the Eclipse Super Star Destroyer.
• Family-Unfriendly Death: Loads of them.
  • Cosmo's older sister Galaxina has her head shoved into a ruptured fuel line by Tsali.
  • Venus commits suicide by impaling herself on one of her own thorn-covered vine tentacles in order to break Dark Tails' control.
  • Tsali graphically tears Molly's limbs off with his powers and then shoots her in Episode 68.
  • Tails gets the most unfriendly death of them all during the final battle.
• Fantasy Kitchen Sink: This trope basically defines Sonic X: Dark Chaos, combining pretty much everything the author could think of - from magic to demons to angels to Lovecraftian horrors to spaceships.
• Fatal Flaw: Both Maledict and Jesus' monomaniacal pride is what keeps them from understanding the terrible consequences of their endless warfare. Likewise, Tsali's vengeful wrath basically jump-started the Metarex War.
• Fate Worse than Death: The people who are killed or Mind Raped by Dark Tails suffer this. He takes their souls and uses them for eternity as conduits of Dark Chaos Energy. And the punishment for high treason in the Demon Empire is eternal torment.
• Faux Affably Evil:
  • Tsali has shades of this in the rewrite. Despite his Ax-Crazy love for killing and bloodshed, he's quite sociable and sympathetic to Trinity, even after he realizes that Trinity is an Angel spy.
  • Maledict himself hides his megalomania and obsessive desire for power under a rather level-headed demeanor and a thin veneer of good intentions. On the other side, Jesus hides his own lust for revenge and callous dislike of non-Angels under a facade of concern and empathy, even though he was perfectly fine with slaughtering quadrillions of innocent people to invade the Milky Way.
• Final Solution: This trope is standard protocol for both the Demons and Angels and is used with wild abandon. A more story-focused example is Tsali's genocide against the Seedrians which started the Metarex War.
• The Federation: The Angel Federation, led by Allysion and Jesus Desjiliac Christos, was originally a group that rebelled against the Demons in ancient times. The Federation also composes two other nations, the Israeli Republic of the Tribes and the Emirate of Mecca. The Emirate and Republic are often at each other's throats; only the Angels keep them together against their common enemy.
• For the Evulz:
  • Tsali has shades of this. Though he has actual reasons to want revenge against the Seedrians, he butchers entire worlds simply because he can, even if they had nothing to do with his enemies.
  • Beelzebub rapes Chris in Episode 67 not because he needed to run a demented experiment like he did on Cosmo, but because he thought it would be fun.
• Forever War: The Demon Empire and Angel Federation have been at war for five hundred trillion years, driven by the Divine Conflict between Maledict and Allysion. Most of it is on-and-off however, since both sides constantly fight each other to stalemate and are forced into long periods of cold war to recover. The background also implies that if they ever made peace, the Angel coalition would immediately and violently collapse to internal religious conflicts.
  • Also played with in-universe; while the Metarex War did last for thirty years, Tsali and the Metarex expected it to keep going for centuries if not millennia. Its rather sudden ending in the last episode leaves both sides completely lost.
• For Want Of A Nail: According to Word of God, the backstory of Dark Chaos diverges from the canon Sonic X in two specific ways. Both of these critical changes set off a chain reaction that leads to the Darker and Edgier Crapsack World of Dark Chaos compared to the canon Sonic X;
  • Tsali's entire story never happens and he doesn't become the Ultimate Weapon in the canon. In Dark Chaos, he does - which results in him exterminating Cosmo's race rather than the Metarex. He quickly turns the subsequent Metarex War into a brutal bloodbath that leaves much the galaxy in ruins and trillions of people dead.
  • An economic depression forces Maledict to abandon his plans and pull his forces out of the Milky Way, so the Demon Empire never appears in canon. In Dark Chaos, this doesn't happen - so Maledict's plan goes off without a hitch and leads to the Demon occupation of the galaxy (which in turns leads to the Angel invasion in Episode 65).
• Foreshadowing: The rewritten Episode 69 focuses on Sonic and friends being caught in the middle of a religious conflict between Marmolim Christians and the Marmolims who worship Maledict. The satanic Marmolims initially revere Sonic as a literal messiah sent by Maledict to save them from the Shroud outside their city, while the Christians accuse him of being The Antichrist and a spawn of the devil. Episode 75 reveals that both of them are more correct than they could ever know.
  • Also from Episode 69, there's a scene (taken from the original series) where Cosmo receives her fortune from a Marmolim seer, who says that her hate will bring suffering and death to those close to her. The previews of the sequel make this a form of retroactive foreshadowing - Cosmo snaps from the trauma, jumps straight through the Moral Event Horizon, and becomes a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds.
  • Cosmo takes Venus' demon-powered scythe from Tsali after he is beaten in Episode 73. In the sequel, Cosmo's actions parallel Venus' mistakes almost to a tee - with tragic consequences.
  • Pretty much every single scene involving the Legend of Disaster is this trope toward the Cruel Twist Ending.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: Neither Sonic nor any of his friends like Eric very much due to how crazy and annoying he is, and how he apparently nearly got all of them killed several times in the past. Even Sonic himself, who is a bit more sympathetic to Eric, simply tolerates him at best.
• From Bad to Worse: The story starts like the original Sonic X, except Tsali attacks Sonic's world rather than Dark Oak. Then Satan himself steps into the fray, which rapidly escalates the conflict until the galaxy is torn apart in a war between demons and angels. And then an Eldritch Abomination appears, obliterates both sides, and nearly causes the end of the entire universe. Finally, the story ends with an entire race of Eldritch Abominations appearing and actually destroying (most of) the entire universe.

G — I

• Gambit Pileup: Loads of characters, and virtually all of them have their own individual plans and plots. All of them end up falling apart by the end of the story thanks to the interference of Dark Tails.
  • Maledict wishes to defeat the Metarex so he can unleash Tsali on his enemies and rule the universe. He is also secretly controlling the Metarex as part of his enormously complicated Gambit Roulette. He also wants to get the Chaos Emeralds in order to keep them away from the Metarex and is trying to protect Sonic the Hedgehog because he's Maledict's son.
  • Tsali steals Planet Eggs so he has enough power to exterminate the Seedrians and destroy the Metarex. And anyone else who gets in his way.
  • Allysion want to kill Tsali and then launch an attack on the Milky Way to upset Maledict's plans.
  • Jesus sends his servant Tephiroth to see if Sonic would be a useful ally, and recruits Trinity to spy on the Demons and find out what they're up to.
  • Venus the Seedrian is trying to expose Maledict's plan in order to stop him from taking over the universe.
  • Dark Oak and the Metarex are stealing and mutating Planet Eggs in order to keep themselves and their organization alive.
• Gambit Roulette: The entire Metarex war is part of a gigantic gambit by Maledict to conquer the universe by creating an "Ultimate" creature strong enough to defeat the Angels. To do this, he started a diplomatic incident to start a war between the Demons and Seedrians, and then he made sure the young Tsali survived the destruction of his homeworld. Then as the conflict escalated, he used a spy to convince Luke to turn Tsali into a Chaos-powered robot, and then had him alter Tsali's programming. In the process, Tsali would go completely beserk and destroy the Seedrians from within, and then Maledict would take him under his guidance so he could be turned on the Angels. Then when the Metarex began to appear, he sent Tsali to defeat them. And to ensure that Tsali ''would'' defeat them, Maledict created an alter-ego known as "M" so he could secretly control the Metarex and lead them to their own destruction.
  • And the only reasons this massive plan didn't work? Tsali (and Cosmo) accidentally got Sonic the Hedgehog into the mix and Maledict unknowingly created Dark Tails by exterminating the Seedrians.
• Genre Blindness:
  • Maledict seems to be a cliché evil overlord Bond villain at first... until his real chessmaster nature starts showing; he didn't want to kill Sonic or Shadow because they are his sons and he knows just how powerful they are. By contrast, Allysion and most of the Angels are quite genre blind, with the notable exception of the very savvy Jesus.
  • The Metarex are easily the most blatant example of this trope, unaware that they were being manipulated by Maledict the whole time despite tons of suspicious hints. They also confuse Tails for Tsali simply because both of them have two tails, with near-disastrous consequences.
• Gladiator Games: The Demon Empire, essentially the Roman Empire in space, uses these as part of it Bread and Circuses policies. In a similar vein to the Romans, they use recaptured slaves and criminals as fighters. However, lethal games are quite rare.

• Go Mad from the Revelation: The typical fate of those who hear the voice of Dark Tails. Not only does it drive several individual characters like numerous Marmolins or Venus the Seedrian and Trinity to gibbering madness, it's mind-blasting enough to cause entire space fleets to go insane and destroy themselves.
• God Before Dogma: This trope is typically the primary difference between the less-evil religious characters and the really evil religious characters in general. However, since the author despises religion, it's depressingly rare.
  • Jesus in particular embodies this trope -  which isn't all that different from his biblical depiction. Most of his fellow Angels avert this though.
• Godzilla Threshold:
  • Episode 63 has a villainous example. Sonic, Shadow, and Eric turn into their Super forms and are on the verge of defeating Tsali once and for all. So what does Tsali do? He summons Lord Maledict himself for backup. Cue Maledict showing up, rescuing Tsali, and utterly curbstomping Sonic and friends.
  • When Dark Tails nearly annihilates the fleets of both sides, both the Demons and Angels separately devote all their attention to taking him down, to the point where the Demons reactivate a galaxy-destroying superweapon just in case. And then Dark Tails achieves godhood in Episode 75 and nearly decimates the entire galaxy, they both decide to take it on together — the threshold is taken to the the point where Jesus Christ and Satan pull an Enemy Mine and decide to (temporarily) help each other.
• Gone Horribly Right: Thirty years prior to the events of Sonic X: Dark Chaos, Luke the Seedrian — the future Dark Oak — roboticized a young fox named Tsali into the "Ultimate Weapon" that could save his homeworld from a Demon invasion. Tsali quickly freed himself, promptly turned against his creators, and exterminated the entire Seedrian race in revenge.
• Great Offscreen War: Several times in this story, mostly because the author has admitted that he isn't good at writing battle scenes.
  • The Demon-Seedrian War, which ended in the creation of Tsali and the near-extermination of Cosmo's race, is a major part of the backstory frequently alluded but never actually shown. The author began to write a prequel to explore it, but it was scrapped.
  • The battles between the Demons and Angels aren't really shown either - the story focuses more on the effects of said battles and the political machinations behind the scenes.
• Greater-Scope Villain: This story has several of these. Maledict is quickly revealed to be this to Tsali and becomes one of the primary villains. However, it's also shown that Jesus and Allysion had quite a large part to do with the Metarex War and the Crapsack World as well. And of course, there's Dark Tails, who eventually becomes the Big Bad everyone else winds up fighting.
• Happiness in Slavery: This trope is the reason the Demon Empire was able to stop slave rebellions; they take pains to treat their slaves well in most cases and many of said slaves worship Maledict as their god anyway. Unless they fall into the hands of Beelzebub, that is. In Episode 69, Momo faithfully serves her master Aamon as her pseudo-grandfather figure, and Aamon in turn allowed her to marry his grandson Lou and legally gain her freedom. Episode 68 reveals that Astorath and his Nephilim treat their legal "slaves" as equals on their warships because the idea of owning another sentient being is utterly alien to them.
• Healing Factor: Tails gets one when he is infected by Shroud parasites. At one point, he regenerates most of his internal organs after Tsali tears them out of his chest. This bites back hard during the final battle when he gets possessed by Dark Tails; the resulting mutation causes his body to start literally falling apart, which starts to heal him, which makes him fall apart again...
• Heaven: In this story, Heaven is a massive gas giant with twelve planet-sized moons in orbit. It is the original Angel homeworld and main world of the Angel Federation. The Angel capitol city, New Jerusalem, is on top of a massive floating station hidden in the storm-ravaged mantle.
• Hell: In this story, Hell is the Demon homeworld and official capitol of the Demon Empire. Once a temperate planet, it was long ago turned into a rocky ball of magma rivers and lava seas. Caronius, capitol city of the Demons, is built around its hollowed-out core.
• Hellfire: Maledict can manifest himself in a tongue of smokeless hellfire that does not consume its surroundings. Most of his powers also use a combination of this trope and Chaos Energy.
• Heroic BSoD: Several episodes feature them, especially near the end thanks to the numerous Trauma Conga Lines coming together.
  • Episode 74 is an entire chapter of these as the heroes and Tsali discover the conspiracy behind the Metarex war and the tragedy that shook the galaxy.
  • Sonic in Episode 75 when he discovers he was created by Maledict.
  • During the final battle, Cosmo in Episode 77 completely breaks down when she realizes she has to kill Tails to defeat Dark Tails.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Both played straight and inverted in Episode 77. Tails is forced to sacrifice himself to defeat Dark Tails and save the universe and Cosmo is the one who fires the Sonic Driver at him. Ending D subverts it where Tails survives and stops Dark Tails' plan without the sacrifice, but Dark Tails also narrowly survives.
• Hidden Depths: In the rewrite, Tsali is revealed to be surprisingly Affably Evil underneath his genocidal psychopathic brutality, at least when he isn't on missions. He originally had a group of mercenaries to aid him in his genocide who he deeply cared about as a family until they betrayed him and tried to kill him. He also privately begins to doubt if all his evil actions would be worth it in the end. He also treats Trinity respectfully as a guest even after he discovers Trinity is an Angel spy.
  • Knuckles is given more depth to cancel out his Flanderization from the show. Though still hotheaded, he's often depicted as wiser, more perceptive, and more reflective than most of the others. He also has a nerdy side to him.
  • Astorath isn't anywhere near the stupid Blood Knight brute he seems to be; he comes to deeply respect Sonic and friends as enemies and has a strong sense of honor. He also correctly predicted that Maledict's master plan would never work from the start, but he was ignored. Even Jesus praises Astorath as an honorable Demon.
• Historical Villain Upgrade:
  • An interesting version of this. The refugee Seedrians eventually saw Tsali the Ultimate Weapon as a supernatural being and The Scourge of God, and Hertia deliberately cultivated fear of him in order to control her people. While Tsali is indeed a genocidal Ax-Crazy android who murdered their entire race after they turned him into a robot and inflicted And I Must Scream on him, it turns out that he didn't do it alone and nor was he the only one behind it.
  • In the background material, this trope is also the reason why Lord Maledict is considered the incarnation of evil in the Bible. He isn't the incarnation of evil, but he certainly is a cruel, manipulative Jerkass God.
• Hobbes Was Right: Maledict embodies this trope, to the point of a particularly extreme version of Lawful Evil. If that wasn't enough, the backstory implies that he isn't completely wrong to be that way either and that he's far better than the alternative.
• Holding Back the Phlebotinum: Maledict explicitly holds back from using the Galaxy Crusher because he wants to conquer the Milky Way Galaxy rather than destroy it and because he's utterly terrified of the prospect that it could be hijacked by his enemies. Indeed, it's only Dark Tails and hordes of Shroud devouring the galaxy that convinces him to reactivate it.
• Horror Hunger: A rather chilling example from the rewrite in the form of the Tsali Endoskeletons. Tsali programmed them to aid him in his genocide of Cosmo's race. In the process, he gave them an endless, all-pervading hunger for Seedrian flesh, blood, skin, and bones. Of course, being robots, they can't eat...
• Human Aliens: The Angels, Jews, and Muslims in the Dark Chaos universe. Humanity was originally descended from them, and they look very similar to humans with only a few minor quirks.
  • Ethnic Angels closely resemble Tolkien elves. They are often tall and fair.
  • Jews are short, dark-skinned tribal people with beards. Jesus, although he's the leader of the whole Federation, is one of these.
  • Male Muslims are generally quite similar to Jews. Female Muslims are always completely covered up, and for good reason.
• Humans Are Flawed: In Episode 75, Shadow the Hedgehog (of all people) uses this as his Kirk Summation when Maledict gives him a We Can Rule Together speech. When Maledict tells him that the "monkeys" are nothing but mongrels who corrupted his perfect design, Shadow retorts in a very neat Continuity Nod to the show's Sonic Adventure 2 arc:
  Shadow: I made a promise to a girl I loved named Maria. I forgot that promise and I nearly wiped out an entire race because of it. You despise humans... and yet a human taught me the most valuable lesson of all; there are still things worth fighting for.
• Hyperspace Is a Scary Place: The Warpspace is re-imagined as basically a Lighter and Softer version of the Warp. It's a mind-shattering dimension of pure Chaos Energy and (according to Maledict) the "template" or "blueprint" of the universe itself. It also happens to be the birthplace of Lovecraftian horrors like Dark Tails and the Can of the Forerunners. However, Demon-made FTL technology has advanced and become so ubiquitous across the universe that it's typically safe to travel. If anything goes wrong, though...
• Idiot Ball: A huge portion of the central conflict in Sonic X: Dark Chaos could've been avoided if Maledict had come right out and told Sonic that he was his father and that he needed his help before Tsali got there first and tried to kill Sonic. Also, the Metarex leaders continued to trust M/ Maledict even while they were slowly losing the Metarex War. Also, Tsali grabs it in Episode 73 - he could've easily killed Cosmo and her friends by simply blowing up the Blue Typhoon, and only storms the ship because he's so Ax-Crazy that he wants to watch them suffer.
• I Gave My Word: Maledict does this numerous times, both good and bad. In particular, during the final battle, Maledict promises to give Sonic his Planet Egg back and spare the galaxy in exchange for the Chaos Emeralds. Afterward, Maledict keeps his word and pardons them... and lets them keep the Chaos Emeralds as thanks for their help.
• Improbable Aiming Skills: In Episode 61, Espio manages to throw an explosive shuriken at a pursuing Jewish cruiser. Not only does he manage to actually hit it in zero-gravity, he gets a direct hit on the ship's ammo magazine and immediately blows it into scrap. Even Espio himself is surprised he made the shot.
  • Tsali demonstrates this numerous times with both his Chaos powers and his wrist-mounted weaponry. Justified, since he's a very advanced battle android and has been fighting a war by himself for thirty years.
• Impossibly Cool Weapon: This fanfic features the Fuckslayer, a demonic guitar with six necks wielded by Beelzebub. It's the very first guitar ever invented. Not only is it both a Lightning Gun and a rocket launcher, but the music it makes is so loud that it can shake battleships apart.
• Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain: The Metarex of become this trope thanks to flanderization and Villain Decay. This is notably averted with Eggman, who has taken several levels in badass.
• In Spite of a Nail: Despite the very different setting and tons of OCs added in, Sonic X: Dark Chaos still roughly follows the general plot arc of the original Sonic X. Sonic fights new villain, Cosmo arrives, the heroes go into space to find the Chaos Emeralds, meet several canon alien races, and the adventure ends with a huge final battle and Heroic Sacrifice Bittersweet Ending.
  • Also, the Seedrians are still utterly wiped out and Dark Oak forms the Metarex in both the canon and Dark Chaos universes, even though the Dark Chaos backstory is very different.
• Ironic Hell: Directly referenced. Venus the Seedrian prayed to Maledict for the power to defend the Seedrians from Tsali. He answered by giving her nearly divine power... and cursing her to slowly transform into a robot so she's just like Tsali.
• It Can Think: The Shroud are a Non-Malicious Monster Necromorph-esque parasite race. That changes in Episode 60 which reveals that the Shroud are led by hyper-intelligent Shroud Primes. And then in Episode 69, Dark Tails evolves them to the point that they start using military tactics and language and religion; they begin worshiping Dark Tails as their god.
• It's All My Fault: Dark Oak holds himself responsible for the destruction of his race at the hands of Tsali... which led to him starting a brutal galactic war so he could take revenge on his wayward creation and find a way to rebuild his race no matter the cost.

J — L

• Jerkass Gods: Maledict and Allysion fit this to a tee. One of them is Satan, the other is Crystal Dragon Jesus; both of them are cruel, manipulative, sadistic, genocidal maniacs with a thin veneer of good intentions.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Pretty much every single member of Eric's crew follows this trope. They often fight, make fun of each other, and make cruel jokes, but they're all firmly on Sonic's side and are willing to help others even at great cost. Sonya in particular embodies this trope - she's highly arrogant and willful, but also has a strong sense of justice.
  • The rewrite makes Tsali of all people into this. Under all his genocidal Ax-Crazy psychopathy, he has quite a few Hidden Depths. He considers his Tsali Endoskeletons as his children and shows remorse that most of them are gone. Likewise, when he hired a group of mercenaries to help him hunt down the Seedrians, he became quite fond of them and was utterly devastated when they betrayed him - it actually causes him to consider whether getting revenge was really worth it in the end. The fact that one of them was his little sister probably didn't help.
• Jumping Off the Slippery Slope: Allysion is an incarnation of this trope, at least according to the perspective of Jesus. Originally, she simply tolerated Angel excesses while focusing entirely on the defeat of Maledict. By the time of Dark Chaos, she's turned into a megalomaniac Blood Knight who channels God Is Evil and fully endorses rape and genocide simply to glorify herself, making her just as evil as Maledict if not even worse.
  • Maledict himself goes from "Let's try to save the galaxy if possible so we can exploit its resources" to "Fuck it let's just blow up the galaxy" by the end of the story.
• Just Before the End: This fanfic takes place in a Crapsack Galaxy torn to pieces by thirty years of civil war and the Angels and Demon forces fighting over the remnants, with an Eldritch Abomination and the Shroud poised to devour everything else. Sonic and friends end up just barely managing to avert the end except in Endings A and B, where they fail.
• Karma Houdini: Pretty much none of the major villains are punished for their actions. Maledict pardons the heroes and leaves with his armies in tow, Jesus and the Angels call off their invasion, and Tsali and the Metarex leaders decide to end the conflict and go their separate ways.
• Katanas Are Just Better: Sonya wields a custom katana made of focused plasma. Espio also carries two wakizashi that he uses during the final episodes. Somewhat fitting, as Sonya is ethnically Japanese (or the Sonic universe equivalent) and Espio is a ninja. And even then, Sonya prefers guns and only uses her sword as a backup.
• Killed Off for Real: Molly, Alice, Venus, Trinity, and Tails.
• Knight in Sour Armor: Sonic and his friends become this in this story. The Milky Way Galaxy is an utter shithole and the rest of the universe is somehow even worse, but it doesn't stop them from trying to make things better.
• Knight Templar: A common trope, particularly among the Angels and the more-fanatical Demons. The Muslims and the Emirate of Mecca take this trope up to eleven. Cosmo's mother Hertia also eventually became this, torturing Tsali's sister and killing a recently born Seedrian male child because of Daffodil's religious influence.
• Kudzu Plot: This fanfic quickly becomes this trope as the Gambit Pileup becomes larger, the characters become more fleshed out, and the story begins to focus on the very complicated politics and conspiracies behind the Metarex War. Episode 74 basically revolves around explaining and revealing what is going on; it's the longest chapter by quite a large margin and even it doesn't fully explain everything. This trope is also part of the reason for the author's frequent Schedule Slip for the rewrite — he is trying to organize everything together. There's a rewrite that ditches and retcons quite a bit of expository material from the original, specifically to keep a clear central story arc and to avoid The Chris Carter Effect.
• Lady Land: Deconstructed. Cosmo and the Seedrian refugees were only made up of female Seedrians after all the males were killed by Tsali or became cyborgs and joined the Metarex. However, by the time Tsali finally kills them thirty years later, their society is already beginning to disintegrate over their clashing egos, personalities, and beliefs.
• Large Ham: Astorath in Sonic X: Dark Chaos pretty much either yells or dramatically enunciates everything he says. Considering the fact he's an expy of the Heavy from Team Fortress 2, it's not entirely out of place.
  • Maledict loses his cool and goes into full scenery-chewing mode during his climactic duel with Jesus in Episode 75. And that's before the author said that his voice is similar to William Dafoe.
    "I am your god, you half-formed chimp! When you swung from trees, I ruled TIME and SPACE!"
  • Allysion is so hammy she could've starred in every single Cecil B. DeMille biblical epic. Everything she says is either a flowery Bible quote, a dramatic threat, or both.
  • Once Dark Tails resurrects himself, he quickly puts BRIAN BLESSED to shame;
    "YOU SHALL NOT DIE HERE... DEATH IS NO ESCAPE... YOU SHALL BE DEVOURED, ANNIHILATED, DEFILED... YOU SHALL KNOW TERROR WITHOUT END... YOU SHALL BE TORN ASUNDER FROM EVERY ATOM, AND YOURS SHALL BE THE CRIES OF TORMENT AND HORROR!"
• Late to the Tragedy: When Sonic and his friends leave their world to find the Chaos Emeralds, they quickly discover that the galaxy is a largely ruined Crapsack World devastated by the thirty-year Metarex War, fought over by Jerkass Gods, and nearly wholly devoured by the Shroud.
• The Legions of Hell: The Demon Empire is this trope turned into a political state, complete with extremely advanced technology and slavery. And it's saying something about the 'verse that they're considered the "nice" faction.
• Light Is Not Good: Played with in Sonic X: Dark Chaos. The Angel Federation stays neutral during a brutal civil war; Jesus decides to get involved, but sends his most powerful assassin Tephiroth to investigate. Neither of them are explicitly evil though, feeding into the setting's Gray-and-Gray Morality.
• Lighter and Softer: The rewrite is simultaneously both this and Darker and Edgier than the original. While there is more violence and horrific content as a whole, the darkness is balanced with much more likable characters, a stronger message of hope and redemption in the face of terror, and the power of friendship. And Black Comedy.
  • Even with the darkness, it's also still Lighter and Softer compared to some of its primary influences.
• Logic Bomb: Tsali's Face–Heel Turn is brought about by one of these when he discovers Maledict set his transformation into an android in motion. Then, directly afterward, he gets another one when Cosmo forgives him for his genocide against her people in a literal form of Evil Cannot Comprehend Good.
• Love Redeems: Cosmo convinces Tsali and the Metarex to end their conflict in the last episode, helping them both realize that their lust for revenge destroyed themselves and brought nothing but pain and suffering to the galaxy.
• Lovecraft Lite: The rewrite becomes this in the canon ending. Dark Tails is ultimately defeated though not without sacrifice and Sonic manages to make a tentative truce with Maledict and Jesus.
• Lovecraftian Superpower: Tails of all people gets one of these after getting infected with Shroud parasites, complete with tremendous amounts of Body Horror. Among the highlights of his first transformation is his semen turning solid and slithering across the floor - before wrapping around him and hardening like body armor. Later on as he manages to take control of the Shroud inside him, he finds that he can do things like move his eyes out of their sockets and look around, grow his fingers into flensing claws, fire shards of his own bones from his wrists, and eventually fuse himself to the X-Tornado by connecting his nerves with its controls. Though all of his friends are utterly horrified and disgusted by his new powers, Tails thinks it's the most awesome thing ever.
• Luke, I Am Your Father: Maledict created numerous "Ultimate" creatures to find a way to defeat the Angels. His first attempt resulted in Shadow, but when Gerald Robotnik discovered Maledict's true plan, he attempted to sabotage the project. After the ARK incident, Maledict abandoned Project Shadow completely and began Project Sonic, resulting in the birth of Sonic the Hedgehog. However, after discovering that the hedgehog only inherited the Devil's super speed, Maledict — fond of his failed creation — shot the infant Sonic in a capsule to Mobius, deciding to spare Sonic's life and allow him to make his own future. He decided to use Tsali as his next subject instead of a hedgehog, kicking off the events of the story.

M — O

• Manchild: Beelzebub is an immature drug-fueled hedonist that would easily be the poster for a man child if he wasn't also incredibly dangerous.
• Mass "Oh, Crap!": Everyone - including Maledict himself - has one of these in Episode 75 when Dark Tails steals the Chaos Emeralds and becomes a god.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: Eric the Hedgehog. Is he simply an eccentric and lucky Idiot Savant, or is he a Humanoid Abomination with the power of Clap Your Hands If You Believe? Both explanations are implied in the story.
• Medical Rape and Impregnate: The Empire of Mecca believe Sex Is Evil to the point that they forcibly surgically impregnate their women every few seconds.
• Medieval Stasis: Zigzagged due to the setting's massive Schizo Tech. Demon and Angel technology, while still making advances, has stagnated due to endless warfare between them, while Jewish and Muslim technology are deliberately held back thanks to religious fiat. Meanwhile, the Marmolims only regressed due to a near-apocalyptic Shroud infestation on their world.
  • Justified with the Shroud, since no known biological species in the universe can resist Shroud corruption. Indeed, the fact that Dark Tails is making them evolve anyway utterly terrifies both Maledict and Jesus.
• Memento MacGuffin: The red gem that Cosmo wears on her chest is revealed to be a very powerful and rare Doma Emerald that her family kept as a symbol of the Seedrians back on her homeworld. It allows her to communicate with the spirit of her mother Hertia and her father Dark Oak.
• Mercy Kill: Tails's death in Episode 77 is this after he sacrifices himself to stop Dark Tails and suffers And I Must Scream because of it.
  • Eggman and his robots terminate Beelzebub's "test subjects" in the Episode 67 rewrite.
• Metaphorically True: Maledict pulls this on Tsali in the climax. He manipulated both Tsali and the Metarex to fight each other — but they were the ones who destroyed the galaxy and did all the killing, not him.
• Mind Rape: The voice of Dark Tails either kills those who hear it outright or drives them violently insane. Cosmo nearly meets this fate in Episode 58, but her mother's amulet protects her from the worst effects. Venus, Alice and Trinity are not so lucky.
• Misplaced Retribution: Tsali ended up murdering Cosmo's entire race in revenge after being slowly and tortuously turned into a robot, even though only his adopted father Luke/Dark Oak was actually responsible for it.
• Mood Whiplash: All over the place, but most notable in Episode 65. The chapter ends with a romantic scene between Cosmo and Tails — and then it cuts to Jesus launching the Angel invasion of the galaxy.
• Morality Kitchen Sink:
  • Sonic and his friends are firmly white, along with Eric and his own crew.
  • Maledict and his servants are dark grey. While they have genuine goals and motivations like order and peace, they cleanse whole planets and even entire galaxies if it suits them.
  • Tsali is black at first.
  • Venus and Tephiroth are both lighter shades of grey.
  • The Metarex are grey too, mostly because they have entirely different motivations from their canon counterparts. Rather than cleansing the galaxy of animal life, they simply wish to gain freedom from the Demons so they can rebuild their race.
• More Dakka: The Dreadnought is built entirely around this trope. It seems unarmed at first glance, until it reveals its extremely powerful hidden arsenal. It's actually described as carrying "enough guns to make an Ork blush.". And during the final battle, the ship unleashes Super Duper Mega Ultra Extreme Wizard Mode — turning it into a flying mass of guns and missile launchers that promptly massacres an entire Demon battle group. While playing the 1812 Overture at full volume.
  • Eric the Hedgehog's character basically revolves around this trope. His Super form, rather than giving him new powers or speed like Sonic, allows him to conjure gigantic guns out of thin air via Clap Your Hands If You Believe.
• Morton's Fork: Later in the story, Maledict eventually realizes that the entire conflict has become this. Either he ends the stalemate by destroying the Milky Way Galaxy himself with the Galaxy Crusher, or the Shroud are going to eat the entire galaxy and destroy it instead. He decides on the former, rationalizing it as a Mercy Kill compared to letting the Shroud get more powerful.
• Moses in the Bulrushes: Sonic the Hedgehog was one of these; Maledict launched him into space as an infant in a capsule to euthanize him — he survived and eventually landed on Mobius. Until Episode 53, Maledict has no idea his son was alive.
• Multiple-Choice Past: When Chris asks where Eric the Hedgehog comes from, Knuckles shrugs and says that Eric has a different (and "crazier") story every single time he's asked the question, so Sonic and friends gave up trying. Turns out every single one of them is true - not that Eric knows it, since he's pretty much insane.
• Multiple Endings: The author wrote several alternate endings for the rewrite.
  • Ending A is the ending of the original version.
  • Ending B is a gigantic Downer Ending where Dark Tails implodes the Dark Planet Egg and opens up a Negative Space Wedgie that swallows the galaxy and kills everyone. It's eventually vanquished, but neither the Demons nor the Angels ever recover from the resulting Shroud invasion.
  • Ending C is a slightly modified version of the original ending where the Forerunners don't invade the universe.
  • Ending D is a "good" ending; Tails survives his battle with Dark Tails and successfully destroys the Dark Planet Egg, saving the universe. However, Dark Tails still lives.
  • Ending E is a silly ending where Eric the Hedgehog gets bored writing the story, deletes everything, and starts over from scratch.
• Mutually Assured Destruction: Played with on an intergalactic scale. Neither Maledict nor Allysion want the Eternal War to flare up again; when the Demon and Angel militaries collide, whole galaxies are exterminated and torn apart. But when the Metarex war distracts the Demons, Allysion realizes she can gain a massive advantage over her enemy by invading the Milky Way first. Her surprise attack quickly turns the entire Milky Way Galaxy into a hellish wasteland as the Demons and Angels go into open conflict.
• My God, What Have I Done?: In Episode 74, Tsali's core systems are damaged in the previous Episode, causing his programming to become scrambled. Because of this, the programs preventing him from feeling regret or remorse for his crimes are disabled. When he and the heroes find out Maledict had been manipulating him from the beginning, he completely breaks down into a sobbing wreck as his systems starts going into full Logic Bomb meltdown - and the horrors he unleashed come back to him.
  • Knuckles has one of these at the end of Episode 73 after setting Tails on fire to destroy his Shroud form, and nearly burning Tails to death when it changes him back to normal.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero:
  • During the Demon-Seedrian War, Venus attempted to kill (pre-android) Tsali in order to prevent him from becoming the Ultimate Weapon. However, she's stopped by Hertia and Luke, who loved him as their adopted son. Guess what happened.
  • Maledict tried to euthanize Sonic, Shadow, and Eric after he created them and discovered their severe flaws. Not only did all three of them survive, but all three of them end up destroying his conspiracy.
• Nigh-Invulnerability:
  • Lord Maledict, being both a Physical God and a Humanoid Abomination, has this. He completely no sells every single attack from Sonic and his friends, even in their Super forms. However, because of his sheer power, his physical body is slowly dying off on its own.
  • Astorath the Prince of Darkness is so physically strong he's completely unaffected by warship-class weapons fired directly at him. It's why Cream fights dirty and throws Cheese directly into his eyes.
• Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: hoo boy. Just to begin, Tsali the Ultimate Weapon is a Demon android two-tailed fox. Tephiroth is an angelic humanoid three-tailed cyborg fox. Maledict is a hedgehog-humanoid-reptile cyborg Physical God. Venus the Seedrian is a Seedrian cyborg vampire.
  • The king of this trope has to go to the Tsali Androids; *deep breath* batshit-insane cannibalistic flesh-eating demonically-possessed fox robots.
• Non Endor Holocaust: Surprisingly averted in Sonic X: Dark Chaos despite the fact that it is quite soft science fiction. Episode 66 has a space battle above a planet — and the planet below is quickly annihilated by the millions of disabled ships crashing into it.
  • In Episode 67, it's specifically stated that the Galaxy Crusher — a Demon battlestation the size of a red giant — cannot be deployed anywhere near planets or stars. Its sheer size messes up gravity so much that being anywhere near it destroys planets.
  • The birth of Dark Tails in Episode 75 causes nearby stars to literally burn out and moons to turn into clouds of blood. The results are not pretty.
• No-Sell: Maledict is basically immune to Super Sonic, Super Shadow, and Super Eric combined. Needless to say, it's a Curb-Stomp Battle when they actually do fight in Episode 64.
• No Sex Allowed: Deconstructed horrifically by the Emirate of Mecca. The Emirate is a space Muslim theocracy that has extremely strict religious rules on sex. This naturally causes the Muslims to have very low birthrates, so rather than having sex they turned their women into literal baby factories, which are surgically impregnated and forced to give birth every few seconds.
• Noodle Incident: Tails occasionally refers to the last time he tried to repair something made by Eric, which ended up with him institutionalized for a week. Also, both Jesus and Maledict consider the Temptation in the Desert to be this trope in-universe.
• Nuke 'em: Cosmo's mother Hertia nuked her own home planet into oblivion to stop Tsali. It didn't work.
• Obliviously Evil: The Shroud are animals following their natural instincts, those instincts being to infect and hideously mutate organic matter.
• Offscreen Villain Dark Matter:
  • Averted. Tsali got the funds to build his own PMC and have his own private asteroid base from Maledict himself, who gave Tsali basically unlimited access to the Demon treasury so that money wouldn't be a concern. Also justified with the Demons themselves, which have the resources of half the universe in their control.
  • Played straight with Dark Tails, although he isn't exactly "natural"...
• Omnicidal Maniac:
  • Tsali, who declares that if he has to burn and murder the entire universe to gain his revenge, he would be more than happy to do it. Only slaying fresh victims gives him any hope for his future; the bloodier, the better.
  • The Shroud wants to consume all life in the universe, with Dark Tails then intending to turn all life including the Shroud into Dark Chaos Energy.
  • Dark Tails wishes to recreate the entire universe in his own image by corrupting it with Dark Chaos Energy. Of course, this puts him at odds with Maledict and Allysion — who both want to do the same thing in their own images.
• Only a Flesh Wound: When Tails refuses to hand over Cosmo to him in Episode 73, Tsali throws him to the floor and graphically rips his heart and lungs out of his chest. Tails responds by turning into Shroud Tails, immediately regenerates his wounds, and retaliates in kind.
• Orcus on His Throne: Lord Maledict is this until Episode 63, when he is so aggravated by Tsali's failures that he shows up personally to challenge Sonic and his friends — and promptly wipes the floor with them. It explicitly justified, as he's both The Chessmaster and trying to run a gigantic universal empire at the same time.
• Order Versus Chaos: Despite having created the Chaos Emeralds, Maledict Maledict firmly believes in imposing absolute order upon the universe - courtesy of his Demon Empire - and he will do anything to accomplish his goal.
  Maledict: That is why the universe belongs to me. We bring order upon the chaos. Without it, life and civilization would not exist. Brother would fight brother, parents would destroy their children. Darkness would swallow all.
• Orphan's Plot Trinket: Sonic keeps an inscribed amulet in a desk in his quarters. It's not until later that he finds out that the amulet was given to him by Maledict when he was created and that the writing reveals Maledict is Sonic's progenitor.
• Our Angels Are Different: Angels are Human Aliens who were originally slaves to the Demon Empire before they launched a massive rebellion and gained their independence. Humans themselves are descended from them. Their close ethnic counterparts, the Jews and the Muslims, are also Human Aliens.
• Our Zombies Are Different: The story has the Shroud, which is essentially a combination of the Flood from Halo and the Necromorphs from Dead Space. Large parasites cause rapid and Body Horror-filled mutation in organic matter, and the resulting monster is both extremely fast and extremely deadly. Multiply them by several trillion and it's not hard to see why Shroud are considered the greatest threat to the denizens of the galaxy. And Dark Tails can control them.
• Outrun the Fireball: The heroes escape the incinerated remains of the Metarex battlestation Tryphon in episode 64.
• Overly Long Name: The Prophet Muhammad's full name is Muhammad Ali Hussein Abu al-Addin bin-Laden al-Zarqawdi Talib.

P — S

• Powered by a Forsaken Child: In Episode 67, Eggman and Rouge discover the truth behind Beelzebub's fake Chaos Emeralds; they're empowered by Dark Chaos Energy - produced by dozens of lobotomized slaves undergoing And I Must Scream.
• Physical God: Maledict is an interesting Deconstruction. He's actually a Humanoid Abomination that was forced to take physical form in order to survive his injuries after his epic battle against Allysion that created the entire universe. And he's trying to keep his physical form at all costs, as dying will unleash his power and cause the end of the universe.

• Powered Armor: Lord Maledict has one of these under his cloak that keeps his horrifically-mutilated and decaying physical body from falling apart. And its "studded with sacred pentagram sigils and spikes, hewn from gold and rubies, adorned with screaming souls, flanked with flaming goat skulls on the shoulders and inscribed with six hundred and sixty-six prayers."
  • Tsali's metal endoskeleton is actually one of these, powered by Dark Chaos Energy which allows him to absorb impacts and tank nearly impossible amounts of damage.
• Praetorian Guard: The Kompanions serve as Maledict's personal bodyguards, as the most elite of the Nephilim/Hell Knights. Their job is mostly ceremonial, and they spend more time guarding important diplomats and foreigners than Maledict - who doesn't need guards at all. However, Episode 75 shows that they're so skilled and well-trained that they can each individually battle Jesus himself in one-on-one combat.
• Pragmatic Villainy: Maledict doesn't want to destroy the galaxy with his galaxy-destroying superweapon because the resources of the Milky Way are too useful to squander - and trillions of his own subjects would die in the process, which could form another rebellion and hurt the Demon Empire. He only eventually relents once the Shroud start devouring the Milky Way in force under Dark Tails. The rewrite makes him so pragmatic that he quickly turns into an Anti-Villain, often criticizing the excesses of his servants and turning him into a personification of Hobbes Was Right.
  • Jesus decides to ally with Sonic and friends even though his Angels considers them evil, understanding that they're both a valuable distraction and could do serious damage to the Angels if they were antagonized.
• Private Military Contractors:
  • The Metarex are depicted as an extremely powerful version of this, funded and controlled by both their Seedrian cyborg leaders and the mysterious "M" who happens to actually be Maledict.
  • Tsali also founded his own private military company, although it's been almost completely destroyed by the start of the story (he's the only member of it left).
• Prophecy Twist: In the backstory of the fanfic, the Seedrians prophesied that they would be destroyed from within by the Black Wind. The prophecy never said a Seedrian would be the "Black Wind" though.
• Proud Warrior Race Guy: The all-male Hell Knights, also called the Nephilim, are an entire race of these who have dedicated themselves to Maledict as an eternal warrior class. In a similar vein to Vikings, they are utterly relentless in battle, but have extremely strong — and unusual — honor codes.
• Psychopathic Manchild: Beelzebub, the Lord of Flies. A death metal druggie and Mad Scientist, he's also a sadistic pedophile who gets off on Cold-Blooded Torture. After capturing them, he ends up raping Chris and almost-raping Cosmo simply because he wanted to feel how "tight" they were.
  • Tsali is basically this trope personified, often going straight into Ax-Crazy with his playful attitude towards violence and bloodshed. It's justified later on with the reveal that he was turned into a robot by Cosmo's race when he was only ten, which prevented him from ageing physically or mentally - and the entire Metarex War was basically a genocidal temper-tantrum over it. Also lightly deconstructed, as his lack of self-control nearly ruins Maledict's plans several times.
• Purple Prose: Invoked, though the story itself typically averts this. Whenever Demonish is translated for the reader, it's quite flowery and dramatic. Background material indicates that it's also pretty much all Woolseyism too, since Demonish is basically impossible for humans to even speak (let alone translate). This trope is also deliberately invoked whenever a character prays to Maledict or Allysion, with plenty of religious references to go with it.
• Pyrrhic Victory: Both played straight and discussed in the final episode. Maledict succeeded in creating an "Ultimate Weapon" greater than he ever dreamed of... but the fact that his prized Ultimate Weapon ( both of them, in fact) ended up turning against him thanks to his own actions made his success ultimately pointless. Even Maledict himself admits his Gambit Roulette wasn't worth it in the end.
• Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: Eric and the crew of the Dreadnought take this Up to Eleven - featuring Alice the Cat (a rescued orphan girl), Sonya the Hedgehog (a foul-mouthed Japanese Delinquent Wrench Wench who happens to be a former princess), Shadow the Hedgehog, Fang the Sniper, Mighty the Armadillo, and of course Eric the Hedgehog himself. They end up holding their own against Demon forces many times their size, and indirectly help Sonic and friends save the galaxy.
• Rank Scales with Asskicking: Maledict is far more powerful than any of his subordinates, as he's both Satan and a Physical God.
• Really 700 Years Old:
  • Jesus Christ (yes, that one) is still in his thirty year old body despite being two thousand years old. Most of the Angels count as this, since they're all ageless Human Aliens. Some of the non-human Angels like Tephiroth take it up to eleven - several of them are trillions of years old.
  • Tsali the Ultimate Weapon, who is actually forty years old but in a ten-year old body. It's also justified, as he was roboticized into a combat android when he was ten.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: Most of the Angel leaders, except for Metatron. They don't want the Metarex war to escalate, and immediately realize that Dark Tails is the biggest threat to the galaxy.
• Reconstruction:
  • The story starts as a deconstruction of Sonic the Hedgehog, from the concept of Chaos Energy and the Chaos Emeralds to throwing the kid-friendly characters into a not-so-kid-friendly universe filled with Black-and-Gray Morality. However, the second half - especially in the rewritten version - is spent showing that The Power of Friendship and The Power of Love can prevail even in the face of cosmic terror.
  • It also reconstructs the Cosmic Horror Story. Not all of the all-powerful alien beings are evil per se, even if they seem to be at first glance.
• Red Baron: Tsali is known and feared as "The Black Wind". Allysion calls Sonic "the Antichrist" and the "Son of Perdition". She's technically not wrong.
• Reference Overdosed: This story could probably rival a Quentin Tarantino movie with the sheer number of shout outs (both blatant and obscure) to other media, especially video games and movies.
  • Hilariously, one of them is an extended reference to Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction.
• Refuge in Audacity: Maledict secretly controlling the Metarex using an incredibly poor disguise was basically this, and the only reason it worked was because neither Dark Oak nor Tsali could believe that Maledict would be able to pull it off.
  • Basically everything Eric the Hedgehog does or says is this. Discovering that Molly and Leon's refugee group are eating their dead? Ask for dessert. Taking on an entire Demon fleet led by Satan himself? Charge in guns blazing and ram Maledict's flagship while blasting the 1812 Overture over coms. Indeed, it's said in-story that the reason he's so dangerous is because he literally has no concept of fear.
  • The entire background setting runs on this - among other things, it features space Muslims with mechanical spiders powered by molested girls, literal Space Jews that are basically Nazis, and enough Black Comedy to rival South Park.
• Religion of Evil: Deconstructed in Sonic X: Dark Chaos. Satan himself is worshiped as a literal god by many races of the galaxy, but the satanist churches are depicted as being rather friendly and helpful to their societies. Meanwhile, Islam (at least the version practiced by the Emirate of Mecca) and Christianity (to a lesser extent) are portrayed as this trope instead - which is a major reason why many in-universe hate them even more than the Demons.
• Remember the New Guy?: Lampshaded and Played for Laughs when Eric the Hedgehog shows up out of nowhere and Chris asks who he is.
  Chris: You guys never told me there was another hedgehog like Sonic on your planet!
  Amy: Yeah, and there's a reason for that.
  Knuckles: Believe us Chris, you're lucky he didn't get teleported to your world with us last time.
• Retcon: The rewrite not only retconned huge parts of the original, but it also retconned nearly all of the author's prequel story Fall of the Seedrians as well - to the point where the author discontinued the prequel entirely.
• Revealing Cover Up: Maledict sends Tsali to kill Venus after she steals tons of classified information from the Demon government. Tsali eventually finishes her off — but not before she reveals that bits of the information she found pertain to him. This makes Tsali intensely suspicious of Maledict and leads him to go find out what she learned which ends up with him discovering the conspiracy behind both him the Metarex War — and wrecking Maledict's entire master plan.
• Right for the Wrong Reasons: Tsali eventually surmises that Maledict isn't actually interested in fighting Sonic the Hedgehog at all, and guesses that it's because he's gonna replace Tsali with them. It's actually because Sonic, Shadow, and Eric are his cloned sons.
• Rock Beats Laser: Played With in the background setting of the fanfic. The Demons initially thought that the Angel rebellion would be easy to defeat - the Demon Empire had technology that could destroy galaxies at the push of a button and control time versus simple projectile weapons and nuclear missiles. Turned out that the Jews, Muslims, and Angels had much more than that, and used their more... advanced technology to fight the Demons into a bloody, eternal stalemate. It helps that the Jews of the Tribal Republic are the masters of stealth and guerrilla warfare, and the Muslims are suicidally courageous and fanatical in battle.
  • And then the Shroud appeared, playing this trope straight. The Shroud have no technology at all, being a parasitic Horde of Alien Locusts, and yet there are so many of them and they are so strong that they can easily fight both Demons and Angels at the same time.
• Rock Me, Asmodeus!: Beelzebub is the one who originally invented both the guitar and rock n' roll (by accident, during the mother of all drug binges). His guitar, Fuckslayer, is the very first guitar ever made and is so strong it can obliterate warships.
• Role Swap AU: Tails and Cosmo end up exchanging the roles in their canonical separation with Tails being the one to pull a Heroic Sacrifice and Cosmo being the one to kill the person she loves.
• Royally Screwed Up: The Emirate of Mecca is ruled by the House of Ishmael. How utterly corrupt and screwed up is it? The Prophet Muhammad (who happens to be a completely insane dictator who tried to irrigate fields with blood) is considered to be one of the better members. The family is the primary reason for the Emirate being a nightmarish totalitarian theocracy. According to Word of God, it was explicitly based on the real life Saudi royal family.
• Rule of Cool: Most of the story runs on this with a generous topping of Darker and Edgier and graphic violence out the wazoo. From battlestations the size of stars to six-necked demonic guitars that can blast warships apart to murderous killer androids to Dragon Ball-esque Chaos powers, it's here. According to Word of God, most of the physics and science run on this too.
• Satan: Lord Maledict is the titular Devil. Ruler of the Demon Empire, he's also the maker of the Chaos Emeralds, and helped create the entire universe. And he also created Sonic the Hedgehog. Uniquely for the setting, Maledict is portrayed as far stronger than Jesus as he proves in Episode 75 - while Jesus is simply a powerful (but technically mortal) Angel, Maledict is literally divine.
• Sadistic Choice: Episode 75 has a truly crowning example. Satan gives Sonic and his friends a choice between giving him the Chaos Emeralds or the metaphysical annihilation of the entire Milky Way Galaxy. Sonic and his friends choose the latter, but D'Arnazhee betrays Maledict and shoots the Galaxy Crusher's firing mechanism right out of his hand.
• Satan Is Good: Played With. Maledict is a Faux Affably Evil Manipulative Bastard tyrant with semi-good intentions. However, compared to Allysion and the Angels (especially the Muslims), he looks like a saint in comparison.
• Scary Dogmatic Aliens: The story goes all over the place with this. The Jews are (ironically) Nazis, the Muslims are Fundamentalists, the Angels are a vague Communist/Fundamentalist hybrid, and the Demons are Conquistadores.
• Scenery Gorn: The story vividly describes a galaxy torn apart. Sonic and his friends find many worlds devastated by the Metarex conflict and Shroud pandemics, and some changed beyond recognition from losing their Planet Eggs. Others have been turned into glassed hellholes by the Demon Empire or transformed into living conduits of Dark Chaos Energy.
• Schizo Tech: Technology is all over the place, depending on the planet and aliens involved. The Demons (minus Astorath and the Nephilim) and Angels are consistently portrayed as Sufficiently Advanced Aliens, but the Jewish forces range from flying pieces of welded scrap with machine guns to secret tech so advanced that it cannot be physically understood. Some races that Sonic and his friends encounter have little to no technology at all, using old wooden sailing ships (the Zeko natives) or straight up satanic Black Magic (the Marmolims). The Muslims may be the king of this trope, combining fanatical spearmen and suicide bombers with golden nuke-flinging battleships and Body Horror-filled genetic engineering. It helps that its a totalitarian theocracy that considers many common pieces of technology to be haraam.
• Science Fantasy: The universe of Sonic X: Dark Chaos, being essentially a twisted mixture of Warhammer 40,000 and Shin Megami Tensei, runs entirely with this. It combines Space Opera science fiction mixed in with magical Chaos powers, Lovecraftian horrors, and Sufficiently Advanced Aliens.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Connections!: Tsali is able to get away with genocide and mass murder without Demon government interference because of his personal connections with Maledict himself. He also has near-limitless access to money from the Demon treasury for the same reason.
• Seppuku: In a flashback in Episode 74, Cosmo's mother Hertia committed seppuku with a plasma knife after Maledict devolved her to her original form. It's actually a case of Better to Die than Be Killed - Maledict explicitly gave her the choice between suicide or a Fate Worse than Death. And in an interesting case of Shown Their Work, Maledict ends her suffering by decapitating her as well.

• Serial Escalation: The fanfic deconstructs the Sonic franchise's use of the trope by quickly introducing numerous Invincible Villains and demonstrating that the heroes are surviving not because of their power, but because the villains keep getting in each other's way or aren't really "villains". And the heroes are affected by the seeming hopelessness of their situation, even though they keep helping as many people as they can.
• Shipper on Deck: In Episode 65, Team Chaotix try to get Tails and Cosmo together just like the regular episode. And just like the regular episode, all of their attempts fail. Tails and Cosmo do get together, though.
• Shoo Out the Clowns: The Chaotix essentially disappear after Episode 65, until they show up for the final battle.
• Shoot the Shaggy Dog: Several of the episodes end up like this, but Episode 68 is probably the most notable. Tsali steals the Chaos Emerald and murders Molly, and then a Demon fleet glasses the planet from orbit.
• Shout-Out: Beelzebub has a guitar called "Fuckslayer".
• Sins of Our Fathers: As revealed in chapter 22, Tsali has been after Cosmo because because her father Lucas made him into what he is now. Tails points out that Cosmo is not guilty of her father's crimes, but Tsali responds that she carries her father's blood, and that's enough for him.
• Slave Race: The Jews were enslaved by the Demon Empire, before many of them rebelled and created their own nation. The Demons also tend to do this with many planets they conquer, if they do not exterminate them outright.
• Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: The fanfic lies closer to the middle. Sonic and his friends are still heroes and hold their ideals, even if several of them are traumatized by the things they see. However, the rest of the setting is very, very, very, VERY cynical.
• Sliding Scale of Plot Versus Characters: This fanfic is heavy on the plot side, although the rewrite does add more characterization to everyone to help explain the plot.
• Sliding Scale of Silliness vs. Seriousness: Somewhere in the middle. While the story itself is (usually) treated quite seriously, the background material and setting is so blatantly tongue-in-cheek that the tongue goes right through the cheek.
• The Sociopath: Tsali the Ultimate Weapon is a Deconstruction of this. [[spoiler: Several systems in his artificial brain were secretly modified to completely suppress his empathy and sense of mercy so he would never feel remorse for his crimes. However, when those systems are accidentally damaged...
• The Spartan Way: Heavily deconstructed. Cosmo's race tried to turn the ten year-old Tsali into the "Ultimate Weapon" by replacing every single body part with robotics (without anesthesia), infusing his mechanical body with Dark Chaos Energy abilities, and putting him through Training from Hell that would make a Space Marine wince. It backfired horribly; by the time it was over, Tsali was nothing more than a bloodthirsty Ax-Crazy berserker — he promptly committed genocide upon the entire Seedrian race in revenge the instant he escaped.
• Spoiler Title: Episode 77 is titled "Tails's Work". If you know that the original episode's Japanese title was "Cosmo's Work" and that Cosmo dies in that episode...
• Spoof Aesop: Muslims are all psychopathic pedophile fundamentalists who enjoy rape and torture because Islam says they should. Both Christianity and Judaism - and their followers - are depicted as stupid and naive at best or complete Religion of Evil at worst. Lampshaded in Episode 68:
  Eric: Remember kids, Islam is bad and if you're a Muslim, you should feel bad!
  Sonya: That's an... odd lesson.
• Star-Crossed Lovers: As in canon, fate (and death) serve to separate Tails and Cosmo. Except this time, it's Tails who ends up sacrificing himself while Cosmo is the one to pull the trigger.
• State Sec: The Intelligence and Reconnaissance Department (IRD) is the state security of the Demon Empire. They are outside the military and follow only Beelzebub's orders. The Erelim is a more benign version of this for the Angel Federation.
• Status Quo Is God: A major theme of Dark Chaos. Sure Sonic and his friends stopped Dark Tails and saved the galaxy... but the endless conflict between Maledict and Allysion continues, they both got what they wanted in the end, and there's nothing anyone can do to stop them. Until the Cruel Twist Ending.
• Stealth Parody: According to Word of God, the rewrite is this trope to grimdark "edgy" Sonic the Hedgehog fanfics via both deconstruction and Black Comedy. The background materials are also scathingly satirical of Judeo-Christian religion rather than the author's actual views.
• Straw Nihilist: Tsali the Ultimate Weapon is one of these until The Reveal in Episode 74. He decides that all morality and compassion is meaningless to him; only revenge has any meaning for him.
• Summon Bigger Fish: Episode 63. Tsali is finally cornered and on the verge of defeat. Cue Maledict himself appearing to face Sonic personally.
• Super Prototype: Tsali himself was this to the Tsali Endoskeletons. It's later revealed to be a Justified Trope — the endoskeletons were built in the last days of the Demon-Seedrian War, with the Seedrians nearly wiped out and scraping together anything to slow the Demons down.
• Superpowered Evil Side: Tails gets one, although eventually he gains full control of it and keeps his normal personality.

T — V

• Take That!: The story has several examples in both its setting and its prose.
  • The entire Angel Federation is a truly enormous Take That! to Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. Especially the Emirate of Mecca, which is basically a damning insult against Muslim theocracies in general and Islam itself as a whole. It's such a huge Take That!, in fact, that it sometimes crosses into borderline racism - the Jews and Muslims are depicted as groups of Future Primitive brown-skinned Human Aliens who prefer fighting each other all the time over petty tribal squabbles, for example. All three countries represent the author's beefs with their religions, even though the recent rewrite balanced their depiction by making them the gray to the Demons' black.
  • The pre-rewrite versions had numerous Take That! moments towards 4Kids Entertainment, who originally dubbed Sonic X. When 4Kids went bankrupt, the author decided the insults weren't needed anymore and removed them.
• That's No Moon: This is the reaction of the Chaotix when they detect into the reactivated Galaxy Crusher, a Demon battlestation the size of a red giant.
  Vector: I thought stars were supposed to be, you know, bright.
  Espio: That's not a star.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: Beelzebub decides that there's only one way to finally take out Sonic and end the Metarex war; blow up the entire galaxy with the Galaxy Crusher.
  • Hell, the Galaxy Crusher is pretty much the physical incarnation of this trope - it's the size of a red giant and capable of obliterating galaxies.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Maledict gives one to Jesus Christ while the two of them are dueling on the Typhoon's flight deck in Episode 75.
  Maledict: What would you know of courage and honor, slave? Listen to you and your wretches yelling of courage and honor, courage and honor, courage and honor! Do you even know the meaning of those words? Courage is doing what must be done, no matter the cost! You know nothing of courage. Honor is protecting my universe from scum like you! You know nothing of honor. You Christians and Muslims and Jews! You rape and pillage and burn, you oppress the weak, you torment the innocent, you keep the universe down with delusions of salvation! You and your Goddess take all they have, but that's not enough for you!
  Jesus: Then you're a slave as much as I am - enslaved by your power, blind to the future. Too hateful to learn. Too spiteful to prosper.
  • Earlier in the same episode, Shadow also gives one the Maledict in response to the latter's We Can Rule Together offer.
  Shadow: I made a promise to to a human I loved named Maria. I forgot that promise and I nearly wiped out an entire race because of it. You despise humans... and yet a human taught me the most valuable lesson of all; there are still things worth fighting for. Demon or Angel, it doesn't matter. I'm nobody's slave Maledict, especially not yours.
• The Tunguska Event: In the background material, it was the result of a disabled Angel scout ship activating its Warpspace drive in Earth's atmosphere just before it crashed.
• The Unpronounceable:
  • Demonish, the common Demon language. Most of it is translated, but not all of it. The easiest way to replicate it is to "roll your face on your keyboard". It is described in-story as a combination of Latin and Enochian put in reverse.
  • Demonese Skript, an ancient form of Demonish, is literally only translatable by Maledict himself.
• The World Is Not Ready: Episode 75 reveals that this is the primary motivation for Maledict trying to rule the entire universe. He believes that sentient mortal beings are not ready for freedom to make their own decisions, and must be controlled (freely or by enslavement) for their own good.
• This Is Unforgivable!: Shadow's reaction to Tsali insulting Maria in Episode 63.
  • Pretty much everyone's reaction to Tsali murdering Molly after promising he would release her in exchange for the Chaos Emerald in Episode 68 and then calling in an entire Demon fleet to destroy the planet they're on.
• Time Abyss: The Eternal War has raged between the Angels and Demons for five hundred trillion years. Maledict and Allysion are even older than that; they helped create the entire universe several times over.
• Time Skip: There are short indeterminate time skips between most of the episodes. Only Episodes 55/56 and the episodes after 74 directly follow each other.
• Tome of Eldritch Lore: In the lore of the fanfic, the Bible and the Koran are depicted as this, driving people to madness and being able to summon Lovecraftian horrors with the right versions.
• Took a Level in Badass: Cosmo, especially compared to the original series. She protects Tails from Tsali, gives a "The Reason You Suck" Speech to the Devil himself, and ends up commanding the Blue Typhoon during the final episodes.
  • Tails is the biggest recipient of badass levels with all the transformations and powers he gains over the course of the series. Not only does he command the Blue Typhoon, he gains control over Chaos powers as well. The rewrite tones it down considerably due to reviewer complaints.
• Torture Porn: Episode 67 is this trope, inflicted on Chris and Cosmo. With emphasis on the "porn."
• Tragic Keepsake: Sonic finds a shred of Tails's glove after the final battle.
• Trauma Conga Line: Tsali's backstory/Start of Darkness was a conga line of epic proportions. First, his home planet is annihilated and his family was killed when he was only ten. The Seedrians rescued him and then Cosmo's father Luke decided to use him in a demented attempt to defeat a Demon invasion of their homeworld. Tsali gets turned into a combat android powered by Dark Chaos Energy—very painfully—and Tsali promptly goes completely crazy from rage once he finally breaks out. He ends up slaughtering the entire Seedrian race before getting several dozen nuclear weapons dropped on him by Cosmo's mother Hertia. He barely survives by making a literal Deal with the Devil—becoming a pawn of the very same person who destroyed his home planet—and is forced to fight a brutal one-man war across the galaxy for revenge against the Metarex... yeah. And just to rub it all in, he hired a group of mercenaries to help him, one of them being his (still living) younger sister only for them to eventually betray him and force him to murder all of them. It's telling that when Dark Chaos begins thirty years later, he's been so utterly brutalized by his experiences that he considers disemboweling children to be a source of cheap entertainment.
• Troll Fic: Word of God confirms that most of the content revolving around the Angel Federation — especially its Straw Character extremely demeaning]] depiction of Islam - was created specifically to piss off Muslim and Christian readers.
• Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: Tsali is the incarnation of this trope. He committed genocide on an entire race when he was only ten years old. Even thirty years later, he's still physically and mentally ten due to being turned into a robot - turning him into an Ax-Crazy Psychopathic Manchild.
• Turned Against Their Masters: Tsali the Ulimate Weapon was involuntarily turned into a Dark Chaos Energy-powered battle android by Dark Oak. The second he awakened and freed himself, he immediately went off the deep end and promptly slaughtered the entire Seedrian race.
• Unwilling Roboticization: The story extensively deconstructs this trope to its utterly horrific extremes. Especially with Tsali - this trope was inflicted to him by the Seedrians, caused him to go nearly insane from pain and despair, and led to him committing genocide on Cosmo's entire race in revenge before starting the Metarex War and destroying most of the galaxy.
• Uterine Replicator: One of the darker moments in this story is that the Miriam pods the Emirate of Mecca uses are a subversion - they aren't a uterine replicator, they're actual women, trapped in a metal pod and forced to bear a child every few seconds. The heroes find this out when they come across a broken pod, still ejecting half-formed stillbirths.
• Unstoppable Rage: Tsali pretty much runs on violently sadistic Ax-Crazy rage, especially in battle.
• The Un-Favorite: It's revealed that Shadow and Eric are this to Maledict; the former because he was "corrupted by human frailty", the latter because a serious accident during his birth turned him into... something else. He only regards Sonic as his true successor.
• Viewers Are Genius: Some of the backstory and references in the fanfic are nearly impossible to understand without a theology major, historical research into the Bible and the Koran, knowledge of American right-wing Evangelical beliefs, familiarity with the works of HP Lovecraft, and knowledge of Christian and Jewish demonology. Some understanding of LaVeyan Satanism helps too.
  • Not to mention the numerous shout-outs to the original Japanese third season of Sonic X - which was never officially released in the West and is much different than the western dub version.
• Villainous Breakdown: The story has a number of these.
  • Tsali completely loses his cool when he is defeated by Super Sonic and friends.
  • In Episode 74 Tsali has another mental breakdown after discovering Maledict was responsible for the entire Metarex war and everything that had happened to him. In the same Episode, the Metarex leaders (especially Dark Oak) have their own breakdowns when Maledict captures them and reveals that they were his pawns all along.
  • Maledict himself has a minor breakdown from Sonic's (apparent) death in Episode 64. However, when Sonic refuses his We Can Rule Together offer, D'Arnazhee destroys the Galaxy Crusher's firing mechanism, and Jesus and the Angels come to Sonic's rescue in Episode 75, he utterly loses it and unleashes his true power.
  • The Metarex leaders, especially Dark Oak himself, have a collective breakdown after their decisive defeat in Episode 64.
• Villain Ball: This fanfic mostly averts this trope - with the major exception of Episode 67. Beelzebub wanted to study Tails' Shroud infection one day, so he goes about it by kidnapping, torturing, and raping Chris and Cosmo... and then gloating about it to Tails when he comes to rescue them. Somewhat justified in this case, since Beelzebub is an utterly sadistic pedophile and narcissistic Mad Scientist rolled up into one.
  • Tsali grabs it in Episode 73. Rather than just blowing up the Blue Typhoon and killing everyone the easy way, he decides to rampage through the ship and meticulously slaughter Sonic and friends one by one. Trinity actually points this out to him... and Tsali retorts that just blowing them up is "way too simple for them." This ends up distracting him at several key moments, letting Tails and Cosmo get away.
    • He also temporarily grabbed it when he took on Super Sonic, Super Shadow, and Super Eric at once because he thought he could win. He was wrong.
• Villain Decay: The fanfic does this badly with the Metarex. In the canon Sonic X, the Metarex were a nearly unstoppable empire of powerful robots led by even more-powerful robot overlords that gave Super Sonic a run for his money. Dark Chaos reduces them to a side faction... and by the halfway point of the story, their armies are all but destroyed and their leaders have gone into hiding (with a collective Villainous Breakdown for good measure). It doesn't help that their motivations are also completely different from the canon; in the show, they wanted to exterminate all animal life in the galaxy and replace it with plant life. In Dark Chaos, they're just trying to find a way to kill Tsali and revive their species by any means necessary.
• Voodoo Shark: While the rewrite does a great job of filling the numerous plot holes in the original, a few explanations do fit this trope.
  • If Tsali is so powerful, why didn't he just kill Sonic and his friends in the very first chapter? It's because Maledict was monitoring him and ordering him not to. But this turns into a plot hole because Tsali can still resist and defy Maledict - which exactly what he does later as the animosity between them grows. Downplayed later on, as it's revealed that Tsali is terrified of pissing off Satan (and for good reason) and when he ignores Maledict and decides to attack the Blue Typhoon in Episode 73, he fully expects to be harshly punished for it... but he decides killing Cosmo and Sonic is worth it and doesn't care anymore.
  • Exposure to Dark Chaos Energy is established to be able to rapidly evolve Shroud parasites. Despite this, during his fight with Dark Tails in Episode 69, Tails does not lose control and mutate into Shroud Tails. This is explained later on - Tails has to directly absorb Dark Chaos Energy to mutate. However, this doesn't explain his first mutation in Episode 67...when he wasn't exposed to any energy at all. This is handwaved later on that the transformation in Episode 67 was an angry "spasm" rather than a full evolution, but it's not much better.

W — Y

• Waking Up Elsewhere: Sonic awakens after his fight with Tsali to find himself on a bed inside Dr Eggman's base. Turned out that the good doctor saved him from almost certain death and allowed him to recover his health during the week that he was comatose.
• War Is Hell: The entire galaxy is hit with this. Not many battles are described directly in story... but the aftermath of those battles are. The Metarex and Tsali steal the Planet Eggs of worlds to siphon Chaos Energy from them, turning the planets into lifeless rocks. Many of the planets Sonic and friends search are either beyond saving or about to be destroyed. One world they find is nothing but a Corpse Land; another is obliterated by an exploding Planet Egg before their very eyes. Others are corrupted by Dark Chaos Energy or infested with Shroud feeding on the remains. Disease and starvation run rampant. The war between the Demons and Angels is described just as brutally, with gigantic war machines the size of towns clashing in merciless battles of attrition that can scour whole worlds of life in days, and plenty of Rape, Pillage, and Burn (on a planetary scale) from both sides.
  • The best example comes at the end of Episode 68; a Demon after-action report details that the entire Leo constellation was eaten by Shroud, with "acceptable" losses of 36.8 trillion people.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Maledict, in many more ways than one. He's willing to unleash horrific atrocities upon millions to keep peace in the Demon Empire and stop the Metarex uprising. The Angels are not much better.
  • The Metarex are completely re-imagined as an organization of these.
• Wham Episode:
  • Episode 65. On the eve of the Demon New Year celebration, Jesus launches an Angel invasion of the galaxy and restarts the Eternal War, killing trillions of innocent people.
  • While not a Wham Episode in the traditional sense, Episode 67 is easily the darkest and most horrific episode of the story, and it marks the story's Genre Shift from gritty Space Opera to grim dark horror.
  • Episode 73 - Sonic and pretty much all his friends are severely injured/crippled by Tsali as he rampages through the Blue Typhoon to find Cosmo. Catching up to them, he seemingly murders Tails, only for Tails to suddenly revive... as a Shroud-infected monster. He defeats Tsali and damages the ship tremendously before Knuckles stops him and reverts him back by nearly burning him to death with a fuel cell. The Blue Typhoon is heavily damaged and basically everyone crosses the Despair Event Horizon in the aftermath.
  • Episode 74, fittingly titled "The Mystery Revealed". Sonic and friends - and a crippled Tsali - land on Cosmo's devastated home planet Seedrius. They soon discover a vault of stolen Demon data files hidden in underground tunnels beneath the same research facility where Tsali was made. These files reveal that Maledict was literally manipulating everything in the backstory, from the destruction of the Seedrians to the entire Metarex war, and it was all part of a gigantic Gambit Roulette to end the Eternal War and conquer the universe. Tsali is so enraged by this discovery that he decides to ally with Sonic and try to go kill Maledict. The Metarex leaders and Dr. Eggman are also captured by Demon special forces.
• Wham Line:
  • Episode 65:
    Jesus Christ: Brothers and sisters, commence Operation Armageddon. Let the galaxy burn.
  • Episode 75:
    Sonic: How would you know who my father is?!
    Maledict: [[[[spoiler:Because I am your father.]]
  • Episode 78:
    M.A.R.Y.: "They are coming".
• Whole-Plot Reference: The discontinued prequel, Fall of the Seedrians, is basically a retelling of Battlestar Galactica (2003) with the Seedrians as the Colonials and Tsali/the Tsali Endoskeletons as the Cylons. The only difference is that it ends much, much worse.
• With Great Power Comes Great Insanity: Eric the Hedgehog is a non-evil example of this; he was created by Maledict along with Sonic and Shadow to create an "Ultimate Weapon". Unfortunately, an unexplained accident turned him into a Humanoid Abomination at the cost of damaging his brain, turning him into a Cloud Cuckoolander Manchild who isn't aware of his own powers.
  • Poor, poor Tsali. Being forcibly turned into a Dark Chaos Energy-powered battle robot really didn't do good for his sanity.
  • Shroud Tails, full stop. Although considering what happens, insanity would probably be a step up.
• The Worf Effect: Zigzagged.
  • Tsali manages to defeat Super Sonic one-on-one in the opening scene. However (unknown to Sonic), he was wounded and only barely won. Come Episode 64 when he fights Sonic, Shadow, and Eric in their Super forms, it doesn't take long for him to lose horribly.
  • Maledict is quickly shown to be an Invincible Villain who curb-stomps the heroes into the floor. Then comes in Dark Tails, who grows so powerful that he shrugs off all of Maledict's attacks. It's a good thing Sonic and friends end up allying with him.
• Worth Living For: A villainous example. Tsali tells Trinity that he probably would've lost his mind and/or killed himself years before, but his genocidal hatred for the Seedrians (and his servitude to Lord Maledict) gave him a purpose.
• Worthy Opponent: This story has numerous examples.
  • After being beaten in Episode 66, Astorath strongly respects Sonic and his friends as warriors — to the point where after he defeats them in Episode 75, he spares their lives.
  • Tsali considers Venus one of these, as she's "the only Seedrian who ever put up a good fight."
  • Jesus Christ respects Astorath for his honor and his Pet the Dog tendencies, even though the two are archenemies on opposing sides. And although he hates Maledict on principle, he privately respects Satan's intelligence and cunning.
• Would Hurt a Child: Played horrifyingly straight with Tsali as a deliberate terror tactic. It's stated more than once that he slaughtered every single Seedrian he found down to the babies. In Episode 70, Trinity finds a recorded memory that Tsali saved for his own entertainment - which shows Tsali setting Seedrian children on fire and using their screaming husks as Human Shields. And Beelzebub ''really'' has a thing for kids...
  • According to the background material, the Muslims also regularly rape and murder children for breaking Shariah law in their territories - including the developmentally and physically disabled.
• Wrong Genre Savvy: Sonic and his friends go off into space expecting to find their Planet Egg, beat up Tsali and the bad guys, and return home as heroes. They don't realize the kind of tale they're really in until much later.
• Xanatos Gambit: The entire Metarex War is this for Maledict, as he's secretly The Man Behind the Man for both Tsali and the Metarex. If Tsali lost, Maledict would just build up the Metarex as a proxy army to aid him in the future; if Tsali won, than he obviously was the better fighter and would also aid Maledict in the future in gratitude for giving Tsali his revenge. Only his servant Venus' betrayal and Sonic's intervention causes the gambit to fall apart.
• Yamato Nadeshiko: Deliberately subverted with Sonya the Hedgehog - she's brash, cocky, prideful, and hot-tempered (but good underneath it all). She also considers women who follow this trope to be weak helpless doormats although she has a Freudian Excuse to explain it. By contrast, Cosmo plays this trope completely straight as part of her Adaptational Badass characterization.
• You Cannot Grasp the True Form: Trying to comprehend the true form of Dark Tails is a very, very bad idea. Maledict — who happens to be the biblical Satan and an immortal Physical God — is literally left stunned with terror after he sees it.

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