Fanfic / The Tyrant and the Hero

The hero Heinrich confronts the tyrannical Monster Lord Alice VIII, better known as Black Alice. According to history, he slays her and goes down in history as the one who ended her reign of terror. A simple story of good triumphing over evil.

But the reality turns out to be quite different.

The Tyrant and the Hero is a Monster Girl Quest fanfiction by Fish on Land. It can be found on Fanfiction.net.

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This fanfic contains examples of:

• Adaptational Heroism: The fic has monsters in general be more heroic, but nowhere is this more apparent than with Black Alice. Canonically a playfully sadistic, cannibalistic, rapist megalomaniac, here she starts out as a Wide-Eyed Idealist. However, she's forced to act like her canon self while acting as a Monster Lord. And in the Normal End, she gains this personality for real due to Ilias' manipulations.
• Adaptation Name Change: Alice "Black Alice" Fateburn VIII now starts out with the name Mary Fateburn, while her younger sister Alice Fateburn IX is now Dinah Fateburn. This was done deliberately to avoid confusion, the assumption being that they are born with different names and only take up the name of Alice when they actually become Monster Lord.
• Adaptational Villainy: Lucifina is the complete opposite of her canon portrayal as a kind and loving mother. Here she's an Ax-Crazy serial killer who's feared even by her fellow angels. This is inspired by her past self, which did act like this.
• Alice Allusion: To begin with, all of the Monster Lords have the name Alice (as in the source material). Black Alice originally has the name Mary (from Mary Ann, the maid that Alice was mistaken for) and physically resembles a grown-up Alice (in her human form, at least). Her younger sister Dinah is named for Alice's cat.
• Always a Bigger Fish: The gang of human bandits raids a small and undefended village with no deaths on their side. Then they're attacked and defeated by insect monsters with just as much ease.
• Asskicking Leads to Leadership: The position of Monster Lord goes to the strongest monster. It is effectively hereditary, though, since this has always been someone from the same family.
• Bag of Holding: Black Alice carries her luggage in a magical cabinet that uses space-time magic, allowing her to shrink it until it can fit on her palm.
• Big Bad Ensemble: The main villains are a group of powerful high-ranking monsters, who start a war with humans by assassinating Alice VII and framing a human for it, and Ilias, who exploits the war (and also helps to start it) in her own plan to acquire a Monster Lord's soul.
• Big Eater: Black Alice, not unlike her eventual descendant Alice XVI. She's capable of eating an entire deer and thinks of pigs as "bite-sized". Heinrich is actually able to tell that she's unsettled when she only eats as much as a normal human.
• Blatant Lies:
  • Black Alice claims to Dinah that she's already started packing, while holding a bag that is obviously empty.
  • Marcus, leader of a bandit group, claims that he and his group aren't cruel men. Nobody present believes it for a second.
• Blow You Away: Sylph, as the spirit of wind, naturally has this kind of power. Heinrich gets it too after forming a contract with her.
• Dating Catwoman: Essentially the premise of the story, with the caveat that the Catwoman in this case isn't a villain (at least at first). It's inspired by a relationship between the two characters in the source material (though, as of time of writing, it hasn't been revealed whether this relationship was romantic in nature).
• Dishing Out Dirt:
  • Black Alice knows some earth magic, including a spell that makes the earth behave like quicksand.
  • Gnome, as the spirit of wind, naturally has this kind of power. Heinrich gets it too after forming a contract with her.
• The Ditz: Sylph. This is best highlighted by her attempt to test Heinrich's intelligence. She asks him a simple maths question (30 x 7; Heinrich quickly solves it in his head while Sylph needs to write it down), then asks him to name ten types of flowers (she herself can only name six), and finally asks him a riddle (which of a tonne of rocks or a tonne of feathers is heavier than the other; Sylph thinks it's the rocks, so Heinrich has to correct her).
• The Dragonslayer: Heinrich kills multiple dragonkin over the course of the story, but one of his biggest achievements is killing a pure-blooded dragon (albeit with help).
• Dramatic Irony:
  • A group of human lumberjacks talk about how monsters are becoming more active and approaching closer to human villages than usual, unaware that they're being overheard by a particular monster.
  • While trying to cheer Heinrich up, Black Alice says that he could become a legendary hero whose name will be known by everyone.
  • Black Alice, after sneaking out of their inn room, hopes that Heinrich is sleeping well. The scene immediately prior to this had Heinrich notice her sneaking out.
  • When thinking to herself, Black Alice reasons that the war was started by humans and monsters, and unlike in the (in-universe) stories, Ilias didn't have anything to do with it.
• Elective Mute: Subverted in the case of Gnome. In canon, Gnome doesn't speak except for one time at the end of the original trilogy. Here she does, though she's described as speaking in a slow and quiet voice. She becomes this after she discovers that Safar, her home, has been destroyed.
• Elemental Embodiment: These very words are used to describe spirits, beings made completely or almost completely out of an element. At their peak are the Four Great Spirits: Sylph (wind), Gnome (earth), Undine (water) and Salamander (fire).
• Elemental Powers: Two different systems of elements are mentioned. The first is based on the elemental system of the original Monster Girl Quest trilogy, with the six elements of fire, water, earth, wind, light and darkness. The second system is based on that in Monster Girl Quest: Paradox, with the same six elements but also adding in ice and lightning (though it leaves out some elements like bio and sonic, presumably because they wouldn't make sense as elements outside of a game).
• Fallen Angel: Lucifina becomes this in both endings.
• Fantastic Racism: Many humans hate and fear monsters, which are portrayed in their religion as the mortal enemies of humanity. This isn't universal, though, as it's mentioned that human ambassadors occasionally visit the monster leadership. And it turns out that it's mainly restricted to the Noah region, with other areas being better off.
• Fire/Water Juxtaposition: Salamander and Undine really don't get along with each other. They make Sylph and Gnome look like the best of friends.
• Foregone Conclusion: The prologue makes it clear that Heinrich and Black Alice will eventually become a hero and the Monster Lord respectively. The rest of the story is about how they get here.
• Generation Xerox: Like in the original Monster Girl Quest, the two main characters are a Monster Lord and a human hero who's initially unaware of the former's true nature (and later gains the power of the Four Spirits). However, one difference is that the Monster Lord in this story starts out naive and is also the one who initially handles the fighting, whereas the human is the (relatively) more wordly one. Word of God states that this was intentional.
• The Heavy: Lucifina serves this role to Ilias, acting as her agent on the surface world.
• Heroic BSoD: Black Alice has this reaction after realising that the bandits and slavers she let go earlier on have returned to their lives of crime, resulting in the deaths of everyone in an entire village. After killing them, she stops eating of her own accord (a very big deal by her standards) and has to be made to eat by Heinrich. She more or less recovers after a talk with Tamamo and some time in Yamatai.
• Hope Spot: Heinrich and Ellen hide from bandits among the roots of a tree. They hear the bandits say that they've lost their targets, and breathe a sigh of relief, only for the bandits to laugh and tell them to get out. It turns out that the two of them had left clear footprints leading to their hiding place, which the bandits noticed and then acted as if they hadn't.
• I Have Many Names: As in the source material, Black Alice has this nickname in addition to her official name of Alipheese "Alice" Fateburn VIII. However, this story has her originally being named Mary (see Alice Allusion above) and also take on the pseudonym Alicetroemeria (and after that, Alice) when disguised as a human. This page uses Black Alice to avoid confusion, since it's the name most known to fans.
• In Medias Res: The prologue shows Heinrich and Black Alice in the Monster Lord's Castle and makes it clear that they've known each other for a long time. The next chapter goes back to before they became known as a hero and Monster Lord, respectively, and the story shows the events leading up to the prologue.
• Internal Reveal:
  • At the end of Chapter 7, Black Alice reveals her true identity to Heinrich.
  • And Chapter 31 is all about Black Alice, once again, explaining herself (specifically, why she has't contacted him and her reasons for acting like a tyrant) to Heinrich.
• Irony: The Noah region in the original games was notable for having humans and monsters living together in peace. Here it's the exact opposite, being the only one of the four regions of the Sentora continent where this isn't the case (aside from Yamatai Village, which remains the same).
• Line-of-Sight Name: Black Alice takes on the name "Alicetroemeria" when disguised, this being a portmanteau of "Alice" and "alstroemeria" (a type of flower which she happened to see at the time).
• Love Confession: The end of Chapter 13 has Black Alice finally confess her love to Heinrich. Appropriately enough, this update was released on Christmas.
• Machiavelli Was Wrong: Tamamo argues for this, pointing out that while a good leader does need to be hard and ruthless, they also need to know when to be merciful.
• Magic Enhancement: In this setting, magic can be used to increase the physical capabilities of one's body, to the point that a human can compete against a monster in strength. It's described as being easier than using magic to affect the outside world. Heinrich learns this during the time skip in Yamatai, and it's mentioned that this same technique is used by many elite human fighters.
• Magic Knight: Heinrich is shown to be this by the time of the prologue, having the power of the four classical elements in addition to using a sword.
• Making a Splash: Undine, as the spirit of water, naturally has this kind of power. Heinrich gets it too after forming a contract with her.
• Manchild: Black Alice, but without the psychopathy that she had in canon. She wears a "dress that wouldn’t have looked out of place on someone ten years younger" and owns a teddy bear. Once she becomes Monster Lord, she does act as psychopathic as in canon, but this is an act to conceal her true plans.
• Mars Needs Women: Since monsters are all-female, they need human men to reproduce. This drives some monsters to kidnap men as sex slaves.
• Mirroring Factions: In a dark way, human and monster criminals are shown to be similar. This is most apparent when human bandits attack a village, killing the men and boys and taking the women and girls as sex slaves. Then they are attacked in turn by insect monsters, who take them as sex slaves.
• Monster Progenitor: The Six Ancestors, the ancestors of monsters, are described in Chapter 30 (and occasionally mentioned in earlier chapters). Only one of them, Tamamo, appears in the story itself.
• Multiple Endings: The story has two different endings. The Normal End (split up into two chapters, "Normal End 1" and "Normal End 2") has Heinrich be controlled by Ilias into killing Black Alice, allowing Ilias to take Black Alice's soul for her own schemes, with Heinrich Raging Against The Heavens but eventually being killed and his soul sealed away, but Lucifina rebels (becoming the first fallen angel) and Tamamo becomes advisor to the Monster Lords (thus setting up the events of the original trilogy). The True End has the spirits interrupt Ilias' attempt at control, so Black Alice survives and she goes into hiding with Heinrich, and Lucifina still rebels (this time because Ilias' failure has shown that she isn't infallible).
• Mythology Gag:
  • When trying out clothes for her journey, Black Alice first puts on Luka's outfit and then Alice's. She eventually settles on the outfit worn by her Alicetroemeria self in Monster Girl Quest: Paradox.
  • The entire incident where Heinrich is taken inside the seal of the Lilith Sisters is based on the Succubus Fantasy anime (which instead had Luka and Minagi in these roles). The Lilith Sisters' initial dialogue, with Morrigan being rude at first only to be reined in by her sisters, is also based on how they were first introduced in Paradox.
• Necromancer:
  • The Artiste family of succubi are masters of necromancy (along with spiritualism and puppeteering), although the first member to appear, Akame, is more interested in studying living things. In contrast, her mother is dedicated to the art, and doesn't let anything like ethics stand in her way...
  • A trio of human necromancers lives in an abandoned fort in the Safina desert, using their zombies to kill and rob travelers.
• Nice to the Waiter: Black Alice is on a First-Name Basis with her servants and even helps them out with their duties.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Black Alice defeats a gang of human bandits and a group of monster slavers, but in both cases lets them off with a warning. They soon go back to their ways of crime, with the bandits ransacking a small village and the slavers then attacking and enslaving them. Black Alice kills them and has a Heroic BSoD.
• Not So Above It All: Undine is normally the most serious of the spirits, but she becomes just as childish whenever she gets into an argument with Salamander or when she's suggesting names for Heinrich's new technique (her suggestions all involve her element, no different from the other spirits' suggestions).
• Oddly Shaped Sword: Angel Halo, created in the third-last chapter by Heinrich killing 666 angels, their holy energy transforming his sword. As in the source material, it has a blade made up of miniature angel bodies, a "point" that is a ring shaped like an angel's halo, and a hilt made of extended angel wings.
• Orichalcum: This is one of the fantasy metals mentioned. Heinrich's sword is made out of it.
• Our Angels Are Different: They serve Goddess Ilias and, appearance-wise, resemble the standard depictions of angels (women with haloes and feathery wings). As in the source material, they're much more sexual than one might expect. They're organised into a hierarchy, with Seraphs at the top (based on real-life Christian angelology, which is again also present in the source material).
• Paper-Thin Disguise: Black Alice's disguise causes her to stand out in multiple ways. Her dress initially has a Cleavage Window, which Heinrich eventually convinces her to patch over. She casually throws around enough power to easily defeat groups of humans or monsters without killing them. She carries around various expensive items like a sword and books. Even the fake name she uses is overly long and complicated (and still contains the name used by the Monster Lords, so it fails on all counts). Notably, many monsters she meets are immediately aware that she's a monster, though they don't know of her status. This is no longer the case as of the ninth chapter, in which she actually changes her appearance and name (ironically, she changes the latter to "Alice", as this isn't an unusual name among humans).
• Parents as People: Alice VII genuinely wants to be a good parent to her children, but isn't sure how. She takes a stern and distant approach with them as a result.
• Playing with Fire: Salamander, as the spirit of fire, naturally has this kind of power. Heinrich gets it too after forming a contract with her.
• Sand Worm: A Sandworm Girl serves as the villain of the Sabasa segment.
• The Schlub Pub Seduction Deduction: Black Alice tries to seduce information out of a pair of guards. The result can only be described as an Epic Fail. Not only do the guards maintain their professionalism, but Black Alice is embarrassed at the mere thought of the seduction techniques she's learned about and runs away.
• Shown Their Work: The fighting in the arena of Grand Noah has several aspects of Roman gladiatorial combat. The fighters are required to build up a layer of fat for protection from attacks and the arena itself has a sand floor to soak up blood.
• Soul Power: Ilias, as the goddess of holy energy, is capable of manipulating people's souls. She can normally only do this to human souls, since the dark energy of monsters interferes with her power. A major part of the story is her trying to find a way around this limitation.
• Succubi and Incubi: Succubi are one of the races of monsters. The first one to appear, Akame Artiste, doesn't have the libido usually expected from one, but later ones certainly do.
• Thou Shall Not Kill: Early on, Black Alice defeats human bandits and monster slavers, but lets them go with a warning not to continue their criminal activities. This backfires horribly, as noted under Nice Job Breaking It, Hero.
• Time Skip: There are many of these throughout the story, often lasting a few months.
• Would Hurt a Child: During the bandit attack on the village, one of them casually mentions killing a boy, and girls are taken as sex slaves in addition to adult women.
• Yin-Yang Bomb: After gaining the power of all four classical elements (wind, earth, fire, water), Heinrich invents two techniques that use all four of them at once. The first one, Element Spica, is powerful enough to utterly obliterate a hill. The second one is the even more powerful Quadruple Giga.
• Youkai: These make up the monsters native to the Yamatai region.