Behold our heroes out to get revenge on a certain goddess, and maybe save the world while they're at it.note
After spending most of his early childhood being abused by his parents before they abandoned him, Mimori Touka tries to spend his high school years in the background.
However, when his entire class is summoned to another world during a school trip by the goddess Vicius, Touka has the worst stats of the class, marking him an "E-rank" hero, with most of his classmates receiving S and A ranks, the goddess without hesitation banished him to "Ruins of Disposal" to die.
But Touka would not just lie down and die. After finding out that his unique skill set, the "Abnormal State Skills" has more potential than everyone imagined, the abandoned hero sets out find a way home and make Vicius pay for what she did.
Failure Frame: I Became the Strongest and Annihilated Everything With Low-Level Spells note is a Light Novel series written by Kaoru Shinozaki; originally a Web Serial Novel released on Shousetsuka ni Narou in 2017, it was later picked up for publication in 2018 with illustrations by KWKM. It was adapted into a Manga by Uyoshi Shou and Uchiuchi Keyaki, which began serialization in Comic Gardo in 2019. The light novel and manga have been licensed by Seven Seas Entertainment. An anime adaptation by Seven Arcs and Synergy SP was announced for a 2024 release.
No relation to the Fatal Frame series.
Compares to series like Arifureta: From Commonplace to World's Strongest, Garbage Brave, I'm The Only One With Unfavorable Skills, Isekai Summoning Rebellion, Nito's Lazy Foreign World Syndrome, and Suterareta Yuusha No Eiyuutan where a group of students are isekai'd to another world and the main character is ostracized for his weak skills before being betrayed.
Associated Tropes:
- Abusive Parents: The reason Mimori starts the story with no self-confidence? His parents are very fond of late-term abortion. How late term? They try to "abort" him after he's 10 years old by repeatedly beating him up, for no explained reason, and then locking him on the veranda of their second-story apartment, in the middle of winter, and demanding he not make a sound, or he'll get more of the same. When the neighbors call the police on them, they have the nerve to be enraged and yell out "How dare they call the police on us?! He's our brat, we can do whatever we want with him!" In the light novel, they even have the gall to repeatedly boast that "perhaps this is the beating that will finally kill him."
- Adaptation Explanation Extrication: The manga skips a major portion of volume 1, including the prologue where Vicius openly kidnaps the entirety of class 2-C to "summon" to this new world to fight the Demon King, consent be damned.
- Always Chaotic Evil: Gold-eyed monsters created by the miasma of the Devil King and his generals. They are all unflinchingly hostile to humans, and creatures that aren't gold-eyed monsters, and those that can have rational thoughts are vicious and sadistic, finding great sport in tormenting their intended prey, even if they can't communicate. Mimori runs across a race of lizardmen in the Disposal Ruins who make a macabre facsimile from the skeletons of previous victims to showcase how they're going to sadistically murder him. Mimori's conscience isn't pained in the slightest when he gives them all a Cruel and Unusual Death.
- Apathetic Teacher: The homeroom teacher, Zakorogi Tamotsu, takes the crown. When he sees Yasu being bullied and brutalized by Oyamada on the school bus the class is taking on the field trip, he tells Yasu "if you're going to be Driven to Suicide, at least die on someone else's watch!"
- Aristocrats Are Evil: All the aristocrats in the story are corrupt scum, so far without exception, and that's the way Vicius likes it. Princess Cattleya lost her entire kingdom and her crown because she had the gall to help her sister Seras escape certain death for the "crimes" of being lusted after by her own father, and Vicius wanting to enslave her.
- Beauty Is Bad: The goddess who summons the class is physically stunning and absolutely abhorrent. The top students of Mimori's class, save three, are the same way.
- The Cake Is a Lie: Vicius promises the class a trip back home if they can prove they killed the Demon King by collecting a certain jewel which can only be done with said demon's death. After several casualties caused by "training accidents", and the fact that Mimori was "disposed of", the class slowly, but surely, starts to wonder if Vicius will follow through, even if they do manage to defeat the Demon King and get said jewel.
- Condescending Compassion: The way Vicius speaks to everyone.
- Crapsack World: The new world Mimori and his class get summoned to is hell-on-earth. The goddess in charge of everything is morally bankrupt, the various countries of the world don't fight with each other only because the goddess herself forbids it, and they don't dare offend her, with the leadership of said countries, hand-picked by the goddess herself, being completely corrupt. For the coup-de-grace, every few centuries, a "demon king" revives and as a consequence, presumably some kind of "evil miasma" turns the local animals into crazed gold-eyed monsters, irrevocably hostile to humans, with acid for blood, so they can't even be used as food, and even humans supposedly go crazy, with the only hope being the "heroes" the goddess herself summons.
- Defiant to the End: A non-lethal variant considering how Mimori ends up. Having been condemned to a seemingly fatal trip to a night-unsurvivable dungeon for the "crime" of not being up to her standards, and forced most of his classmates and teacher to turn against him, Vicius "allows" him to break down to tears just before sending him. Instead, he angrily takes one last shot at her, basically telling her to go fuck herself before disappearing. Her briefly shown reaction in the manga was both priceless and unsettling.
- Did You Just Flip Off Cthulhu?: When Vicius has already demonstrated that she's going to send Mimori to an execution ground, regardless of anything he does, and has browbeaten, threatened, manipulated, and tricked the rest of the class, including the teacher, to agree, even rendering unconscious Sogou Akira, the Class Representative who stood up for him, she asks for any last words from him. Instead of breaking down, pleading, or begging for his life like she hoped, he defiantly responds by Flipping the Bird and yelling "go to hell, bitch goddess!"
- Dysfunction Junction: Every last one of the "heroes" Vicius summoned has serious mental issues. Kobato has social anxiety. Asagi is borderline psychotic. Ayaka has a messiah complex. Yasu has 8th-grader syndrome to the point of madness. Kirihara has it even worse. Oyamada is a genuine psycho Serial Rapist with a criminal background. The Hijiri sisters are dangerously co-dependent. And the protagonist Mimori has completely untreated trauma from his abusive childhood that he hides through play-acting as a "normal" teen who is Beneath Notice.
- Evil Versus Oblivion: Vicius, who summons Mimori and his class to this new world, is morally bankrupt, but she, and the summoning ritual she uses, is the only thing that has kept humanity from facing extinction every few centuries when she summons "heroes" to go fight the Demon King and his gold-eyed monster army. The reason? Even the local humans are driven crazy by the "wicked miasma" and only heroes from another world can fight, though it's strongly implied that Vicius does things this way for her own amusement and doesn't bother dealing with the "Demon King" directly (and she's also implied to be behind the "Demon King" as well).
- Fantastic Racism: In addition to all her other vileness, Vicius is a human supremacist and teaches the population that hatred is a virtue while the concept of peaceful coexistence, as preached by the Speed tribe, is a terrifying threat, demanding of genocide. We learn this from the mercenary party [Heroic Sword] who looks back to the time they eradicated Eve's tribe fondly, as glory days, because they eliminated every last man, woman, and child, for fun, chasing Eve herself into the hands of a slaver caravan.
- In the Blood: While special abilities are not inheritable, stats are, thus the children of the strongest heroes are powerhouses in their own right. One of the reasons Vicius is so eager to dispose of low-rank "heroes" is that she's got a selective breeding program going on.
- Kill the God: What Mimori would very much like to do to Vicius, so he's questing to find a way.
- Obstructive Code of Conduct: With 100% certainty, any being that tries to bring too much "other world" technology or culture to the world where the story takes meets with fatal disaster. Even Vicius herself is not able to circumvent this. The who, what, how, and why this works remains unclear.
- Polite Villains, Rude Heroes: Vicius is Faux Affably Evil. Mimori is a Knight in Sour Armor who figures "if I'm going to get killed anyway, why bother being polite?"
- Rape as Drama: Combined with Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil. The vast majority of the antagonistic humans Mimori comes across tend to be lead by a guy who gives one, or more, of the female companions Mimori has on his quest rape threats and phrases it as "giving her the honor of bearing his child". Mimori's conscience isn't pained in the slightest when he kills them, no matter how dirty the tactics he uses.
- Released to Elsewhere: Vicius used to simply have summoned people who didn't measure up to her standards openly executed. When she realized this was actually having the opposite of the intended effect, ie making the rest refuse to fight outright, she instead came up with the system of teleporting them to a far off dungeon with basically no hope of survival.
- RPG Mechanics 'Verse: Invoked. Vicius gives random abilities, the ability to level up, and stat sheets to all of Mimori's class, including Mimori himself, and then discards him because the stats and abilities she gave him are sub-par to her standards.
- Social Services Does Not Exist: Defied! The police pay Mimori's parents a visit when the neighbors spot Mimori being abused. In fact, what serves as Child Protective Services in Japan descended on their home, repeatedly, to the annoyance of Mimori's parents. While neither the manga nor the light novel go into specifics, this results in Mimori finding himself in his uncle's custody and gets a loving home, at least until he finds himself in class 2-C.
- Spoiler Cover: See the lovely elf in the page image? The fact that she joins Mimori on his quest doesn't happen until Volume 2 of the light novel, although she does appear in chapter 2 of the manga, well before the two even meet.
- Villain World: Vicius runs everything in this new world, and will happily tell the leaders of all the countries, "you know this girl here, she dared to defy my whims, hunt her down for me." They'll do it too, for fear that she will side with one, or more, of their neighbors and send the armies of said neighbors against them instead. The reason there isn't a mass revolt is that she, and the "heroes" she summons from another world, are the only defense against a Demon King that "revives" every few centuries and wants to annihilate everybody. It's strongly implied that she's behind that too...
- Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: In-Universe. The title even spells it out. Mimori's life on Earth was hell under his parents, and in this new world, the same goddess that arbitrarily summoned him also arbitrarily "disposed of him" and browbeat the rest of the class to cheer her on, inflicting violence on anyone who disagreed and spoke up for him, blaming him for it, so he goes a bit murder-crazy.
- You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: As demonstrated at the beginning of the story, if Vicius doesn't value your existence, she will "dispose of you", and if you don't go quietly, you must be punished for your "selfishness".
