Webcomic / Feast For A King

A story about killing the monsters.

Feast for a King is an ongoing "sci-fi action dark comedy horror erotica?" comic started by Kosmicdream on September 25th, 2014. Our main character wakes up with no memory, handcuffed on a platform suspended above a pit of horrible man-eating monsters we soon learn are called Worms. Exploring the many mysteries of the dark, high sci-fi setting, this epic follows an ensemble cast of humans, aliens (primarily two species, Worms and Hekatonkheires), and robots over the course of 500+ years in a nonlinear manner. There's plenty of Flashback Within a Flashback and other confusing changes in perspectives early on which only get more complex as more characters, plotlines, and alien sub-species are introduced, making an Archive Binge as confusing as it is elucidating. A Wiki Walk through the creator's Toyhouse page to review the characters or timeline is basically a must.

The comic is very much 18+, with trigger warnings for "Offensive/Derogatory/Explicit Language warning, Explicit Violence/Gore/Body Horror, Nudity, Explicit Sexual Situations, Mature Sexual Themes/Discussions/Sexual Violence, Incestual Relationships/Topics, Sexual Abuse/ Mentions/Discussions, Drug use/Mention, Emotional Abuse/Manipulation, Suicide Related Topics, Mass Deaths/Corpses, [and] Genocide" on the About page. You have been warned. It can be read here.

---

Tropes:

• Alien Geometries: Literally, with Celadon speaking in the triangle-based Obtuse language. Later, her psychic ship, which is fittingly triangle-shaped fits this trope as well.
• Aliens Speaking English: Most adult Worms and Hekatons both speak in English, explained because Worms need to eat humans to become humanoid, which gives them the memories and abilities of the person they ate, while the first Hekatons were raised in human captivity.
• Alliterative Family: Rome's relatives are Rembrandt, Rowan, Randall, Robin... and Antony. He's special.
• Anachronic Order: While the story never re-tells the same events from different perspectives, it does piggy-back different characters' perspectives or jump back to earlier threads left unfinished.
• An Arm and a Leg: Happens repeatedly,, but the plasticity of Worm and Hekaton bodies mean it's often not very serious:
  • Knife cuts off Paper's arm as part of his 'compensation' for delivering a worm head to HEEL.
  • Crimson tears her own arm off while freaking out about transforming into a Worm Queen; this change sticks.
• And Now for Someone Completely Different: Jarring transitions between sex scenes and gritty fights or melodrama are common, sometimes after a few pages and sometimes after a whole chapter focusing on one character.
• Apocalypse How: Multiple, of course. We begin in the aftermath of a colony-destroying earthquake and Worm attack, while at least one moon has been destroyed via explosion and a whole species is set to be genocided during the Final Feast.
• Archnemesis Dad: Perkons, the most feared and hated figure in all of Hekaton history, is this to his children Locket and Key.
• Art Evolution: Starting out quite sketchy and predominately greyscale (minus blood or lights given the notable Splash of Color), the art becomes much cleaner and gains more shading later on, even incorporating colors more frequently.
• Autocannibalism: Crimson sometimes consumes her lost tissue when injured, something even Dylan finds concerning when she sees it.
• Back from the Dead: Hydragora weeds can bring dead hydragora worms back to life as weeds, and several other mechanisms for reviving dead characters appear. Aeschylus and Randall through Weed shenanigans, Galore through one of Celadon's personalities becoming her, Celadon through a King Worm's seed reviving her after eating her alive.
• Belligerent Sexual Tension: Most obviously Dylan and Crimson, but really most fights or stand-offs we see have at least a bit of it; how things end up vary from dedicated husbands to a literal Fatal Attraction.
• Bizarre Alien Biology: Throughout the first chapter alone we realize Worms have strange properties, but over the course of the story more and more strange details about Worms and Hekatons keep coming to light. From Hekatons' timers towards their explosive deaths and their half-dozen subtypes (counting known crossbreeds) with unique abilities to King Worm seeds which can create miracles, bizarre biology is putting it lightly.
• Bizarre Alien Reproduction: Worms and Hekatons both have rather creative methods of procreation.
• Black Comedy: Nothing really seems to be off the table, with extended jokes about incest, disability, torture, death, genocide... almost everything in the content warning has an associated gag.
• Boxed Crook: This is how Knife recruited Simon into THUMB: Knife was sent to apprehend Simon, but offered to 'pull strings' to have him recruited rather than arrested. This was partly because Simon could speak Obtuse, and partly because Knife thought he was cute.
• Bullying a Dragon: Subverted Rome mistakes Knife for a random hydragora worm at one point and attempts to drive him away by insulting him and slapping his hat off his head. Other characters who know Knife's identity are horrified and assume Rome is about to die, but Knife shrugs off the insult.
• Cannibalism Superpower: Hydragora worms gain memories and skills, as well as some habits and behaviours, from those they consume. Similarly, Knife gained some of his siblings' unique powers from killing and absorbing them.
• Color-Coded Characters: To a minor extent on pages with color early on, such as Rome's distinctive pink hair, but most obviously with Celadon's alternate selves which are differentiated by the color and placement of the triangle on their faces, as well as how much they enjoy hurting Crimson's feelings.
• Combat Compliment: Despite not being able to speak, Knife repeatedly compliments Nail during their fight by grinning, giving enthusiastic thumbs-ups, and friendly waves between blows.
• Conditioned to Accept Horror: Everybody who has to deal regularly with Worms or Hekatons, just about, including our main character soon enough.
• Content Warnings: As well as the extensive out-of-universe content warning, an argument between Agent Spoon and Princess Buttf*cker comes with an comedic in-panel warning:
  • "What you are about to witness is some verbal shit throwing action. its about to go down. Knowing these two jerks in particular, Im just gonna take the time to preface this with a special apology for whatever rude shit they'll say. Im

serious.. be careful.. This has been a friendly loving yucko warning."

• Curb-Stomp Battle: Fork vs Crimson the first two times and plenty of other fights that end up reading more like extermination jobs, given how ridiculously OP certain aliens can get.
• Cyborg: Rome Aiguille, Human Weapon and biomechanical Warrior Prince extraordinaire, is the most notable early on, but we eventually find out that Princess Cash Leadman was formerly a member of an army of Ridiculously Human Robots who wanted to Become a Real Boy and so swapped out her old mechabody to be a cyborg.
• Cute Monster Character: Arguably just about all of Dylan's experiments, though especially Pluto.
• Decapitation Presentation: Knife brings Paper the head of that one worm from page four as part of a deal, after lugging it around for a chapter or so. then Paper gets rather attached to it...
• Defeat Equals Explosion: Hekatonkheires contain bombs which detonate when they die, with the explosion depending on their type.
• Distracted by the Sexy: Most of the cast is horny at completely the wrong time: Dylan and Crimson's initial meeting sees both of them flirting more than fighting (at first)... ignoring Fork's bifurcated body by their feet; previously, Crimson himself struggled to come to his senses when he first meets Galore (Mainly because he's dealing with a combo of Pheromones and Erotic Asphyxiation)
• Doorstopper: While not as long-running as some webcomics, Feast for a King has been updating consistently for 9 years and has accumulated over 7 thousand pages, without counting the multiple side-stories behind a paywall... and that's all keeping in mind we haven't escaped the second of three planned arcs.
• Epic Fail: Fork's "rematch" with Crimson.
• Excrement Statement: Since Hekaton urine is hightly flammable, this qualifies as a genuine threat. Knife once urinated on Spoon's shoes to intimidate him. Simon also kills Nail by urinating on him and setting him on fire.
• Expecting Someone Taller: Paper initially assumes Knife is an impostor because she was told Knife was hot. In fairness Knife has cut off his own face at this point.
• Explicit Content: Frequent scenes of sexual content or graphic violence can be found throughout the comic (that list of trigger warnings wasn't just for show!), at around the same frequency as Info Dump about detailed lore.
• Everyone Is Related: All Hekatons come from an initial 5 siblings, and the Aguilles are a consistently plot-relevant race of human-seeming... creatures... created by Aldebaraan.
• Extra Eyes and Eyes Do Not Belong There: Both extremely common among worms.
• Fetish: Most notably when Crimson fantasizes about slurping up Celadon's period blood but Worms are basically synonymous with tentacles... so there's that. Simon is also very interested in getting peed on.
• Fingore: When Canary, oblivious to being a king worm, accidentally uses his powers to produce a seed containing the reincarnation of Aldebaran, the seed sprouts from his fingernail.
• First Law of Metafictional Thermodynamics: Absolutely in effect as the cast gets larger and we see Rome take a "suspiciously long nap" that allows narrative attention to shift for a few thousand pages, while other old characters either go so Out of Focus that you'd need binoculars to see them.
• First Kiss: Randall Aiguille's first kiss is with Aeschylus, several centuries after his Randall's own death, when weed-Aeschylus brings him back to life as a weed.
• Four Eyes, Zero Soul: Rome wears glasses and has an unsettling cruel streak, enjoying the torture of Worms (or other non-human creatures that he believes to be Worms) way too much to be considered normal.
• Four Lines, All Waiting: It's impressive how many characters and arcs are juggled at one time, but if you're wondering what's going on with, say, the bird guy, or the first Worm we see, or Helix, you'll be left wondering for QUITE a while.
• Fourth-Wall Observer: Miss Mirror most consistently, though Celadon and other characters have their moments of fourth-wall-breaking. K explicitly refuses to let other characters call her 'Knife', despite being the spirit of the Cosmic Knife, because it would be 'confusing for the readers'.
• Genetic Memory: All 2nd-generation Hekatons and onward contain a suppressed echo of their original progrenitors, and can commune with them under certain circumstances, though most do not know this.
• Genocide from the Inside: A central conceit of the premise is that THUMB agents Spoon and Knife are working to exterminate all Hekatonkheires... even though they're both Hekatons themselves. Both seem to have deepseated hatred and trauma related to their species, stemming at least in part Spoon's constant awareness of his timer counting down and Knife's being raised to view his people as weapons. Also, their species is going to be fed to aliens in a planets-destroying apocalypse soon anyway, so they figure they might as well try to starve the aliens out.
• Genre-Busting: Containing loads of drama/suspense, action-y fights, sexy... also fights, and science-fantasy lore & worldbuilding, finding even a handful of genres to pin down is no easy task.
• Gorn: Often. Very Often. Too often to even attempt to list.
• Half the Man He Used to Be: Agent Spoon. His timer blew up after Knife disappeared, somehow managing to survive and split into two halves. One half continues to live as Spoon, while the other claimed a new identity.
• Hanlon's Razor: Nobody really has the full picture, and so by combination of misinformation, bad first impressions, and well-meaning ignorance we see monsters made of men. Literally.
• Huge Guy, Tiny Girl: Lauma is the size of a regular hekaton, while her husband Velns is large enough that she can sit in the palm of his hand.
• Humanoid Aliens: Both Worms and Hekatons can look like humans, though a Worm would need to eat a human to resemble them, and a Hekaton needs to reach full maturity to become humanoid
• I Am Not My Father: Locket doesn't appreciate when Chain compares his stubborn behaviour to his father, even if it's a fair comparison.
• Info Dump: Frequent, most notably when we get species lore like Galore to Crimson about Hekaton types, Dollop to Fork on the same subject, or Mirror to Paper on Celadon's Origins
• Interspecies Romance: Crimson and Celadon, Good Leadman and Evil Mother (or arguably Cash, if AI counts as a species, and actually most other couples teased at or confirmed, minus most members of Hekaton society.
• It Makes Sense in Context: Usually. At the least, it makes *more* sense in context than you'd expect.
• Jigsaw Puzzle Plot: The story is currently in-progress, so readers don't have all the pieces of the puzzle quite yet, but the lore of the world and deciphering the series of events presented through the ensemble cast presents quite the head-scratcher.
• Kudzu Plot: With the large cast and constant Flash Back and Flash Forward throughout, it's virtually impossible not to lose track of a plotline or two as new ones crop up and old questions are left unanswered for thousands of pages at a time.
• Look Behind You: Played with in a scene where Knife repeatedly does this to Rome, coincidentally happening to point at Locket, who is following them under the cover of Hekaton invisibility, causing Locket to worry that his cover has been blown.
• Loss of Identity: Our initial viewpoint character has no memories whatsoever at the outset of the story, not even their name!
• Made of Explodium: Hekatons.
• Meaningful Rename: Grant Lumberman to Good Leadman, and then later to pronouncing the last name leed instead of led. Because he's a leader. Also Crimson choosing their own name, Celadon taking the name after her green hue, Mop seemingly being named after... a mop... and Aunty K taking the initial of the utensil her heart has become.
• Meanwhile, in the Future…: Constant, due to the flashforwards allowing us to see how certain decisions pan out immediately and giving doses of dramatic irony ASAP.
• Medium Blending: While almost entirely still comic pages, there is one page which is a GIF and one which is an embedded animated Youtube video.
• Mind Screw: Certain characters like Crimson and Celadon are walking examples of this, with the simple question "what species are you?" prompting endless confusion.
• Mind Screwdriver: Kosmic's Toyhouse has a full list of characters along with a mostly-complete timeline.
• Mission Control: THUMB and HEEL both keep a line on their operatives while out on fieldwork, such as Doctor Slate and the Hekaton resistance counseling and observing Rock.
• Morality Kitchen Sink: Almost all of the viewpoint characters are different shades of morally grey, or work on such an alien value framework that "morally grey" is meaningless. How do you judge somebody for cannibalism when the personalities of everybody they eat live on as semi-immortal psychic ghosts, to raise just one example?
• Murder in the Family: Spoon and Knife. Spoon killed his parents, and Knife killed most of his siblings and a baby worm that he kind of adopted. Truly a match made in heaven.
• Murder-Suicide: Simon seems to have killed Nail because he didn't want Nail to outlive his self-detonation. This detonation then fails to kill him.
• Nightmare Face: Knife pulls this off fairly frequently with shapeshifting, as do others like Aeschylus in worm form, or Galore before she's fully mature.
• Non-Human Head: Helpers can turn their heads into triangles.
• Non-Indicative Name: Worms often look like anything BUT worms, from dogs or birds or bunnies to humans. Hekatons aren't usually multi-limbed, and only one was a giant.
• Non-Linear Character: Miss Mirror, who's also a Fourth-Wall Observer to go along with it.
• Non-Mammal Mammaries: Worm and Hekaton females (and males) often have breasts.
• No Time to Explain: The main character isn't given time to ask many questions or get many answers from Aeschylus or Rome until several chapters and a half-dozen perspective switches, by which time both of them have almost died several times.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Fork invokes this in his conversation with Dylan, explaining in a rare outburst that his seemingly cavalier attitude (and constant flirtation) is partially meant to make his opponents underestimate him.
• Offing the Offspring: Knife squishes the baby that's been following him around for a few days upon seeing Simon again in the present, desperate to win back his love.
• Off with His Head!: Knife is already holding the head of that scary Worm from the first couple pages the first time we meet him, having decapitated the beast off-screen.
• The Only One Allowed to Defeat You: After Nail mortally wounds Knife, Simon shoots him in the back and claims this as his justification. Nail calls this out as a life. Simon's real reason seems to be that he didn't want Nail to outlive him when he killed himself.
• Out with a Bang: Galore repeatedly claims that hekaton-human mating traditionally ends with the death of the human mate, but eventually decides against killing her preferred mate, Crimson.
• Pet Monstrosity: Newly hatched hydragora worms can't talk, and imprint on people like baby animals, meaning they are sometimes kept as pets. Several worm characters, inclduing Dylan and Paper, experienced this in their backstories.
• Pocket Dimension: The 'heart worlds' that Mandragora worms can send those they absorb into.
• Puny Earthlings: Worms can change shape and use all sorts of special powers depending on the individual, Hekatons have a plethora of abilities based on their type, and humans... well, they have guns and grenades. Kind of drew the short end of the stick, though at least they don't have to deal with exploding when they get too emotional, like Hekatons.
• Rescue Sex: King offers this to Rome when they finally reach relative safety, but is turned down.
• See the Invisible: Invisible D-Type hekatons leave wet footprints behind due to the oil their skin secretes while invisible. Kosmic admits that the footprints exist mostly for 'visual symbolism' and that the way the invisibility effect works is 'mostly nonsense'.
• Self-Made Orphan: Simon. Key and Locket are both plotting on murdering their father too, meaning they could very possibly become this if they succeed.
• Show Within a Show: Mr. Rotten is the Mickey-Mouse-like protagonist of the massive Wibbleworld franchise, which includes a theme park, merchandise, and of course a TV show in the comic's universe.
• Sibling Murder: Perkons killed all of his siblings except for Laima, who managed to fake her death.
• Signed Language: Knife and Rome both use this, but Rome admits he is not very good at it since he doesn't know any other deaf people.
• Single-Stroke Battle: Fork vs Crimson The first two times, as well as several of Knife's fights.
• Speculative Fiction LGBT: While worms and hekatons seem to have their own understandings of sexuality which might make them exempt from this trope, the majority of the human main characters are also some flavor of queer by word of god; the comic explores themes of gender experimentation/fluidity and confusing or conflicted desire which tend to feature queer characters.
• Spirit Advisor: Celadon is this to Crimson, but generally a really mean and unhelpful one.
• Theme Naming: THUMB's top Agents Knife, Fork, and Spoon (also an example of Family Theme Naming) and their counterparts Agent Rock, Paper, and Scissors at HEEL are notable examples of this.
• Two Aliases, One Character: Due to the non-chronological order in which the story is told, the multiplicity of viewpoint characters, the variety of secret organisations, and the number of characters who shapeshift, body-hop, and undergo memory alterations, this happens repeatedly:
  • Agent Paper is Bunny, the worm Crimson saved during the war on DM Tia.
  • Agents Scissors is actually the other half of Agent Spoon, who uploaded his consciousness into Agent Cross's old body.
  • Agent Cross, Cash Leadman, Princess Buttf*cker, Cress, and Crescent are all the same person at different points in time.
• Twin Switch: Crimson is unable to tell the three versions of Celadon apart, apparently because Celadon #1 prevents them from explaining this. The results are deeply confusing and tragic for Crimson, who does not understand why 'Celadon's' personality is so inconsistent and capriciously cruel.
• Unwitting Pawn: Much of the cast is used by somebody else at some point or another, but especially Dylan, who serves as a pawn for Antony's whims, Celadon's plots, and even gets manipulated by Crimson to circumvent her attempt at death due to her shame and fear. And Dylan's one of the smarter characters in the setting.
• Versus Character Splash: Occurs when Spoon and Princess Buttf*cker attempt to out-insult each other. Happens again when Pluto and Ducky encounter Experiment #2 while escaping Dylan's lab (announced as 'Baby Fight!'). In the latter case we also see a victory screen ('Baby Truce!') when they decide not to fight a page later.
• Viewers Are Geniuses: The comic expects viewers to keep over a half-dozen disparate plotlines across 5 centuries and dozens of characters connected, picking up on tiny clues and references to piece together a plot years in the making. Either the readers are geniuses, they're patient to the extreme, or they've accepted defeat.
• Webcomic Time: The author has joked multiple times on his twitter about characters entering "really long naps" when the narrative shifts away from them, such as Rome's 3-year nap (which was a few hours at most in-universe). Justified largely due to the Anachronic Order of the plot jumping around so much, so each individual event can take much longer to be completed in-universe.
• What Is This Thing You Call "Love"?: Galore initially has no concept of non-sexual and platonic love and can't understand that Crimson loves her but is not in love with her. It's unclear why she lacks this concept, which other Hekatons seem to grasp, but it may relate either to her upbrining as part of the war on DM Tia, or being ostracized for being transgender.
• Wingdinglish: Obtuse is depicted as a string of coloured triangles.
• The Worm That Walks: Hydragora worms appear to be a single organism but are actually colonies of millions of tiny worms.
• You Wake Up in a Room: Or on a raised platform dangling above a massive pit of worms, as the case may be.