YMMV / A Dead World

• Arc Fatigue: While appreciated for the Character Development given to Alex and Cain, Dead Money has received this reception to some reviewers, as it has put the main plot on halt and lasted for well over ten chapters. Previous 'quests' took one or two at most.
• Broken Base: Alex’s weakness to radiation has been met with divided reactions, with camp one believing that he should be able to adapt and build up resistance to it, and camp two believing that something existing for him to fear adds depth and heaviness to an otherwise nigh-unkillable One-Man Army.
• Complete Monster:
  • Mortimer is the second-in-command of the White Gloves, and secretly plans to bring back the organization's people-eating roots. Having grown bored with eating "common folk," he has the son of the White Gloves' biggest beef supplier kidnapped, with the intention of having him served at the White Gloves' banquet. He then plans to reveal the truth of the meal, using the fact that the entire organization ate human flesh to avoid punishment and open discussion of returning to cannibalism. Mortimer fancies himself an apex predator, and the heroes all agree that death at the hands of an actual apex predator was no less than he deserved.
  • Father Elijah is a former member of the Brotherhood of Steel who was exiled for wanting to use the Brotherhood's hoarded technology for conquest. After his initial attempts at conquest were met with rebellion, he seeks the legendary treasure of the Sierra Madre, a Pre-War hotel infamous for the Cloud and its holographic security guards and horribly mutated inhabitants. Elijah traps and kidnaps people to break into the Sierra Madre's vault, using bomb collars to ensure their compliance (which are all wired to explode if one wearer dies), while letting his mutated servant Dog eat those he doesn't need. He does the same to Threnody Cain, Dog/God, Dean Domino, and Christine, the Brotherhood knight who pursued him. When Cain, Alex Mercer, and Christine open the vault, Elijah cuts Alex in half with a force field and gloats to Cain about how he plans to use the Cloud and the holograms to wipe out all life on Earth so he can rule over the dead world. When Cain refuses to step away from the controls so he can detonate her collar without destroying them, he threatens to let the Cloud kill her slowly and drag her body away from them.
• Growing the Beard: Self-admitted. Word of God is that the story started out as a fun side project, and that the early chapters were spontaneous. After the first ten or so, she got an idea of where she wanted to go with the story, and then the plot and drama really began to roll.
• Idiot Ball:
  • After Cain finally corners Benny, he asks her if they can talk in his suite. Agreeing to that is harmless enough, but the real moment comes when Benny tells her to go on ahead, he’ll be up in a few minutes. And Cain takes him at his word. When his inevitable betrayal comes, she can only kick herself for it.
  • Alex trying to eat a Ghost Person, when it bleeds green blood and by now he’s learned that color signifies he should stay away. Sure enough, the first bite makes him violently, painfully, lose half his biomass. Like Cain above, he berates himself afterwards.
• Jerkass Woobie: Alex, immensely. He’s antisocial, rude, violent, terrifying, and lacks conventional human morals. And yet, he also struggles with trying not to be a monster, feels lost in an unfamiliar world with the only person who loved him dead, and is tired of being rejected. Oh, and all his quiet time is filled with the perfectly-recalled memories of his victims' dying screams. No wonder the guy has issues.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Discussed. Cain has a grand time trying to decide when, exactly, Elijah crossed it, noting that each time she thinks he’s sunk as low as possible, he proves her wrong.
  • Dean mutilating Christine's vocal chords with the Auto-Doc is treated as this In-Universe.
• The Woobie: Cain during “Dead Money”. She goes from being on the brink of ruling the Mojave, to being kidnapped, robbed, and having an explosive collar slapped around her neck. She then spends several horrifying hours having to deal with everything, ranging from the air to monsters to radios, trying to kill her. She has an insane megalomaniac monitoring her and holding the detonator. And to top it off, she doesn’t believe anyone will miss her if she dies, nor that anyone will try and find her. And when Alex does show up, he's a vital resource but also even more vulnerable than she is, which presents another danger as his Horror Hunger can't be relieved.