YMMV / Confessions of a D-List Supervillain

• Accidental Aesop: Prisons don't make criminals rehabilitate. They make criminals into better criminals.
• Alternate Character Interpretation:
  • Ultraweapon. Cal is an Unreliable Narrator when it comes to Lazarus Peterson, who seems to go from being an Upper-Class Twit and Corrupt Corporate Executive to Evil Overlord at the drop of a hat. However, it's possible he may have been a genuine hero once but his screw-up in releasing the Bugs and later memory-erasing of Aphrodite made him realize he'd done more damage to the world than could ever be forgiven. So, he went Then Let Me Be Evil and possibly committed Suicide by Cop.
  • Is the Evil Overlord an Affably Evil Pragmatic Villainy Evil Overlord who just happens to want to take over the world? Or is he a bastard who murdered countless followers and was going to enslave the planet with the same horrific means we find in Confessions? The books seem to be pointing to the latter.
  • Calvin Stringel, himself, is a Deadpan Snarker Harmless Villain from our first perspective and Antihero but is he nearly as harmless as he appears? He sells weapons to the equivalent of Hydra, overlooks Maxine Velocity's tendency to kidnap women for sex, kills a number of pursuers, and almost beats the Biloxi Bugler to death for explicitly petty revenge. He also never lets go of his desire to murder Lazarus Patterson and eventually succeeds.
• Crazy Is Cool: While a bit too pathetic to be truly awesome, Imaginary Larry is the most powerful Reality Warper and superhuman on the planet and uses his powers to conjure every high school dramedy ever made so he can live them out as the plucky underdog hero.
• Fan-Preferred Couple:
  • There's some indications fans prefer Wendy over Aphrodite.
  • Quite a few readers liked Vicky a great deal more than Aphrodite even if death makes their relationship unlikely to continue.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: It's mentioned in Origins that the Biloxi Bugler had courted controversy by refusing to remove the Confederate flag design from his motorcycle because it's part of the Mississippi flag. In 2020, six years after Origins was released, Mississippi voted to change its flag's design to remove the Confederate symbol.
• Inferred Holocaust: Half-a-billion people die due to the events of Confessions. You'd never know it from the rest of the series.
• Iron Woobie: Mechani-Cal. Even when he catches a break, he can't catch a break.
• Moral Event Horizon: When Ultraweapon erases Stacy's memory of her past three-months building a relationship with Cal and taking a level in badass.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • While perfectly enjoyable on its own, Confessions doesn't actually include much villainy from Cal.
  • Made up for with Origins of a D-List Supervillain which covers Cal's early career.
• The Woobie: The revelation Imaginary Larry just wanted to go to college and a fight with his mother triggered both her death as well as twenty-years of insanity. Poor guy wakes up to find himself middle-aged as well as having had five kids the military used Honey Pot agents for him to stud in his madness. May be considered an Iron Woobie since his reaction is to become a superhero.